The Departure of the Hero’s Party is the threshold event in which Theo joins Luc and the others on their renewed demon-hunting quest, leaving the capital for the open road. Its decisive significance lies in the collision between public duty and private choice: Luc must continue serving as a Hero, but he refuses to let the institution surrounding that role dictate whom he loves, whether he must produce a successor, or what his life will become after the demons are defeated.

Causes and Background

The departure becomes possible after Luc is cleared to return to his quest, making the party’s exit from the capital necessary almost immediately. Preparation begins with training and practical equipment. Luc takes Theo to the armory to find a weapon, rejecting Theo’s belief that his existing knives will be sufficient against a demon. Theo, meanwhile, accepts the responsibilities of his new position as the party’s healer. He is determined not merely to accompany the group, but to improve the quality of life on the road, beginning with meals that would otherwise consist largely of traveler’s rations.

The mission takes place within a wider political and military crisis. The Demon King has been defeated, but remnants of his army remain scattered across the land under the leadership of surviving Demon Lords. The Hero’s party therefore continues to protect ordinary people from a threat that has not disappeared with the fall of its former ruler. The capital’s palace makes that institutional structure visible: one half houses the King, his family, councils, and balls, while the other trains magic users and knights who will serve the royals or enter the Hero’s party. Luc and his companions leave not as independent wanderers alone, but as representatives of a system that claims their labor for the protection of the realm.

Departure from the Capital

The morning of departure arrives with breakfast delivered to the party’s room. Luc eats with his characteristic ferocity, while Theo thinks ahead to the practical demands of travel and the care of the group. In the courtyard, every member carries a pack, including Cargo, whose saddlebags are strapped around his round middle. The court mage Syvia is present to see them off, and Eliza stands nearby, turning what should be a ceremonial beginning into a confrontation.

Eliza attempts to retain authority over Luc, and the conflict exposes the pressure placed upon him to continue the Heroic bloodline. Julius has already warned Theo that Eliza wants Luc to sire the next Hero, something that cannot be achieved through either of Julius’s or Theo’s relationships with him. The demand reduces Luc’s future to hereditary service, treating love and family as instruments of succession. Luc finally refuses to accept that arrangement. He declares that he appreciates what Eliza has done for him but that their relationship of control is ending once the demons are defeated; his life, he insists, is not hers to command.

The exchange becomes deliberately cruel, with Luc answering Eliza’s concern for bloodline by pointing out that she could have children herself if she valued reproduction so highly. He then turns away from her and returns to the party. Rather than allow the argument to delay their movement, he takes Theo by the wrist and pulls him toward the gate, while the others scramble to follow. Syvia’s warning that the King’s will may change with the seasons underscores the danger still hanging over them: leaving the capital does not mean escaping royal authority, but it does create physical distance from its immediate surveillance.

The procession through the capital is charged with public recognition. People part to make way for the party, some bowing and others offering friendly waves. Theo, already uncomfortable with the crowded city, finds the attention more oppressive than before. Luc remains oblivious to the display, keeping his grip on Theo’s wrist until they reach the open road and the capital begins to recede behind them. The gesture makes the departure intimate as well as political: Luc does not merely lead the party away; he visibly chooses to keep Theo beside him.

The First Road and the New Party Dynamic

The party’s first night is spent in a farmer’s hay barn amid the farmland surrounding the capital. The farmer and her wife provide a pot of stew for supper and eggs, bacon, and toast the following morning. As autumn approaches, the weather is cooling, but the sun still carries the force of summer. By midday, the travelers reach the forest, where the shade offers relief from the heat and marks their fuller transition from settled political space into the uncertain geography of the quest.

The group is tense, and Theo believes the tension centers on his presence. Conversation is sparse. Wicker attempts to fill the silence with aimless observations about whatever the party passes, but no one directly addresses the strain. Theo resents the way the role of “group mother” seems to have fallen to him, yet he also acts on it. At a stream, he orders everyone to wash before they determine how to hunt dinner. His authority is domestic and practical rather than martial, but it is precisely through such acts that he begins to function as the party’s healer and caretaker.

The contrast between the party’s public image and its private life is central to the event. In the capital, the group is watched, honored, and politically managed. On the road, its survival depends on food, cleanliness, equipment, shade, shelter, and mutual cooperation. Theo’s presence shifts the meaning of the quest from a formal heroic assignment toward a shared household in motion. The party’s journey is still organized around demons and danger, but its daily continuity increasingly depends on the care he provides.

Love, Bloodline, and Chosen Futures

The departure is also the public beginning of Theo and Luc’s attempt to build a future together under conditions that make such a future difficult. Luc has already described the loneliness imposed by the Hero’s role: his earliest long relationships belonged to people living in the capital, while later romances ended because the party stayed only briefly in each town or because departure made permanence impossible. He presents this instability as the fate of the Hero, but his relationship with Theo challenges that pattern.

Theo promises to wait for Luc regardless of how long it takes, touching the pendant that symbolizes his prior commitment. Luc answers with a family heirloom: a silver ring textured like scales and set with a dark sapphire, the only possession he has from his father, who died after saving an adventuring party from a demon attack. Luc places the ring on Theo’s marriage finger, where it unexpectedly contracts to fit. The object links inheritance to chosen commitment. Eliza wants Luc to continue a biological line of Heroes; Luc instead passes forward a ring associated with sacrifice, memory, and love, creating a bond that does not depend on producing a successor.

This is why the road departure functions as more than the opening of another adventure. The conventional quest would send the Hero away from home in order to restore an established order. Here, Luc leaves the capital while rejecting the order’s claim over his intimate life. Theo’s hoped-for destination is not another throne or heroic monument, but Leafel: the small home where they might live without demons or mages breaking down the door. The journey therefore contains two competing futures, one defined by bloodline and institutional duty, the other by peace, partnership, and a home built outside the capital’s control.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The immediate consequence is that the Hero’s party becomes a traveling unit with Theo as its healer and Luc openly aligned with him. Their route begins through farmland and forest rather than through the ceremonial spaces of the capital, and their first shared problems are material ones: food, shelter, washing, equipment, and the management of strained relationships. The departure turns Theo from a protected or contested figure into an active member of the party whose care affects how the group lives.

The event also establishes the conflict that later returns in the trial of the Demon King’s Host. Theo’s identity as Malthios’s host eventually brings him before the court in the capital, where Luc must decide how to reconcile the Hero’s duty to kill the Demon King with his commitment to Theo. When the court later demands judgment, people from Leafel appear through a mirror spell to demand Theo’s release, proving that the home and community Theo imagined as a refuge have become a political force of their own. The departure is therefore the first movement toward the community that will defend him when the heroic institution turns against him.

At the trial’s conclusion, Luc declares that he will fulfill his duty to kill the Demon King, but that he alone will choose when that happens. He describes Theo as Malthios’s prison and himself as the humble guard who will never again let Theo out of his sight. Faced with Eliza’s accusation that he is abandoning the future for which he trained, Luc answers that choosing a quiet and peaceful life with the man he loves is the only choice he has ever made for himself. King Alexis consequently sentences Malthios to life in prison and frees Theo of all charges. The party’s departure thus points toward a transformed meaning of heroism: not the unquestioning continuation of bloodline and command, but the possibility that those born with the Hero’s gift can choose their own fate while still protecting others.