As soon as the many bodyguards noticed us, they immediately stopped playing with the demonic artifact, placing it in a metal cage while the rest stood by the door to greet us.
They weren't as elegant and coordinated as the masked one; some of them were striking a salute while some others kept their arms low and simply kept a straight posture; it was a pretty amusing sight. Some of them, noticing the others having a certain pose, would try to mimic them.
Ilay ignored all of them and headed directly to where the weapon had been stored; Leo followed him shortly after.
"So this is the weapon you made? It's quite powerful, I can tell that much, and it seems to function like any normal demonic artifact." He commented as he took the weapon in his hands.
As he tried to raise the weapon, he seemed taken aback by the weight of the spiked ball; he was still able to lift it and make it spin in his hands.
"This weapon seems highly unbalanced; the weight is a bit off, and the power—" He tried to throw the ball in a straight line in front of him but couldn't.
"The ability itself barely seems like it'll have a positive effect on the wielder; making the weapons faster makes it just all the more difficult to wield; the chains without a proper glove will turn your hands into minced meat." He was able to deduce after just one swing.
"I don't even want to imagine what will happen to your body if you get hit by this thing once this ability has ramped up for a while. Still, I doubt even some special gloves would survive against this thing; it eats your hands like nothing." He kept commenting as he kept spinning the weapon.
"Where did you get the idea of a weapon like this one?" He then asked.
As the ball was rapidly accelerating, I saw that it was slowly becoming harder for him to wield it until he suddenly let it go, making the weapon crash against a small statue present in the garden, obliterating it.
"Can I try it?" Leo asked shortly after.
Ilay handed him the weapon so that he could play with it while I explained to Ilay the story behind that weapon, the knight of that story, and his unmatched prowess in wielding such a strange weapon. While narrating his fighting style, I tried to mimic the movements that knight made.
Leo, too, tried to put into practice what I was describing and ended up almost hurting himself in an attempt to kick the ball, as his foot missed the ball and it almost came crashing against his body; the chain clamping against his shin was the thing that hurt him the most.
"Are you okay?" The moment Leo fell, we all came to his rescue.
"Yeah! I'm fine! I'm fine, I think." He yelled in return.
He had a really bad bruise on his legs; moreover, his right hand was also in pretty bad condition after having spun that weapon for no more than a minute.
"Look at this; look at how bruised your hands are. You should've let go of the weapon if it started to hurt you." Ilay was nagging at Leo as he was preparing himself to carry him back to the house.
Even he can't remain as stoic as usual when it comes to dealing with Leonhart, huh?
"Don't worry, I'm fine." He tried to repeat while gently pushing his brother out of the way.
"From the way you described it, the power your benefactor used is Dealer; it's quite a commonly known power; it was used a lot before Fracture unified. Now it's quite rare to see an individual use that power." Leo explained.
Yeah, I think I remember hearing about a dealer title somewhere.
"Oh, what do you know about that power?" I was now even more curious.
"Well, the effects of that power are quite simple: the user is assigned a deck of cards; the amount of cards depends on how the individual has contributed to the growth of the demon, and as for the deck, it can unleash anything captured by the user." He explained.
I wonder what the true form behind that demon is.
"That ability has an incredibly deceptive power, because it can trick the user into a false sense of safety. The order of cards isn't decided after the user shuffles the deck; every card is constantly changing based on how the demons feel, so you can draw the same card like three times in a row if you're lucky or unlucky enough." Ilay chimed in to finish the explanation of those powers.
"The big downside of that power is that it doesn't work on you if you also don't possess a hand of cards. There are ways to work around that rule, but it's easy for enemies to also exploit this ability." He added as he finally got ahold of Leo.
He picked him up and lifted him under his arms like one would hold a cat and carried him back inside the house, so I, in return, picked up the weapon to bring it back.
The chain felt smooth to the touch, and when I tried to lift the weapon, I found it especially hard since that weapon weighed so much. So heavy, I gave up on carrying it normally and slowly but painfully dragged it behind, ruining the floor tiles of the house.
"What does… ngh! That… has to do… with the knight… I mentioned earlier?" I asked in between pants of breath.
How the hell were you both able to lift this thing so effortlessly? You guys are not humans.
"Well, nothing really; I was just trying to figure out what that ability was." Leo answered.
Oh, you little…
"I honestly don't think mastering a weapon to that degree is beneficial." Ilay gave me his opinion.
"But why?" I immediately protested back.
"Because it's inefficient, a weapon like that will take years of repetitive training, if not maybe decades, to reach that level, especially without a teacher. In that time you could've learned how to fight using your father's style of combat or ours." His reasoning was sound; it made perfect sense, yet I couldn't accept it.
I admired that knight, his fighting style, and the way his spikes would bounce around the battlefield, devastating anything they came in contact with, and the many unique ways of defending himself he would use along with the ways to suddenly extend or shorten the range of his weapon.
In every fight he took part in with that weapon, he emerged victorious; if someone tried to get a hold of the chains, they would rip the hands of his opponents to shreds.
"Fine, we'll ask Father what he can do for you later, but don't expect much; there are very few people who actually use this kind of outdated weapon. Most of the time, if they're relying on a close-range weapon, it must have a crazy effect." He didn't fight it further; he simply gave up and let out a small sigh as he headed to one of the few guest rooms that were still intact.
"Thank you so much!" I immediately let go of the massive weapon and went in for the hug.
After putting Leo down, he silently headed away while ordering me to stay with Leo.
"He is much more alive than he was before, isn't he?" I commented.
"Yeah, I think he didn't take the death of that maid too well initially." Leo answered.
"Do you think he can hear us from that distance?" I asked.
"Most likely." He answered.
Ah, well, it's not like he was trying to hide it. So it should probably be okay to discuss things between us, right? It still feels a bit wrong to comment about it behind his back. Maybe I should've asked him how he was.
"That would've been worse." Leo commented as if he could hear what I was thinking.
Huh? Am I really that easy to read?
It was in these cases where Leo seemed much older than he let on to be; the childish, playful personality completely faded away. This was slowly happening more and more. It was starting to make me believe all of his cheerfulness was a front.
After taking a long, deep breath, Leo began to stretch his body and lay down on the bed. After dragging the weapon inside the room, I also lay down to take a breather.
"Man, that thing's heavy as hell; how are you even able to lift it?" I asked him.
"Oh, that's simple; we used… Actually, it's not that simple, and you can't do it because of your medicine; you'll have to wait until you're fully healed." He stopped mid-sentence as he was about to explain, which only left me more curious.
"By the way, since you know so much about demons, can you explain this thing called corruption?" I then asked to slowly steer back the conversation in that direction.
"Oh, that? It's simple; it's the wasteful demonic energy that has rotted away, or at least that's the closest comparison I could make," he summarized.
"So, you know that after it's used, it evaporates and gets absorbed in the clouds, raining down like gray snow, but in this case, it didn't have the chance to do so, and it's now stuck inside your body, slowly poisoning you as well as the demons living within your body since it hasn't been refined." He explained.
"Just how bad is the poison?" I then asked.
"Mhh, I don't know; honestly, you're a case that's well beyond the norm since you were born with this and it was never treated… I don't think you should even be alive." As soon as he reached his conclusion, I felt like the world had stopped spinning around itself.
Why?
If my mother knew that I was born with such powerful poison within me, why didn't she do her best to treat it? What was the reason for her to let me live like this?