Dex held Lumia's gaze for several seconds that stretched like an eternity. The war within him was fiercer than any battle he had fought against cave demon. Part of him was screaming with savage force, commanding him to be silent, to rise and withdraw, to preserve the aura of mystery and absolute power that intimidated enemies and guaranteed survival. But another part-buried deeply and very far down-felt a sudden and strange relief.
Dex drew an immensely deep breath, filling his lungs with the cold, damp forest air, then exhaled it slowly. He felt a strange, overwhelming urge to confess. Perhaps because Lumia was as foreign to this world as he was-a being that understood nothing of human politics or society's judgements. Or perhaps because, after all this concealment, he simply needed to hear his truth spoken aloud in the open air, to prove to himself that he had been real, and that he had not lost his mind.
He settled into a more relaxed posture, leaning his broad back against the rough bark of the tree. The intensity of the Phoenix fire in his blue eyes receded, calming and shifting from a blazing blue to a warm, sorrowful orange-the colour of a dying sunset breathing its last over the ruins of a shattered city.
"You are right, Lumia... right to a terrifying degree," Dex began to speak, his voice taking on a rough, deep tone shot through with a grief he was unaccustomed to showing-a grief that scraped the throat like swallowing ground glass. "I am a stranger here. A stranger in this world to the same degree that you are a stranger in this age. Our meeting in that cavern was no coincidence. We were two pieces of wreckage discarded by time, colliding at the bottom."
He closed his eyes for a moment, summoning images he had tried to erase.
"In the place I came from... in my original world, there was no sky filled with winged dragons. There was no Mana flowing through people's veins to grant them miracles. No one flew through the air or cast fire incantations. It was a purely material world, stripped bare of magic, governed by human laws and built from solid concrete and cold steel. And those laws, Lumia-I swear to you-were harsher, more lethal, and more savage than the claws of any demon or rampaging beast we might face in Falus Forest."
He opened his eyes and looked into the fire between them, as though he could see the reel of his former life burning within it. He began to tell her, in slow and heavy words, about his previous life in a world called Earth.
He told her about the ordinary life that was overturned in a single cursed day. He described the tightly constructed trap set for him with demonic precision, and how he was exploited as a scapegoat in a filthy game played by those with wealth and power. He told her how a hideous murder was fabricated against him-one he had not committed-and how he was stripped of his name, his reputation, and his every dream in the prime of his youth, to stand before a corrupt judge who brought down his gavel and declared the end of an innocent man's life with all the ease and detachment of signing a routine piece of paperwork.
"Then came the prison..." Dex said, and his voice trembled slightly against his will.
He was not describing a place. He was describing a psychological and architectural hell.
"Not a prison like the dungeons of this Empire, where they throw you into a damp cellar to be eaten by rats. No. Prison in my world was an advanced industry for systematically shattering the human soul. Solitary confinement... can you imagine a space no more than two metres in length and a metre and a half in width?"
He traced the dimensions in the air with his hands.
"Concrete walls: solid and very cold, designed to drain the warmth from your body and leave you shivering through the night. No furniture, no colour-only an iron cot and a metal toilet. And worst of all... the isolation. The massive steel door slammed shut with a ringing that deafened the ears and announced your severance from the universe. The only window was a small slot high in the wall, barred with dense iron rods. I would stand on the tips of my toes to see through it a small piece of sky-not to enjoy it, but to remember what I had lost. To torture myself with a false hope every morning."
Dex fell silent for a moment, swallowing the tightness forming in his throat. Lumia was listening with absolute concentration. Her silver eyes, flushed with crimson, widened with every detail he painted. She did not understand what concrete was, or what a court of law meant-but she understood with perfect clarity the meaning of cosmic oppression.
"I spent fifteen years in that condition, Lumia," Dex spoke the number as though expelling poison from his mouth. "Fifteen years, counting the pulses in my own chest so as not to lose my mind. Hearing the echo of my own breathing. Talking to the shadows on the walls. I was not a monster when I entered that place. I was an ordinary young man who loved life-but the filthy world decided to put me in a suffocating metal cage, because destroying an innocent man was far easier than finding the truth and confronting the real monsters who wore expensive suits."
He closed his fist with a force that nearly drove his nails through his palm.
"I died there. Not executed. Not killed in a fight. I died from the slow suffocation, from the rotting of the soul, from the heart stopping from despair in a dark corner-entirely alone, with no one to hold my hand, no one to say goodbye to me, no one to weep for me. I was Prisoner 4021, and nothing more than a number erased from the ledgers."
He raised his head and looked at her directly, and the fire returned to his eyes with frightening force, cutting through the grief like a blade.
"Then I woke here. In the world of Ekarthas. In the body of this frail young man that everyone mocked and despised. But they understood nothing-nothing at all. They did not understand that the soul which had taken root in this body was born from the coldest, darkest floor in the cosmos. And when that dark and deformed soul merged with the forbidden Phoenix fire... I swore. I swore by every particle of Mana in this existence that I would never be put in a cage again. That I would never be a victim again. If this world wishes to be cruel... I will show it a hell that its own gods have never imagined."
A single luminous crimson tear descended from Lumia's silver eye and fell onto the black cloak without a sound-as though her Celestial body had responded to the echo of absolute human pain.