Chapter 35: “Hero” or a “Monster”
"ARTHUR!!!" Vienna's hoarse scream bellowed through the empty silence disrupting the illusion of peace and replacing it with a scene of absolute unequivocal chaos. "Arthur, are you ok? Oh my god, I'm sorry, I'm so so so sorry! I should have killed that man when I had the chance," rushing over to the paralysed figure of Arthur and wrapping him in a tight, almost suffocating embrace, Vienna darkly muttered. Her terrified gaze locked with Arthur's confident dirty brown eyes in which not a trace of fear could be seen. Was this all a game to Arthur? Was he not aware of the dangers that man presented him with? He could have died for the gods' sake, yet here he was, smiling, as though all the events that had transpired in the past few minutes were nothing more than a fun little event.
"Yep, I'm fine!" Arthur beamed a bright smile that didn't quite reach his eyes as before he could fully spread the smirk across his otherwise less than stellar face, he winced, his bright eyes shaking in their sockets while his body performed an uncontrollable lurch of agony, further pressing his face into the buxom bosom of the woman who cradled his broken body with a look of unparalleled fear. Arthur wasn't fine. Of course, he wasn't fine. His legs were nailed to the ground and filled with an uncountable number of beginner-knight-propelled splinters. His bones had been pierced while his flesh obscured by the thin fabric of his trousers had been mangled to such a horrific degree that if one were to remove the thin veil masking the destruction, it'd be impossible to identify the mass of flesh as human legs. Yet even after experiencing such hellish pain, such inhuman torment, Arthur still smiled, not because he wanted to but because he needed to. He was a hero. That was the act he had chosen, and he'd continue performing this act until the day he died, or at least until he left the company of the Zepar family.
And it was only after witnessing Arthur's heroic smile that Vienna truly understood the deep-rooted selflessness that the boy seemed to project in abundance. This was the Arthur who had saved Charlotte. This was the Arthur that had beat her eldest daughter into submission, not the anxious but cute ball of perfectness that accompanied her on a day-to-day basis, but this heroic boy. This is who Arthur truly was. He was a hero, her hero.
Vienna's hold over the boy instantly tightened, fully pressing the child's fragile skull against her F-cup breasts. Her eyes turned frightening. With heart-shaped pink pupils, her gaze shifted from the broken boy in her embrace over to the dingy stairwell that they had entered from surveying the contents of the stairs to the fullest extent through the use of her mana sense and locating the contorted figure of what remained to be Roland.
A waterfall of blood poured profusely out of the man's stump of an arm, crashing against the many stone steps dyeing their usually grey pigmentation in a violent crimson. His eyes that previously shone with unparalleled fury were now hollow and without light. Roland's legs split apart from one another, both heading in directions that the human body shouldn't feasibly allow. If this was where the list of injuries ended, maybe one could have made a case for the man's survival; however, it didn't stop here.
The worst had yet to come, the source of the devastatingly grating crunch that Arthur had heard earlier. It wasn't his legs. They had silently splintered from the wind pressure that sliced off the man's arm. No, the source of the sound was a sight too harrowing for Arthur to bear. His eyes, his hollow gaze that one could have excused with the man's incapacitation, were without life courtesy of the man's contorted head.
His chin did not face down but rather up, in place of where his hair should have been while a scraggly beard of wind-swept balding hair fell across the man's wine-stained clothes. His head had been flipped, turned a full one-hundred-eighty degree from the overwhelming force of Arthur's attack against his vulnerable body.
He was dead.
Arthur had unknowingly killed a man, a fact Vienna wouldn't allow the boy to know. Arthur wasn't ready to learn the truth of his actions, he was a hero, and she didn't want to stain this view that the boy seemingly held. With a gentle flick of her wrist, a torrent of translucent colourless wind swept across the passage in which the body lay, embracing it within the typhoon and shredding it apart, flesh was peeled from bone, while skin was separated from muscle, seconds, it took only seconds for Vienna's half-hearted attempt at clean up to end leaving in its absence…nothing, the stairwell was empty, devoid of the gruesome landscape that Arthur had previously painted, no blood lined the walls nor ground while not even a follicle of the man's skin remained.
'He doesn't need to know. He's a hero, my hero, ' Vienna manically commented, her pink heart-shaped pupils returning to their usual emerald hue. "Does anyone have a potion?!" Vienna frantically yelled, her full attention again placed upon the quivering body in her arms. She could feel it, the cold sweat that dripped ceaselessly from the boy's shaking brow, his heavy breaths, his gentle trembles, all symptoms created from the unbelievable pain that racked the child's frail body.
