Free Web NovelChapter 11: A Trip Down Memory Lane
The sickening stench of charred meat and melted iron completely saturated the damp air of the dugout.
It was a smell that commanded paralyzing terror.
The pile of smoking, blackened ash resting on the dirt floor was the only physical evidence that the burly mercenary had ever existed.
Exactly thirty seconds ago, he had been a living, breathing man, driven mad by the psychological weight of the impending Gore-Tide.
Now, he was just a pile of soot slowly cooling in the freezing drafts of the Carrion Front.
The surviving members of the penal squad were completely broken.
They had violently scrambled backward the absolute microsecond the golden flames had erupted, desperately pressing their backs against the furthest dirt walls of the dugout.
Their rusted iron armor scraped loudly against the earth. They were hyperventilating, their eyes wide and bloodshot as they stared at the woman standing in the center of the room.
They didn’t just see a disgraced noble or a prisoner of war anymore.
They saw a walking, breathing natural disaster...
If she had sneered, or laughed like a sadistic maniac, or threatened to burn the rest of them alive, they might have been able to process it.
A crazy Lethal mage was something the veterans of the trenches could at least conceptually understand But Aurelia Solis didn’t do any of that.
She stood perfectly still, her heavy magically reinforced iron chains resting uselessly behind her back.
Her glowing, piercing crimson eyes slowly swept across the terrified faces of the mercenaries and the weeping, disgraced noble.
There was absolutely no gloating in her expression...There was no sadistic pleasure, and there was certainly no apology...
There was only a chilling hollow apathy. frёewebnoѵēl.com
It was the look of a monster that was completely, utterly exhausted by its own monstrous nature.
She expected them to hate her... She expected them to fear her... She expected them to wait until she fell asleep and try to drive a standard-issue steel sword through her throat...
And she simply did not care.
Without uttering a single syllable, Aurelia slowly turned away from the smoking pile of ash.
She walked over to an empty, crude wooden cot situated in the corner opposite to Caius.
She didn’t brush the dirt off the thin mattress. She simply lay down, pulling her knees up tightly to her chest and turning her back to the entire room.
She closed her eyes, entirely indifferent to the terrified heavy panting of the men behind her.
From the absolute darkest corner of the dugout, Caius watched her.
He didn’t move a single muscle. His back was pressed firmly against the damp earth with his hands resting casually on his knees.
He was forcing his heart rate to slowly stabilize, using the residual vitality from the forty devoured Blight-Fiend cores to forcibly calm his nervous system.
He knew exactly who she was, and he knew exactly what she was capable of.
Suddenly, the temperature inside Caius’s mind plummeted, shifting from the freezing ambient cold of the trench to the terrifying zero of the Void.
’Champion,’ Ereba’s melodic voice echoed against the inside of his skull.
The ancient, reality-devouring Goddess did not sound amused, nor did she sound particularly threatened by the display of golden holy fire.
She sounded genuinely confused.
’What exactly is a Villainess?’ Caius blinked his crimson eyes in the darkness, pulling his gaze away from Aurelia’s huddled form.
’And why do you label these mortals with such strange, conceptual titles in your mind?’ Ereba continued, her presence swirling curiously through his soul. ’I have felt these terms surface in your surface thoughts since the moment we formed our contract... Protagonist... Main Villain... Villainess... What do these concepts mean, Caius?’
Caius let out a microscopic, completely silent exhale.
He slowly reached up, rubbing his temples with his soot-stained fingers. A dull headache was beginning to form behind his eyes, exacerbated by the foul stench of the burned mercenary.
’It’s... hard to explain,’ Caius replied internally, choosing his words with care.
How exactly did one explain the concept of an RPG video game to an ancient, higher-dimensional deity who had been locked in a sensory-deprivation prison for millennia?
’Think of this entire world as a stage play,’ Caius began. ’A massive sprawling highly coordinated performance.’
’A stage play?’ Ereba mused.
’Yes. Everything that is happening right now, everything that will happen in the future... it is a pre-written script,’ Caius explained, staring blankly at the sputtering oil lantern hanging from the ceiling. ’The empires rising and falling, the endless wars against the corrupted beasts, the strict hierarchies of the Pantheon... it was all designed for the sake of a narrative.’
He paused, letting the sheer, existential weight of the concept settle into the Void.
’The reincarnated God of Light... the boy currently sitting comfortably in the capital while I am freezing in the mud, he is the Protagonist. He is the favored actor, the entire script bends to ensure his absolute victory. The universe literally contorts itself to hand him ancient artifacts, loyal companions, and unyielding glory.’
Caius shifted his gaze back to the blond woman lying on the cot.
’And her?’ Caius thought with a bitter sympathetic edge bleeding into his thoughts. ’Aurelia is a Villainess... She is a scripted tragedy... Her destiny is to slowly lose her mind to her own cursed flames, burn half the empire to ash, and then be brutally slaughtered by the Protagonist so he can look like a righteous savior.’
Ereba was completely silent.
’And me?’ Caius finished, a dark self-deprecating smirk touching his lips in the shadows. ’I’m a Main Villain. Or, at least, I was supposed to be. I was written to be an arrogant, pathetic stepping stone. A minor antagonist destined to be publicly humiliated and executed to showcase the Protagonist’s early power.’
The deep abyssal ocean of Void mana resting within his soul was entirely unnervingly still.
For the first time since he had met her, the Chained Goddess did not offer a quick, witty retort or a dark, condescending laugh.
The idea that her eternal imprisonment, her absolute authority, and the very existence of the thirteen Major Gods were nothing more than programmed variables in a rigged narrative was a concept that fundamentally defied divine comprehension.
