"Grandpa..."
The word hung in the air a moment after she said it. Then Bell's face crumpled.
The tears came faster now. They ran down her cheeks and dripped from her chin onto the backs of her hands, and she could not stop them. She did not understand why they were falling. She did not know that old man. She did not have a single shard of memory of him, not a face, not a voice, not even a slip of a dream. He was a complete stranger to her. And yet her chest was breaking open over him, as though he had been the only person who had ever loved her.
"Why...?" she whispered. Her voice was shaking. "Why do I feel sad? And at the same time, why do I feel like I've lost something? Why?"
Her fingers curled into the fabric of Max's jacket. Her whole body trembled.
"WHY???!!!"
Her scream tore across the terrace and bounced off the glass towers on the other side of the street. A pair of sleeping pigeons burst out of the flower pots and flapped away into the dark. Bell didn't notice them. She pressed her fists against her chest as if she could push the pain back into the place it had come from.
She could not understand herself, and that was the worst part.
All her life, she had cried for only two reasons. The first was the bullies. The second was the day she finally accepted the truth about her family, that they did not care one single ounce about what happened to her. Those were the only two things that had ever been strong enough to break her. When she had learned that her grandparents had died before she was even born, she had not shed a tear. She had felt nothing. They were names on a family tree, and she could not cry over names.
Her whole life, she had believed in only one thing.
REALITY.
Be a rationalist. Trust what you can measure. Believe what you can prove. And stop giving your heart to people who do not deserve it.
It was the rule that had kept her alive. It was the reason she had become a chemist, because a flask of acid did not lie to you, and a reaction never pretended to love you. It was also the reason she had become an atheist. She had told herself that if she kept believing in a God who watched over her, if she kept hoping that someone out there would love her, she would die a fool. She would give all of her heart to people and powers who had never given her a single ounce of attention, care, or love in return.
So she had locked it all away. Every hope and every prayer. She had shut the door and thrown away the key, and she had been proud of how well it worked.
And now a stranger's name had kicked that door off its hinges.
Bell clenched both of her fists and shouted again, hoarse and furious. "WHY?!"
"I don't know him! I don't remember anything about him, not even a little piece of him! I never even dreamed about him! So why?! WHY?!"
Max stood up.
He did not say anything. He did not try to explain. He crossed the grass in two steps, knelt down, and wrapped both arms around her, and held her as hard as he could. Her fists beat once against his chest, weakly, and then they stopped. She buried her face in his shirt and sobbed.
Max rested his chin on top of her head and looked out at the city with tired eyes.
He knew what he was seeing. This was the moment when she finally showed her true colors. The cheerful, curious scientist who laughed at his jokes and punched his arm, the girl who had spent the whole evening giggling over lasagna, was only half of her. The other half was this one. A pessimist who had been burned too many times, who had learned to care only for the truth and for what could be proved, and who had gone so far as to turn her back on God and curse Him for abandoning her.
He did not blame her for it. He understood it too well.
'Everyone hides behind a mask,' Max thought. 'A mask that protects other people from us, and protects us from being seen.'
He closed his eyes.
'And under that mask is the same thing in all of us. Evil.'
It was an ugly word, and he said it to himself without flinching.
'Most people reject that truth. They deny it as hard as they can. But why? Why do they fight it so hard?'
'Is it because they're afraid of feeling vulnerable? Because they're afraid that if they admit it, their plans will fall apart and everything they've built will come to ruin? Or is it because they're afraid that if they accept what they truly are, God will refuse to accept them? That the door to heaven will close?'
Max's arms tightened around Bell.
'But the only thing I know is this. No matter how hard we deny our nature, we can't call it a lie. It's still true. Plenty of people hated Jesus because He told the truth. They called Him a hundred insulting names. But there was one name they never dared to use. They couldn't call Him a liar, because deep in their hearts, in the place they didn't want to look at, they knew that He wasn't. They were only fooling themselves out of fear.'
He laughed silently at himself.
