This chapter can be skipped with little to no true lost to the story itself. This chapter was used and made specifically for the author to limit and gauge how to treat and use the nobility within the setting of the story. If at any time you feel that you dislike how the current chapter is going, please feel free to skip the chapter, the next one returns to the regular style.
You have been informed.
[Legend of the Nameless Hero - Chapter 12]
The room returned to a dead silence after the three figures left the room. It was not due to any of these proud nobles finding themselves deep in thought or being lost in the scene. No, not deep thought, they were completely frozen in a mental state of pure shock.
In some medical cases, a person’s body will believe so greatly that it has perished that it will give up on living. While there are various cases and ways that the mind or body can cause this, the fact remains that in circumstances of extreme fear or surprise, cells or bodily functions will cease functionality and the body will reach a point of living death, followed by true death due to the lack of cardio-functionality. No matter what blood may flow through a human’s veins, no matter their merit or achievements in life, if fear seeps into the depths of their being, their body shall hesitate as their instincts of survival overtakes their senses. Of course, this is only if the body should actually experience such fear as to lead to said response, those specifically trained to resist mental shock or powerful waves of moral can often avoid the full effects of psychological trauma or shock. The results of such things of said breaking of the psyche as a result of a broken level of fear far beyond a person’s range of recovery will fall to hysteria, the military termed ‘Thousand-yard stare’, and or simple mental colapse.
Human instinct is established to a realm of ‘reality’. This constitutes the ‘rules’ of the ‘world’ that they live in are comprised of. A major reason children have such good memories is to adapt to the many ‘rules’ of their world. These are not meant for a modern world, but from a time where ‘humans’ were definable as homosapien, before speech and before civilization. The only difference between the animals called homosapien and that of a ‘human’ is time, and the reactions of that of an animal and that of a definable ‘person’ will often be the same.
The most common instances of ‘rules’ known to human society are the ideology of ‘religion’, ‘culture’, ‘authority’, and ‘hierarchy’. Many of these result back to animal instinct, as the difference between tribes of homosapien, or even primates can find definition within the bounds of culture and religion. The definition of a leader within a group, or those who orchestrate leadership are thusly authority and hierarchy.
As humans grow up, they will slowly restrict their concept of the world, allowing them to utilize their diminishing mental capacity more efficiently. While there are an undefinable number of reason surrounding the very concept of human memory that remain unexplainable outside of the realm of mere guesswork and quantitative or qualitative reasoning, the limitation of the imaginative complex of a human as it develops is a key principal of a human’s ability to conform to a society or realm of understanding.
While it is common for modern humans to be rather rebellious in their youthful phases, the end result is, within understandable means and deviation, a certain level of necessary conformity for the requirement to function within the pre-established societal normalities they are birthed into. To tie these concepts to what had occurred to the near one hundred individuals within this room, the point becomes rather simple. They had long since established the ‘rules’ of a person’s strength, as well as what a person can and cannot do. They, as nobles, looked at the world from their various perches as they relished in the capacity of trying to climb ever higher as to look down on those beneath them. A peasant must obey a noble, their blood and history gives them authority. This is an unbreakable concept of their society, their very pride based upon the concept of bloodlines and deserved respect.
To them, Gregory was a mighty warrior, not to mention the fact that he was a man. The woman was, for a lack of better words, a mere woman. Beyond that, Gregory was the greatest warrior in the Kingdom aside from the Second Prince and his opponent was a frail looking woman. A woman.
The male nobles had scoffed at the very idea of having such a powerful man fight such a frail woman, right up until they watched said powerful man nearly splatter into solid rock and bleed all over the floor.
Needless to say, everything that had just occurred went far beyond their capacity to understand or cope. The older the person within the room, the harder it would be for them, and the greater the backlash to their minds.
Well, that, and the fact that a scene of a man being beaten senseless as blood gushed across the floor after being thrown halfway across the room by such a small figure, the cries of the victim turning to moans and finally a silence as if waiting for the end. The scene of the attacker in a blood rage that none of these nobles had ever witnessed sending a fear to the depths of their beings as if they could actually feel the desire to cut flesh slashing at their very own backs. Then, as if it had never happened, the cause of the incident put back on a normal face, altered the soul of the First Princess, talked about the slaughter of every person in the room with the most powerful individual in the Kingdom, and then left with the Princess who had been her rival along with said most powerful person in the Kingdom, all with no signs of any consequence as if no one present could do anything. To actually manage to further add to the already obscene circumstance, the cause of all of this, that woman in that white, or perhaps silver, dress was a self proclaimed ‘commoner’, thus the very same breed that in all senses of the word should be akin to a dog meant only to serve a noble. That dog, was treating the master as if they were animals to be put down.
To say that this was a normal level of shock, it would not be too far as to say such an assertion was a substantial understatement.
But, that simply, simply wasn’t the end of the matter. There was also the problem with that woman. The further the nobles tried to comprehend or cope with the matter, the more of an offense to their sense of reality the whole incident became.
