Free Web NovelChapter 18: A Changed View Of The World
It felt ridiculously mundane, entirely out of place amidst the backdrop of a continental apocalypse.
Caius looked up at her, slightly surprised by the vulnerability in her voice.
The cold mask of the Mad Sun had completely dissolved, leaving behind nothing but the exposed nerves of a severely traumatized girl.
"Caius," he replied simply,. "Caius Draxos."
Aurelia repeated the name softly under her breath with her pale lips barely moving, as if engraving it directly into the marrow of her bones.
Caius...
Caius Draxos...
It wasn’t a name she recognized from the high courts though she did remember his family name.
The expenditure of mana she had used to vaporize hundreds of Blight-Fiends had completely depleted her core as the horrific chill of the Carrion Front was seeping directly into her frail frame.
The subterranean bunker was basically a glorified icebox with the permafrost of the eastern wastes radiating through the packed earth.
Her teeth chattered audibly as her body temperature dangerously plummeted. She would recover by tomorrow though...
Aurelia took another step forward with her heavy mud-caked boots dragging across the floor, until she was standing right between his knees.
"Caius..." Aurelia whispered desperately.
The sheer proximity to another human being without the immediate threat of a detonation was dizzying. "Can I... can I hold you?"
The request was so incredibly fragile that it gave Caius momentary pause.
Caius looked up at the terrifying Villainess.
He saw the desperation in her movements.
He saw the way her hands hovered nervously in the air, terrified to initiate contact but desperately starving for it.
’Let’s think about things reasonably... She is completely mana-exhausted. If she enters hypothermic shock, her core might violently destabilize. A destabilized core in a confined space means a mana explosion and I need her to be functional... The Gore-Tide is far from over, and without her artillery support, holding this sector becomes exponentially more difficult.’
Caius was completely exhausted himself with his muscles aching with the deep fatigue of leveling up too fast.
His eyelids felt like they were made of lead.
He simply nodded.
"Yeah," Caius murmured quietly. "Come here."
Aurelia let out a pathetic trembling breath.
She immediately slumped forward, all the tension leaving her spine in a single rush.
She collapsed entirely against his broad, muscular chest.
Aurelia wrapped her pale, soot-stained arms tightly around his torso, burying her perfect face deeply into the crook of his uninjured neck.
Caius slowly wrapped his uninjured left arm around her waist, pulling her close.
As she pressed herself against him, absorbing his heat, a shuddering sigh of pure relief escaped her lips.
’Amazing..’
The violent shivering wracking her frame began to slowly subside as his body temperature actively bled into hers, fighting back the hypothermia.
"I’m so happy.." Aurelia whispered into his skin with her hot tears wetting the collar of his ruined shirt. "I am so... so happy that someone can finally hold me."
She didn’t pull away.
She clung to him with the desperate white-knuckled grip of a drowning sailor clinging to a piece of driftwood.
Aurelia inhaled the scent of him which was a nose burning mixture of sweat and blood.
To her, it was the most intoxicating scent in the world. freēwebnovel.com
She rested her chin on his chest, her eyes drifting toward the makeshift linen bandage wrapped around his right shoulder.
Fresh, dark blood was already beginning to seep through the white cloth, expanding in a morbid bloom across the fabric.
The Alpha’s claws had dug deep, and the rudimentary binding wasn’t enough to halt the arterial weeping entirely.
Aurelia frowned slightly, her glowing crimson eyes softening with a deep sadness.
"I don’t like seeing you hurt..." she murmured with her fingertips lightly brushing against his collarbone, tracing the edge of the stained linen.
She remembered the feeling of his body slamming into hers as he physically displaced her from the trajectory of the beast’s jaws.
He had taken that damage for her... He was bleeding because of her...
Before Caius could stop her, before his tired mind could even register the shift in her mana signature, Aurelia gently placed her bare pale palm directly over the bleeding claw marks.
"Wait—" Caius tensed, his entire body going rigid.
