DanMachi Vol.15

CHAPTER 6 : MEETINGS AND OATHS

Lyu Leon was once a girl who lived in an elven village.

To say that she was "just" a girl, though, would be misleading. She was a member of the clan that had protected the village's holy tree for generations, and almost from the moment she was born she had been trained in the ways of the elven warriors. If outsiders should ever invade, she would defend the village alongside the adults. Despite lacking any deity's blessing, their skill with bow and blade meant they were entirely capable of dealing with any of the monsters that inhabited the surface of the mortal plane.

That day, Lyu and the other warriors had driven off a foreign caravan that had gotten too close.

"Those filthy animal-people merchants!"

"Did you see their disgusting faces? It's like the ugliness just oozes out of their souls. They're nothing like us."

Lyu's face was hidden under her cloak, which obscured the rest of her small form beneath its swaying drape. As they returned to the village, she overheard the adult elves speak of their scorn for the beings they'd just repelled.

The elven settlement was covered by the thick canopy of the foliage overhead. Even in the current era—the so-called time of the gods, when deities walked the land and human and demi-human exchange flourished—the elves alone shunned the other races out of pride and hid themselves away in the forests.

With the holy tree in its very center, Lyu's home was one such place—Lumirua Forest.

"..."

"Hideous, inside and out. How vile they are, how unlike our own beautiful selves."

Lyu silently watched the other members of her clan discuss the other races.

Elves were famous among the mortals for their extraordinary beauty.

They were prideful, fastidious, and eschewed revealing themselves to any they deemed unworthy. But looking at the supposedly attractive members of her own race,Lyu felt that it was the beautiful-seeming elves who were, in fact, the vilest of all.

With scornful smiles on their lovely faces, they flattered one another with flowery rhetoric. As she'd watched them and walked among them, Lyu had come to harbor doubts.

She couldn't remember when they'd started, but over the eleven years since she'd entered the world, those doubts had grown in her young heart.

And eventually, those doubts had turned into revulsion.

To the elves, who took such pride in their race, such thinking was heresy. But once the seed had been planted, Lyu could not stop them from growing. The arrogance spouted by elven men and women alike only spurred her shame and dejection onward, eating away at her self-respect.

The young Lyu knew nothing. She had never left her village, and her world was too small.

And yet she was certain that what she saw around her was terribly distorted.

Every day, her heart grew more and more distant from her family and the other elves in her village. She was ashamed of them and ashamed, too, of herself.

One day, she separated from the other elves in her party and eventually came to a clear forest stream. As she brought its cool water to her mouth to slake her thirst, she caught sight of her reflection in her cupped hands.

Those pointed ears and sky-blue eyes.

The same long golden hair and fine, delicate features as everyone else in her village.

That day as she looked down into her small hands, Lyu made up her mind.

"...Good-bye."

Cloaked in the dark of night, Lyu ran away from her home—alone, taking only some seiros ore to use as traveling money.