Chapter 954 - 953: A Familiar Hatred

’They noticed me.’

The boy met their attention without lowering his eyes.

He should have been shaking.

He knew that much. These beings had crossed distances faster than he could follow and broken the land merely by fighting upon it.

Any one of them could kill him.

However, his breathing remained steady.

Even he did not understand it.

His mother lay behind him. His father’s hand rested among the spilled coins. Looking at them hurt so badly that he could scarcely bear to turn his head.

And looking at the six-winged demon made him want to drive the sword through that smiling face.

But his fingers were steady around the hilt.

Why?

He had no answer.

He only knew that running would have been the sensible thing to do before their attention settled upon him.

Yet he had stayed.

For one thing, where would he go?

The road had become rubble. The houses were broken. Even if he reached the hills, how far could he run before something with wings like those caught him?

His best chance had been to remain beneath their notice.

A powerless human.

Something too unimportant to bother killing.

Then he had heard the conversation.

The small demoness and the tattooed man had asked about the other’s changed body.

Daemons.

Bloodlines.

A ritual.

He had never heard anyone speak of Daemons before. Everything he knew said these creatures were demons. There was no other race in the stories told at home.

But the six-winged one had described something older.

Stronger.

And the others had listened.

The boy did not understand most of it. However, he understood that the thing which had killed his parents was becoming more dangerous.

Revenge would require more than surviving today.

He had kept listening because every word might tell him something he needed.

Then the demon had spoken about a city.

Thousands of lives, taken so he could change his blood.

The boy’s thumb pressed against the sword’s grip.

Of course his village had meant nothing to such a creature.

Miresti had simply been in the way.

But there was another reason he had not looked away.

He wanted to remember them.

The short one who called herself Honourable. The man with the tattoos. The two who arrived breathless and complained about the distance.

Their faces. Their voices. The way they stood around his parents’ killer and spoke so easily.

He wanted to know who mattered to that demon.

One day, perhaps he could make him reach for someone who would never answer again.

The thought was foolish.

He had a sword he could barely use.

But the pain inside him wanted somewhere to go.

Now all five were looking at him.

They were not going to leave quietly.

Something tightened around his body.

His feet rose from the rubble.

The boy kicked once and reached down with his free hand, but there was nothing to grasp. He was carried above a fallen beam and toward the centre of the ruined square.

Struggling changed nothing.

He stopped wasting the strength.

The sword remained in his hand.

A moment later, he hung before the six-winged demon, close enough to see the broken black rings around its pupils.

The eyes themselves were crimson.

He stared into them.

And waited.

"Is he mute?" Sonya asked, inclining her head. "Or has seeing us frightened the words out of him?"

Akaza’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"I don’t think he’s mute."

He studied the boy’s face.

"And I don’t think he’s afraid."

"Then why hasn’t he said anything?" Virella murmured.

Simon remained silent.

Black hair clung to the boy’s forehead beneath a coating of dust. His eyes were black too, their gaze unusually steady in a face marked by scratches and bruises.

He was thin, wearing ordinary clothes torn by the collapse of his home.

If he was right, the boy should be around fifteen years of age.

Not far from the age of Simon’s own body.

But most boys that age would have been pleading, struggling, crying, or unable to stop trembling.

This one simply watched him.

That was not the most remarkable part.

There was no killing intent.

None Simon could perceive in the usual way.

Yet Wrath stirred within his heart.

He was not using the seed to influence the boy. It was responding to what already burned inside him.

Hatred.

So much that Simon briefly looked past him toward the ruined doorway.

The dead man.

The woman whose arm had protected the place where the boy had been sitting.

Then he looked back.

The child wanted him dead.

He wanted it with an intensity entirely absent from his expression.

Whether he understood what killing intent was or not, he had kept it from spilling outward.

Without the Seed of Wrath, Simon would not have known how much hatred and fury lay behind those quiet dark eyes.

Something familiar tightened within him.

He remembered being young.

Human.

Too weak to stop the demons that had taken his parents and family.

At first, his hatred had possessed faces. The creatures responsible. The ones he wanted to find.

But it had not remained so narrow.

Eventually, every demon had become something he wanted gone.

He had carried that hatred through years of war.

Now he stood on the other side of it.

The boy watched him with the same stillness Simon associated with his own gaze after obtaining Fearless.

However, Simon could find no awakened power or Blessing within him.

No strength capable of concealing the threat behind a technique.

Only an ordinary human body, injured and terribly weak.

Was he talented?

Simon could not tell.

Calmness was not proof of a powerful Blessing. Hatred did not guarantee someone would live long enough to become dangerous.

But he had a strong feeling that dismissing this child would be a mistake.

He knew what a survivor could do with that kind of purpose.

The boy might fail.

He might die somewhere else without ever learning to use the sword he held.

Or he might become someone whose name made demons remember the day they should have killed him.

Simon had once been such a survivor.

The resemblance did not move him to mercy.

It settled his decision.

He raised one hand.

The boy followed it with his eyes but did not pull away.

Not like he could though.

Simon’s claw touched the cloth over his heart.

A narrow line of black flame entered the boy’s chest and pierced his heart.

Puchi!

The flame vanished almost as soon as it appeared.

The boy’s breath caught.

Then he coughed out a mouthful of blood.

For the first time, the steadiness in his pupils broke.

The ground below seemed suddenly farther away. Sound dulled around him, and the strength holding his body upright began slipping beyond his reach.

He understood.

There would be no road out of the village.

No day spent learning how to hold the sword properly.

No years in which to remember these faces.

This was all he would get.

His fingers tightened.

The demon’s hand was still before him.

His expression had barely changed.

The boy looked at that face, and everything he had kept silent rose at once.

His mother would never hear him again.

His father would never take the sword back.

And this creature was going to stand here, unharmed, while the last of their family stopped breathing.

No.

He dragged in what little air his failing body allowed.

Then he screamed.

"AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!"

The sound tore across the ruined square.

He seized the hilt with both hands.

Not the chest. He had seen what had struck that body without stopping it.

Not the throat.

The eyes.

Surely an eye could still be hurt.

He pulled his arms back, twisted with the little movement left to him, and drove the sword upward.

There was no skill in it.

But there was every remaining piece of him.

His shoulders strained. His teeth bared. The point travelled toward the crimson pupil whose broken ring he had memorised.

Just once.

’DIEEEEE!!!!’

The tip reached the thin layer of demonic energy moving over Simon’s body.

CRACK!

The blade broke.

Simon had not raised a hand to stop it.

The upper half spun away and struck the paving. Another fragment fell between them, leaving the boy holding a hilt and a short length of ruined steel.

He stared.

It had not even touched the eye.

His arms tried to finish the thrust anyway.

But the point was gone.

There was nothing left to reach with.

Hatred remained in his widening eyes. So did the anger, the refusal, and a terrible disbelief that even this had been denied him.

Then his gaze dropped toward the broken sword.

His father’s sword.

For a moment, the fury could not conceal how young his face was.

His mouth trembled.

The light in his eyes faded before he could speak.

Simon withdrew the force holding him.

Thud!

The boy fell onto the broken road.

His hand remained closed around the hilt. The severed length of blade lay beyond his fingers, catching a dull reflection from the sky.

Dust settled into his black hair.

His face was turned upward, his eyes open beneath the drifting smoke.

His chest did not rise again.