The Dragon Kingdom's Scout's POV [level 12]
I had been in position on the eastern road for a few days, rotating between three observation posts as I waited for the Beastmen main army to show itself.
The column appeared on the horizon at mid-morning of the fourth day.
I raised my viewing glass and looked at it for a long time before I wrote anything down, because what I was looking at required confirmation that my eyes were reporting correctly.
The column stretched back further than my viewing glass could resolve at its current extension. I adjusted. The rear of it was still beyond clear resolution.
At the front of it, moving at the walking pace of the slowest people behind him, was Tim.
Tim had gone to the Beastman Country, this much I had known.
What was coming down this road was tens of thousands people and a number beyond that which had apparently attached themselves to the column somewhere between the Beastman Country and this point, and at the head of it was a twenty-two year old Adventurer.
I wrote the note with hands that were steadier than I felt. Tied it to my crow's leg with the care as I send it away, just as Queen Draudillon Oriculus ordered.
*Tim has returned from the Beastman Country leading what appears to be a mass column of rescued humans numbering in the tens of thousands. Assessment: the Beastman Country's military capacity has gone missing. Maybe Tim wiped them out.???*
The crow went east.
I kept watching.
---
Tim's POV
The cheering reached us as we saw the Capital City in the distance.
The crowd noise of a capital city prepared for a celebration was audible from a significant distance, the specific frequency of many voices in coordinated enthusiasm travelling further than the individual components would have. I heard it before I saw the open gates.
Draudillon had been busy.
The gates were wide open, which was not normal gate protocol for a city under the military pressure the Dragon Kingdom had been sustaining. The streets visible through the gate were full of people, which was also not normal, this was a prepared reception, not a spontaneous one, the density and positioning of the crowd consistent with people who had been told to be there for a specific arrival time.
The flowers started falling on me, as when we reached the gate. Thrown from both sides of the street, the specific gesture of welcome celebration that this culture reserved for significant returns, military victories, the end of sieges.
The petals covered the road ahead of me in the layered red, as pretty it looked, I feel like some thing is wrong.
I heard her voice over the crowd noise.
Draudillon had positioned herself at the top of the castle stairs, which was the high point with the sightlines to address the whole street. The form she was presenting was the young girl form, and her voice carried across the city, likely some form of magic.
She called me the great hero of the Dragon Kingdom. Said I had single-handedly beaten back the Beastmen. Said I had saved everyone who had been Kidnapped.
The crowd's response was the response of a population was genuine, the relief and gratitude were real even if the framing was Draudillon's construction and I alreally found out that she did this whole thing to avoid getting her ass kicked.
I stood in the middle of it with veins in my forehead.
She had orchestrated this, The celebration, and the public declaration, all of it deployed in order to avoid a well-earned beat-down, as I could not kick her ass in front of her entire capital at the celebration she had arranged for my return without destroying the goodwill of people of this kingdom.
It pissed me off even more.
I walked up the castle stairs.
She leaned toward me when I reached the top, the movement small enough to look like a formal greeting from the crowd's perspective, as she said.
"I'm sorry tim, I didn't mean for any of thi-"
I cut her off.
"I will never help your kingdom again," I said. My voice holding barely contained Rage. "I gave you my trust, and the first thing you did was to use me, Next time your kingdom burns, I will only help if you step down as queen Permanently, And go to hell YOU OLD HAG"
She received this with the expression of someone who had prepared for anger with a calm look on her face, as she gave me a 'HERO' reward
The necklace she presented was green and shiny and probably worth a significant amount in material terms. I accepted it with the grace required by the public moment and turned and walked back down the stairs.
[Wild magic item: Sandman's necklace]
[effect: No more need for sleep]
---
A few hours later....
As I was leaving, I noted alot of people followed me out of the city.
I had started walking through the gate and onto the road that led north toward E-Rantel, and when I looked back after a few minutes I discovered that the crowd had growen again behind me.
Not all of them. A good portion of the capital's population, combined with the forty-eight thousand I had brought from the Beastman Country, combined with what appeared to be people who had come to the capital from surrounding areas for the celebration and had decided to follow me home.
what do I do with them...?
Over One hundred thousand. Approximately. The number had definitively increased from what I had brought, which meant the Dragon Kingdom's capital had contributed its own portion to what was following me down the road.
I looked at this for a while.
Then I looked at the road ahead, which was long and was going to get longer, and resumed walking.
