The Villain Is Destined to Die: But as the Creator, I know All Endings-Chapter 239: Day - 2: The Encounter Between the Two of Us
Thinking without the restraint of actuality leads you toward infinite wisdom. Henceforth, logic is not always the key, sometimes the opposite is.
And this is not foolishness. This is what a true genius does very often. To think from an entirely different angle is to see what you have always been looking at but never actually seen.
It is simply a matter of perspective. Ask the grass, and the deer is the monster. Ask the grass, and the lion is its only protector.
The truth does not change.
And sometimes, one shift in angle is enough to overturn everything you believed you knew.
* * *
As the silence stretched beyond the rising waves, rain began to fill it.
Leon gazed down at the man bowing before him.
Bronze hair, a smooth scar-free face, and eyes that looked to have witnessed strokes of centuries. He looked completely different from the one Leon had remembered. Not a single trace of his facial features overlapped with the name he had always attached to that legend.
Leon’s heart started to beat faster and faster. A strange sense of warmth and an ancient connection that defied any logic settled between him and Bronze.
’What is this strange feeling?’
Leon kept asking himself.
Even Rumi was unable to reason it out. It was all strange, but it existed before their eyes, undeniable and sourceless all at once.
"Shin...? Is that really you?" Leon muttered that name once again in Lumina’s, looking down at the figure he added. "How are you alive...?"
He was indeed stunned by his own finding. And this was the first thing he had to ask.
Before now, Leon had believed there was some connection between himself and Shin. He had till now speculated that they might have been holding onto the same thread of fate all this time.
Yet here Shin Kataino was. Still breathing. Kneeling before a man wearing his lover’s face.
’Is he the same Shin we all know?’ Leon couldn’t help but to ask himself.
If he went by the original storyline of the game, Shin Kataino was supposed to be dead by now. So how did he still exist after so many centuries?
The answer arrived in his mind on its own.
"A regressor..." Leon muttered, eyes widening slightly.
He looked sharply at Shin, who was slowly raising his head.
’Shin Kataino was a regressor.’
The more the conclusion settled, the more unsettled Leon became.
This was his game. He had designed it. He should have known about every character, every thread, every secret buried inside this world.
Yet something like this had unfolded right in front of him without warning.
It made Leon begin to question something he had never seriously questioned before.
Whether he had truly created Rebirth of Fivefold Calamity at all? Because the mess quietly which was slowly unraveling inside his head was telling him otherwise.
Maybe it was all just the butterfly effect...?
’No.’
Leon rejected the idea immediately.
This was too much to be a simple change. There was no way Leon’s influence in the present could have reached back this far. Whatever this was, it seemed to have originated long before Leon Valentine was ever born.
He glanced at the status window still hovering faintly at the edge of his vision.
[Exiled Prince of Fate]
[Bearer of Death Wish]
Neither of those titles ever belonged to Shin Kataino. Those were not the titles of the man he had designed. They were the titles of someone who had lived an entirely different life across entirely different centuries and had paid for every single year of it.
’The Exiled Prince of Fate...?’ Leon thought about this for the time being. ’He said that he was thrown away by the Upper Reality to the lower world. Then....’
’Shin Kataino had already reached the Calamity Rank.’
Don’t know why, but Leon was having a hard time digesting everything.
’I am missing something.’
’I thought so too,’ Just like him, Rumi was having trouble as well.
Leon gripped the Moonblade again and pressed its tip against Bronze’s throat.
"Answer me." Leon demanded in Lumina’s voice, his voice felt cold and without room for negotiation. "How are you still alive? What happened to your face? And where have you been all this time?"
There was no mistaking it. This person kneeling before him was once Shin.
Bronze slowly raised his head and met Lumina’s cold gaze. Whatever had broken in him moments ago had been packed back down. What remained was something quieter and much harder to read.
"Listen, Elizabeth—"
"Don’t address me by that name."
Leon pressed the tip slightly harder. Just enough to make the point without making it a threat.
Bronze’s eyes widened. He bit his lip and looked down, his composure slipping for just a moment before he steadied himself.
