When the surviving sirens looked back and saw the death god had not pursued them, they all let out a collective breath and exchanged expressions of sheer relief.
Not even Odysseus or Orpheus had ever caused them this level of casualties.
When death drew near, they discovered they were just as fragile and helpless as the ordinary mortals they had hunted for so long.
They could not even summon the thought of going back to avenge their fallen sisters.
Just the memory of the brutal image, glimpsed as they fled, of him tearing a sister's spine out with his bare hands, was enough to leave the sirens shaking.
They could not imagine the agony of that.
They breathed in the open air with desperate greed, grateful simply to be alive.
And just as they were looking at each other, the faint smiles of survivors who had made it through appearing on their faces,
The next moment, boom!!
On the horizon, dark clouds gathered in an instant, and thunder and storm came together.
Then a figure bathed in moonlight, radiating a sacred aura, descended from the parting clouds above.
The moment that supreme, impossibly dignified presence and the overwhelming divine power reached them,
The sirens, with their divine bloodline, could sense exactly how terrifying the arrival was.
That abundant, fearsome divine power was without question the level of a principal god.
When they tremblingly raised their heads, what they faced was the cold gaze of the goddess of the hunt, already slowly drawing back her bowstring.
"Die."
No chance to explain, no need to ask questions.
Then, like stars falling, a single strike plunged into the sea below.
Boom!!
Terrifying moonlight exploded outward, swallowing everything on the surface of the water in an instant.
When the light cleared, a massive spiral whirlpool had formed at the point of impact.
The whirlpool was already stained completely red with the divine blood of the river god's daughters.
That overwhelming radiance caused every god who happened to notice to take one look and immediately glance away again.
Oh, that was Artemis stirring things up.
Nothing to worry about then.
As two among the twelve principal gods who clawed their way to recognition through sheer force and earned Zeus's acknowledgment, even their fellow principal gods had no particular desire to provoke these two without good reason.
After all, they were among those who survived Hera's endless schemes and assassination attempts from childhood and ultimately came out on top.
Maintaining the precious status of a goddess of chastity, the identity of a virgin goddess, in a place like Greece took far more than simply asking Zeus for an eternal blessing of purity.
It required the power to personally defend it at every turn.
Even Hera, who despised the other children of Zeus, had no choice but to acknowledge the standing of Apollo and Artemis.
Who was this foolish enough to provoke an Artemis this formidable?
Far away, Night seemed to sense something as he lifted his head slightly and looked toward the other side of the horizon.
Around him, the sailors, having now learned the truth of what happened, were in a state of wild excitement and admiration.
Upon learning the creatures the hero had killed were sirens, this was exactly the kind of hero-defeats-monster epic they had always heard about.
And they had been here for it, right in the middle of it all.
The sailors swelled with pride at this honor, and the fact that all the actual killing had been done entirely by Griffith with nothing to do with any of them did not diminish the sense of shared glory in the slightest.
Was this not basically us plus Lord Griffith combined into an unstoppable force of total destruction?
Lord Griffith handles the total destruction.
We handle the combined.
But while everyone else was celebrating, Night could not find it in himself to smile.
Because he noticed his attendant Kleis was dead.
Not only Kleis.
Quite a few sailors had been successfully lured by the sirens while the battle was happening and had their throats torn apart.
If the sirens had not been relatively focused, directing most of their effort at him, these sailors would all have been dead long before.
"Do none of you feel grief?"
Night asked quietly; however, his words only sent confusion and uncertainty across the sailors' faces, as though they genuinely could not understand what he meant.
When they watched him raise his fists and slaughter those beautiful creatures without mercy, they were terrified of him and thought of him as some demon lord.
But the moment they understood those creatures were man-eating monsters, they seamlessly shifted back, regarding him as a hero and praised him without reservation.
The righteous justification of violence, and even the rejection of violence, always came filtered through a set of biases.
The deaths of their companions were simply forgotten.
After all, the dead had become a source of glory for the living, and those who lost their lives did not even have the right to be mourned.
Night found this scene incomprehensible and felt a little heavy-hearted.
Originally, he planned to send Kleis away before things got dangerous, but he never imagined that even before setting foot on the Trojan battlefield, that faithful attendant who had followed every order to the letter would already be gone.
And so he spoke directly, naming it plainly.
"Our companions died here on this unnamed island."
When someone finally understood what he meant, they began to comfort him, saying that if those men knew they had died on a journey that ended in the defeat of the siren creatures, they would surely have felt nothing but gratitude and considered it a worthy death.
"You are the hero who defeated the sirens.
There is no need to grieve over lives as humble as ours."
The sailors expressed their gratitude for his compassion.
Even though in his own mind, a small amount of empathy was nothing worth being grateful for.
Yet in fact, it earned Night the genuine and wholehearted thanks of every sailor there.
He was not sure when it started, but it seemed that for a hero, showing even a flicker of basic humanity was enough to be called compassion.
An ordinary passerby who gave a little to a beggar freezing to death on the roadside would be remembered only by the beggar.
But a hero who did nothing, who only spoke a few words of concern, could be endlessly praised by crowds of people.
And if the sailors' reaction had simply left him with something pressing uncomfortably on his chest that he could not release,
What came next was something he found entirely impossible to accept.
The sailors expressed their one regret.
"What a shame that as trophies worthy of a hero's honor, almost no live sirens had been captured as prizes."
To them, it was really a shame.
After all, terrifying as the siren creatures were, stripped of their song and restrained, they were still strikingly beautiful women.
As daughters of a river god, carrying the refined bloodline of divine heritage, they should by nature have been as noble and lovely as the sea nymphs of the ocean.
Setting aside the man-eating aspect,
They were genuinely beautiful.
The kind of existence ordinary people could never hope to touch in their lifetimes.
If the hero had taken the lead and enjoyed the spoils, they might have had a chance to share in it as well.
But Lord Griffith didn't keep any prisoners and killed them all.
The sailors found this quite regrettable.
Night: "..."
He let out a long breath, feeling that the men of this era were beyond saving.
At the same time, he took back his earlier words.
It turned out there really were people who could feel that way toward creatures that ate human beings.
But it was precisely the sailors' remarks that made him abandon any thought of continuing the journey with them.
As expected, they were not on the same path.
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)