AFTER DEATH I LIVE AGAIN - Season 2 Episode 28

When tides were high and valleys were low,

When ashes made the whole world glow,

There was a man with a rocking stick,

Whose breath could make the whole world sick,

He huffed and puffed and blew one down,

And went to breed just like a clown.

The behemoth paused his recitation of the rhythmic poem that his dear mother sang to him so many years ago, attempting to recall how the rest of the verse went. This was one of the very first and very last memories he had of his mother, as she perished shortly after his childhood during the war of the ashes.

Ah. That’s how it went. He blinked lazily, his memory foggy from the passage of time and yet remarkably clear as if he could hear his mother’s voice once again. He remembered now.

Yet Kronos was his given name,

To him the world was just a game,

To forge and crush and birth and kill,

He looked down affix his windowsill,

Upon his spawn some grand or tall,

And some that were especially small.

The words to the ancient poem poured out of the behemoth’s mouth unbidden, like water rushing downwards from the breaking of a dam.

He felt sleepy. Lazy, almost. His eyelids were heavy as sandbags, and his tail felt limp. And yet he was compelled to continue, feeling an obligation to depart this particular poem from his childhood upon the mortal standing in the distance. But why?

The behemoth wasn’t sure. He just knew that he had to do it.

He toyed with them all day with fright,

Reveling in watching them laugh and fight,

He made them work all through the night,

Just to see the next sunlight,

‘But why’, someone came out to say,

‘Do we have to work the night away?’

When Kronos heard such words alright,

He began to set the world alight.

But there was fault within his plan,

He knew not of the rocking man–

…

The behemoth’s skin crawled, noticing an exceptional magical force emitting from a location several kilometers away. His hypnotic stupor was broken, and he blinked in a daze.

The magic signature was not the boy’s. It felt similar to his in some way, but in a much more sinister fashion. All in all, the mana felt surprisingly familiar, as if he encountered it before in the underworld.

Suddenly, he realized whose mana it was.

Hecate.

Without another word, he turned tail and fled into the distance, leaving Devon bewildered.

—–

Devon spent the next few hours after the behemoth fled collecting some food and beer from the pantry of the tavern inn. He scoured the rest of the village for anything useful he could find, eventually producing two knapsacks to hold some food and other belongings as well as a compass and, to his surprise, the golden watch that the visiting noble wagered in the gamble during the night of their victory over the howler monkeys.

He also had his bag of coins, and added some more to his coin collection. The villagers were relatively poor, so they did not have many coins, and the ones they did have were stuck under beds or between counters and other hiding places. He left most of the hidden coins untouched, taking only from the abodes of the more fortunate traveling merchants and nobles.

Not a single carriage remained in the stables or otherwise, with indications that they were all deployed in the villagers’ hurried escape from the village. It made sense now why they left– the behemoth must have made quite a commotion coming this way. And since it was targeting him specifically, it probably made a beeline for this village once it caught a whiff of his mana through. The camouflage effect of [Blessing of the Witch] probably activated too late, and gave away his location.

With his pockets heavy with coin and the Mjolnir slung on his back, or at least the pommel of the Mjolnir affixed with a high quality moonlight steel sword to be more technically accurate, Devon set off on foot towards the rural path, following the tracks of the carriage.

Meanwhile, in a place not too far from where he was, a certain bespectacled businesswoman in a tight ripped black pencil skirt and beer stained white shirt’s purple eyes were lit with rage, as she followed the roar of the one of the thirteen noble demon clan’s Behemoths.