The Hero Who Defeated the Demon King
"Can you move?"
"I'm fine."
Was she really fine? This woman had maybe a month left to live. Even breathing had to be agony, and the one arm she still had probably wouldn't move the way it should.
I'd given her a rough account of her condition, but she was in no state to be walking anywhere. I'd been turning over how to transport her when the Hero herself had cut through the problem: she would go on her own two feet.
She wrapped herself in a large cloak and pulled the hood down until it swallowed her face. If any of her skin showed, people would see how it had been corrupted. The God of Death Poison wasn't contagious, but anyone who didn't know that would look at her and see a plague. Worse still, Olivia Reinhardt was famous. Someone might take one look at her face and know exactly who she was. If that rumor reached Alex, he would send pursuers. I couldn't fight them off and protect her at the same time. The smart play was to stay hidden, move quietly, and at the very least burn the poison out of her.
The missing eye and the missing arm would be expensive to restore—but if we could get our hands on an Elixir, or find a priest with healing powerful enough, it was doable.
"Do you know the way to Elvenheim?"
"I've never been there myself, but I know where it is. Shouldn't you be the one who knows, Hero? I heard you went there after you banished me."
"I went. Doesn't mean I remember the way."
"Is that something to be proud of?"
"Sorry…"
"…"
Why was she shrinking like this?
The Hero I knew had been arrogant, self-assured—the kind of woman whose pride scraped the heavens. She had carried herself as if she were the only person in the world who mattered. Even if her comrades had betrayed her, the reasons had been so absurd there was nothing in them worth grieving. And the contract with the Holy Sword had been forcibly severed by the Goddess's Orb, so that shouldn't have been weighing on her either.
Or maybe that was just how I saw it.
"What?"
She must have felt my gaze. I smiled, a little awkwardly.
"Nothing. I was just thinking you've gotten a lot milder than the you I used to know."
"…"
"You used to be more of a mess, I guess. Full of energy. You'd say whatever came into your head depending on your mood."
"I've got nothing to say to that."
"Want to try giving me an excuse, at least?"
"An excuse? Whether you kill someone with a smile or in tears, it's still murder. If you hurt someone, it's a sin—no matter the reason. Isn't this better than rattling off my whole life story and trying to justify it?"
Fair enough. So she had her reasons for being such a pain—but those reasons didn't matter to the people who'd been on the receiving end of it. That was the idea.
It was a surprisingly healthy way of thinking, and it caught me off guard. I had traveled with the Hero for a long time, but I felt as though I'd learned more about her in the past few days than I had in all those months on the road. Then again, the biggest reason I hadn't known her was simpler than that: during our party days, she had never spoken a word to me.
Anyway.
"That's not how it works, Hero."
"What's not?"
"The one who caused the harm doesn't get to decide how the one who was hurt thinks about it. You don't want to dump your circumstances on me and mess with my feelings—I understand that. But maybe the person who got hurt wants to know everything."
"…"
"Whether to hear the circumstances, and how to judge them afterward—that's for the victim to decide. Not the one who did the damage."
"I… see."
She answered a little awkwardly.
"Fine, then. My mother died giving birth to me, and—"
"Ah—we're going that far back?"
"You asked!"
The rest of it broke apart into a cough, a pained sound catching in her throat.
"Don't push yourself. You're basically a walking corpse right now."
"…"
She glared at me, clearly annoyed, but she seemed to remember I was the one who'd saved her life, because the anger faded almost as quickly as it came. Whether she had grown somewhere along the road, or the shock of betrayal had hit her harder than I'd imagined, she was more withdrawn than the Hero I remembered. The absolute self-confidence she had once carried was nowhere to be seen.
"…Do you know who the previous Hero was?"
"The previous Hero? That would be Ben Reynolds."
"Except for him, every Hero has come from House Reinhardt."
"That's right."
That was why House Reinhardt had been known as the family that produced Heroes. I remembered the uproar when it came out that the previous Hero wasn't a Reinhardt at all.
"My father took it hard that he was never chosen as Hero. I mean that literally—it nearly killed him. Once he realized House Reinhardt wasn't the only family that could produce a Hero, it seems things got pretty rough for him."
