Chapter 246
"An honest confession."
"Even you, Aldraya. Even I never expected it."
Behind that lewd façade and moral depravity, it turns out that Erusha still harbored a heart so remarkably gentle.
Truly unexpected.
Throughout Erusha's sincere and winding confession, Aldraya did not move.
She did not merely fall silent; she froze, becoming a masterpiece of nonexistence.
For a full ten minutes, not a single muscle in her face twitched, no breath could be heard, and even the rhythm of her heartbeat seemed to vanish into the densest silence.
Her presence diminished, camouflaging itself perfectly within the darkness of the cave behind her, like a marble statue carved by a Renaissance master that had lost the moonlight.
She was an empty mirror, a vacuum that absorbed every word, every emotional vibration, every exposed fracture of vulnerability from Erusha's speaking soul.
Ten minutes and eleven seconds passed within that distorted space-time before life finally flowed back into her form.
Then, like a spring emerging from stone, Aldraya's lips parted.
The voice that followed was softer than before, resembling the wind brushing against dry leaves at midnight.
She admitted that she had never expected to hear such a sincere confession from a soul that had essentially been seized, invaded, and marginalized within its own body.
There was an implied sense of honor in her words, an acknowledgment of human complexity that transcended the boundaries of good and evil.
Those words also served as the closing of Erusha's episode of self-revelation, an unspoken permission to finally rest from the torment of conscious suffering.
After the words drifted away, a subtle change occurred in the body before her.
The pink light in the right eye dimmed slightly—not extinguished, but as if falling asleep.
Control over the body shifted gently, like a driver handing over the wheel after surviving a dangerous road.
Yet the strange optical phenomenon remained.
Two different eye colors continued to emit their respective glows, a permanent visual warning that two rulers resided within this body.
The blazing blue eye that now regained dominance signaled that control had returned to Theo Vkytor.
As his first response, a soft chuckle escaped his lips.
That sound carried layers of meaning.
There was relief, there was deep irony, and perhaps even a flicker of genuine astonishment.
Theo himself, the architect of all this chaos, admitted that he too had never expected it.
He had never imagined that behind Erusha Birtash's lewd and depraved mask lay a consciousness capable of being hurt, confused, and ultimately accepting with gentleness.
"Therefore—"
"K-K-K…."
'His body rejects it, but his face… remains empty.
Damn it, the most terrifying contrast.'
Fuuuuuh!
'Pain at this level should tear an expression apart—yet he is denied the right to react.'
The smile that appeared on Aldraya's lips was no ordinary smile.
It was too flat, too devoid of emotional curvature, like a thin line drawn with pencil across blank paper.
Yet its presence was undeniable, an anomalous phenomenon upon a face usually resembling a frozen lake.
The smile had barely been interpreted when the situation abruptly changed with devastating speed.
Theo, who was about to say something, was cut off mid-word.
His instincts moved faster than his thoughts.
Both of his hands shot forward, gripping Aldraya's shoulders tightly at the exact moment her body wavered and the back of her head nearly slammed into the hard cave floor.
He managed to steady her faltering body, but what followed was far more horrifying than a simple faint.
Under Theo's grasp, Aldraya's body convulsed violently.
Not the weak trembling of someone cold, but brutal, rhythmic seizures, as if unseen hands inside her were twisting every nerve and muscle according to an unreadable score of suffering.
Her spine arched like a bow drawn nearly to the point of breaking, her jaw locked so tightly that the grinding of her teeth rang sharply, and her breath came in chaotic, choking intervals.
But the most terrifying part was her face.
Amid the storm of such extreme physical torment, Aldraya's face remained flat.
There were no creases of pain, no widened eyes, no groaning mouth.
The expression was fixed in a horrifying neutrality, as if her body and face were disconnected, as if the pain occurred in a vessel no longer linked to its expressive center.
Then, the scream broke out.
It was not a hysterical shriek or emotional wail, but a hoarse sound like grinding metal, a pure reflex of a collapsing nervous system.
The scream sounded alien and inhuman, as though it did not come from Aldraya, but from the deepest layer of her existence, from something beneath her individual soul.
It was the sound of a fractured dogma, the shattering foundation of belief tearing through flesh and bone.
Each convulsive jolt was a chain reaction from her core, shrinking and collapsing.
The sacred energy that once flowed steadily like an eternal river now crowded into narrowing channels, erupting in small, destructive bursts from within.
Theo, who continued to hold her, could feel a strange cold seeping from her body—a cold not of temperature, but of lost substance, like holding a vessel whose contents were slowly spilling into another realm.
That absence of expression was, in truth, the peak of her suffering.
Expression had long been sacrificed, buried beneath layers of roles and destiny.
The flat smile briefly detected earlier now became the bitterest irony, for now even the capacity to smile had vanished.
The pain she endured was unspoken, indescribable, a storm raging within a void.
Aldraya's hand clawed at the ground with pale nails, not seeking support, but as a final spasmodic motion of an entity that had forgotten how to "exist" without the dogma that once sustained it.
She stood upon a horrifying threshold.
Not merely dying, but being erased from the status of her own existence—becoming something wounded without language to express it, while literally and metaphorically fading in the helpless embrace of Theo.
"What's happening to you?!"
"…"
"Aldraya—answer me!
Say something—anything at all!"
Theo Vkytor's analytical composure, a fortress that had never faltered even before the most intimate confessions, finally cracked.
The fracture widened rapidly into a gap, and ultimately collapsed into pure panic.
Watching Aldraya convulse without expression, her body seemingly ravaged from within by something unseen, all logic and planning evaporated like smoke.
He shook Aldraya's shoulders gently at first, then increasingly harder, as if trying to jolt consciousness back from the depths behind those empty eyes.
Questions spilled from his mouth, short and pleading.
'None of the options fit.
Whatever I do now—be it spells, artifacts, forced separation—it all ends the same.
Too late.'
Hooooh!
'She isn't being attacked. She's being emptied.'
Huuuuuuh!
'W-Wait. That's it.
The Nothing.
The potential she awakened—nonexistence that does not destroy, but consumes and stores.
That is the only way to save the former Supreme Angel.'
Fhuuuuuh!
"Listen to me, Aldraya!
If I offer you a deal right now, will you accept it?"
The panic gripping Theo slowly transformed into a torrent of wild, desperate calculation.
To be continued…