"Can I please tell him this part?" Ginsi looked at Lerva intently.
"Okay."
"The boy wasn't anything special, even a bit slow to catch on to things. But the thing that struck his father as odd was the fact that the boy wanted nothing more but to fight the darkness. He knew that Ouran was scared but he could help but linger on the look in his eyes.
So, when Ouran ran into the darkness alone, accompanied by none, I felt a loss, and at the same time, I felt it was something that was going to happen sooner or later. I didn't even try to stop him, it would be undermining his resolve, especially since no one knew him more than I did. I just felt a bit sad that this is how he was choosing to go.
What I had not thought of, is that Ouran was not intending to die. That was not a suicide march. His memories went dark, they flashed bright, dropping someone on the boundary. It went dark again, flashing bright every time he came out with a couple of people on his shoulders.
Over and over, people began to pile. In all essence, the title that would later be known as knight Errant, started with him, and inspired the creation of such a rank. Things took a turn for the worse now. Every time he peaked out, he was more battered than the last time. His armour became so scrapped you could see the sores on his bare skin.
Slower and slower he got. Ouran peaked out once again, fatigued, and exhausted. The people were scarred witless, yet they wanted to tell him not to go back in. None did, for all of them imagined themselves as being one of the last few stuck in there, and having the chance of survival snipped from them, without even a chance. Even still, through the visor of Ouran's helmet, they saw that he would have ignored their protest.
His breathing became heavy and clogged. His power, [State], allowed him to reverse the states of different things, or even vary between states of matter. Once a destroyer got too close, he switched his battered state, for its grand form. But it failed.
This was nothing new, he understood that the state of beings could not be switched so easily for the weak. Ouran's body kept switching between phases of matter, it didn't help him this time, for even the ethereal cannot escape the grasp of the darkness. A feeling welled up in him at his earlier thought about him being weak.
"Weak? Me?"
A strange appendage from the side gouged his side, filling him with a kind of toxin beyond his body's capability to handle, and that was saying something, considering he was at level 250. Not only that, but the claw like thing went on to shuffle his organs. At this moment he thought about it again, almost admitting to being weak.
"Never!"
He then drove his blade into the appendage in his side, shattering it into flakes of bloody steel. He knew for a matter of fact, there were still people in here, even if he could not feel them in the conventional sense.
'Just hold on for a little longer, I need to get this pest off me.'
This was big talk, but ultimately empty. Ouran sure didn't think it was. Using his unparalleled coordination, he grabbed tightly to the appendage, his gauntlet in tethers, he felt the nauseating contact on his fingers, that immediately just rooted off. Even the bones beneath rotted to purple sludge, mixing with the creature.
Unphased by the pain, and by my abject horror, he the swung his head, taking a huge bite into the appendage that had just rotted his entire arm into nothing. This was no mistake, neither was it done in blind rage, or blinded by any other emotion.
"You freakin think just because my hand is gone, my blade is shattered I cannot stop you. Dream again."
At this moment, the millisecond before his teeth touched the seething flesh like substitute, an explosion occurred flinging any and everything near him away, violently. For an instant, his body became a bomb as strong as his resolve. In the clearing of the heat, his body stood there unscathed by the explosion.
He looked at his arm, introspecting it, watching all of it including the bones regenerate, as well as his side. Sadly, his armour was just a piece of junk, it remained in scraps.
Ouran had done something amazing, and he immediately knew what it was.
"I broke the second seal?"
He had learned that to unleash one had to prove their qualification to power. To learn a special skill, they had to chose a path they most would like to follow. To learn a power, one must flex authority at something they had no authority over, and not even doubt. But then the question became how one would break the second seal?
Being slow, he could not take credit for all these findings, but being an advent reader, he had absorbed all of it like a greedy sponge. Whilst Lerva's papers had many a conclusion on how to do this thing of which even she did not think existed or could be done, existing in nothing but theory, only one of these theories hit home with Ouran.
It was part of Lerva's more recent studies. It studied how and why different people take different paths. Likening the second seal to the first, they knew they had to prove something, but this time, they were all not proving the same thing, qualification to power, but they were proving something unique to them.
It had to do with his special skill, or it was a clue. Instead of his physical state, he had to change some other state about him. It then occurred to him, that the gap in strength between him and the destroyers always bothered him but never the first knight.
Realising that everyone except the first knight and legendary hero Eruil, entered the darkness without a single thought that they could lose. Both of them were far weaker than him, yet they went on to fight regardless, Eruil even caused enough havoc to force them to strategically retreat, why couldn't he?
'Because my arm fell off? Because my innards are decorating the floor? Because my armour and sword were snowflakes buried in the sand?'
He didn't care, for at that moment, not even expecting this to make him stronger or anything, without even knowing if this is what breaking the second seal was about, he went in to chew the appendage off. None of this mattered, because his state of mind had changed. Now he looked at all of them with not arrogance, but a certainty he would and could win, regardless of how much worse the situation could get.
In that moment, he proved something to himself, he may not be an incarnation of the first ever knight, but there was no doubt, none whatsoever, that he indeed was a true knight. His second seal broke with a thunderous bang, snapping open the flood gates that had blocked his water from flowing.
