The room that Leon fought the shade of Artorias in swiftly reformed around him. In only a matter of seconds, all of the furniture had returned, the carpets had sprung back into being, and the room’s proportions had fixed themselves. There wasn’t so much as a single scorch mark on the floor to act as proof of the fight that had just taken place.
The lights, however, did not turn back on; neither did the sun begin to shine again, nor the villa become populated with people.
Leon barely noticed any of this. He knelt on the ground, his eyes unfocused, his body and mind fatigued, his brain locked up as he tried to comprehend everything that had just happened. An illusion of his father, and one that had quite gravely injured him. One that he’d had to kill. One that had almost killed him after he’d hesitated to strike the killing blow.
There was no strength in Leon’s body. He felt about as weak as he did when he’d first seen Artorias and been stricken with terror.
He had no idea how long he knelt there, but he was slowly pulled out of his fugue state by Nestor and Xaphan.
[Leon!] Xaphan shouted. [You need to get up and finish this! The longer you stay there, the more time you’re giving that Yooman asslicker to fix his shit and start fucking with us again!]
[By the Gods, demon, you’re dumb,] Nestor softly said in response, his tone almost soothing despite the words he was speaking. [Have you not been paying any attention at all? The pirate’s name is ‘Jormun’, and look around at this place… Whatever that idiot controlling this place did, it clearly broke much of this pocket space. It’ll take hours if not longer for it to recover. Leon has plenty of time to get his mind back in order.]
[Who are you and what did you do with the dead man?] Xaphan sarcastically demanded before turning his attention back to Leon. [Leon, there’ll be time to think later. Right now, you need to move.]
Leon rapidly blinked. His vision had blurred again with unshed tears, this whole incident ripping open the wound that was his father’s death. But as his brain started to get whirring again, he realized just how much of a mess he was. He wasn’t wearing his cuirass or his helmet, but his armor was still covering his legs, left arm, and most of his right arm. His torso was covered in blood from the wounds the shade inflicted upon him, the latter of which was still bleeding a bit, though Leon’s natural healing abilities had largely stopped it. Still, Leon was in a significant amount of physical pain.
And that wasn’t even touching on the still-lingering wounds his right hand had taken when they’d been caught up in the formation of the spatial tunnel that had brought Leon here.
But all of that was nothing compared to how awful Leon felt about what had just happened. Sure, he hadn’t just actually killed his father, that much his rational mind could understand, but he’d still caused a great deal of damage to his father’s image, and he was having a bit of trouble reconciling that with his emotions.
‘It wasn’t real…’ Leon thought to himself repeatedly. ‘It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real…’
After a number of repetitions, he finally said it out loud.
“It wasn’t real…”
It wasn’t much, and he still felt terrible, but it was enough for him to start moving again. He summoned all the grit he could and pushed himself to his feet, while summoning another healing spell in the same breath. He pressed that spell to his chest, using it to quickly close his wounds that were still bleeding. He then stripped himself down to his skivvies and blasted himself with water to wash himself clean of blood, before drying himself with fire and then summoning fresh clothes from his soul realm. In all, it only took about thirty seconds, but he felt immeasurably better once it was done. He wasn’t back to normal, but he was at least ready to get his head back in the game.
[Leon, you good?] Xaphan asked.
[Well enough,] Leon replied. [What in the hells was that? Was it darkness magic? My lightning didn’t have the effect I would’ve thought it would…]
[Our family’s power isn’t a hard counter to darkness magic,] Nestor said in a tone that was both didactic and exasperated. [As I’m sure you’ve been taught—and if you haven’t, then your teachers have treated you with criminal neglect—no element of magic has a perfect counter, not even light and dark or fire and water. What our powers do is prevent foreign magic from interfering with our minds. And in that respect, your power was completely successful. Your mental defenses were breached, allowing this temple to summon that shade—your father, I presume? Regardless, once you saturated your brain with your power, the influence was eliminated. Your power after that wouldn’t have any extra effect on the shade once it was summoned, though.]
Leon took a deep, steadying breath. [I suppose that makes sense. It wasn’t really my father, though. Whatever that thing was didn’t even use any magic.]
[Of course it wouldn’t,] Nestor said chidingly. [As powerful as the forces that power this temple’s magics may be, the lightning of our family is unique and can’t be reproduced so easily. That shade could never have displayed our power.]
Leon nodded and closed his eyes. [I suppose… that makes sense,] he whispered, though it didn’t quite explain why the shade hadn’t used normal lightning magic.
