◉◉◉◉◉
Even after being dead for centuries, this dark wizard still had fanatics trying to bring him back. Reon could not help marveling at the sheer pull the man must have had.
So this is what they mean when they say even monsters can have their own messiah.
He was still thinking that when a sharp crack split the air.
The next instant, a whip slammed hard across his back.
"You worthless little bastard, who said you could stand there daydreaming?"
The towering, obese overseer roared at him, a leather whip hanging in his hand, stained with dark grime.
The blow sent Reon stumbling to the ground. The searing pain snapped him fully awake, Only then did he realize how conspicuous he'd looked, standing motionless in the middle of a crowd of working slaves.
He lifted his eyes and took a quick measure of the man before lowering them again. Without a word, he pushed himself back to his feet and unsteadily made his way toward the nearby pile of stone.
"Filthy trash, you don't move unless you're beaten."
Seeing no reaction from him, the fat overseer spat on the ground, turned with obvious disgust, and swaggered away.
With effort, Reon hoisted a block of stone and tossed it into a cart. At the same time, he quietly watched the man's arrogant retreating back, his own face completely expressionless.
There had been no mercy at all in that strike, yet he had not made a sound from start to finish, He knew exactly what kind of people men like this were. They fed on suffering.
Whether he clenched his teeth in resentment or broke down crying, any emotional response would be like bleeding in front of a pack of wolves. It would only invite worse.
So the correct answer was just enough numbness to make him boring.
Reon drew a quiet breath and reflected inwardly. Same bad habit as always. The moment something catches my interest, I lose track of everything else.
"At the end of the day, that's on me."
He gave a small nod, as though the lash on his back meant nothing.
"If there are rules, then when it's time to work, I should work."
He turned toward Jellal and Hugh, who were looking his way with concern, and gave them a glance that said he was fine.
Then he bent down and threw himself into hauling bricks as if making up for his mistake.
The stone blocks had been cut into enormous blocks, their edges rough and jagged. Every single one took all the strength he had to lift. And whenever one crashed into the cart, the impact would jolt the wound on his back until it throbbed with pain again.
Nothing about it was easy.
He could already feel the blood on his back drying into the prison cloth. Every movement tugged at the wound.
The sticky sensation was unbearable for someone as fussy about cleanliness as he was. He found himself swearing that once he got out of here, he was going to soak in a proper hot spring until every inch of him had healed.
By the time the sun was hanging directly overhead, Reon had finally managed to reduce the pile in front of him to almost nothing.
He had to admit it, an E-physique was pitiful beyond words.
He paused for a breath, then watched in speechless frustration as Jellal and Hugh pushed carts piled high with stone right past him with effortless ease.
And it wasn't just them. Most of the slaves had physical strength that didn't match what you'd expect from prisoners. Even the youngest of them, Millianna, handled stones with shocking efficiency.
If Hugh and Jellal had not kept conveniently carrying off the largest blocks whenever they passed by, and if the steady warmth flowing from the card in his mind had not kept supporting him, Reon was certain there was no way he could have finished such brutal labor while injured.
And in this stone tower, he didn't even need to imagine what happened to people who failed to meet their quota.
Looks like a world with magic really is different. Even ordinary people who can't cast it are far tougher than anyone back in my old life.
Having learned his lesson, Reon kept his thoughts going while making sure his hands never stopped moving.
Then suddenly, a burst of shouting erupted from the slope ahead and caught his attention.
A handcart loaded with rubble for filling gaps had tipped over violently, sending stones clattering down the incline.
A slave with panic written all over his face stumbled and fell hard to the ground. He had clearly lost control of the cart by accident.
Unfortunately for him, several overseers had been chatting at the base of the slope.
The stones tumbling down were not large, but a few of them struck the same fat overseer who had whipped Reon earlier, They did no real damage, but they splashed him with dust and grit and left him looking ridiculous.
The entire area went dead silent.
The fat on the overseer's face twitched violently. He did not even bother brushing the dirt off himself. His tiny eyes locked onto the slave now collapsed on the ground, white-faced and shaking.
"You little bastard... You want to die?"
