Chương 29: I Went on a Quest With the Hero!

POV: The Dark Lord, Milo Miles Strangely, Nyx did not ping me once the whole night; maybe she had been off planning some destruction somewhere, probably. Our last call had been yesterday, which meant the terrorizing fell to her today. And if she somehow didn't get around to it, that was fine too; I could fly out to Arkhay later, today or tomorrow, and farm the fear myself.

Except, after yesterday, if I went and terrorized Arkhay, I would almost certainly torch whatever it was I had going with Evelisse, a nd I'd like to believe I had something going. A Hero doesn't laugh and have fun with the Dark Lord if she's harboring animosity towards him, right? Right? But that left me stuck. If I couldn't terrorize properly, then what exactly was I supposed to do? Fear was the only thing keeping me and perhaps even this world alive.

No fear, no Terror Level, and a dead Dark Lord doesn't get a second date. I sighed and looked around the room; It was a good room. Not unlike Nyx's quarters back in my so-called kingdom, except this one had its own bathroom and a wide double bed soft enough that I had slept like the dead. If only I could just... stay here. Forever. Be a guy who lived in a nice town and ate breakfast and didn't have a cosmic kill-or-be-killed obligation hanging over his head.

I tried to bury the terror-quota problem somewhere I couldn't feel it. Nyx should be able to handle it today. I just hope she didn't handle it in a way that ended with Evelisse being furious at me. Maybe I should warn her? I could mental link her right now. Then again, the last time we talked, I had told her anything goes as long as nobody dies, and if I called back twelve hours later to add fine print, she would kill me. …. I think I'm screwed either way. A knock at the door.

Soft, polite, and I knew who it might have been. I opened the door, and Lunessa was there. She stood in the hall in an apron over a pair of shorts, sleeves pushed up, a smudge of flour on one forearm. A sight, frankly, that a man in my condition was not equipped to handle this early.

"Morning, Milo." She tilted her head, amused.

"Sorry to wake you so early." I would have liked to keep looking at her a beat longer, but that would tarnish my image even further, so I locked my eyes firmly on her face.

"N-not at all! Totally fine!" She smiled, that smile, the dangerous one.

"There's all sorts to do in Eremiah while it's still morning. Eve'll fill you in later." What? We were doing things again today?

"First, though, breakfast! Hope it's to your taste." She stepped aside and gestured toward the dining table. Evelisse was already there. She'd changed; no light armor, no coat today. Just a loose, pale top and a pair of shorts, her hair pulled back, looking less like the Hero and more like a country girl on a slow morning. She was setting mugs out around the table. It was, no exaggeration, a vision sent down from somewhere holy.

A far cry from a grumbling Nyx ordering me to cook over a campfire and stop whining about it. Her eyes flicked up and met mine. She looked away at once. That was... cute. Lunessa caught the whole exchange and beamed, and with the morning light coming through the window behind her, I'll say it plainly: she looked like a goddess. Maybe it was the night market still in my system. Maybe it was the one-two of Lunessa's kindness and Evelisse's entirely unexpected softer side.

But sitting in the warm little kitchen, I felt, again, like I had landed in some better world than the one I actually lived in.

"All right, Milo, wipe that look off your face and sit. You're getting my other specialty today!" I sat down, obediently, and did not say a single idiotic thing, which I considered a personal triumph. The specialty turned out to be fluffy golden pancakes, stacked high, with a pat of butter melting down the side and a little jug of fruit syrup beside them. They smelled incredible. They tasted better.

The meal passed with Evelisse saying approximately nothing; eyes on her plate, the occasional glance she thought I didn't catch. When it was done, Lunessa rose and began gathering the dishes. I got up too.

"Uhh…let me help with the dishes?"

"Nuh-uh. You sit. Eve needs to talk to you." And off she went to the kitchen, leaving me at the table with Evelisse sitting directly across from me, her face faintly pink. She fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve for a moment. Then she shot to her feet.

"I-I'm going to get changed." She bolted to a side room and shut the door behind her. I thought she was supposed to be talking to me about something. A few minutes later she reemerged, back in her usual gear — the light armor, the high-collared black top, the skirt. She planted herself across from me, drew a deep breath like she was steadying for a dive, and said:"We're heading out."