The return journey was going to take considerably longer than my solo travel time.
---
Cerabrate's POV [level 28] [Leader of the Crystal Tear adventureer group]
I had been waiting at the road because I had a point to make to the so-called Hero of the Dragon Kingdom.
My team, The Great Crystal Tear, had been hearing about Tim for years, and now he is here to steal my woman.
Draudillon Oriculus deserved a proper knight in shineing armor. Someone who had worked for recognition through the established channels, through the guild ranks, through the demonstration of capability in contexts that the proper institutions assessed. Not someone who had shown up from a randow orphanage and stumbled into legendary status through what I had decided was pure dumn luck.
And there was the matter of the queen herself, whose form I found compelling and whose kingdom I had decided I was going to serve in a more personal capacity.
Tim's image was much higher than mine, which made him a problem I was going to resolve publicly.
I drew my sword.
I shouted my challenger.
"Now listen you half-ass creep, First, Queen Draudillon Oriculus is mine, and second I'll-"
The bloodlust hit me before the words had finished leaving my mouth.
I have been in combat. I have been in situations where the opponent was stronger than me and I knew it and managed it. I have felt the specific fear of genuine danger and maintained my professional function despite it. This was not that. This was something that had no combat analogue in my experience, a True pressure of Death.
My legs stopped working.
The rest of my team stopped working simultaneously, which told me that whatever I was experiencing, they were experiencing it too, and that it was not a targeted spell but simply what was present in the air around Tim at this moment.
He walked toward me.
Every cell in my body delivered the same message if I turn my back to run, I WILL DIE.
I was not sure I could have moved even if I had decided to.
As he Bloodlust grew as he got closer, I start to feel my hair falling off.
'I WAnT tO LIVe'
He was one metre away.
I watched my life flash before my eyes, I NEED to THINK of a way OUT.
He was half a metre away.
THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK,THINK.
He was in front of me.
"I'm sorry", I said weakly.
He kept walking past me...?
The bloodlust evaporated the moment he passed me, the air behind it normal with no trace of what had been there. My legs worked again. The rest of my team's legs worked again. The people who had been walking behind Tim continued walking behind Tim as though nothing had happened, parting around us as water parted around rocks in a stream, and hours later, the column of people had passed and the road was empty and I was still on my knees in the grass beside the road.
I got up.
I ran as fast as I can.
I did not look back.
'Fucking human skin-wearing Monster, I'm going home'.
---
Queen Draudillon Oriculus's POV [level ???]
I watched Tim walk away from my castle stairs with the necklace and the consequences of what I had done, and I held the queen's expression until the crowd's attention was distributed enough that the expression was no longer required, and then I let it go and thought about what I had actually accomplished.
The plan had been reasonable given the information I had. Tim's documented achievements were impressive. The frost dragon story was real, the dwarf kingdom's records confirmed it, and the dwarf kingdom had no reason to fabricate records about their hero.
What the information had not conveyed was the scale of the gap between the documented achievements and the actual capability. The frost dragon had been one dragon and one fortress and one operation. This was extraordinary event but they were normal.
What Tim had just done was defeat a country.
Not a military campaign. Not a coalition operation. A single person had walked into a country that maintained an active standing army, had systematically destoryed every military asset that country possessed, had retrieved every human being that country had been holding, and had walked back across the border with them, like it was child's play.
My plan had involved Tim going to the Beastman Country and the Beastman Country's army responding to his presence, by killing him or kidnapping him, so that created a crisis requiring the dwarf kingdom's intervention. The dwarf kingdom's forces, combined with the Dragon Kingdom's forces and the damage Tim's presence left, would have been sufficient to force The beastman country to back off.
Tim had not needed the dwarf kingdom's forces. Tim had not needed the Dragon Kingdom's forces too.
Tim had resolved the entire military situation in the time it took me to organise a welcome celebration.
He was right to be angry. I had used him based on a threat model that was wrong, which made the use worse than it would have been if I had correctly assessed him, I had underestimated him, and that underestimation was my failure.
Now he hates me, and soon the dwarf kingdom was going to find out, and there goes any good relations with them.
I had gotten sloppy lately.
I went back inside to manage the consequences of my own actions.
---
Tim [level 97]
Hero: [1/1] [legendary] [New] [Unlocked form having more than One kingdom seeing you as a Hero] [No stat boost, If the user is in the moral high-ground, than no debuff of any kind can be applied on to user, till death]