Chapter 86: The Fiancé

"...What are you?"

The only words that left Boreas’s mangled lips.

There wasn’t much of him left to say them with. His body had been shredded into bloody pieces, and whatever the lightning hadn’t torn apart had been burned and melted into the molten glass at the bottom of the crater.

A mouth, a throat, one eye.

All across what was left of Rensfell, people stared up at the figure hanging in the smoking sky.

Ivory hair, indigo eyes, long dark horns that gave him the look of a regal dark angel, and a pair of dragon wings scattering purplish light every time they moved.

One can’t decide if he was beautiful or terrifying.

Adonis looked down at Prussia.

The blood and bruises on her body was infuriating yet he looked completely emotionless.

"Die."

Whoosh! He hurled Indra straight down.

But the green-haired mage had already pulled his arms back together. He slapped a hand against the molten ground and an invisible wall of wind sprang up. The spear hit it and was knocked away, spinning off into the air.

Adonis dove after it and caught it mid-spin.

"Raaaghhh! Now’s my chance!"

Boreas flung his hand upward and waves of exploding wind blasted out of the crater, one after another.

A Magic Analyzing Sword appeared in Adonis’s hand.

Slash, Slash, Slash!

He split apart every wave, but each swing sent a shudder up his arm, and by the sixth one he grunted, and at some point his wrist almost twisted the wrong way.

It’s his [Dragon Enchantment] keeping him together.

Without that durability, his body would’ve been torn apart like a twig after the first two slashes.

After all, Mages and enchanters aren’t blessed with the physical fortitude swordsmen had.

"Hahaha! Keep swinging, pretty boy!"

Boreas cackled and fired more.

His legs were nearly ready, another minute more and he’d launch himself out of this hole and into the sky.

So Adonis stopped dodging, and flew straight down.

Straight into the crater, where the air itself was packed with invisible spheres, any one of which could go off with enough force to flatten a city.

"Brother Adonis!"

"Be careful!!"

The nuns and children screamed.

Litha clutched her chest with tears in her eyes.

"M-, My husband will win!"

...Well.

In that case, he couldn’t lose.

Smirking confidently, Adonis lazily swept the analyzing sword through the empty air in front of him once.

Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.

Then he poured lightning into Indra, rivers of it, crawling and branching across the shaft until it glowed white, and threw.

Boreas was getting to his feet.

"Haha! Can’t you learn? You’ll just trigger my invisible bla—"

Shiiiing!

The spear fell like a lance of light and split his head in half.

He choked on his own laugh, sweating fearfully.

’How...? How can he...?’

Whooosh! In a flash, Adonis was standing at the bottom of the crater, right in front of him.

"I used the sword to analyze your airburst magic. Honestly? It wasn’t that impressive. All it took was a fragment or two. After that, Indra could travel freely across the danger zone. It’s not rocket science."

Boreas screamed frenziedly, forcibly accelerating his regeneration.

...Snap, Adonis clicked his fingers.

The spear, still lodged in Boreas’s skull, lit up with a roar.

"AAAAAGGGGHHHHH—!!"

"I’m going to destroy you so completely that you’ll never restore your body again. You hear me, pig?"

His voice was perfectly calm.

But not the lightning...

Millions of volts, again and again, running through the spear and into the body that kept trying to rebuild itself.

Boreas regenerated, burned, regenerated, burned.

Sometimes slower, sometimes wrongly.

His arm came back with too many joints, or his jaw stretched, or skin split grotesquely.

He was losing the shape of a man, flickering between human and monster, as if his body no longer remembered which one it was supposed to be.

Adonis grabbed his ugly, beastly face in one hand and glared at him with his sharpened dragon eyes.

Boreas was shaking with indescribable fear.

"Wh-, What... who... are you?"

Adonis’s grip tightened until tears squeezed out of the corners of Boreas’s eyes and ran down his cheeks.

"I’m the fiancé."

"...Oh."

Boreas’s last words before he crumbled into ash.

Adonis let his dragon form go and stood alone over a pile of charred flesh.

’If I remember right... Boreas was a minor villain.’

A chimera made by the alchemists in some secret research lab in Naxos, if he was recalling correctly.

’Not important right now.’

He looked down at his arms, Alpis was sleeping in them, curled up with her tail tucked around his wrist, breathing softly against his chest.

"Heh, you overworked yourself, huh."

He looked up, past the impossibly high crater walls, there’s small heads peeking over the edges.

Father Rill as well as the nuns and kids, all waving.

Adonis waved back with a smile.

Hours later...

The wounded were laid out in rows across the open ground.