Evelisse told me that whenever she visited Eremiah, she would stop by the guildhouse and pick up whatever quest had been languishing on the board too long. Which suited me on every possible front—I would get to see more of the world and spend the day with her. The walk over took us past adventurers of every stripe. Are they even called adventurers here? The guildhouse itself was quieter than I had pictured; due to the early hour, probably. Even so, the place lit something in me.

A party sat hunched over a parchment in one corner: a hulking swordsman, a mage who was, objectively, very pretty, and a stout dwarf with an axe across his back. If I weren't the Dark Lord, I would have put together a party of my own, taken jobs, gone on real adventures. Maybe even, somehow, try to save the world. Or maybe I would have stayed a nobody and lived a small, unremarkable life and never amounted to anything; maybe become a farmer in a fantasy world.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Either way, at least today I got a taste of the dream. As Evelisse approached the front desk, heads turned toward her. Whispers threaded through the room, too low for me to catch, though I could guess the gist: awe, curiosity. The receptionist was a human girl, short brown hair and round glasses, in a crisp guild uniform with the crest stitched at the breast.

"Good morning!" she chirped, then clocked who she was looking at.

"Oh! Hero Evelisse! It's been ages since you came by!"

"Morning, Lytia." Evelisse managed a tired smile.

"Yeah. Things have been... a lot, lately."

"I can imagine." Lytia's face softened.

"It's barely been three months since the last Dark Lord fell, and here you are shouldering it all over again." Evelisse let that pass with a small nod and changed course.

"Anyway, anything been stuck on the board lately?"

"Hmm. There is one, actually." Lytia thumbed through a stack.

"Though it's not for Eremiah or anywhere close. It's out at Flola."

"Flola?" Evelisse's brow creased.

"Isn't that supposed to be one of the calmer towns?"

"It is, usually just a few goblins, nothing serious. But as of last week, there've been sightings of a troll."

"A troll." Evelisse straightened.

"Has it destroyed anything?"

"That's the strange part. No. Not so much as a fence." Lytia leaned in a little.

"The patrols said it didn't act like a troll at all. More like it was... pacing the area. Watching. As though it were waiting for someone. Or something." That snagged even me. Trolls, far as I understood, were the big-and-stupid sort of monster; all muscle, no scheme. A troll that patrolled and waited for a specific someone was weird, as if behaving like it had been told to. Evelisse had gone quiet, turning something over behind her eyes.

I had assumed she would snap the quest up on the spot, sense of justice, all that, but she didn't.

"It's all right, Hero Evelisse," Lytia said, gentle.

"Flola's a half day out, and I know you've got far bigger things weighing on you. The troll isn't hurting anyone for now. The local garrison's just waiting on reinforcements before they deal with it."

"How long until those arrive?"

"Five days, at the earliest." So it was a distance problem. I had been flying everywhere since I got here, and it genuinely hadn't sunk in how miserable travel was for everyone who couldn't. Half a day on the road, each way, for one big stray monster. I leaned over and tapped Evelisse on the shoulder, dropping my voice.

"I can just fly us there." We walked out past Eremiah's walls and into open land. I had asked Evelisse for the direction to this Flola town, and lucky for me, since there were no real mountains in the way, I could just point myself in a straight line and go. I told her she'd better hold on to me. Hug, grab, something, so she wouldn't drop out of the sky. She took a moment to think about that, of course.

"If you'd really rather not," I said, "we can always go hand the quest back." She weighed that for a few seconds. Then, with the enthusiasm of someone agreeing to hold a spider, she stepped in and wrapped her arms around me, her face turned against my back, a nd we flew. Before long a walled town rose up ahead, and a good distance off to its side, a lone silhouette; t he troll.

It was enormous, easily three times a man's height, grey-skinned and slab-shouldered, with a bulbous nose and small mean eyes set deep in its skull. One fist dragged a stone club the size of a cart, though I did not know where a thing like that found that club. It wasn't moving toward the town. It tracked off to the left of it instead, slow and deliberate. I brought us down well clear of it, putting a good stretch of ground between us and the wandering giant.

