19 The Aftermath

Kyros didn't want to admit it, but it was kind of painful.

He and Eo weren't that close to begin with, but Eo was the first person to have actually treat him like a normal person. While everyone called him "savior" and whatnot, Eo had just seen him as another person. In fact, Eo calmly explained to Kyros what "savior" even meant.

Kyros closed his eyes, vision burning. He had managed to get a safe distance away with the help of some of his surviving Air elementals.

Kyros' heart was still beating extremely fast. His wounds still throbbed painfully, and in his head the scene replayed in his head, whether or not he wanted to.

They had seen Eo walk off some distance, after which he suddenly stopped. Then, metallic golems he summoned started to rise. He calmly waited as they walked towards him, after which they suddenly turned towards Kyros and his team. The next thing he knew, the golems were on top of the group with a strange runic field all around them, draining everyone of their essence.

Because the draining was so quick, most people didn't realize their essence was draining at all. Kyros, who had an unusually large pool of it, had enough to actually feel it drain. He was trying to think about what to do about the situation when he saw Eo appear on the back of one of the golems, arms outstretched.

The moment he raised his arms, hundreds of terrible harpoons rained upon them, killing 6 of their combined group. Kyros was still in disbelief that Eo would kill his underlings as well. After watching them die with nothing to say but maniacally engorged eyes, Eo's hand would tremble and a grey flash would appear. In the next instant Eo had Kyros under his spikes.

Kyros tightly shut his eyes as he ran along the terrain. Six of them dead. Wifjad, the one who thought of Eo as his first true friend, and Jimean, the one who became a much better person after meeting Eo. Dezoov, the one who always helped Kyros out with his studying notes in the Academy, and Enmio, the one who was excited to have just reached the essence benchmark for the Yellow Rank Test. Nainto, the only other Heat Elemental in Kyros' group as well as the absolute comic nerd, and finally Likad, who finally confessed the other day that she secretly liked Eo.

Kyros swallowed bitterly. This mission was a complete and utter failure. He could only imagine the amount of disappointment that would be directed at him when he got back to the buses. The Hero and so called Savior, managing to get 6 of his own troops getting killed from one of them going rogue. Kyros should've known about how suspicious Eo was from the beginning. He cursed at himself for not realizing it earlier.

Why didn't Eo stop everyone, including his own group, from going further into Zone D? Why did he set up a wall when fighting the Phase II Diamond-headed wolf? Why was Eo the only one who "took a rest", resulting in everyone seeing everyone else's essence score but his?

"Um," Ulsher said. "Didn't the weird metal thingies say something about only a Purple-ranked surviving?"

"Yeah, I heard that too," Prezna added. "For a second I thought that meant only Kyros was going to survive, but it turns out he wasn't highly ranked enough."

Everything clicked in Kyros' head all of a sudden.

"Nimus, you know your essence meter you brought?"

"Yeah?"

"Show it to me."

Nimus handed over the meter to Kyros.

"Nimus, does the meter save the data values inputted into it?"

"Huh? Yeah, I think."

"Good."

Kyros turned on essence meter screen. Then he opened the logbook.

"Nimus, who used the meter first yesterday?"

"Me... "

Kyros found Nimus' essence value and counted down 16 more values instead of 15.

Kyros confirmed his suspicions. Of course Eo would check his essence value the night before this fated day, right?

"Guys, look."

"Hm?"

"This value. It's Eo's."

Kyros looked around to see the horrified expressions of everyone around him.

"Yep. He had the highest value out of all of us here."

Kyros rubbed his eyes in exhaustion.

"He was the Purple-ranked one."

☆

Eo looked around. Stolen power was still tingling at his fingertips. He saw the dead bodies and vomited.

There were two very familiar looking silhouettes within the pile of six bodies, but Eo did not want to confirm his suspicions.

Instead, Eo glared at the golems.

The golems seemed to advance towards him.

"Welcome, Hero." One of them hissed. "We would like you to jo-"

Eo synthesized a 20 ton block of iron and crushed the golems. Iron was inferior? Not with his extra essence.

Another golem behind him displayed a message, but before it could even start reading it Eo used his overloaded tangiform to brute-force rip it into pieces.

Eo breathed heavily.

After replaying the events of what happened, he finally understood Kyros' terrified expressions.

Eo knew that from now on, he would be branded as a criminal, a traitor, and a murderer.

Eo synthesized a shovel and started digging graves. Even after the overloaded effect of essence wore off, he still worked at it until nighttime. He ignored his skin blisters and cuts and buried the bodies, averting his gaze from each of their frozen terrified expressions.