Side Story: Gibeon and the Reapers
Was this the end? His mother had risked everything to help him get away, but was he just going to die here, helplessly on the side of the road? On the other hand, if it would release him from this suffering, then maybe that would be for the best.
With so much regret and frustration weighing down on him, Gibeon’s consciousness started to fade, until...
“Heeey, are you alive?” asked a lax voice.
Gibeon tried to move his mouth to tell the person to just leave him alone, but it came out as gibberish barely above a whisper.
“Le...me...be...”
“Ooh, you are still alive!”
“Leader~! What are you doing here in this backstreet?”
It seemed that someone else had arrived, but it was none of Gibeon’s concern.
“I found one on the ground.”
“Ah, jeez. You had to go and find another one. Yeesh, are they alive?”
“Barely. On death’s door.”
“Well, what’re we going to do about them?”
“We gotta bring ’em back with us.”
“There goes that bad habit of yours again. This after you’ve been taking in nothing but girls as of late too.”
“Give me a break. I can’t just leave ’em once I see ’em.”
Gibeon thought that the back-and-forth happening over his half-dead body was annoying, but he lacked the strength to speak up.
Just then, Gibeon felt water slowly drizzle into his mouth. Despite his heart giving way to the thought of death, his body instinctively started moving his throat to take in the liquid. With each satisfying gulp, the water revitalized the half-dead Gibeon as if new life were coursing through his body.
“Drink slowly,” the man insisted.
Gibeon’s cries telling him to stop never even left his mouth as the man called “leader” saved his life. He then passed out on the spot.
When Gibeon next awoke, he was lying in a soft bed. He was still lacking the strength to move on his own, but he was indeed alive. As he reeled from the shock of still being able to draw breath, a figure approached him.
“Heya, kid. Awake?”
It was a withered, middle-aged man with a full, shaggy beard. To say he looked put together would be a flat-out lie.
Gibeon glared at the man as he started to realize that the man’s voice sounded faintly familiar. It belonged to the same man who’d saved him from nearly dying. Though his body was immobile, his mouth worked well enough to reply back.
“Why did you save me?” Gibeon asked, his tone resentful for the favor he never asked for. “A little longer and I could have finally died.”
The man walked over to Gibeon and flicked his forehead.
“Yowch!” Gibeon cried in pain.
The man chuckled. “Keh heh heh, if it hurts, it means you’re alive.”
“But I wanted to die,” Gibeon argued.
“That so? Coulda sworn I heard you say you wanted to live.”
“I didn’t say that,” Gibeon refuted. Of course he wouldn’t say that. He had already given up the notion of living any longer.
“No, you definitely wanted to live. It’s true because I said so.”
Gibeon had no words. He lay there speechless as the man then came up to him and put a dagger into his hands. Clueless as to what the old man was trying to do, Gibeon let him move his body as he pleased—or rather, Gibeon was not able to resist due to his weakened state. The man held both of Gibeon’s hands so that the dagger was facing Gibeon himself. It was only a dagger, but Gibeon couldn’t even support its weight on his own. The man’s hands around his was the only reason he could hold the dagger firm.
“Well? You want to die, right? Stab this right here and you’ll get your wish,” the man said, bringing the tip of the dagger above Gibeon’s heart.
Gibeon’s heart was pounding like mad.
“You don’t want to suffer, so stab nice and quick,” the man said, stopping the dagger’s point a hair’s breadth away from his chest. “C’mon, all you need to do is put some strength into it. Should be simple.”
As simple as it might be, Gibeon’s hands remained frozen.
“Hurry up. Didn’t you say you wanted to die?”
“Ngh...”
That was right. The man was absolutely right. Gibeon had already lost his homeland and was forced to live life all on his own. He should have died along with his country, just like his mother and father had. He didn’t deserve to live, so life needed to end. Nevertheless, for some reason, he couldn’t push the dagger any farther.
“Kuh... Urgh...” Gibeon grimaced as his hands could do nothing but tremble. He was the one who wanted to die so badly, so why was he being so hesitant now? One stab would make his wish come true.
