Chapter 685: A Question With a Clear Answer |
Alex felt the world turning dark. The roar of the battle, the golden light, the dissolving chaos and hunger domains- all of it faded into a suffocating silence.
It crashed down all at once, dragging him into a spiral that moved from fear into something worse, something closer to absolute helplessness.
The terrifying truth bled straight through the denial he had been holding onto without fully admitting he was holding onto it, drowning whatever desperate hope had been keeping the worst possibility at arm’s length beneath an icy, settled certainty.
He had known Sophia was special. He was no fool, and he had never pretended otherwise, not even to himself.
When he had first noticed the accumulation of mana in her body, he had attributed it to some fortunate encounter in the Ancient World, a stroke of luck similar to his own awakening through the Evolution Fruit.
The comparison alone suggested how rare such an event must have been, but the Ancient World was vast, and opportunities were there for the taking, as Alex himself had gone from nothing to everything after his encounter with Cronos.
But the longer he had watched her, the clearer it became that what Sophia had encountered was not anything simple.
Within months, she had awakened. Within months after that, she was already at Second Rank, a pace that was achievable, after all, he had done it himself, so had Venedikt, so had Andrei, but only through specially engineered conditions designed to accelerate what would otherwise take much longer.
Sophia had none of that. No mana-enriched chamber. No specialized machinery. No recovery pods. Not even the help from Zero needed to develop a class, the foundational process that conditioned a body to focus its growth along particular lines rather than diffusing it everywhere at once.
Her growth rate was, by any honest measure, absurd. Mildly slower than his own, yet considerably faster than Venedikt’s or Andrei’s, and it was all achieved with no equipment, no guidance, no visible mechanism that explained it.
Alex had accepted long ago that she was genuinely special. He had only understood the full scope of what that meant after returning from an entire year inside the Ancestral Realm and finding that Sophia had adopted a pet.
A small red bird.
A Scarlet Tanager, to be precise.
One look had told him the bird was not what it appeared to be, and seeing it through the eyes of the Ancient had confirmed it beyond any possibility of misreading.
It was an entity. A bird in its most reduced, surface-level appearance, and something of genuinely terrible strength underneath that appearance, stripped down to a shape small enough to sit comfortably on a child’s shoulder.
Alex had built theories since then, turning the possibilities over in the quiet hours when there was nothing more urgent demanding his attention.
A mostly unknown Bard legacy holder who commanded creatures and animals as extensions of their own will. A Dragoness who had risen to prominence during the Devourer Beast rampage at the end of his previous life, or even the Chaos Queen herself, with whom he had crossed paths directly more than once.
He was no stranger to chaos creatures and was also no stranger to their queen. He had watched her rampage across the Ancient Realm on more than one occasion, her fury directed almost exclusively at the Ratlings, the Mutants, the Plagued, the things that the rest of the realm had already declared war against.
Even when she had hunted him specifically for the Ancient blade Sorrow, he had come away from the encounter with the impression of someone who, beneath everything chaotic and overwhelming about her nature, carried something that could honestly be called a good heart.
She clearly still carried it. It was the only explanation for why, even consumed by madness, even mid-collapse, she had turned her fury toward two Demon Sin Generals instead of simply letting the madness loose on whatever was nearest.
But the question that settled into Alex now, cold and persistent, was not whether that good heart was real.
It was how long someone could keep choosing it.
How long a person could consciously, deliberately point their own unraveling at evil rather than at whatever was simply closest, before the part of them still making that choice ran out of the strength required to keep making it.
His sister was out there, somewhere in the Ancient World, carrying strength as well as madness, which had driven two Sin Generals to near death in a battle that no person other than a handful would walk away alive from.
And the question that mattered now was if the version of her doing the fighting would still be there to come home.
"Margaret and Darrien."
The voice arrived like a cold breeze, and oddly, it had the effect of calming the chaos in Alex’s mind rather than worsening it, drawing him back from the spiral he had been falling through and into the more solid, manageable ground of reality.
His thoughts shifted toward the names themselves, toward what they had meant to him across the years.
"They are both dead." Lady Enigma’s voice carried a weight that arrived with the statement and stayed there, and she drew a breath, audible and deliberate, as though even she felt some portion of the loss. "But it was not your sister’s fault. On the contrary, she avenged them."
"One of them survived," Alex said absentmindedly, the shock from the death of both of his teachers still clouding his thoughts.
The battle had appeared, on its surface, to end with Beelzebub’s madness turning against Sire, the chaotic violence of it potentially capable of destroying them both in the confusion.
But Alex had watched the hunger move with too much intention beneath its apparent chaos, the attack against Sire arriving with the precision of something planned rather than the randomness of something simply unraveling.
He knew those soulless creatures well enough to recognize purpose when it wore the mask of madness.
"Beelzebub consumed the Sin of Pride," Lady Enigma confirmed. "He should not have been capable of it, but he managed it, and in doing so, he acted in clear defiance of Ahrimon."
She paused, and the pause carried genuine uncertainty rather than performed hesitation.
"It was certainly for power. Beyond that, I cannot be entirely certain of his motives, though I suspect Beelzebub intends to use the strength of his fellow Sin Generals to break the laws binding him to Ahrimon. To find a way to escape this world and gain something closer to true freedom."
"But I cannot be certain about..."
"I wasn’t asking for an explanation." Alex’s voice cut through cleanly, his eyes finding hers and holding them with an expression stripped of everything that usually accompanied conversation.
"I assume that you believe I am asking you to kill your sister." Lady Enigma said, after a heartbeat that seemed to wait for some reaction and receive none, "That is not what I am asking."
She let that land before continuing.
"You need only banish her three companions. Once that is done, we seal her, which will place her into a comatose state. That alone should be sufficient to complete Earth’s law awakening within the five years available to us."
"Once everything reaches its conclusion, once you have erased the taint of Ahrimon, we will have the means to sever the connection your sister carries to chaos. Removing that connection would leave her no different from any other young girl."
She offered him a small smile, the expression carrying the particular confidence of someone who believed they were presenting good news.
"It would be a happy ending for everyone. No unnecessary deaths on either world." The silence that followed in the chamber was heavy, and within it, Alex’s stillness did not change.
"What if you can sever Sophia’s connection to chaos?" Alex asked.
"That shouldn’t be a problem," Enigma replied. "She is still immature in her development, and has not fully turned into a chaos queen, though she has begun her descent into madness. That is precisely why we need to act quickly."
"I asked what if you can’t help her," Alex repeated it without raising his voice, without any visible flicker of the anger that the question’s substance would have justified in most people.
Enigma’s expression hardened.
"You already know about the chaos queen who waged a catastrophic war across the Ancient World," she said. "She was newly born then, barely formed, with almost no understanding of what she carried."
"Now consider how much death and misery she would have caused had she possessed the time and the fortune to actually grow into what she was becoming."
She held his gaze.
"You don’t know this, but across the wider cosmos, every time a chaos queen survives long enough to roam freely through the chaos realm unchecked, she becomes a calamity for everything living within her reach." .
"Many of them have caused the death of entire galaxies. Countless billions upon billions of lives, gone, because no one acted while acting was still possible."
"You have seen for yourself," she continued, "that there is no reasoning with a creature once madness has fully claimed it."
"This is not an answer," Alex said, voice barely above a whisper.