Chapter 166: I was just being stupid

Leon did not turn his head. He knew she was there.

"You want me to finish it," he said.

"Yes."

"I am not going to."

Batnac blinked. "What?"

"I am not going to kill you today."

"Why not?"

"Because I have an offer."

’Is this the later?’ Medusa asked.

’Yes.’

’I did wonder.’

For a heartbeat, the giant only stared. Then he began to laugh, a thin and cracked wheeze that shook the plates of his chest. The laugh turned into a hacking cough, and blood ran from the corner of his mouth.

"An offer," he said. "You have an offer. After this? After everything?"

"Yes."

"I would sooner die."

"I thought you might say that."

"I would sooner be taken apart screw by screw." He turned his head away. "Whatever it is, the answer is no. Do you hear me? I will never work for the man who killed Teon Allistar."

"I did not say work."

"Then what?"

Leon looked down at him for a few more seconds. Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice until it was barely louder than the wind.

What he said took less than a minute.

Nobody else heard it. The neighbors behind the wall strained to listen and caught nothing. The siren drowned out everything else, and the last of the drones lay silent on the road, with their lenses dark. Even Medusa, who heard everything, said nothing at all.

Batnac listened.

At first his face was a mask of fury, and his lips curled back from his teeth. Then the fury began to crack

. His eyes widened, and his mouth opened slightly, and the color drained out of his cheeks until they were the color of old paper. He tried to speak twice and stopped both times.

"That," he said at last. "That is not possible."

"It is."

"You are lying."

"Have I lied to you since I took off the mask?"

Batnac opened his mouth to answer, and he found that he could not. Every word the boy had spoken since the mask came off had turned out to be true.

He glanced at the heap of scrap that had been his arms, and at the wall that had caved in around him, and at the quiet boy crouching over him without a scratch or a speck of dust on his jacket.

He looked at the sky, where the white smoke was still drifting, and then back at Leon’s face.

His jaw worked.

"If I say no," he said.

"Then I will leave you here for the Association."

"They will lock me away."

"They will, and your drones will be shut down one by one, and your house will be taken apart room by room." Leon’s voice was quiet and steady.

"And I will walk away. I do not think they will catch me, but even if they do, I will be no worse off than I was this morning. You are the one who has something to lose."

"That is blackmail."

"It is a choice."

"It is not a choice at all!"

"No," Leon agreed. "It isn’t much of one."

A vehincle roared overhead, low and loud, and the shadow of its wings swept across the broken yard. White lights flickered on the horizon, and the sirens rose to a high, ragged screech. Along the wall, the neighbors ducked down, and somebody gasped.

"Decide," Leon said.

Behind the wall, a woman’s voice called out something shaky about the transports, and a man told her to be quiet.

Leon glanced up. For a second, his eyes met Iris’s across the yard. She was gripping the stones of the wall so tightly that her fingers had gone white, and she opened her mouth, and closed it again. He looked away first.

He turned back to the giant and waited.

Batnac closed his eyes.

He lay still for a long time, or what felt like one. His body shook faintly in the dust, and the blue glow behind his ribs flickered and dimmed.

A single tear ran down the side of his face and vanished into the ash.

He was an S-rank, one of the most feared players in the west. He had held a city in the palm of his hand.

And he had no arms, and no drones, and no friends within a hundred kilometers, and a man was kneeling over him who could have ended him without so much as raising his voice.

He thought about the small gray envelope on the shelf in his house, the one with nobody left to deliver it to.

He thought about strangers in uniforms opening his doors and carrying out his machines, one crate at a time, and about the Association clerks who would pick through everything he had ever owned.

There was nothing left to bargain with. There was nothing left to fight with.

He opened his eyes.

"Fine," Batnac said. His voice was rough, and it did not shake. "I accept."

Leon let out a slow breath and straightened up.

"Good," he said.

"Do not say good." Batnac’s voice was rough, and his eyes were still wet. "Say it again. Say it out loud, so that I can hear it once more with my own ears. I want to be sure that I did not hit my head."

"You hit your head several times today."

"Say it!"

Leon glanced over his shoulder at the broken wall. The neighbors were too far away to hear anything over the sirens, but he lowered his voice a little anyway.

"I am going to join the Player Guild Association," he said. "And you are going to take me there."

Batnac stared at him for a long moment. Then a thin, helpless laugh came out of his chest and turned into a cough.

"Yes," he wheezed. "That is what I heard. I was hoping that I had heard it wrong."

"You did not."

"The Association has a million gold on your head."

"I know."

"They know that you plotted to take over Raging Lions. They believe that you killed him when the plot failed, and that you came back to destroy the guild." Batnac’s head rolled in the dust until he could see the boy’s face.

"Every S-rank in the Association would take that bounty with their own hands. You cannot join them, and you cannot even walk into their building."

"That is why you are coming with me."

"Why would that change anything?"

"Because of how it looks," Leon said. "You are an S-rank, and you went out to find the most wanted man in the world, and you found him."

"If you walk through the front door beside me, then you are the man who brought me in. Nobody locks that man away, and they will probably thank him."

Batnac opened his mouth and shut it again.

"They will ask what happened to my arms," he said at last.

"You were injured while you were catching me. That much is true."

"It is the kind of truth that is full of holes."

"Most truths are," Leon said.

Batnac closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, there was a different look in them.

It was not hope, exactly. It was the look of a man who has been standing at the edge of a cliff for an hour and has just noticed a ledge below him.

"I have one more question," Batnac said. "It is not about the plan. It is about you."

"Ask."

"Why?" His voice dropped. "You could have run. You could have found another city and been somebody else by tomorrow night."

"Why would you walk toward the people who are hunting you?"

Leon looked up at the sky, where the white smoke from the fight was still drifting over the rooftops.

"Hmph, how long will I keep hiding?" he said. "I thought it was the smartest thing to do, but its just being stupid."

"I was hiding from people who are weaker than I am, and I did not see it until today. You came at me with everything you had, and you could not touch me. So why should I spend my life running from men who cannot touch me?"

"Because there are a great many of them, you think you can take down all the S-ranks in the world."

"Then I will meet them all at once, and yes, I can." Leon shrugged. "I do not need to hide anymore. I can go where I like and do what I like, and there is nobody alive who can stop me."

" If that is true, then I would rather do it from the inside. A man who sits at their own table cannot be hunted by them."

"That..." Batnac said slowly, gnashing his teeth.

Nonetheless, he didn’t say anything else, and within minutes, a strange helicopter with the mark of the association swung by, flying over the roofs.

Behind the wall, the neighbors dropped flat.

A loudspeaker crackled on the underside, and a hard, nervous voice rolled down over the yard. "Attention! All persons in the yard, this is the Player Guild Association! You are..."