Ch.182Report on the Downfall of Charity (24)

# The Final Confession

However, Leonardo’s hand reaches for something deeper than the dagger. It’s white powder wrapped in paper, saved for the absolute last resort.

Trying not to draw attention, Leonardo pulls his body backward while lying down. Curling up as if in pain, he carefully picks up the package with his fingers.

But his eyes remain fixed on Kain.

“Yes. That wasteland, that damned wasteland! It wasn’t ordinary land. It was cursed with the most terrible, horrific curse.

Monsters that looked like humans and beasts ground together in a mortar and pulled out, those hands and legs and eyes that slipped out of the shadows when you least expected it! There were at least ten crawling hands under my field bed!

The closer we got to the heart, the more everyone went mad. There was no way to tell if what we saw was hallucination or beast!

Sin? Sin, you say? Yes. We all committed sins. The sin of ignorance! The sin we committed was being stupid, foolish, unable to see what lay ahead!”

“You deceived the children.”

“Ugh!” A kick flies at him. Leonardo clutches his stomach and groans.

“You tied innocent children with ropes and placed them at the front of the formation. Whispering that they needed to defeat the Demon King. While those innocent children pushed forward, holding onto their crumbling minds, you just followed behind them. Isn’t that right?”

“You bastard!”

Another kick flies. Leonardo sheds a tear, feeling like his jaw might break.

“You buried people alive. You sealed the Demon King inside a girl who couldn’t resist and buried her alive. You left the boy who swore to protect her to die as well. Isn’t that right?”

“Aaaaargh!”

The hero rises. Desperately hiding the packet of powder clutched in his left hand, he swings with his right fist. Predictably, he takes a blow to his lower abdomen and collapses back down. He feels like he might vomit from the twisting in his gut.

“Ungrateful bastard!”

The Apostle of Charity shouts. The man who brought Venelucia to ruin looks at Kain with resentful eyes.

“You dog! While you were rolling around in some nameless hut, I walked through hell with just one sword in hand.

While you were eating and sleeping comfortably in your home, I had to burn the corpses of dead monsters and eat them!

While you were opening your eyes in the morning and sleeping at night, I had to walk through darkness relying only on sacred fire!

You ungrateful wretch, who do you think you have to thank for being alive like this!”

“You deceived the world.”

“The world deceived us!”

“You betrayed hope!”

“Our hope was nowhere to be found!”

“You concealed the truth!”

“Because the truth was horrific!”

Leonardo laughs like a madman. It’s a carefully calculated performance. But it was half sincere.

“Yes. Truth? You want the truth? Self-proclaimed punisher, I’ll tell you the truth you so desperately want! You fool, the Demon King isn’t lying out there!

What ruined your life. What terribly twisted your life. What nailed down your life, crucified your thoughts, and left you with nothing but regret and lamentation. That’s the Demon King we saw!

So the Demon King cannot be killed! Because the Demon King is a fragment of my life and soul!

You must have terrible memories you don’t want to think about. Things you don’t even want to face. Something horrible you’ll regret and lament for your entire life!

That will drag you along. It will take you to that terrible time and place. You will feel anew all those thoughts and emotions and helplessness forever! Forever and ever, you will never escape from it!

What is the Demon King? It’s the sum of all the past you turned away from and ran from! The past you turned away from, the past you denied, will harbor resentment and consume your today and exploit your tomorrow! Yes. That land was such a place!”

Leonardo trembled. Anger. Resentment. And the relief of finally telling a story that had been bottled up inside for so long. There was also some degree of resignation.

A sense of despair that everything was now over, as if saying, let’s at least ease our minds since it’s come to this. It was also groundwork for one final deception.

“And you want us to ‘fight’ that? Ha. Ha! Yes. We had to fight. The seven of us standing there fought with our own memories. Could we win? Can you win? Ha. Ha! But. But you know.”

Leonardo snickers again. His eyes were filled with madness.

“But Arius of Temperance said something incredible. ‘We’ve been deceived.’ He put down his weapon and said that. Looking up at the sky, looking toward the Papal States, he spat and declared, ‘We have been deceived by His Holiness the Pope.’

Everyone thought that Two-headed Eagle priest had gone mad. But he wasn’t mad. He was very rational. Either he was the smartest among us, or he was even more insane, enough to handle his own madness! Whatever.

He. He pointed to our guide. Our last guide. Our hero. The one who led us there, our true hero.”

The Knight of the Scabbard, Laios. But Kain widened his eyes in bewilderment. When Laios reached the Demon King’s wasteland, he was already blind.

He died after being abandoned in the wasteland, unable to even walk properly. At least that’s what Kain knew.

‘A hero? If Laios wasn’t the hero, then who?’

As Kain becomes confused, he suddenly recalls a memory. Laios’s resentment he had seen in the fields of the City of Lombardt.

* * * * *

“How would eating one fruit make you a hero? If it were me, I’d make plenty of them and share them with everyone. Then everyone would become heroes.”

Ismene snaps back at Laios’s complaint with a sharp voice.

“Idiot! They don’t do it because it’s not easy! Trust me. Didn’t I tell you eating that fruit makes you a hero? I heard it clearly.”

Still, Laios hesitates.

“But this is wrong.”

Ismene calmly persuades him.

“Then what? Either way, both you and I will be dragged into the crusade. War means we might die from who knows what kind of beating.”

Hearing Ismene’s words, Laios mutters.

“You’ve never been to war either.”

Ismene decides she can’t convince him with words anymore. She flips open a small metal box. Kain knows what it is. The fruit of Asas.

“Shut up. Just take this.”

