Chapter 332
Her explanation followed rigid logic.
Her request to meet had been set for 10:40 a.m., and Theo had arrived before her at precisely 10:40 and fifty-eight seconds.
An exceedingly narrow margin—only two seconds before the clock's hand would advance and register the time as 10:41.
To Aldraya, this was neither luck nor punctuality worthy of praise, but a lateness that had been narrowly avoided.
"I'm sorry for making you wait. I'll try not to be late again next time."
A faint smile bloomed at the corner of Theo's lips, an expression carrying both apology and an acknowledgment of the rigidity of the rules upheld by the girl before him.
His voice emerged low and sincere, admitting the fault of having made Aldraya wait, even if only for a critical span of seconds.
He did not attempt to defend himself or make excuses, instead accepting the temporal parameters Aldraya had set as absolute.
More than that, he offered a promise for the future—an oath that, from now on, his punctuality would not falter by even a single second.
The promise was not spoken with bravado, but with the calm of someone who fully understood the weight of such words when spoken before an entity like Aldraya.
'Too dense, too layered to be translated in a single sweep of consciousness.'
Aldraya's gaze was like liquid crystal poured directly into Theo's soul.
Both of her ruby eyes locked perfectly onto his, unblinking and unmoving, forming a tunnel of visual contact so dense it felt almost physical.
Time seemed to swell and thicken between them, each second grinding softly like grains of sand inside an inverted hourglass.
Theo stood straight, receiving that gaze, yet within his mind a deep confusion began to creep in.
Instinctively, he attempted to access the window that was usually always open—the subtle telepathic channel woven through RWIA—Resolve, Will, Intent, Ambition—nested within Aldraya's consciousness.
Normally, through that symbiotic bond, he could catch traces of emotion, flashes of imagery, or at the very least a basic wave of awareness from the girl before him.
This time, however, all he encountered was an indecipherable silence of frequency.
Not emptiness, but a wall of data noise so complex and dense that it could not be translated directly.
Within his inner murmur, Theo quickly realized that the problem did not lie with his RWIA.
The subordinate entity was still functioning faithfully, dutifully reporting every piece of raw physiological and psychic data experienced by Aldraya's consciousness.
Heart rate, breathing patterns, heightened neural activity.
The reports were there, yet their contents were an unreadable flood of raw information.
That very chaos of data was itself a message.
It meant that Aldraya's current thoughts were not a single emotion or a simple sentence.
They were a storm of calculations, a multidimensional deliberation involving countless variables, memories, and future scenarios—so many that even the system he himself had created required considerable time to process and translate them into something comprehensible to his human awareness.
"Do you know… why I asked you to come here?"
Twenty seconds was not a long time by ordinary standards, yet beneath Aldraya's unblinking, intensely focused gaze, each second felt like a full minute stretched thin.
The silent school corridor became a vacuum where only their visual contact held gravity.
Theo could feel that all of Aldraya's attention—every ounce of her extraordinary cognitive power—was focused on him.
He was like an ancient text being read, a code being unraveled layer by layer, and that act of reading demanded extreme precision.
Exactly at the twenty-first second, as if an internal timer had sounded, the silence shattered.
Aldraya's thin lips parted, and the voice that emerged was as flat and clear as before, but now carried a question that struck directly at the core.
She asked whether Theo understood the reason behind her urgent summons to this place.
The question was not voiced with accusation or casual curiosity, but as an examination.
This was the first test—a way for Aldraya to measure the extent of Theo's intuitive understanding of their situation, of the narrative they were living through, and of herself.
She was evaluating whether their RWIA bond had forged a synchronized understanding, or whether Theo was still moving within the darkness of his human assumptions.
"If I had to guess… this has something to do with the first arc, episode ten, right?"
Without pausing to reflect or weigh his words, Theo immediately returned his answer in the form of a counter-question.
His voice was calm, yet carried the burden of the special knowledge he bore.
He asked whether this sudden call was connected to the broader framework of the first arc, the final part of episode ten, which had been haunting his thoughts ever since class.
His question was not a wild guess, but an inference rooted in a deep understanding of the mechanisms governing the world they inhabited.
Within his mind, a series of rapid flashbacks played out.
Theo recalled days—weeks, even—long before the date between Erietta and Ilux had finally taken place.
During those times, he often shared his knowledge with Aldraya.
In the quiet of his room or in secluded corners, he meticulously laid out the grand narrative map of the game Flo Viva Mythology.
He explained every plot point, key character, turning point, and tragic or heroic ending.
The game itself, as he described it, was a world inspired by the universe of his own horror novel, Last Prayer.
A work of fiction that, it turned out, possessed roots in a reality far deeper and more dangerous than he had ever imagined.
However, a catastrophic distortion changed everything.
The company Vostraith Legacy—the entity that funded and developed Flo Viva Mythology until it could exist in Theo's real world—proved to be the cause of an unimaginable calamity.
Its ambitious funding and technological implementation triggered a devastating dimensional accident.
The accident was so massive that it absorbed and consumed ninety-nine percent of everything in their real world, fusing it into the game reality that was meant to exist only within servers.
The original world vanished, leaving behind only fragments now forced to live within the narrative flow of a game that had become their new reality.
'A rough outline, at least enough to prepare her—without destroying her.'
Yes, even though Theo held full command over that dark future knowledge, he deliberately filtered the information he shared with Aldraya.
There were parts too brutal, fates too tragic, or narrative twists too shattering, which he kept sealed within his own heart.
His intention was not deception, but a form of subtle protection.
He wanted to lessen the shock and psychological burden that might strike Aldraya's consciousness if she knew every horrifying detail of the destiny written for them and the world around them.
Even so, the reality that Aldraya was a character within Flo Viva Mythology had been successfully processed by that intelligent entity—accepted not as a shocking fact, but as a new parameter within the existential equation she now had to confront.
Despite that censorship, Theo still provided a map of the conflicts to come.
In their past conversations, he had plainly laid out the main battle lines.
To be continued…