The woman had, with single arm, thrown the massive Gregory across the room with enough force to temporarily incapacitate the man. Said woman had, just a moment before throwing Gregory, had defended against and broken Gregory’s sword with the very same hand. Instead of the arm falling off and her dying as she should, she survived. The floor should be covered in the woman’s blood, allowing the nobles to deal with how to delay or prevent the First Princess’s engagement. But, the blade didn’t cut her arm off, she didn’t die, and the First Princess is no longer engaged as she apparently no longer remembers that her beloved ever existed.
That woman, in a scene of horror, had even self mutilated herself as if deranged. A mix of laughter and hate mixed into one as her sheer presence forced its way out as if to dominate the souls of those present. An unstoppable force of fear as if a doom had placed itself upon their entire domain. Without pain or signs of fatigue after losing so much blood, she proceeded to torture and maul her opponent without any hesitation. To nobles who never saw blood, seeing a man slowly beaten and slashed to death would be, in itself, could become a trauma to many, especially the younger nobility. After all, regardless of bloodlines or authority, the younger one is, the less experience they have, and the more certain experiences can have on them emotionally.
For a modern human, perhaps they would be capable of coping with a similar experience due to the advanced forms of entertainment and enrichment that are available for experience during one’s youth. From action to horror in the realm of visual entertainment to the violence and tendencies induced within the video game industry, there is simply a broader area to draw from. While even many modern individuals can be heavily affected from a scene such as the one that just occurred, due to their larger font of life experiences in a modern world, their brain’s self defense mechanisms would be able to create coping delusions and enter a state of denial until the mind can handle the strain.
But, to those of a medieval society where they lacked the very concept of the unknown due to an unrecognizable degree of time spent within cultural stagnation, such an occurrence such as what just occurred would have been a heavy blow to their psyche. If they were peasantry, their extreme degree of ignorance and narrow minded nature would have allowed them to simply accept whatever occurred whenever it occurred. This is a key concept as to why religions in ancient times spread and shifted with far greater frequency than in modern times.
For nobles, however, the peak of most if not all medieval societies that stood within a dense veil of an ignorant arrogance bred from the devotion towards bloodlines and wealth over a multitude of generations are far different. They do not accept, they force others to accept, their ignorance and narrow minded nature is far different to that of a peasant’s, it is one that cannot bend, that cannot adapt, that falls deep within the pools of stagnation and depravity. Such a situation would induce a different mental event all together.
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They would enter a state of shock, their fear of the woman who turned into a monster, their surprise when the High Lord Isaac Keylock was cordial with her, their surrender when it was mentioned she was intending to slaughter them all, their total relief when she left, and the shock and collapse of their mental function as their sense of reason returned and failed them all at once. In other words, when faced with the first unknown of their entire lives, they were simply unable to face it, something they hadn’t even deemed impossible. A word born itself from either a depth of ignorance, foolishness, or unwillingness to accept the probability of an event becoming a reality.
Everything, after all, has a chance of occurring within some space, within some reality, somewhere, sometime, all things capable and incapable within human thought or reason and beyond can indeed, become a reality.
If left as is, these nobles might have truly lost their minds as they continued to fall deeper and deeper into the realm of madness as they became incapable of coping with their newly changed reality. Only someone with a significant mental fortitude, ignorance, or sheer adaptability could recover from such a level of shock.
Within the entire room, or perhaps, within the entire noble population, there were only two men who had avoided the mental shock. Only two, out of hundreds of nobles within the Kingdom, only two had the required skills or experiences to endure a sight of such a nature.
Lord Isaac Kaylock had been able to avoid even the slightest level of shock simple because of his character and mental strength that would easily weight against or even above that of a modern human being. If born into a modern world, or perhaps any other besides the one he found himself in, his mind would have led him to becoming a revolutionary in almost any field he entered. This is why his mind could easily see through the hero’s almost unrecognizable plans and directed her away from said intent. While the hero is extremely clever with not only her mental training and psychological background, but even her social and cultural context under her leader making her a sheer juggernaut in many ways, Lord Isaac Kaylock’s life experience with tens of to even hundreds of thousands of people, accomplishing many dozens of things a person would normally shirk from even consider of accomplishing within several lifetimes was simply a being who could matcher the hero blow for blow not only within a game of wit, but could even force her back given the situation.
The hero is only twenty two years of age, no matter how much of a temporal advantage was given to her, life experience of over sixty years of clawing one’s way through a hostile world will trump second hand knowledge. It isn’t a matter of a world, a time, a place or age, it is simply a matter of two different people from two different times. Though, mere age has nothing to do with one’s experience, the fact that the hero is in the same realm as Isaac is a testament to her own gifts. Truly, both are titans within this world, to judge which one would be greater than one another would be to arbitrarily decide that certain strengths are greater than others while ignoring others to state a winner. No, there simply isn’t such a thing as greater or lesser in reality, only those who walk within it. Life’s strengths and weaknesses are two halves of an even greater whole.
