Chapter 375: Accident-Prone Unicorn
The reaction was immediate and unanimous.
"My lady, what are you doing?! "
"Where do you think you’re going? Stop! Stop right now!"
"What are you doing with that sword?! It’s not safe! Please, my lady—put that down!"
"Hey that’s my sword! When did she take it!?"
Horror and disbelief rippled through the centaurs as they realized what was happening. Their precious, naive, utterly defenseless queen was about to challenge the Hero to single combat.
Poppy merely harrumphed, coming to a stop before Luca with all the confidence of a warrior who had already won.
"Honestly." She said, shrugging one shoulder with exaggerated casualness. "I didn’t want to do this myself."
"Queens aren’t supposed to make the moves—we’re supposed to sit gracefully on our thrones and rule over others while our knights handle the messy work of battle. That’s simply how these things are done."
"But...it seems I have no choice."
She sighed, as though the weight of the world had been placed upon her small shoulders.
"My knights have given everything they have, and still it wasn’t enough. So now..."
Her grip tightened on the sword’s hilt. "Now I must protect my First Knight’s honor myself!"
Sigrid’s lips moved soundlessly. "Lady Poppy..."
"If showing off my true, secret skills is what it takes to save my commander, then I shall go all out!"
Poppy declared, glaring up at Luca who was trying not to laugh.
"Your time has come, human! You are about to learn what true swordsmanship really is!"
With supreme bravado, she grabbed the hilt with both hands and pulled.
But...it didn’t budge.
Poppy blinked, looking down at the hilt.
"What in the world...? Is this sword made of solid tolinum?!"
She tugged harder, her face turning red. "Did I accidentally grab a heavy broadsword made from rare, super-dense ore?!"
A knight buried her face in her hands, groaning in embarrassment.
"No, My Lady...that’s actually the lightest training rapier we have..."
Poppy’s cheeks flushed crimson. She had just declared that she would reveal her hidden skills and defeat the Hero.
And now she couldn’t even lift the sword she had dragged onto the field!
But she was the Queen. And queens did not surrender!
So with a determined grunt, she wrapped both hands around the hilt and heaved with every ounce of strength in her small, untrained arms.
"Nnnnn—!"
The sword rose slowly, inching upward like a reluctant sunrise.
Sweat beaded on her forehead. Her face turned from pink to red to an alarming shade of crimson.
Then—miraculously—she raised it above her head!
"I did it!" She exclaimed, her voice bright with triumph. "I did it! I actually lifted the sword! Did everyone see that?! I lifted it!"
She was celebrating as though lifting the weapon was the greatest achievement in the history of centaur warfare.
Thea, however, saw the danger with terrifying clarity.
"Lady Poppy, DON’T—! "
But it was too late.
"See, human?!" Poppy cheered, taking a triumphant step forward. "I told you I could—WHOA!"
Focused entirely on holding the heavy metal aloft, Poppy stepped squarely on a loose rock.
Her foot slipped and he tumbled backward, her legs flying into the air.
Time seemed to slow in that moment.
Every centaur watched in paralyzing horror as the blade reached the apex of its arc and began its descent—plummeting directly toward Poppy’s small, fragile body.
It was falling point-first, as though it had been aimed, as though the universe itself had decided this was the moment it would claim their queen.
A collective scream of pure horror tore through the valley.
"LADY POPPY!"
Centaurs who had been completely immobilized moments before were suddenly lunging forward.
Sigrid was already halfway across the field, moving with a speed that should have been impossible given her condition. Her hand was on her sword, ready to throw it—to knock the falling blade off course before it could strike her Queen.
But even she wasn’t fast enough.
Meanwhile, Poppy lay frozen, her eyes wide, watching death descend toward her. The sword grew larger and larger in her vision.
’So this is it.’ She thought, with strange, detached calm. ’This is how I die. Not in battle. Not protecting my people.’
’But tripping over a rock with my own stolen sword. How shameful of a end for a queen.’
’Sigh...I never even got to hear my mother’s voice all the way to very end.’
The blade was inches from her chest.
But then—just as the sword was about to end her.