He was no better than those people. He had mocked and doubted and run from the truth just like them. He had trained himself to lie before he became a hitman, and he had been very, very good at it. He could look any man in the eye and say anything. But there was one person he could never lie to, and that was himself. If he did, he knew that he would become something worse than what he had already done.
If anyone ever called him evil, he would not call them a liar. He had already seen too much of what he was.
Bell's grip on him slowly loosened.
The sobs grew quieter, then turned into long, shaky breaths. Finally, after a long, long time, she lifted her face and looked up at him. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her nose was running. Her hair was a tangled mess against her wet cheeks.
For a moment, she wanted to punch him.
She really did. Her hand twitched at her side. If he had not said the name 'Tina', she would not have seen that vision. She would not be sitting on a fake lawn with her makeup in ruins, crying over a man she did not know. Her perfect night would still be perfect. She would still be happy.
But the anger would not come.
She had cried too hard. She had screamed too loud. The mask she had worn for so many years had cracked down the middle and fallen to pieces on the grass, and there was no way to put it back on. She could feel the cold air on her bare face. Strangely, it was a relief.
She sniffled and wiped her nose with the sleeve of his jacket.
"Then what happened after that?" she asked. Her voice was thick, but it was steady. "You said you died. And you said you regressed. Does that mean we met again? Did we finally defeat that guy?"
Max looked at her quietly.
He noticed how she said it. That guy. The huge monster that had crawled out of Qlippha wearing her grandfather's face was only 'that guy' to her now, a nameless stranger. She was holding him at arm's length, as if she could keep the pain away by giving it a smaller name. It was the oldest trick of a rationalist. If you could not accept something, you made it into a problem and solved it from far away.
Max understood. He had been doing the same thing with his own past for years. He did not correct her.
"No, and yes," he said.
"No, and what?"
"No, because that was the first time and the last time I ever met you," Max said. "I never found you again, not in any round after that. Maybe it's because you were never meant to be reborn in that world. Maybe the body you took was never supposed to be alive in the first place. I don't know the real reason."
Bell nodded slowly. She was still holding on to his hand.
"And yes," Max continued, "because it was after my nineteen-thousand-five-hundredth regression that I finally managed to kill him."
Bell blinked.
Her red eyes went wide. She stared at him. Then something strange happened to the corners of her mouth. They twitched. She pressed her lips together and looked away, and her shoulders began to shake.
"Nineteen thousand, five hundred?" she said. Her voice wobbled. She was fighting hard not to laugh. "Max. Just how weak were you in that world?"
Max opened his mouth to defend himself.
Then he closed it again. He had no energy left. He had spent every drop of it on the last half hour of confessions, and there was nothing left to fight with. He only slumped his shoulders and let out a long, defeated sigh.
"If your opponent is on the same level as the Primordials," he said, in a flat voice, "then it takes a lot more than a few lifetimes."
"The Primordials?"
"Yeah. The Primordial Goddess of Light, Emilianias. The Primordial God of the Sun, Solanus, who is also the god of the Solanian Empire. The Primordial God of Fate, Mysteries, and Nature, Yggdrasil."
He counted them off on his fingers, one at a time.
"Funny story about Yggdrasil. She died around my twenty-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-eighth regression, and I still don't know why. I never found out who did it. And lastly, the Primordial Goddess of the Moon, Luneverica, who is the goddess of the Lunarian Empire. A being at that level isn't something you beat in one try, Bell. It takes lifetimes of failing. It takes outsmarting him a thousand different ways, and then throwing yourself at him again."
He gave a dry, bitter laugh.
"Fuck. Even then, I needed Auranium's help to finally take him down."
"Auranium," Bell repeated.
It was the name she had said earlier, when she asked if he was the crown prince. The father of Sylan. She turned it over in her head. "The father of Sylan Armada Von Noctis. That Auranium?"
"That one," Max said. "And do you know how we killed him?"