When he opened his eyes, he was ready to face the world again. He’d be thinking about what happened here for a long time, but for now, he had to focus on finding Gaius and Maia. To that end, he took quick stock of his surroundings.
The villa was still devoid of magical power, save for the section not too far ahead that still scattered his magic senses. The room he’d just defeated Artorias in had returned to normal, but Leon didn’t take that for granted, and kept his eyes open for any signs of change. For the most part, however, the villa was still dark and deserted.
[What happened to this place?] Leon wondered to his soul realm passengers.
[I think that Jormun broke this place,] Nestor explained. [To create a pocket space such as this and fill it with all that it has is no small feat, as I believe I’ve said before. Without the direct influence of powerful beings, a pocket realm would have to rely solely upon enchantments and wisps to run them.]
[Right, I remember you saying something to that effect earlier…]
[Yes. Well, that enchantment scheme would have to be mind-bendingly complex, too much for any one person to really comprehend and control all at once. If Jormun is screwing with the settings to mess with you, it’s likely that he’s disrupting the enchantment scheme to the point of breakage. At the very least, it seems like whatever ‘trial’ this temple was having its subject undergo has, at least partially, been unraveled.]
[But anything might happen, Jormun could send in a massive dragon or something, couldn’t he?]
[I doubt it,] Nestor said dismissively. [I think he’s already done as much as he’s capable of. If I had to guess, I’d say that that there’s not much else he can do until you go to a new pocket space. This one looks so mangled that it can’t be manipulated in any coherent way from the outside anymore. The only thing you can do is to find the exit and leave as fast as you can.]
[And there is an exit?]
[I should think so, this is supposed to be a trial, not a prison. I’m guessing that whoever is the subject of the trial has to do something that fulfills the trial’s conditions, and then you and they will be transported out.]
[Right…]
Leon was still a little anxious, but there was nothing he could do right now except move forward. Unless…
[I don’t suppose there’s any way I might be able to break out of here if I had to?] he asked Nestor.
Nestor replied, [That’s always a possibility, but save that as a backup plan. Trying to break through a world, even one this small, isn’t as easy a thing as breaking through a spatial tunnel.]
Xaphan snorted and added, [You’re still in this world, too. Unless there’re conditions like what you faced in the spatial tunnel, you shouldn’t even contemplate that option unless you want to risk being so twisted by spatial forces that all of your organs are ripped out through your asshole.]
Leon smiled as he turned his attention back toward the only door out of this room that he hadn’t taken to enter. [As always, demon, your powers of rhetoric allow you to make the most compelling arguments.]
[Damn right!] Xaphan sounded quite proud, either not picking up on Leon’s light sarcasm or just ignoring it.
Leon strode over to the door and walked right through without hesitation. There was another long hallway on the other side with more than a dozen doors leading off of it. Leon ignored nearly all of them, though, for he already knew where he needed to go. He didn’t need to waste his time exploring dark, empty rooms, not when the black hole in his perception began at the opposite end of the hallway.
As he walked, he felt his heart rate start to slow down. He was about to walk into the unknown, into quite possibly some other kind of terror that this place could’ve drawn from his mind. Anything and everything could be beyond that door. But compared to facing down his own father, Leon couldn’t imagine anything more making his heart flutter even a little. After what had just happened, he felt numb and resigned. His walking pace was steady, his heart rate quickly slowing, and his hands no longer shook. He wouldn’t exactly say that he was ready for anything, but at the very least, he was about as ready as his mental state would allow.
Leon didn’t pay any more attention to the door between him and the warded part of this floor than he needed to see if it was in any way trapped. Thankfully, it wasn’t, or at least, not in any way that he could detect, so he pushed the door open and stepped into the room beyond.
The other side of the door was like a whole other world compared to where Leon just was. In the rest of the trial world, everything was dark and devoid of life; whatever Jormun had done to screw with Leon had caused the world to nearly break down completely. No sun, no magic lanterns, no people. Just a dark and cold world.
When he entered the next room, it was like all the light in the world turned back on. The sun shone through the windows, there was a large firepit in the center of the surprisingly small room, and there were magic lanterns glowing in the ceiling casting soft, white light onto the walls. The room was much smaller than it had appeared outside, where it had seemed to be at least five or six similarly-sized rooms, making Leon’s head swim a little bit as he was forced to adjust his spatial awareness, but his disorientation lasted only a few seconds.
