MTM 163

“Harto…!”

Seeing that Harto had woken up, Leon brightened up and was about to approach him, only to hesitate.

“Ah….”

Allen felt the same way. Harto’s blue eyes were nowhere to be seen; they had lost their vitality and turned pale white.

“Is…everyone… fine…?”

Harto, unable to see the expressions on Allen and Leon’s faces due to his blindness, asked about their well-being before his own.

Facing Harto’s unfocused eyes, the two were overcome with shock. They had simply assumed he was weakened; they never dreamed his condition was so wretched that he would go blind.

As the two stood frozen, speechless and unable to answer Harto’s question, Zed whispered softly.

“Everyone is safe. Ser seems a little sick, but… he will recover soon.”

“I see…. It’s not too serious? Zed, please make sure to heal him….”

“Yes, don’t worry. I’ll make sure he gets better.”

Zed’s voice was infinitely affectionate. Even as ​unauthorized copy​he spoke, he continued infusing him with holy power.

Only then did it become clear. Zed wasn’t just holding Harto in his arms. He was constantly using his holy power, as if draining his own life force, and Harto, despite absorbing that immense healing power with his whole body, still showed no signs of improvement. This meant that Harto’s current condition was far from normal.

Allen’s face flushed instantly. Zed had not ignored Ser. He was simply pouring everything he had into holding onto the fading life within his embrace, leaving him with no energy to pay attention to anything else.

Even though he didn’t know the full story, he felt infinitely ashamed of himself for having lashed out at Zed, who was fighting a desperate battle to hold onto the dying Harto.

“Pyuu…!”

“Pii…!”

As if aware of Harto’s precarious condition, the elementals clung to Krom, letting out pitiful cries.

“Where is Sleepy…?”

Silence fell at Harto’s question. They had been banished from Carseon, and didn’t have the luxury of looking after that little rabbit.

Allen glanced at Zed with a troubled expression. Zed rubbed the corners of Harto’s trembling eyes and whispered softly.

“He’s sleeping. Sleepy sleeps a lot, you know. You should get some more sleep too, Harto.”

“Alright….”

Harto, unaware that it was a lie, was relieved by Zed’s words and drifted back into a deep sleep. In the silence that had returned, Zed quietly opened his pendant and handed stolen content an elixir to Allen. After feeding the elixir to the sleeping Ser, Allen sat back down before the campfire with a heavy heart.

Crackle, crackle.

The blazing red flames cast the shadows of the group into the darkness. Leon’s sniffling could be heard intermittently through the silence. Shaken by Harto’s condition, he wiped away his tears with his sleeve.

“Ha… I really don’t understand.”

Allen sighed and rose with a heavy heart. His gaze turned toward Zed, who was holding Harto in his arms. His anger had subsided, but in its place filled doubt and emptiness.

Allen spoke after hesitating for a moment.

“I think it would be best for us to part ways here.”

“Ah, Allen…? Part ways? What do you mean…!”

Leon, his eyes red from crying, gaped in shock. However, Allen had already made up his mind; he effortlessly lifted the sleeping Ser and slung him over his shoulder.

“I only joined you briefly on the way to the Land of Abundance. Ser and I are going to the Land of Abundance as originally planned.”

“No, but how could you suddenly…?”

Confused, Leon turned his head to Zed for help, but the latter simply stared at Allen silently.

There were no excuses, nor any attempts to hold him back. As Allen had said, they had traveled together because they shared the same destination in the first place; Zed had no justification to stop visit our sitethem, or perhaps even the mental capacity to do so.

“Zed… are you just going to let them go…?”

Leon asked in a tearful voice. Although he had left the mercenary group to follow Zed and Harto, trusting them completely, he wasn’t sure if turning his back on Ser and Allen to follow the two was the right choice. Honestly, Allen wasn’t completely wrong. From the moment they met the Seeker until they reached Carseon, Zed had never once properly explained the situation. It was a situation where it was entirely understandable that Allen, who had been thoroughly excluded to the point where the title of “comrade” seemed meaningless, had finally exploded.

“Leon, hurry up.”

There was no coercion. However, that single remark, heard amidst Allen’s receding footsteps, weighed on Leon’s heart.

“In a forest like this… if we leave them there…”

Moving through this forest at night, where monsters and spirits ran rampant, was far too dangerous. Even as a mage, he would need to join them to fully protect Ser and Allen.

Leon looked back and forth between the path Allen had walked and Zed, then finally gazed at the sleeping Harto. His heart ached for the ailing Harto, making it hard for him to move, but Leon knew all too well that Zed was stronger than anyone.

“I can’t just let the two of them go like that…”

“I understand.”

When Zed, resigned to his fate, replied in a low voice, Leon finally rose from his seat. He was about to follow Allen when he turned back to ask Zed one last time.

“Zed… you know why Allen is acting like that. Even now, even just a little bit, could you tell me the truth?”

Despite the question bordering on pleading, Zed remained tight-lipped.

“…I understand.”

Leon was disappointed by his silence. With a brief bow, he followed Allen.

Tap, tap.

In the empty space left by the departing party, the bonfire burned even brighter. Zed could not take his eyes off the darkness where the three had vanished, until he looked at Harto, held in his arms.

“…Harto, I think I finally understand how you feel. It must have been a difficult thing for you to speak of.”

How long had Harto blamed himself and suffered in guilt before revealing his true identity as Hartiros? Harto had endured, swallowing alone the truth that he could not share even with Leon and Allen, his close comrades since their time in the mercenary group. Feeling that weight for the first time, Zed’s heart ached.

It was not easy for Zed himself to accept the fact that Harto was Hartiros. How could they have borne such a cruel truth so suddenly? Leon had followed merely out of curiosity, and Allen and Ser had joined simply because they were heading to the Land of Abundance. That was precisely why he could not force them to share the burden of pain with him.

“Harto, I don’t know what you’re thinking… but perhaps parting ways here is the best option, for them and for us.”

Zed stroked Harto with a bitter smile. Harto’s body was still burning hot like a ball of fire. Zed had been ceaselessly drawing up his holy power and pouring it into him, but even he was now reaching his limit. His vision was blurring and the sensation in his limbs was dulling, yet he could not stop. It was because he knew better than anyone that Harto was fighting a far more desperate struggle than he was.

“Ugh… Is this my limit…?”

Zed let out a weary breath, wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead, and cast his gaze somewhere.

“Since when…?”

Without a sound, something was silently watching them from within the dense bushes.

Blue eyes clearly visible even in the darkness. It was a black rabbit, an Aju. Even in the deep darkness, piercing blue eyes stared at Zed. At first, he thought it was just one of the ordinary Aju wandering the forest, but the creature’s gaze felt strangely familiar.

“Sleepy…?”

As he called out the name, the creature approached Zed’s feet as if it had been waiting. Before the shock from Sleepy’s sudden appearance could even subside, a voice flowed from behind like a song.

“When the white moon melts and drenches the black sea, do not light a lamp to search for a bird with broken wings. If you insist on tearing that nest to warm the rain-soaked feathers with your own heat, you will find yourself standing on a path that turns its back on divine providence.”

Just as he was momentarily startled by the voice reciting the contents of the note the prophet had delivered without missing a single word, the witch Cynthia cut through the darkness and revealed herself.