Prometheus' Flame (II)

Walking through a city full of corpses with a child definitely wasn't anything like a pleasant experience.

Prometheus had been frowning the entire time, but not only because of that. There were other reasons too.

He had thought he would be like a normal person, filled with fear and disgust toward corpses, especially corpses so swollen and rotten—but he wasn't.

On the contrary, he even felt that his mood was very calm, and what he felt was something utterly ordinary.

It was as if, to him, corpses were nothing more than the red-hot steel in a workshop, an everyday sight that wasn't worth paying any extra attention to. No matter how wretched their deaths had been, no matter how terrifying their faces had become, they were only one scene among countless ordinary images.

That eerie calm made his brows knit tightly despite himself.

The blacksmith Prometheus was an ordinary man living on Phenilos. As a blacksmith, of course he would be familiar with things like red-hot steel and a forge. But corpses?

He shouldn't have felt familiar with corpses. This was not the attitude the blacksmith Prometheus should have had.

If I wasn't a blacksmith, then who would I be?

He had no answer to that.

Tia's voice rang out at just the right moment, cutting off his thoughts. "Uncle, are they moving...?"

There were not many things in this city now that could be called "they," but there shouldn't have been a single one of them capable of moving. Holding that thought, Prometheus turned back and stared at the place the girl was pointing to. There was a pile of corpses heaped at the corner of the street.

His pupils shrank slightly—honestly speaking, the girl was right.

They were indeed moving, their bodies trembling, writhing across the ground. Then,