In the end, those of the nobility who could have recovered by themselves were countable on a single hand within the Kremor Kingdom. It, however, just so happened that the only one of these few nobles thusly mentioned had been present for the trial. The person to recover first could be considered Lord Isaac’s greatest student, First Prince Leon Lovett, the man praised and supported by the nobility to take the seat as heir to the throne.
The only obstacle for the noble’s desires to have the prince take the throne was a single man. That ‘man’, however, was the political and economical juggernaut that was Lord Isaac Kaylock. Lord Isaac had personally requested that First Prince Leon not pursue the throne so long as he, Lord Isaac, the Prince’s beloved teacher, was still amongst the living. Each of the royal Family see Lord Isaac as if he were a second father, and in fact, all of the Royal Children besides First Princess Sophia and the Second Prince Heraldr view Lord Isaac as someone even more important than their own father. It was only out of his strong personal devotion and love towards Lord Isaac, the man who had raised him since birth, that First Prince Leon had not pursued his own ambitions against his sister and father. While he holds his blood loyalties towards his father, there is a limit to how much one could love a father who rarely spoke and one rarely saw even during one’s childhood. It was no secret that even King Gideon’s own children saw the old man as nothing more than a weak and incompetent leader and actively sought their own interests to ensure the nobles never rended power away from the throne.
While he had agreed to not pursue the throne, nor take actions against his sister Sophia, this was not because he had given up on the throne, but because of the incomprehensible and absolute wisdom of Lord Isaac that Leon resolved himself to follow the path Isaac was leading. After all, almost half of the noble housed would instantly invest or offer up their entire family assets if it was at the behest of the very same Lord Isaac. One must never forget the influence and accomplishments that single man has accumulated, it had since long ago reached a point of devotion. Authority and accomplishment over the course of over five decades tends to lead to that when most human beings fail to live past fifty years old.
It was by focusing his entire mind onto that single point that first Prince Leon was able to recover his mind from the void that had been created. All of Lord Isaac’s actions are beyond my comprehension, if it’s him, even that woman is within his calculations. Why else was he completely uneffected. There’s no reason to to be fear this… unknown… for Lord Isaac’s very being is beyond anything…. yes…. that’s why… It’s just Lord Isaac… If it is him, then it must be.
Such were the thoughts of the Prince.
Following this string of rather unreasonable thoughts of devotion, First Prince Leon regained his senses after nearly fifteen minutes of staring into what seemed to be the void itself. As if shattering the realm of silence all around him, he uttered a single word, rending the void that had taken absolute hold over the halls.
(First Prince Leon)
“... … … … … … … … … do … … … … …
… … … … … …”
It started as a single word, but that is all a person needs to start a recovery from a state of shock. A single word, or a single movement is all it takes to claw one’s way out of such a state. Even with that one word, the eyes of several of the older nobles turned towards the sound. After several more seconds, like a tidal wave crashing upon the shores of the Prince’s mind, his full sense of reality returned to him, allowing him to continue what he was going to say.
(First Prince Leon)
“Lord Father… What are we going to do?
We just made an enemy of that… if what I was told right, she was claiming to have been here to help in the first place… if that… no… with her passing the trial, the Lords of Light themselves have truly spoken… her tales are ALL true… and… Oh…. Lords of Light above… we have just disgraced their will!
Lord Father, what are we going to do about this blunder!?”
The room remained in dead silence. While Prince Leon might have recovered to the extent of speech, only a half dozen nobles had truly regained some sense with another dozen or so being able to comprehend the prince’s words.
However...~
*Fupak*
The Second Prince, Master Prince Heraldr, had risen from his seat and crashed his large hands together. The Second Prince was well known to be a supporter of Leon taking the throne, as well as his great distrust of Lord Isaac Kaylock. Often leading to various conflicts, scandals, and outbursts within the court that are often just barely contained.
(Second Prince Heraldr)
“Enough of your disrespect, ALL OF YOU!
Your prince and rightful heir to the throne has posed a question. It may be to the Lord Father, but who are you nobles to disrespect your king!
EYES UPON THE FAMILY YOU SPINELESS MEN OWE YOUR FULL LOYALTY AND DEVOTION TOWARDS!
If a mere woman has enough spunk to scare the lot of you, yield your houses now to braver men within your line or from without. It matters not to the Royalty who serves your assets so long as they don’t faint whenever a woman bares a threat to you.
The King will now dictate the completion of the Holy Trial.
OFFER YOUR ATTENTION, any still staring off into space shall see your lines ended before the sun sets!”
[LNH Chapter 12- END]
White's Corner:
Well... been awhile hasn't it? Well a full ~3,200 word chapter for you, with at least one more in the works for tonight, I can't leave you with just a chapter like this right? So much explanation.... The horror... but, it needed to be done, it is either split this piece into three parts, or have a massive 30 page chapter instead. I opted to start putting the chapters out now rather than delay even longer.
But ya... six weeks.... Medical school... enough said on that regard.
I've got plenty of material stockpiled in my notebook, just need to type it out and release.
Stay Tuned~
~White