A blue portal spiraled open directly above Poppy’s head.
Whoosh!
The falling sword vanished into it without a sound. The portal closed a heartbeat later, shrinking to nothing and leaving behind only empty air where certain death had been.
Silence.
Poppy lay on the ground, completely unharmed, blinking up at the spot where the sword had been.
The centaurs stood frozen mid-charge, their bodies still braced for a tragedy that had been averted in the space between heartbeats.
Then the relief hit like a tidal wave.
"Thank the gods! Thank the fucking gods! I nearly pissed myself from fear!"
"I thought...I thought we had lost her. I thought she was—"
The speaker couldn’t even finish, her voice cracking with residual terror.
"If such a horrific accident had occurred, I don’t know how I could have faced her ancestors."
"My legs were already weak, but now they’re practically useless!" A centaur collapsed back to the ground, her entire body shaking.
It was in that moment they understood something they had always known but never truly confronted.
They could protect Poppy from external enemies—armies, assassins, monsters in the dark.
They had full confidence in their ability to do so, or at least to die trying.
But there was one threat they could not easily defend against.
Poppy herself!
If anything were to happen to their queen in the future, there was a disturbingly high probability that it would be the result of her own mistake—some ridiculous, entirely preventable accident that ended with her dying a silly death.
They had watched her nearly poison herself with tea, nearly fall from heights while reaching for flowers, nearly drown in a stream that barely reached her knees.
And now she had nearly impaled herself with her own sword.
The frustration was immense. The helplessness even greater. What could they possibly do about a queen whose greatest enemy was herself?!
Thea reached Poppy.
"Thank you, Hero." She said to Luca first, her voice tight but sincere. "Truly. Thank you."
Then she turned to her queen and her expression expression turned to one that could have frozen lava.
Her voice, when she spoke, was terrifyingly calm.
"Lady Poppy..."
Poppy cringed. "I...I can explain—"
"How. Dare. You."
Thea’s composure cracked, raw fury bleeding through.
"How dare you sneak off my back without a word!"
"How dare you steal a sword and challenge the Hero without telling anyone!"
"How dare you—" She took a deep breath, visibly struggling to control herself.
"Do you have any idea what almost just happened? Do you have any concept of how close—"
Poppy scrambled to defend herself.
"I just wanted to help! Everyone was so exhausted and Sigrid was about to lose and I thought—I thought maybe I could—"
"Get. On. My. Back."
"But I said—"
"Get on my back, my lady."
The tone brooked no argument. It was the voice not of a knight addressing her Queen.
But of a mother who had reached the absolute limit of their patience with her child and was one wrong word away from losing all composure entirely.
Poppy, for once in her life, did not argue. She climbed meekly onto Thea’s back, her earlier bravado completely evaporated.
Thea continued scolding her in low, furious tones as they retreated from the field, and Poppy—the Queen who had just declared she would show the Hero "true swordsmanship"—could do nothing but hang her head and accept the lecture in silence.
---
Luca, who had saved her in that final moment, stood watching the scene unfold with an expression of genuine bafflement.
He had lived for thousands upon thousands of years.
He had witnessed things that defied description—miracles and horrors, wonders and tragedies, events so strange they would seem like fever dreams to anyone he tried to describe them to.
But he had never—not once, in all his millennia of existence seen someone almost kill themselves with their own sword quite like that.
Well. Actually...
There was Lulu.
On his very first day of meeting her, she had accidentally shot herself in the butt with her own arrow.
But even that had been relatively minor. An arrow lodged in the rear was embarrassing and painful, certainly, but it wasn’t life-threatening.
It had even served as a strange catalyst for the friendship between her, Luna, and himself.
They still laughed about it sometimes.
But this?
This had been a straight, undeniable, inches-from-death catastrophe!
The sword had been plummeting directly toward Poppy’s heart.
Not her shoulder. Not her leg. Her heart!
Luca realized, in that moment, that Poppy was even more dangerous to herself than Lulu had ever been.
Lulu was clumsy, yes. Accident-prone, absolutely.
But Poppy was on an entirely different level, a level of self-destructive chaos that bordered on the supernatural!