Bell leaned forward, in spite of herself. She was a scientist, and she could never leave a mystery unsolved, even when it was breaking her heart. "How?"
"We jumped at him and punched him."
There was a pause.
"We punched him?" Bell said.
"From the front and from the back," Max said, completely serious. "It took me forever to figure it out. I tried everything for hundreds of rounds. Swords, spears, fire, curses, holy magic, blessed arrows. Nothing worked. He just stood there and laughed. Then one day I tried to hit him with my fists, almost by accident, and I noticed that he flinched."
He held up his right hand and slowly closed it.
"It turned out that only physical attacks worked on him. That was the only rule. But a single person wasn't enough, either. He had two hearts, one in front and one behind, and both of them had to shatter at the same time. So it needed two people. I punched him in the front with a rain of really, really malicious haymakers, and Auranium punched him from behind. We kept going until his hearts broke, and he finally fell."
He looked at his clenched fist. It was just a fist, a big one with old scars across the knuckles. But for a moment he seemed to be seeing the other hand that had once been next to it, a pale, gloved hand striking the same spot from the other side.
Bell was silent for a few seconds. Then she exhaled slowly.
"So much for the grand final battle," she said. "A divine monster from the Abyss, and the answer was a sandwich punch."
"Don't call it that."
"Then why didn't you use the sword?" Bell asked. She tilted her head, as the thought struck her. "Black Blight. You said it was the most powerful blade in that world. You said I killed the Corrupt Pope with it. Why didn't you and Auranium just stab him and get it over with?"
Max looked at her.
He raised one hand to his chin and tapped it slowly with his finger. A strange, calm smile spread over his face. It was a thin, dangerous smile, and Bell, who had spent the last month learning to read his moods, felt a small alarm bell ring in her head.
"Good question," Max said softly. "Yeah. Why shouldn't we use that, Bell?"
"Max?"
"BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT!"
Bell flinched so hard that she almost fell backward.
"I ALREADY TRIED THAT!" Max shouted. He had jumped to his feet, and his hands were flying in the air. All the exhaustion had vanished, burned away in a flash by something much hotter. "I TRIED IT BEFORE! I LITERALLY OFFERED MY FUCKING LIFESPAN TO THE SWORD, SO IT WOULD KILL THAT BASTARD, AND IT STILL FAILED!"
"M-Max..."
"DO YOU KNOW HOW FRUSTRATING THAT IS?!" He ripped his fingers through his hair. "I AM THE SON OF REVAN! I AM THE SON OF THE ONE WHO SEALED EVERY ANCIENT GOD AND EVERY LESSER GOD WITH HIS OWN SWORD, BLACK BLIGHT, AFTER THEY REBELLED AGAINST THE PRIMORDIALS AND TRIED TO BECOME GODS OF THAT WORLD! MY FATHER CAGED THEM ALL! AND I, HIS SON, WITH HIS SWORD IN MY HAND, COULD NOT EVEN KILL ONE OF THEM! I COULDN'T EVEN SEAL THAT BASTARD!"
His voice cracked on the last word. It echoed once across the empty terrace and then disappeared into the night.
Somewhere in the city below, a dog started barking, confused.
Max stood in the middle of the fake grass with his chest heaving, and his whole body shaking. He looked like a man who had been holding a heavy stone in his arms for thirty thousand years and had finally dropped it.
"Haah..." he gasped. "Haah. Haah."
He bent over, put his hands on his knees, and let out a long, ragged breath.
"Finally," he said. "I fucking finally let that out. Thank you. I needed that."
Bell stared at him with her mouth hanging open. A moment ago, she had been the one in pieces. Now she was the one watching him come apart.
Max straightened up and wiped his face with both hands. When he spoke again, his voice was calm, and slightly embarrassed.
"Anyways. In short, even if I used the sword, it was useless. The only requirement to beat that bastard was to punch him until both his hearts shattered, and that was the only way. Fuck. Even after..." He paused and corrected himself. "Even after me and Auranium finally killed him, I still died. I'd taken too many fatal and internal injuries. I had made myself the bait so that the pope would only focus on me, and Auranium could get behind him."
