I Picked Up the Hero Who Banished Me

6 – [The Hero Who Defeated the Demon King – 03]

“Can you move?”

“I’m fine.”

“Seriously, you okay?”

This person, they’re terminal, with maybe a month left.

Even breathing is agonizing, and their only remaining arm probably won’t move right.

I gave a rough explanation, but they’re in no condition to be moving, so I was worrying about how to even transport them, and then the hero up and said, “I’ll go myself.”

They used a big cloak to cover their body and pulled up the hood to hide their face.

If their skin was exposed, the tainted flesh would show, and even though the reaper’s poison isn’t contagious, someone without that knowledge might react badly.

Plus, Olivia Reinhart is a pretty famous hero, so there’s a chance someone could see their face and recognize them.

If that turned into a rumor and somehow reached Alex’s ears, they might send pursuers.

It’d be hard for me to fight those pursuers and protect the hero alone, so it was wiser to move as secretly as possible to at least get rid of the reaper’s poison.

The lost eye and arm are expensive, but if we could get an elixir or a high-level healing priest, we could figure something out.

“Do you know the way to Elven Heim?”

“I’ve never been myself, but I know the location. Shouldn’t you know it better, actually, hero? I heard you went after you exiled me.”

“I did go, but I don’t remember the way.”

“Are you bragging?”

“Sorry…”

“…”

Why are they so crumpled?

The hero I know was more arrogant, confident, the very definition of self-assured and prideful, with their self-esteem and ego scraping the sky.

Even if they were betrayed by their companions, it was for some ridiculous reason, so there’s no need to be sad about it, and the contract with the holy sword was forcefully broken by the goddess’s orb, so it should be fine.

No, is that just from my perspective?

“Why?”

My gaze must have made him self-conscious, because the Hero asked, and I gave a clumsy laugh.

“No, it’s just… I thought you’ve become quite a bit more docile than the you I know.”

“…….”

“You used to be more of a mess, I guess you could say, just overflowing with energy. And you’d often spout off whatever was on your mind.”

“Got nothing to say back.”

“How about an excuse, then?”

“Excuse? Like how killing someone with a smile or killing someone while crying is still the same killing—whether there’s a reason or not, if I inflicted harm, it’s a sin. Isn’t this better than rattling off my life story from beginning to end just to justify myself, as if I had some reason?”

Indeed.

So the reason he used to be such a pain wasn’t that there *wasn’t* a reason, but that it doesn’t matter to the people who suffered the brunt of it.

I was surprised, genuinely, by how healthy and grounded his thinking was. We travelled together for quite some time, but I felt like I’d learned more about the Hero these last few days than in all that time.

No, more like the biggest reason I didn’t know much about the Hero was that he never spoke to me back in the party days.

Anyway.

“That’s different, Hero.”

“What is?”

“The one who caused the harm shouldn’t get to decide how the harmed party thinks. You don’t want to confuse them by offering a useless backstory, but maybe the one who was hurt *does* want to know everything.”

“…….”

“Whether or not they learn the situation, how they judge it, that’s decided by the victim, not by the guilty perpetrator.”

“I see, yeah.”

The Hero replied a little awkwardly.

“So, yeah, my mother gave birth to me and then she died…”

“Oh, are you going that far back?”

“You asked! *Cough, uhh.*”

“Don’t push yourself. You’re practically a walking corpse right now.”

“…….”

The hero glared at me, a bit annoyed, but seemed to quickly calm down, probably aware that I was his savior.

Whether it was psychological growth during the journey, or the shock of betrayal hit him harder than I thought, he was somewhat more passive than the hero I knew.

It’s like his absolute confidence was gone.

“……Do you know who the previous hero was?”

“The previous hero was Sir Ben Reynolds.”

“Except for him, all the heroes were made in the Reinhardt family.”

“That’s right.”

Because of that, the Reinhardt family was practically called a hero-making family, and when it was revealed that the previous hero wasn’t from the Reinhardt family, there was quite an uproar, I remembered.

“My father was sorry that he wasn’t chosen as a hero. He really, literally, suffered to death. …Apparently he had a hard time realizing that the Reinhardt family wasn’t the only family that could produce heroes.”

“That’s…”

I stopped myself for a moment.

“Because the hero before *that* one was a total degenerate, right?”

“…….”

