Chapter 84: Back then you told me to take in and raise those troublesome kids! And now, look at them!
Thanks to the help provided by Bell and a captain at the Luminous Tier, the soldiers and stigmata users at the awakened tier managed to cut down a significant number of the rampaging awakened monsters.
Without Bell influencing the environment, they would have clearly struggled to hold the fortress. So, once they judged that the remaining monsters could be handled by the stigmata users and soldiers, Bell and the Luminous Tier captain set off with a few others to finish off the demon tree, alongside Duke Everheart himself.
Their goal was simple. Because the monsters seemed endless, arriving in unbroken waves, Bell and Duke Everheart judged the situation critical—they couldn’t afford to wait for reinforcements, or they would eventually lose to sheer exhaustion.
So Duke Everheart chose to use a precious single-use artifact. One that could be called something crafted from an exceedingly rare stigmata, so rare that only a handful existed in the entire world.
With that decision made, the remaining soldiers and stigmata users had to hold the fortress while Bell and Duke Everheart dealt with the demon tree.
But circumstances weren’t so kind. Right as Bell and Duke Everheart’s group began their fight, the exhausted fortress guards found themselves with far more guests.
Four awakened monsters, one of them so close to the Luminous Tier it was almost indistinguishable from it.
That was where the chaos began.
The monsters tore through the barrier, smashed the fortress apart, and broke straight into the western district.
Atop a tall building, a woman with a grim expression, her face streaked with blood, stood catching her breath as she stared out at the western district being torn to pieces.
Buildings crumbled, some bursting into flame in the middle of the pouring rain. Her gaze locked onto a gorilla-shaped monster, its body encased in stone, standing upright like a man and roaring.
Boom—!
Its punch obliterated a large building in front of it, the ground shaking violently. The awakened held their ground, not trying to defeat the monster outright, but doing their best to buy time until the demon tree was taken down.
The woman clicked her tongue. "I swear it! I’m drinking myself sick after I squeeze every last coin out of Duke Everheart for this mess!"
Then, smirking, she raised her bow, its wood twisting and curling in strange shapes. She drew the string, and three arrows materialized out of nothing, brimming with soul essence, faint flames writhing wildly around them.
The woman took aim. Her job as a ranged attacker wasn’t to deal heavy damage—it was to make sure everything kept running smoothly.
She checked on each stigmata user’s condition. Then she spotted a man cornered, his body sent flying by a humanoid tiger covered in thick fur.
Just as the tiger moved in to finish him off, she had already loosed her arrow.
Through the darkness, through the howling wind and pouring rain, her arrow sliced through it all, blazing with a fierce flame, leaving a faint crimson trail behind it.
Whizz—! Whizz—! Whizz—!
Boom—!
The arrows shot forward with a sharp whistling sound, slamming into the humanoid tiger’s body and shattering its arm, blood spraying out in excess.
The tiger let out a furious roar, but its body healed almost instantly, the arm reforming as though nothing had happened at all. Still, it was enough.
The dying man managed to scramble up and save himself. The woman finally turned her focus elsewhere, scanning the rest of the battlefield and drawing her bow again.
Her arrows flew several more times, until she suddenly felt a faint, terrible tremor. The tall building she stood on shook violently.
"Huh...?!"
She flinched, glancing down, and found the stone gorilla climbing toward her with startling speed. Her face went stiff, watching it close in on her position.
But the next instant, she leapt into the air. She was at a height that would have been suicidal for anyone else, her body swallowed by the wind as she drew her bow again.
Whizz! Whizz! Whizz—!
Boom! Bam! Bam!
’Damn it, everyone else is busy. What am I supposed to do?’
The shots hit their mark, but they weren’t nearly enough to pierce the gorilla’s body, so close to reaching the Luminous Tier.
In this situation, the woman thought it might be difficult to save herself in one piece. Watching the gorilla lunge up toward her, her lips twitched.
’Ah, damn it.’
But—
Thrum—!
Crackle! Crackle!
The crackling sound of lightning burst out behind her, followed by a light whistling as a figure shot past her, straight toward the gorilla.
The silhouette of a man appeared, long white hair streaming, red lightning flickering wildly across his body.
The gorilla roared, hurling its fist toward the silhouette. But the man dodged effortlessly, tilting his body, brushing against the gorilla’s arm, then using it as a springboard to launch himself straight at its face.
His hand rose high, and—
Whoosh—!!
Slam—Boom!!
The gorilla let out a thunderous roar, its body forced down as though gravity itself had crushed it into the ground. At the same moment, the woman landed comfortably atop a low rooftop.
The man’s silhouette finally came into clear view as he approached her. A handsome figure, wearing a warm, easy smile that was pleasant just to look at.
"Hello there, you all right?" the man said with a smile, offering her a hand as she looked worn out enough to collapse.
And the woman?
"Ah," she went quiet, staring at him, her expression turning complicated for a moment before she smiled. "Um... Do you have a girlfriend?"
"Eh?"
***
At the Academy, right now, students carried on with their lessons as usual. Even with the rain pouring down hard, it didn’t bother anyone in the slightest—the academy truly offered the best of everything, so much so that the rain simply became a backdrop, if anything making them feel even better.
At the Tower of Wisdom, where the library stood and where Estiel currently resided, he stared out the window with a grim expression, raising his hand as though about to decide to do something about the distant events unfolding.
But he lowered it again, pouting with an incredibly complicated mix of emotions. He looked down at the book in his hands—a diary of prohibitions, things Estiel was not allowed to do.
Because he always erased his own memories after peering into countless possible futures, pasts, and presents across different dimensions, his past self always left notes behind for his present self.
Estiel had no idea what his past self was planning for him right now. But it should be known—all of it had left him utterly exasperated.
"What is this?!" Estiel shouted, hurling the diary aside. "Back then you told me to take in and raise those troublesome kids! And now, look at them!"
He scoffed. "They’re playing with fire! And you’re telling me I’m not allowed to help them?"
It was giving him a genuine headache. Sometimes his past self asked him to intervene and change fate, but in other matters, he was forbidden from interfering at all.
Like right now, knowing that the troublesome kids he’d decided to take in and raise were currently caught right in the middle of danger.
As furious as he was about all this, Estiel didn’t dare defy his past self. Not without reason—Estiel, more than anyone, understood that every one of his own actions, everything he did, had already been carefully planned out.
So all he had to do was watch and let everything unfold slowly. The diary had already been filled with thousands of pages, and Estiel was currently at page 121.
That’s right... All he had to do was watch, but...
"Ugh..." His head suddenly began to ache as he started thinking about what would happen next. For now, the ones giving him the headache were Eiros and the princess, Renessa.
But as for what came after that...
"Good grief... Why do these kids keep getting themselves tangled up in things that make me worry?"
***