"Wa-wait! Let's not rush the questions, Bell!"
Max waved both hands in front of his chest like a man trying to stop a runaway cart with his bare palms. His voice came out half a pitch too high.
"You're asking a lot all at once, and you know I can't answer everything fully. Even that brief summary I gave you earlier nearly wiped me out. And now you want this too?"
Bell didn't answer. She only narrowed her eyes.
Max gulped.
"I know, I know. I told you I would tell you the whole truth. But not like this! You're driving me into a corner here. Can you at least let me breathe? Please? I swear I'll write you a whole essay afterward, with footnotes, if that helps you calm down."
He slid off the fake grass onto his knees. Then he shuffled forward on them until he was kneeling right in front of her, with his hands pressed together like a man at a shrine.
'Dad was right,' he thought desperately. 'Women are scary as hell when you piss them off. But this kind of anger is something else. It's like she's got a period or something.'
Bell studied him for a long moment. The cold in her face had not melted, but a small, curious crease had appeared between her eyebrows.
"Why are you kneeling?" she asked.
"Because I'm begging you."
"It looks like you're admitting that you did something wrong, Max."
"I didn't do anything wrong! I just..." He stopped. He had no idea how to finish that sentence.
Bell leaned forward until her face was only a hand's width from his. Her blonde hair had come loose from its pins and fell around her cheeks, and the golden lights behind her made it glow like a halo. It would have been beautiful if her eyes had not been so sharp.
"Tell me what really happened to that lover of yours," she said softly.
Max looked into her grey eyes for a few seconds. Then he let out a long breath, and his shoulders dropped.
"Fine," he said. "I guess I have to talk about this first. And I really don't want to, because it brings back terrible memories of her deaths. But at the same time, it also reminds me of the times I was happy next to her."
He pushed himself up and brushed the dust off his knees. Then he lifted his left hand in front of his face and stared at it, turning it slowly in the light.
Bell noticed. She stopped glaring and watched his hand, too. It was a strong hand, long-fingered and steady, with a few thin scars across the back. There was nothing strange about it at all.
"Did you know," Max said quietly, "that I lost my left arm around my twenty-five-thousand-and-third regression? Do you want to know why?"
"I want to," Bell said slowly. "But what does that have to do with your lover?"
"Everything."
He closed his fingers into a fist.
"Everything I've done, every regression I've lived, and every painful thing in my past, all of it leads back to her."
The wind made the strings of lights sway. Somewhere below, a car door slammed.
"Emhyria Van Hemreis," Max said. "My first lover. And the reason I became the Dark Lord, because I stole that role from her."
Bell froze.
The words went into her head one at a time. Emhyria Van Hemreis. Dark Lord. Stole that role. She had heard that name before, many times, in her mother's living room, shouted at a television screen in two languages.
"W-what?!" she gasped. Then her voice shot up like a firework. "YOUR FIRST LOVER IS THE FINAL VILLAIN OF THE GAME?! THE SO-CALLED WITCH OF CALAMITY? THE ONE WHO BEARS THE HARROWEDHEART?!"
"Yeah."
"Wow. I mean, wow!" Bell grabbed her own hair with both hands. "My mom had such a hard time killing her in that game! Her abilities were completely broken! Even with the Goddess's Blessing and the Goddess's sword, Excalibur, the heroine, the Saintess Emiliana Van Emilios, couldn't beat her without help from every single male lead! Every single one!"
"I know."
"And the worst part is that she's weaker than the Hidden Final Boss! Emperor Auranium Van Valraven the Great! The father of Sylan, like you told me earlier!"
Max nodded slowly, and a faint smile touched his lips in spite of everything. Bell had recited the details like a student reading from a textbook, and she had gotten every single one right.
She was correct. Emhyria Van Hemreis was the final boss of the game, at the end of Arc Fifteen, in the last episode of the main story. Auranium, on the other hand, only became the hidden final boss under one condition. A player had to go against his wishes to destroy the Solanian Empire, to punish it for the crimes it had committed against the Raven Empire. Those crimes went all the way back to the reign of Emperor Revan and Emperor Aurelius the First. And Aurelius the First was Max himself, in his very first life.
