“That can’t be!”
At the landlord’s words, Cairens sprang up and shouted.
“Atlante…… collapsed in just two days……?”
“……It’s not a lie, it’s the truth.”
The landlord shook his head, looking at Cairens with pity as he muttered in disbelief.
“A disaster, a disaster struck. A massive inferno covered the city and took the lives of countless people there. Since it happened just a few days ago, it seems the rumor hasn’t spread far yet……”
“Good heavens……”
The shocked merchant let out a sigh and watched Cairens carefully. Like someone who had lost their mind, Cairens trembled and still denied the landlord’s words.
“Then, then…… what about the people? Are there any survivors? If there are, where are they……”
“I don’t know. How many barely survived…… Only that everyone lost their homes and scattered in all directions.”
“That’s a lie.”
Cairens denied to the end the words of the landlord, who shook his head with sad eyes.
Even knowing that the landlord had no reason to lie to wanderers who insisted on going to Atlante, he still denied his words. More accurately, it was closer to not wanting to believe.
If flames had covered Atlante, did that mean all those countless people who had been in the plaza died?
Thinking that the people who had tried so hard to live had disappeared into flames in an instant made his spine tingle.
‘Then…… Mother?’
The princess of Atlante who gave birth to him. Though she was a heartless mother who had never properly held him or embraced him, she was still Cairens’s mother.
A pitiful mother suffering from the wound of being betrayed by a god.
He couldn’t believe that she, who was hateful yet somehow pitiful, would die so futilely.
“That’s absurd, that can’t be. This must be a lie…… I can’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes.”
Cairens, who had collapsed to the floor with a thud, laughed like someone who had lost their mind.
Watching the child struggle with the shock of losing his homeland, the two people couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
He thought that once everything was over, he could return to his daily life when he went back to Atlante. But reality was cruel and did not take Cairens’s side.
“Ah, that’s absurd.”
The merchant took Cairens all the way to Atlante as he stubbornly insisted he couldn’t believe it and would see it with his own two eyes. For three days, Cairens firmly closed his ears to people’s words and insisted on going to see for himself with his own two eyes, but he couldn’t help being shocked at the desolate landscape of Atlante.
The green meadows, the trees and blue river—everything had burned in the flames that fell from the sky, leaving nothing behind.
“This can’t be……”
Four days from waking up in Iatep to reaching here. During that time, the blade of truth that he had refused to believe despite people’s attempts to stop him was strangling Cairens.
Only after seeing from afar the collapsing castle walls and buildings that had already turned to ash did he accept the fact that his homeland had been destroyed beyond repair.
“Why, why…… Why does my homeland, why does Atlante have to collapse like this, why!”
A grief-stricken cry echoed over the land that had turned to ashes. Cairens, who had collapsed to the ground with a thud, fiddled with the crumbled sand. Just days ago, though dry, it had been land where grass grew.
“Child, are you all right?”
The merchant who had brought Cairens tried to comfort him by patting his shoulder, but it was useless.
“……”
His throat was blocked and he couldn’t even breathe properly. Handling the land that had turned to ash, Cairens sat there for a long while, staring blankly at the ruined city.
The land where people’s vitality had clearly existed had turned into a cold plaza of death without a trace of warmth.
The faces of those who had burdened him by calling him the son of a god, the jealous Ricarkos, and the king who always looked at him with eyes full of expectation flashed before his eyes.
Though he didn’t have particularly good memories of living with them, thinking he would never see them again made him sad.
And most sorrowful of all was……
“Mother…… Mother…… Mom…… Mooom!”
Like a cub searching for its mother, the child’s mournful cry echoed over the ruined land.
Mother.
The closest blood relative even when they weren’t together, the one who gave birth to him. Having become completely alone, Cairens cried out bitterly like a child, calling out “Mom,” which he had never properly called before.
“Mooom……! Mom, Mooom!”
Whose fault was it exactly? To whom should he assign the sin of making his homeland, Atlante, such a mess? The people who said to offer Cairens as a sacrifice? Or the High Priestess who dared to anger the god?
No. There was a bigger cause than that.
‘Henelion and Seianes.’
Only now could he understand why Seianes had sent him all the way to the Iatep coast, far from Atlante.
He had known. What kind of retaliation Henelion would inflict on the humans who dared to try to take his son’s life.
But before that, shouldn’t they have considered the reason why they had no choice but to go that far?
‘They just wanted to live. They didn’t want to see their parents, siblings, and neighbors die in agony, and they didn’t want to meet their end that way either…… That’s all……’
Though they were responsible for driving Cairens to sacrifice, the ones who provided the cause that forced them to make such a choice in the first place were the gods.
It would be a lie to say he didn’t resent them. But the moment he saw from a distance their appearance, devoid of any vitality, worn down by continuous suffering, he felt pity and compassion rather than hatred.
If he had been in their position, he might have made the same choice.
Holding onto dying friends and family, the thread-like hope they grasped to protect at least those who remained. They must have felt like grabbing even a rotten rope.
Of course, it was natural to determine right and wrong for trying to kill him. But that was Cairens’s responsibility. It was wrong to erase them without a trace like this, without even giving them a chance to apologize.
Yes, the gods had made it this way. They corrupted humans, and they provided an environment where they had no choice but to be filled with selfishness. Yet with the utmost arrogance, they demanded humans pay for their sins.
Why don’t the gods pay for their sins, for the price of those sins?
Just because they’re gods?
Just because they rule and govern the things that make up this world one by one, they don’t receive punishment?
“Ha, hahaha……”
Cairens, who had been crying out for his mother for a long while, laughed as if he had lost his mind.
Only now did he fully understand why his mother had so denied the existence of gods. She had felt disgust toward Henelion, toward the gods who treated people, themselves, as beings worth less than ants.
Just as she had cursed Cairens’s bloodline, now Cairens found his own bloodline cursed.
And he was ashamed of himself for once having taken pride in that bloodline.
“Hahahaha!”
He laughed madly like that for a long while.
Cairens now hated everything. Seianes, who had made the land desolate for some reason, his father Henelion, who had inflicted merciless punishment on humans, even his own bloodline—everything felt futile.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t bring himself to hate Abrisius, who had tried to save him.
“Everyone, I won’t forgive anyone.”
Sharpening the blade of hatred, Cairens swore to himself.
“I’ll take revenge. On everything that made my homeland, my family like this……”
They said Cairens would have the fate of a hero. Cairens didn’t know what monster he would defeat, whether he would stand on the side of the gods and fight against the underground Divine Race.
But if a choice was given to Cairens, if he could choose what kind of hero to become, he would choose without hesitation to become a hero of humans.
He wanted to transform humans who had lost their homes and hope due to the whims and arrogance of gods, who bowed and scraped to please them.
That gods are not idols, that they don’t need to be worshipped and served. That it’s okay to deny those arrogant beings who act as if human offerings are only natural.
Even if they called him mad, he wanted to do that.
Because he is a human hero. As a hero for humans, not anyone else, he would save them from the gods who restrain and bind them.
“Just wait and see. I won’t become the hero you want, I’ll show you how.”
The curtain rose announcing the birth of Cairens the hero who saves humans, not a hero who receives the gods’ revelations.
