Chapter 301: Forgiveness
Hai Yun squeezed her eyes shut, ignoring the sounds around her. She sat on her knees with her head down, completely depleted, unable even to weep. The burdens of leadership had already exhausted her emotions. The lives she had become responsible for would be lost, but in the end, that’s what they had all expected. What more could she have done?
She had exhausted her mana in an ultimate attack that had been snuffed out with hardly any effort by their opponent, just as he had negated all the others. Without any resources to manipulate her spells, she was less than useless, and ultimately, she was a liability. Physically, she was nearly as weak as she had been as a regular human, regardless of the levels she had gained during the assimilation. It was exactly as pathetic an end as she deserved. She only hoped that her ineptitude would be forgotten, left to rot in the dirt, along with her existence.
She was full of regrets, but she did her best to let them go before she was killed. A single tear ran down her cheek as she wished that she could have been better for the sake of her attendants. The trust she had been given had never really been earned.
But minutes went by and death didn’t come. It wasn’t until she was physically lifted off the ground and placed on her feet that she came back to her senses. The person that had brought her back to the present was the very same man that had defeated them all.
She blinked, eyes bloodshot, simply confused while his hands firmly held her arms until she put her feet down.
“You’ve had a hard time, huh?” He observed, seemingly understanding everything at a glance.
He pulled her into a generous hug, evoking gasps from her nearest dirt-covered attendants as they slowly recovered, dragging themselves back toward the battlefield. Her face felt warm as the rest of her tears finally came.
“Don’t worry, you did a good job.” He added as he released her. “The kid Seki explained enough for me to get the picture. I’m gonna need to talk to the Banshee, I mean Irina, but we’re all good.” He stated as if whatever happened was somehow already water under the bridge.
He put one hand on her shoulder and used his other to pull her limp hand between them, then placed a wrapped chocolate in her palm, before nodding to himself and walking off to speak to others. She stared at the chocolate for a long time, wondering where it had even come from and what it meant.
“Mistress?” The young girl that had been her attendant since the beginning spoke quietly, dirt caked in her hair from tumbling away in the blasts. When Hai Yun turned her head, glad that the girl had survived, still carefully holding the chocolate, the girl continued. “He’s inviting everyone to come with him to Ghost Reef, he says he’s Coop… from the leaderboards.”
“Oh.” Hai Yun managed, throat scratchy, unsure of what to say.
The girl kept going, smiling in a way Hai Yun hadn’t seen before. “He said we’re all welcome to stay in his settlement if we want. And he said he’ll do his best to keep us safe. Don’t you think that’s great?”