“If you can’t do it on your own, I’ll help you out,” the man said as he slowly pushed on Gibeon’s hands from above.
The dagger’s tip poked through his skin and dug into the meat, sending pain coursing through his body. It was only a matter of time before the knife would skewer his heart.
Gibeon did indeed have a death wish, but the only thing that coursed through his head at the moment was the vestige of his mother’s face, wearing the same smile she had up until she met her end.
“You must live.”
His mother’s final words echoed in his mind. Before he even noticed it, he was using the last of his power to push the man’s hands away and drop the dagger.
“See? You want to live.”
“Urk... Guh...” Gibeon didn’t know why, but tears started to stream from his face.
“Living isn’t so bad. Try pushing through a little more.” The man rustled Gibeon’s hair as he tried to choke back his tears. “Sure, there’ll be bad times, but there’ll be times so good that you’ll celebrate still being alive.”
“Don’t talk like you know me,” Gibeon croaked.
“True, I don’t. But you don’t know what life has to offer. Don’t give up on living so young.”
The man sat by Gibeon’s side, patting his head, until he eventually stopped crying.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
After the strange middle-aged man took him in, Gibeon went to work for him, but he wasn’t the only one to do so. Scores of others the man had taken in worked under him, and they referred to him as “Leader.”
“So why do they call the leader, well, ‘Leader’?” Gibeon asked one of his comrades.
After a grueling month, Gibeon had regained enough strength to come out of the room and meet with the leader’s comrades. He was happily welcomed into the fold, perhaps because everyone else had similar circumstances as well. Not much time had passed, but Gibeon felt a comfortable sense of warmth staying with these people, like he had with his family long ago.
Gibeon was with Kiel, the one closest in age to him and the one tasked with being his educator. Kiel too was someone the leader had taken in.
“Let me ask you this. Do you know of the Reapers?” Kiel asked.
“The Reapers are that guild of assassins, right?” Gibeon guessed. He had heard rumors of them when he was still prince of his nation. They said that once the group set their sights on someone, they were as good as dead.
“So yeah, those Reapers are us,” Kiel explained.
“Are you pulling my leg?” Gibeon questioned.
“Nope. I’m dead serious.”
Gibeon looked around him, and everyone else’s lips were curled into devious smiles. “Huh? Are you seriously ‘dead serious’?”
“What did I just get finished telling you?”
Gibeon’s face twitched in panic, but who could blame him? “Then the leader is the boss of the Reapers?”
Kiel nodded. “That’s the gist of it.”
“What? Then this place is bad news, and I’m here in the thick of it!”
Maybe it was because he had worked a lot with Kiel, but Gibeon’s speech had started to take after him. That was how well he was fitting in here.
His days of being on guard and vigilant like a stray dog had come to an end, but he was fine with that given he felt so comfortable where he was. Part of that had to do with being around other displaced people with situations similar to his, but the biggest reason was because the leader was extremely accepting. He relied on instinct, was empathetic, loved people, and never abandoned a person in need. He was the definition of a good-natured individual. All the others adored him too because they owed him their lives.
It was that demeanor of his that had healed Gibeon’s ravaged heart, and while Gibeon wouldn’t admit it outright, he loved the leader. He had never seen someone so nice before in his life. Hearing that he was the boss of the Reapers wasn’t clicking for him.
“Huh? Then do you mean the reason the leader takes some of the senior members out on occasion is because...” Gibeon trailed off.
“He takes requests,” Kiel finished. “There’s no way he could feed a family this big by just working normally.”
“Requests...? Assassination requests?”
“More or less.”
“H-He kills people? The leader?” Gibeon stammered in sheer disbelief. He didn’t think the leader was capable of killing.
Kiel smiled awkwardly. “Well, yeah. On the surface, at least.”
“On the surface?” Gibeon repeated, cocking his head.
“Do you think the leader can kill someone?”
“Not at all,” replied Gibeon. It hadn’t been that long since he had started living with the leader. He might get asked what he actually knew about the leader, but he would say with certainty that the old man was incapable of harming a hair on anyone’s head.