[Oh yeah…] he heard Nestor mutter from his soul realm, [I would wipe out this entire plane just to pick the brain of whoever or whatever built this place…]
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Leon ignored the dead man. He couldn’t spare Nestor too much attention, for the room wasn’t unoccupied, and his sudden entrance drew the gazes of everyone else there.
“Ahh, I was told that we had an uninvited guest…” said an almost obscenely rotund man sitting on the other side of the room, across from the firepit. It took Leon a moment, but after a second or two, he realized that he knew who this profoundly fat man was: Prince Octavius.
Leon rapidly blinked, wondering if he was mistaken, but the more he looked, the more he realized that it was the Prince, or some twisted image of him. Like with Artorias, there wasn’t much doubt in Leon’s mind that this form was just an illusion conjured by darkness magic or something of that nature, but it was still a shock.
Even more of a shock was seeing the other handful of people in the room. He saw sitting on Octavius’ left, the Sapphire Paladin, while on his right, the Earthshaker Paladin—a brief spike of anger flashing through Leon’s mind as he laid eyes on Trajan’s murderer, quelled only by the memory of skewering the Paladin upon his blade and turning him to ash with a copious application of lightning.
Both Paladins were smiling obsequiously and hanging off the Prince’s arm like well-paid escorts, and barely spared Leon more than a glance. Each one had skin as smooth as glass of the highest quality, their features seeming just a little more symmetrical than they were, their beauty exaggerated by the trial world beyond reality. Still, their auras were seventh-tier, so if things went south, Leon knew that he’d be in a bit of a pickle.
However, all thoughts about the Paladins were immediately snuffed out when his gaze landed upon the woman behind Octavius, quietly rubbing the folds of his thick, soft neck with a contented smile on her face, her pale skin practically glowing in the sunlight that streamed through the windows, her hair appearing like glimmering silver as it cascaded down her back, her sapphire eyes narrow with how widely she was smiling.
Valeria.
And she looked like she was gladly serving Octavius, her hands practically disappearing into the rolls of fat behind his neck like she was kneading the softest of dough. She didn’t spare Leon so much as a single glance.
Leon had thought that, after Artorias, this trial world had nothing left to throw at him that could truly infuriate him. And now, he kicked himself for his lack of imagination. To see someone here whom he loved, their form twisted and perverted, had his heart rate climbing right back up. Leon took a menacing step forward before he caught himself. His anger at seeing her here nearly drove his anger at seeing Earthshaker out of his mind.
‘Two seventh-tier mages…’ he thought to himself. ‘Calm yourself, idiot, she’s not real! Keep a cool head… Keep cool…. Keep cool… The last thing you need is to make a fatal mistake at this stage…’
Leon did his best not to immediately fly off the handle, but that was easier said than done. He began to walk forward again, his body filling with magic power almost uncontrollably as he prepared for what seemed like inevitable violence.
“Who are you, and why are you here?” the fat Octavius blubbered, his voice almost comically distorted by his immense girth, the huge pouch of fat below his chin quivering with every syllable. “How did you get through my guards?”
Leon ignored the questions. His eyes were mostly focused on Valeria, still rubbing Octavius’ neck with a look of utter bliss on her face.
“Are you ignoring me, Peasant?”
Leon slowly walked around the firepit, his mantra of keeping himself cool, already not working all that well, now starting to fail completely. He was only a hair’s breadth away from drawing his blade and attacking, and it seemed that the Paladins sensed this, for they stood up and drew their own weapons, their auras rising to match his in intensity and degree of killing intent.
But Leon didn’t charge. As he got a closer look at the group, he realized something: he’d missed someone in his initial scan of the area. A man, golden-haired, handsome, but much thinner and weaker than he remembered. He was on his hands and feet, his head bowed low.
Octavius was sitting on him like a stool.
Leon paused a moment as he took in this strange sight. Gaius’ aura was weak and his body was nearly devoid of all muscle, but Leon had a strange feeling that he was real, unlike everyone else in the room, who were practically gross caricatures of their real life counterparts.
“Gaius…?” Leon asked aloud.
Gaius didn’t respond. All he did he was whimper and bow his head lower.
Octavius, on the other hand, looked incensed, and he shouted, “YOU WOULD ADDRESS THIS SLAVE BEFORE YOUR KING! I WOULD HAVE YOUR HEAD!” The fat Prince began to struggle and shake in a clear attempt to rise to his feet, but he was unable to do so, even his fifth-tier powers proving unable to support all of this extra weight.
The same wasn’t true of the Paladins. In unison, they began to circle around to Leon’s sides, trapping him between them and the firepit.
