Chương 27: I Got an Evening Date!

POV: The Dark Lord, Milo Miles We stood outside Lunessa's house, the sky already deepening toward night. After the meal, Lunessa handed me a change of clothes, the same plain white shirt I'd been wearing all along. One of the thugs during the escort mission had slashed a small part of my shirt open, so this was pretty thoughtful of her. Though, I had no idea why she kept a man's shirt on hand, and I didn't ask.

I figured it tracked with what she'd said about having gone through a few assistants; enough of them must have wrecked their clothes on the job that she'd started keeping spares around, every size, every sort of person. When I had finished changing, Lunessa shoved us out the door. Evelisse tried to protest; Lunessa shushed her flat, and she gave up, resigned to her fate. Then Lunessa pressed a few coins into Evelisse's hand, like she was sending a pair of kids off on their first outing.

"Have fun! And don't come back until you've sorted everything out!" She waved us off, beaming. So there I was, walking toward the night market beside the Hero. She had worn her coat and drawn her hood up again; I assumed she did not want to be recognized as the Hero to draw unwanted crowds. This whole thing was almost aggressively rom-com. First I had saved the Hero a few days back; then, by sheer coincidence, I had saved her older sister; and now we had been ordered to go have fun together.

Textbook tropes, every one. Which suited me fine, since the last thing I wanted was for Evelisse to keep treating me like some evil entity. This was my opening. A chance to convince her, somehow, that I wasn't the cold, scheming monster lying in wait that she seemed to think I was. I had no idea how much nonsense Ywain had packed into her head, but I couldn't let it set. A few minutes in, she stopped walking. We were in the middle of the street, still the residential quarter, quiet, no one around.

"Y-you should go," she said.

"But your sister said—""I'll deal with her later. She's always been like this." She stood there with her arms drawn in close, one hand worrying at the cuff of the opposite sleeve, gaze fixed somewhere off to the side of me. Why does she keep trying to send me off? Does she already hate me that much? Then a thought struck. The Affection Sight skill. I focused on her and let the skill open. A single word surfaced beneath her, faint, like text printed on the air. Confused Confused?

As in, she can't tell whether she likes me? Or whether she hates me? Wait, aren't those the same question? Some help that was. It told me what she felt and nothing about why or which way it leaned, which left me exactly where I had started: in the dark, just with a label on it now. But a label was something. Confused wasn't hate. Confused meant there was still room to work with.

"... Why are you staring at me like that?" Oh, crap.

"N-nothing! I was just thinking, maybe we should do the thing your sister wanted? Go to the market?"

"What? No."

"Why are you so set on getting rid of me? It's a walk. That's all. Don't you want to unwind for once?"

"How am I supposed to unwind when—" She caught herself.

"When what?" I asked. Her eyes slid away from mine. Something passed behind them, a quick calculation, and then she let out a long breath.

"... Fine," she said.

"A little while. That's all." I did not know what just happened in her thoughts, but yes! We walked on, and I asked her about the night market. She explained it without much enthusiasm, but she explained it anyway; it was a cluster of stalls that opened around the central plaza and down the main roads every Saturday evening. Never too packed; Eremiah's population wasn't large, and the town had room enough to keep it from feeling crowded.

A lot of the young people left for the bigger cities anyway, Arkhay and Astrea, chasing work.

"So... you did the same? Headed to Astrea to become the Hero?" I glanced over at her as we walked. She was quiet for a moment, weighing whether the question deserved an answer. I figured she would keep her childhood to herself since we hardly knew each other, so I turned my eyes back to the road ahead.

"Sis has been my closest family since I was about three." Oh.

"We lived with our aunt here for a few years. But Eremiah wasn't always like it is now. Back then it was much smaller, and monster attacks weren't rare — worse during the Dark Lord's reign." So there'd always been Dark Lords here. The job came with history. She tipped her face up to the sky, and I followed her gaze. The stars were out, sharp and clear and scattered thick across the dark. It was beautiful. Nothing like the sky back home, where the night was always smudged grey with smoke.

