Chapter 526
"Ridiculous!" the youngest screamed, and for the first time, his faint smile vanished completely, replaced by something more primitive, older, and far more terrifying—not anger, but shame, the kind of shame born from realizing that he was speaking to a wall, that all his words, all his laughter, every Sa he unleashed left none of the marks he had wanted upon the young man lying on the ground with two empty eye sockets.
"Do you even know who I am? I am the greatest ruler the Land of the Gods has ever had! I am the one who rebuilt this civilization from ruin after King Xavier XVII and Myra Astrielle chose to die like cowards! I am the one who brought order to the chaotic Gods, who made them laugh in unison, who turned a cold palace into the hell I commanded! I am the one who—"
He unleashed Sa: Fragmentation, and Theo's battered body split into three pieces that remained connected only by thin strands of flesh as delicate as sewing thread. Blood flowed from those connections not like water, but like sand—dry, brittle, as though it no longer believed it had any reason to keep flowing.
"I am the one who will burn Erietta Bathee upside down before every god!" the youngest continued, his voice growing louder, sharper, increasingly resembling someone screaming into a well too deep to return an echo.
"I am the one who will make her feel the flames from her head to the tips of her toes, slowly, so she understands that death does not always arrive as a liberator—sometimes it comes as an executioner who savors every single scream! And you, Inspirator, all you can do is lie there and listen, utterly powerless!"
"That's right. Everything is unfolding exactly as it was written in the script," Theo replied once again.
This time, the words came from the middle section of his body, the only part that still possessed an intact mouth, though his lips had been torn open in three places. After speaking, he let out a long sigh, the kind of sigh that sounded like someone patiently waiting for a bus at a stop where no bus would ever arrive—patient, resigned, yet strangely not hopeless.
The youngest clenched both fists, his long nails digging into his own palms until blood flowed. The blood was not red but gray, gray like the sky before a storm, gray like Theo's eyes back when he still had eyes that could see. Then he screamed, his cry shaking the air, the earth, and even the distant pillars of atonement that still faithfully awaited Erietta Bathee's body, wherever it might be now.
"RESPOND!" the youngest roared, and his voice came not from his throat but from his entire body, from every pore, from every crack in his authority that had begun to show signs of exhaustion.
"RESPOND, YOU FILTHY CREATURE! DON'T JUST SAY 'YES,' 'OHH,' OR 'I SEE'! SCREAM! CRY! BEG! PROVE THAT YOU'RE STILL HUMAN! PROVE THAT YOU CAN STILL FEEL SOMETHING!"
Hhhh!!
"My parents? They were worthless!" the youngest shrieked as he cast Sa: Denial. Theo nearly avoided it by rolling to the right, yet the edge of the attack still grazed him, peeling away the remaining skin on his arm like burned paper—without fire, without heat, only the absolute decree that the arm no longer deserved to have skin.
"Xavier XVII and Myra Astrielle died like cowards! They abandoned a crumbling throne, abandoned a cold palace, abandoned me—the youngest child they never even acknowledged!"
Huuh!!
"Human heroism? What a joke! They weren't heroic. They were selfish! They chose to die together for love—a love they never gave me, not even the slightest fragment of it!"
He laughed, a laugh that burst from his throat like shattered glass struck by a hammer. Amid that laughter, he unleashed Sa: Reduction toward Theo, who could now do nothing but crawl left, then right. His battered body moved like a spider with three broken legs—slow, desperate, yet strangely unwilling to stop.
"Human heroism... bullshit," Theo replied as he spat out blood. The blood was no longer red but a murky gray, like rice water left to settle for far too long. The word "bullshit" came out flat, devoid of emotion, yet somehow it cut deeper than every Sa the youngest had unleashed, like a thorn invisible to the eye that pierced in the most unexpected place.
The youngest halted in his tracks. His blazing crimson eyes blinked once, then twice, like lamps beginning to die. For a brief moment, the hatred on his face transformed into genuine confusion, confusion born from his inability to understand why the word "bullshit," spoken by a young man whose body had already been destroyed, hurt far more than every insult he had ever received from his siblings during those lonely birthday celebrations.
"You... how dare you—" he began.
He never finished.
Theo spat again, but this time it was not blood. It was ordinary saliva, as clear as water, landing directly on the tip of the youngest's shoe, a shoe crafted from the bones of an extinct dragon. The spit left no stain at all, yet that absence of a stain was the greatest insult of all, as though the youngest was not even worthy of being dirtied by a human's saliva.
"Your parents... died for love," Theo said from where he now sat half-upright and half-prostrated, his broken body folded into a strange posture. Humanity knew that position as sitting between two prostrations—his right knee touching the ground, his left knee raised, his back curved like an imperfect crescent moon, and what remained of his hands resting upon his thighs with an almost sacred solemnity, as though he were praying to a god who had never answered anyone's prayers.
"But you... will die in loneliness."
Those words fell like a stone cast into a once-calm pond. For one long second—far too long—the youngest neither moved, nor spoke, nor laughed. He simply stood there with his mouth half-open, like a six-year-old boy realizing for the very first time that the birthday cake as hard as stone was not a gift, but a message—a message telling him that no one in the room cared whether he lived or died.
"Sa: Judgment!" the youngest finally screamed, his voice emerging not from his throat but from the deepest hollow within his chest, a hollow he had spent thousands of years trying to fill with power, laughter, and wicked schemes. Yet it had never been filled, never, because the emptiness inside one's heart could never be filled by anything except the one thing that had been missing from the very beginning: love.
The Sa surged forward in relentless waves, piling atop one another like an endless tsunami. Sa: Reduction came from the left, Sa: Denial from the right, Sa: Fragmentation descended from above, and Sa: Singularity rose from below. The five Sa did not attack one after another, but all at once, layered together like sheets of paper glued together by impatient hands.
To be continued…