The ashes of Number Three were still dancing in the air when silence fell — heavier than the steel scattered across the ground.
The curved shield smoked against Lukas’s arm as if it were hungry; the gladius rested angled downward, point low, ready to bite again.
The barbarians without numbers in their eyes were the first to break.
A young woman’s blade clattered onto the stone and stayed there.
Her body folded at the knees, her forehead pressed into the blood-soaked street.
“P-please… don’t kill me.”
Her voice came out thin, trembling.
“I didn’t want to… I just obeyed… if I didn’t come, my sister would’ve been hunted as a traitor…”
Behind her, one by one, the others followed — weapons dropped, knees in the mud.
There was no speech.
Only surrender.
It wasn’t the silence of pride — it was the silence of survival.
Lukas bit his lip until he tasted iron.
Gold and violet pulled at his eyes in opposite directions.
Somewhere deep inside, the old bitterness — the one from the life before — woke up, demanding payment with interest.
Morgana spoke first, her laughter sharp as a freshly-sharpened blade:
“Well, well, chocolatinho… a rare gem begging for mercy. What a waste.
People like her… weren’t made for the mud.”
“I wouldn’t…” Lukas’s teeth clenched. “I’d never lay with a barbarian. Pretty or not. Doesn’t change what they did.”
César’s voice poured over him like water on embers:
“That was in another life, boy. Don’t let the past choose for you again.
Look closely — no numbers, no strength, no will to fight. They’ve already lost.”
The girl crawled an inch closer, hands raised, fingers shaking.
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“I just… I just want to hold my sister again. I’ll do whatever you say. I’ll work, I’ll clean, I—”
The gladius lifted a finger’s breadth, almost on its own. One motion was all it would take — the shield could be judge and hammer in the same breath.
César whispered: “Mercy is not weakness. It’s discipline.”
Morgana countered: “Mercy is a gamble… and you know how much I love games.”
Lukas’s arm weighed heavy.
He drew in a slow breath, the same way he did before a strike — inhale, set the foot, decide.
The wind carried the scent of iron and oil from the walls… and the distant song of the Copas, chanting Luiz’s name.
Sorriso was still standing — and that was enough.
The gladius did not fall.
“Stand only to leave,” he said, his voice cold. “Drop everything. Go back the way you came.
Anyone who reaches for a weapon… dies.”
A murmur rippled through them like water between stones.
The young woman cried aloud, face pressed into the street.
“Thank you… thank you… thank you…”
“Don’t thank me.”
Lukas turned the shield and opened a path, pointing with its edge.
“This is my mercy, not your right.”
The first ones moved slowly, hands where he could see.
An old man lifted his grandson by the arm; two brothers carried a wounded comrade.
They passed by Lukas without ever meeting his gaze.
No one ran.
You don’t run in front of a predator.
When the last shadow turned the corner, Lukas lowered his gladius and, for a brief moment, listened to his own heartbeat.
It was calm.
His shield arm burned with a good kind of exhaustion — the kind that comes from doing the right thing, the hard way.
César nodded within him, silent.
Morgana sighed, a short laugh following:
“So virtuous… it’s almost annoying. …But beautiful.”
Lukas looked down the empty street — the marks of the Black Impact still etched into stone, and the gray trace that once was Mira.
The city lived.
Sorriso lived.
“Next sector,” he murmured, adjusting his grip on the shield.
“The war’s not over.”
And he walked — legionary stride, shield and gladius in cadence.
With each step, the metal whispered the same lesson:
Absorb. Return. Finish.
There was no glory today.
There was work.
And work was what kept the South standing.
From the rooftops, torn banners flapped in the wind.
Far away, a bell refused to stop ringing.
And Sorriso — stubborn, scarred, golden — kept breathing.
End of Chapter.41
