MMORPG : Ancient WORLD

Chapter 689: No Clean Answers

After his father’s reminder about their unusual behavior, Alex and the group decided to act normally and not think about the things weighing on their minds. It was a near-impossible ask, but they could only try not to worry their families.

The lunch was everything it always was.

Loud, warm, unhurried, the table was crowded with food and voices. After a full year inside the Ancestral Realm, after everything it had asked of them, the battles that had no clean edges, the moments where survival had been a narrower thing than any of them would say out loud, a day like this was something each of them had carried in the back of their mind like a private promise.

A reason to get through to the other side.

It wasn’t as freeing as it had been before. The weight was still there, quiet and patient, sitting just beneath everything. But the table was full, and the food was good, and for some time, they truly forgot the troubles plaguing their lives.

That was enough.

After the dishes were cleared, no one moved to leave. They stayed, drifting from the table to the living room, rearranging themselves into the familiar shape of an afternoon together.

Bran in his usual chair, the mothers settling back into the sofa, Sophia cross-legged on the couch, Alex and Ven sitting on the sofa right next to her, Saahira tucked comfortably into the space beside Andrei like she had always belonged there, which, by now, she had.

The conversation moved the way it always did on such a day. The brothers shared what they could, sharing watered-down versions of events, enough to satisfy without giving too much away.

The family shared their own experience with everything that had happened on Earth while they had been gone. Small things, as one could expect from everyday life.

There was teasing. There was pressure, the gentle, relentless kind that only their mothers could manage. There was laughter, real laughter, the kind that reminded them what they had been fighting so hard to protect.

By the time the conversation finally wound itself down, the light through the windows had shifted, and they realised it was already past noon.

The mothers had already decided, somewhere between dessert and the third cup of tea, what they had planned to make for dinner. And since a proper dinner meant a proper shop, they decided to work on that next.

Saahira offered to come along, and Sophia didn’t so much offer as simply appear at the door with her shoes already on, which settled the matter.

Bran lasted another twenty minutes before his phone pulled him away. An overseas client, he said, a meeting that needed a few hours of his attention, and would be back before dinner.

The front door closed.

The house settled into silence.

Alex, Andrei, and Venedikt remained where they were, the living room suddenly very still around them, the warmth of the afternoon still sitting in the air but no longer carrying the same noise.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

They didn’t need to. The doors they had carefully kept closed all morning were still there, and the things behind them hadn’t gone anywhere, and now there was no one left to perform for.

They sat in silence for nearly an hour, each of them turning over the same ground in their own way, circling the same conclusions again and again, hoping that one more pass might soften them into something more bearable.

None of it did.

They had each, in their own time, made peace with the simple fact that whatever path led out of this would not be a clean one.

Alex stared at nothing in particular, his hands loose in his lap, his face giving nothing to the empty room.

He had been over it so many times now that the edges of it had worn smooth. The thought no longer surprised him. It no longer even had the decency to feel new.

He would have to ask Sophie to give up the friends, her companions, whom she loved and cared for dearly.

He was certain, had been certain for a long time, that whatever those nightmarish entities of the void were to the rest of the world, to Sophie they were companions in the truest sense, loved the way friends were loved, and that they certainly felt the same toward her, treating her as something more precious than their own continued existence.

He wasn’t worried about earning her anger for it. Her hatred, if it came to that, was a price he had already decided he could carry. Her well-being mattered more to him than anything else, including how she might come to feel about him for protecting it.

But it was the extreme end of this thought that had stayed with him. The one that had arrived quietly, without announcement, in the minutes after his meeting with Lady Enigma had ended, and had not left since.

If the odds were better the other way.

If keeping the Chaos Queen’s legacy, allowing Sophie to simply master it, to claim it fully rather than be consumed by it, somehow offered a higher chance of her survival than severing the connection entirely.

He would choose that, even knowing what it meant.

Knowing that another year’s delay would invite the wrath of Ahrimon, a demon king whose cruelty was not incidental but fundamental, woven into the architecture of what he was, and that his patience, tested, would end in blood.

Millions of deaths in both worlds. People who had never asked to be part of any of this, who had simply been alive in the wrong moment, carried off by a tide they hadn’t seen coming.

Still, he would choose Sophie over them.

The thought had arrived with such quiet certainty that it had horrified him, and it still did.

He felt something close to hatred for himself, sharp and immediate, at how easily his mind had arrived there, at the fact that he could weigh his sister’s life against countless unnamed lives and find hers heavier without needing to think twice.

But it was heavier. To him, it simply was.

He had already lived through losing her once. He had watched what that loss did to his family, the shape it carved into all of them that never quite filled back in. If he had the means to stop that from happening again, he would use them. If he didn’t have the means, he would build them.

