Chapter 519
"You... yawned?" the youngest asked, and for the first time, his voice lost all of its refinement, losing the smooth, penetrating whisper he always used. It became higher, sharper, more like the voice of a little boy who did not receive the birthday cake he had asked for.
"You yawned in front of me? In front of the Ruler of the Land of the Gods? In front of someone who could turn your bones into dust with nothing more than a blink?"
The youngest laughed, a laugh unlike any he had made before. It was no longer the quiet chuckle that resonated from deep within his chest like a vibration, but a loud, wild laugh that erupted from his throat, carrying something dangerously close to madness.
And as he laughed, the atmosphere around Theo changed.
Not gradually, not little by little, but instantly, like a switch being flipped from off to on. The air surrounding the young man began to tremble, began to split apart, began tearing the space around him into countless tiny fractures that followed no pattern whatsoever. Those fractures were born not from the power within Theo himself, but from the crushing pressure pressing down from outside, from the youngest's fury that he could no longer conceal behind his thin smile.
"You won't be going anywhere," the youngest said between bursts of laughter, his voice now heavy and low, emerging from his chest like the growl of the deepest part of the earth.
"Because you and I are not finished. Because you, with your filthy hair, your lazy eyes, and that insolent attitude you dragged here from that rotten human world, have made the greatest mistake of your life. You made me feel... ignored. And I despise being ignored. Not since I was six years old. Not since I blew out birthday candles alone in a cold room with no one there to wish me a happy birthday."
He stopped laughing.
And the moment his laughter ceased, the atmosphere surrounding Theo grew even heavier, not heavy like a burden, but heavy like despair, like someone drowning while realizing there would be no hand reaching down to pull them back to the surface because every hand was already occupied with something else.
"But very well," the youngest continued, his thin smile returning, though this time it was no longer thin. It stretched wide, wide like a freshly sharpened blade.
"I'll tell you something you might want to store inside that filthy head of yours before you die. Or before you... survive. Because yes, there is a possibility, a tiny one, so tiny it is no larger than the dust clinging to your shoes, that you could defeat me. Not kill me, of course. No one can kill me in the Land of the Gods, in this home that I transformed from a cold palace into the hell that I rule. But defeat me? Perhaps. Perhaps you could force me to take a single step backward. Perhaps you could make me smile not only with my lips, but with my heart. Perhaps you could..."
He stopped, leaning forward.
For the first time, the distance between them vanished, becoming so close that Theo could smell something strange coming from the youngest's body. It was not perfume, nor sweat, nor blood, but the scent of loneliness, the very same scent he had breathed every single day when he was a child, sleeping alone inside a room far too large for a little boy whom no one had ever wanted.
"The most likely outcome," the youngest whispered, and this time his whisper did not seep through the pores of the air. It entered Theo's ears directly, burrowed into his mind, and reached the deepest place where every doubt and every fear lay hidden.
"... Is that you survive with injuries that are... relatively minor. Losing both of your arms. Losing both of your legs. Perhaps half your face as well, if I happen to be in a particularly bad mood. But your body will still live, Theo. Your heart will continue beating. And you will lie upon the cold ground of the Land of the Gods while blood pours from the four stumps that remain, as I stand over you and ask, 'Was it still worth it? Was it still worth coming here, defending a girl you didn't even know, making me, the Sole Ruler of the Land of the Gods, feel ignored simply because you were too lazy to listen to my monologue?'"
Theo let out a long sigh.
Not the weary sigh from before, but a different one, a breath released from lungs that had suddenly decided it was time to stop remaining passive and finally begin to move.
At that exact same moment, without pause, without warning, and without the slightest change in his half-asleep expression, he did something strange. He rose onto his tiptoes, bringing both palms together high above his head, higher than his own height, far higher, like a child reaching for a toy placed on the highest shelf, stretching with all the strength he had because it remained just beyond his grasp.
"What—" the youngest uttered.
But before that single word had even finished leaving the blade-like smile stretched across his lips, Theo launched himself forward.
Not in one direction, but in four directions at once: right, left, upward, and downward, as though the space surrounding him had suddenly become too narrow for a single body, forcing that body to become many, to become a thousand, ten thousand, something no blinking eye could ever hope to count.
Every movement created a clone.
Every clone that moved created another clone of itself.
Every newly created clone moved again and created yet another clone.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Like ripples spreading endlessly across water.
Like a virus dividing within cells that would never die.
Like a nightmare giving birth to another nightmare within its own womb.
No one could count how many Theos now stood, floated, hung suspended, or sat in midair surrounding the youngest. One hundred. One thousand. Ten thousand. Or perhaps some impossible odd number that no human tongue could ever pronounce because human language had never been designed to describe numbers born from chaos itself.
Ninety-nine thousand one hundred clones.
Every one of them carried empty hands that held no sword.
Every one of them possessed the same half-closed eyes.
Every one of them wore the same indifferent expression.
Yet every one of them was moving now.
Every one of them was attacking now.
Every one of them swung something that was not a sword, yet resembled a slash, a cut, something that had never been given a name because no one had ever thought to name a movement born from bored nothingness.
"One more centimeter," whispered a thousand Theos at once.
Unlike the youngest's whispers that seeped into the air, theirs tore through it, shredding the atmosphere into thousands of tiny fragments, each fragment carrying the exact same voice.
The youngest, whose smile still remained despite his eyes now being opened wider than ever before, so wide that it became unmistakably clear the gray within his irises was not the color of a sky awaiting a storm, but the ashes of something that had burned away and could never live again, finally realized that only a single centimeter separated him from death.
Or from a pain that had never touched him since the night he blew out birthday candles all by himself.
So he moved.
Not by jumping.
Not by dodging.
But by flipping through the air, his pale, slender body spinning like a leaf falling from a dead tree.
To be continued…