Upon hearing Vienna's desperate plea Luna and Sephra snapped out of their mesmerised stares. Their hands hurriedly ran through the lining of their elaborate dresses only to come to the same harrowing conclusion. They couldn't find anything. Of course, they couldn't. They hadn't attended this meeting under the assumption that someone would need urgent healing. Such a thought hadn't even passed through the pair's mind. With pale faces, Sephra and Luna could only spare the grieving mother a brief shake of the head, a motion that sent absolute despair through the young Marquis's devoted mind. "W-" Vienna started only to be promptly cut off by the muffled voice of none other than Arthur, his heated breaths pressed against the mother's enormous breasts painting a translucent portrait of what lay underneath, upon Vienna's lacy dress.
"Mmmmmm", Arthur all but screamed, struggling against Vienna's overwhelmingly firm grip before finally managing to pull his head free from her fierce embrace. "I said I'm fine, didn't I? Why are you making such a big deal over this," Arthur gently smiled before gesturing to his broken body with an exhausted wave.
"No, you're clearly not fine, Arthur, just stay still while-" Vienna once again continued ignoring the boy's heroic act of selflessness, only to be stunned by what happened next. With his one free hand, Arthur's fingers silently snaked their way into his undamaged pocket before coiling around an oblong vial-like shape. Retracting his soaked hand, what greeted the rooms next was a sight so shocking, so ridiculous, that one couldn't help but doubt the reality the boy had forced upon them. Sitting upon Arthur's open palm shimmered a vial of crimson, the contents of which was evident to all.
"What…" The group could only helplessly stutter. How was it that out of all the people present in the room, amongst the wealthiest people in Zepar city, Arthur, a servant of all things, was the sole owner of the one cure they all unanimously sought? Was this fate, a stroke of providence? It had to be. There was no way Arthur could have predicted the need for such necessity prior to his departure from the Zepar estate. That's how the aged collective responded to the miraculous wonder cure. That's how they rationalised the potion's existence, yet alas, such rationality meant nothing before Arthur's system. He hadn't possessed the forethought to steal a potion in advance or any such ideas. He had no need. Stealing a potion was just a waste of effort for the young child who could buy such commodities at his every whim.
"See? I told you I'm fine," Arthur joked before popping the cork cap that restrained the crimson liquid and downing the vial's tasteless contents. He had come to realise a fact within the past few months, one regarding the very potion he drank, and that was that the systems potions were different, not only in taste with their bland nature but also in effect, you see, a potion should be able to heal any, and everyone with the only factor limiting its effectiveness and potency being one's strength, but Arthur's potions were different, they didn't work on anyone but him, he was their sole purpose their one reason to exist, and they wouldn't heal anyone else. This factor was both a blessing and a curse to the young child.
Within seconds Arthur's porcupine-like legs began to heal. The sensation was numbing and unsettling, so much so that Arthur felt an eerie hatred towards it, yet he still thanked the potion nonetheless. His damaged muscles returned to their previous health with their newfound strength sufficient enough to push out the splintered pieces of wood with unsettling efficiency until, eventually, nothing remained of the foreign substances within the child's frail legs.
Silence again befell the stagnant room as all gazes remained fixed upon the now standing figure of the triumphant boy. That was until Luna decided to break the stunned silence not with her usual sensual purr but with a voice filled with absolute disbelief.
"Vienna…What did you bring here, this child…he's a monster," Luna horrifically mumbled though her expression did not mirror the tone of her voice as she stared at the positively beaming child with more curiosity than ever before.
Vienna's face winced at Luna's horrified gasp. She didn't like that word, not when it was used in conjunction with her dearly beloveds name. It was dehumanising. It made Arthur seem like a beast as opposed to the kind human he really is. He wasn't a monster, just a boy, a boy with talent that defied the heavens and natural order of the world, yet even though such objections appeared in Vienna's Arthur-obsessed mind, she dared not voice her discomfort. Luna was right to be angry, to be scared. Who wouldn't be in the presence of such a creature? If Arthur was at the elemental harnessing stage by the age of 7, one could only imagine his power by the age of ten or even sixteen. He was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off, and Vienna had brought such a boy into a meeting with her two closest friends.
"I'm-I'm…" Vienna stuttered. She couldn't say it, that simple sentence that would end this conflict, she wouldn't say it, never. Vienna would never apologise for bringing Arthur with her. That would be an admittance of guilt, a confirmation of wrongdoing. She would be abandoning Arthur to say that his presence here was something that never should have happened.
"You're not taking him with you…." Sephra's stern voice boomed, halting Vienna's stuttering and earning the mother's ire.
"What are you talking about?" Vienna half-heartedly asked, angry with the woman's sudden intrusion into the conversion while remaining confused about what she was even blabbering on about.
