The hero, who was neither the arrogant, greedy first nor the whiny, childish third drove towards the gate. There was a loud noise, and a man flew into the air. The hero's hand rose to block the suns in order to see more effectively.
Is that Flavius Memmius Sevso? The hero smiled at the young man's antics, which were once again allowing his youthful energy to shine through as a boon to his chosen profession.
A profession that the hero had gently nudged the young man into.
Flavius is a true inspiration to his fellow gladiators. He should be thankful I decided to help him out. Not that I'd ever say anything to him about it.
No, the second hero wasn't that type of person. There was no merit in being flashy like the first hero or a complete idiot like the third hero. The Goddess who summoned the heroes had ideas on how things needed to be done, but she had simply been wrong. It was so obvious to see for anyone with half a brain!
Lucia wanted her followers to flourish, growing in both numbers and ardor, and add to her power. To that end, she encouraged them to destroy and enslave other races, providing humanity with slaves to labor in their steads and to pleasure them in their idle times. As an added benefit, her followers enjoyed the improved morale that constant victories against the woefully unprepared fantasy creature races brought.
The hero understood the concepts even though she'd never directly explained them. The ideas were easy enough to comprehend for anyone who wasn't a complete idiot. Thankfully, complete idiots like the third hero had never directly requested the help of the second hero, and the boy had only intruded into Stadal on a single occasion, at which time he had been so humiliated by how relatively weak he was that he'd pretended the incident had never occurred when asked at a later time, providing great amusement to both the first and the second heroes.
The second hero liked to help people. Not just humans, but all people. That was why the dwarf city had to be retaken from the near-war that had broken out between the Charus Kingdom and the Stadal Empire. The dwarves were being worked far too hard. They were practically being worked to death!
That didn't require the attention of a hero. The second hero considered it, drumming a pair of fingers on the steering wheel of a very ordinary-looking steam-powered car as the line for the fourth gate moved slowly along. That was what anyone would do if they were given the chance.
Those dwarves had needed to be rescued, and they happened to be sitting on top of some of the most valuable metals and minerals that the second hero could put to use. It was win-win. The hero brought an army of drones to their aid, and now the dwarves had no need to work at all, with the machines doing the mining, crafting, brewing, and other tasks expected of them. They could simply relax in their homes and enjoy their lives.
They couldn't leave though.
Of course not!
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This city was their home!
The hero wasn't trying to take that away from them. Never. All they needed to do now was relax and enjoy their new lives of luxury; surely they were now the most pampered and well-treated beings in this world.
The second hero produced an ordinary badge and displayed it to the gladiator at the gate, a mousy young girl named Flavinia Verina, who wasn't really suited to being a gladiator but whose passion for it had overridden the hero's inclination to set her on the path to becoming a tailor, which was more likely to be her true calling.
"Victory be upon you," Flavinia said, seeming incredibly distracted.
The second hero frowned slightly. Had something happened to the girl? The trip to Onyxfell had taken a few hours, and there were surely any number of details missed in that time. The hero would have used a flying drone to make the trip speedier, but compromises had to be made in order to ensure anonymity. It wouldn't do for the people to know the identity of their silent benefactor.
Similarly, there was no need to ask what was troubling the girl. It was no coincidence that crime within Onyxfell had plummeted ever since the second hero had arrived. Beyond that, however, the people of the city had been given a new way to compete for the victories that they craved, one that didn't rely so heavily on physical prowess or mindlessly attempting to acquire nonsensical stat points.
In this way, the so-called City of Wrath had seen its interests change course slightly. No longer did its citizens clamor endlessly for war without even having a reason for it. Now they turned inward, becoming more productive and intelligent, unlike the idiots living in Charus City with the idiot third, who were much too far gone for even the second hero's brilliance to be of use in rescuing them.
Yes, this was the way in which Lucia should have been working all along. Attempting to grow the population of a kingdom and its faith was far too slow. Instead, she should have been working to gain the favor of other nations in their entirety, as the second hero was doing.
The Stadal Empire Conversion Project was nearly complete now after almost a decade of meticulous, tireless work. The Empire's people were already greatly appreciative for all the benefits they could see, and when it was revealed that those and more had been the will of Lucia—even though they hadn't, but she seemed clever enough to play the part once it was described to her—they would surely jump to, at worst, a dual faith system in which she would gain a substantive foothold from which to continue with her usual method of cultivating believers.
At that time, the second hero would already be gone, naturally. There were many more people who could be helped and whose lives could be improved. That this work was in the service of a Goddess was not what the second hero would have preferred, but the abilities that came with such a powerful sponsor were too useful to pass up.
Abilities that allowed the creation of all manner of things, including weapons. Guns were the most primitive of the weapons that the second hero was capable of creating, but they had been the only ones that Lucia's idiot believers could be trusted to handle without destroying the entire world. She had pleaded for the schematics to more powerful weapons, and it had only been through the second hero's quick-witted explanations that she had accepted the claim that she would receive more followers than she could manage on her own if she permitted this plan to be carried out.
Ten years had been the agreed upon time limit. Coming up soon, now. If I don't get moving, those religious nuts will probably blow up the whole fucking planet. I don't really want to give them those weapons, but a deal's a deal.
So it came to be that the second hero of the Charus Kingdom also entered Onyxfell, the City of Wrath and capital of the Stadal Empire, on that momentous afternoon, ten days prior to the Hero's Cup.