The ones with the worst injuries closest to the tents.

The nuns moved between them with whatever cloth and water they had left.

A few of them were singing and petting the children’s heads as they sat in clusters wrapped in blankets.

Most of the kids seemed fine, but Father Rill was worried if this would traumatize them.

He gripped his chest tightly.

’I’ll make sure they stay happy, even if it costs me the rest of my life. I don’t want them to ever have to think about what happened today... not ever.’

A lot of them were orphans. They had no family.

The people they’d learned to call family were the ones lying under sheets at the edge of the field.

As for Adonis, he never left Prussia’s side.

The villagers had gathered what little health potions they could scrape together, and every spare drop went to her. She got the most, far more than anyone else. Her wounds were still serious, but the villagers kept pouring, again and again, vial after vial, and no one complained.

To them, what she did was everything.

If Prussia hadn’t bought enough time for Adonis to get here, none of them would be alive.

He watched her chest rise and fall.

’Just hold on a bit longer, please...’

An army from the church arrived near evening.

Rows of nuns in white, versed in healing magic, with armored knights marching on both sides, and at the front of them, riding elegantly on a white horse, was the Mother Superior.

Even the injured tried to get on their knees.

Father Rill was the first to kiss the ground.

Others followed, one by one, wincing but bowing.

"Please. None of that is necessary."

Her voice was gentle, but her eyes were filled with sorrow at the massacre before her.

"If only the village church bell hadn’t been destroyed, we would have come to stop these... barbarians."

The Melcian Church had special bells, enchanted so that every church annex could call the main church, or any other church, just by ringing one.

But the bell in Rensfell was a pile of scraps now.

That was the first thing Shadow Wolf had destroyed.

The Mother Superior’s red eyes narrowed. Off to the side, tied up and still unconscious, lay Skein and Hegor.

Her look didn’t soften.

The nuns from the main church cast their healing magic across the field like a warm light.

They even tried their luck on the ones everyone assumed were already dead, pointless as it was.

Inside the largest tent, a group of nuns surrounded Prussia’s cot with glowing hands.

Adonis was still there, sitting in a chair at the foot of it with his arms folded.

They were all looking at him with strange eyes.

"...What?" Adonis shrugged.

"Brother Adonis, surely you have some respect. We have to remove Lady Prussia’s clothing in order to heal her fully. So you will have to leave the tent."

"Prussia? Ahaha. If she were awake, she’d probably climax from the fact that I’m looking at her naked body. You don’t know her like I do."

He scoffed, smug, and shut his eyes tight in contempt of the whole concept of shame.

...huuuu, no one said anything.

He opened one eye.

The nuns were all frowning at him.

He turned around, Mother Euphemia stood in the tent entrance with her arms folded and a stern look on her face.

"...Fine."

Adonis sighed and stood up.

"I’ll leave. For now."

Minutes later, a large, fancy parasol had been set up in the middle of a field of wounded people and burned buildings.

Underneath it, Euphemia sipped her tea.

From where she sat, she had a perfect view of Adonis.

He’s still trying to peep inside Prussia’s tent.

She sighed, patting the empty chair next to her, softly.

"Nonie, come and sit next to me~"

All the nuns and knights working across the field froze.

"EH—?!"

Soon enough, they were seated together, with tea and biscuits between them.

Adonis took a bite and a crumble refused to leave his lip so Euphemia dabbed it away with her handkerchief.

"Chew first, then speak, dear."

"I didn’t say any..."

"You were about to."

He took a sip of tea instead.

Tap.

Her folded fan nudged his cup upward by half an inch.

"The angle. You’re drinking like you’re taking medicine."

"..."

He set the cup down and sighed.

’Tch, she’s like someone’s mother...’

Technically, she was.

Euphemia held her cup on its saucer.

"I know all this began because of the salt and the spices, so I wanted to tell you none of this is your fault. Your intentions were good. If anything, it is mine, for not stopping you when you first brought up your offer. The nobles and the church have no business sharing anything... that is th truth of it."

He crossed his legs and sipped his tea coolly.

"That’s not true."

...Hm? Euphemia mumbled it into her tea.

"When I become king, I’m going to build a world where nobles and the church live in peace. I don’t believe in whatever nonsense we’re living in right now. These walls? I want to tear them down. And build a new one where everyone is free to be who they want."

The wind moved the edge of the parasol.

Euphemia’s eyes were on him, only on him.

Suddenly, she’s no longer interested in tea.

She put a hand against her cheek.

It felt warm, maybe even a little red.

’...Is that so?’

The old elf mother discovers what feelings are like.