Chapter 361: Weight Of Aftermath

While that was happening, Alexia reached the rest of them shortly after.

First, she treated Lily.

Then she had to stop for a while, nearly collapsing from the sheer amount of Essence she had burned through in such a short span of time, before she could even think about moving on to Ray.

Michael also needed immediate treatment after Juliana put him down with a neurotoxin. Alexia did everything she could for him... but she still couldn’t save the eye he’d been stabbed in.

"Wait, what did you say?" I frowned and leaned closer to Michael, studying him as if I were seeing him for the first time. His right eye was closed, a long pale scar cutting across it like a slash of white paint. "Oh, fuck. Did you actually lose an eye?!"

Michael looked personally offended. "You’re just noticing now?! We’ve been talking for a while!"

"I thought you were trying out some new edgy fashion statement to look cool!"

"...Respectfully, what is wrong with you?"

Yeah...

I really needed to start paying more attention to the people around me.

•••

It was strange, having no right arm.

I kept reaching for things without thinking. Trying to grab, to steady myself, and to move fingers that simply weren’t there. There was nothing there. Nothing but a weird phantom sensation.

And then there was a problem of not being able to maintain balance properly. Turns out, losing a limb seriously messes with your center of gravity.

I nearly tripped twice just walking out of the shelter I had woken up in. But once I did step outside, I forgot about all those little troubles for a moment and just admired the small wooden cabin before us to its absolute fullness.

Because yes, it was a cabin that we had walked out of — made from massive tree logs stacked together with a surprising amount of architectural precision.

The bark of the wood hadn’t been stripped away, leaving the entire cabin tinted in a deep charcoal shade of gray, the same color as the majority of the trees in the forest beyond this shore.

And yes, we were on the shore of the Lake of Grief, where the sand was white like snow. The edge of the beach in the distance blurred into the silver of the shimmering sea that looked as ghostly as it was beautiful under the glow of the crimson moon.

The air outside was cold and salty. It stung my tongue and made my half-healed wounds itch under the straps of bandages.

I hadn’t really had time to appreciate this place the first time I saw it.

You know. Busy fighting a fallen god and all. But now... now it looked almost unreal, almost dreamlike.

Somewhere behind the cabin, on the other side of it, I could hear the sounds of muffled laughter and idle chatter.

Judging by how far away the commotion was coming from, and how much splashing water and collective yelling were involved, they were probably doing something that required a lot of

teamwork

.

Curious, I wanted to see what they were up to. But Michael chose that time to continue his story.

Apparently, according to Kang, he had managed to retrieve most of the relics from the God Who Eats Is’ corpse. But not all of them.

The most important missing one was the obsidian spike that had been lodged in my chest when he and Alexia found me.

The Divine Extraction Needle.

Kang insisted that when he swam back to the shore with my unconscious body on his back, then returned to the ice islet to gather the remaining artifacts, the stake had simply... vanished.

He searched for it for as long as he could, but the glacier platform began cracking unnaturally from below.

Because deep-water beasts were ramming into it with frenzied hunger, emboldened now that the crushing presence of the God had disappeared with his death.

In the end, Kang was forced to retreat. He barely escaped with his life as the ginormous sea monsters tore the ice apart, and in the chaos, he lost several more artifacts.

I felt my eyelid twitch and sighed, the air leaking from my lips like a punctured tire. "Lost them? Divine artifacts aren’t loose change you drop between couch cushions, Kang! They’re literally god-tier loot! Damn that dog!"

Michael winced at me with his one good eye. "Be fair, Sam. Come on. He’s still only a C-ranker. Between collapsing ice, giant sea monsters, and carrying injured people back and forth — ahem, you — it’s a miracle he retrieved as many artifacts as he did."

"Yeah, yeah," I muttered, tugging my bedsheet-toga tighter as cold wind rolled off the silver sea.

The phantom ache in my missing hand flared again, making me shiver.

