Chapter 191: Give me one reason

"I will ask you one question," Iris said. "And I want you to think before you answer, because I will know if you are lying."

"That is fair."

"Give me one reason that I should not do this."

"Do what?"

"Let go." Her fingers shifted on the string, very slightly.

"Let go, and see what happens. I normally don’t use this... but against an S-rank threat, I think it’s worth it."

"If I let this arrow fly, there will be nothing left of you. Not a body, and not a bone. Not a name. It would be as though you had never been born."

Leon felt the hair rise on his arms. He told himself that she was just bluffing, and couldn’t actually do that.

A woman like that could not erase a man from the world. It was absurd, and he almost laughed at the thought.

But the arrow was not absurd.

It did not look like a weapon. It looked like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence, and the sentence was his name.

Everything in him was telling him that she was telling the truth, and that she had not been exaggerating. She could do it. She might not want to, but she could.

And he was the strongest person in the world, possessing SSS-rank level of power as well as different legendary items.

He had stood in front of ten S-ranks and put them on the floor, and he had met a woman who was level two hundred and not been afraid.

Now he was standing in a kitchen that smelled like bread, and he could not make his legs move.

It was a very strange feeling. He did not like it at all.

"One reason," Iris said again.

Leon looked at the arrow, and then he looked at her face.

He could have lied. There were a dozen things he could have said, and some of them might even have worked.

He could have told her that he was her friend, or that she owed him for the week he had spent being polite on her sofa.

He could have said that he would leave and never come back, that he would forget this had happened, that no one would ever know. He could have begged.

He was not going to do any of those things.

"I do not have one," he said.

Her eyebrows moved. She had not expected that.

"I thought about it," Leon said. "I really did. I looked for a reason, and I do not have a good one. You have every right to be angry."

" I lied to you, I put you in danger, and I did not even have the decency to tell you why. If you decide that this is the right thing to do, then I cannot say that you are wrong."

"You are very calm about it."

"I am not calm. I am terrified."

"You do not look terrified."

"I have a good face for it."

The corner of her mouth twitched, and he was sure that she had almost smiled. Then the bow hummed, and the smile went away.

"So you would let me," she said.

"I would not stop you. If you think it is right, then you can do it." He said it quietly. "But I will tell you one more thing, and I want you to listen to it carefully, because I do not say it to frighten you."

"Go on."

"Do not expect me to stand still while you do."

The silence changed.

It was a small change. He had not raised his voice, and he had not moved a muscle. But the air in the kitchen seemed to go very thin and very sharp, like the moment before a pane of glass breaks.

"I will not run," Leon said. "But... if that arrow leaves your hand, then I am going to move, cause I surely don’t want to be erased..."

She stared at him, with neither of them moving.

The cold on the back of his neck had turned to something like ice water, and he felt his heartbeat in his throat.

"That is not a reason," Iris said at last.

"It’s not?"

"That is a threat."

"It is a little of both."

"It is a bad reason."

"I know."

"You are a very stupid man."

"I have been told."

"Stop smiling."

"I am not smiling."

"You are doing it with your eyes."

He did not think that he was. But he let his face go still, and he waited.

A long minute passed. It was the longest minute of his life, and he had spent a day among S-ranks. He watched her fingers on the string.

He watched the white point of the arrow. He watched her breathing, which was fast and shallow, and he watched her eyes, which were looking at him as though she were trying to read something written very small.

She was deciding. He could see that. She was standing on a line, and she did not know which side she wanted to fall to, and in the end it would not be his strength that decided it. It would be hers.

The string creaked.

Leon did not look away.

Then, very slowly, Iris’s hand opened.

The arrow came apart in her fingers, dissolving into a thread of pale light that drifted upward and vanished against the ceiling like breath on a cold morning.

The string went slack. The bow stayed in her other hand for a moment longer, faintly glowing, and then she lowered it to her side, and it faded to a shimmer, and then to nothing.

The humming stopped, and everything was back to normal again.

Leon let out a breath that shook a little at the end.

Iris leaned back against the wall. She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, and her shoulders trembled, and he thought for a moment that she was going to cry again.

Instead she laughed, one short helpless breath of a laugh, and let her hand fall.