Lucifia couldn't help but feel pleased with herself as she watches the 4 knights retreat with their tails between their legs. But after the stunt she pulled, Hagurd can't revel in the same feeling.
He never did have any intentions of killing any of the knights, and as grateful as he is to Lu for healing him, he can't bring himself to thank her. Not while he's staring at Tidge's corpse who, even though it didn't have a head anymore, feels like it's staring back at him with resentment.
"Why? Why did you need to go that far!?" Hagurd raises his voice at Lu as gets up from the snow-covered ground. He faces the she-devil directly, glowering at her without a hint of fear in his eyes.
"Because they went that far, they tried to kill you. Do you think a slap on the wrist would make a guy like that give up and change their ways?" Lu argues while holding her head up high and glaring back at Hagurd. She's not amused by his confidence and his ungratefulness.
Lu's smile shifts into a frown, but rather than entertain herself by arguing with a human, she instead looks over her shoulder to motion Hagurd into doing the same.
The furrows on Hagurd's brow dig deeper as he gets more and more frustrated with Lu, but he does yield and looks over her shoulder and in doing so he sees Aranea looking back at him from the manor's porch.
Aranea, who heard everything Hagurd said, is holding her chest with both of her hands. She's having trouble understanding the words he said as she starts to remember every memory of him she has, to look for the signs he showed of being a father to her.
She tightly clutches her chest as questions begin to pile up on top of her, weighing her head down into slumping. Hagurd sees the pained expression Aranea has before she looked down at her feet.
"She asked me to save you no matter what after hearing what you said. I hesitated of course, but she then broke down crying so I couldn't refuse," Lu explains to Hagurd without a hint of the usual sass that her word carries. "Aren't you going to thank her?"
Nothing else would make the weight on Hagurd's chest lighter than to approach Aranea as his daughter and finally come clean with her and hope for a new start.
He's already relinquished his fealty to Aspen and he's ready to take the first step, but somehow his feet feel frozen in place. He wants to think it's his old age telling him that he can no longer stay out in the snow for too long, but Hagurd knows his heart too well that he can't lie to himself.
He's merely afraid of being rejected by Aranea. She has all the right to do so after the years of hiding the truth, distancing himself from her, and lying to comfort her. Doing one good act can't magically erase his years of indecisiveness.
'Move, let me move so I can end this. Stop stalling and face the consequences of your action!' Hagurd yells at himself to get a grip.
"Move, why would she cry like that if she didn't love you?" Lu says to Hagurd as she walks past him and pushes his back.
With that nudge alone, Hagurd no longer feels the trepidation attacking his mind and body.
"What're you going to do now?" Hagurd asks while looking over his shoulder to glance at Lu.
"You said that in three days the capital will be here right? They'll come for this place, take me, Melissa, and Aranea. Probably you and -… Drew.
So I'll do what I promised I'd do, I'll stand my ground and protect this place. Nothing will get past me," Lu declares as she crosses her arms. She worries for Drew, realizing that Aranea can't look for him and she can't go find him herself as it would mean leaving Aranea and Melissa alone to fend for themselves.
'You better be alright, I won't forgive you if you got yourself killed,' Lu swears to herself while looking up at the grey sky.
"Lu, I can't overlook what you did. You murdered someone," Hagurd suddenly speaks up, bringing Lu back down to reality.
"Are you going to lecture me, old man?" She hisses back.
"Let me finish. I can't overlook what you did but thank you," Hagurd earnestly says to Lu, causing her to look back at him and see him walking towards Aranea.
Lu's lips curl into a faint smile as she turns back to face the forest.
Hagurd, while walking towards the manor without breaking his gaze from Aranea, is slowly finding it difficult to approach her. It's not the snow that's making him trudge but the anxiety slowly building in his chest as he gets closer to her.
He thinks it's a miracle he can even open his mouth.
"Aranea, I want to say-" Hagurd's eyes widen as he sees his daughter lunging towards him with her arms reaching out.
He finds himself with Aranea hugging him as she collapses into a fit of crying. To Aranea, rather than feeling anger or resentment towards Hagurd, she just feels happy that her father does exist and that he does indeed care about her.
Where Hagurd sees himself as a coward who couldn't decide which was more important, to Aranea it's her father doing his best to make things work out. She's happy with the thought that the man she believed she only troubled is her father, and the same could be said for Hagurd as he always thought that Aranea has grown to hate him for his half-baked attempts of supporting her.
"-I'm sorry, I'm so sorry for not being a great parent," Hagurd apologizes causing Aranea to shake her head.
"It's fine! Th, -Thank you for always staying by my side!" She cries out.
"Of course, w, -what kind of parent would abandon the child they love?" Hagurd prays, that if a god is watching over them right now, let him have this day.
…
Lu can feel the cold subside somewhat. It tells her that it's already the afternoon, but the sky is still grey and the only light of day is coming from a few rays of sunlight breaking through the thick clouds.
Tidge's headless corpse and his head is currently half-covered in snow.
However the cold isn't the only thing she's picking up on, Lu can hear a powerful march of knights that's growing closer and closer to the manor.
"They're all wearing plate armor, how adorable." Lu's ears catch the clanking of metal to metal, letting her know that a real company of knights are about to arrive at her doorstep.
Taking a guess solely alone from how rhythmic their march is, Lu assumes that there are at least 30 to 40 knights ready for battle, and she wasn't entirely off the mark as 50 knights enter Lucifia's view.
They're neatly lined up into a pair of columns of 5 and rows of 5 in a rectangular shape indicative of a phalanx formation. From head to toe, they're wearing plate armor with chainmail underneath. For weapons, they're drawing their arming swords, the last column row are pointing their spears forward, and all of them raises their tower shields up from the ground.
Leading this company that's half a hundred strong is a blonde young man with blue eyes. His appearance isn't all that striking, Lu can even say that it's plain and generic.
"Demon! By the goddess Arthesia's mercy I will rid this world of you! Attack!" The blonde knight commands as he and his fellow knights charge at the demon, bearing their swords with the intent to kill.
With a flat expression on her face, Lu spins around and her tail sweeps across the first column of knights, tearing them all in half, shield and all. Those in the second column find themselves getting splattered with the warm blood of their fellow knights.
It takes a moment for it to register but just like that there's only 40 of them left. Lu flashes a wide grin at the company of knights, alarming their leader into ordering his knights in forming a defensive position against the demon's next attack.
Rather than making it easy for herself to deal with the knights by using her tail, Lu instead leaps and slithers into one of the groups before they could completely turtle themselves.
Their commander, the blonde knight, hears the screams of his comrades inside the phalanx as Lu tears them apart limb from limb. He's too staggered at the bloody sight that he couldn't order them to break formation, and because of the indoctrinazation that ripped away their basic instinct to flee from danger, the group of knights could only watch and wait for their death or an order.
By the end of it, there's only 20 left for Lu as she now stands in the middle of a desecrated ground drenched in blood and littered with bodies and shields. She treated the spears as flagpoles where she hangs the bodies of the spearmen. Some of the swords and hidden daggers that the knights had on them found their way into Lu, leaving her with a few swords lodged in her back, shoulder, and waist.
Yet she did not mind, treating these mortal wounds as mere bruishes that she'll walk off.
"Pray to your goddess, blondie~ because unfortunately, I'm not as merciful as her," Lu says as she holds her arms out, taunting the remaining 20 knights to come do their best to kill this archdemon.