Trent blight is not a disease that just waits for someone to get on their way. Medes used the treasured tin soldier positioning circle to risk forcibly teleporting himself to the public teleportation circle closest to Flint.
The young miscellaneous scientist didn't have time to clean up his appearance, his stained robe, messy hair and beard. Under the messy bangs, tears kept dripping on the cracked teleportation silver plate.
He may never use it again.
Flint looked worse than Meders—five months away, and now Flint was horribly thin, with no gleam in his eyes. It was as if the muscles and internal organs had been removed alive, leaving only a dying body.
Medes wasn't sure whether to hug his former head.
"Let me see Miss Ramon," he said simply, walking towards the modest house.
The phantom Oliver clenched Nemo's tightly. Too bad he could only see half of his mother's face - Sonia reclining at the head of the bed, soft cloth wrapped around her eyes. She put one lightly on her obviously bulging belly, and there was a soothing smile on the corner of her mouth. Even if only half of his face is exposed, that smile is still sweet.
"Mr. Meders," she greeted politely. "Hello, this is our first time seeing each other. Unfortunately, I can't get out of bed to greet you."
She paused for a moment. "Is there food on the table on the left? I'm hungry."
"Uh, yes." Medes responded subconsciously.
"Sure enough... Flint! You didn't eat well, what did I say last night?" Sonia's momentum was not weakened by the illness, although Flint looked haggard, he still shrank his neck subconsciously.
"Sonia..." Flint sat down on the edge of the bed, shaking his wife's sweaty bangs. "I'll eat in a minute, I promise."
Medes stood by the bed, and a large array of magic circles of different sizes joined end to end and circled around Sonia from head to toe. He was silent for half a minute: "It is indeed Trent blight. According to the time you contacted me and Miss Ramon's physical condition, she is now at the end of the... contagious period. Flint, I have to talk to you alone. talk."
Hearing this sentence, their fearless head trembled slightly.
"No." Sonia's voice was brisk, and the smile on the corner of her mouth still didn't disappear. "I don't mind, I want to know."
"...Miss Ramon..."
"Go ahead, Balthazar." Flint squeezed his wife's. "Tell us."
"I know you must have notified me as soon as possible, but... it's too late." Medes gritted his teeth, "At the end of the contagious period, the curse has begun to spread, I may have a way to slow down this process, but... "
"How long is the maximum?" Sonia asked earnestly. "Flint told me about Trent blight, and I'm about to start having one. Is that so?"
"Typically, the first day after the contagious period is over, people can keep their normal thinking. But from the second day on, the curse will start to destroy the brain. Finally it will focus on your eyes, turning them into cros Seeds of Eden's Blood Tree."
"Yeah." Sonia didn't show a look of fear or collapse, she nodded calmly, and the one that was not held by Flint gently stroked her abdomen. "and then?"
"I, uh, based on my research..."
The wandering dancer and Dmitry thought completely different. She didn't have the slightest charming temperament, and in the face of her impending death, Sonia looked calm and calm. And he himself began to stutter, his throat a little bitter,
"Based on my research, Flint is able to use his power to temporarily suppress the curse, and the time you stay awake becomes two days. But after two days, no matter how hard he tries, the curse will... I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. If I Could have been there earlier, if I had done some more research..."
"What if I don't want the child?" Flint asked suddenly.
"Pregnancy makes her physically weak, doesn't it? So if we don't want the baby, can she... just one more day..."
"Flint!" Sonia yelled.
"I'm sorry, Flint. Any external force applied now will exacerbate Miss Ramon's weakness." Medeth's long uncut nails pierced the palm of his hand.
The man who killed the Demon King sat on the edge of the bed, his lower lip trembling. After more than ten seconds, he finally let out a faint choked sob. As if it was himself who was pronounced near death.
"Mr. Meders." Sonia patted Flint on the back and continued to ask calmly. "Are our children still alive?"
Medes stayed where he was for a while.
"Based on what I know, I have a wild guess. This child is still part of my body, and the main target of the curse is my brain. Even if the child will be infected with the curse, it should be him who will start the disease. Or the moment she survived as a 'human individual'. Is that so?"
"In theory..." The woman was terribly smart.
"That is -- as long as the child survives, it will be the first case to be detected at the earliest stages of infection."
Sonia stopped rubbing her stomach: "Listen to what you just said, 'early detection' will help. And now there is indeed a patient who was found early enough. Mr. Medes, tell me, this child Is there any hope?"
