Chương 35: I Buried the Holy Sword

POV: The Dark Lord, Milo Miles I still couldn't tell you what color Nyx's, well, what I had glimpsed when she sent me sprawling, had been, since I could not remember. After that mortifying incident, I floated my idea: bury the Mooncleaver somewhere out in the forest. The logic was clean. The only thing that could kill me easily was that sword, and the sword was sitting in our bathroom. So we put it in the ground, deep, where no one could dig it up.

No sword, no easy kill, then tomorrow I would have a fighting chance. Unless they could summon it back to hand at will, like some thunder god out of a comic, which I doubted, because if they could, Ywain and Evelisse would have done it back then. Nyx turned the idea over.

"... sure. Worth a try, I suppose. No harm in it." She walked to the bathroom, lifted the Mooncleaver, and carried it toward the door. I half-braced for her to bark at me to grab the thing, then remembered that picking it up might kill me. So I just watched her do it, and felt quietly grateful.

"Get out here, idiot. I'm not the one digging the hole." Yep. That would be my job. Or it wasn't, because the moment we got outside I asked Luke to handle the digging instead, and she agreed by bobbing all three of her heads. Then she padded ahead, leading us into the trees. Nyx walked beside me, wearing that default grimace of hers. At this point I honestly couldn't tell anymore whether she was in a bad mood or whether that was just her default face.

Not that she had ever been one to start a conversation with me, but the quiet between us felt heavier than the usual quiet, and I knew why. The guilt was still sitting on me from earlier. The whole me-being-ungrateful thing.

"So…" I tried to sound casual and didn't quite manage it.

"What did you and Greg talk about? Anything I should know?" She didn't look over.

"Not much. Not right now, anyway." What was that supposed to mean?

"Um, any plans for tomorrow?" I asked.

"You're asking me?" Now she looked at me, flat.

"Do you have a plan? You want me to come up with one for you?" Shoot. Bad phrasing.

"No! I mean, we could plan it! Together, or something." She didn't answer. But she didn't walk ahead and ditch me either, which I decided to take as a good sign. Before long, we reached a clearing; a modest one, nothing like the big one where I had first run into Luke. Luke let out a low growl, and I took it to mean this'll do.

"All right. Dig, Luke. Make it deep." Nyx drove the Mooncleaver point-first into the dirt and stepped back. Luke set to it. Her great paws tore into the earth in heavy, churning scoops, dirt spraying out behind her in dark arcs, the hole widening fast under all three sets of working jaws and claws. In a couple of seconds, she'd opened a pit deep enough to swallow several men. We laid the Mooncleaver inside, and Luke pushed the soil back over it, packing it down.

There was something almost sad in it; the holy blade that had likely cut down who knew how many Dark Lords before me, ending up buried in a hole in the middle of a forest. We started back, Luke leading again, and the heavy silence came right back with us. Nyx still hadn't decided to talk to me about anything real. Not that I had much to compare it to; she had never exactly chatted with me for fun. But it sat wrong, and I knew the wrongness was mostly mine. How were you supposed to fix this?

How did people normally do it? Wait it out? Ask questions and hope? She had given me so little to actually work with about how any of this functioned; scraps, here and there, and a hundred questions still hanging unanswered in the air. Like the whole balance thing. Didn't it fall apart the second you looked at it? If the Hero were truly exceptional and the Church could just pinpoint where the Dark Lord spawned, they'd wipe him out every single time, easy.

And if the Dark Lord were the exceptional one, like some monster who clawed his way to Terror Level 100 in a week, then wouldn't the Hero not stand a chance? Then what would happen to Lycora? Would the whole world really just get erased? The system was a mess. Murky, arbitrary, transparent to no one.

Nyx had told me the Hero's side came down to whoever was running the Lord Luminaryn account, which was its own kind of insane; like the fate of a world hung on two people playing a PvP match instead of anyone actually trying to keep things balanced. Reminded me of certain governments back home, honestly. And then there was Nyx herself. She'd been here a week, same as the whole mess. I'd asked about her family once, early on, and she'd shut it down, which was fair. I got that. But I knew next to nothing.