“Yeah, I feel the same.”
“Wait, what do you mean?” Gibeon needed more clarification in order to make heads or tails of what he meant.
“This stays between us, but the leader gets paid to help people out.”
“He what? Aren’t the Reapers a guild of assassins?”
“The job he took this time was for a person trying to get his daughter out of the country by faking her death to avoid the noble who’s after her. Dealing with noblemen is so messy that if he doesn’t fake her death, they’ll come chasing after her.”
“He can’t just get her out of the country?” Gibeon questioned.
“If he were to just help her flee the country, then who knows what kind of harassment the nobles would dish out on the family she leaves behind? But if she were killed by the Reapers, then they wouldn’t want to get themselves implicated, so they won’t come messing with her family.”
“Ah, I see.” Gibeon was convinced that it was indeed an effective way of eluding noblemen. It was essentially running off in the night to leave your past life behind, but with a few extra steps.
“They’re from a pretty big merchant family,” Kiel added, “so we’re all excited about the reward.”
“Does any of that play into why he’s out killing chickens right now?” Gibeon was curious as to why he and the few others in the yard were killing chickens and draining their blood.
“It sure as heck does. He’s going to use chicken blood as a stand-in for human blood and splash it all over the room. That’ll make it look like a gruesome murder scene. This time we’re using chickens, but sometimes we use pigs.”
“Is there some kinda difference?”
“Depends on what the leader wants on the menu. Today he’s in the mood for chicken.”
“Oh, gimme a break...” Gibeon shoulders slumped in disappointment. He thought there was some special meaning, but it was ultimately meaningless. He could feel his image of the terrifying band of killers known as the Reapers crumbling into bits.
“Anyway, that’s what the ‘guild of assassins,’ the Reapers, really do,” Kiel finished.
“Yeah, I get it,” Gibeon said with a nod. “It’s so like the leader.”
“Yeah, ain’t it?”
Killing people without actually killing them in order to save them—that was very much in line with the leader’s personality, according to Gibeon. Along with that, he was relieved to hear that the leader had never killed a single person. Gibeon was sure that he wasn’t the only one who thought the leader wasn’t suited toward bloodshed either.
“Say, what is Amarna doing over there, laughing like a creep?” Gibeon asked, looking over at the young girl who the leader had taken in two months prior to himself.
“Guh hee hee hee,” she sickeningly snickered to herself, which she’d been doing for quite some time now. She was also counting in a creepy manner. “Oooone, twooo...”
“Aah, that’s the advance for the job. Leader told her to count it to see if the amount was right. And you know how much Amarna loves money.”
“Yeah, but she’s so creepy about it.”
Ching, ching. The coins jangled as Amarna placed each one in the bottle, one by one, giggling in delight at the noise. “Geh hee hee hee, I love the sound of money~!”
“Okay, I’ll admit, it is kind of creepy,” Kiel said.
“I can hear her counting money from her room in the middle of the night too. It’s chilling,” Gibeon stated, referencing the fact that his and Amarna’s rooms were right next to each other. He could hear her clear as a whistle through the thin walls, and hearing her in the dead of night was doubly scary. “I seriously want a room change. On the first day, I was about to wet myself because I thought that I was hearing ghosts.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess that would be scary at night. But we’ve got no other rooms, so buck up.”
“In that case, swap with me, Kiel.”
“Not on your life. You know how spooky that crap is.”
Gibeon gave him the stink eye, but Kiel wasn’t about to crack from something as simple as that.
“Heey, could someone go out and go shopping?!” asked the leader, coming back inside from his work out in the yard—covered head to toe in blood for some reason.
“Gyah!” Kiel shouted. “Leader, you’re drenched in blood!”
“Did you finally actually kill someone?!” cried Gibeon.
“You got it all wrong! I accidentally spilled a bucket of blood on my head. We’re short on blood because of it, so I need you guys to buy some more chickens.”
Just then, Amarna rushed over to the leader. “What are you doing, sir?! Being scatterbrained is reserved for cute children only. You’re a fully grown adult, so you should have more of a grip! You’re wasting my money!”
