Chapter 129: Killed by his own son
Leon turned, raising an eyebrow slightly. "You don’t have to do that."
"I know," she said, falling into step beside him anyway. "But this is your first time in this part of the city, right? Easy to get turned around at night if you don’t know the streets."
It was a thin excuse, and judging by the faint color rising in her cheeks, she seemed to know it too.
Still, Leon didn’t push back on it. He fell into an easy pace beside her instead, the two of them walking together down the quiet, narrow street leading away from her house.
The evening air had cooled noticeably since he’d first arrived at her door, the golden light from earlier fading into a softer, deeper blue overhead.
A handful of streetlights flickered on along the road, casting warm pools of light across the pavement as they walked.
"So," Iris said after a moment, glancing sideways at him, "are you always this quiet, or is it just because I talked your ear off for three hours straight?"
Leon huffed out a short laugh. "A little of both, maybe."
"That’s not very reassuring," she said, though her tone carried more amusement than actual complaint.
They kept walking, the conversation drifting easily between them now, lighter than it had been back in the study.
Iris brought up some of the more ridiculous illustrations she remembered from her grandmother’s books, describing one particularly dramatic depiction of Heracles wrestling a lion.
To her, the lion drawn in the book looked more like an oversized housecat than anything genuinely fearsome.
Leon laughed properly at that, the sound surprising even himself slightly, given how long it had been since he’d actually found something funny without an undercurrent of exhaustion or tension riding beneath it.
"You should see some of the illustrations of Medusa," Iris continued, grinning now. "One of the older books draws her with snakes that look like they’re smiling. It’s supposed to be terrifying, apparently, but it just looks ridiculous."
Leon smiled slightly at that, thinking privately that he had met the real Medusa’s snakes, though he kept that particular detail to himself.
They turned a corner onto a wider street, the buildings around them growing taller again as they moved back toward the busier parts of the city.
More people filled the sidewalks here, a mix of civilians heading home for the evening and a handful of players easily identifiable by their gear, moving with the same relaxed confidence Leon had noticed earlier.
"This way," Iris said, gesturing toward the next intersection.
Leon nodded, though he found himself, somewhat unexpectedly, in no particular rush to actually get there.
The easy conversation, the quiet laughter, the simple, uncomplicated warmth of just walking beside someone without needing to watch every word carefully, it was a rare enough feeling that he found himself wanting to hold onto it a little longer.
They continued down the street, Iris launching into another story, this one about the time she’d tried reading one of her grandmother’s oldest books aloud to a group of classmates as a child, only for the entire group to burst out laughing at her instead of listening seriously.
"I didn’t talk about any of it again for years after that," she admitted, a rueful smile tugging at her mouth. "Not until I found someone who actually seemed to care."
Leon glanced at her, something in her tone catching his attention. "That someone being me?"
Iris’s cheeks colored slightly, and she looked away, feigning sudden interest in a shop window they were passing. "Don’t let it go to your head."
Leon chuckled quietly, letting the moment settle between them without pushing further.
They walked on for another block, the conversation slowing into something more comfortable, less urgent, filled with small, easy silences that didn’t feel like they needed filling.
Then, without warning, the atmosphere around them shifted entirely.
A low, mechanical hum rippled through the air above them, drawing Leon’s attention upward on instinct.
Several blocks away, mounted high along the side of one of the city’s tallest buildings, an enormous holographic screen flickered to life, its surface stretching wide enough to be visible from streets away.
The screen brightened fully a second later, and Leon’s entire body went rigid.
Teon’s face filled the display, massive and unmistakable, projected larger than life across the side of the skyscraper.
Beside it, a second, slightly blurred image accompanied the first, the unmistakable shape of a body lying motionless on broken ground.
Bold text scrolled beneath both images, bright and impossible to miss even from this distance.
S-rank player and guild master of S-rank guild Roaring Lions, Teon Allistar, now dead, killed after a fight with his own son.
Leon froze completely where he stood, every muscle in his body locking in place as the words settled over him.
His expression shifted instantly, the easy warmth from moments earlier draining away, replaced by something cold and distant, his eyes fixed unblinking on the massive image still hovering high above the street.
Beside him, Iris had gone equally still, her earlier laughter dying in her throat as she stared up at the same screen, her own expression shifting rapidly from confusion into open shock.
"That’s... Teon Allistar," she said slowly, her voice barely above a whisper. "The Teon Allistar?"
Leon said nothing, his jaw tightening slightly, his eyes still locked on the enormous, unmoving image of his father’s face.
Iris kept staring upward, clearly struggling to process what she was seeing.
Even someone entirely outside the player system, someone who by her own admission didn’t particularly care for players in general, knew the name Teon Allistar.
If anything, it was harder not to know who Teon Allistar was.
He’d been one of the most powerful S-rank players in the world, a guild master whose reputation stretched across continents, a man widely regarded as nearly untouchable given his sheer combat strength alone.
S-rank players didn’t simply die like regular players. Not without a fight that shook entire cities, the kind of confrontation that made headlines for weeks, discussed and dissected endlessly by anyone with even a passing interest in the player hierarchy.
And yet here it was, displayed plainly and undeniably across a screen large enough for half the city to see at once.
Killed by his own son.