Sera and I walked for a moment by each other's side, our boots crunching softly against the fresh layer of snow. I wanted to talk to her about so many things—to bridge the quiet distance that had built up over the last few minutes—but she seemed completely awkward and shy. I suppose walking around completely alone in a desolate winter zone with a peer of the opposite sex that you secretly fancy is bound to make anyone feel a little flustered.
Well, truth be told, I felt a little awkward myself. It was just that she was so fundamentally endearing that my usual rapid-fire calculation matrix completely stalled out. I didn't know what to do or say, so I just walked silently beside her, letting the cold wind fill the space between us.
VillainEnjoyer: "Dude definitely didn't plan his date well enough." |
DraconicSoul: "I may have hated on the streamer early on, but now that I think about it, most of the situations he's been in were completely unfavourable to him. As the stream progresses, I think he's actually a more balanced character in a world full of variables packed with OP twists." |
RandomGuy69: "@DraconicSoul Lil bro, no one asked. And stop ruining the romantic atmosphere with your unnecessary opinions." |
CherryEater: "The stream feels less isekai and more slice-of-life with a mix of romance and thriller right now. And I am all in for it!" |
MachinaDeus: "I understand your point, but I definitely didn't expect this level of emotional depth from a Final Boss protagonist." |
FangirlingIsMyPassion: "Streamer, if you see my message, just know that I love you!!! And also, ask Sera about her favourite things if you're struggling to initiate a conversation!" |
I caught the advice flickering across the periphery of my streaming feed. I could technically ask her about her favourite things. Still, the true internal hurdle was that I already knew the answers, thanks to my memory of the original novel and the hyper-database of [Mad Mind]. Pretending to be ignorant felt strange. But looking at her downcast profile, I decided it was worth a shot anyway.
"Sera, what's your favourite food?" I asked, turning my hidden gaze toward her with a genuine, gentle smile.
"Huh..." Seraphina blinked, slightly startled by the sudden, mundane question cutting through the tense atmosphere, but she quickly composed herself. "I... I really like to eat anything made by my mom..."
She looked away from me, her eyes drifting down to the pristine white snow beneath our boots as a soft, deeply nostalgic smile touched her lips.
"Your mother cooks for you?" I asked, allowing a touch of genuine surprise to colour my voice, even though the detail was thoroughly logged in my memories. "Isn't she a Countess of the Empire?"
"Well, yeah, she is," Seraphina replied, looking back up at me, her nostalgic smile lingering. "She is an incredibly busy woman with her territory duties, but whenever she manages to find even a little bit of free time, she goes straight to the estate kitchen to cook something up just for me. Most of the time, either our head chef or Dad handles the meals, but whenever Mom cooks... It's just something incredibly special."
Hearing that gentle melody in her voice broke my heart a little. This pure, fiercely innocent girl had been systematically broken by so many horrific, traumatic experiences in the original text. Yet, even after surviving that absolute meat grinder of a narrative, she had still desperately tried to remain kind to the world.
But Sophia had to ruin it. In the original timeline, my psychopathic older sister had to do those unspeakable, monstrous things to Seraphina just to completely break her spirit and forcefully "claim" her as her own twisted possession.
Luckily, I had already managed to violently derail the plotline. I'd altered the plotline's trajectory so heavily that Sophia would never become that predatory monster from the source material. But preventing one catastrophe had unfortunately birthed an entirely different, highly concerning operational hazard.
Sophia Von Crown was completely, pathologically obsessed with me.
It didn't matter that I was her literal blood-related little brother. She had openly, legally declared to our entire family lineage that I was the only individual she was ever going to marry. My concept of basic human privacy had literally ceased to exist the moment I completed the high-tier quest to defeat her back when I was only eight years old.
Just a year ago, while exploring our family mansion, I stumbled upon a heavily concealed, private chamber hidden deep within the structural foundations of our family mansion. What I discovered inside that room still gave me phantom psychological tremors.
