Minna. Everyone. Not Alena, who’d picked the lock to the Demon Lord’s sanctum while a thousand traps sang around her ears. Not Kael, whose forbidden spell had stripped the Lord’s wards bare, shaving years off his own life. Not Elara, who had called upon her goddess so fiercely that her hair had turned white. Not Finn, who had taken a poisoned dagger meant for Theo’s back and now stood smiling with purple veins crawling up his neck.
He opened his mouth to call after them— Alena, Kael, Elara, Finn —but the words felt foreign on his tongue, like speaking a language he had never bothered to learn. yuusha ni minna
“We were your family,” Alena said. “And you didn’t know our names.” Not Kael, whose forbidden spell had stripped the
The silence stretched.
In the hushed aftermath of the Demon Lord’s collapse, dust and shadow bled from the crumbling sky-tower. Alena, the party’s thief, was the first to speak. He opened his mouth to call after them—
Theo stood alone in the dust and silence. For the first time in three years, he felt the weight of his own name. Theo. Not Yuusha. Not Hero. A boy from a farming village who had been handed a sword and a prophecy and told that everyone else was just scenery.
She turned and walked toward the broken archway that led to the outer stair. The others followed—Kael limping, Elara helping Finn, who was starting to shiver. No one looked back.