“Yeah, the hero before Sir Ben Reynolds was a degenerate that’ll go down in history. Because of that, the Reinhardt family’s image was also damaged, and that’s when a hero was born from somewhere other than Reinhardt. The situation quickly deteriorated, and my father really suffered.”

As we walked, I focused on the hero’s story.

It wasn’t a new story, and I’d expected something along those lines, but I hadn’t imagined Olivia Reinhart, that strong woman, would keep it buried inside as such a deep pain.

It was like she hadn’t really seen me, and maybe I hadn’t really tried to see her as a person either.

“And when I turned seven, I was chosen as the hero.”

“…….”

“My father was so happy he even cried, and I, as a child, was just happy about that. It was the first time I’d ever seen my father, who was always so tired, happy… And then, he got sick and passed away. Even in his last moments, he kept telling me how to live as a hero.”

I just listened to the Hero’s story in silence.

“My dead mother, too, apparently spent every night praying for me to become a hero. I was destined from the moment I was born to be chosen, to become a hero, to live as a hero. I can’t fail to save even one person. My mother and father both risked their lives to raise me as a hero… I have to be a proper hero, I have no other choice.”

Her voice was getting louder and her words were speeding up.

It didn’t look positive.

“If I’m not a hero, I have no value… I have to be a hero that everyone can acknowledge. For the Reinhart family, for the hero… for the world, I have to, I must.”

It was like there was an invisible shadow.

I could picture the Hero’s parents, constantly whispering something into her ear.

They might call it love, but to the Hero, it was a curse, a binding that wasn’t love at all.

The idea that she isn’t living how she wants, but how she *has* to, was clearly a distorted one.

The more mistakes she made, the more anxious she became.

No matter how successful she was, she would just count the times she failed, never finding any peace of mind.

“You were exiled because you were a commoner, right? That’s just an excuse. An excuse I made to convince myself, a self-justification.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember when you saved me at the beginning of our journey?”

“Ah, come to think of it, that did happen.”

“So, for you, it’s just on the level of ‘that thing happened,’ huh?”

The hero gave an awkward laugh.

Back then, the hero was still just trained, with little practical experience.

Even though his physical abilities were outstanding and he was powerful, his lack of experience led to occasional mistakes.

But most mistakes were taken care of by the hero himself, so they never grew into bigger problems.

Then, one day in the dungeon, a situation arose that even the hero couldn’t handle, and I ended up taking an attack meant for him. The wound took too long to heal, and the scar from where a monster clawed me is still clearly visible on my back.

“I’d never imagined it.”

“Huh?”

“If it were me, the hero, dying to save someone, I could imagine that, maybe even I was yearning for it. …But someone risking their life for me was something I couldn’t allow, and you having the thought to save the hero felt so foreign to me.”

“……”

“You became ‘some unknown mystery’ to me. …So I became unnecessarily hostile towards you, and eventually, I exiled you.”

“I see.”

It seemed like the hero was quite bothered by exiling me, but I didn’t really feel much of anything.

Of course, I was a bit annoyed back then, but I got a decent severance package.

If I was planning to continue my adventurer career it would have been a bit of a problem, but that wasn’t the case either, so for me it was just like stopping a job halfway, nothing really to be worked up over.

But for the hero, maybe it was an exceptional occurrence that deviated from the ‘hero’s duties’.

Just the fact that the hero who was supposed to be protected was indeed protected was enough to restrict his actions, that kind of shackle was so deeply embedded within him.

In a way, it was even deeper than a god of death’s poison, preventing him from even desiring, or being able to desire, a life lived in any other way.

“My story is irrelevant to you, and there’s no reason for you to understand it. …You can hit me, you know?”

“What, you want me to hit that half-corpse of yours? Someone sees, I’m the one who ends up a piece of trash, you know? Guess you’re thinking with that hero brain of yours.”

“Nobody’s around.”

“You can’t use magic.”

“Even without magic, I can tell.”

“You’re human, right?”

“The species designation is human, for now.”

*Why human?*

He spoke so well, and seemed to have no trouble walking, you wouldn’t believe he was half-dead.

“So, are you going to hit me?”

“Let’s not.”

“If it were me, I’d have hit you. You’re pretty impressive.”

Honestly speaking.

Even if I hit him now, I felt like my fist would hurt more.