Sophia had meticulously stashed away countless candid photos, a high-end computer with high-resolution videos, and hidden audio recordings tracking my every movement since childhood. It didn't even stop at simple surveillance. The room was populated with literal life-sized body pillows bearing my exact likeness, along with some deeply disturbing, custom-moulded pleasure toys crafted perfectly to my physical shape.
"Amon, why exactly do you... Look so pale all of a sudden?"
Sera's soft voice cleanly snapped me out of the psychological abyss. I blinked beneath my blindfold, looking down at her innocent, intensely curious face, and realised I had completely zoned out while cataloguing Sophia's terrifying collection. My older sister's extreme, hyper-evolved bro-con behaviour truly gave me a recurring dose of genuine trauma that was going to take an entire lifetime to overcome.
"Ah, it's really nothing at all, Sera. I was just briefly thinking about something," I replied reassuringly, forcing my pale complexion to regulate as I offered her a small, steady smile.
"If you truly don't mind me asking... what exactly were you thinking about?"
Her golden eyes were practically dancing with a potent mix of pure innocence and absolute curiosity. It was a look that made me want to completely cast aside my filters and just adore her on the spot, but I restrained myself. I had to stay focused.
"Well, I was actually wondering about your specific type of guy," I said, my voice smooth, calm, and entirely casual.
It was a calculated, deliberate probe. Based on my deep understanding of her character development, I knew she had likely developed some latent, deeply rooted romantic feelings for me due to how aggressively and decisively I had protected her on multiple occasions. But I needed to be certain of her feelings before moving forward.
Seraphina instantly halted in her tracks, her boots sinking slightly into the fresh snow. A faint, rapid crimson flush crept up her cheeks, perfectly contrasting against the white winter backdrop.
"T-That is a little... s-sudden, Amon..." she stammered, her hands gripping her baby dragon a little tighter as her melodic voice turned incredibly meek, quiet, and shy.
"How much cuter are you physically trying to get right now, Sera?" I groaned internally, my heart doing a dangerous, irregular flutter in my chest. "Damn it. If she keeps executing these shy expressions, my emotional defences are going to completely collapse."
At that exact moment, the distinct, jagged traces of Dark Magium I had been tracking through the sub-zero air completely vanished. The rancid magium frequency just evaporated into nothingness.
The abrupt silence could mean only one thing: Oberyn had officially swooped in and cleanly slaughtered every remaining infected lifeform in the immediate epicentre.
His tactical layout was crystal clear now. He had deliberately used the freshman class as disposable, unsuspecting bait to lure a massive concentration of the infected lifeforms away from the primary source of corruption. Once the horde was fragmented and pulled into the open, he simply walked into the weakened core, cleared out the remaining hostiles, and harvested the high-grade biological samples he so desperately coveted for his research.
"Hey there, Crown."
I heard that familiar, smooth voice echo from the shadows of the frost-laden trees behind me. When I turned my head back, Oberyn stood there casually, his pristine white lab coat now heavily stained with the thick, viscous black blood of the slain Revenants.
"You're a complete disgrace of a Professor, Oberyn," I spat out, my voice completely devoid of any human warmth.
Truth be told, I felt a surge of genuine, burning anger flaring in my chest. Daring to deploy completely unpolished, naive first-years as expendable meat-shields just to gather raw materials for a personal research project disgusted and infuriated me to no end—even if, from a purely administrative standpoint, the underlying tactical reasoning behind it was entirely flawless and logically sound.
"Aw, what's the matter? Do you actually feel angry with me, Crown?" Oberyn smiled warmly at me, his tone remaining perfectly calm, measured, and drowning in confidence. "Please, don't be. Because I am entirely structured to believe that someone of your specific calibre understands exactly why I executed this operation."
"That doesn't provide you with a single valid excuse, Oberyn," I countered coldly, my wand hand tightening slightly. "You possessed a dozen alternative methods to achieve your harvest goals, but you deliberately chose the most obnoxious, parasitic path available simply because you didn't want your fucking precious identity getting compromised to those Aimus retards who caused this corruption on the Frozen Grounds of the Academy in the first place."
