Chapter 96: Ahead Lies Hell (cont.)

It was truly terrifying.

"Hell? Amakusa Shirou, don't make me laugh. This so-called hell of yours is nothing."

"I've seen plenty of things like this. You really are arrogant, Amakusa Shirou. Did you actually think you were the only one who had ever seen hell?" Shirou mocked. "Zieg, let's go. The Holy Grail is right before us!"

Zieg no longer looked at the wailing people.

The sorrow of this sea of flames, this hell.

If they were talking about hell, she did not think this cycle of death was any more terrifying than the silent homunculus control room.

It was a place without consciousness, without will, where everyone was like walking corpses.

If not because she had been afraid, why had she struggled so hard to escape from there?

She, too, had seen hell!

"Up ahead is hell. Stop."

Amakusa Shirou shouted.

"So what?" Zieg continued forward without looking back.

Shirou sighed. "Amakusa, Zieg has made herself so clear. Why don't you understand? You, who led the Shimabara Rebellion—why don't you understand?"

"Understand what?" Amakusa Shirou looked at Shirou and asked in confusion.

Zieg stopped walking.

She recalled what Ruler and Assassin had told her about Amakusa Shirou.

It had been an uprising sparked to resist tyranny.

Under Amakusa Shirou's leadership, people who could not eat their fill or keep themselves warm had fought desperately.

Though it had failed, Zieg still felt sorrow for him.

She had to tell him, tell this man who had once fought so hard yet had already lost faith in humanity—

"Even in a hell like that, didn't someone like you step forward?"

Amakusa froze.

Someone like him had stepped forward?

"But I failed! I failed!!!"

"So what?" Zieg raised her head and looked toward the distant Holy Grail.

"After all these years, people still