The moment Evelisse's feet hit the dirt, she let go of me fast and set about tugging her sleeves and skirt back into order, raking her fingers through her wind-thrashed hair. Right. The wind up there must've been brutal on her. I hadn't thought of that. She cleared her throat, a faint pink riding her cheeks.

"All right. I'll handle this." She murmured something under her breath, and blue translucent gauntlets shimmered into being over her forearms, greaves forming down her shins. I'll admit, it was a hell of a thing to see. I had only ever watched her fight with the Mooncleaver before. Which was, at present, sitting in the bathroom of my kingdom. I glanced back toward the troll — — and it was staring straight at me. Frozen. Locked on. What the f— Then it moved. Straight at me, full tilt, a rabid, ground-eating charge.

"Uh, Evelisse? The troll's coming!" I took a step back before I'd decided to. Why did I do that? Level 9999. I could fold that thing in half. Probably. Right? Evelisse was already gone; a blur off the ground, blue light streaking. She met the troll head-on, drove a gauntleted fist up into its jaw, pivoted off its staggering bulk and brought a greave down across the back of its skull. The giant dropped face-first and went still. Then I heard it. Another charge. Behind me. A second troll.

I did not know where it came from. It hurled its stone club before I could so much as turn, and with my garbage reflexes the thing caught me square, bowled me end over end across the dirt while the club crashed down somewhere past me. It didn't hurt. Annoying, but it didn't hurt. The troll came on, bearing down on me where I sprawled, and its arm was glowing. Pure, searing white, light bleeding off it like steam. I didn't know what that was.

But I knew, in my gut, that a troll was not supposed to be able to do that. Evelisse was already sprinting for me. She wasn't going to reach me in time. I pushed up to my feet just as the glowing fist came down and caved into my ribs. It threw me. And this time, there was pain. Real, white-hot, splitting pain, the kind I hadn't felt since I'd arrived in this world, the kind Level 9999 was supposed to make impossible. This was even more painful than Ywain's punch.

I hit the ground and tasted copper, and when I coughed, blood came with it.... What the fuck? My vision swam at the edges. But I held on to it. Evelisse hit the holy troll like a thrown spear; a kick to the face, then somehow twisting in midair to land a second across its temple, and it folded." Milo!" Her voice cracked across the field. I got an arm under me, then the other, pushing up off the dirt — Something erupted out of the ground and snatched her around the waist. A tail.

Barbed, segmented, the dull grey-green of old bone, whipping up from a fresh crater of churned earth. The rest of it followed; it was a burrowing thing like a centipede grown monstrous, mandibles wide, dozens of legs raking the air as it hauled itself half out of its tunnel with Evelisse caught fast in its tail. Why are there so many monsters? How am I bleeding? How is ANY of this happening? Evelisse strained against the coil, prying at it, but it had her, and for once she wasn't slipping free easily.

I had to do something. Something that didn't end with me wrapped up in that thing too. Charging in swinging seemed like a fast way to get us both caught. Then it came to me. One of my newer skills. I pulled it up. Infernal Flame Blasts purple flame onto the target until the user deems it sufficient. Only holy elements can cleanse it. Cooldown: 60 seconds. I leveled my palm at the grovewyrm and thought the name.

A magic circle bloomed in front of my hand, and a gout of purple fire roared through it and took the thing full in the face. It shrieked, thrashing, flailing, but the flames clung, refusing to die. Then its face lit. That same searing white as the troll's arm. And my fire winked out. A holy cleanse. From a monster. That shouldn't be possible. None of this should be possible. But the moment's reprieve was enough.

Evelisse had torn loose; she was airborne, dropping a flying kick straight down through the wyrm's skull, then on it, fists hammering, once, twice, until the thrashing stopped. Done. The edges of my vision were going dark now. Adrenaline burning off, I guessed. The last thing I saw was Evelisse, scrambling up, running flat-out toward me, her mouth shaping my name I could no longer hear. Then it all went black.