Chapter 694: The Choice Was Never There |
"Big Brother."
The words broke apart before they finished, and then she was crying, not the quiet, contained tears of someone keeping themselves together, but the kind that came from somewhere deep and long-held, the kind that had been waiting for exactly this moment, for exactly this person, to finally let go in front of.
Alex held her without a word.
He didn’t offer reassurances yet. He didn’t reach for the right thing to say. He simply held her and felt, for the first time with his whole chest rather than just his mind, the true weight of what his sister had been carrying alone. The full, terrible shape of it.
It took a few minutes.
Her breathing slowly found its way back to something uneven but manageable, her body still shaking slightly with the aftershocks of it, her exhales still catching and breaking before they completed themselves.
"Even today," she started, her voice fragile and raw, "today I took the lives of good people."
Alex went still.
"They were losing to bad people, Bell confirmed it, I know that, but there were good people there as well." Her hands gripped the fabric at his sleeve without seeming to realize it. "I saw them. They were injured but alive, and I..." The breath broke again. "I killed them."
The words came out steady. He made sure of that. He made sure his voice gave her nothing to be more afraid of, nothing to carry on top of what she was already carrying.
But beneath it, the quiver was there, suppressed, contained, tucked somewhere she couldn’t hear it.
Elder Darrien. Lady Margaret.
Their faces moved through his mind, the grief of his teacher’s death still fresh and heavy on his mind. The people who had guided and protected him, and gave away their lives for the betterment of their world.
"You were not responsible for their deaths. If anything, you helped them," Alex said, knowing very well that his elders were never leaving that place alive, because the Sin Generals had already closed every exit.
The last attempt to flee had been cut off. Whatever minutes they had been given beyond that point had only existed because the Chaos Queen had arrived when she did.
Alex also knew her arrival had not been a coincidence.
Lady Enigma had guided Sophie there; he was certain of it. Whether it was because she had seen no path to two Elders’ survival and had chosen, pragmatically, to use the moment to remove a Sin General using the only instrument capable of doing it.
Or whether the answer was darker than that.
Whether she had possessed the means to save them and had simply chosen not to, deciding that the clearest way to make the threat of Sophie undeniable to Alex was to let two people he cared for die at her hands.
He didn’t know which it was yet.
Both possibilities lived in him with equal and uncomfortable weight, but what he knew, with certainty, was that Sophie had not chosen any of it. The guilt she was wearing as a second skin belonged to forces she had never been asked permission to carry.
However, he also knew that didn’t erase the other truth, the small city in the Ancestral realm, half-decimated, the lives lost in the atrocity he had witnessed firsthand.
Those had happened at Sophie’s hand, indirectly or not. He would not pretend otherwise, not even to himself.
But he also knew that if the vessel of the Chaos Queen had been anyone other than a kindhearted child who had fought her own nature every single day, if it had been someone indifferent, or someone broken, or someone who simply did not care about other worlds’ population.
He was certain then that by now there would have been no world left to save. Its chances of survival would have grown thinner with every passing day until they disappeared entirely.
"You are not at fault," Alex said, feeling her shiver against him as old memories surfaced behind her eyes, resurrecting themselves with the particular cruelty of things that had been suppressed too long. "It is the chaos that was imposed upon you." He kept his voice even, kept it certain. "Did you ever receive any option, any choice, to accept or refuse the Chaos legacy?"
She didn’t answer. She already knew the answer.
"I know you didn’t," Alex said. "So what fault is it of yours that the madness drives you toward things that are Chaos’s own nature and not your own?"
The reasoning reached her. He could feel it in the way her breathing shifted slightly, the grip on his sleeve loosening by a fraction. It didn’t absolve her, he knew that, and somewhere beneath the grief, she knew it too.
The things that had happened at her hand would never be fully erased by context or circumstance. The only path forward was the harder one, only acceptance, and the quiet knowledge that she had done better than anyone else could have in her position, and that it had mattered, even when it hadn’t felt like it.
But the guilt was not finished with her yet.
"But why me?" The words came out small and quivering, barely holding their shape.
Alex was quiet for a moment.
Then, gently, he pulled back just enough to look at her face, at the cold that had settled into her eyes alongside the tears.
"Sophie, do you know what position I hold in the Ancient World?" Alex asked.