After handing the fruit to the boy, the girl took a plum from her pocket and put it in the box instead. Anyway, those who would open the box wouldn’t know what kind of fruit it was supposed to be.

“Will I really become a hero if I eat this?”

“That’s what they say. So let’s eat it and become heroes. Heroes don’t die like dogs, right? I don’t want to see you die like that.”

I won’t die like that either. I’ll become a hero, defeat the Demon King splendidly, and return home with you. Don’t you like that?

To Ismene’s question, the boy makes a promise.

“Let’s become heroes together and return home.”

* * * * *

“Ismene.”

Kain groaned. Leonardo leans back as if surprised.

“How do you know that name? Well, whatever. It’s all ruined now anyway. Yes. That child was our most excellent guide. That child never lost her way.

While other weaklings fell by the wayside, she, even as her mind was nearly gone, kept muttering like a mantra that she and Laios were heroes.

At first, I thought it was just crazy talk. The Children’s Crusade kids were full of hot air. But these little ones were actually useful. They were good at finding paths. And they were less afraid.

When other children went mad, they walked straight in a line. All we had to do was follow the path these children found.

So they were our guides. You don’t know what a comfort it is to have somewhere else to look. So I asked. What makes you heroes? Who told you that you were heroes?

Ah, and then that half-baked knight said it. They received a revelation from the Two-headed Eagle. He and his girlfriend were apostles of light who would defeat the Demon King.”

It’s a lie. Laios lied. Kain instinctively knew that he had made up the story because he didn’t want anyone to know they had stolen and eaten the Asas fruit.

“But. Thinking about it made me angry, you know?”

“What?”

“That all those hundreds of thousands of troops did was just bring these two brats here? So many people died, even more went mad, and countless were injured. Those who returned alive would probably spread hatred for the rest of their lives.

But that ‘chosen’ boy was lying there with his eyes gouged out, and the girl had lost her mind. What could we do with kids like these?

So our wise Arius of Temperance realized. This wasn’t our fault. It was the fault of the Papal States, the fault of His Holiness the Pope, and we were deceived by him. After all, it was His Holiness the Pope who declared there was a Demon King in the first place.

‘What have we done?’ Arianne, that stupid woman, was still crying even then. ‘No. This can’t be. This can’t be happening. Something’s wrong. There must be something we haven’t found!’

Haven’t found my ass! What were we supposed to do in a land like that? But then, our great hero Ismene spoke again. ‘I am a hero. I received a revelation. To defeat the Demon King. Laios and I were chosen.’

I wanted to slap her. But Arius just said, ‘Really? Then this isn’t our fight. It’s something you have to handle yourself.’

And he pointed at her. Haha. Ha. Who was next? Hans? Roberta? I don’t remember well. Everyone rushed to point fingers at Ismene. No. Not everyone. Arianne just kept crying.

‘You. It’s you. You have to solve this. This isn’t our job. You brought us here.

Because of you, tens of thousands of people died, dozens went mad, and even more will live with terrible memories for the rest of their lives!

You should have stepped up earlier. If there was such a thing, you should have said you were a hero from the beginning!’

Yes. I know. That child said she was a hero. That she and her puppy lover were heroes. We were the ones who didn’t listen.

Us? The seven of us each had terrible pasts. Everyone wanted to escape. But why did we want to live so badly? We just grew up in shitty situations.

But I understood why we had to live such shitty lives. It was because of that wicked girl. All our suffering. The reason our lives rolled down a shitty path we didn’t want,

was because we seven were ‘chosen’ by God to escort that girl to this wasteland. In that sense, we were the ‘chosen’ ones. For ‘this shining moment.’

We were just living as extras.

So what could we do? We left the hero to handle it herself. But that idiot couldn’t even do that properly.”

The words “What did she do” got stuck in his throat and wouldn’t come out. But there was no need to ask. Leonardo was happy, recalling those brilliant days once more.

“‘It’s not my fault. Why is it because of me, no, I didn’t want to do this,’ she cried, and then shouted, ‘I hate everyone. Just die!’

And then, all the shadows of the wasteland, all the hatred, rushed toward that child. Simply by regaining a bit of her senses, she raised the monsters again.

She had seen what the entire crusade had experienced.

She was the saint of the crusade. Everyone in the crusade confessed their sins and experiences to her, wailing. Not all hundreds of thousands, but whether she was eating or sleeping. Sin. Sin. Sin.

Since we could go anywhere as long as we were with her, everyone thought she was sacred and special. That she was a child loved by God, on a different level from the other crazy kids.

In other words, that child knew all the sins humans could commit against each other. But, that wasn’t necessarily all bad?”

Kain thought he knew the answer. Anger flowed through every vein in his body. He wanted to tear off his limbs and throw them into the sea in front of Venelucia.

Purely out of duty. For that one reason, that he couldn’t let everything up to now be in vain, he endured and endured.

“I told you. It was hard to attack because each person’s Demon King was different. But when it was clearly visible right in front of us. Things became easier. There it is. The Demon King. Ismene. So.”

Leonardo burst into bright laughter.

“So the seven heroes rightfully had to execute the Demon King. By cutting off her limbs and sealing her.”

Kain let out a roar of fury.

Leonardo’s eyes flashed. He drew his dagger and lunged at Kain.

He couldn’t understand why his opponent was so shocked and enraged by his words. He only noted that Kain wasn’t responding properly.

It was a trustworthy dagger that had been with him his entire life. Leonardo was confident. Because of that, both Leonardo and Kain, lost in shock and anger, failed to notice the figure rushing in from the side.

“Traitor!”

Francesco’s body flew in.