"When I was five, sis and our aunt decided to send me to the Church; the Dark Lord was growing stronger, and the Church had marked me as a Hero candidate. So I stayed there. Grew up there."

"Why didn't your sister go with you? To the Church."

"She had our aunt to help. Aunt ran a shop, all sorts of goods, and she needed the extra pair of hands." So that's where Lunessa got the head for trade and bargaining.

"Then a few years on, our aunt died." She said it evenly.

"A monster attack, while she was out collecting stock from another town."

"Oh. I'm…sorry." She breathed out slowly.

"It's all right. I wasn't that close to her, so honestly I didn't feel much. But sis took it hard. We'd lost our parents young, and our aunt was the one who'd carried us through after." Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. I wanted to ask how her parents had died. But socially hopeless as I was, even I knew better than to reach for that one.

"... Thank you. For telling me. And I'm sorry, for everything you and your sister have had to go through." She looked at me then, and gave me a small, awkward smile. I didn't know what had made her open up. But standing there, I thought I finally understood the word the skill had shown me. Her whole life, Dark Lords had been the thing in the dark; the monsters that killed, the reason she had been handed to the Church at five and shaped into a weapon to end them.

I would have bet the last Dark Lord had a hand in her parents' deaths too. And then I had turned up out of nowhere, babbling about wanting to be friends, wanting to walk her through a night market. Of course she was confused. But I meant all of it. That was the thing. This second chance of mine, I was going to spend it doing the things I had been too afraid to do in my previous life. I watched her as we walked.

She still looked caught somewhere between thoughts, weighed down, probably, by the story she just told me. I needed to lift her out of it. The market wasn't the riot of noise and light I had been picturing. A scatter of stalls lined the central plaza and trailed down the main road, lanterns strung between them, the smell of fried something drifting on the air. But the crowd was thin. Half the stalls had more vendor than customer, the owners calling out with a little too much hope in their voices.

"It's quieter than usual," Evelisse said, reading my face again.

"The crowds. They thin out when a new Dark Lord spawns. People stay in." Ah.

"... Sorry," I said. She didn't answer that. Just kept walking. Right. Probably shouldn't have apologized for being myself, out loud, in public, to the Hero. I filed that away and trotted to catch up. She turned out to be a decent, if reluctant, tour guide. She walked me past a stall selling skewers of some glazed river fish, another doing paper cones of spiced nuts, and stopped in front of a cart heaped with golden spirals of fried dough dusted in sugar and something pink.

"Those are good," she admitted, almost grudgingly.

"Honeyspun. They only make them at night markets."

"Let's get one!" We walked towards the stall and I asked for a honeyspun. Before I could even pat down pockets I knew were empty, she had handed the vendor one of Lunessa's coins and passed me half the spiral. I took it and felt, distinctly, eight years old. The Dark Lord. Being bought a snack by the Hero with her big sister's allowance money. It was delicious, which made it worse. We wandered on.

The further we went, the more the stalls turned to games — ring tosses, a thing with stacked tins, a booth where you threw weighted darts at a board of little wooden charms to win them.

"Want to try?" I asked, already drifting toward the dart booth, because if there was one thing I figured I couldn't fail at, it was throwing small objects hard. That was, in hindsight, the problem. I lined up a dart, eyed the wooden charm dead center, and threw it the way I'd throw anything; which is to say, without the faintest sense of how much force a Level 9999 arm puts behind a dart. The dart went through the charm. And the board. And the back of the booth. And, judging by the crack, something structural.

The whole stall sagged sideways with a groan. A beat of silence.

"... Oops," I said.

"The darts must have…uhh, used very strong materials!" The vendor stared at the dart-shaped hole in his establishment. Evelisse had already stepped forward, reaching for the coin pouch.

"I'm so sorry, please, let me cover the damage—" The man's eyes went from the hole, to her, to the strands of pale blue hair slipping loose at the edge of her hood. Something shifted in his face. He straightened, waved both hands.

