Born of a Feat Even Hephaestus Could Not Match
He roared it, driving a strength fit to burst through both arms locked around the axe.
"Asterion! Choose!"
Not as a monster. Not as the Minotaur. He called me by the human name Asterion, and I met his bloodshot eyes in silence.
What kind of world was this?
The Age of Myth...
An age when men called heroes could strike people dead as the mood took them, then dress the slaughter in divine blood and the will of the gods and boast of it as some great deed. A world where a single human life could flicker out, cheap as a fly's, at one capricious whim of the Olympian gods.
And in a world like that, I was to answer for one killing. To climb, of my own will, onto a judgment that wagered my life at even odds? If I killed more people this very moment and ran, I might even survive.
But...
I forced that cheap arithmetic out of my head. Deucalion was not browbeating me. He was opening a road for a man who had never yet seen the sun. If I killed again here simply to live, and fled through a storm of blood, then not only my flesh but my soul would remain a monster past all turning back.
But the first road he had offered—if I owned the crime of taking a single life, knelt of my own accord before human law, and received judgment?
Asterion.
He had not called me by the monster's title, Minotaur. He had called me by a human name: Asterion. He was asking me which I would be. A blood-starved monster, hunted in filth until I died—or a man who seized this last chance to remain Asterion, even if he had to pay for what he had done.
I looked deep into Deucalion's eyes, which met mine without a tremor.
He said he was my brother. My half-brother.
A brother with half my blood in him. Then the decent thing, as the younger, was to step willingly onto that narrow bridge he had barely managed to throw down for me, sweating all the while. I drew a long breath, and slowly—very slowly—I bent.
Thud.
I lowered my head until it nearly brushed the floor, and murmured.
"I will... accept judgment."
The moment those few words left me, Deucalion's shoulders jerked. The axe he had been gripping struck the stone with a clang and rolled away. He dragged in rough breaths, fighting to keep his legs from buckling beneath him, then glanced about and snatched up a coil of thick hemp rope from a corner of the storehouse. Step by step, he came right up to me.
When I looked up, the remnants of fear still clung to his face, but his eyes did not waver. I offered no resistance. Meekly, I gathered both arms and held them out, and Deucalion unwound the rope and began to wrap it around my thick wrists.
Honestly, if I had wanted to, I could have snapped that miserable hemp with nothing more than a flex of my arm. But I waited quietly and let him bind me. These were the symbolic shackles of my choice to follow human law.
When the binding was done, Deucalion stared down at the shaggy mane covering the line of my jaw and spoke.
"Your beard has grown so thick I can hardly make out your face."
He added, his voice firm.
"Once you are in the prison, cut the beard away first. Do not hide inside a beast's hide. Bare your face and receive judgment properly. Let every citizen of Crete look upon your eyes and your face."
I nodded in silence.
Then Ariadne, who had been watching from behind me with her heart in her throat, came running.
"Asterion!"
She snatched up the veil that had fallen to the floor and carefully laid it over my bound hands. It was the very veil that had tickled the tip of my nose and woken me.
"I-I'm sorry..."
Ariadne whispered it, sniffling, her eyes rimmed red.
"I'm so sorry. The only thing I can give you right now is this worthless little scrap of cloth."
My sister's tears pattered onto the veil and stained it. With my bound hands I closed tight around the light feel of that cloth. A worthless scrap, she called it.
"Thank you, Sister."
At my thanks, Ariadne bit her lip hard and nodded. Deucalion took up the loose end of the rope that bound me.
"Come."
Kreeeak—
The storehouse door swung fully open, and I followed at Deucalion's back with heavy steps.
"He's coming out! The monster's coming out!"
"H-he's tied! His Highness the Prince has subdued the monster!"
The soldiers holding formation outside leveled their spearpoints in panic the moment my massive frame emerged from the dark. But when I walked out bound and unresisting, a murmur of disbelief soon filled the square. I followed Deucalion in silence, along the road that led not back to the Labyrinth but to the prison beneath the palace. Before long we passed the mouth of the vast maze I had smashed my way out of.
And there, I saw it. A single corpse laid on the cold ground near the entrance, covered in white cloth. It was the recovered body of that derelict watchman—the archer whose skull I had shattered with a straight punch only a few hours ago, unable to hold my rage.
"Aaaah! Husband! No! If you leave us like this, so pointlessly, what are we supposed to do!"
"Dad! Daaad!"
Beside the body, a woman who seemed to be his wife beat the ground and wailed, and a small child who had not yet lost his baby fat clutched his father's cold hand and sobbed. That crying flew to my ear and stabbed in like a dagger.
Ah...
My step faltered.
Inside the Labyrinth, I hadn't known. Not when I was thrashing to survive and smashing the walls. Not even when I raged that I would kill the negligent bastard who had left me to starve. I had thought what I did was justified.
But even if that soldier was a rotten man who had neglected the tributes and shirked his watch, to someone he had been a precious husband, and an ordinary father with a pitiful child. I had shattered a human life simply because I could not endure one moment's grievance and the fury boiling up in me. The weight of the world, invisible through a beast's eyes, showed its terrible shape the moment I regained a human's sight, and it crushed me.
I am a murderer.
I was endlessly ashamed of a sin that could not be atoned. And so, all the more, not a shred of regret remained in the choice I had made: not to flee, but to receive judgment as a human being. I bit my lip hard and walked on.
