Free Web NovelChapter 19: The Fleshweaver (5): Finally, I Understood Why Alice Was Crying
I woke in pieces, the canvas ceiling a blur above me.
I was lying on a cot, in a tent lit by a single oil lamp. It took me a moment to gather the fragments — where I was, how I’d gotten here. And then I felt a hand in mine.
Alice. Slumped over a chair pulled up against the cot, her head fallen near my arm, asleep, her fingers still closed around mine. She must have stayed there the whole time, watching over me, worrying, while I drifted somewhere in the dark.
I ran my free hand through my hair.
"Sorry, Alice," I murmured.
Once again, she’d taken care of me. Once again, I’d shifted the whole weight onto her shoulders.
I freed myself with painstaking care so as not to wake her, laid her hand back against the mattress, and stepped out for some air.
The night was cool, the camp silent. A handful of tents, dying braziers, and far off the black mass of the gutted castle cut against the stars. My body didn’t hurt anymore — not an ache, not a wound. Alice had stitched me back together entirely, down to the last bone.
I walked a little, aimless, letting it all come back. The chimeras. The door. Anthonius. The breach, Elsa’s fight that my eye couldn’t follow. The spell. And the trance — that red hole in my memory I’d kept only scraps of.
I called up my status.
[ STATUS ]
Name: Kuro Shiragi | Race: Human | Class: Hero of the Infinite | Level: 25
[ Stats ]
Strength 48 | Vitality 49 | Agility 59 | Mana 50 | Intelligence 50 | Perception 42 | Free points: 6
[ Skills ]
[ Divine Blessing - Lv. 2 ] (passive) | [ Infinite Evolution - Lv. MAX ] (passive) | [ Eye of Infinity - Lv. 4 ] | [ Drowned Widow’s Dance - Lv. 9 ] | [ Dash - Lv. 2 ] | [ Apotheosis ] (Unique Skill)
My eyes stopped on one line. Drowned Widow’s Dance - Lv. 9.
Nine. The last window I remembered seeing, in the trance, had left it at six. I must have pushed it up three more times after that — during those hours I had no memory of, without even seeing the notifications flash past my eyes. A shiver ran through me. There it was, in numbers, the proof of how far I’d gone. Of everything I’d done while I was no longer anyone.
My eyes drifted to the last line. Apotheosis. No level beside it, no bar to fill — just two words I’d never seen the System use. Unique Skill. As if it had reached the rung past which there was nothing left to evolve.
I should have been thrilled. But I remembered the cost. As long as my will held, it refilled me faster than my body could burn out — almost impossible to kill in a fight. And the night before, that was exactly what had nearly killed me: it hadn’t known when to stop, and neither had I, so I’d danced in my own blood for hours, kept upright by the very thing that should have let me fall.
Which dropped me back onto the question I could never quite leave alone. Why me? Why pour all of this into one person — the limitless evolution, a skill that brushed the divine, the whole impossible heap of it? Was it the class, "Hero of the Infinite," whatever that actually meant? Was it the Blessing? I had no answer, and the System wasn’t in the habit of handing those out.
The Blessing, though. My eye climbed back to it and stopped.
Divine Blessing - Lv. 2.
Two. The night I’d landed here it had read Lv. 1, fresh out of its evolution from the Hero’s Blessing. I’d never thought about it since, never once tried to raise it — and somewhere in everything that had happened, it had climbed a level on its own. Experience gain x10.2, now. A fifth of a point more than before.
Laughable, at a glance. Except I’d stopped believing it was only about experience a while ago. The more I watched my skills evolve, level, fuse — faster than anything Elsa or Alice or the chronicles swore was possible — the more I suspected the Blessing wasn’t multiplying my experience alone. It was multiplying everything the System touched in me. Every gain, every evolution, every rung climbed, all of it run through the same accelerator. And if that was true, then that ridiculous little 0.2 wasn’t small at all. It was enormous. It just didn’t look the part.
And then another window, one I’d never seen before.