"No, no, no need, Hero Evelisse. It's nothing. An honor, really." He was practically bowing. Evelisse went very still. Then she pulled the hood lower and turned away, fast, tugging me by the sleeve toward the next row of stalls before he could say more.

"... They always do that," she muttered once we were clear.

"Seems like the hood did not do much."

"Just take it off then," I said.

"What? But–""You keep yanking the hood down you can barely see." I slowed.

"Look, there's, what, twenty people in this whole market? Half of them are vendors. Nobody's hunting you out here." I shrugged.

"Just take it off. You'd be able to actually relax." She didn't move.

"Besides," I added, before my brain caught up with my mouth, "you look great with your hair down." Oh damn, the sentence just came out by itself. I hoped she would not think of me as an even worse creep than I already was. There was a pause under the hood. I couldn't see her face, but the tips of her ears, just visible at the edge of the fabric, had gone pink. I could feel my heart skipping in…joy?

"... That's not—" she started, and stopped.

"Fine." She reached up and drew the hood back. Her hair spilled loose, catching the lantern light, the blue gone almost silver in it. She wouldn't quite look at me, chin angled off to one side, that same loose strand she kept tucking back falling forward again. I, being me, did not have anything smooth to say about it. So I said, "See? Better," and immediately pretended to be very interested in the next stall.

The next one was a test-of-strength game — the kind with a tall measuring tower, a lever at the base, and a heavy mallet you swing to send the puck rocketing up toward a bell at the top. Ring the bell, win a prize. A row of sad little stuffed animals hung off the side. This, surely, I could do without incident. No throwing. No leaning. Just one controlled swing. I picked up the mallet, eyed the lever, and brought it down, gently, I genuinely thought, gently.

The puck shot up the tower so fast it didn't ring the bell so much as obliterate it, punching clean through the little cap at the top with a sound like a snapped guitar string. Springs sprang. Something inside the tower made a long, unwell grinding noise. Then the measuring lights flickered, all of them, top to bottom, and died. The vendor looked at his smoking machine. Then at me. Then back at his machine.

"... To be fair," I offered, "it looked like it was already on its last legs." It had, genuinely. The thing was held together with rust and optimism. But that was not, I sensed, the point the vendor was currently focused on. This time Evelisse made a sound. A small one, half a breath, quickly swallowed. When I looked over, she had a hand pressed to her mouth and her shoulders were not entirely steady.

"Are you…laughing at me?"

"No," she said, in the voice of someone absolutely laughing at me.

"You are. You're laughing."

"I'm not." Her shoulders gave another traitorous shake.

"It's just—do you destroy everything you touch?"

"No! Today was the first time. Well, minus the walls on my hut on my first day here."

"You put a dart through a building."

"In my defense, I was aiming at the charm."

"You hit the charm. You also hit four other things behind it."

"That's called precision."

"That's called property damage." I went to make some dignified gesture to underline my point, a grand sweep of the arm, very authoritative, and somewhere in the middle of it my feet simply gave up on each other. One leg crossed the other, the other declined to cooperate. I went down hard, flat on the dirt, in front of everyone. No post. No obstacle. No excuse. Just my own two legs, conspiring. Level 9999. Felled, by nothing whatsoever.

For a moment I just lay there, cheek against the cool earth, reconsidering several life choices. I got back up, and then she lost it. A real laugh, head dipping, one hand still at her mouth like she could catch it and put it back, the other coming to rest against my arm for balance without either of us seeming to notice until it was already there. The sound of it was bright and unguarded and completely unlike anything I had heard from her, and it undid something in her whole face.

For just a second she didn't look like the tired Hero carrying the weight of the world. She just looked like a girl at a night market, laughing because an idiot who had been trying so hard to impress her and failed at it. I used the Affection Sight skill again. The word beneath her had changed. Charmed Oh! I almost said yes out loud, but I contained myself. I didn't say anything to her, of course, but seeing her like that… I think I'm charmed by her too.