"Oh, O-Of course," he said quietly. "I will be careful."
He paused. Took a breath and brgun.
"I... cannot tell you the reason behind all of it. But believe me. Everything was for a purpose. For me and for you both." He exhaled. "If we succeed then we could... we could finally save you."
Leon’s eyes stayed still.
’The hell is he spouting.’
"Who is ’we’?" Leon asked. "Is there someone else with you?"
"I cannot answer that." Bronze said without hesitation. "I am sorry. But you don’t worry about them. Their goal is the same as mine."
Leon said nothing.
His mind was already running at full capacity, he was pulling every word Bronze had been saying. Every sentence was landing somewhere between familiar and completely foreign.
He was growing impatient.
"What do you mean by saving me?" Leon asked. "What is going to happen to me?"
The moment those words left his mouth, something changed in Bronze’s face.
His pupils contracted.
"No," Bronze said. His voice had dropped to almost nothing. "I cannot tell you that either."
’This...!!’
Leon was this close to driving the Moonblade forward when Rumi’s voice cracked through his thoughts like a whip.
’Haru, don’t! What are you doing?!’
Her voice jolted him from the inside out. His grip stayed tight around the blade but his arm didn’t move.
’Haaah... sorry, but he is really pissing me off.’
’I can tell. But first, try to find out where he was all this time.’
Leon inwardly exhaled and let his mind settle. Rumi was right. Getting angry would close every door that was currently sitting open. His first priority had to be information. As much of it as Bronze was willing to give, and maybe a little more than that.
He pulled his thoughts back into order.
In the original storyline, Shin had gone missing during the Calamity War. Leon and Alice had encountered traces of him through the Shattered Swordmaiden book in the AstralTale Library, where they discovered that he got captured by Zenith and became a ghoul under her command. Leon had assumed that was the real end of him. A background tragedy. But the person kneeling in front of him right now was not a ghoul. He doesn’t look dead either.
There were more pieces to this puzzle than Leon had ever been given. And that fact alone was beginning to irritate him in a way that had nothing to do with Bronze.
He steadied himself and asked the question.
"After you left me," Leon said in Lumina’s voice, quiet and carrying the particular weight of someone who had waited centuries to ask for it. "Where were you all this time?"
It was the question Lumina had never gotten to ask. The one she had carried alone until the very end, dying in an abandoned place with no one beside her.
Leon felt the anger stir every time that image surfaced. It was not his anger exactly. But it lived in him anyway.
’If only I had been there. If only I had been alive in her era. Then I would never have let her suffer this painfully.’
A woman who had the power to shake the foundations of this world, dying alone in a place no one thought to look.
At the very least, that much. She deserved someone beside her at the end.
And in the end she closed her eyes not to the sound of her most cherished voice but to the sound of nothing at all.
Bronze responded this time. He looked up and spoke directly, and Leon watched his face as the words came out.
"I had gone to war. I stood alongside those Twin Calamities. I have fought the Calamites." His jaw tightened. "And there, I came to know that ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ had a goal of ▒▒▒▒▒. I could not just sit there and do nothing. I just... could not."
Leon almost took a step back.
Something had just happened to Bronze’s words.
Not all of them. Just certain ones, dropping out of existence mid-sentence, replaced by something Leon’s mind could not hold onto no matter how hard he reached for it.
He looked at Bronze’s lips during the gap and found no help there either. Whatever his mouth had formed, Leon’s eyes refused to read it.
’What was that?’ Leon asked inwardly.
Rumi was the same.
’I heard the same thing as you,’ she replied. ’Or rather... I heard nothing. As if those words were never spoken at all.’
Leon couldn’t hold it in and asked again, "you came to know what?"
Bronze answered the same, "...That, ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ was after the ▒▒▒▒▒, and when I find out who ▒▒▒▒▒ was referring to, I found out that ▒▒▒▒▒ want nobody else but you."
"....?!"
At this point, Leon’s entire body shivered. He could not help but repeat it.
"Me?" His voice came out in Lumina’s cadence but the disbelief underneath it was entirely his own. "What does that mean?" 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖
Lumina was the cause of something. Of what, Leon could not piece together.
