Free Web NovelChapter 70: An Unfinished Story: Volume 1 Finale
The healers got Vexis up.
Not smoothly. His legs didn’t cooperate in any meaningful way, his arms didn’t help when they tried to position him, and the moment they got him onto the stretcher his whole body seemed to decide that it had been running on borrowed time and was done pretending otherwise. He could feel each individual muscle group giving up separately, calves first, then thighs, then his lower back, like a building shutting off floor by floor.
He stared at the coliseum ceiling. His hands were still blue.
The official announcement came while they were loading him.
"By disqualification of its remaining participant, Class F is eliminated from the third format. Class A is declared the winner by technicality."
The crowd made the sound crowds make when they don’t know how they feel about something.
---
Xavier watched the stretcher pass through the tunnel entrance.
The escort of healers, the officials, the trailing professor with the black hair who walked at the same pace as always. And the figure on the stretcher: blue hands, closed eyes, breathing too hard, hair flat with sweat. With a pink bellus beside him.
Vexis Lestilaut.
He turned that over in the same space he’d been turning it over all culmination.
In his previous run of this timeline, the name Vexis Lestilaut doesn’t appeared at all of one academic year. An opening. A death news. A rung on the ladder that Xavier stepped on once and didn’t think about again.
This version had defied the supposed to be death. Hence why I didn’t received any news from Ahki of any brewing war against other kingdoms. The Lestilaut family never really had the reason to be cruel and spiteful. But this time. Something changed. He over powered Alfia , and then produced a Stima technique in a mage competition that had left the faculty temporarily speechless. Without, apparently, having been a trained mage for more than a few months.
Xavier’s finger had stopped tapping.
He didn’t know what kind of variable produced this. Krishka’s insertions tended to operate quietly, subtly, threading small changes that compounded over years. They were patient in the way that surgical interventions were patient. They didn’t announce themselves in a coliseum by headbutting a battlemagus eleven times and grinning through it.
This felt like something else. Something original to the branch. A genuine deviation, not a planted one. And genuine deviations were, in some ways, harder to account for than Krishka’s moves because they didn’t follow a methodology. You couldn’t reverse-engineer the intent.
He’d need to get closer.
He filed it. Watched the tunnel until the stretcher disappeared.
He needed to understand what Vexis Lestilaut actually was before this timeline moved without him. But first.
Xavier looked at the the sponsors leaving. The foreign ministry individuals already packing their runic totems.
I need to deal with this.
---
Inside Vexis’s head, Arthur was not handling this well.
’WHAT IS HAPPENING. WHY AM I FLOATING. WHY DOES EVERYTHING LOOK LIKE THIS. AM I DEAD. IS THIS DEAD. I THINK I’M DEAD.’
Vexis was grinning at the ceiling of the hallway. His arms sat useless at his sides on the stretcher and he couldn’t feel his feet but he was, objectively, having a great time.
’Calm down,’ he thought back.
’CALM DOWN? I WOKE UP AS A GHOST AND YOU WANT ME TO CALM DOWN? HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN BACK IN YOUR BODY. WAIT. IS THIS HOW YOU FELT THIS WHOLE TIME? THIS IS A HORRIBLE WAY TO EXIST—’
’When you pass out. ’And yes. It’s terrible. You get used to it.’
’I’m not going to get used to this! This isn’t fair! They put me in here, I didn’t choose any of this, I just wanted to—’
’Arthur.’
’—leave a comment, I was literally just leaving a comment—’
’Arthur.’
The voice in Arthur’s head went quiet for a second.
’What.’
’Stop screaming. You’re making my head hurt.’
’Wha— the audacity. You little prick! You always do this shit too!’ fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
’Stop whining! It’s not so bad!.’ Vexis looked sideways at Arthur’s ghost form drifting beside the stretcher. He’d imagined Arthur differently. He wasn’t sure how, exactly. More like himself, maybe. Same height, similar build.