"Oh, I specifically chose this path because you were on the roster, Crown," Oberyn chuckled softly at my words, his brilliant green eyes flashing with an unsettling, predatory amusement. "I had absolute faith that you wouldn't just sit idly by and watch. I knew with absolute certainty that you would deploy those familiars of yours to guarantee the survival metrics of your precious peers."
I looked at him silently, my wand gripped tightly in my hand. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to step forward and mangle his arrogant face into the snow, but beneath my burning frustration, I knew the bastard was fundamentally right. He had backed me into a corner using his strategic logic.
"Oh, and by the way," Oberyn added casually, tapping his chin as if he had just remembered a minor, mundane detail on a syllabus. "The Aimus are actually present in the Frozen Zone right this very second. When I closely examined the structural density of the corruption core just now, I realised that the device had been placed not too long ago." He looked around the barren white horizon, lazily stretching his arms over his blood-stained lab coat.
"They planted it here exactly yesterday, from what I could mathematically deduce after analysing the magium decay around the core."
Hearing those precise words, the pieces of the puzzle violently collided in my mind, and everything clicked with absolute, sickening clarity. This entire scenario wasn't just an administrative oversight or a random ecological leak. It was a calculated, deliberate trap—a trap specifically designed to lure us out into the open. I could barely process the infuriating reality that the two of us had actually fallen for it.
"I know exactly what is running through that complex mind of yours, Crown. You're thinking it's a trap and that we both blindly walked into it," Oberyn said, his green eyes calmly scanning the tree line, his demeanour entirely unbothered. "But in reality, we didn't truly fail. By executing this specific trap, the Aimus are openly, structurally admitting that someone embedded deep within the Academy's high-level administration is an active traitor. Otherwise, there is an absolute zero-percent probability that the Aimus could have set up an elaborate, high-density corruption core inside this restricted zone and gone completely unnoticed by the main barrier filters."
"Wait..." My breath hitched as a freezing realisation gripped my throat, completely bypassing Oberyn's administrative deduction.
The Aimus didn't care about exposing a traitor. They didn't care about Oberyn.
"They placed this trap... to explicitly lure me out here..."
CRACK—!
. . .
A high-calibre sniper round didn't just pierce tissue; it tore cleanly through Amon's heart.
The kinetic shockwave snapped his body backwards, and he dropped lifelessly onto the frozen ground. In an instant, a torrent of dark crimson blood spilt outward from the catastrophic chest wound, rapidly painting the pristine white snow a violent, steaming red around his unmoving form.
Seraphina stared down at his corpse in absolute, unadulterated horror. The world around her seemed to lose all sound. Her legs instantly gave out beneath her, crashing into the snow, as hot tears rapidly formed at the corners of her eyes. The boy who had been one of her first friends in R.S. Advanced Academy, the one she had been casually teasing seconds ago, was suddenly a cold, unbreathing body.
Standing a few paces away, Oberyn merely clicked his tongue, his handsome face twisting into an expression of deep annoyance rather than grief.
"Nightfallen, stay exactly where you are and do not move," Oberyn commanded, his voice dropping into a flat, professional register. "I am going to locate and apprehend the assailants immediately."
With a subtle distortion of the air, the Prosecutor vanished from the spot entirely, tracking the bullet's trajectory back to its source.
The projectile that had struck Amon was a masterclass in absolute assassination. It was heavily enchanted with highly concentrated Dark Magium energy, seamlessly layered with Anti-Magic and Anti-Skill arrays designed to completely collapse a target's passive Magium defences upon contact.
Furthermore, its propulsion velocity radically eclipsed even the hyper-velocity baseline of Amon's blackhole bullets—travelling faster than a speed that effectively broke the flow of time itself. In other words, Amon had absolutely no mechanical pathway to evade or block the shot. It was a weapon explicitly manufactured to ensure his permanent expiration.
