Chapter 27: Incredulity
"Do you truly grasp the weight of your words, insignificant thing?"
The voice arrived frigid, piercing like a blade cutting through a vacuum. It wasn't loud, nor did it need to be. Every syllable seemed to exert direct pressure upon Yukeli's cortex, forcing every fiber of his body to vibrate in a painful dissonance.
"You claim to have slain a Second-Order creature? A First-Order maggot like you? A minuscule thing that cannot even comprehend the architecture of its own essence?"
"Hahaha."
The creature's laughter flooded Yukeli's mind.
It was not a natural sound; it lacked the warmth or imperfection of organic laughter. These were frequencies that scraped against the interior of his skull—notes of pure derision that felt branded onto the walls of his consciousness.
To his horror, Yukeli realized something even more disturbing: the creature spoke in an alien tongue. The sounds were harsh, composed of phonemes impossible for a human throat to reproduce—vibrations from an era before man. And yet, he understood everything.
Every meaning arrived polished. Every intention was a weight impossible to ignore. The words were not heard; they were imposed directly upon his understanding, as if the Merchant were rewriting his very perception of reality.
The laughter continued, but Yukeli sensed the subtext. There was no joy there.
Only contempt. Disbelief. An incredulity so profound it bordered on offense. To that entity, Yukeli's claim was a logical fallacy—the delusion of an insect that had forgotten its place in the world.
"I... I wasn't alone," Yukeli forced the words out.
His throat felt dry and rigid, as if every syllable required breaking through a layer of stone. He forced air through paralyzed lungs, struggling to keep his voice steady while swallowing the terror tightening in his chest.
The creature's laughter swelled. It grew deeper. Crueler.
"Hahahahaha!"
The vibration tore through Yukeli's mind like a shockwave.
"Not even dozens of creatures like you could leave so much as a scratch on a Second-Order being," the voice continued, icy and absolute. "Even if it were the weakest wretch to crawl from the Womb of the Great Mother."
Yukeli did not understand the term, but the weight of those words was ancient. The "Womb of the Great Mother" sounded like a fundamental truth, a place from which all dense life emerged. But he had no mental capacity for linguistic archaeology now.
His mind was occupied with resistance. He and the other two had brought down the serpent. He remembered the metallic tang of blood, the suffocating despair, the final moment the beast collapsed. It had been brutal. It had been heretical.
But it had been real. They had won.
Why, then, did this entity treat the fact as a physical impossibility?
Silence fell. But it was not an empty silence; it was dense, heavy as molten lead. Something enormous was thinking. Yukeli felt the creature's presence turn entirely toward him, analyzing every fragment of his memory, every pulse of his will.
The Merchant wasn't just reading his thoughts; he was dissecting his soul. The sensation was that of a surgical invasion. Every idea that surfaced in Yukeli's mind was cut open and examined by something far older and infinitely more intelligent than himself.
The silence lasted for seconds that felt like eons. Then the creature spoke again, stripped of all laughter. Only coldness remained.
"Do you truly believe you are telling the truth?"
The question fell upon him like a physical weight. Yukeli stood motionless—not by choice, but because the air around him seemed to have solidified under the creature's focus. Not even his fingers would respond. Only his breath, slow and controlled, indicated he had not yet been erased from existence.
But within his mind, everything was in motion.
Why ask? The creature was already inside his head. It had seen the images of the serpent and the glow of the rune. The demand for a verbal response meant there was something a mental scan could not confirm.
Something that required the weight of a choice.
A chill ran down his spine. The Merchant was testing the integrity of his essence.
Yukeli organized his memories. The serpent. The struggle. The flow of power as the beast's primordial essence was pulled into him, changing him forever. He had not lied. He had no reason to lie. But the creature's reaction made it clear: in the logic of that world, what he had done was a systemic impossibility.
A glitch in the world's code.
Yukeli inhaled slowly. Panic was a noise he could not afford. He forced his mind to become a mirror of that brutal truth.
"Yes."
The word came out low but firm. An anchor of sound in the midst of another's domain.
"I am telling the truth."
The silence returned, even denser than before. Yukeli felt the immediate shift. The creature's presence did not recede, but the focus changed from "contempt" to "study."
Until then, the Merchant had treated him as something irrelevant. Now, it observed him with the meticulous care of a predator that had just found prey that shouldn't exist.
"Curious," the voice finally said. There was no laughter. Only the sound of a calculation being redone. "How peculiar... you truly carry the conviction of your words."
The entity dove deeper. It wasn't a violent invasion, but a detailed exploration, analyzing emotions and tactile impressions. To Yukeli, this was worse. It meant he was now an object of interest to a patient and eternal mind.
"A First-Order creature..." the Merchant continued, almost in an internal monologue. "Who claims to have participated in the fall of a Second-Order being... and who carries the scars of that heresy in the form of a Rune."
Silence returned. Then the presence whispered, lower, more pensive:
"If this is real..."
The sentence hung suspended in the air. Yukeli felt the contempt being diluted by a new emotion: a hungry curiosity. And he knew, in the depths of his soul, that for a being like the Merchant, being "curious" was the most dangerous state of all.