The whip lashed out again, this time with a murderous force several times greater than when he had struck Reon, snapping through the air like a venomous snake.
The slave was scared out of his mind, but he did not dare dodge. He could only endure the pain and throw himself face-first onto the ground, banging his head repeatedly as he begged for mercy.
"Please, sir, spare me, Spare me. I didn't mean to, I swear..."
"Didn't mean to?"
The fat overseer's eyes went bloodshot as he grabbed the man by the hair.
"So what you're saying is I deserved to get hit?"
"N-no..." The slave's face twisted from pain as he stammered incoherently. "I was stupid... clumsy... I messed up..."
"Oh, now you know how to beg?"
The overseer bared his teeth and brought the whip down hard across the man's face.
"Where was all that fear when you humiliated me?"
The dull, meaty sound of the whip striking flesh was horrifying, Every blow split skin and tore deeper.
The faces of the surrounding slaves all turned pale as paper, The air was thick with shared dread, the kind that comes from seeing someone else's fate and knowing it could be yours next.
He's dead.
Reon lowered his eyelids, expressionless, Just as he had thought, any reaction from a slave only fed the fire.
If no one intervened, that man would be beaten to death.
But in a situation like this, who would dare draw that kind of attention onto themselves?
"Good thing I've always had a lot of nerve."
Reon muttered under his breath.
His gaze swept the area, Everyone's attention had been dragged over there. No one was watching him.
Quietly, he stepped back toward the rear of the crowd. A flash of dark gold light flickered in his hand, and a card appeared.
Reon was not a vindictive person. He considered that earlier lash from the fat overseer reasonable.
So what he was doing now was absolutely not revenge.
The main goal was to test his ability, save a life while he was at it, and maybe gather some information. At most, if the aftermath happened to splash onto some bystander, that had nothing whatsoever to do with revenge.
Yes, Exactly. Perfectly reasonable.
Reon nodded to himself in firm agreement.
The card flowed and shifted in his palm, transforming into a great bow the color of fresh blood.
So it really is red.
His face did not change, but inside, a spark of excitement rose. His guess about the Heroic Spirit's identity had just become even more certain.
There was no time to waste. Reon tightened his grip on the longbow.
An indescribable sense of familiarity flowed up from his palm, as if he had wielded this bow for decades, It felt as natural as moving his own arm, and a confidence like that of a legendary marksman rose within him on its own.
Does this weapon actually come with archery experience?
Reon's eyes widened despite himself. To simply skip over decades of effort someone else had bled for... this really was the kind of absurdity only a fantasy weapon could get away with.
"Then again, if it's my cheat, absurd is exactly what I want."
After the initial shock, a smile touched his face.
Because with nothing but the handful of times he'd visited an archery range back in his old life, he honestly would not have trusted himself to hit anything.
"In that case... better choose a safer trajectory."
Reon raised the bow and angled it toward the sky.
The next moment, he made the motion of drawing an arrow from empty air.
As the bowstring stretched into a perfect full moon, an arrow formed out of magical energy in his grasp.
[Arrow Construction]
Fwoosh~
Reon supplied the sound effect in his own head and released the string.
A nearly invisible streak of red sliced across the sky and vanished into the clouds.
The fat overseer was still grinning viciously, his whip raised high. The slave beneath him was already half-dead.
Then the air screamed.
A flash of light plunged straight down from the heavens, piercing clean through the overseer's thick neck. It punched on through his chest, tore out through his abdomen without losing momentum, and buried itself in the ground with a sharp metallic ring, leaving behind nothing but a smooth, bloodless hole.
The fat overseer froze where he stood. The whip slipped from his fingers and fell.
The smug triumph on his face hardened into blank disbelief. He tried to look down, only to see hot blood pouring from his throat in thick surges.
His massive body crashed to the ground and kicked up a cloud of dust.
Time itself seemed to stop.
Every slave and every other overseer stood rooted in place, their eyes nailed to the corpse still twitching faintly on the ground.
At the back of the crowd, Reon calmly relaxed his fingers from the bowstring.
The crimson longbow dissolved into motes of light and vanished, as if it had never existed at all.
◉◉◉◉◉
~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
Thank you so much for your support and for reading!