About her, about any of it. I was still chewing on all of that when my foot caught on a root and I went down face-first into the dirt. Nyx stopped. Glanced back at me with an expression I read, generously, as disdain.

"Sorry," I muttered, picking myself up. We walked the rest of the way in silence, just footsteps and the rustle of leaves, until the kingdom came back into view. I looked up. The sun was sinking, the light going soft and gold over the clearing. It was peaceful. Quiet. Hard to believe that come morning, someone would be coming here to kill me. Should we just leave? Pack up and move on? Was that even an option? Evelisse had told me to run, once, and I hadn't.

And Nyx, back then, hadn't called the idea impossible either. Luke flopped down on the grass, clearly angling for a quick nap. And Nyx just stood there, looking up at the sky, which wasn't like her at all. I had expected her to march straight to her room, or at least snap at me about what I ought to be prepping for tomorrow. Honestly, I almost wished she would. Stolen novel; please report.

"Um…Nyx." A beat.

"What?" She turned. And somehow, even unfriendly as it was, I was glad she hadn't just ignored me.

"I..." I made myself hold her gaze.

"I really want this to go well. Not just tomorrow. The days after it, too." Her arms crossed, but she didn't look away, and she didn't cut me off. So I kept going.

"And I need your help. I need us to have something, anything, that gives us better odds than last time. Because last time was..." I exhaled.

"I almost died, Nyx. I would have been dead, if you hadn't pulled me out of it." She said nothing. Her jaw shifted, just slightly.

"I'm not smart. I'm not a strategist, I know that. But I want to actually do my best for this fight. And once it's over, I'm hoping we can be better at this. Partners, I mean. The kind who, you know. Share things."

"Are you calling me incompetent right now?" The words came sharp, but there wasn't much heat behind them.

"No, no, that's not—" I caught myself before I dug deeper.

"I'm saying that you might be right, that there's stuff I'm not allowed to know yet. And that's okay. I'm not asking for that. I just want us to be..." I groped for it.

"More honest, I guess. That's the word. Not the personal stuff, not your business, I mean the surviving-this-world-together kind of honest. If that makes any sense." She didn't answer. Her wings had gone still against her back.

"I had no one back in my old world," I said, quieter now, the words coming easier the further out they got.

"And here, even with how much of an idiot I've been, you're the one who stayed, willingly or not. You kept me alive, and despite that, I know I came off as ungrateful and self-centered, and I have been asking for you to do things for me instead of having a proper discussion. For that, I'm sorry." I looked at her, all the deflection gone out of me.

"This time, I don't want to screw it up again. So… please." I watched her face. And for just a moment, I thought I saw something in it give. The hard set of it loosening a bit. She sighed, "Fine. But you better contribute since I'm not your babysitter." Inside the house, in the living room, I laid out everything I could think of. Ywain might bring a team we had never faced, packing who-knew-what kind of overpowered nonsense. And the worst case? Evelisse might be standing with him. I ran Nyx through my whole kit.

SKILLS PASSIVE Mental Link, Intimidating Aura, Flight, Eye of Affirmation, Thousand Arms OFFENSIVE Sleep Gas, Telekinesis, Sensory Distortion, Infernal Flame, Hell's Sword DEFENSIVE Smokescreen, Purgatory Shield SUMMONS Skeleton Going by the last fights, Telekinesis just didn't work on Ywain. Being isekai'd, he'd probably been handed some goddess-blessing that shrugged off lower-tier spells. My Telekinesis was only level 2, and I doubted a single level increase since the last fight would suddenly make it work.

Sleep Gas, though, had landed. Last time, Ywain, Evelisse, and their support mage had all gone down under it; not for long, I think just less than an hour, but it worked. That was something. The real bet was the new skills. Hell's Sword and Thousand Arms together. An actual combat option, thanks to the Dark Lord of War upgrade.

