The Storm King

Chapter 447: The Lion’s Guilt

Leon could barely believe what was happening. When he’d finally confronted Valeria and started getting some real answers about his mother and his family’s enemies, Roland had to show up days early and interrupt.

Or, more specifically, have Gaius interrupt. There were few things Leon wanted to do more at that moment than walk outside and wring Gaius’ neck.

As things were, though, he and Valeria had come to an accord, of sorts. They were going to trust each other at least until they could find another opportunity to finish their conversation.

Valeria herself was standing at the foot of her bed staring at him as she waited for him to give her a directive on how to proceed now that their conversation had been interrupted. Leon silently cursed as he took in the state of her—her tied-back hair had come loose, her blue shirt had been shredded and covered in blood, and she had a look of acceptance, relief, and joy on her face that made for an uncanny sight. If it was somehow possible, Leon’s guilt at hurting her and happiness in making at least a temporary peace both deepened. With the benefit of more time to process and the knowledge of how she felt about him, he couldn’t even imagine what she might be going through—he knew that if he had to choose between Artorias and Elise as Valeria had to choose between him and her father, he wouldn’t be able to make a decision.

“I’ll head out first. Give you some time to get changed,” he softly said, nodding to her as politely as he could.

“Got it,” she said. She didn’t wait for so much as a second before she began pulling off her shirt. “You really got me good, Anzu,” she said, her voice straining a bit to sound light-hearted even as the griffin stared daggers at her. It wasn’t until Leon clicked his tongue and got Anzu’s attention that the griffin relaxed.

Leon, for his part, wasn’t too interested in whatever she was trying to do by taking her shirt off in his presence and simply turned his back to her—though she had given him a good enough look at her body to see that her wounds were now just a few faint white lines on her otherwise flawless skin. He felt like he should stay for a few more seconds since he couldn’t just open the door and leave with her half-naked behind him, but she seemed to disagree.

“I appreciate it, but you can open the door and leave if you want,” she said. “Sounds like they’re getting a bit impatient out there. I think Anzu will block their view, anyway.”

Leon could hear Gaius speaking with Marcus, Alix, Alcander, and the rest of the knights out in the hall. None of them knew that Leon was with Valeria, and none could say as to why neither of them was coming out, or if they were even still in their rooms.

Leon cast one last look over his shoulder at her and found her smiling back at him, her body turned away and an arm covering her substantial chest. It seemed to him that her smile was meant to be cheeky or otherwise playful, but her obvious nervousness and the way her eyes flickered toward Anzu ruined the effect Leon thought she was going for.

He lightly shrugged and pulled the door open just enough to allow himself to get out, surprising the knight who was still standing outside of it.

“Out of the way,” Leon curtly growled, feeling no desire to be in any way polite. Given how damn loudly the knight had been knocking.

The knight practically jumped out of his armor as Leon’s baleful gaze hit him like a boulder to the face, and he reeled a few feet further down the hall, leaving no one with a clear view into Valeria’s room for the split second before Anzu blocked the doorway with his large frame.

“Sir Leon?!” Gaius exclaimed in surprise as he registered not only Leon’s presence but also where he was coming from. “What… what were you doing…?”

Leon just glared at the young nobleman and blocked anyone from approaching Valeria’s doorway until Anzu slunk past him into the hallway. Only then did Leon fully close it behind him.

“Where’s Dame Valeria?” Marcus asked, his eyebrow raised, and a smile on his face that was both intrigued and congratulatory.

Leon glanced back at the door, thought for a moment, lightly frowned, and said, “She’ll be out in a minute.”

“Oh? Oh ho ho?” Marcus playfully said as he walked closer. “What, pray tell, were you doing in Dame Valeria’s chambers, Sir Leon? Could you h—”

“We were talking, I had some issues I needed to bring up with her,” Leon replied, cutting Marcus off, though not before Alix started walking over with stars in her eyes and Gaius stumbled back as a look of horror crossed his face. What they were doing was the last thing he wanted to talk about with them.

“Sir Leon!” Alix cried with a faux-scandalized tone before her curiosity got the better of her. “Did you finally make a move?! Or was it Val?! Are you two finally together now?! I mean, you’ve been obviously crazy about each other this entire time, so it’s good to see that you’re finally resolving this thick sexual tension!”

At that moment, Valeria’s door opened again and she strode out into the hall, not a hair out of place. If Leon hadn’t been responsible for it, he never would’ve guessed that she’d just been mauled by Anzu a scant few minutes beforehand.

