The Lion's Baptism
After seeing off the Hera Familia members, who all seemed inexplicably apologetic, my rare moment of peace didn't last long. Hoping to settle my churning stomach, I decided a night stroll was in order and wandered through Orario after dark.
The sky was beginning to darken, and the shops were folding up one by one. A little more time passed, and even those vanished, leaving me walking alone through streets swallowed by total silence.
Is there a bar anywhere around here...?
Under normal circumstances, this kind of dead quiet never lasted through the night — there was always the distant roar of taverns to chase it away — but apparently this era simply had fewer drinking establishments than I remembered.
So there was a time like this, too.
The Orario in my memories was always raucous and alive, which made this stillness feel deeply strange, almost alien. It was as if I'd been flung into some other city, some other world that merely resembled Orario.
So much has happened...
Walking these streets like this, the old memories surfaced whether I wanted them to or not.
From the day I first arrived here — my first adventure, my failures, my challenges, my successes, the cheers, the jeers, the tears, the longing.
Fragments of memory surfaced and faded, each one dragging its emotions along behind it. I smiled bitterly at recollections that were happy and yet now carried a dull, aching pain, and set my feet toward somewhere without quite deciding where.
"Haah..."
Really, there's no better place for brooding than this.
I looked down over Orario from atop the city wall, the whole city cloaked in shadow. Seen from up here, it felt twice as unfamiliar as before.
"What am I supposed to do from here on out...?"
I muttered to myself at the aimlessness of it all, and of course nothing answered back. Well, it was talking to myself — if something had answered, that would've been far more terrifying.
At a loss, I tipped my head back toward the sky. Cloudless and clear, the night sky was strewn thick with stars and moonlight.
Wuum— A faint tremor seemed to ripple through the air, then vanished. Was it just my imagination?
"Haah..."
Lately, just when things started to loosen up, some incident or another would erupt, and I kept forgetting. Forgetting where I was, and what exactly I was doing here.
It's about time I made a decision.
As Meteria said, groaning and agonizing over it forever wouldn't change anything. Sooner or later, I had to choose a direction for myself.
It wasn't just the matter of Ais. With all the other enormous problems stacked on top of it, I had to decide what stance to take when faced with choices that would determine the future itself.
Follow it? Defy it? Or simply ignore it?
The options laid out before me were as difficult to commit to as ever. Put another way, it felt like whichever path I chose, regret would follow.
If I ignored it, my conscience wouldn't permit it. But if I defied it, the future I'd walked through clutched at my ankles like a chain.
It felt as though the gods above, as though everyone I'd ever grown close to — my comrades — had been taken hostage. The fact that their futures might be rewritten by my own hands still pressed down on me, heavy as a millstone.
I'd surely faced the exact same thing when I was living in that present, so why did it feel so viscerally wrong now? Was it because what I knew had changed?
"Haah..."
My third sigh. But sighing changed nothing.
No matter how many breaths I let out, this worry lodged inside me showed not the slightest intention of growing lighter.
Perhaps that was why.
"You look to be carrying quite a burden."
"...!"
I hadn't sensed a single thing — someone had been approaching from behind me the entire time.
"You're..."
I spun around in a hurry to see who it was.
Careless as I'd been, to fail to notice someone closing in on me like that — had I really gone soft from lounging around too long?
Struck, absurdly, by the passage of the years themselves, I turned to find a man standing there, so massively built that you'd have to doubt your own eyes to believe the scale of him.
"The Colossus...?"
"It's been a while."
A deep, weighty voice, and an atmosphere to match.
The strongest man in the city. My grandfather's greatest servant stood before my eyes.
"What brings you here... surely you haven't come to check up on me again..."
"Just a simple patrol. Before the great undertaking begins, this sort of groundwork is what matters most."
"I see..."
The Colossus's words were sound logic. Truthfully, the closer things got, the more thorough one ought to be.
But at the same time, there was something suspicious in it. Being "thorough" meant, in other words, that there was something he was worried about.
I could hardly write it off as him simply being an anxious sort — that wasn't the man he was.
"Is something bothering you, sir?"
"...I can't say there isn't. After all, there's one standing right in front of me."
"Excuse me?"
At that, I swept my gaze left and right. Naturally, there was nothing there.
"...Me?"
Nod. The Colossus dipped his head.
Wait — you're suspicious of me now?
"It isn't suspicion. Merely one item on the list of things that catch my eye."
"Isn't that exactly the same thing? Why bring it up now of all..."
"Heh."
The Colossus let out a small chuckle at my flustered reaction.
What — did I just get teased?
"You seemed to be brooding awfully hard, so I thought I'd try a joke."
A joke... Well, the Colossus was human too, perfectly capable of humor, I supposed — but given the image he carried, the remark caught me off guard.
Here was a man so hardened you'd expect a blade to snap against him before it drew blood — and yet he had a surprisingly soft side? Then why had he been so sharp with me last time?
"I heard from the old man. So you were tangled up with him after all."
"The old man...? Do you perhaps mean Gran... Lord Zeus?"
"Hm? You're not tangled up with him?"
"Excuse me?"
"No one with ties to that old man would ever use a respectful title like 'Lord Zeus.' It's 'old man,' 'gramps,' or 'that piece of garbage,' nine times out of ten."
Grandpa...? What kind of life have you been living, exactly?
"Well, never mind that. What are you doing out here moping at this hour?"
"I wouldn't call it moping... I was just thinking about what lies ahead."
"Hm. So it was moping."
No, I told you it wasn't.