"Yes," Meders replied numbly, "but that's just a theory, and... as I said, any external force will do anything to your body..."
"I have at most two days to live." Sonia's voice was very firm. "My brain is rotten into a pot of porridge. I just have a body that can breathe. I don't want to die like that. After I lose consciousness, you guys think of ways to save this child. Just fine."
"I see what you mean. Come here, Balthazar, this time we have to talk to the two of us," Flint said with difficulty, as if the words were filled with broken glass and he vomited blood from his throat . "It's time for you to rest, Sonia."
"Don't go." Sonia grabbed the edge of her lover's clothes. "I want to stay with you a little longer. We made a promise to each other, dear. We won't hide anything from each other, have you forgotten?"
"Sonia..."
"Even if you can't see it, I can smell it." She tried her best to make her tone light. "You have something on your mind, a very important one. You see, I'm not even afraid of death, and your little secret can't knock me down. Let me guess—you know who did this, don't you?"
"..." Flint closed his eyes in pain.
Medes sucked in a breath: "Do you need me to avoid it?"
"No, I trust you, my brother." Flint hugged his wife wearily.
"Balthazar, I think you should have heard of the recent war between Alban and Willard." Flint lowered his eyes. "The two sides have been at a standoff."
"I know. But this should have nothing to do with you. Didn't you agree with Your Majesty to retire?"
"Yes, but less than a month ago, Sampson called me into the palace for a heart-to-heart talk. You know that I failed to protect Abbas and let him die at the bottom of the abyss. Bringing back the bone jade is considered to serve the country, but it is an affair. Go... I always felt I owed the Alastair family. So I went."
Flint did not use the title "Your Majesty".
"Sampson's meaning was very clear, he asked me 'Have you had enough rest'. He also said that if I wanted, he could help me call up anyone I wanted. He wanted the 'Tin Soldiers' back as a legendary mercenary group Acting again, even intervening in war."
"..." Medes was speechless.
"Actually, that's what I thought too." The necromancer next to Oliver added at this moment, "Flint is still so young, and he is so strong, he will always start over. To be honest, I... dreamed of him rebuilding the Tin Soldier. "
"How stupid I am," said the dry bone softly.
And Flint on the other side continued.
"I rejected him... Rather, I rejected him very firmly. I told him I had brought back enough bone jade for Alban to last five hundred years, and I didn't want to rebuild the tin soldiers for the war. No one could Replacing my former comrade."
Flint smiled sadly: "I also told him that I have recently started looking for a house in a remote village. My baby is four months away, and now I just want to live a peaceful life with my family. He laughs I agreed, like it was just a whim of an old man. I shouldn't have been so firm, Sonia, it was all my fault..."
"What did the Alastair family do?" Sonia pondered for a moment, "Why didn't you contact your younger brother immediately?"
"Well. This old friend of mine is more sober, brother he's too upright. Now I'm going to Iman for help, and when he knows the truth, I don't know what's going to happen - he's also a soon-to-be father and I don't want to. Take him away from his children."
Flint put his chin on his wife's shoulder: "Emmanuel is the Knight Commander of the trial. If he has nothing to do with this matter, no matter how it ends, the Pope will have no problem keeping him."
Medes stood stiffly, his Adam's apple rolling. "If I'm not mistaken, Flint. You mean... Your Majesty did all this?"
"I guess he didn't want me to find out... I..."
"Let me tell you." Sonia stroked Flint's hair and sighed softly. "Flint went to look for our future home the other day. He has always protected me very well, and our quarters are kept secret in order to prevent the retaliation of the tin soldiers enemies. Flint has also set up all over our quarters. A magic circle that detects powerful magic items. I won't be stupid enough to run around, at most at the market at the door."
"I smelled a wonderful scent that day, and oh my God, it was an indescribably wonderful scent. An old blind old woman was selling spice bags in a tent, and I went over and looked. I've always loved these things, Flint knows, our majesty... should know. Actually, it's suspicious now that I think about it. The old lady kept insisting that she would sell it to a 'fateful person' and drove away several customers. And when I went, she Just warmly pulled me into the tent."
"It's like I'm afraid I'll run away." She smiled helplessly.
"The scent of the Croydon blood tree," Medes guessed dryly.