“C’mon, it’s everyone’s money. Don’t go pocketing any of it, now. Maybe I shouldn’t have left you to count the money.”
“Why don’t you just dissolve some red paint in water?” Amarna suggested, her face lighting up like she had a brilliant revelation.
“No, they’d catch on to that right away,” the leader said.
“Gaaaargh!” Amarna screamed, holding her head in her hands. “These needless expenses are piling uuuup!”
“Calm down. Calm down. We’re not going bankrupt over a chicken or two. I’ll file the expenses with the client later,” the leader said, trying to draw in the reins.
Amarna simply glared back at him. “You better. And don’t you lose a single coin!”
“I got it. I got it. Just go and buy me some more chickens. There. Gibeon over there looks like he’s free. Get him to do it.”
“Aww, what?” Gibeon made a sour face after he unluckily met eyes with the leader.
“No, I’ll go! Gibeon isn’t reliable enough. The owner of the butcher shop will swindle him easily!” Amarna insisted.
Gibeon liked that Amarna would go in his place, but he didn’t like her reason. “I can handle shopping! Quit looking down on me!”
“Hah! A mere child wouldn’t understand the profound depths of shopping!” Amarna said, mocking and laughing at Gibeon.
“Oh, brother. I don’t wanna hear that from a miserly cheapskate like you.”
“I am not a cheapskate. I just love money more than anything else in the world!”
“That’s what we call a cheapskate!”
As Gibeon and Amarna bickered, everyone around them walked away as if to say, “Oh boy, here they go again.” They didn’t get along with each other, and despite being close in age, they would incessantly argue whenever anything popped up.
“For crying out loud, I don’t care which of you goes, but could ya hurry and go?” the leader said.
“Aah, fine. I’ll go, sir,” said Kiel, raising his hand.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Living with the Reapers meant that Gibeon had no permanent residence. He was regularly moving from place to place since they would be spotted if they stayed somewhere too long. That life, moving from land to land, was very fulfilling.
The name of the Reapers was known everywhere they went. Whenever word of another murder went out, Gibeon and his friends would look at each other and laugh because they knew the truth. Each person who was supposedly killed was living out a new life in faraway lands.
Setting up the foundation of their lives after the escape was also a part of the Reapers’ job. It was the Reapers’ motto to provide great service even after the job was through. Gibeon was proud of the Reapers and was proud to be a part of them, but sometimes he felt dissatisfied.
“It’s kinda annoying that people say the leader is out killing and maiming when he’s actually doing a world of good, y’know,” Gibeon commented.
Kiel awkwardly grinned while Amarna made a pouty face.
“Yeah, that’s what everyone thinks,” Kiel said.
“It pisses me off to be in the same boat as some snot-nosed brat, but I feel the same,” Amarna spat.
Gibeon, Kiel, and Amarna had all been saved and taken in by the leader. If it weren’t for him, they would have lost their lives a long time ago. Their feelings for him were stronger than anything else.
“But since he’s okay with it, there ain’t much we can say about it,” Kiel pointed out.
“That pisses me off too. Why do you keep letting them say that stuff?” Gibeon protested.
“Well, for the sake of the people he’s saved, y’know?”
If word got out that their leader had saved those people, their pursuers would know that they were alive, which would effectively negate his efforts. Even though Gibeon knew that, he couldn’t help but dislike the fact that those not in the know feared the Reapers.
“But the leader is such a great guy...” Gibeon said.
“We all know that. And so do the people whom he has saved so far. Just bear with it,” Kiel instructed.
“I know!”
Gibeon wanted the leader’s escapades to be made public one day. It wasn’t likely one would find a person so willing to work for the sake of others. He definitely deserved more public recognition. Indeed, one day. Sadly, before that day could arrive, the leader unexpectedly died. He had been ill, and the illness had progressed so fast that it was too late by the time he noticed it.
Perhaps the dragonkin’s medicine could have saved him, but it wasn’t something that one could obtain at a moment’s notice. Still, unable to give up on their leader, the group had concocted a plan to sneak into the Dragon King’s castle that held the elixir. It was obvious that an item as rare as dragonkin medicine would be strictly guarded, and if they were caught, they probably would face death, but it would be worth it if it meant the leader had a chance to live.