"So you died again," Bell said quietly.
"So I died again," Max agreed. He sat back down on the grass with a little thump. "It was worth it, though."
He scratched his cheek and thought for a second, searching for a way to make her understand.
"It was like fighting Six Paths Madara. But you're not Might Guy, and you're definitely not Sasuke or Naruto."
Bell paused.
"That's the most useful explanation you've ever given me," she said.
"Thank you."
"I don't know if that's a good thing."
She wiped the last of the tears from her cheeks and let out a breath that was half laugh and half sob. It felt strange to laugh. Her chest still ached, and her throat was raw. But the laughter was real, and it loosened something inside her.
"Fair enough," she said.
"So there," Max said. He held out his hands as if presenting a finished plate. "At least now you have the summary version. I'm not going to tell you the whole story, because it would take an entire week to finish, Bell. I'd have to start with the first regression and walk you through all nineteen thousand five hundred of them. We'd both starve."
"I'd survive on cake."
"You'd get diabetes."
"I'd die happy."
Max laughed. For a moment, the air between them was light, and the dark, heavy mood of the last hour seemed to lift. The golden lights swayed. The moon had risen high and small, a silver coin in the sky.
Bell sat very still and looked at him.
She was thinking. She was thinking harder than she had ever thought about anything, harder than she had thought about any of her experiments. She was lining up the pieces of what he had told her, one at a time, and laying them side by side.
A vision. A name. A world that had been a game. A man who had lived thirty thousand lives. A boy who had been an emperor. A father who forged a sword that could cage gods.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, the word he had said, which she had caught on the wind and refused to let go of.
She had let him finish the story about the pope. She had let him shout. She had even let him make his stupid jokes. But there was a splinter lodged in her heart, and it had been bothering her since the beginning. And now that the pope was dead, and the vision was understood, and the tears were dry, she had finally run out of reasons to ignore it.
Bell folded her hands in her lap. She lifted her head, and her grey eyes met his.
"Since I finally understand that vision," she said, "and since you've finished with that topic, how about we switch to a different one?"
Max, who was still smiling, tilted his head. "Which one?"
"The one where you died many times." She raised one finger. "The one where you tell me about Revan." She raised a second finger. "About Auranium." A third. "And about how you ended up possessing the body of the Act Three Middle Boss himself."
Max's smile slipped a little.
"Sylan Armada Von Noctis," Bell said slowly. She said each word carefully, as if she were laying them out on a table. "Or should I say, his true name."
"Bell..."
"Aurelius the Second, Van Valraven."
The wind seemed to stop.
Bell's expression had changed. The red eyes, the swollen face, the rumpled hair were all still there, but something cold had slid into her gaze. Her mouth curved up at one corner, but it was not a smile. It was a thin, sharp line, the kind of expression that a person wears when they are about to read a verdict aloud.
"And lastly," she said, "I want to hear about the part where you used the word 'lover.'"
Max's heart skipped a beat.
'Oh,' he thought. 'Oh, no.'
"You said it twice, actually," Bell went on in a soft, pleasant voice. "You said that you watched your lover die in front of you. You said that you had lived all those lives just to see her die. And I was sitting right here, in the middle of all this, and I was trying so hard to be understanding. I really was."
She leaned a little closer.
"It seems that I wasn't your first, huh, Max?"
Her eyes did not blink. They were full of malice and hatred, and for a second, they made her look exactly like a girl who had once bitten the toe of a man's shoe and sworn that she would choke him to death with her own two hands.
Max stared back at her.
It was not a glare he had ever seen on her face in this life. But it was one that he knew very well. It was the same glare that had once burned at him across a stone courtyard in another world, from the dust on a cold flagstone floor. It had not changed at all.
All the color drained out of his face.
His mouth opened. Then it closed. He tried to swallow, and the lump in his throat was the size of an apple.
-GULP!