Him repeatedly calling my worries "moping" stirred a flicker of displeasure. I was being completely serious here — why did he keep reducing it to that?
"Because that's exactly what it is."
"No, like I said..."
"Why are you agonizing over things like this? That wasn't how you were before."
"That's..."
There was only one "before" the Colossus could mean — the first time we'd crossed paths.
Back then, with no context to go on, I'd charged in without a second thought. But now, burdened with so much knowledge, I couldn't help being different from the man I'd been.
It wasn't that I regretted what happened that day. If I returned to that moment, I would make the same choice and say the same words again.
But that didn't mean the worry vanished. As long as this place remained the past, this dilemma would erupt like a recurring disaster, tormenting me again and again.
The only way out was to reach a conclusion — and yet there I stood, stuck in place, unable to do a single thing.
"Hmm..."
Neither of us spoke, but not everything in this world needs words to get through. Rare as it was, silence could sometimes teach more than speech ever could.
The Colossus's eyes were sharp enough to pierce straight through me. The gaze of a seasoned warrior carried, in itself, something impossible to put into words.
"I see. I have a rough idea what this is about."
You do? About what, exactly?
What could he possibly know?
"Do you know the northern wasteland beyond the city wall?"
"...? You mean the place out that way?"
I knew it too, from my memories. If I recalled right, it was the stretch of ground that appeared after crossing three mountains...
"That's the one. Tomorrow, when the morning sun rises, come out to that place."
"Huh? Um, wait, at dawn—?!"
Before I could even answer, the Colossus kicked off from where he stood and vanished into the distance.
"No, wait, what the..."
I had plenty I wanted to say, but no real grounds to say any of it, so I grumbled my way back to the basement that had somehow become my home, slept, and rose before sunrise to head for the place he'd pointed out.
When I arrived, I spotted the Colossus — apparently having gotten there himself only moments before — hauling something into position.
"Hm. You came."
With those words, he set down whatever he'd been carrying.
THOOM— A thunderous crash, and for a moment I could have sworn the ground itself rang out.
...A pillar?
It was a pillar. The kind of column that looked fit to bear the weight of an entire colossal fortress. Even at a glance I could tell it weighed a staggering amount — if I tried to lift the thing myself, I knew it wouldn't come easy.
Wait — summoning me out here out of nowhere was one thing, but why on earth a pillar...?
"Did you bring a weapon?"
"Uh... sorry?"
"Good."
In the same breath, the Colossus turned his back to the pillar and fixed his eyes on me.
The instant he turned, darkness began swallowing our surroundings, as though night itself had fallen all over again.
"!!!"
No — this wasn't darkness!
I fell back a step, squared my stance, and tensed every muscle in my body.
This was killing intent. Pure, dense, concentrated bloodlust, thick enough to smother everything in its path!
"What is the meaning of—!"
"Nothing clears the head like a good fight."
Utterly indifferent to my alarm, the Colossus pressed on.
But in his eyes lurked a fighting spirit he couldn't have hidden if he tried.
"I'll keep it short."
His voice dripped with the thrill of battle — the savage joy of a warrior.
Whatever he actually said, there was only one thing my ears could hear.
"Come at me."
I'm going to kill you right here, he meant.
The lion had decided. He would bestow a baptism upon the rabbit before his eyes.
He would pour new teachings upon a new comrade still wandering in the dark.
Yes — this was a trial. As one hero of a bygone age, he would stand as a towering wall across his junior's path... a trial, so that the boy might grow into something stronger.
So that, by surmounting this wall, he might be reborn as a greater adventurer.
The rabbit was certainly not weak. But he was naive.
Strong, and at the very same moment, not strong at all.
And that was precisely why this was a trial of his own imposing.
A blessing from a senior to his junior.
Cross over this, he willed, cast off the rust that had crept over the rabbit, and reach the summit of heroism once more.
Tch. Isn't that all just excuses?
In truth, it might not be necessary at all. The rabbit might already be complete.
But to the lion, it made not the slightest difference either way.
A mighty foe that no amount of desperate strength could bring down.
An absolute wall that could not be crossed even by passing one's limits.
That was the very road he himself had walked.
The journey everyone of his kind had made.
Was it a joke?
Or was it fate?
The past had risen to bar the future's way.
From the moment the rabbit had first stood before him, the lion had been craving this — this exact situation, this exact clash.
The ages turn in circles.
Stories turn in circles too.
Or perhaps, even the will of the Heroes themselves.
Unconsciously, the lion had longed to see a future without him in it.
He had wanted to confirm it.
Did it carry on properly — the path we left behind?
The legacy he had left. The legacy they had left.
As though drawn by their wishes, the white rabbit had come to Orario.
Admiring them, imitating them, wanting to become like them — that rabbit.
Had he used them as his stepping stones to press onward?
If so... there was no way in hell he'd let him off easy!!!
The lion roared.
With his chest. With his very soul.
To a junior he should never have lived to meet, he wanted, in this one moment, to deliver the finest baptism of all.
To offer the highest praise he could muster.
You dared to follow in my footsteps — and did you ever once disgrace them?
It was the lion's instinct, something that transcended even the understanding of the gods. What no mind, no heart could parse, his body seized in fragments all the same.
In this instant, he understood — not with his head, but with instinct — exactly what he had to do.
The trial —
the duty they had never managed to finish.
The baptism —
the closing of a role they had never been able to complete.
The obligation and the right that belonged to them all — the duty they should have fulfilled, yet never could.
It ends here, and now. So the lion declared, and with his declaration came a roar that split the earth.
And the battle began.