Bronze looked up at her.
He gave her a bitter smile. The kind that has long since stopped finding anything funny.
Then he nodded, slowly "We still could not find out how to stop it from progressing. For that we needed as much knowledge as we could gather. From everywhere, even from every era if necessary."
He exhaled through his nose, and then for the first time, he grinned.
"And then we came up with an idea. It was something brilliant. Something that even ▒▒▒▒▒ would never dream of thinking of."
Leon listened without blinking. His eyes were fixed entirely on Bronze’s face, on every microexpression that surfaced on.
Whatever this idea was, Shin believed in it completely. That much was clear. A man who had lived across centuries carrying a corrupted dark core and two titles that no version of Shin Kataino was ever supposed to have, and he still believed the idea was brilliant.
That meant it was either genuinely extraordinary. Or it had already failed in ways Bronze had not yet allowed himself to admit.
Leon opened his mouth to ask which one.
CRACK–!
The sound came from inside Bronze’s chest.
"Hm?"
Leon’s brow furrowed.
Bronze did not finish his sentence.
He looked down at his own chest. Both hands came up slowly, hovering just in front of it without touching. His face had gone completely pale in the span of a single breath.
"...ah. Looks like I broke the rule set by us."
Bronze slowly lowered his hands from his chest.
He looked up at her one more time.
And for the first time since he had collapsed to his knees, his expression was completely calm. Not the forced composure from earlier. Not the bitterness of a man pressing grief back down into a manageable shape.
Something quieter than all of that. Something that looked, uncomfortably, like relief.
"I am glad," he said softly. "That the last thing I see is your face."
His chest started to shine with dark and white ambient light, and the cracking sound became natural.
After taking a long breath, Shin looked at Lumina, with a serious look, he added at last.
"You will be eternal till the last versions of ’us’ remain," he winked at her, and slowly the cracking sound intensified. "Until the next cycle."
That was the last word of Bronze.
Or perhaps, at last, of Shin Kataino of this Cycle.
Leon still had questions, he hurriedly opened his lips and asked.
"Wait, what do you mean by ’versions’?"
Leon kneeled down to his level, the Moonblade still in hand. The moment the dark mana touched his skin, his skill flickered and gave out.
His disguise dissolved.
The form shifted back to Leon Valentine. Wet black hair catching the wind. Those sharp golden eyes. The frame of a young man who had no business being on this ship on this night.
"...?!"
Bronze’s eyes widened in shock.
Then they stopped.
Because something beneath the surface of this stranger’s appearance had reached him before any word could. His shattering body went still for just a moment.
His wide eyes moved slowly across Leon’s face. A sense of recognition similar to what Leon had felt earlier traced his mind and body.
"T-That fragment inside youl...?" he stuttered between the sounds of his cracking core.
Leon nearly moved to hide his face. Then he stopped. Because Shin was not looking at him with fury.
He was looking at him the way a man looks when something he stopped believing in a very long time ago walks through the door anyway.
His expression had gone surreally calm. The bitterness was gone. The exhaustion was gone. And what remained was something Leon had not seen on his face once during this entire encounter.
Hope.
"Hahahaahaha...!!" Bronze laughed. Loud and broken and completely unguarded, right in the middle of his own cracking chest. "Haaah... looks like... looks like we succeeded."
"What...?" Leon uttered.
Black cracks were spreading now. Across his arms, up his neck, across his face. The inside of him was becoming visible through the fractures, purple and dark bleeding through the seams of a body that had held together through nothing but will for longer than it should have.
But despite the pain and everything else, he was smiling.
Bronze’s eyes began to close. A crack traced slowly around his face, following the line of his jaw, threading across his cheekbones, reaching the corners of his eyes.
He whispered just enough for Leon to hear.
"This is your Cycle now... Creator."
.
.
[
A/N: All my exams and interviews are over. Thanks for your patience. The updates will be regular from this month. Hence, I will me also adding Daily goals. I have also reduced the price of last 2 Priv tires.
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