Leon wasn’t too interested in them, only giving them enough attention to be sure they weren’t attacking just yet.
“Gaius,” Leon loudly stated, “can you hear me?”
“Kill this peasant!” Octavius shouted irately, his arm jiggling with fat as he waved his hand at Leon. “I want his head! Kill him now!”
Leon sighed, then turned his attention fully to the Paladins. With his armor wrecked again, he was sorely tempted to finally take Xaphan up on his offer to come out of his soul realm and crack a few skulls, but he didn’t indulge that temptation just yet. He was starting to get an idea of what exactly was going on here, and he didn’t think that violence was going to be the best way to solve this problem.
Earthshaker and Sapphire began to wordlessly approach Leon, identical sadistic smiles plastered on their inhumanely-perfect faces, but before they could take more than a couple of steps, the ring on Leon’s finger flashed with light, and his form began to fade from view as light was bent around him.
“GAIUS!” Leon shouted as he moved, not wanting either Sapphire or Earthshaker to start hurling magic at him and get in a lucky hit that might disrupt his invisibility. “Get ahold of yourself! We have to go!”
Leon wasn’t quite sure what he could say. From his own experience dealing with the shade of Artorias, he could take a guess as to what was going on here: the trial world was striking Gaius where it hurt. Leon had to get Gaius to start fighting back, but he couldn’t be sure what kind of state Gaius was in, or how far Leon could push him without breaking his mind. The nobleman already didn’t even acknowledge anyone around him, merely meekly keeping his eyes on the floor directly below him as he struggled to support the obese Prince using him as a stool, tears occasionally slipping from his eyes and sliding down his nose.
At the very least, Leon had a bad feeling that Gaius needed to rise up and do most of this work himself if either of them had any hope to escape.
“You’re better than this!” Leon shouted, hoping his voice was reaching the broken, quietly sobbing man. He kept shouting, and he kept moving, not stopping for even a moment even as the two Paladins did their best to hunt him down. He hoped Gaius would do something soon, because he didn’t know how long he had left until those two started to throw magic around.
When they did, he’d likely be revealed, and at that point, he’d have little choice but to fight.
---
Gaius was worthless. He knew that in his heart of hearts. There was no confirmation needed, the proof was in how long and how willing he was to go along with Octavius.
Sure, he had his moments of rebellion during his squireship, but in the end, he did little to stop Octavius’ mad grab for power even though he’d had the power to stop it, and thousands died because of it. He was worthless.
When Gaius walked through the doors of the temple and appeared in front of Octavius, he did his best to make up for that. He knew that something was wrong, that this was some kind of illusionary world, but the punishment doled out by the Paladins felt every bit as painful as he’d imagined.
All the fight he had in him vanished as soon as Valeria appeared. The things she’d said to him were nothing that he hadn’t said to himself in the past, but to hear those words in her voice, telling him in no uncertain terms exactly how little he mattered to anyone around him, Gaius felt himself shatter to pieces.
The fat Octavius made many demands of him, each more humiliating and demeaning than the last. By the end of it all, when Gaius found himself acting as the stool for the bloated Prince, he was just happy that everyone else was now leaving him alone. It was humiliating, to be sure, but it was marginally better to being actively tormented.
He was done fighting. Octavius was right. Valeria was right. He was worthless. Having the self-awareness to acknowledge that fact didn’t make him a better person, he was still the same arrogant, conceited person that he’d always been. He was still the overprivileged, entitled, spoiled richboy that he’d been in the Knight Academy.
He had the worth of an ant, he was worth less than nothing, he was…
He was…
He…
He heard something. It was faint, but it almost sounded like someone was shouting.
It was nothing. Gaius kept his head down. He didn’t want Octavius to punish him again. He most especially did not want to see the rotund Prince pawing at Valeria like he’d been doing while he’d been more actively tormenting Gaius.
Gaius didn’t look up. He concentrated solely on keeping himself upright. The Prince was quite heavy, and it took nearly all of Gaius’ strength just to stay there on his hands and knees and not collapse under the Prince’s immense weight.
But then, he heard it again, the sound of someone shouting. It kind of sounded like his name, and it was getting louder.
Gaius fought the urge to look up. That would only get him punished.
“…ius!!!”
‘It’s nothing, don’t rock the boat,’ Gaius thought to himself, his eyes closing as he tried his best to drown out everything around him.
It was nothing. He was only hearing things. It was his brain conjuring something from nothing, a fantasy that he might be able to escape to and find some refuge in. It wasn’t real.
