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"Listen, Xel, I have something important to tell you.... There's no easy way to say this, so I'll say it straight out. Joaquin, captain of the Estella district army detachment, is dead."
"What? It can't be. But I saw him yesterday." I say, refusing to believe Lilian's words I just heard.
"Yes, I know. He died this morning. No one expected this." the girl says, looking at me with grief. "I know he was someone close to you, and that's why it took me so long to decide to come here."
'I don't understand; wasn't it all supposed to be over by now? After all, that's why I fought Garnuk in a fight that could have cost me my life, right?'
"How... How did it happen?" I say, straining to try to understand. I can't think straight, but reality hits me like the heaviest of hammers.
"Well..." says Lilian, looking undecided on how to proceed. "The thing is, despite the fact that we won and took control of the city, that doesn't mean that all the orcs accepted us without reservation, and..."
"Who was it? Tell me who the culprit was," I ask, interrupting her mid-sentence, and suddenly a terrible anger bursts in my chest.
I notice how Azur asks me what's going on as he feels my emotions through the link, but I ignore him and try to block our connection. Now I just need to know who took a loved one from me to return the damage tenfold.
"There's no point in trying to find blame." Lilian says, frowning as she looks at me, "You need to calm down. This is something I already knew could happen...."
"YOU KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN, AND YOU DIDN'T STOP IT?" I say, jumping up on the desk and grabbing Lilian by the neck to hoist her into the air as the documents go flying through the air around us, "GIVE ME A REASON NOT TO KILL YOU RIGHT HERE!"
As soon as I do this, Lilian's cat leaps into my arms, trying to claw me as her body begins to grow in size. But, holding the girl with my left hand, I use my right to yank the damn cat off me, and after throwing the feline body hard against the floor, I jump off the desk and destroy Yuumi's body with a stomp. At this, Lilian reacts with an expression of enormous suffering but says nothing.
In response to my shouts, a detachment of ten heavily armed orcs enters the room at the same time.
"Is something wrong, boss? Do you want us to take care of her?" one of them asks me solicitously.
"OUT!" I shout at the top of my lungs, and the orcs rush out. As I continue to hold Lilian with one hand, I go to lock the door of this damned place after the guards exit so that no one else will come to disturb me.
"L-listen to me... You're jumping to a lot of conclusions... and you're wrong about all of them." Lilian says in a mumble, struggling to speak due to the strength of my grip and the pain she must be enduring from the destruction of her summoned companion's body, "Please, Xelean, don't make a stupid..."
"DON'T CALL ME STUPID!" I say, as irrational anger bubbles up in my chest.
"I'm calling you *cough* THAT BECAUSE *cough* THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE RIGHT NOW, STUPID!" says Lilian, suddenly becoming enraged as she starts yelling at me with a face red with fury "LET ME LEAVE! AND LET ME FINISH EXPLAINING MYSELF BEFORE YOU DECIDE WHO IS GUILTY OF WHAT!"
Surprised by her outburst, I let her go, and she fell to the ground, coughing.
I look at her sobbing, undecided on what to do. But the desire to break things and take it out on someone for the pain I feel still burns brightly.
After a few moments, Lilian catches her breath, stands up, and, as she arranges her crumpled clothes from the fall, begins to say, "Good! Now sit down in that chair and finish listening to my damn explanation. Really, you're one of the last people I could expect this kind of thing from."
At these words, guilt and doubt begin to win out over my anger, and the tiredness of the day returns, so I listen to Lilian and sit behind my desk.
After watching me obey her, Lilian sits down in a chair across from me and begins to speak again "If I said this was something I was expecting, that's only because this was a possibility we had already contemplated due to the situation. But I could never have known what and when it was going to happen.... Or to whom. So, you see, you're stupid."
"I don't..." I start to say with a frown, annoyed at the insult.
'None of this would have happened if she'd explained herself properly from the beginning.'
"Silence! I didn't give you permission to speak. Do you want to hear what I've kindly come to tell you, or would you rather go to the streets of a city you don't know to try to find out for yourself?" Lilian says with a hard expression, and the coldness in her voice leads me to obey her again.
When she sees that I don't try to retort anything, she continues speaking "Good. I see you're not totally a hopeless case.... As I was going to say a few minutes ago, before I was rudely interrupted by someone I considered my friend, although we gained control of the city, the relations between our troops and the city's inhabitants are very strained. We have been working hard at trying to smooth out the rough edges between their perspective and ours to try to get them to accept us, but it is a difficult process, and it is going to take a long time. Also, the thing is that some of the people in our troops who were not soldiers before joining the expedition don't take some orders very well and treat the orcs as if they were brute imbeciles just because they find it irrational that they have ceded their city to us as a matter of tradition and honor."
As she gets to this part, Lilian pauses and sighs; at the same time, her gaze softens for a moment. "Today, at 11 a.m., Joaquin died trying to stop a battle that was about to break out between a group of orc soldiers and some of our troops who were aiming guns at each other from a distance. We don't really know who started it or why they were arguing. We don't even know if either side really intended to do what they did or if it was just an accident, because most of the people involved also died, and the few who survived are now just accusing the opposing side. The point is that someone fired first, and after that first shot, the 10 soldiers of our troops and the 13 orcs started shooting non-stop, massacring each other. Joaquin, being in the middle and trying to stop the conflict, received part of the projectiles from both sides. He was a very skilled warrior, but he couldn't do much in the face of the number of attacks that hit him at the same time from all directions... As you see, there is no one really to blame, because no one wanted to harm him. He was just an accidental victim of the situation we are going through..." says Lilian, whose expression has been softening as she spoke, and she looks at me again with a look full of compassion. "The truth is that he shouldn't have put himself between two armed groups with weapons at a distance like that..."
"He was like that... Always doing the right thing, not caring about the rules or who he had to face for it. It was that same personality that led him to rescue me from a future of loneliness and poverty when my parents died. And to take me to Ragnar's house, Julia's father, to protect me from your uncle's revenge. Even though he was risking his position by doing so," I say, recalling my first moments with the old captain. As I speak, sadness and grief flood my chest. I collapse onto the desk, and tears begin to fall down my face at the realization that I will never see him again, no matter what I do or who I punish.
"Xel, I'm... I'm sorry. Go get some rest, and try to get some sleep. I understand that sleep helps in this kind of situation," says Lilian, who extends a hesitant hand towards me but decides to withdraw it before reaching out to touch me.
"Yes, thank you for letting me know. And... Forgive me, I shouldn't have acted like that... Now, could you please leave me? I need to be alone..." I say between sobs, embarrassed by what happened before and by the fact that Lilian is seeing me in this state.
Lilian leaves the room, giving me a pitying look, and a few moments later I feel Azur, who is waiting behind the window. I let the little blue-black dragon in, and I go to lie down while I let the pain consume me until the unsubstantial darkness of the dream world makes it subside, even if it is only for a while.