We stood there in silence for a while, staring out at the endless stretch of the Lake of Grief. The swishing sound of the waves swallowed the silence between us.

After a long moment, Michael raised a hand to his face and let out a shuddering breath into his palm. Then his shoulders began to tremble, subtle tremors breaking through his usual upbeat facade.

Right there, under the haunting light of the bleeding moon, he looked less like some destined hero and more like a boy who had suddenly realized the weight he carried might be too heavy to bear after all.

It broke something in my chest. I knew Michael Godswill was mentally one of the toughest people I had ever met.

But seeing him break down so pitifully made me realize a fact I had been subconsciously ignoring all this time. He... was just a kid.

We all were.

We weren’t even eighteen yet. Not all of us.

We were barely young adults.

And yet we’d been forced to watch each other bleed to near death and endure trauma no one our age should be put through to suffer.

We didn’t deserve this. We didn’t deserve any of this.

It was all so... inhumane.

"...Michael," I said softly, my voice barely audible over the crashing of the silver waves.

"I almost killed them, Sam," he whispered. And his voice finally broke. "Ray. Vince. Lily... If I hadn’t— if Juliana hadn’t stopped me..."

"But she did," I said, more firmly than I intended. I tried to cross my arms, remembered I only had one, and settled for tucking my left hand into the folds of my toga. "Stop beating yourself about what-ifs."

He sobbed a few more times and shook his head, still hiding his face, only now his nails were digging into his cheek.

"Hey," I muttered, nudging him with my shoulder. "Don’t get too depressed. If you start crying, I’ll take it as a challenge and we’ll end up in a full-blown crying marathon. I don’t have enough bedsheets to turn into tissues for both of us."

He gave a choked-off laugh and lowered his hand, the tearful wetness of his single eye was rimmed with a silver glow reflecting off the sea. Then he nodded.

•••

We sat there on the beach and kept talking for... I honestly don’t remember for how long.

Michael told me about what happened after he came back to his senses. He said he had a long conversation with the rest of the group.

Naturally, some of them — cough Vince and Ray cough — were visibly uncomfortable around him.

So Michael decided to tell them the truth about his Demon Sword. He told them he had come into contact with it and what it really was.

That revelation shocked them more than it frightened them. What followed was a long, exhausting chain of questions and answers that Michael described as nothing but pure mental torture. I could relate.

By the end of it, however, the majority of them seemed to have reached a shaky kind of peace with him. And by the next day, mostly everything returned to normal.

...Mostly.

While nearly everyone understood that what happened to Michael wasn’t Michael’s fault and that he had been manipulated, one person still avoided him like the plague.

It was Lily.

"She won’t even look at me," Michael groaned, clearly on the verge of crying again. "I’ve tried to talk to her alone so many times, but she keeps distance."

...Yeah.

I couldn’t blame her.

She had only recently found out she’d been coerced into getting together with the boy she thought she loved... which she did, but I had no doubt she was definitely questioning the genuineness of her feelings right now.

It was a mess.

I could’ve gone to Lily and explained that what she felt wasn’t fake. That Xaldreth couldn’t create emotions, only amplify what was already there.

But that would require telling her things I didn’t want to tell her... or didn’t know how to tell her.

So I did the next best thing.

I patted Michael’s hunched back.

"There, there," I said solemnly. "That’s rough, buddy. But don’t worry. Plenty of fish in the sea! I’ll find you a new girl. You already seem to like the ones I choose anyway, right?"

He turned slowly and glared at me. "You’re such an asshole."

I burst out laughing. And after rolling his eyes, so did he. When the moment settled, Michael grew quiet again.

Then, in a small voice, he said, "I’m sorry."

"Huh?" I glanced at him. "For what?"

"...You know," he said vaguely.

Actually, I didn’t.

There were a hundred things he could be apologizing for, and most of them were truly never his fault.

I could’ve told him that, but I knew empty reassurances wouldn’t mean much unless I answered honestly.

So I shrugged. "I’m sorry too."

"Huh? For what?"

"You know..."