He could hate himself for such callousness on this matter, and he did, somewhere underneath everything else. But the truth of it stayed fixed regardless of how he felt about it.

Between his sister and a number of strangers too large to hold in his mind as individuals, she was more important to him.

He couldn’t sacrifice her for them, because whatever the world had made him into, he wasn’t a hero. He had never asked to be a savior, and when the responsibility of saving the world had been pushed onto him without his consent, he hadn’t complained. He had simply treated it as the price attached to his second chance at living.

But setting aside the hatred and the fear and the anger he carried toward himself for all of it, what he actually wanted hadn’t changed. He wanted both. He wanted his sister safe, and he wanted the people of both worlds spared the cost of getting her there.

Whether that happened through the fairly simple path Enigma had laid out for him, or through some other route he hadn’t found yet, he intended to find a way to have both.

For Andrei and Venedikt, the weight was different in shape, but no lighter. If anything, it was more complicated because Alex’s burden, as impossible as it was, had a clear direction to it. He knew what he was fighting for and what it would cost him, and the only agony was in the paying.

His brothers had no such clarity.

They had been children when it happened.

Their father had not simply died to them. He had been taken apart in public. Branded. The word traitor was not a quiet word; it was a word that moved through communities like something contagious, that rewrote every memory of a man in the minds of everyone who had ever known him, that reached backward through time and made even the good years feel like a lie.

Their house had gone first. Then the comfort they had never thought to question, because children never did, and then the friends, who became strangers overnight with the particular cruelty that only children were capable of, not malicious, exactly, just faithful to whatever their parents had decided to believe.

Then the relatives, who had their own lives to protect and found it easier, in the end, to simply stop acknowledging the existence of two boys and their mother, who now carried the wrong name.

So they had gone to the mountain.

They had grown up in the cold and the hardship and the long, grinding work of surviving without the things that most people their age had never once thought to be grateful for. And they had been reminded, regularly and without mercy, of exactly whose sons they were. ƒгeewebnovёl.com

Children of a traitor.

That was what they had been given to build themselves on.

And they had.

They had done it, slowly, painfully, without shame, by selling themselves into slave contracts to have a chance at building a life. They did it with the stubbornness of people who had been given no other option.

They had done it; before they even met Alex, they had built somewhat of a value for themselves, and it was bound to grow, never reach even the shadow of what they were today, but far better than living with the only future being low-class citizens with no way of acquiring even a proper job to feed their family.

That was what mattered. They had crawled out of that nightmare and built a new life.

It was after all this that things changed, and only did so because of what they had built.

Their father’s name had been cleared. The allegations were erased, and the word traitor was taken back and replaced with something that was supposed to feel like restitution.

War hero.

And it had given them something, a quietness around the old wound, a small mercy of knowing that the world had at least arrived, finally, at the truth.

Their mother had found the most peace in the truth. For her, knowing that her husband had not been a traitor, had not abandoned them willingly, had always been righteous, and that had been enough to begin healing. She only had to learn to be comfortable with who he had always been.

For Venedikt and Andrei, the reality was harder.

The years remained what they were. The harsh life remained what it had been. The friends who had become strangers did not return. The relatives who had looked away did not look back. The childhood that had been taken from them did not come back simply because someone had finally decided to tell the truth about why it had been taken.

And their father... Their father was alive.

That was the fact that sat at the center of everything now, and it was not a comfortable fact. Their father was alive, but not free, not himself, but alive, a tool stripped of will, carrying out others’ dirty work, existing in that hollow state only because he had traded his humanity and his freedom so his family could simply live.

Not thrive. Just live. Just have a future.

That alone was difficult enough to carry.

And now they were being told he could be restored. That the man could be returned to himself, his memories and his freedom given back, their family made whole again in a way none of them had thought possible.

Everything aside, the choice should have been simple, but it wasn’t.

The question now that troubled them was, Did they want it?

Not the freedom for him; the choice to free him was never in question, but bringing him back into their lives was different. That was what sat at the center of their silence now.

They were happy and had rebuilt a new life. The family they had become had found its shape around his absence, and it was a good life, a real one, earned through years of hardship neither of them would ever fully put into words.

And their father was, in the most honest sense, a stranger to them now. Not through any fault of his own, simply because they had been children when he left, and time had done what time always did: blurred the edges of him until what remained was not quite a person, just an impression. A name. A wound that had long since scarred over.

Whether they wanted to open that again, whether they wanted to relearn a man they could barely remember and reshape a family that had already learned to be whole, that was what the two of them had been quietly turning over for the better part of a full day.

The silence held, and neither of them reached for an answer yet.