Not a single person in the group was opposed to the idea—except one. The leader had overheard Gibeon and the others whispering about their plans.
“There’s no need for you to risk your lives to save me and what little time I have left,” the leader said, driving his point home.
Naturally, everyone objected. No one was more important to them than the leader. They couldn’t possibly sit idly by and watch his health deteriorate. Although the leader understood how they felt—no, because he understood how they felt—he couldn’t possibly ask them to risk danger on his behalf.
“Could you all spend whatever time I have left together with me instead?” he asked, stating the wish that would cost him his life.
Everyone tearfully agreed. Time passed with things proceeding very peacefully. No one spoke of the leader’s illness; they simply played, celebrated, and laughed as if nothing were wrong. And the leader watched them all with a smile as time ticked on.
“Live strong even after I’m gone,” the leader said before closing his eyes to rest. He looked so peaceful that it was hard to believe he’d been ill.
Thinking of how his gentle eyes would never open again, everyone clung to the leader’s body and wept.
After staying next to their leader’s remains for days on end, the most senior member of the group finally spoke to the mourners. “Let’s put the leader to rest.”
As the leader had wished before his death, they decorated a plot with flowers, dug a grave, and placed him inside.
“I’m sure he’ll be able to rest easy here,” Gibeon said, looking at the area surrounded by blooms. For the savior of so many people, it wasn’t a bad spot for his eternal sleep.
One by one, people prayed for the leader’s soul to rest in peace and walked away. They had discussed what they would do with the Reapers from now on, although that point didn’t need discussing. They could only be the Reapers with their leader around. Without him, they would be Reapers in name only. By unanimous decision, they decided to disband.
After that, Gibeon’s comrades, who had all gathered under the leader, went their separate ways in order to fulfill the old man’s last words and “live strong.” And although the close-knit group of people were all on their separate journeys now, the bond that their leader helped build remained intact. Even apart, the pride of the former Reapers would never die.
That being said, Gibeon had been living carefree with the Reapers for so long that he reached an impasse, choosing a less scrupulous path that would have earned him a fist to the head if the leader were still alive. However, through an unforeseen stroke of luck, the Dragon King had taken him in. Every day, he was reminded that one truly didn’t know what life had in store for them.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
One day, Gibeon went to the capital by himself, to meet a certain someone.
“Hey, Amarna,” he said as he greeted her.
Amarna, who was working as a store vendor, went from all smiles to all frowns all at once. “What might you want, you snot-nosed brat?”
“Yeah, nice to see you too, cheapskate...”
“If you’re here to sling insults, then be gone. You’re disrupting business,” Amarna said, waving her hand to shoo Gibeon away.
“You seem to be friends with Ruri, but does she know that you used to be part of the Reapers?”
“Why would she know? There’s no need for me to tell her.”
“Hmm...”
“Is that all you came to speak about?”
“Have you...seen the others?” Gibeon asked, referring to the other Reapers he hadn’t seen ever since the group’s disbandment.
“No, I haven’t. What about you, Gibeon?”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“What in the world did you even come here for?” Amarna said, sighing in exasperation.
“Nothing really. Just curious,” he replied.
“So I see.”
“But, y’know, I wonder if everyone else is alive and well.”
“I’m sure they’re all fine. You’re still alive and well, and you’re the biggest problem child out of the bunch.” Miffed by her remark, Gibeon was about to retort back, but Amarna continued. “All of us remember the leader’s final words well.”
“Live strong even after I’m gone.”
The rest of the Reapers were probably following those words to the letter, living healthy and robust lives.
“Yeah... You’re right,” Gibeon said.
“If you’re not going to buy anything, would you mind scurrying along? You’re disrupting business.”
“I’ll be back.”
“Yes, well, if you’re a paying customer, then you’re more than welcome back.”
Dismayed by Amarna’s typical reply, Gibeon made his way back to the castle—his new home.
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