Minna Free: Yuusha Ni

Theo looked down at his sword. The light was fading from its blade. “I don’t… I don’t understand. The prophecy said ‘the yuusha and his companions.’ You were my companions.”

Theo stood alone in the dust and silence. For the first time in three years, he felt the weight of his own name. Theo. Not Yuusha. Not Hero. A boy from a farming village who had been handed a sword and a prophecy and told that everyone else was just scenery. yuusha ni minna

“Alena. We’ve slept back-to-back in the rain. You’ve held my hair back when I was sick from a cursed wound. I stole the Crown of Stars for you, and you gave it to a merchant for a horse we rode for two days before it broke a leg.” Theo looked down at his sword

Outside, the first true dawn in a decade broke over the mountains. And the hero, for the first time, realized he had already lost the only battle that had ever mattered. The prophecy said ‘the yuusha and his companions

Minna. Everyone. Not Alena, who’d picked the lock to the Demon Lord’s sanctum while a thousand traps sang around her ears. Not Kael, whose forbidden spell had stripped the Lord’s wards bare, shaving years off his own life. Not Elara, who had called upon her goddess so fiercely that her hair had turned white. Not Finn, who had taken a poisoned dagger meant for Theo’s back and now stood smiling with purple veins crawling up his neck.