She looked up at him, tears still tracing slow lines down her face, and shook her head.
Alex held her gaze for a moment, and then he made a decision.
She would find out soon enough. Better she heard it from him, with the reasoning attached, than piece it together alone and arrive at something worse.
"I am the Ruler of Malefis Domain," he said quietly. "The same person who saved Nova today. And the same person who condemned hundreds to their deaths in the process, even though I possessed the means to save them, simply because it was needed." He didn’t look away from her.
"The same person who will wage war against the Eldravian Empire, and watch millions die because of choices I made and will continue to make. I will be responsible for many of their deaths. Directly and indirectly both."
Sophie was very still.
"I ask myself the same question," Alex said, and the smile that came with it was genuine in a way that had nothing comfortable in it, the smile of someone who had sat with an impossible thing long enough to stop pretending it was anything else. "Why me? Why do I have to carry this?"
He exhaled slowly. "But I don’t have a choice. The Eldravian Empire will wage that war with or without my presence. The Demon King will try to consume this world with or without my resistance. The only thing my absence would change is how quickly things would reach the bad ending."
He held her eyes.
"So in truth, there is no choice. There is only doing my best. Saving as many people as I possibly can, and yes, the question will always remain. Maybe I could have done better. Maybe someone else in my position could have done better."
A pause.
"But there is also the reality that at least we are fighting for the right thing. Someone else in our position might sell their loyalty to power and safety without a second thought. And then what? The entire world would be lost, and there would be no one left to ask whether someone could have done better."
He reached out and gently smoothed her hair back from her face, his hand careful and slow.
"You and I have to accept it," he said. "No one else is in our position, and no one else could do better." His thumb moved across her cheek, catching what the tears had left behind. "We have to believe that with everything we have that we were chosen because we were the only right choice."
"And that is exactly why we cannot afford to wallow in despair or self-pity. We have to work, and make hard decisions. Follow guidance when it is wiser than our own, and do what is demanded of us, even when it costs us."
Sophie looked at him, her eyes still hazy, still processing, still trying to find the ground beneath everything he was laying in front of her.
"My dear sister," Alex said, his voice dropping into something quieter, more careful. "In your case, that means choosing between humanity and peace or power and corruption."
He held her gaze.
"You have to leave the Chaos Queen’s legacy behind, and that means all of your companions." The word companions landed gently. He had chosen it with full knowledge of what it meant to her.
Every sense he possessed sharpened in the same instant, and beneath the stillness of his expression, his awareness had narrowed to a razor’s edge, extending outward to encompass every corner of the room. The cat is in her lap. The bird at her shoulder. The fish was moving in slow circles beside her bed.
Three pairs of eyes that had never stopped watching him.
He wasn’t afraid they would attack. That wasn’t what he was bracing for, but he had expected their resistance, which would explain how much retaliation he would be dealing with from the chaos spawns.
He had expected some form of resistance from entities whose entire existence was oriented around the protection and service of their queen. He was asking to sever that, so resistance and discomfort were expected.
However, they were perfectly calm.
"I can’t," Sophia said. Her voice was small and exhausted, the voice of someone revisiting a door they had already tried. "I have tried, Brother. Even the Ancestral Realm Ruler couldn’t help me. She said it wasn’t possible."
The words landed in Alex’s chest like something cold and heavy dropping into still water.
He kept his facial expression still, but his mind was understanding the implications of this new truth. He had expected his sister to discard the chaos legacy, but she certainly didn’t have the means or maybe even the will, but he had never considered the posibility of her going straight to the Realm Ruler, an entity whose strenght was unriveled in is mind.
If even the Realm Ruler had turned her away, then what were the chances of his succeeding? Did Lady Enigma have better means than a cosmic-scale entity? That question felt like a hanging blade above his neck.
This explained why the three chaos spawn in this room had not reacted to his suggestion with anything resembling alarm. They had sat comfortably. Patiently. Watching.
Because they already knew.
The realization settled through him slowly, with the particular chill of something that changed the shape of everything that came before it.
He had come into this room believing he was asking Sophie to make a difficult choice in abandoning an entire race of entities who treated her with kindness and absolute loyalty.
He was only now understanding that the choice might never have been available to her at all.
