Free Web NovelChapter 265: True Fusion
The Igasus Kingdom won.
A barely known and mostly insignificant territory outside of the Seven Kingdoms won against the rising terror of the Hellwrath Army.
It had caused quite the shockwave, and naturally, there were changes to things, the majority being the appearance of new faces within the Kingdom.
Yet the people of Igasus could easily be told apart from the foreigners by the heavy looks on their faces.
Many of them had lost something, and all of that was thanks to the Commander of the Igasus Kingdom, who had gone from being beloved by the Kingdom to now being regarded as Igasus’ most brutal commander.
It had been three days now, and those days had been nothing but hellish.
Even as he sat on the ledge of his guard empire overlooking everything, every time he closed his eyes, he could so vividly hear those screams.
________
"Please... bring back my son."
...
"My husband never even wanted to fight."
"He was a farmer. He couldn’t even hold a spear properly. Why did you take him from me?"
...
"My brother died on the wall. He was all I had left."
...
"My son followed your orders. Now he’s buried because of them."
...
"Commander..."
"Was there really no other way?"
...
"I hate the Hellwraths. But I hate you too."
________
A quiet shake of his head and all those voices disappeared, forced into some dark corner of his mind.
He rose from the ledge where he sat, his eyes closed. Then they slowly opened, luminous blue flashing through the realm as White whispered,
"I understand now."
The second he said those words,
CRACCCK!
The sound of cracking echoed out as fractures spread through the space around him all at once.
SHATTTTTER!
Everything around him shattered apart as though it had been nothing but a glassy illusion, and White found himself back where it had all started.
The dark ground beneath him.
The crashing waves behind him, leaving gigantic bones upon the shore.
And ultimately, the towering mountain before him, where a single silhouette sat with a wild, insane grin stretching from ear to ear.
He gave one more look at the world around him, the hardened gaze of someone trying to deny any association with this evil, but then that gaze softened as he took it all in.
During the beginning, when Dark White had told him this was his soul, he had denied it.
Most of that denial came from what the soul reeked of:
The sickening corpses, the putrid dark river that was mostly the blood of these hellish nightmares of creatures.
All of it was an evil he thought he could never commit himself.
But he had seen evil now.
Not just in the names they had called him, but when he stood amongst hundreds of thousands of corpses and found the severed head of a boy only a few feet away, knowing well that the boy was there because he had ordered it.
Now, he understood.
This realm...This was him.
And Dark White?
White turned back, looking at that black-haired devil.
He had always gotten it wrong:
Dark White was no separate entity from him.
The truth was...
"You’re the representation of what I’m truly capable of."
He said quietly, a truth he had known for days now.
Not many could have made the choice he was forced to make.
No normal human mind should have naturally come up with such insane methods of winning the war, yet he had.
And not only had he come up with them, but he had also followed through and succeeded.
Those were choices that the previous him would have doubted he was capable of making, yet, he had made them himself.
BOOOOOOOM!
The ground shook as a terrifying ripple of darkness crossed through the entire realm while Dark White descended from the mountain, landing before him.
It naturally towered over White, one finger pointing down at him as White looked up at the grin above.
"Now you see..."
It said, bringing down its finger.
The sharp finger stopped an inch from White’s forehead.
Then it continued forward, piercing into his forehead.
"...What Darkness truly is."
Dark White completed, digging its finger into White’s forehead, and in the next moment, its entire body dispersed into shadows that rushed through the opening.
It was like pitch-black glue, heavy enough to force White onto both knees, rapidly being absorbed into his body as it took over cells and altered their structure.
This wasn’t Dark White taking control of the mind space.
This was White realizing Dark White was his potential and finally becoming prepared to directly fuse with the grinning calamity...becoming one with it.
And when the fusion was complete, he found himself once more within that crimson throne room, standing right before her.
This time...
She was smiling.
The Umbrawyric Queen grinned from ear to ear as she looked down at him.
The change was clear.
For one, the naivety he once radiated had completely disappeared.
That racial weakness of morality had been forcefully wiped away once and for all.
And when he raised his eyes, the luminous blue glow, the most basic eye color of the Umbrawyrs, the one possessed only by their infants, was gone.
In its place was endless darkness, along with a crimson-red ring resting within their depths, staring back at her quietly, with no emotion visible.
There were two additional slits beneath his primary eyes, though they remained closed as he slowly rose to his feet.
White turned to his hands, opening and closing them. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
The dark complexion of his body was gone once more.
He had returned to being fully white skinned, but now, his skin color was more of a frozen pale.
The sort one would find on a being slowly dying beneath endless snow.
There were obvious changes to the musculature of his body, but he was in no mood to marvel at them.
What caught his attention instead was the color of his veins.
When he had been fully human, his veins were green, when he had fused with the Umbrawyr, his veins became red, but now, they glowed with a faint blue hue.
It felt like a bizarre color for an Umbrawyr, a race known for darkness.
"You’re not an ordinary Umbrawyr."
The Umbrawyric Queen’s voice echoed through the throne room, as though answering his thoughts.
"You have the potential to become an Umbrawyric King, a unique existence, hence the blue color. Only you will possess such blood flowing through your veins."
She said, but he cared little for the color of his blood.
"The next test."
He said immediately.
As always, her hand reached to the side, summoning a vortex, but what appeared shook White slightly.
It was a familiar vortex.
One that gave birth to a massive pitch-black gate radiating a deadly, sickening aura as it stood within the throne room.
It was the first door she had summoned before, the one containing the Umbrawyro Grimoire, which she had warned he wouldn’t survive for even a second inside.
White felt ready to take on a new test, but taking on that...
There was a certain fear of it, but speaking of fear...
His hand reached toward his chest, searching for the rhythm of his heart.
Fear.
Caution.
Wariness.
Those emotions should make someone’s heartbeat spike faster, but feeling his own heart, there were no changes at all.
In fact, the fear he thought he was feeling wasn’t real.
It was merely his mortal memories remembering what fear was and understanding that he should be afraid in this moment.
"Umbrawyrs don’t feel fear."
The Queen answered, stepping down from her throne.
"Years of evolution with Darkness, and we’ve ridden ourselves of that weakness."
She came to a stop before him.
She had always been taller than him, as long as he could remember, standing around 4 meters tall.
Now it was as though she had shrunk, for he towered over her by an entire head.
"Don’t tell me you wish to argue about fear being a weakness."
She said, waiting for his objection, but...there was none.
Many of the truths White had once believed absolute had been torn apart so thoroughly that he could no longer say with certainty what was right or wrong.
But this wasn’t the time for that.
His eyes turned toward the gate that seemed to be waiting for him, and she followed his gaze.
"I wouldn’t be afraid of it if I were you."
She said, and he paused.
"Sure, it may indeed be the end of you, but it is also your ancestry."
"A journey back to those who looked exactly like you, with the same blue blood flowing through their veins."
"There are more than seven types of Unique Umbrawyrs, but we possess only two Ancestry Gates."
"One for the Queen. The other for the King."
"All the rest...have been lost."
She informed him.
"So, as much as this is danger in its purest form, it is also a rare opportunity, one you’ve proven yourself quite deserving of."
