Chapter 711: (S/M)adness are two sides of the same coin
Now that Zhen Liu had the added context that this mad killer was the metalsmith’s old friend, the subsequent journey to try and stop this guy took on a much sadder undertone.
This meant that over the course of what must’ve been months, or even years given that this metalsmith had been chasing after his friend just to see why he had changed, only to find out that he was becoming worst and worst by the day.
Things were getting so bad that the metalsmith had seen cases of refugees trying to escape their villages, before the metalsmith’s old friend had a chance to kill them. It was actually under these circumstances that the metalsmith and the friend, reunited.
…
‘Huh…looks like the scene itself is to be left unchanged but what about…the dialogue…’
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After all of this time, after burying body, after body, after body, $+$-_+the metalsmith, had finally found his old friend before he was going to attack yet another innocent village.
“I finally found you, you bastard. Now I’m going to…wait…”
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t my old friend,_-#+$&! How have you been? Make any new killer weapons? You want to let me have another go with them?”
When the metalsmith came all this way to try and stop his friend from continuing his rampage, he had assumed he was going to find his old friend as a mad killer with hatred, fury and madness plain in his eyes. He was indeed all of those things, granted it was more maniacal glee than hatred and he was still wielding that same bone-handled blade from all those years ago, but he also found out that his old friend was…actually dead.
“What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!,” his old friend mocked through what he now recognized as decaying teeth.
The metalsmith had to take care of a lot of bodies these last few days, and he recognized the look of a corpse. He recognized the emptiness of the eyes, how they seem to shrink away in the eye sockets as a corpse rotted away. The paleness of the skin when the blood stops to flow and begins to fester. He even recognized the subtle feeling of eternal cold that radiates from deceased flesh. These were all the traits that he could notice immediately coming from his old friend’s body, and yet…he was still moving.
He was still talking.
He was still acting as if he was alive.
The sight of such a contradiction made the metalsmith sick to his stomach, how was his friend doing all of this, why was he like this?
He needed to know, and his only source was the man himself.
“You…what happened to you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I feel like a million gold pieces!,” the metalsmith’s friend exclaimed while spreading his arms wide with one hand still holding that strange looking blade.
“Oh no…what happened…”
From this one action, the metalsmith could see one of several dozen wounds that decorated his deceased friend’s body. Any single one of those wounds would’ve been fatal on their own, but the fact that there were so many…it didn’t take much to imagine what kind of pain his friend went through.
Sensing what the metalsmith was thinking, the living corpse began to regale his tale.
“Oh, like what you see? Beautiful aren’t they? I earned these lovely little reminders from my very first battle by Laughing King’s side! I forget the name of the warrior who gave these to me, but I made sure to return the favor, three times over! Or was it six? Hahaha!”
The way his friend laughed sent a chill down the metalsmith’s spine.
It sounded wrong, like someone trying to mimic the voice of a man through artificial means. It was so close to sounding human, yet so far from it that the metalsmith instinctually wanted to smash this corpse into dust like he did dozens of times before now, and toss the remains into another funeral pyre…but he didn’t.
He still needed to know, he still had to know…was there anything more he could right now?
Could he fix him?
Even if it was a desperate wish, a pointless prayer to an uncaring universe…he still needed to try.
What kind of man would he be, if he couldn’t be there for his [best friend]?
And so, even if it pained him, he continued the dialogue.
“A lot of those wounds seem fatal…is the one who gave you those, the reason why you’re like this now?”
“What? Oh! Oh no, no, no! My current, blessed form isn’t the result of the heretics that slayed me in the first place. This is the result of the blessing the Laughing King saw fit to give me and my fellow warriors!”
“A…blessing?”
“Yes! A blessing!,” the metalsmith’s old friend said with an unusual amount of enthusiasm, almost bordering on fanaticism, his head nodding and bending in an unnatural direction and manner.
“Before our battle began in full, the Laughing King had one of his priestesses bless us, all of us, with something special. It activated something in the beautiful weapons they had gifted us and it made us hit harder, it made us move faster, it made us even tougher so that even if we fell like blades of grass before the harvester’s scythe, we would simply rise up and keep fighting again, and again, and again….and so many of us fell that day.”
In a moment of calm and clarity, the living corpse looked down as if he was remembering something terrible.
“We all…fell down that day…we all…were blasted…slashed…burned, decapitated, slaughtered, maimed, killed, Killed, KILLED!,” the metalsmith’s [friend] shouted with fury, lashing out with his greatsword against the ground, tearing up massive furrows of earth before stopping abruptly.
“But we didn’t die,” he began to laugh before transitioning into singing.
“So we kept going, so we kept going, so we kept going, until we won the war…until we won the war…and then…we were abandoned.”
As soon as the word “abandoned” left his old friend’s mouth, the once maniacal glee that infected every word of his speech, suddenly disappeared. It was replaced with something else: despair.
“We, who won the war with their blessings, we, who fell and bled in service to king and country, we, who became monsters so that others could live in peace were abandoned!. We were tossed away like broken toys, broken tools that had lost their function, and for what reason?! NONE!”
‘Wait a minute, what?’
As the metalsmith felt his friend’s rage grow fiercer and fiercer, he could sense some sort of energy radiating from the greatsword. It felt as if the sword was not only encouraging this anger, but was redirecting it.
Into what exactly…he had a vague idea.
“And so, we wandered, my risen comrades and I, wandered into trying to find some new purpose, some new reason to keep existing…until it came to us. A revelation…from above.”
At this point, the old friend took on yet another mood change, to that of religious fervor.
“We were blessed with these undying, unstoppable forms. We became perfect warriors…and all we needed to do in order to achieve this…was to die.”
“No…”
“At this revelation, we knew what we needed to do. We needed to spread this blessing, this gift, so that all may become perfect, all may become unstoppable…so that all could never die again.”
Reflecting this feeling, the greatsword in his old friend’s hand began to glow with an evil light, as if fed by the fallen man’s obsession. And in turn, the sword fed him back.
“Unfortunately, my comrades fell before they could help to spread this holy revelation. Their bodies fell apart and turned to dust while we were on our holy crusade. Their swords grew dull and became broken.Only I remain now, and so, it is my sworn duty to spread this word of life after death.”
“Oh no…”
As soon as his [friend] made this particular revelation, the metalsmith realized what had happened…and that it was all his fault.
The greatswords that were given to his [friend] and his fellow warriors that were cursed, cursed to make them into undying berserkers or something of that level, but they weren’t supposed to last as long as this.
When his [friend/beloved] came to him that day to get his sword fixed up,the metalsmith had accidentally strengthened the curse that was innate to the sword’s design.
While he wasn’t the one who made the damn thing in the first place, he was the reason why his friend was still standing here before him, spouting this madness.
He was the reason why his beloved was able to slaughter all of those people, he was the reason why all of those villages were burnt to the ground and stank of death and he was the reason why their hometown was now a mass graveyard.
And now…it was up to him to put a stop to all of this.
‘One more body for the fire then…’
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[Hammer of Damnation] is currently undergoing an existential crisis.