Auranium's own bloodline came through Aurelius's twin sister, Princess Renalith.
Bell's mouth was still open. Then something slid into place behind her eyes, and her gaze sharpened.
"Wait. Is she the one who caused you to regress so many times?!"
"Yes and no," Max said.
"What? What do you mean, yes and no?"
"Indirectly, yes. But no, because I already had the regression ability before I met her." Max scratched his head. "But I should explain how I got it first. Then the rest will make sense."
Bell exhaled and sat back on her heels. She was still furious, and she was still hurt, but she was also a scientist, and a scientist could not resist an unsolved mystery.
"Fine," she said. "We'll go that way, so I can finally understand how your regression works. And I want to know how you can say you came from that world, and that the original timeline was your second life. How could you possibly know that was your second life?"
"Because it wasn't the original timeline, Bell."
"What?"
"This isn't the original timeline," Max said. "This is the second timeline of this world. Some people would call it an alternate timeline. When I came here, the things that happened didn't match the things I remembered from before. This world split off from the one I knew. And this life, the one we're sitting in right now, is my thirty-thousand-and-third."
Bell's mouth went dry.
"My first life," Max went on, "was as Aurelius the First, Van Valraven. Before I became a prince, I was a sickly child. Terminally ill. The doctors didn't think I would live past ten. But even then, I was loved by my parents. My father was Emperor Revan the Founder, Van Valraven, also known as the First Black Sun of the Raven Empire. He had been alive for about eleven thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight years. My mother was Empress Marriane Margaret Van Valraven, the First Crimson Moon."
"Eleven thousand years," Bell whispered. "Your dad was eleven thousand years old?"
"Give or take."
"I'm going to ignore that and keep listening."
"Good plan." Max took a breath. "My mother believed she was a transmigrator. By her own count, it was her eleventh transmigration, and her twelfth life. She thought she had possessed the body of a villainess. She also happened to be the former saintess of the vampire race, of Sanguinius, the god of blood and of the vampires. And I had a twin sister, Renalith Daenys Van Valraven. She was the heir."
"Wa-wait!" Bell held up both hands. "Stop. Before we go any farther. Your mother was the saintess of the vampire race, and also the villainess of that world, and then she remembered that it was her original life? What does that even mean? I'm so confused, Max."
"Yeah." Max rubbed the back of his neck. "I guess I'll have to explain that, too."
He sat down on the grass in front of her.
"The short version is that my mother was always from that world. I'll tell you the long version some other time. But the body she believed she'd possessed belonged to a villainess from another visual novel. It was also a smut one, about a fairy princess who gets lost and ends up on the Central Continent."
"The Central Continent," Bell said slowly. "Where the five nations are."
"Right. Amaria, Solania, Lunaria, the Holy Nation, and Ravenia, which was what my father's land was called before it became an empire. And yes, that visual novel is the prequel to The Adventures of Emiliana, Searching for Truth." Max grimaced. "When my mother woke up in that body, she knew she was screwed. The villainess she'd become was fated to die hated by everyone. That was the fate of the Saintess of Sanguinius."
"That's fucking cruel," Bell said.
"Tell me about it."
He picked at a blade of fake grass and went on.
"She tried everything to avoid her role. She tried to be good. She tried to be kind. It didn't matter. People hated her anyway. Even the fiancé of the body she'd taken hated her. She'd been through eleven transmigrations, and every time it ended the same way. So in the end, she stopped trying to fight it. She went to the leader of the nation of Ravenia, my father, Revan Van Valraven, and made him an offer. She would help him, and in return, she wanted him to stab her with his sword, Black Blight."
"WHAT?!" Bell's voice cracked across the terrace. "Why would she want to die? And why on that sword? Isn't that the sword that sealed all the ancient gods and lesser gods in Qlippha?"
"Yes."
"And before you go on, I have to ask. How is the god of the vampire race still alive? Why wasn't he sealed away too?"