Already, Gaius’ memories of the past few years were growing dim. When he tried to seek solace in his memories, they all had a foggy, dreamlike quality that prevented him from being anywhere but in the moment. Right now, nothing was more real than the dumpy Prince on his back, whose hand was lightly resting on Gaius’ head, his fingers slightly curling around Gaius’ golden hair like he was a dog whose owner was concerned would fly out of control.
“GAIUS!” someone roared in his ear, startling Gaius and sending his thoughts scattering.
With his thoughts went his terror, and for just a moment, Gaius lifted his head and opened his eyes just enough to take in his surroundings. Before him, he saw a familiar face, one that had been on his mind quite a lot over the past four years.
Leon Ursus…
‘No, Leon Raime,’ Gaius thought to himself.
Leon stared down at him, his bright golden eyes sparkling in the light of Octavius’ sitting room. They were so captivating that Gaius found himself getting a bit lost. Leon was standing before him, staring—glaring at him, a look of expectation and muted fury on his face.
Leon’s mouth opened and moved, but Gaius couldn’t hear what he said. It was all muffled, like he was trying to speak from underwater.
Suddenly, the hands of both of Octavius’ Paladins grabbed Leon by the shoulders simultaneously and hurled him backward into the firepit. The roaring flames crackled and parted, leaving Leon unharmed, but Gaius wasn’t able to see much more as Octavius pressed his hand down on Gaius’ head, forcing his eyes back to the floor.
‘Why is he here?’ Gaius wondered, a strange sense of hope blooming in his chest like a small candle in a dark basilica—too small to make much difference, but it was so dark in Gaius’ mind that it was impossible to miss. ‘Did he… did he come here for me?’
For the first time in… well, he didn’t know how long, Gaius began to fight back against Octavius. His neck muscles strained as he forced himself to look up, to overcome Octavius’ heavy hand so that he could see what was happening.
It was tough, almost the toughest thing Gaius had ever done, but after a few seconds, he’d managed to lift his head just enough to see Leon clashing with the Paladins at speeds great enough that he couldn’t possibly follow every move. But it was still spectacular. Gaius found himself completely taken in, so much so that whatever Octavius was shouting at him about was lost on him.
‘He can stand…’ Gaius thought to himself. ‘He can fight.’
Leon was stronger than anyone he’d ever known, strong enough to turn down even the immense riches of the Great Plateau to pursue his own agenda. Gaius didn’t think himself capable of that strength, but as he saw Leon dodging and weaving, deflecting every sword strike from the two Paladins or dodging them entirely, avoiding death or dismemberment by a hair’s breadth with every move he made, Gaius found that tiny candle of hope in his chest start to burn brighter.
His hands on the ground balled into fists and, inspired by the sight of Leon holding off two Paladins, Gaius began to push against the obese Prince using him as a stool. He pushed and struggled, and despite Octavius pushing back, hitting and spitting curses at him, Gaius didn’t stop. He pushed and forced himself up, until Octavius could no longer sit on him, and once that weight was removed, Gaius sprang to his feet so fast that he became momentarily dizzy.
“Kill him!” Octavius wheezed as he pointed at Gaius. “Kill him now!”
The Paladins were tied down with Leon, leaving only Valeria there who could follow his command. And it looked like she would. She took one look at Gaius, one that was short and devoid of all emotion, and took a step toward him, drawing a dagger from a sheath at her waist as she did.
He was nothing to her, nothing more than an annoyance at best, air at worst. Gaius stared back at her, unflinching. It hurt him deeply to see her like this, but he’d made the decision to let her go. He wasn’t going to back out of that now.
Gaius stared her down. She was a fifth-tier mage, and he was unarmed, but that didn’t change anything. He was done being humiliated. If he was going to die, then he was going to die on his feet.
As if she sensed that conviction blooming in his heart, Valeria paused, a strange look passing over her face.
And then, everything went dark. Valeria and Octavius vanished, the walls fell away, the ceiling melted away into darkness, and the floor disappeared—though, strangely, Gaius didn’t fall. That didn’t stop Gaius’ heart rate from spiking in panic, but when and he glanced over his shoulder at where Leon and the Paladins had been fighting and saw that the Paladins had also disappeared, leaving Leon standing there, breathing heavily as he stared back, Gaius breathed a sigh of relief and began to calm down.
“It’s about damn time you got your shit together,” Leon said with a deep sigh. “I’ve been trying to get you to move your ass for more than an hour.”