Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 19 – Fire and Flames (2)

Still the blue and gold lights waited, otherwise inert. They had infinite patience, and I had to go forward at some point unless I wanted to die down there.

I stepped into the room with the two lights.

The wall silently closed behind me, leaving me in the circular room.

I observed the lights with the system to see if they could give me any sort of hint as to what they were.

The System returned nonsense.

VWOOOoooooo.

The lights brightened, the blue and gold colors warring with each other in a collision of illumination that blinded me.

Then, after the light became unbearable and the warble in my ears reached its peak, everything stopped.

I felt a warmth on my face, and a steady glow lit up the backs of my eyelids.

A gentle breeze brushed past my face.

I opened my eyes.

A barren land surrounded me atop a hill I stood at the apex of, next to an old, withered tree. The landscape was black, and the smell of ash and burnt wood wafted through the air.

A steady gray fog of ash covered the landscape, drifting down around the hill.

Far above, in a sky of red and black, a blazing rock hung on the horizon, seemingly unmoving.

“What do you think?”

The raspy, echoing voice of a woman sounded out from next to me as I looked out over the horizon.

The voice startled me, I would have sworn that I had been alone up there at first. There wouldn’t have been anywhere for someone to hide.

I turned.

A robed figure stood, leaning against the withered tree.

The figure gestured vaguely with one hand, her face hidden within the hood of the robe.

“Excuse me?”

“The village, what do you think of it?”

‘What village?’

There wasn’t anything that could be described as a village in the bleak landscape.

“Who are you?”

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‘Is this an apparition of the system?’

The figure wagged a finger at me.

“Look.”

I followed the figure’s pointing finger with my eyes.

There, only a short distance from the hill, a semi-translucent image of a large wooden building appeared, other buildings around it even hazier and harder to make out, no more than mere shapes.

“The village, what do you think of it?”

However I looked at it, it must have been another test from the System, so I decided to play along.

It didn’t look like much of a village, only a building with a few vague shapes at most.

“Ah, but imagine what it could be. Tell me, what do you see?”

The figure spoke as if reading my thoughts. It probably was.

I had never interacted with the System in such a way. Monsters and dungeons existed and were largely believed to be creations of the system, yes, but I hadn’t heard of the system creating an “NPC” before.

“Don’t get distracted, tell me what kind of village you see there.”

“I’m not sure what you mean…”

“Do you see a rigidly structured, organized village, planned out ahead of time by settlers, or do you see a village that grew around a singular structure and popped up spontaneously as it grew over time?

“…”

I imagined in my head how such a village might look. I liked the idea of something that grew communally over time, sudden and spontaneous, a place that people grew to love and stayed with for the location as much as the people, a place unlike any I had experienced thus far.

“Good, hold that image.”

As I watched, the blobs of indistinct shape assembled themselves into huts and buildings, arrayed loosely around the large central structure.

“And what kind of figure leads this village?”

I imagined a leader who put the people first, one who was impossibly selfless and struck strongly to their values.

“The village experiences an attack by monsters, the villagers fight off the monsters and decide to create a better defense for next time. Do they fortify their measly walls and create an organized lookout structure, or do they revel in the feel of crushing those that would wish destruction upon them?”

The village I had created in my mind was one of community and selflessness. It didn’t sound right for the village to revel in combat.

They would have found some other way to combat the monsters and focused on their defenses, not sought to destroy them.

The village solidified in front of us. It was surrounded by sturdy, stone walls that seemed to contrast its gentle wooden huts and otherwise somewhat sporadic organization.

As we looked over the scene, flaming rocks began to rain from the sky, crashing against the ground in a radius around the village, leaving it untouched.

“The village faces a crisis, you can help them. Depending on the level of the crisis, you will be rewarded accordingly. How bad is their crisis?”

“What?”

“…”

How bad was their crisis? If I had correctly caught what she was saying, then the villagers of the village that she had conjured through my imagination would suffer from a crisis based on the level of reward I wanted.

What would that mean for the villagers? Would they be indistinguishable from real people, as the figure I was speaking with seemed to be? If so, then would my want for a higher reward lead to a higher amount of suffering for otherwise real people?