[ Level 25 reached — select your path of progression ]
Path of Balance — +2 to all stats | +2 free points
Path of the Duelist — +6 Agility, +4 Perception, +2 Strength | +2 free points
Path of the Arcanist — +6 Mana, +4 Intelligence, +2 Perception | +2 free points
Path of the Colossus — +6 Strength, +6 Vitality | +2 free points
Path of the Spellblade — +4 Agility, +4 Mana, +2 Strength, +2 Perception | +2 free points
A choice now, at every level. I should have lingered on it. But that night I didn’t have the heart. I closed the window with a flick. All I took from it was the essential: I’d grown stronger.
I held out my arm and imagined a blade resting in my palm. My feet slid on their own into the first figure of the Widow. No sword, no water, just the motion — slow, repeated — for the emptiness it carved in my head. It did me good. As long as I was dancing, I had nothing to think about.
Applause, suddenly, from the edge of the camp.
"You’ve improved, I see."
I stopped and turned. Elsa. And I saw what the night had hidden from me until then: one eye gone, covered by a bandage, and a scar running across her face, from the top of her brow to below her cheekbone.
"I see..." My throat tightened. "It wasn’t easy for you, was it, Elsa."
She came closer, a crooked smile on her lips, and ruffled my hair as if I were still a kid.
"Don’t worry about that."
"So how did it end? Is he dead?"
And she told me. One of her spells had finally torn a breach in the rift, and the human reinforcements had had time to pour through — elite soldiers, the best the garrison could give. Most of them had stayed behind, fighting at her side, at ours, and despite myself I saw again all those armored bodies strewn across the courtyard when I’d looked down on it from above. The fight had been close, for a long time. It was Alice’s healing, she said — of the body and the mind — and that buff she’d sent down over her, the Sacred Surge, I thought, that had finally tipped the scales. It had dragged on for hours more, soldiers coming in waves to back her up, until at last, through sheer attrition, they’d worn him down.
"After all," she said with a half-smile, "he was a high demon."
A high demon. I knew it — I’d read it, in the palace libraries. In the hierarchy on the other side, there was the Demon King at the very top, then his Strategist, then the Seven Calamities. And below them, the high demons, who had never numbered more than a hundred, most of them slaughtered by the ancient heroes, or so the chronicles said.
"And even so," I went on, "he was here. Right in the middle of human territory. Abducting people and running his experiments with total impunity."
"Yes." The word landed heavy. "I’ve already sent a missive to the palace. They’ll dispatch magical investigation teams to work out how it was possible. It’s out of our hands now." She let a silence fall. "I know it’s hard. But that’s how it is, and you have to accept it. We’re only the swords of la Pangracya, you and I. We cut where we’re told to cut, and the rest is none of our business."
"I see," I said.
Her gaze shifted then. It hardened, sharpened, and she studied me for a long moment before going on, lower.
"Alice told me how she found you. What you were dancing in, when she got there."
I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"Listen to me, because I won’t say it twice. That System handing you your little blue windows doesn’t just make you stronger. It watches. And the moment it strikes hardest isn’t when you’re at the top — it’s when you’re at your lowest, broken, on the ground, ready to give anything to stop feeling weak. That’s when it gives. It dresses madness up as a reward and lets you drown in it. I’ve seen men far steadier than you lose themselves that way, chasing power until there was nothing left of them."
She fixed her single eye on mine.
"Yesterday, you got a taste of it."
I looked down. The red lake. The erased hours. That number on my window I didn’t recognize.
"So here’s the trap, and it has no easy answer. You have to want to grow stronger — that hunger, out here, is what keeps you alive, and the day you stop feeling it, you’re already dead. But you can never let yourself get drunk on it. The instant strength becomes the goal, the instant you chase the next window for the window’s own sake, it isn’t you holding the blade anymore. It’s the blade holding you."
I stayed quiet a while, letting her words settle. She was right. I’d felt it, the day before — how thin the line was — that intoxication rising with every number, that thirst nothing could slake, and me fading away behind it, almost glad to disappear so long as I became something else. fгeewebnovёl.com
And yet.