’Your mind is an incredibly complex labyrinth, Caius...’ Ereba finally murmured with curiosity. ’The sheer magnitude of what you are claiming... it is entirely alien. It implies a creator above the Creator. A conceptual authority that dictates the Gods themselves.’
Caius nodded slowly in the dark. ’I know it sounds insane.’
’A lesser deity, or perhaps even my arrogant peers in the Pantheon, would have simply bypassed your mortal will,’ Ereba noted smoothly. ’The moment you formed a divine tether, they would have violently shattered your mental barriers. They would have ruthlessly extracted this truth from your neurons without asking.’
The shadows in the dugout seemed to lengthen, drawn instinctively toward Caius’s dark corner.
’But I am not like them,’ the Goddess whispered with her presence wrapping around his consciousness with an incredibly intimate warmth. ’And... I have manners. The contract requires consent.’
She paused.
’May I look, Champion?’
Caius froze.
He was being asked to grant an ancient, reality-devouring entity absolute, unrestricted access to the deepest, most private vaults of his soul.
To let her sift through his previous life, his memories of modern Earth, his embarrassments, his failures, and his complete encyclopedic knowledge of [God Reborn].
His initial instinct was to violently throw up a mental wall and refuse but then, he remembered the promise he had made to her in the darkness of her prison.
’I promise I’ll show you the world.’
So far, all he had shown the Chained Goddess was the violently obliterated door of his bedroom, a freezing carriage ride, and a blood-soaked, muddy trench filled with dead beasts and hanging corpses.
The Carrion Front wasn’t exactly the scenic route...
If they were going to survive the Gore-Tide, and if they were going to dismantle the plot of the Protagonist, they needed absolute unquestionable trust.
’Yeah,’ Caius replied mentally, slowly leaning his head back against the damp dirt wall and closing his eyes.
’Go ahead, Ereba. Look at everything.’
The absolute microsecond the mental consent was given, Caius violently flinched.
His jaw instantly locked shut with his hands gripping the edges of his wooden crate so tightly the wood splintered beneath his fingertips.
Gah!
A sharp, piercing headache violently spiked directly behind his eyes. It wasn’t physical pain... It didn’t feel like a blade or a blunt force trauma...
It felt like extreme, agonizing expansion.
It was the incomprehensible weight of a higher-dimensional entity stepping out of the spiritual realm and physically walking through the fragile microscopic neural pathways of a human brain.
His vision violently exploded into a blinding canvas of abstract light and rapidly shifting colors.
He could actually feel her sifting through his memories, turning the pages of his soul like an ancient scholar in a forbidden library...
She saw his past life...
She saw a world completely, utterly devoid of mana or divine miracles.
She saw towering, impossible monoliths of glass and steel piercing the sky...
She saw metal beasts roaring down paved highways, sustained not by magic, but by explosive black liquid...
She saw the vast, invisible network of the internet, connecting billions of human minds in a web of instant chaotic information...
’Astounding...’ Ereba’s voice echoed in the maelstrom, vibrating with awe. ’A realm built entirely by mortal hands... No gods... No blessings... Just unyielding human defiance against nature.’
The memories rapidly shifted, accelerating into a blinding blur.
She delved deeper, bypassing the mundane and diving directly into the core of his current existence.
She saw the glowing, holographic UI of [God Reborn].
She watched through his memories as he navigated the dense, branching storylines of the game.
She saw the 3D models of the thirteen Major Gods.
She read the lore wikis detailing the exact weaknesses of the empire’s greatest Saints.
She witnessed the pre-rendered cutscenes of Aurelia Solis burning the capital, and the grand, triumphant victory of the reincarnated God of Light standing over Caius’s own shattered corpse.
She saw the script...
She saw the invisible strings attached to the limbs of every single living being on the continent of Ur... and then, just as violently as it had begun, the pressure vanished.
Whoosh! freёwebnovel.com
Caius aggressively gasped with his chest heaving as he slumped forward on his wooden crate.
He opened his eyes, blinking rapidly to clear the lingering bursts of static from his vision. The dim, flickering light of the dugout’s oil lantern slowly swam back into focus.
His brain felt incredibly hot, vibrating with a strange phantom touch.
He waited for her to say something. He waited for the Goddess of Nothingness to process the absolute, terrifying truth that she was a boss in a programmed universe.
He expected rage... He expected a divine meltdown but there was nothing.
Ereba had gone completely silent.
The deep, abyssal presence in his soul violently retracted, pulling away from his surface thoughts and sinking into the absolute, deepest depths of his spiritual core.
She was shutting herself in...
The sheer volume of data, the existential horror of the rigged universe, and the blinding influx of alien technology from his past life had completely overloaded her divine senses.
She needed time to digest the download.
Caius sat in the dark, his breathing slowly returning to a steady, rhythmic pace.
’Take your time,’ Caius thought softly into the void of his own mind, offering the Goddess the privacy she needed.
He looked around the suffocating dugout.
The surviving mercenaries had finally collapsed into a restless twitching exhaustion. The disgraced noble had passed out from blood loss and sheer terror.
On the far cot, Aurelia Solis remained curled in a tight ball, her breathing shallow and completely silent.
They were all just waiting to die.
Caius slowly pulled his legs up onto his crate, resting his arms on his knees.
He didn’t sleep... He couldn’t afford to drop his guard in a room full of desperate men and a highly unstable Villainess...
He just closed his eyes, tuning out the horrific stench of the charred mercenary, and focused entirely on the humming power running through his veins.
He had to be ready.
When dawn broke, the Gore-Tide was coming... probably...
