Free Web NovelChapter 78: Cross And Straw [27] Cross And Straw...
A man stood staring at a pitiful sight: a boy, bloodied and in clear pain, sat without his shirt, his upper body bare. Wounds spread across his back, covering nearly every inch of his pearl-like skin.
His teeth were clenched, but he made no attempt to do anything about his wounds. At this point, it had almost been routine.
Every day, without fail, he would arrive in the damned room, go through torture disguised as conditioning, and get whipped for being weak...for being a child.
His past self knelt in the debris, small and pale and holding himself together with nothing but the particular stubbornness of a boy who had wanted nothing more than to make his parents proud.
The man—Azreil Hector Aristeus—stood with his back to Leonidas and the pilgrim both, facing the kneeling boy like a judge who had already reached his verdict before entering the room.
His vermillion cloak hung still now. The wind that had followed his conjuration had settled. The stick in his hand wasn’t wind anymore; it had refined itself, thinned and lengthened into a snake-like shape, grayish energy spreading from it like poisonous miasma.
"Five whips for every mistake."
Leonidas—the real one—found himself clenching his fists involuntarily. He wanted nothing more than to break free from the invisible force that bound him and kill the man who stood before him.
"Five for being late and five more for showing weakness."
Without waiting for an invitation, Azreil moved his hand. The motion was slow, almost crawling, but the effect was anything but.
As if living, the whip moved forward with eagerness, snapping and hissing as it cut through space, erasing the distance. It lashed across the boy’s back, drawing blood.
Leonidas watched it happen. He watched his past self barely stop himself from crying, saw the pleading in his eyes, but he found himself unable to do anything.
The Modern God of War struck again, the gray weapon painting a bloody canvas across the boy’s back. Wounds littered his body, some old, some healed, while most spurted open the moment the whip came into contact with them.
His small shoulders lurched forward with the impact, his spine curving inward, his forehead dropping toward the stone. A breath left him, nothing near a scream, but enough to reach the Azreil’s ears.
"Five more for showing weakness."
His voice was emotionless, so lacking in everything that one would find it hard to believe he was a human.
Blood ran down the pale skin of his back in thin lines, tracing the architecture of wounds that had been made before this one, older marks still red and raised, a map of every session in this room that had come before today.
The whip moved again.
Besides Leonidas, the pilgrim did something resembling a tongue lick. Only that it looked monstrous on its...body.
The damned creature had just appeared beside him when the dark void had receaded, and the memory had created itself.
Leonidas looked at it, a hint of disgust making way into his features.
The pilgrim’s real form was nothing like the borrowed one it wore. No stolen armor, no raven hair, no familiar eyes turned wrong.
What stood beside him was a figure of straw and hay, bundled and bound into the rough approximation of a human shape, the kind of thing put in fields to frighten birds away from crops. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
Except it had been nailed.
A cross of dark wood rose behind it, old and heavy, the grain of it visible even in the half-light of a memory that didn’t belong to either of them.
The arms of the cross spread wide, and the figure was fixed to it with nails driven through its wrists, ankles, and the place where its heart would have been; each nail was darkened with rust. A faint sheen on its crumbling surface.
There were gaps in its bundled body where the hay had parted, and through those gaps there was nothing, just absence, a void deeper than Willow’s eyes.
The pilgrim had no face, just a faint outline of one, a crude imitation. Cross and Straw was watching the memory with him, just as much a witness as he was.
Fortunately, it couldn’t speak, not with that hellhole of a body at least, so Leonidas was spared from further psychological damage.
They were both witnesses to a past that could not be changed, one that could not be redeemed either.
This...this was the man I was so afraid of?
He could not believe it. Why had this pathetic, deadbeat, abusive piece of shit scared him so much? It was incomprehensible, but highly understandable too.
The man acted cold and indifferent to everything, as if the very world was beneath him...yet there he was, beating a child because of his own weakness.
What a disgrace to the human race.
Still, he was an Excelsus-ranked human, a man who stood at the very height of the mortal world, ruling the Circle of War with an iron fist.
The sound of wind crackling spread through the room, the whip lashing out again. Little Leonidas grit his teeth, blood dripping from his mouth, then smiled.
Mother had said that smile in the face of pain...for it is the best way to face it.
And that was exactly what his past version had done. Hell, he still did it despite the animosity he held towards his family.
The whip of wind that Azreil had manifested disappeared without ceremony, fusing into the air surrounding them, back into its natural habitat.
"Go see Cristali."
With those words, Azreil turned and left through the small door they had entered through, leaving a crying child in his wake.
The tears came almost instantly, with Little Leonidas heaving on the ground, clutching his face, screaming, and tearing apart his body.
His nails crashed into his face, leaving bloody trails on his face. Pain ravaged his very being, an agony so unbearable that death seemed a better alternative.
Leonidas could practically feel what he had felt back then.
The memory shifted.