His instincts screamed at him. He fully expected the intense pain of an open wound being exposed to bone-melting heat.
The lie about the Ash core was just that... a lie.
He had no actual immunity to her flames. If she ignited now, she would cauterize his shoulder by turning his entire arm into a charred stump but the pain never came.
Instead of destructive, blinding holy fire... a soft and warm golden light gently pulsed from her palm.
It wasn’t the violent plasma that had vaporized the Blight-Fiends. It was a serene, entirely stable luminescence that bathed the dim dugout in a halo of divine warmth.
Caius’s crimson eyes widened in shock.
The agonizing, burning throb of the torn muscle fibers instantly vanished.
The sensation was entirely overwritten by a soothing euphoria. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
The golden light seeped directly into his flesh, bypassing the linen and sinking deep into his cellular structure.
It was aggressively knitting the micro-tears back together... The ruptured capillaries sealed themselves... The shredded muscle fibers actively re-wove their strands under the guidance of the divine authority...
The bleeding stopped entirely.
In a matter of seconds, the deep gashes closed, leaving behind nothing but smooth unblemished skin.
The linen bandage loosened, no longer strained by the swelling of inflamed tissue.
Aurelia pulled her hand back, staring at his perfectly healed shoulder in worldview-shattering disbelief once again.
’Did I do that...?’
Her breath hitched. Her glowing crimson eyes darted from her palm to his shoulder, and back again.
Her flames... her cursed, indiscriminate flames of absolute destruction... had just healed him.
The Imperial scribes, the high mages of the capital, the Inquisitors with their cold tests... they had all been wrong.
They had fundamentally misunderstood the very nature of her existence.
Because her flames were the authority of the Sun God. They were the primordial foundational energy of the Solis Empire.
They were originally meant to provide life, warmth, growth, and salvation.
They were meant to be a beacon of hope in the dark.
The inquisitors had told her she was a monster incapable of anything but annihilation... They had convinced her that she was an apocalypse, a glitch in the divine order that needed to be locked in a cage and pointed at the Empire’s enemies.
But right here, right now, holding this boy in the dark filthy trench of the Carrion Front... she wasn’t a monster.
She was a savior.
Her soul wasn’t entirely consumed by malice.
It possessed the capacity to heal, to mend, to protect and the only catalyst required to unlock that divine grace was a target that she genuinely cared for.
A target completely devoid of the subconscious hatred that tainted her interactions with the rest of the miserable world.
The weight of that realization crashed down upon her.
It didn’t just alter her perception of the moment... it fundamentally altered her entire existence.
The chains of her lifelong trauma were suddenly snapped.
Caius stared at his shoulder, equally stunned. He raised his left hand, probing the smooth skin where a gaping wound had existed mere moments prior.
There wasn’t even a scar.
He let out a long slow breath, resting his head back against the damp dirt wall.
Caius’s eyes grew incredibly heavy. He didn’t have the mental bandwidth left to analyze the lore implications of what had just occurred... He was a gamer running on fumes, and he needed a save point which was now.
He closed his eyes.
The warmth of the beautiful dangerous woman resting securely in his arms acted as a perfect, stabilizing blanket, lulling him inevitably toward unconsciousness.
’Good,’ Caius thought internally as the heavy pull of sleep dragged him under. ’The bomb is completely defused. The healing mechanic is unlocked and we have a solid alliance. We can survive this.’
It was the most catastrophic fatal miscalculation Caius had ever made in his entire, reincarnated life.
As Caius’s breathing slowly leveled out, falling into a steady, rhythmic slumber, the dugout plunged back into freezing silence.
The sputtering oil lantern cast long static shadows across the dirt floor.
Outside, the distant, muffled sounds of the surviving imperial fodder digging mass graves provided a grim lullaby to the end of the vanguard but Aurelia Solis did not fall asleep.
In the pitch-black darkness of the subterranean room, her glowing crimson eyes remained wide open.