The person floating beside him was short. Pale in a different way from Lestilaut pale, with black hair and eyes so dark they didn’t catch the corridor light. Slight frame. He was wearing clothes Vexis had never seen a cut of before.
’So that’s what you look like,’ Vexis thought.
Arthur stopped mid-spiral and looked at him. ’What?’
’Nothing.’
’You said something. You literally just said something.’
’I said it’s nothing.’
’You can’t just say "so that’s what you look like" and then say it’s nothing. What does that mean.’
Vexis looked at the ceiling again. ’I imagined you differently. You look like someone from Creslan.’
The pause that followed was long enough to be a full sentence by itself.
’...Boy,’ Arthur said. ’Are you serious right now.’
’It was an observation—’
’Just because I have small eyes you’re going to assume my whole nationality? My whole ethnic background?’ His ghost voice had gone flat in a specific way. ’You know what that is? That’s called racism. From Where I’m from.’
Vexis frowned. ’I didn’t say anything offensive. Creslans are perfectly respected—’
’I’m not from Creslan, i thought you knew this by now! Im from a different world!’
I know that now—
’My ancestors are from a completely different continent! On a completely different planet!’
Okay.
’I am Korean, Vexis. Do you know what Korean is? No. You don’t. Because it doesn’t exist here. And that’s the problem.’
Vexis considered this. ’Is it adjacent to Creslan?’
Arthur made a sound that wasn’t a word.
’Never mind. The point is—’ Arthur’s voice had sharpened back into something more functional. ’The point is that I’m a ghost right now and you’re in my body and I need to know how long this is going to last because I have things to do and decisions to make and I can’t make any of them from this angle.’
’I just fought a battlemagus,’ Vexis said. ’I think I’ve earned five minutes.’
’You fought him using your pathetic ass aetheric blood—’
’My aetheric blood.’
’
Arthur was quiet for a moment. When he came back his voice had dropped to something flatter. More like his actual register when he wasn’t panicking.
’You’re enjoying this.’
’Yeah! I am Enormously. It feels so good that the roles have swapped’
’Of course you are.’
The healers turned the corner into the main academy corridor and Vexis let the argument go quiet, watching the ceiling change from coliseum stone to the indoor stonework of the main hall. Students had been filtering out of the coliseum through the adjacent exits and the corridor had a sparse traffic of people moving in both directions, most of them glancing at the stretcher and away.
Then he saw Havier.
Standing near the wall at the corridor’s turn, arms at his sides, watching the floor. He looked up at the sound of the stretcher wheels and his eyes found Vexis’s and then immediately found somewhere else to be.
He started walking.
’Healers,’ Vexis said. His voice came out rough and thin. ’Stop.’
They halted.
The corridor went quieter around them. A few students nearby slowed without fully stopping, catching the shift in the air.
Arthur had gone quiet.
Vexis turned his head. His neck was the only thing still cooperating reliably. His hands were still blue at the knuckles and he couldn’t move them but it didn’t matter for this.
Havier had almost reached the turn in the corridor. His back was to Vexis, pace measured, everything about the set of his shoulders broadcasting that he had no intention of looking back. His hands were at his sides and perfectly still.
"Havier."
The name came out plain. No edge to it. No authority, no weight of history behind it. Just the name.
Havier stopped walking.
The corridor was quiet enough to hear it.
"I’m sorry,’ Vexis said. ’For what I did to you. For all of it."
Nobody moved. The healers held the stretcher level.
Havier stood at the turn with his back to Vexis and one hand lifted slightly from his side, like he’d almost reached for something and decided against it. He was quiet for a long time. When his voice came it was contained and flat and carried the weight of something that had been sitting in one place for years and hadn’t decided yet whether it was ready to move.
"You don’t get to say sorry."
He walked away.
The corridor sounds came back slowly. Distant footsteps somewhere, a door, the low ambient hum of a building full of people who didn’t know what had just happened.
Vexis looked at the ceiling. Arthur said nothing.
Then the ceiling blurred.
His vision tunneled from the edges inward, the stonework going soft and imprecise, and Vexis registered distantly that the Stima overclock had finished collecting what it was owed, and then the corridor went dark.