I thought back to what I had experienced for the previous six years, how I had to struggle for every penny earned to have a chance at living the life that everyone else took for granted, all the sideways glances in the street, the pity-filled comments and whispered judgments.

If someone were in such a position over me, where my entire life and memory were formed in mere moments, what would I think if they decided to make it harder for me and hinder my dreams just so that they could be slightly stronger against some unknown future event?

“Make it as easy as possible, even if it makes the reward less.”

“…”

There was silence. The rustle of a brief wind against leaves from above met my ears.

I looked above me, leaves jostling against each other in the branches of the tree returned to its former glory.

“Unfortunately, we don’t always get to choose what the consequences of our decisions will be.”

I glanced over at the figure again, who had vanished and left me alone at the top of the hill.

Those last words had left an ominous atmosphere behind.

‘Great…’

* * *

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[Author – Farlight]

[Proofreader – Harley]

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The road to the village was long disused. As I drew closer to it, patches of grass popped up from the ground and extended towards the village walls, growing thicker and steadier up to the stone.

Chunks of rock continued to fall around the village, just past the hill I had started on.

The road could only be called as such from the slight discoloration where the earth had been long tread in the past, bits of gravel and stone scattered over it to dissuade the growth of the plant life and grass.

Tall walls of thick stone rose to meet me at the end of the road, doors that looked to be made of a reinforced wood that seemed small in comparison to the towering wall were set at the base of the wall at the end of the road.

“A person! I see a person!”

A clamor broke out atop the wall and I saw a head peek out to look at me, yelling at others that I couldn’t see.

“Get the chief!”

The figure vanished again, leaving me to watch as various heads peeked over the top of the wall at me intermittently, whispering things I couldn’t hear.

After a few minutes of waiting, the upper torso of a withering old man appeared above the walls, his hair long greyed and wrinkles covering his face.

“Traveler! You’ll have to excuse my wariness, but where are you from?!”

He had to almost shout down at me for me to properly hear him, his voice loud and carrying.

It made sense that he might be somewhat confused. I judged from the constantly falling meteors around the village that they probably didn’t get many visitors.

Could I just tell him that I was sent from another land to help?

“I’m an explorer from another world!”

I knew how unbelievable it sounded, but it was more plausible than being vague and saying I was from a nearby city or something when I didn’t even know if such a city existed.

The chief was silent for a moment, seeming to contemplate something.

Finally, he turned and said something to someone beyond the top of the wall.

“Very well, come in and we can discuss more in safety.”

‘In safety?’

The meteors themselves were falling what seemed to be a safe distance from the walls, so what other danger could there be?

Krrrrrr.

The chief went back over the wall.

The doors swung open not long after, revealing a gentle earthen path past the doors into a spacious village with huts spaced here and there in the grass around the intertwining paths connecting them.

People watched me from near the huts and structures, still carrying clothes, baskets, and other objects from tasks in their day-to-day business.

The chief stood, leaning on a walking stick, at the forefront with a person on either side of him. There was a nervous, slim girl next to him.

She had a youthful face and looked to be just old enough to use the System, as it wouldn’t activate for anyone below the hard-set age of twenty for some reason. She was the one who had previously seen me and shouted for someone to get the chief.

On the chieftain’s other side was a middle-aged man in glasses with a slim face, holding a book under one arm.

“Rodrig…”

The chief spoke, glancing at the man in glasses, who was watching me carefully and absently thumbing at the book under his arm.

“Ah… Yes, of course! Ahem…”

The man hurriedly approached me with the book, opening it and flipping through the book to find a certain page.

“Sorry… If you’ll excuse me…”

He gave me a nervous smile, his movements somewhat hesitant and clumsy as he reached up to my forehead.

He looked down at the book, the script unrecognizable to me, as he held his hand in front of my head and began a stuttering mumble from whatever he was reading.

A hazy golden light soon connected the man’s hand to my forehead, and he jumped back in surprise, nearly dropping the book.

The girl who stood next to the chief tugged on the chief’s sleeve in excitement as more whispers went around the villagers watching us.

“Grandpa, it’s him! It’s really him!”

It looked as if they were expecting me somehow, some doing of the System that had created them?

“It’s the man who’s going to save us!”