Emrys looked away from the mountain and turned his gaze to Goldard's body, sliced into four pieces, along with the crater the Black Cross had carved out.
"Yeah, using the Black Cross was really excessive," he said sheepishly.
He stared at the disaster, scratching his head, unable to figure out how he was going to cover up the traces of it.
After several minutes of fruitless thinking, he decided to leave that problem to his future self and hurried back toward the village.
He'd managed to destroy the boulders before they crashed into the village, but some debris had still made it through. He could sense that a few villagers had been hurt during the attack.
"Mr. Joran," Emrys said, landing.
Joran stood right in front of him, carrying one of the wounded.
Joran was startled by Emrys's sudden appearance and immediately stepped back, on guard.
"Who are you?" he asked, suspicious. Then he began studying the figure in front of him more carefully.
The wounded man in his arms also lifted his head to look at Emrys, and the shock that hit him upon seeing him was significant.
"Fa-Faker?" he managed to say.
Joran turned his head toward him, equally stunned, and said.
"What do you mean, Faker? You're telling me this is the Faker everyone talks about? And how do you know that?"
The wounded man, his voice still shaking, answered him.
"He saved the village I lived in before I came here. I'll never forget what he looks like. He saved me and my fam—"
"Okay, okay, that's enough, no need to make a whole thing of it, this isn't really the time anyway," Emrys cut in.
He immediately summoned the Scepter Asclepius into his hands and held it out toward the wounded man.
"Sacred treasure, release."
The white light pouring from Asclepius washed over the man, and the open wound on his head closed up.
After a moment, Asclepius stopped giving off light, and the man stepped out of Joran's arms to stand on his own.
"How do you feel?" Emrys asked.
"I-I feel incredibly good," the man answered, dumbfounded by what had just happened to him.
"Wonderful! Mr. Joran, you and him head to the announcement square and tell everyone you come across to do the same. There are more wounded, I'll treat them and join you. I'm counting on you," Emrys said before taking off running again.
To Joran and the other man, it was as if he'd simply vanished, his speed was that absurd, but that display of speed wasn't really what shocked Joran most.
I'm sure I've heard that voice before, but where?
Emrys followed through on his own words and ran across the whole village to treat the few wounded there were. Unlike the man from before, none of them recognized him.
Asclepius's light burst out from every corner of the village. About thirty people had been hit by debris; most of the injuries were minor, of course. Some had fractures, but Emrys knew Asclepius couldn't heal wounds of that magnitude. All it could do was ease the villagers' pain and set splints to hold their bones in place.
The fact that not a single villager had died was an immense relief to him. But as he moved on to treat others, he sensed an aura rapidly and dangerously fading, and that aura seemed to belong to a child.
As he got closer, he began hearing screams. They were coming from someone next to the person whose aura was fading.
"Help! Someone, please, help!"
Emrys recognized the voice, it belonged to the old tailor who lived with his granddaughter, and it was thick with panic, fear, and despair.
"Wait, isn't that Iklia's grandfather?"
Upon hearing his voice, Emrys understood who the dying person was. He ran even faster to reach the wounded girl and arrived within seconds.
His arrival startled Iklia's grandfather, but the man didn't stay on guard for long, simply throwing himself at Emrys's feet.
"Please, please, do something," the old man begged, his tear-filled eyes lifting toward Emrys without even trying to figure out who he was. "She's still breathing, but she's not moving, she hasn't moved at all since the debris hit her."
Emrys knelt down immediately in front of her and held Asclepius out over her. The white light spread across the small, motionless body, closing a wound at the back of her skull, stabilizing her breathing, which grew deeper, steadier.
But something was off.
Her aura is strange. Something's wrong, but I can't pin it down with my haki.
Emrys didn't waste time thinking it over and immediately used Structural Grasp on her.
"Trace On."
And the result that came back hit him like a dagger straight to the heart.
Spinal column severed at the lower thoracic vertebrae. Spinal cord irreversibly damaged by the impact.
Emrys stayed silent for a long moment, his mind almost refusing to accept what he'd just discovered.
"Well?" the grandfather asked, his voice trembling with desperate hope. "She's going to be okay, right? Tell me she's going to be okay."
Emrys closed his eyes for a moment, searching for the least cruel words he could find to deliver a truth that would remain unbearable no matter how he phrased it.
"Her life is no longer in danger," he finally said, his voice gentler than he'd thought himself capable of in a moment like this. "But... her spine has been severely damaged. My scepter isn't able to handle injuries of this magnitude."
The old man went silent, confusion and terror warring across his weathered face.
"What does that mean," he finally murmured, his voice cracking, as if he already dreaded the answer.
Emrys's heart clenched even tighter at the thought of having to say it plainly.
Damn it, how doctors even do this?
"It means there's a very strong chance she'll never walk again for the rest of her life," Emrys answered, every word costing him more than any physical wound he could have taken during the entire battle.
The grandfather collapsed forward, his arms wrapping around his granddaughter's still-unconscious little body, a wrenching sob tearing out of his throat.
Emrys stayed kneeling beside them, unable to find a single word that could ease that pain, feeling a quiet rage begin to boil somewhere deep in his chest, a rage he hadn't felt with this kind of intensity in a very long time.
A child. A simple child who loved playing with her friends and talking to her little crush.