Before long I was locked in the underground prison of the royal palace of Crete. The barred door closed, and from outside came the cold metallic sound of a lock being fastened. Deucalion stood beyond the iron bars and gazed quietly at me where I was sunk in the dark.
With that short, heavy sentence he turned and climbed the prison stairs in long strides. Tap, tap, tap... When the footsteps had faded completely and even the torchlight was gone, the cell fell quiet. A darkness no different from the Labyrinth, where not a single point of light came in. I sank onto the cold floor and drew my knees in.
I wait for judgment.
I had to own my crime and prepare to accept the punishment. I did not know whether I would be beheaded tomorrow, or whether something still more terrible was waiting. My heart, if anything, was settling into calm.
Just as I was about to sink quietly into that stillness—
"Hic... sob... waaaaah..."
From inside the prison, which ought to have been silent, came the sound of someone wailing in grief. And from the cell right beside mine.
Who? Is there another prisoner locked down here besides me?
I pricked up my ears. The sobbing belonged to a thoroughly wretched middle-aged man.
"No... waaah... no, what the hell did I even do wrong to get treated like this shit?! Huh?"
The man beyond the wall suddenly burst with indignation and began to plead his grievance.
"The Labyrinth breaking is my fault?! How was I supposed to know he'd smash through the walls and come out?! What am I, a prophet?!"
Huh? Wait. That familiar tangle of words...
"From the start, for fuck's sake! The bastard who calls himself king cuts the deadline in half and rides my ass, hacks the materials budget down to the bone, and they're the ones who made me use soft stone! They work me through the night, I barely get the thing finished for them, and now they throw me in here calling it shoddy construction?! My damned luck...!"
The middle-aged man's mournful lament echoed sorrowfully through the underground prison. I was so dumbfounded I let out a snort. The genius inventor of the age. Daedalus, architect of the Labyrinth, was in the cell right beside mine.
So he's in here because I broke the Labyrinth?
As the very man who had smashed his masterpiece apart with his bare fists and walked out, I felt a strange prick of guilt. Carefully, I put my mouth to the thick stone wall and whispered in a voice no bigger than a mosquito's.
"Uh... I-I'm sorry for breaking it."
In an instant, the sobbing from the next cell cut off.
"Y-you—who are you!"
Daedalus shouted, startled, and then, as if he had sensed exactly who I was, began pounding the prison wall like a madman.
"Hey, you crazy bastard! Why the hell did you bust out of a perfectly good labyrinth?! And if you escaped, you should've run for the hills—why are you sitting in here all nicely caught! You can talk like a person, and instead of solving the maze the proper way you just smash the walls like a brute?!"
At that shout, thick with grievance, I was too dumbfounded not to answer.
"The people sent in as tributes couldn't find the way either. They starved and keeled over. How was I supposed to solve it properly and walk out? I wanted to live, so I broke through the wall!"
Hearing my protest, Daedalus flinched, and then his voice began to tremble in a peculiar way.
"R-really? The tributes all lost the way and starved to death too? Haha! As expected, the design of my Labyrinth itself was perfect! A perfect maze that no one can escape! I really am a genius—mwahahaha!"
The man who had been bawling only a moment ago burst into laughter, instantly drunk on the single fact that his design had succeeded. But the laughter lasted only a breath before he pressed himself to the wall again in a rush.
"Hey, but you! After you got out of the Labyrinth, you didn't smash anything else, did you? Yank a palace pillar clean out, maybe! Wreck the city walls! Please, just tell me you raised hell and broke everything!"
"Mm... I broke a few shelves in the granary. That's about it."
"Aigooooo!"
From beyond the wall came the sound of Daedalus rolling on the floor and wailing.
"If you escaped, you should've raised hell outside, smashed the place to pieces, and then run! Then I could at least claim the Labyrinth didn't break because it was weak—you just punched through it with monstrous brute strength! Haa... my damned luck... If all that broke was the Labyrinth, my head's as good as gone for shoddy construction, no way around it!"
He stamped in such pitiful despair that I carefully offered what comfort I could.
"Come now. I'm locked up because I killed a man, but surely, sir, the king wouldn't go so far as to execute you over nothing more than a bit of shoddy work?"
In that instant—
BANG!
"Shoddy construction?! Take that back!!"
Daedalus shrieked as if his pride had been stabbed, and then went quiet as a dead mouse.
"..."
A long while later, a mutter in a voice that seemed to be crawling along the ground came over the wall.
"...Right. Truth is, it isn't only the shoddy work."
"Pardon?"
"Because I'm the one who... built the wooden cow and offered it up... so Her Majesty the Queen could roll around with that mad bull..."
Daedalus sank into boundless gloom.
"Haa, fuck. Even I think it's a miracle my head didn't fly off back then..."
Ah. Right. Only then did I recall one of the true culprits behind my birth.
That legendary cow suit the queen wore for bestiality... the lunatic who built it was this very man...
Not merely something you could climb inside. Custom-built, down to the holes. I had been born of a feat only a mythic-rank craftsman could pull off.
"So I was born of a feat even Lord Hephaestus couldn't manage."
"Th-that's right, isn't it? Even Lord Hephaestus... Y-you mocking me?! You think I made it because I wanted to? They ordered me, so I did it!"