Chapter 184: Who knows?

"How do you know about it?" Leon asked.

He kept his voice flat. His hands stayed in his pockets, and he did not shift his weight on the shield. Nothing about him looked worried, and he made sure of that.

Milda blinked, as if she had forgotten he was there for a moment. Then she lowered her gaze from the shield and gave a small, awkward laugh.

"I do not know it," she said. "Not really. I have only heard about it."

"Heard about it where?"

"In stories... and old records. The kind of thing that gets passed around the Association when someone is bored enough to go digging in the archives." She waved a hand vaguely.

"A shield with a carved face and green light, that no attack could break. I never saw it myself. I thought it was only a legend."

"It sounds like you know a lot for someone who only heard stories."

"I read a great deal."

Leon narrowed his eyes.

She said it easily, and her smile never wavered, but he had spent too many years reading people who wanted something from him.

There was a gap in what she was telling him. It was small, the kind of gap a person leaves when they step carefully around a hole in the floor. She had stopped talking right before she reached the part that mattered.

He decided not to push. Not yet. If she wanted to keep something back, he could wait until she was ready to let it slip.

"Fine," he said.

"You do not believe me."

"I did not say that."

"You did not have to." Milda sighed. Then her eyes widened a little, and her whole expression changed, as if a piece she had been missing had finally clicked into place. "Oh. Oh, I see. I understand now."

"Understand what?"

"Your strength. Your level." She lifted a finger and pointed at him, and then at the shield beneath his feet.

"You are only level twenty. That has been bothering me since I saw you. A level twenty player cannot kill an S-rank. It cannot be done, there is no way for the numbers to work. But if you have that..."

She trailed off, and her voice went quiet.

"Then that is how you did it," she said. "That is why you are so strong. It is the Aegis."

Leon raised an eyebrow. "Is that what you think?"

"It is the legendary shield, the Aegis," Milda said. She was talking faster now, half to him and half to herself.

"It is said that it can take any attack and return it with ten times the force. A player with that could stand in front of someone far above his level and let them destroy themselves. That is how you killed Garrick. He hit you with everything he had, and it all came back."

Leon did not answer.

He had not told her any of that, and he had not confirmed it either. But he did not correct her, and his silence was answer enough.

Milda took a long breath. When she spoke again, the playful lightness had gone from her voice. It had become lower and steadier, and every word came out slowly.

"Leon," she said. "How did you get a legendary grade item?"

The wind rushed past. For a moment the only sound between them was the far-off whistle of the air against the clouds below.

Then Leon smiled.

It started in the corner of his mouth and widened slowly, and it was the same smug smirk he had shown the whole room when the experience notifications had floated in front of him. He tilted his head back and looked up at her.

"Ohh," he said. "So you finally realize."

"Realize what?"

"What I have been trying to tell you since I walked into that room."

Milda frowned. She stared at him for a long moment, and her gaze dropped to his right hand, which was still resting in his pocket.

Something else was on her mind now, and she looked at him as if she was trying to remember a detail from a report she had read three times.

"The sword," she said.

"What sword?"

"Do not play games with me. The sword you used to kill Teon." Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

"It was in the reports. A blade that cut straight through an S-rank’s defense. The witnesses said they had never seen anything like it. I assumed it was only a rare weapon, a good one, perhaps even an epic one. But now..."

She stopped and swallowed.

"Is that also a legendary item?"

Leon chuckled.

He did not answer right away. He stood there on the green shield, with the wind tugging at his torn shirt and the whole city spread out below him, and he looked completely at ease.

It was the look of someone who had been holding a very good card for a very long time and finally got to put it on the table.

"Tell me," he said. "What do you think?"

Milda opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

She closed it. Then she opened it again, and still nothing came out. Her lips moved for a moment, as if she were trying to form a word and could not find the right one.

Her hands, which had been clasped so calmly behind her back, were now trembling slightly at her sides.

She was one of the ten Heads of the Player Guild Association. She had been standing at the top of the world for longer than she liked to count. Very little surprised her anymore, and almost nothing frightened her.

But this was different.

She was thinking about the records. Every Head had to read them when they took their seat, and every one of them knew the same short list by heart.

The grades of an item went from common up to legendary, and above legendary there was nothing. A legendary item was the highest thing the system could produce. Only a handful had ever been recorded in the entire history of the Association.

And the last person who had carried one, an item ranked SSS, was a man everyone called White.

He had also been the last adventurer to hold the rank of SSS.

Milda’s eyes moved back to Leon. She looked at the boy who had barged into her council and threatened her S-ranks, who had demanded the highest rank in the world as if he were asking for a cup of tea.

A little while ago she had been telling herself that he was too young, and too reckless, and that he did not know what he was asking for.

She had been wrong about that.

He had known exactly what he was asking for. He had known it better than any of them.

If he was carrying an SSS-rank item, and not just one but two, then he was not a boy who had stumbled into a lucky win. He was standing in a place that nobody else had stood in for a very long time.

The Association had spent years building ranks and rules and requirements, and all of it had been made for people who were weaker than this.

Leon deserved the rank of SSS.

The thought sat in her chest like a stone. She did not like it, but she could not argue with it.

There was only one thing she could not understand, and it was the thing that mattered most.

"How?" she said, finally. It came out rough, and she cleared her throat and tried again. "How did you get them?"

Leon tilted his head. "Get what?"

"The items. Two legendary rank items, in the hands of a level twenty boy." She took a step forward in the air, and her voice grew sharper, with an edge she had not let show before.

"Those do not drop from monsters. They do not appear in treasure chests, or reward screens, or the hands of a lucky fool."

"There is no record in this world of anyone finding one by accident since the day White disappeared. So I am asking you, as a Head of this Association, where did you find them?"

For a few seconds Leon said nothing at all.

He looked down at the Aegis under his boots. He looked at the ring on his finger, which was still glowing faintly green.

Then he looked back up at Milda, and the corner of his mouth lifted again, slow and lazy.

"Well," he said, "who knows?"

Milda’s smile twitched.

It was only for a moment, and she brought it back quickly, but Leon caught it. She had asked a serious question in a serious voice, and she had been given a lazy shrug in return.

For a woman who had spent most of her life being listened to, it was clearly not a pleasant feeling.

"Who knows...?" she repeated slowly.

"Yeah, who knows," Leon said.