Lewd King's Bucket List-Chapter 51: Child of War (2)
My birth was the stuff of legends!
You wouldn’t believe how hard my mother had to squeeze to push me out.
Turned out she had quite a small pelvic bone, which didn’t particularly help when squeezing out a big-headed baby.
And I don’t mean metaphorically.
My cranium was astronomically large! Like, huge! You wouldn’t believe it if I told you!
Thankfully, they had some weird cap that regulated the growth of my head, so I didn’t grow up to be some sort of hideous monster.
No, no.
I grew up to be a beautiful monster!
My natural blue hair proof of my Catatran lineage. My chiseled jawline a result of my father. Yup! Praise me, love me, adore me!
Don’t worry. You can, Pax. My Origin will be in pretty bad shape by the time you read this.
But that’s beside the point.
My mother only held me once within the first few weeks after I was born, that being the actual day.
With her elevated constitution, she recovered from childbirth in mere hours and was already returned to the frontlines.
Frontlines, which she immediately found to be more disastrous than she’d ever imagined.
She’d been hearing great success stories of my father, but had been much too naïve to see them for the lie they were.
Even after seeing the horrid state, all she had was a kernel of doubt.
The first time she asked the whereabouts of King Antion, she’d been told the same thing she always had.
"Things are pretty bad up north. If the King left his post, the line would collapse."
The next time, a slightly different answer saying the same thing.
As if the soldiers had been directed to say such a thing.
In fact, my mother noticed the odd way people seemed to act around her, even on the battlefield. Like they all felt guilty.
To some, her presence wasn’t something that inspired a sense of victory but represented the defeat of humanity.
Those outliers still refused to reveal the truth.
Years passed without my mother learning of my father’s death.
Told you, best kept secret in the world. One that nearly everyone in the army knew but her.
Maybe she would have been more suspicious, but the dire situation on the frontlines didn’t allow it.
She was, of course, upset at being unable to see my father, but she understood the reasons.
Either way, she had three year old me to rely on. To keep her company.
The baby, which the soldiers openly adored and secretly hated.
My mother knew they blamed me for her absence. She vehemently disagreed with them, but to not bring down morale, she withheld her hatred for those who talked ill of her baby.
Her baby, me, the awesome big bad Ixion, who was raised by random soldiers — a three-year-old who barely knew the face of his own mother.
As much as I was hated by the others at first. My dashingly cute looks led those close to dote on me. Even teaching me how to swing a stick as if a sword.
That faction eventually grew fond of me and would become my greatest supporters.
Two of that crew were teenagers, not even...
I think they were twelve at the time. Having lied on their forms and enlisted to battle.
The two cadets, Despair and Hope.
While most of that group were like parents to me, those two were more like friends. Always by my side and playing with me. Especially so when their ages were found out, and they were forbidden from entering battle until they turned fifteen.
Unlike most, those two knew not of King Anton’s death, having enlisted after.
Though the truth of my father’s fate eventually reached them.
Despair, before he became a bastard, was outraged at the charade. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I asked Hope years later, and it went something like this:
"Brother! Is this the world we want to protect?! The world we came to the frontlines to die for?! A wold which lies to their protector?! A world that favors the weak who hide behind the strong?"
That wasn’t his entire spiel, but it was a good summary of it.
My mother overheard Despair’s rage.
Yet, Despair had not outright named my mother as ’protector.’
Even after three years of not seeing her husband, she only held doubt at most that something had happened to him. That the stories regaled to her were fabrications.
Eventually, the truth bubbled in her mind. But she began to delude herself that he still lived. The only thing holding back her mental breakdown was me and a secret.
But, as with all secrets, it could only be kept by the dead.
If someone who knew the secret was alive — almost all soldiers — it would eventually worm its way to her ear.
Yet, it was the way the truth was revealed to her that broke her.
Maybe she could have recovered if she hadn’t seen it herself...
The Scourge — Corrupted as you call it — as I’m sure you’ve witnessed by now, Pax, spreads merely by touch alone.
Once one touches it, their body and soul mutate into something horrific and grotesque.
Even the strongest can be culled by a single drop touching their skin.
With that fact in mind, it was very rare for a soldier to ’die’ on the battlefield. For that to happen, they’d have to be killed in a fraction of a second.
It happened, but rarely.
And it most definitely never happened to the strong.
It definitely didn’t happen to King Antion, one of the strongest to ever live.
It was easy to guess by now, but he’d been mutated into an abomination.
Two years after I met Despair and Hope, on my fifth birthday, my mother got an urgent notice of an absurdly powerful Scourge beast tearing soldiers apart left and right. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶
She rushed to the scene, ready to face the monster.
When she got there, she didn’t see a monster; she saw the man within.
