Chapter 177: Central Sector [6]

Leon’s voice had gone hoarse. His eyes were blurring. He kept going.

"DON’T MAKE ME WATCH YOU DIE! PLEASE! JUST RUN!"

For a fraction of a moment the words seemed to hit them. Some of the advancing soldiers slowed.

Then the young warrior who had started all of it let out a laugh.

"Don’t give me that Sir Leon!"

Leon went quiet.

"Of course I’m scared!" The young soldier was parrying a vampire’s blow and shouting over the clash at the same time. "My knees are shaking so hard I can barely feel them! Every part of me is telling me to run! I know I’m not strong enough to beat that man! I know the gap!" He forced his opponent back with a gritty desperate series of swings. "But when I look at you I don’t feel like running!"

Leon stared at him.

"You want to know why?" The young soldier’s voice rose and carried across the sector in a way that didn’t belong to someone fighting for his life except that it clearly did. "Because you don’t back down! And watching you refuse to break makes me want to push forward too! You don’t have to be an untouchable god! You don’t have to win everything by yourself!"

He glanced back at Leon’s ruined form in the dirt and his eyes were blazing with something Leon had never seen aimed at himself before.

"You made us believe that even if we’re afraid, even if we’re weaker, even if we’re standing in front of something we can’t possibly understand, we still get to choose to fight! You taught us that being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared! It means you refuse to leave behind the person who gave you the guts to stand in the first place!"

He raised his blade high and his grin was bright and completely unafraid.

"So don’t you dare tell us we’re wasting our lives Sir Leon! You gave us the courage to stand! The least we can do is stand with you!"

The battlefield noise went somewhere else.

Leon didn’t hear the clashing steel or the screaming or the mana discharges anymore. The world he was in was smaller and older than this one and it was built from marble floors and moonlight on fountain water and a girl’s voice that he had spent years trying to pretend he didn’t still hear.

"Weak? No way."

Aurelia’s voice. Young and warm and completely certain.

"Whenever you’re beside me I feel brave. Even when something scary happens I know you’re there. So how can someone who makes me feel that brave possibly be weak?"

He believed them now.

He was still the same person with the same limitations and the same things he couldn’t do.

But all these people had turned around.

And that had been enough.

He had always thought strength meant being the one who could fix the impossible situation. The one who defeated the undefeatable. The one who never needed anyone to stand beside him.

He had spent his whole life chasing the version of himself that needed nothing from anyone else because he thought that was what it meant to be worth something.

But all those people had turned around.

Aurelia had known it when she was seven years old and he had taken until this moment in the blood-soaked dirt of a battlefield to understand it.

A smile arrived onto Leon’s face.

’I had it backwards the entire time.’

A tiny spark appeared beside his right hand. Blue and electric. It was there for less than a second and then it was gone.

He didn’t see it.

He wasn’t looking at his hand. He was looking at the sky.

The change in the atmosphere happened before Zeus moved.

Leon felt it through the earth before he could look up. ℯ

He turned his head toward the sky.

Thick blood-red mana was pooling in the upper atmosphere. Dense and volatile and expanding. It looked like a bruise spreading across the cloud layer at first and then it became something worse than that.

A sphere of crimson that kept growing and growing and the pressure coming off it even from this distance was making the air itself groan.

Leon’s peaceful expression vanished.

’P-Progenitor blood?’

Everything within ten miles of where that thing came down was going to be dead before they had time to understand what had happened.

Every person on this field, every soldier who had just turned around. Every man and woman who had decided to stand beside him.

His eyes swept across the hundreds of people still fighting below that sphere of crimson death without any idea it was above them.

’No.’

He thrashed. His arms moved against Zeus’s boot with every scrap of strength remaining in his body which turned out to be not very much. The ribs sent fire through him with each movement. His vision was going dark at the corners.

His fingers stretched across the soil toward them. Toward the soldiers who couldn’t see what was coming. His bloodied fingertips scraped across dirt and rock.

’I have to reach them. I have to do something. I can’t let them die here. Not for me. Not for nothing.’

The tiny blue spark appeared again beside his outstretched hand. Brighter this time. It didn’t vanish immediately.

Leon still didn’t see it. His whole being was aimed at the people he couldn’t reach. His palm slammed flat against the earth.

’I am their Spire.’

His fingers dug in until his skin split and bled.

’I am Leon Evercrest.’

The spark multiplied.

Zeus raised his left hand toward the horizon.

The crimson sphere began its descent.

"Now little insects," Zeus said. "Let us see what your precious courage achieves against—"

"I’M NOT DONE YET!"

A violent tremor ripped through the earth.

Zeus stopped.

His hand was still raised. His gaze went down slowly to the boy pinned beneath his foot.

"...Hm?"

The smug expression on his face changed. His brows came together.

He looked down.

Small blue light was leaking from Leon’s skin.

Then it stopped trying to be small.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.