170 Yoelona
Unlike Luke, who was using the long trip to practice his skills, learn about the world, and study during breaks, Alexis, Yoelona, and Matthew were having an arduous journey.
Let’s just say that the personalities of the three were not at all compatible. While Yoelona was a discreet woman who was suspicious of everything, the half-dragon was a woman who drew attention everywhere she went, both because of her appearance and her humor. Matthew acted as the appeaser of the two women’s brief intrigues, that is, except when his kleptomania made him steal from someone because those were the only times Yoelona and Alexis were on the same side.
Luckily, the S-Class managed to gain some of Yoelona’s trust over the weeks and tried to discover why she was so scared of a demon; after all, Alexis had seen several during her life. The half-dragon understood that demons can be frightening to normal people, but she still judged the reaction of wanting all the people she has a connection with to leave the big cities to be exaggerated.
One night, while they were resting around a bonfire, Alexis told how she used to eliminate some demons at the request of the Cardinal Church. The emissaries would do the intelligence and support work while she was sent to the fight. This information made Yoelona finally trust in the half-dragon.
After looking at the ground and being silent for several minutes, while sitting on a log of wood near the fire, Yoelona declared:
“All right… I will tell you two everything, so pay attention.”
Matthew and Alexis, who were chatting about what Luke was like in childhood, were surprised by the woman’s sudden speech and began to pay attention immediately.
The story which Yoelona told began ten years before she even met Luke. At that time, she was still living in the city where she was born, in the Melki Empire.
As a result of her hard work and unique skills, she was called to a special team that would report directly to the emperor. After commanding a simple battalion for more than fifteen years in Stahurt, she thought that now she would finally gain the recognition she deserved for her efforts.
However, Yoelona’s happiness turned to frustration, and as the years passed in that special team, following the emperor’s orders became more and more arduous.
“Kill that entire village, they are insurgents!”
“Execute this man, he refuses to obey my authority!”
“Burn that village, and don’t you dare to spare the children like last time! They are plagues too!”
The face of the emperor of Melki soon ceased to be the symbol of power that Yoelona so admired, and his eyes seemed to grow denser and colder. The message embedded in Yoelona’s heart that the Melki Empire was powerful, honorable, and peaceful slowly faded away.
Even after developing post-traumatic stress disorder, Yoelona stood firm in her position. She could barely detail what those months were like for Alexis and Matthews because nothing seemed to be alive to her during that time.
After gaining the full confidence of all her colleagues and the emperor, in a desperate act of trying to find proof that everything they were doing was really for the good of the nation, Yoelona invaded the basement of the palace on Mount Palatine. Since there was a party taking place that night at the top of the palace, she thought it would be impossible to discover.
Yoelona managed to easily infiltrate the basement, but the things she discovered that night didn’t prove that the emperor ordered all this for the good of the nation, but rather to benefit one particular race: the demons.
The lands burned by the emperor’s special squad were used to store monster nests, and the bodies of the ‘insurgents’ were used to feed the Devil himself.
On top of all this, she found a map with the names of almost two hundred demons gathered throughout the Melki Empire. On this map, the entire territory of the nation was divided into ten different regions, and the leader of each region was called the ‘Servant of Chaos’.
Upon discovering all this, Yoelona fled as fast as she could from that land, where she could no longer feel safe.
‘All my life, I believed I was defending the sovereignty and honor of an Empire, but I was actually defending the territory of monsters…’ The same conclusion kept hammering in the former soldier’s mind.
Even after years passed, Yoelona continued to live as a nomad, traveling throughout the Broteforge Empire. The traumas of her life didn’t allow her to live in the same region for more than a few weeks, fearing that she would be found by demons.
This changed a little when she met some children who tried to steal from her. These children were: Meredith, Matthew, Luke, Ynosuke, and Zack. They attracted her affection and were able to comfort some of her anguish.
Yoelona soon decided that she would help them in some way, but she was terrible at arithmetic and grammar, so she paid a trusted man named Dwarven to teach four of the children during his spare time, while one would train with her personally. Between a huge teenager named Zack, an experienced martial artist whose name was Ynosuke, and a half-wolf named Luke, she chose the one who seemed to be the fastest at absorbing the techniques she could teach.
Although she knew that this would leave them at a disadvantage to most and wanted to be hypocritical of her, Yoelona always told them to use Gene Skills under no circumstances. In the end, the truth was that the ex-military woman was still very afraid of anything that was even remotely related to demons.
“So, I ran away from you guys…” Yoelona spoke, still looking at Matthew. The man with a few gray hairs was shocked by the woman’s story. “I thought that if I stayed, I might become emotionally dependent on you, and that if the demons ever found me, you would be at risk.”
Although her voice was slightly emotional, no muscle in Yoelona’s face seemed to express her true feelings, as if they were paralyzed.
“So, I moved to the far end of the continent, in a town just outside the big city Suzano. I built a hut for myself and was living happily. One day, I heard rumors of a beast in the nearby forest and went to kill it to calm the population, but what I found was not a beast, not an ordinary monster but a legitimate demon, disguising itself in human skin.”
“How did you know it was a demon?” Matthew inquired, startled and wrapped up in the subject. He had never gotten to see a demon personally.
“I didn’t simply deduce that he was a demon, I recognized his appearance from one of the scrolls I found in the basement of the Emperor’s Palace of Melki. I remember to this day everything I read in those scrolls…” Yoelona spoke and stood up from the log.
It was already about dawn, and none of them could rest from being wrapped up in the woman’s story.
“That night in the forest, I learned that the demons are no longer content with just the dominance of the Melki Empire. And if they want to, the Broteforge Empire will fall soon.” She said and stepped on the fire with her boots to extinguish the fire.
“Now I know why you didn’t tell until you knew I was a member of the Cardinal Church…” Alexis spoke with a confident smile. His horns were sparkling with animation.