---
Arthur felt the vacuum before he understood what was happening.
A pull, massive and directionless, and then nothing. No Vexis, no corridor, no stretcher. Just the specific dark that he’d felt once before, the one that had existed in the space before the Eyes vision had assembled, the empty room between one thing and another. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
Then a screen.
It opened in front of him the way the system interface opened, the same familiar weight of something external inserting itself into his perception. But this one was different in a way that stopped his breath before he could identify exactly why.
The text that appeared on it was in Korean.
He hadn’t seen Korean since he woke up in Vexis’s body. Not once. He hadn’t realized until this second how completely he’d stopped expecting it.
The text read:
[Good work, reader. I really did enjoy the deviation you created so far. Looks like I made the right choice pulling you here.]
Arthur stared at it.
Then: ’HEY.’
His voice came out in his own language for the first time in months and it sounded strange even to him.
Are you LazyTurtle? Are you the author? You absolute BASTARD. I was just reading your novel. I was sitting at my desk! I wasn’t doing anything! I was leaving a comment and then I DIED—’
The text changed.
[You were. Your comments irritated me, honestly, at best. But you were the reason I decided this story needs an ending it deserves. So I pulled you in for the purpose.]
’For the PURPOSE.’ Arthur’s voice had gone to a register he didn’t use often. ’For the PURPOSE. You abducted me from my own life to fix your own story because you couldn’t be bothered to finish it yourself? Do you understand how batshit insane that is? Do you understand what I have been through in the last weeks? I DIED. I died twice ! I’ve been living inside someone else’s body paying off his social debts and getting dogshowed by some NPCs and fighting academy tournaments and—’
[Then why are you doing all of this?]
The question sat there.
[You talk like you don’t care. About this world. About this story. Don’t lie to yourself, Arthur. You were the first person who ever read this. The first comment. The first person who told me my magic system had holes and my protagonist was lazy and my side characters deserved better. You cared enough to leave three hundred notes on something you called a failed novel. So tell me. If it’s really true that none of this matters to you. Why are you doing all of this?]
Arthur opened his mouth.
’To survi—’
[To survive? No.]
The text cut him off cleanly.
[I can see what’s in your chest, Arthur. I built this world. I know what it looks like when someone cares about it. ’You created names, scenarios that wasn’t in my writing. You know what Theodore looks like when he’s trying not to cry. You know what Vexis’s mother sounds like when she says please. Don’t tell me you’re doing this to survive. You looked pissed when Kreasial was being hurt.]
Arthur closed his mouth.
He stood in the dark in front of the screen and didn’t say anything for a moment.
[So do your best. Create the narrative this story deserves. The ending neither of us got to see. And when it’s done, I’ll tell you everything. Every answer you’ve been running on no information trying to find. And then I’ll bring you home. Like nothing happened.]
The screen flickered. Held.
Then a second image opened below the text. A room, rendered in flat, overlit detail. Messy. A computer against the wall beside a window with the blinds half-down. A desk with a cold cup of something beside the keyboard. A black ceramic mug with white text on the side.
Monday.
A bed. A person in it, asleep, facing the wall.
He knew the curve of those shoulders. He knew the specific way that person slept with one arm under the pillow.
[I’ll send you back two years before you found this world. Back before the first Chapter. Like none of it happened. Do we have a deal?]
Arthur looked at the room.
At the mug. At the blinds. At the slope of his own sleeping shoulders.
He looked for a long time.
’No wait—’
The screen disappeared.
A light opened where it had been, white and total, and it swallowed everything including the question he hadn’t finished asking, and then there was nothing, and then all of his senses came back at once the way they did after a deep and dreamless sleep.
He opened his eyes.
A pale, furious, blonde face was approximately six inches from his and the voice attached to it was not using its indoor register.
"YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARD. I JUST HAD MY BODY AND YOU TOOK IT AGAIN."
Arthur stared at the ceiling.
"Fucking hell."