This was so fundamental that it went on to become the knight doctrine. The same one that Lerva had been looking for, in order to be able to screen squires into knight. The absolute certainty of victory against all odds, and not because of arrogance, but because you refuse to lose, even to the darkness, actually, especially to the darkness.
After breaking this seal, all the training to level up that had been pent up, just waiting for him to break the seal, rushed through, instantly levelling his body up to level 261.
This was also valuable data, it showed us that the second seal stopped one from levelling up, but all the levelling up they made rushes through. Almost like someone writing an assignment so early that when it is finally open to submission, you instantly get graded. This was a minor thing when compared to Ouran's accomplishment.
After all that, he hurriedly tried to rescue the ones left and leave that place. He went through many a towns on his way back to the academy, spending those thousand years rescuing all that he could alone. Having broken the second seal, he became the second legendary hero, Ouran of power, right next to Eruil of change.
Ouran became known as the hero of power because he showed that even more power could be gained, but beyond that, he showed that power levels were not a constriction, one could take on anyone, they just had to be a knight in their heart.
Lerva, you can tell the rest of the story from here."
"Thank you Ginsi."
She then took a sip of a soothing drink. Laurel Fo had made everyone some. Truthfully, she was trying to get the Knight to take it's helmet off. All of them realised her ploy, also hopefully hoping it would work. Despite the delectable smell of this heavenly sweet and flavourful drink, it refused, to their predictable disappointment.
"After he came back, Ouran made it a priority to establish these teachings, this philosophy that he had imprinted on himself from the first knight, and the first legendary hero. I also began to meditate on my skill, [Confide in Confidence]. But since all of us shared the same power, all I had to do is figure it out, and when they finally reached level 250 like me, they could do it.
All of us Laurels are actually different beings sharing a single universal signature, we did not level up at the same rate, but we all eventually do the same constructs of power, sharing even our special skill. Each Laurel is born at the level I created them at, to level up, they need to put in their own effort. As it stood, I was the only one at level 250.
To remedy this, I made three new Laurels, Roon, Egnism, and Sdoli. Their task was to keep training until they broke their seal focusing on our special skill. Once done, they would come back to tell the rest of us how to do it, whilst I went back to my studies and a did bit of my other work.
I tended to shy away from it, but I had been called mother, the official ruler of the Earth, but then things changed. More and more manifestations began happening, in rapid succession. Amongst these were the ones most known today, most going extinct.
The forest folk, dragon kin, elementals, spirits, ghosts, mentalists, mountain folk, sea folk, beast folk, and the most troubling, were the true beasts, and even worse, the cloud folk, they referred to themselves as the gods.
Other manifestations were more recent; the ancient ones of this time were quite troublesome. This is the well theatrically retold era of power, ushered by Ouran. Many separated, forming their own coalitions, deeming that, they could find another way to face the darkness that I could not see.
I tried to stop them, but only briefly. Each provided ample reasoning as to why they thought this. Later on, of course, long after Ouran's death, I learned that destroyers preferred fighting those that had taken on powers without manifesting. I theorised from my own manifestation that something about this change altered the contents of my soul.
If this was true, it meant that, not only will less effort be put into fighting the other manifestations, but destroyers would go on to obliterate them without any mercy, almost as if when facing those with default souls, they were torn between losing something potentially precious and not losing to it.
I likened it to the ancient human dilemma, where someone is against fighting itself, but will defend themselves if need be. I never published this, but I learned that being a default soul meant that the destroyers took it easier in battle to avoid doing something irreversible, but push comes to shove, this hesitation did not stop them.
So, unfortunately, this meant that other manifestations would not enjoy this added, minor but appreciated hesitation from the destroyers. And this is how, it eventually came to be that only humans became knights, whilst anyone is welcome to try, those who do pass, never lived past their first encounter.
It was as if the destroyers took one good look at them and said make yourselves scarce. Once in a while though, special individuals appear who can still fight despite this, one of them is the hero of old, Elleria, a forest folk ancestor who defended the place until help arrived. There was also Moiler, the ancestor of the forgotten manifestation, Infections.
No-one bets an eye when discarding rotten food, and this made me realise what made the destroyers were so much more different than everything in the world, the fact we looked more like livestock than anything. But destroyers had also been battling something else, the fact that we had become so formidable that they had to take us seriously in battle.
So, the nations of other manifestations set up their own guards, choosing their own paths. Those who joined the knights eventually died, quickly too. And those that survived were celebrated but were far and few in between. By the time I made this discovery, it was too late, too many manifestations had separated themselves, on the foolish assumption that alone they could become far more than what the knights were.
I knew the arrogance of their leaders, imposing such a law upon their descendants before they were born was madness, but I didn't stop them. Honestly, before I made the discovery, I actually believed their reasoning too, I thought manifestations were the future of the fight.
Not just me, everyone else thought that manifestations were the next big step after the knights. The ones who would go on to free all of us, especially since their children were born with a power, and only had to fulfil simpler conditions to unlock them.
No-one saw the great purge coming. One person in particular chose to blame themselves for this and chose to do something rash about it. Ouran's resolve was as unrivalled as his incredible self-coordination, and even Ginsi couldn't stop him from going."