"So, the Hell's Sword." I looked at Nyx.

"How strong is it, exactly?" If anyone knew, it'd be her; she should have advised Dark Lords before me, and even if she hadn't worked with that skill specifically, she'd surely have the textbook on it.

"Reliable enough. It comes with extras, too," she said.

"Firing off flame slashes. Calling up a wolf made of fire, that kind of thing." That sounded incredible. How did I not know that? Was there a separate menu somewhere? Did I have to unlock them one at a time?

"But at your Terror Level," she went on, before I could get excited, "it'll likely only behave as a regular sword. An unbreakable one, at least." Right. That answered that. She tapped a claw against the table, thinking.

"Here's what I think. I should be able to handle either the rest of his team or Ywain himself. My bet is he'll be carrying some holy enhancement, like those monsters that nearly gutted you. So I take him. You deal with the others." I blinked at her.

"You'd do that?" She gave a short, unbothered shrug, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"If I don't, you're dead inside a minute. Normally only the Mooncleaver carries holy power that absurd, but we've had too many anomalies lately to assume Ywain doesn't." A pause.

"So I'm not ruling it out." I didn't say anything, but it landed heavier than she made it sound. The last time Nyx fought Ywain, she'd nearly lost. I still saw it sometimes when I closed my eyes; Ywain hoisting her into the air, then closing one hand around her throat like she weighed nothing.

"I'll put the others down fast, then come to you," I said.

"And if you get into trouble before I'm done, mental link me." Her eyes widened, just a little. And I swear her mouth moved; not into a smile, nothing that obvious, but it moved, like a smile had thought about it and changed its mind.

"You'd better," she said.

"Though I'm half expecting you to be too busy mooning over the former Hero to do anything useful." That... had not occurred to me. If Evelisse really did line up with Ywain, could I even fight her? I supposed I could at least put her to sleep; Telekinesis and Sleep Gas had both worked on her before. Except, at Eremiah she'd shrugged off Nyx's immobilization like it was nothing. If she was still that furious, then even without the Mooncleaver it would be a tough fight.

"What. Are you seriously sitting there planning to make out with the former Hero tomorrow?" Nyx's expression dropped several degrees.

"What was her name. Evelisse?"

"Yes, I mean, no—you've got her name right, but no! I'm not planning anything weird, I was strategizing!" She held the flat stare a beat longer than necessary, then let it go and folded her arms.

"Regardless. I'm trusting you and Luke to handle the others. I'll brief her after this." She ticked it off.

"We hold ready from dawn. The instant Ywain shows, I lock onto him. You and Luke clear the rest, fast." We talked through some alternatives after that; Luke flash-freezing the others so I could finish them quickly. Which, I realized, meant killing them. When I hesitated, Nyx's glare snapped onto me.

"Milo. They are coming here to kill you." Her voice didn't rise; it went hard and even, which was worse.

"You'd be even dumber than I gave you credit for if you think you can afford mercy out there. I told you already. Tomorrow, you kill, or you die. Those are the options." She wasn't wrong. I didn't know if I had it in me. I suspected it would be the hardest thing I'd ever tried to do, but I made myself swallow the protest and decided I would find out when the moment came. One way or another. I asked again, too, about just packing up and moving the kingdom somewhere far off.

Nyx shut it down flat: the fight had to happen. She would explain why afterward. Provided I lived through it, was the unspoken half of that. Well, come to think of it, even if we could move the kingdom somewhere else, the previous problem would still persist; the Church would likely suspect Evelisse since I assumed the ones who knew of this attack would be Ywain, her, and a few of the top-level guys. So, moving out was never the option. By the time she finished briefing Luke, it was full evening.

We split off to our rooms. Nyx said she would wake me in a few hours; better to break up the night than let us be jumped while we were both dead asleep at dawn. So I lay down and tried to sleep. It took a while, but eventually, I got into dreamland. And then I was jolted awake by the sound of explosions, spellfire, the crack and roar of something tearing the night apart, right outside the walls.