And because of a decision bordering on outright racism, made by people who claimed to stand on the side of good, she would never walk again.
Emrys stayed a moment longer, resting a hesitant hand on the old man's shoulder, before standing up, his face hidden behind his mask giving away nothing of the storm raging behind it.
"I'm truly sorry," he said, his voice strained to the breaking point. "I'm going to keep treating the other wounded. Stay with her."
He walked away without waiting for a response, his fists clenched so tight his knuckles would have gone white if anyone could have seen them beneath his gauntlets.
*
It took Emrys another twenty minutes to treat and administer first aid to the rest of the population hit by rock debris. But his mind was still haunted by the fate that had befallen Iklia and her grandfather.
Once he was certain no one else needed treatment, he quietly left the village, making sure no one followed him.
He headed for the hill where Goldard's remains still lay, the crater from the Black Cross still gaping, a silent witness to the violence he'd unleashed there a few hours earlier.
"Trace On."
He used Structural Grasp on Goldard's remains, searching for one very specific piece of information.
So where are you hiding, you mortherfucker.
After sifting through the residual magical energy still clinging to Goldard's body, Emrys got access to the information he was looking for.
The location of their base.
It was a fortified camp situated about a hundred kilometers from the village. Nestled between two steep hills and guarded by hundreds of soldiers, both fairy and giant. The commander of this base was a member of the goddess clan.
Emrys tried extending his haki all the way out to that distance. He managed it, but felt his mental energy draining at an alarming rate, and even then, the detection remained vague.
He pulled his haki back, now knowing where his next target was.
"I can't be very precise with haki on this one," he murmured, a joyless smile stretching across his lips beneath his mask. "But well. Given what I'm about to send them, it comes down to about the same thing anyway."
He straightened up, letting Goldard's body drop, and held out his left hand in front of him.
"Trace On."
His imposing bow materialized in his hand. Having grown considerably, the bow no longer towered over him, though it remained massive all the same.
Then, in his left hand, a long, slender sword appeared.
Its silver metal was marked by a continuous twist running from the guard all the way to its tip. The entire blade seemed to have been forged in a spiral, each rotation forming ridges that gradually converged as they neared the point. Fine blue markings traced some of these twists, standing out against the silver steel.
At the base of the blade sat a fairly wide guard, made of several gold and silver pieces that opened elegantly on either side. A few blue patterns completed the ornamentation, while a small portion of the blade extended below the guard.
The grip, much slimmer, was mainly blue and silver. It ended in a small dark pommel held in place by a golden ring. The grip felt almost dissonant with the rest of the sword, as if it had been grafted on rather than belonging to it from the start.
And yet, the sword remained one of extraordinary elegance.
He nocked the sword against the bowstring.
Beneath his fingers, the blade began to transform, lengthening, thinning, gradually losing its original shape to take on a slimmer, more aerodynamic silhouette, every curve reshaping itself to perfectly match the trajectory of a projectile rather than a melee blade.
Red lines began appearing along the length of the now-formed arrow, pulsing gently like a heart on the verge of racing out of control.
Emrys drew the bow, feeling all the tension building in his arms, in his shoulders.
The colossal magical energy pouring off the projectile made the air around Emrys tremble.
He closed his eyes.
"My core is twisted in madness."
His voice rang out, strangely calm despite the power rumbling between his hands.
"Caladbolg."
He released the arrow.
It shot off with a piercing shriek, splitting the air at a speed no human eye could have followed, leaving behind a trail of reddish light that lingered a moment before fading into the sky.
Emrys stayed still, tracking its trajectory with his haki until it vanished completely from his range, that particular sensation of unleashed power still making the space around him tremble.
He dismissed his bow, letting his arms drop, the tension that had built up all the way into his back finally releasing.
Then he turned back toward the village, resuming his path to Fondval, his voice echoing through the silence of the dusk.
"There, consider it a gift, you'll let me know how it goes. A Caladbolg II, with all the power of the original Caladbolg."
*
Hundreds of kilometers away, in the fortified base nestled between two steep hills, Morticiel felt something shatter in the air.
A wave. A surge of magical energy at a level of power he had never felt in his entire existence, closing in at a terrifying speed.
"What is—" he began, his usually calm face collapsing into an expression of pure horror.
He immediately turned to the soldiers around him, his voice rising into a desperate shout.
"ALERT! EVERYONE, EVACUATE NOW! SOMETHING'S COMING—"
He didn't have time to finish his sentence.
The arrow slammed into the center of the base in a blinding flash of reddish light, before the explosion that followed swallowed absolutely everything within a radius the surrounding hills themselves couldn't contain.
BOOOOOOOOOOOM.
The blast wave leveled the two hills flanking the base, pulverizing every structure, every palisade, every soldier stationed there, in a cataclysm that could be heard and felt for dozens of kilometers around, a mushroom cloud of dust and light rising into the sky like a second, fleeting sun.
When silence finally settled back over that stretch of valley, absolutely nothing remained of the Stigma base. Not a single stone left standing, not a single body, not the slightest trace that anything had ever existed at that exact spot mere minutes before.
Only an immense crater, still smoking, bore witness to the unimaginable power that had just been unleashed there.
And somewhere, far away, a young man in a black mask and crimson cloak calmly resumed his walk back toward a small village that, for the first time in a long while, could finally hope for a little respite, even if only for a short time.