"To the fifth prince's coming of age ceremony…I'm not letting you take Arthur with you." Sephra firmly stated, stunning the bewildered mother who looked as though spited by the woman's adamant stance.
"It doesn't matter if you won't let me take Arthur. You're not the one who owns him. Arthur works for me and me alone, so if I say that I'm taking him to the fifth prince's coming of age ceremony, then that's what's going to happen." Vienna venomously spat, her gaze turning murderous.
"Stop being so selfish for once, Vienna and think about Arthur. What do you think will happen when the emperor discovers the boy's talent? Do you think he'll be happy, overcome with emotion that such a child exists or do you think that he'll be terrified by Arthur's overwhelming potential? Because I have every right to believe that the emperor would pick the latter out of the two options. That, along with the added fact that the seven-year-old boy would clearly upstage his youngest boy at his own ceremony, makes me believe that what you're attempting to is paramount to the murder of your servant," Sephra furiously yelled. She wasn't going to let Arthur die, not out of the goodness of her heart or some sporadic act of altruism, but because he was too interesting. Sephra wasn't going to lose her target of interest so soon after finally finding it. She still had so much to learn about the previous peasant, where he had grown up, and how he got so strong. For what reason had he been hired by the Zepar family asides from his freakish strength? She couldn't let Arthur die before she had an answer to everything.
At the same time, Luna merely watched from the side with a passive gaze. She couldn't have cared less about the little argument that was currently being waged between her two friends. In fact, the only reason she hadn't tuned their war out entirely resided in the fact that she was eagerly awaiting her desired outcome. Luna's gaze hovered over the figure of the monstrous child, explicit curiosity shimmering in her ruby red eyes. Did Arthur know this was going to happen, had the boy already predicted his expulsion from the prince's ceremony? Such a belief wasn't impossible, not after Luna had heard that ominous taunt. 'I know. What do you know, Arthur?' Luna inwardly questioned her fragile ears, again detecting the reignition of a row between her closest companions.
"Huh…" Vienna hollowly muttered upon hearing Sephra's well-constructed rebuttal. Why was she calling her selfish? Weren't her actions the embodiment of selflessness? She wasn't being selfish at all. This was something both her and Arthur wanted. Even if the boy hadn't said as much, Vienna could tell, she knew, she knew everything about Arthur, or at least that's what she'd like to believe. Yet what Sephra said, her words of anger, cut deep into the starstruck marquis's mind. Though Vienna refused to acknowledge her selfishness in manners concerning Arthur, the rest of Sephra's comment rang true.
She had overlooked it, but bringing Arthur to the meeting would bring more panic than good. He was still young, but a seven-year-old boy, yet perhaps it was because he was so much more mature than what his current age would signify that Vienna already viewed the child as though he were the same age as her eldest daughter, as much as Vienna didn't want to admit it Sephra had a point, perhaps it would be unwise to take Arthur with her to a meeting of the highest class, besides it wasn't like this was the only coming of age ceremony scheduled for the near future, in three years it would be time for the first princesses, surely by then it'd be fine to bring Arthur along with her, it had to be, after all, he'd finally be ten years old, his power despite still being freakish would no longer be out of the bounds of possibility, that was as long as it continued to remain at the same level it was at now which for some reason Vienna didn't doubt, Arthur had shown little progress in the past six months having not gained even a single stage throughout the entire time. Yes, in three years' time, in a mere three years, Vienna would be able to have Arthur all to herself. They'd dance the night away and mingle with nobility. They'd do it all under the watchful eyes of the emperor. 'Three years, three years, three years,' Vienna recited the same sentence in her broken mind like a mantra.
"But-but, where would Arthur stay? I can't leave him with the maids at my estate…they hate him," Vienna boldly proclaimed though her voice quickly died down into nothing more than a hushed whisper.
"Hmmm…He can stay with me~" Luna giggled, sending a teasing wave at the "red-faced" child, much to the despair of the bereaved mother who merely spared the temptress a half-assed glare.
"No…" Vienna rapidly blurted. Never, never would she allow her dearest Arthur to stay with such a temptress. The mere prospect of Arthur being so close to Luna filled her with an ungodly rage, especially when she recalled her and the fox's prior "Business conversation." Vienna had no doubt in her strategic mind that if she were to leave Arthur to Luna, he'd end up working in the scarlet woman, led astray by the prospect of money and beauty. She had seen it all before, Arthur's greedy eyes, his clouded gaze. Even if the boy wasn't aware of these sinful traits, Vienna had noted them all. In fact, one of her plans to get with the child revolved around the former of these two weaknesses. Money speaks, after all.