There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL) novel Chapter 167

Chapter 167: Chapter 162. The Knight’s Duty

The room was filled with coughing sounds then, and as the others tried to calm the Elder, Zein and Bassena looked at each other in palpable confusion.

"Alright, sorry for calling you that," Bassena, as the one who uttered the phrase, raised his palms in apology, although his tone sounded more confused than apologetic.

Zein, who was similarly confused, voiced it out to the middle-aged man. "But then, what are you? All channels of information networks call you a cult."

Before Senan could make a reply, however, a sound of a harsh clicking tongue could be heard from the window. "Tsk!" Zein turned his head and saw the youngest-looking esper standing with a clenched fist. "This is why I said we should do something about it from the start!"

"Arlo, shut up!" another member, female this time, looking not far in age from the young man, slapped the esper’s chest with a frown.

"Sorry, I get where you’re coming from," Senan sighed and brought Zein’s attention back to the table. "The circulating information indeed seems to regard the Templar of Arms Master as a cult."

At that point, someone came inside the room with a tray of warm tea, and they waited until the cups were served to the two guests before the middle-aged man continued.

"And while we are not a cult, we--the old generation--indeed, were to be blamed for this misconception."

"What do you mean?"

Senan let out another sigh as he intertwined his fingers and started to tell them the story that they already knew; about how the organization was split at some point. And it was this faction, the traitorous one, who glorified the second coming of Setnath and wanted that power for themselves, who made the Templar known to be a cult.

At the beginning of the fracture, the orthodox faction, which consisted of the main clan members of House Ishtera, was too weak to surface. They were in hiding, still recovering their power, and coming out to clear that misconception wasn’t something they could afford to do.

And then, it just became ingrained for everyone that the Templar of Arms Master was a place that worshipped Setnath and wished for his second coming.

"In their inadequacy, the previous generation decided not to change it at all," Senan smiled bitterly as he explained, looking at the blue eyes that brought back nostalgia and the face that crushed his heart to pieces. "It’s false, and it broke my heart, but it’s also a good mask."

"Because people don’t take cults seriously," Bassena explained further, taking the warm teacup and putting it in Zein’s hand.

"Yes, unless they committed heinous crimes, people ignored cults, and avoid them completely," the middle-aged man chuckled, although it came out like a choking sound. "So it’s possible for us to survive."

"It’s pathetic!" the young esper from before, Arlo, grumbled again before getting jabbed by another one.

Zein stared at the swirling brown tea in his cup. It was different from the high-quality one he enjoyed these days when he had a teatime with Radia. The bold scent reminded him of borderland, when supplies just came in and there were some decent tea leaves and coffee beans there; leftover products from orange-zone. He thought about how these people probably didn’t have it easy either.

At least, he knew now that they were part of the original Templar, of those that he saw in the vision, and not from the one ordered for his father to be killed.

But that only confused him more.

"Then...what exactly are you?" Zein frowned as he recalled the reverent face of those people surrounding that person--his mother’s ancestor. "You don’t like to be called a...worshipper...but wasn’t the first generation created the Templar for the Carrier?"

"So you know about that?" Senan raised his brows. For all he knew, the information that was still in circulation about them was that they were a cult that had received purging. And even if someone managed to dig deeper into the history before that, they would at most only find out that the organization was keeping a secret about Setnath.

Before he could make further reply, however, the Elder was already taking over, finally calm enough to join the conversation. "That is true," the old man said. His eyes, which had never left Zein’s face since earlier, were looking at the guide keenly, with so much longing and nostalgia. "Sir Arlan Ishtera created the Templar of the Arms Master for her, the one he called the Savior. And the Savior was indeed the carrier of the seed of Setnath. But...that’s not the reason why the Ishtera decided to create the Templar."

"Then?"

The Elder paused to take a sip of warm water first, before taking a deep breath and continuing. "Young Master, there’s a reason why we called your ancestor our ’Savior’."

His ancestor--Zein felt his eye twitch at that. But there was no use in denying it anymore, that the person in his vision was indeed his ancestor. And he had a good idea why the first generation revered the person so much. "Because she guided them from shard to shard until they came out of the Deathzone?"

He remembered the scene vaguely; the top of the cliff where the shard was. For people who were trapped within the deadly miasma, who had no idea about the existence of the Towers or the Temples that had only begun to sprout, her existence would be akin to that of a Goddess, or an apostle sent by the Celestial Beings. Guiding them to safety, purifying the freshly awakened espers, threading path into a better land...

"For our ancestors, everywhere was the Deathzone. It was because they followed her that the Ishtera and the vassal clans could survive. Without her, this old man and everyone else in this room wouldn’t be able to exist," the old man said with a smile, as if he witnessed that period himself.

But while the Elder couldn’t witness that moment way back in the past, he was the oldest one of the current Templars. He and the middle-aged man was probably the one who had heard about the original story the most. It was easy to see that the story would be passed down from generation to generation, before bed, or in front of the fireplace. And different from the newest generation, the Elder and Senan tasted the era where the legend had proof. They saw Lucia, they had met the descendant of the Savior, the carrier of the seed fragment. So their joy, as well as their sadness as they recounted the story was almost tragic and bittersweet.