I raised my head. "I understand. But I’m not turning back because of it." My voice was calm, level, and that was the strangest part — none of yesterday’s fever was left in it. "I want to grow stronger, Elsa. Much stronger. Strong enough that I never have to watch someone die in my place again with no way to stop it. But I want to still be me while I get there. Both at once."
She studied me, and something passed through her gaze — not quite approval, more the kind you give someone who’s finally landed on the right question.
"Good." She nodded. "Then I’ll do everything to get you there. And if I see you start to drown again, I’ll be there to haul you back before you go under. That work for you?"
"That works."
She turned away, and her tone went dry again, professional.
"Go find Alice, and get some sleep while you’ve still got a bit of night left. We break camp at dawn. The next dungeon’s waiting, and we’ve already lost enough time."
I went back to the tent.
Alice wasn’t asleep anymore.
She was sitting up on the cot, knees drawn against her chest, and she watched me come in without a word. Her eyes were red. She’d been crying, and she was crying still, soundlessly, tears rolling down without her trying to wipe them away.
I stopped dead. The full weight of what I’d put her through dropped onto me all at once.
"Alice..." fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
"I thought you were going to die." Her voice was small, broken, nothing like the steel calm I knew from her. "When I woke up and saw you over there, standing in all that blood, dancing like you couldn’t feel anything anymore... I called your name. Over and over. And you didn’t even hear me, Kuro. You didn’t hear me."
I knelt in front of the cot and took her hands in mine.
"I’m sorry." I meant it, all the way down. "I didn’t want... I wasn’t aware of any of it, and I’m sorry I made you live through that."
She shook her head, and the tears came harder.
"You don’t understand." She gripped my hands, hard. "I don’t care about the demon. I don’t care about this war, this world, about what they all expect of you. None of it has ever mattered to me. There’s only you. And you’re tearing yourself apart for people, for a world, that aren’t worth a single one of your wounds."
She lifted her eyes to mine, and there was something deeper than grief in them, something almost pleading.
"You don’t need to become anything. You don’t need to save anyone. Let the world burn, I couldn’t care less. Stay with me, that’s all I’m asking. Stay, and let them manage without you."
I stayed a moment without answering, her forehead almost against mine.
"I can’t, Alice." I said it gently, without any hardness. "I wish I could be like you, feel nothing for the rest. It would be so much simpler. But I can’t do it. When someone falls in front of me — Alexia, Eric, Anthonius dead on his feet to shield me — I can’t act like it doesn’t touch me. And most of all, I can’t stay there, on the ground, watching them die because I’m too weak to hold them back. That’s what tears me apart, not the other way around."
I tightened my grip on her hands.
"So I’m going to grow stronger. Strong enough that I never have to choose who I let go again. You included. You most of all."
She held my gaze for a long time, her tears slowing little by little. And then something gave way in her, a surrender soft and sad.
"...All right," she breathed at last. "If that’s really what you want, then I won’t stop you. I’ll do better than that — I’ll help you. I’ll heal you, I’ll make you stronger, I’ll keep you alive no matter what." A fragile, wet smile rose to her lips. "That way, at least, you’ll never need anyone but me."
I lay down beside her on the narrow cot, and this time it was me who drew her against me, her head against my chest, my arms closing around her. Usually it was the other way around; usually it was her holding me. For once, I wanted her to be the one who felt safe.
"I won’t disappear like that again," I murmured into her hair. "I promise."
I felt her nod against me, and bit by bit her breathing slowed, evened out, the last tremors of her crying spacing apart before they stopped altogether. She fell asleep there, against me, clutching my shirt as if I might still vanish.
I wasn’t asleep yet.
Lying in the dark, her warmth against my side, I called up one last time the window I’d closed earlier. And this time I stopped on it for good. The free points could wait. But the path, I didn’t hesitate over for long. The Spellblade. Not the pure duelist, not the pure mage, but both at once, blade and spell — exactly what I was becoming.
[ Path selected: Spellblade ]
Stronger. But not at any price, this time. While staying me.
On that thought, at last, I closed my eyes, her breath against me and the scent of flowers still caught in her hair.