"Oh, right. Sorry." Max tossed the blade of grass aside. "That god was neutral. Sanguinius only cared about his own people. He ignored the war between the Primordials and the other gods, so he was spared. He kept ruling the vampire race. As for why my mother wanted to die, she was tired, Bell. She was tired of living like that. And she theorized that the Black Blight, with its strange power, could finally kill her and let her rest."
Bell lowered her eyes. A shadow crossed her face.
"If I were in her shoes," she said quietly, "I would choose to die, too."
Max nodded. He did not blame his mother for it at all.
"Yeah. So would I. Anyway, my father accepted her deal. And then she started creating technology, strange and wonderful technology the people of Ravenia had never seen. She did it for the sake of the ogres, the orcs, the beastfolk, and the hybrids who had been cast out for being hybrids. She did it for the common elves who had migrated to escape the cruelty of the High Elves, and for the humans who had been slaves in Solania and found shelter in Ravenia. If you want a word for my father's nation, it was a utopia."
Author's Note: Ravenia was created as a paradise for beings who had been treated like trash elsewhere. These included beastfolk, ogres, orcs, and draconics, who had been looked down on by the dragons. They also included hybrids, born of experiments or of love between different races, such as demi-demons, fairy-demon hybrids, and half-humans and half-elves. Common elves and humans lived there too. Revan believed they could live together in harmony and equality. He gave them equal rights, for men and women alike, and discrimination did not exist in his nation. He banned polygamy, because he believed it only brought strife to genuine relationships. He also made a law that cheating would be punished severely, with torture, public shame, and death by crucifixion. This applied to everyone, man or woman, noble or royal. Any man or woman who could defend themselves was enlisted in the army or the knighthood, so that no discrimination could take root. The only people not allowed in Ravenia were goblins, who raided villages, stole money, and raped women, and the Dark Elves, whose ambition was to rule the world through tyranny disguised as peace. Fun Fact: Revan himself was half demon and half dragon. He was known as both the Death God and the Time God, because he wielded the power of time manipulation, which was called "Izanami.", and Black Blight which signifies death itself.
"I see," Bell said. Her voice was soft, and there was a strange ache in it. "Your father really was a great man, Max. I wish I had a father like that..."
Max reached over and put his hand on her head. He patted it slowly, the way he had done at the ball, and this time she did not complain.
"Yeah," he said. "Even now, I can't surpass either of my parents when it comes to being great for their people."
He looked up at the stars.
"Anyway, over time, my parents grew closer. And it turned into love. My mother held back at first, but my father was stubborn, and eventually she gave in. They were great at communicating with each other, you know? It's a shame my sister and I weren't. If she had only talked to me about why she wanted to leave the throne, if we had only talked, maybe I wouldn't have ended up hating her." He coughed. "Cough. Sorry. Anyway."
He shook the thought away.
"One day, my mother found a temple with my father. Inside, there was a red grail. She touched it, almost by instinct, and drank the blood inside. And then she remembered everything. She told my father that the transmigration was fake, and that she'd been from that world all along. My father was overjoyed. It meant he didn't have to kill her anymore, as she'd asked. And after that, they lived happily ever after."
Bell blinked.
"Th-that's it?" she asked. She sounded almost offended. "That's the whole story?"
"Oh, no. That's just a tiny summary. I don't want to tell you their whole story yet."
Author's Note: The whole story of Max's mother will be told in my next planned novel, in which she is the protagonist.
"Okay, Max," Bell said, with a sigh. "Then go on with your regressions."
"Before you ask," Max said, raising a finger, "I'll answer something first. How did I become an emperor if my twin sister was the heir? Did I start a coup? Hell no! I couldn't do that. I loved my sister as much as I loved our parents. But..."
His hand slowly balled into a fist.
"...she abandoned us."
Bell's expression softened. "Abandoned you? What really happened back then?"
She knew it was a sensitive subject. She could see it in the way his jaw had tightened. But she couldn't help asking.
"She ran away," Max said. His voice was shaking now. "She ran away from her responsibilities as the heir! She ran away from the crown that she was supposed to wear!"
