"What about you, Mydei?"
Phainon looked at Mydei curiously.
"What did you see in that trial... and what are you afraid of?"
As the widely watched successor to Strife, Mydei's concerns mattered enormously to all of Amphoreus.
The birth of a demigod was at stake.
"First, let me correct you on one point: the word fear doesn't exist in the Xuan Feng people's dictionary," Mydei stressed.
"Hah. Is there anything in your dictionary at all?"
"Hmph." Mydei went on:
"In the trial, I saw Okhema, and..."
"My old comrades."
He raised his head toward the sky that was forever bright.
"Hephaestus, Padikas, Leon, Ptolemy, and Poussetta... From the day I returned from the Nether Sea, those five were always at my side."
"Through our years of exile, we lived and nearly died together."
"Those ten years were spent wandering from place to place, but I still look back on them fondly."
"Every night, we'd gather around a campfire, drink our fill of mead, and sing at the top of our lungs..."
His expression grew wistful.
"The wild winds of Amphoreus smell of rust. Hephaestus always laughed at me for mixing sheep's milk into my mead. He said it made the drink's vivid red look all wrong."
"He was small and thin, but on the battlefield, he was ferocious. He cut down enemies by the score."
"Padikas knew medicine and was always concocting strange remedies. Leon was a swift runner and the follower I trusted most."
"Ptolemy was forever fussing over words. When we left Xuan Feng, he made off with quite a few ancient books from the Great Library. They belonged to my family anyway, so he didn't need to return them."
"As for Poussetta... he didn't talk much, but he could play a fine tune."
As Phainon listened to