This Hero is Sleeping!

"Do you know da wae?"

"Marcus, spit out the fruit and then speak."

In the middle of the great grand forest of Silvanus, the groups of four with Bagpipe, Marcus, Tomas, and Hyden made their way past the trees.

"Just follow, we don't have much time."

Hyden said.

If that elf he was after had truly entered the forest as the rock man said, then they were in big trouble.

His goddess had told him. Fortuna had mentioned it.

It wasn't over yet. His chance wasn't gone yet.

Things were deeply troublesome. If he didn't make a move fast and swing his blade even faster, he would have no choice but to lose himself.

"Keep your pace up. And make sure you don't get lost."

"Hah! Those robed fellas said the same thing to us."

"But in the end, we never did get lost. Our Lord Leres even went on a profoundly different path."

"Puuun puuuun puuuuuuun!"

This was getting deeply frustrating. The mist took over their sight and Hyden started tracking the gathering spirits with a simple spell.

"Alright, make sure none of you walk away or get lost."

With that decided, he started moving forward and the three idiots followed straight.

"If you don't mind me asking, by the way," spoke Tomas. "Why do we need to rush if the girl has gone home? Is it because you want a reward for securing her? What matters is that she is safe, that is the spirit of helping."

"My, Tomas. You are so wise sometimes."

"Right?"

Marcus nodded at Tomas and Hyden sighed.

These idiots.

Were they possibly trying to get the girl back to the elves? That would have been a real problem.

"We have to move so that the girl does not meet the village."

"Does not meet the village?"

Even though they couldn't see him in the mist anymore, Hyden nodded.

He had moved into the elves' land just a few days back. His goal? To get the girl captured and hidden away in a cage out of her captivity and slay her.

He had received an edict from his goddess. The goddess of fate, fortune herself had announced it.

As an Apostle chosen by a god, he had more access to knowledge about the world than most others.

And a special thing had started spreading amongst the other apostles and oracles. A world-damning threat that had made the gods resort to summoning people from another world and dubbing them heroes.

Demonic Dark Desire.

A strange, uncontrollable… phenomenon, as they had coined it. It was a phenomenon that affected people, bringing out their deepest darkest desires and molding them to fit them.

But just having a desire wasn't enough. It would also have to be strong enough.

A child whose entire family was killed in front of her for defending themselves. Who had no choice but to stay hungry and alone in a cave for days on end with a corpse?

A mother whose child and husband were killed, taken from her own hands, all because people had deemed her not human enough.

Such events had brought up enough of a demonic dark desire to make others take action and turn into beings that did not fit this world.

It could have just been the work of a demonic god. Hyden still believed it to be so.

But fate had different thoughts.

It is not the demonic gods, she had announced. And like a loyal steed, he had lowered his head in front of his master.

And that loyal steed was here, in the place where, using a great deal of her power, the god of fate, Fortuna had informed him of the next incident of the Demonic Dark Desire.

She had told him. That the person responsible for everything was going to be a young girl captured by the elves and held in a place they couldn't see.

Why they had captured her, what they wanted to do with her, Hyden had no idea about any of these.

But he did know that he was going to have to kill that girl or the entire village, if not the entire country of Silvanus could be in danger.

The heroes were still feeble and weak, and they were being used like puppets, a good deal of them at least, by General Volfram and the people of the empire.

He had no choice but to take matters into his own hands.

And the way to do that, for now, was to make sure that the elf girl could cause no harm.

He had taken the sword that he had sharpened over years on end to be of use to his goddess as an apostle and had taken it against the land of the elves.

The stupid elves gladly welcomed him with open arms even though he was a human.

With his great skills, he focused on what mattered and destroyed most of what was on their grounds.

And just as he hoped, he had also managed to find the girl who was the culprit of everything.

But she escaped.

And the head of the village, in a last hurrah, managed to wound him with the Elves' special poison that killed him from the inside.

Using the last of his strength, he ran for two days and nights straight while elf scouts continued to chase after him, and with great effort he managed to escape them. Fortuna had warned him about it, about the poison those pesky elves wielded. And he had prepared a perfect antidote too.

But those damned monsters chasing after him left him no space to consume it. They only let him go when they shot an arrow into his shoulders and pushed him down a cliff and into the den of imps.

Thankfully.

One imp was different than the others.

"Elric… you may have come as Fortuna's gift to me," he spoke in his mind. "This favor, I am never, ever going to forget it."