Chapter 42: The Good Guy.
Damien breathed a sigh of relief. Leslie might’ve been adorable, but she had still given him plenty of trouble. If not for the undead priest, Damien wasn’t sure he could’ve beaten her in a straight fight.
"Any last words, Leslie?"
Leslie smiled helplessly. She lay on the frozen ground, blood steadily pouring from the stumps where her legs once were. Even if Damien chose to walk away now, she was still going to die.
"Seris never mentioned you fought this well."
Damien scoffed.
"Of course she didn’t, because she doesn’t know. I make it a habit to surprise people, both friend and foe. But you know more about surprises than I do? Why did you stay close to me with your clone if you weren’t going to make a move?"
Leslie coughed up another mouthful of blood before forcing herself to answer.
"I... I wanted to do it while making it look like the Eidolons finished you off. How did you even know I was aiming for your life?"
Damien went silent for a moment, not because he was thinking of an answer, but because he wasn’t sure answering was even worth it. In the end, seeing that she was already dying, he decided to satisfy her curiosity.
"It was just a hunch, really. Why hide a party member? And why was that party member running so close to me while you guys stayed ahead? Why didn’t you and Paige brief me on your dormant abilities or even your status effects before the mission? With all those questions piling up in my head, I started thinking about the political instability of the Round Table and how fragile it really was."
"Andrea is supposed to be your leader, yet even she’s having trouble controlling the rest of you. Then I remembered Elias mentioning your name before. That’s how I found out you’re Naomi’s sister. I became suspicious right then and there. Naomi struck me as the kind of woman who makes a move before thinking about the consequences, and God knows she hates Andrea. She also sees me as one of Andrea’s lackeys, so why wouldn’t she try to take me out? I mean... that’s exactly what I would’ve done if I were in her position."
Damien scratched the side of his head.
"Though I’d probably have done it the right way."
Leslie listened quietly, but something still bugged her.
"Was that really all it took for you to attack me without a second thought? We were still inside enemy lines. We hadn’t even completed the mission yet."
Damien slowly shook his head.
"No. I was just being paranoid."
He looked down at her with an indifferent expression.
"But at the time, it didn’t really matter, because I was already planning to kill you anyway. It didn’t matter whether Naomi sent you to assassinate me, or whether you wanted to do it out of some misguided sense of duty... or justice for humanity. I already knew you had to die if I ever wanted to kill Naomi."
He shrugged lightly.
"So, in a way... your sister really did cause your death."
Leslie’s body had already turned deathly pale. Blood loss was finally catching up to her, and even keeping her eyes open was becoming difficult.
"Why..."
She swallowed painfully before finishing her sentence.
"Why do you hate my sister so much? What did she ever do to you?"
For a moment, only the raging blizzard could be heard sweeping through the frozen forest.
Damien genuinely thought about it.
He certainly had his reasons. Plenty of them, in fact. But he couldn’t think of a single reason why Leslie needed to know any of them.
So he answered plainly.
"She gave me the stink eye once."
Leslie’s vision finally gave out, but before she breathed her last, she couldn’t help but whisper to herself.
"How petty".
Damien felt his shoulders finally loosen. Leslie had certainly worked him over. In fact, he was genuinely exhausted this time. If there was a bed nearby, he would’ve thrown himself onto it without a second thought.
But at that very moment, something inexplicable began to happen.
Leslie’s legless corpse slowly melted into a pool of crimson blood before the blood itself began evaporating into thin air.
Within moments, nothing remained except the clothes she had been wearing, but even those were quickly swept away by the raging blizzard.
Damien stared blankly at the empty patch of snow.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
"Huh, this one is also a clone, how’s that even possible? Could her physical status be clone or something, it should be possible since I’m undead, but if I die I don’t think my body will vanish like this, this has got to be a clone".
Priesty growled aggressively in the direction of the Eidolon army, Damien’s senses couldn’t reach such a distance, but the wind still carried the sound of marching.
The Eidolon army was on the move.
"I see now".
Damien suddenly realised.
"Leslie was never supposed to make it back to camp alive. She was supposed to die after making sure she had seen the new equipment the Eidolons were hauling out of the ruins, while the second clone counted their numbers and gathered whatever information it could.
She already knew about my attack on her clone back inside the Eidolon camp. Which means, when one clone dies, its memories are passed on to the remaining clones before eventually returning to the true body.
If that’s really how her dormant ability works, then each clone must be autonomous to a certain extent. Otherwise, there would’ve been no reason for her to split herself in the first place".
Damien cursed inwardly.
"Leslie, you have no idea how inconvenient this is for me".
Damien turned away.
Leslie surviving was truly becoming a nuisance. Even if he tried to explain that they had been planning to kill him first, who would actually believe him?
And why would they?
He had killed Paige and butchered two of Leslie’s clones. If anything, everyone would see him as the aggressor, while Leslie and Naomi would walk away looking like the victims.
Priesty let out a low growl beside him.
Damien glanced at the undead priest and sighed.
"Yeah, I know, buddy. Being the good guy is really difficult."