"She pulled me, and I was instantly drawn to the smell. Like all spice merchants, she took the spice bags apart in the tent to show the contents."
"There was a shriveled fruit with gold dust in it, which I had never seen before. So I looked closely for a while—and she grabbed mine and kept her finger on the fruit of my heart. I guess to make sure that I enough time to watch."
Flint hugged his beloved wife tightly and said nothing.
"Then my eyes started to hurt, and I thought it was dust at first—but when I got home, the pain was still there. I'm out and about, and I'm still aware of normal eye pain. Something was wrong, and I immediately contacted Flynn. special."
"And I found the breath of the curse of the abyss." Flint's mood finally calmed down.
"But Your Majesty... Your Majesty should not have the fruit of the Croydon Blood Tree." Medes' voice trembled more and more severely.
"I thought so, too, before I had the occasional chat with Abbas." Fury finally began to appear in Flint's voice. "Abbas said a long time ago that he slipped into the palace laboratory warehouse while everyone was not paying attention, and discovered the source of the disease that should have disappeared. A smiley face."
"Sonia was wrong. My first reaction was to ask the court physicians for help. They soon diagnosed Trent blight. The emperor told me that the old woman was a spy sent by Willard and wanted to kill me. And caused a plague in Alban. Let me mourn by the way—how reasonable that sounds."
"'It's Dinni's arrangement, my poor boy. You're far from retirement, it's time to go back to the field.' . . . he said."
"But after that, Sonia described the fruit to me. There's a smiling face at the bottom of the fruit, Balthazar." Flint's voice trembled violently.
"Maybe it's just a coincidence..." Medes struggled.
"There are two vertical lines on the mouth of the smiling face, which is a bit familiar, and I took a few more glances because of this." Sonia added with a sigh.
Abbas' usual mark, a smiling face with two vertical lines on its mouth. A secret code known only to Abbas's friends—there is no coincidence to explain what is happening now.
The whole room fell silent for a while.
"Remember our agreement, Flint?" Sonia was the first to speak.
"Which one?"
"The one you said after the marriage proposal—if you, as a mercenary, die when your child doesn't remember anything, let me not tell the child too much about you. You don't want your descendants to have too naive visions for this profession. ."
"Um."
"Now is my request, if our child survives, you don't tell him anything about me. Although I don't think you'd do anything stupid, I don't want him to grow up with hatred. Promise me, Flint."
"I… "
"I beg you."
"...Okay." The head of the Tin Soldier mercenary regiment had red eyes and looked like he was about to cry.
"I'm really tired now, maybe you two also need a little time to communicate." Sonia clenched the quilt and tried to give them a smile. "Go talk for a while, lads. I need a half-hour's sleep."
But when they walked out of the room and closed the door, they could still hear the desperate and suppressed cries in the room.
Tears welled up in Flint's eyes. He gritted his teeth, not daring to make a sound. It wasn't until he got far enough that he dared to allow himself to let out a loud sob.
"Flint..." Medes took a step back.
"What do I need to do next?" After finally calming down, the most powerful man on the surface was finally able to speak again.
"Your child can survive, there is only a little theoretical hope." Medes closed his eyes in pain. "As your friend, I advise you to give up."
"Tell me what to do," Flint murmured. "It's her wish."
"A five-month-old fetus... You need to use your own flesh and strength to keep this child alive. That's regardless of Trent's blight. If you really want to save the child, you must use your strength to suppress the curse, Seal it in that heart."
"If only to seal..."
"It's not as simple as sealing it." Under a series of desperate shocks, Medes finally cried out in collapse. "The curse is held in the heart, and the heart grows, but it can't beat! Listen, it can't beat! You've got to put in enough power to support it with your power—you know that means What, Flint, it's going to hollow you out!"
Medes tugged at his hair.
"I have to tell you that even if you do, the chances of this child surviving are a measly few percent. But once your power is drained to the limit, it won't recover! You... you Can't take us with you any more..."
"I want to be a good father if I can." Flint wiped the tears from his face fiercely and squeezed the sentence between his teeth. "It's definitely hard, I know, but that doesn't require world-shattering forces."
"You'll have nothing." The wound on Medes' palm is still bleeding. "If this kid... you'll really have nothing. Please Flint, you've always been the most rational one of us. Yes, I feel sorry for Sonia too, but you will come out, everyone will always come out. Your future is still very long, and you are very awake now... "
"I'm not coming out," Flint said slowly.