“Sorry everyone, I had to get dressed,” she said, winking at Leon, clearly taking some amount of pleasure in his relatively obvious discomfort.

Leon rolled his eyes and ignored the looks everyone was giving him. He especially ignored Alix as she scooted past him to excitedly whisper into Valeria’s ear as she blatantly stared at him. Hearing them joke about him and Valeria only exacerbated his guilt over his actions.

Instead of responding, Leon turned back to Gaius, who appeared to be fighting off the urge to burst into tears.

“I knew it… I knew it…” he kept repeating to himself.

“Sir Tullius,” Leon loudly said, pulling the young nobleman out of his depression-induced mantra. “You said that Sir Roland has arrived.”

“… Right,” Gaius replied with a complete lack of enthusiasm, his eyes not once turning in Leon’s direction. “Let’s head back up…”

He waved his hand at his knights and they began to file out of the hallway, making room for everyone else to follow. A few uncomfortable minutes of making their way through the underground camp later, Leon and co. emerged in the late evening sun to find that everyone else had largely finished cleaning up the hill, gathering the bodies of the fallen, and setting up their own camp. It had even been fortified with a wooden palisade set in a stone foundation and featuring a stone gatehouse. Leon could also tell that the 2nd Legion had been quite diligent in setting up the standard suite of enchantments to ensure the wall was a protective as it ought to be.

The center of the camp at the top of the shallow hill was their destination. There, the main command tent along with the sleeping tents for Arellius, Gaius, and the Duchess of Vesontio had been set up. Most of the local leadership was in the command tent, so that was where Leon and the others made their way.

The first thing Leon saw upon striding in just behind Gaius was Roland and several of his knights looking more than a little uncomfortable as they kept a close eye on everyone around them. Roland seemed to relax just a hair upon seeing Leon’s entrance but otherwise remained on guard.

Sertor Arellius and Vesontio, however, appeared to be more than relaxed, with the two draped over chaise lounges next to the low table in the center of the tent, upon which was a relatively accurate map of the surrounding areas. The rest of their subordinates who were present were waiting patiently either standing or in seats closer to the edge of the tent.

“Sir Leon!” Roland called out in greeting as Leon came closer.

“Sir Roland,” Leon replied, his demeanor still less than cordial given where he was only a few minutes ago. “You’re quite early, I wasn’t expecting you for several days at least.”

“We had quite a bit of luck breaking out of the camp,” Roland explained. “We probably should’ve done so sooner, but… actually, how about we pretend that I didn’t just say that?”

Leon shrugged. Roland wanted to not come off like he was publicly second-guessing August’s decisions, but Leon wholly agreed that they should’ve tried to break out of their camp much sooner, especially since it seemed it was so easy to do that Roland arrived in hours instead of days.

“How many people did you bring?” Leon asked.

Roland glanced meaningfully at Arellius and the Duchess, both of whom had paused their own conversation to listen in. The Duchess seemed a bit aggrieved about something—Leon guessed his lack of formal greeting—but Arellius seemed more amused than anything.

“They’re on our side… probably,” Leon said as he gave Roland a quick run-down of the day’s events.

When he was finished, Roland’s attitude had shifted to something akin to regret and mourning. “All the giants are gone?” he asked.

Leon slowly nodded as he carefully controlled his expression to not show just how devastated he was about that.

“And your unit is gone?”

Again, Leon nodded.

Roland opened and closed his mouth several times as he processed this information and found himself unable to say anything.

“What’s done is done,” Leon said, his voice sounding much more confident and sure of himself than he did in his heart. “Time to move on. How many people did you manage to bring with you?”

Roland looked like he wanted to continue the other conversation, but with everyone staring at him in expectation, he sighed and said, “In addition to my retinue of five hundred, I brought two thousand of the Legion’s finest, and another two thousand from the Marquis of Aventino’s retinue.”

“My father sent that many?” Marcus asked, his tone more wonder than doubt.

“Lord Aeneas was concerned whether or not two thousand would cut it,” Roland answered. “That’s why he doubled those I brought. We were only supposed to run a few distraction missions, but now that I’m here and see what was waiting for us, I think we can do a lot more than that…”

“You can say that again,” Arellius enthusiastically boomed.