But the laws of this reality did not govern what came next.
The temperature in the clearing suddenly plummeted past the point of freezing, a heavy, suffocating pressure descending over the terrain that made the air itself feel like solid lead. Behind the weeping Seraphina, two towering figures materialised through the blizzard.
The playful, chaotic aura that usually defined Amou was entirely gone, replaced by a cold, apocalyptic stillness. Beside her, Tiamat's expression was a mask of absolute, clinical detachment—a terrifying neutrality that signalled a willingness to erase the entire world.
"Tiamat, repair Master's physical vessel immediately. I will handle the retrieval of his soul," Amou commanded. Her voice completely lacked its usual seductive playfulness, filled instead with a bone-chilling seriousness that betrayed her entire established personality.
Without uttering a single syllable, Tiamat crouched smoothly beside Amon's corpse. She placed her porcelain hand directly over the catastrophic, blood-soaked cavity in his chest. A faint hum vibrated through the air as her magium engaged, and the severed arteries, crushed bone, and ruptured muscle tissue instantly knit themselves back together. Within a fraction of a second, his chest was perfectly unmarred, as if the bullet had never existed.
"Death," Amou called out, her voice a flat, merciless decree aimed at the space before her.
In the very next second, the fabric of reality tore open. A pale woman of overwhelming, terrifying beauty and cosmic presence emerged from the void, clad in dark, heavy flowing robes that seemed to swallow the ambient light. In her grasp rested an intimidating, razor-sharp scythe that radiated the finality of existence. Strands of long silver hair cascaded down her back, and a thick blindfold covered her eyes, yet her presence alone made the surrounding trees groan under an invisible weight.
"You called, Madam...?" the entity whispered, bowing her head deeply despite her status as the absolute end of all living things.
"I will keep our interaction exceptionally short, Death," Amou said, looking down at the conceptual entity with eyes burning with cold fury. "Return my master's soul to his vessel this instant."
Death froze, her blindfolded head tilting slightly in profound bewilderment. "But Madam... his mortal thread has been formally severed by a weapon of corruption. By the laws of—"
Before the entity could finish her protest, Amou's hand blurred forward, gripping Death by the face with terrifying velocity. The Primordial applied a fraction of her true pressure, and the very concept of the end was instantly brought to her knees, writhing in agonising, conceptual pain as her structure threatened to shatter under Amou's fingers.
"I did not grant you permission to speak, Death," Amou stated, her words dropping like icebergs. "An inferior existence should never talk back when a Primordial Beast dictates an order."
"Amou, you are reaching the threshold of erasing her concept. Loosen your grip slightly," Tiamat remarked passively, looking over from Amon's healed body. "We require the mechanism of Death to remain intact. If she ceases to exist, we will be temporarily unable to properly purge and process the inferior lifeforms that dared to target our beloved Master."
"I don't care, Tiamat," Amou's grip tightened even further, ignoring the muffled, agonising gasps of the entity in her hand. "This minor byproduct of Creation dared to claim our Master's soul without calculating the consequences of her actions. Does she not care if the Soul Palace itself is cast into the bottomless depths of Limbo?"
The Soul Palace existed as the central hub of the afterlife, the cosmic transit world where the souls of the deceased resided to undergo final judgment before being routed to Paradise or Inferno. Because it was directly interconnected with both fundamental worlds, the physical or conceptual destruction of the Soul Palace would instantly trigger a chain-reaction collapse of both Paradise and Inferno—plunging the entirety of Creation into absolute, unmitigated chaos.
"Death, I highly suggest you return our Master's soul to his physical vessel before her grip tightens any further," Tiamat added, her amethyst eyes fixing onto the trembling, blindfolded entity. Her voice remained entirely neutral, yet the absolute certainty behind it was more terrifying than any threat. "Otherwise, I cannot guarantee what might happen within the next sixty seconds."