"There's only one Sonia Ramon and one Flint Lopez in this world. There can't be two identical feelings, and I'm pretty sure I can't get out."
"Many people have had this experience, you can't be so weak!"
"You don't understand, Balthazar. I'm going to be homeless soon."
"You'll have another home, Flint... Captain!"
"No, never again. The home that belongs to me, never again."
Oliver's eyes turned red, and he let out a long sigh of relief, trying to keep himself breathing in this depressing fantasy. He grabbed his chest, his heart was beating vigorously.
"As you can see. Sonia was awake for two days, and then... I took you out of your mother's body, Oliver Ramon. The head of the regiment began to rescue you as agreed, but... The over-injection of power is very painful, like peeling off the skin. I thought that at this point, the captain would retreat. But he didn't."
"He's really mad. From the moment Miss Ramon died, he was mad. At least I thought that. He was mad to save you. — 'The child isn't even a whole person, Sonia is dead, she won't know — you should take care of yourself.'"
"Then he beat me." The necromancer touched his skinless cheek.
"I left there without seeing the result. Maybe I didn't want to see the despair of the most powerful man. At that time, your father didn't let anyone approach. Just doing everything in his power to save you. At that time, you looked like a formless corpse, and he didn't even look like a human being."
"That doesn't sound like an outrageous mistake." Oliver's voice trembled a little. "Maybe you're overly blaming yourself."
"Do not."
The necromancer stood in the fog and did not call out more images.
"As a coward, I've been inquiring about him from afar since then. A month later I heard that he had returned to the capital near Alban with the Sword of Remnant, no children but a coffin on his back. .I thought… "
"You think he's going to seek revenge on Sampson?" Nemo's voice was flat, and he had a pretty bad guess.
"It was a critical period of the war," said the dry bone softly. "If he killed Alban's king at that time, Alban would be over."
Oliver turned his head in disbelief, staring at the Necromancer beside him.
Medes held the tin soldier's badge with a bone full of talismans.
"I struggled for a long time."
"The head of the regiment is the person I admire the most in the world, but I've seen the craziest, most irrational side of him... I ask myself, do I really have the right to put the lives of an entire country on a desperate man in character?"
Nemo closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.
"… I told Sampson. I betrayed the trust of the commander, I told Sampson." Blood and tears flowed from the skeleton's eyes.
"I told him... Flint knew what you were doing, you have to be careful not to see him."
"Since I'm still alive, that means that my father was not the capital that went for revenge." Oliver looked away from Medes.
"Yes. He's still the same Flint Lopez after all." Medes' voice was full of pain and remorse. "But Sampson Alastair is Sampson Alastair after all. He knows that in this way, he has completely offended Flint, a strong man... He took advantage of Flint's weakness to treat Flint Lint issued a hunt order."
"I've been on my knees and begged the king countless times to assure him that Flint is no longer the unusually strong man he used to be... but he doesn't believe it."
"Because you're one of the Tin Soldiers." Ann's tone was full of sarcasm. "He wouldn't believe it, he's just that kind of person—the ruthless king who stifled all danger in the bud."
"And then another month, Sampson got a gift. A gift from Flint Lopez."
"...gift?" Adrian frowned.
"Flint's own right arm." The light in Medes' eyes dimmed. "Only a note was attached, 'We will be separated from now on.'"
"It was cut off with complex abyss magic and cannot be recovered by healing. The captain also knows Sampson... Now that I think about it, he should be protecting you, Oliver. He wants to eliminate his 'threat' and protect you from Austria Ilburn's pursuit."
"But Uncle Ramon... no, the right arm of the Flint we know is intact."
"This is what I want to tell you, the end of the story." Meders glanced at the silent Oliver, his voice very weak. With trembling fingers, he summoned the last vision.
Young Medes was standing in the room.
A noose hangs in the house, and Medes is standing in front of it, staring blankly at the swinging rope. He stretched out one and fiddled with it lightly.
He shaved and groomed himself neatly, the tin soldier's badge glittering on his chest.
After a few minutes, he sighed slightly and got up on the chair. But the communication crystal engraved with the emblem of the tin soldier began to flicker at this moment. Meders fell straight off the wooden chair, he didn't even have time to stand up, he climbed directly beside the crystal—
"Let's meet, Balthazar." Flint's voice came from the crystal. "It's time to end this."