Chapter 518
"You will not meet him tonight," said the left hand, his voice quiet yet carrying an undeniable certainty, like someone who already knew how this story would end because he had read its script thousands of years ago, while Aldraya, whose silvery-white hair fluttered without wind and whose unblinking eyes reflected the dim light from the crucifixion pillars in the distance, merely smiled, a smile that never reached his eyes because they had long since lost the ability to reflect anything except a cold emptiness.
"You are mistaken," Aldraya replied, his voice emerging not from his throat but from deep within his chest, heavy and profound, resembling the youngest's voice yet carrying an entirely different tone, a tone that declared he had no need to threaten anyone because threats were merely tools for those who still doubted their own strength.
"We will meet again. We will become one again. But look at you three, already here waiting for me, as though you knew I would come. Or perhaps... you had no choice but to face me because the LORD ordered you to keep me away from the place where He is playing with His newest toy."
Behind Aldraya, in the distance that could only be seen by eyes that never blinked, stood the silhouette of Theo, a nineteen-year-old young man who had never wielded a sword, whose hair looked as though he had not bathed for a thousand years, standing before the youngest.
Even though several light-years separated them, Aldraya could feel that something was terribly wrong, something that was never supposed to happen in a scenario he had memorized by heart.
Inside Theo's mind, in the deepest place where foreign voices were normally forbidden from entering, a silent commotion unfolded, not a disturbance that could be heard by ears, but one that echoed through consciousness itself, born from questions he could not answer no matter how many thousands of times he repeated them within a fraction of a second.
"This isn't right," Theo whispered to himself, and even his inner voice sounded unfamiliar, like someone listening to a recording of their own voice being played at the wrong speed.
"In the scenario of Flo Viva Mythology, the youngest, together with the left hand, the right hand, and his assistant, was supposed to stop Ilux from approaching the crucifixion site of Erietta Bathee. Not me. Not Aldraya. And certainly not separated like this. I'm here facing the youngest alone, while Aldraya is confronting his three guardians instead. This makes no sense. Does the youngest not realize at all that he has stepped outside the scenario? Or does he realize it, and that is exactly what he wants? Did he deliberately choose to face me, not because I am more threatening than Ilux, but because there is something about me... something that has caught his curiosity?"
Time, within the chaotic Land of the Gods, no longer behaved as it should. It leaped. It stopped. It turned in directions that no clock or calendar had ever taught.
And when it finally decided to move again, with hesitant steps like someone walking across a floor that might collapse at any moment, Theo found himself still standing before the youngest, in the same place yet beneath different air, with the light having shifted from dim to even dimmer, as though reality itself could no longer decide whether to endure or surrender to the exhaustion it had felt ever since the Hole Youth took his very first step into the Land of the Gods.
The youngest, completely unbothered by the bewildering leap in time, let out a long sigh before he began to speak.
Not to Theo, but to himself, to the air, to the crucifixion pillars still faithfully waiting for Erietta Bathee's body in the distance, to the Gods who might already be dead or dying in the other layers of the Land of the Gods, to anyone willing to listen... or unwilling to listen at all.
"How foolish humanity is," the youngest said, his voice carrying neither anger, nor sadness, nor disappointment, but disgust, a subtle disgust carefully preserved for thousands of years like wine aging in a dark underground cellar.
"They dare to defy the Gods. They dare to interfere with the sacrificial plan that had been arranged long before their great-great-grandfathers were even born. They dare to enter the Land of the Gods without an honorable name, without a family name whose ancestors are worthy of remembrance, without any classification whatsoever except... filthy hair and half-closed eyes."
He let out a soft chuckle, the very same eerie, low laugh that had echoed through the hall earlier, before continuing.
"And how rotten a life must be to choose to stand before me now, before the sole ruler of the Land of the Gods, bringing neither offerings, nor prayers, nor knees willing to bend. You know, human named Theo Vkytor, back in my father's era, King Xavier XVII, before he chose to die like a coward, every human who came here always brought something: gold, slaves, their most beautiful daughters, or at the very least a bottle of wine that had been fermented for a thousand years. But you? You came empty-handed, carrying nothing but shameless drowsiness and a courage that, to be perfectly honest, annoys me far more than it impresses me."
Theo, who had been standing in exactly the same posture he had maintained ever since walking through the eastern gate, hands tucked into his pockets, eyes half-closed, shoulders slightly slumped forward like someone who had just woken up and still had not decided whether the day was worth living, let out a sigh.
It was not the dramatic sigh the youngest had made eight seconds earlier in the hall, but a short, ordinary sigh, the sigh of someone who had heard far too many villain monologues in previous games and had grown tired of the same repetitive narrative structure.
"Are you finished?" Theo asked, his voice flat, impossibly flat, as calm as the surface of a lake untouched by the wind.
He did not even bother opening his eyes any wider when he spoke. His half-closed eyes remained exactly as they were, unchanged by even a single millimeter.
"Because if you're not, I'm going over to Aldraya and the others now. They might need help. Or maybe they don't. But at least something is happening over there, something is moving, something that isn't just... talking."
He yawned, not a fake yawn meant as an insult, but a genuine one born from a body that was truly exhausted, truly bored, and truly indifferent to whoever stood before him or whatever threats that person might make.
And as his mouth opened wide in that yawn, the youngest, watching him, felt something strange stir within his chest, something he had not experienced since his sixth birthday party, when he blew out the candles all by himself.
Curiosity, mixed with offense, two emotions that should never have been able to coexist within the same space, now pressed against one another inside him like two hissing cats trapped together inside a sack far too small to contain them.
To be continued…