The others began to discuss the tactical and strategic situation, but Leon barely contributed. For the most part, he was completely checked out of the meeting. Without giants or a unit of his own, he didn’t feel the need to make his opinion known.

Instead, what he focused on was his conversation with Valeria. For the most part, she’d given him few surprises. With what he already knew, it made perfect sense that his connection to his mother had been the reason why her father had been hunting him, and being given the name of the man who’d sent Justin the plane hadn’t been too significant since it’d come without any other actionable information. At the very least, though, he now had some idea of how far he was going to have to go to achieve revenge—he had an Anax as his enemy, whatever that meant.

More significantly, though, was the information she’d given him about his mother. There was nothing he wanted to do more than to sink into his soul realm and grill the Thunderbird about his mother, but unfortunately, he couldn’t just do that in the middle of a meeting, no matter how little he was paying attention.

Perhaps more pressing, however, was how he was going to handle Valeria and her father. As things were, he figured the chances of making peace with her family were laughably small, no matter his personal feelings toward Valeria herself. He didn’t want to kill her, but his feelings about her father was another matter entirely. Valeria seemed to maintain that he was a good man whenever she spoke about him, but Leon didn’t know the man, his only connection to Justin being the fact that he’d had Leon’s father murdered.

He glanced at Valeria sitting next to him. She was back to her usual stoic self, her expression ice cold, her posture perfect, her gaze lingering on no one in particular. If he hadn’t known otherwise, he never would’ve guessed that she’d been so horribly injured less than an hour ago.

He couldn’t help but appreciate that about her. She was so like him in many ways, from her diligence in her training to her general demeanor. If he were completely honest with himself, Leon would have to admit that he found her incredibly attractive, and if her father hadn’t been connected to Artorias’ death, then he would’ve followed Elise’s suggestion and tried to bring Valeria into his harem, or whatever it was that he had.

Leon had no intention to kill Valeria. Seeing how injured she’d been filled with him with such guilt that he knew there was no way he’d be able to live with himself if he did something like that again.

‘But killing her father? Is that something I can do?’ Leon thought to himself, feeling doubt for the first time since he left the Northern Vales. If he’d thought about it only a few hours before, it would’ve been no question, he’d have killed Justin in a heartbeat. But now…

He supposed it would depend on the circumstances of their confrontation. If Justin were the person that Valeria claimed him to be, then… maybe Leon could make peace with him. If he proved himself otherwise or tried to kill Leon, then Leon would fight with all he had. He didn’t want to fight an eighth-tier mage head-on, of course, but as it was right now, Leon felt like he had a good chance of winning if he invoked Xaphan’s power. Plus, it seemed like Naiad was close by, and as that thought returned to his head, Leon felt a powerful urge to venture back out into the woods to continue his—

“Sir Leon?” Roland asked.

Leon blinked and pulled himself out of his thoughts, his mood souring a bit as his attention was pulled back to more immediate responsibilities. Roland and the rest of the command staff were staring at him, obviously waiting for something. Leon cocked an eyebrow, stared at Roland, and silently asked him what the Paladin wanted.

“Did you get all that?” Roland asked.

Leon glanced at the map of their surroundings that had been laid out on the table in front of them. From what he could tell from what had been marked on the map, the plan they’d come up with was about what he expected: attack Duronius’ northern flank at the same time as August did, assuming Duronius didn’t simply retreat when he realized he was outflanked. They’d break through in the north and swing south to crush the remaining Octavian forces. With more than a hundred thousand in August’s camp and almost sixty thousand outside of it, their chances were good that their plan would work if they moved before Duke Duronius.

Leon nodded and said, “I got it.” He’d obviously missed out on the details, like how they’d communicate with August, but he could ask the others later, right now he just didn’t care about the specifics of the plan they’d come up with.

Roland didn’t look entirely happy with Leon’s response, but no one felt like arguing with Leon with the way he was glaring around the room. Even Arellius’s loud attitude was rather damped when his and Leon’s gazes crossed.

“… All right, then,” the Legate quietly said in the awkward silence following Leon’s response. “I suppose we ought to get some rest, then, if we’re to pull this off before the morning.”

Leon nodded as everyone spoke their agreement. His gaze wandered over in Valeria’s direction again, his eyes admiring her noble figure. He figured he should wait to continue their discussion until he was in a better state of mind, and the same went for confronting the Thunderbird. At the very least, they could wait until there weren’t about two hundred thousand Octavian troops nearby they had to deal with.