"That's because—"
I stopped myself mid-sentence.
"The Hero before last was a complete degenerate, right?"
"…"
"That's right. The Hero before Ben Reynolds was a degenerate who'd go down in the history books. House Reinhardt's reputation was already in the gutter because of him, and then a Hero was born outside the family. Everything went to hell overnight, and my father suffered for it. Truly."
I listened closely as we walked. It wasn't a story I was hearing for the first time. I had more or less expected it. What I hadn't expected was that Olivia Reinhardt—this strong, formidable woman—carried it inside her as a wound. Just as she had never really looked at me, maybe I had never really tried to see her as a person either.
"And then, around the time I turned seven, I was chosen as Hero."
"…"
"My father wept with joy. I was just a child, so I was happy too—because my father, who'd always been so lifeless, was smiling for the first time. And then he got sick and died. Right up until the moment he passed, he was teaching me how a Hero was supposed to live."
I simply listened in silence.
"They say my mother, who died, spent every night of her life praying I'd become the Hero. From the moment I was born, I was meant to be chosen. I was chosen. I was destined to live as a Hero. I had to save every last person. My father and mother both staked their lives on raising me to be one. I had to be a proper Hero. I had no other choice."
Her voice was rising, the words coming faster. This didn't sound like a good thing.
There seemed to be an invisible shadow hanging over her. I could almost see it: her father and mother, whispering endlessly into her ear. They might have called it love. To her, it was a curse—a binding that had been laid upon her.
Wanting to live a certain way was one thing. Believing you had no choice but to live that way was something twisted. The more mistakes she made, the more restless she became. No matter how many times she succeeded, she only counted her failures, never finding any peace of mind.
"I told you I banished you because you were a commoner, didn't I? That was just an excuse too. An excuse I used to convince myself. To rationalize it."
"What do you mean?"
"Do you remember, early in the journey, when you saved me?"
"Ah, now that you mention it, that did happen."
"So for you, it's just at the level of 'that did happen.'"
She smiled, awkwardly.
Back then, the Hero had only ever trained. She had little real combat experience. Her physical abilities were still far beyond anyone else's, and she was powerful—but inexperience meant she made mistakes from time to time. Most of those mistakes she patched up herself, so they never became real problems.
Then one day, in a dungeon, a situation arose that even she couldn't handle. I took the hit in her place. Treatment came too late, and the scar from that monster's claws is still clearly visible on my back.
"I'd never imagined it."
"Imagined what?"
"I could imagine dying to save someone. I was the Hero—that was the point. I might have even longed for it. But someone putting their life on the line for me? I couldn't accept that. The fact that you even thought about saving the Hero felt… alien. Completely foreign."
"…"
"You became something unknown. Something I couldn't understand. So I treated you as an enemy more than I needed to. And in the end, I banished you."
"I see."
She seemed to dwell on having banished me, but I didn't feel much of anything about it. I'd been annoyed at the time, sure, but I'd gotten a proper severance. If I'd planned to keep working as an adventurer after that, it might have been a problem. I hadn't, so for me it was just a job that ended midway. Nothing worth dwelling on.
But for her, it might have been something unprecedented—something that fell outside what a Hero was supposed to do. The mere fact that the Hero, who was supposed to be the one doing the protecting, had been protected herself had constrained her actions so thoroughly. The binding ran that deep. In a way, it was buried even deeper in her than the God of Death Poison. So deep she couldn't even want a different kind of life. Couldn't even imagine wanting one.
"My story has nothing to do with you. You have no reason to understand it. …You can hit me, if you want."
"What, you want me to hit a body that's basically half a corpse? If anyone saw that, I'd be the one who looks like garbage. As expected of the Hero—always thinking ahead."
"There's no one around."
"You can't use mana."
"I don't need mana to know that much."
"You are human, right?"
"My species is listed as human, yes."
Why "human"? She talked too well and walked too easily for someone who was supposed to be dying.
"So? Are you going to hit me?"
"I'll pass."
"I would have, if I were you. Impressive."
Honestly? Even if I did hit her right now, I had a feeling my fist would be the one that hurt more.