He staggered to his feet.
"SHE FUCKING RAN AWAY BECAUSE OF ONE MAN! ONE MAN FROM THE LUNARIAN EMPIRE!"
His fist slammed into a marble pillar at the edge of the garden.
-THUD!
But he pulled the punch at the very last second. The pillar shook, and a little dust sifted down from the top. Max froze with his hand against the stone, and then slowly lowered it. He was still a vampire, and one real blow would have brought the whole building down on the party below.
"And you know what the effect was?" he said, in a lower and harsher voice. "Do you know how much it mattered, when we were in the middle of our war with Solania, and they were trying to conquer my people and turn them into slaves?!"
His shoulders heaved.
"She was foolish. She was a fool! And that foolishness... cost the lives of our parents."
Bell's eyes went wide. She pressed her hand against her chest.
"I-I'm sorry, Max," she said quickly. "I shouldn't have made you dig into something so painful."
"No." Max shook his head and turned around. His face was drawn, but his eyes were steady. "You deserve to know. You deserve to know how a sick, dying child became the greatest emperor who ever lived."
He straightened his back. For a moment, in the golden light, he looked taller than he had before.
"The four other nations acknowledged it. Lunaria in the north. The Holy Nation in the south, back when it still had honor, and centered itself on saving people's lives before greed corrupted it. The Amarian Kingdom at the center. And my own Raven Empire in the east, which was the first to accept me."
Bell nodded politely. A small part of her wanted to laugh. Max was boasting like a boy in a schoolyard. But she stopped herself, because she could still see how raw the wound was. Instead she asked a question.
"Why were you at war with Solania in the first place? I know they're the villains in the story. They did terrible things 200 years ago in the game's timeline, and they were still doing them in the present. The developer said they were based on Imperial Japan because of their warcrimes, right?"
Author's Note: I hate Imperial Japanese in WW2 of all my heart after what they did to my nation and treat our women as their comfort women, so that's why i use them as an example.
"Yeah."
"But the game never really explained what happened 200 years ago. It was a plot hole. So how did Ravenia, a nation that only wanted peace and equality and better technology for its people, end up at war with them?"
Max exhaled slowly. He sat back down, took a breath, and began.
"Because of our technology, Bell. Thanks to my mother's knowledge from Earth, we were developing things the other nations couldn't match. And it frightened everyone. Even the Holy Nation felt threatened. It looked like we were preparing for war, even though we weren't. We were only trying to make our people's lives easier."
His hands clenched.
"Then the tyrant of Solania, that fucking bastard who rose to the throne by usurping his brother, even though he was an illegitimate child, declared war on us. Of course we accepted. We had an unfinished grudge against them, too. But that war cost my mother her life. That bastard drove his sword straight through her heart. He knew the weakness of vampires is their hearts, and he took advantage of it."
He fell silent for a long moment.
"When my father saw it," he said finally, "the vow that was engraved on both their wedding rings activated. And the vow said this."
He spoke it softly, almost like a prayer, and the words seemed to come from a long way off.
[Wherever your road bends, I will walk it too,
through storm-cut hills and valleys drowned in rain —
no distance drawn by fate can sever you
from me, nor darkness swallow us in vain.
And when your breath at last forgets the sky,
mine will not linger long enough to grieve;
I'll take that final road on which you die
and let its silence be the air I breathe.
Though hell itself should rise to bar the gate,
and every flame conspire to pull us apart,
I'll walk through fire for you, and call it fate —
for love like ours was carved into the heart
before the world had language for its name,
before the stars had learned to hold a flame.
So let this vow outlive the dust we're made of:
where you are, I am. What we are is love —
and love, unbroken, still, will rule
this bruised and burning world we're prisoner to.]
The wind stirred the lights again. Nobody spoke.
"Wow," Bell breathed at last. "That's an eternal love oath if I ever heard one. It sounds both possessive and obsessive. But it might be the purest love I've ever heard. And it must have destroyed you, Max, right?"
Max nodded slowly.
"Yes. After they died, the nobles started arguing about who would take the throne. Some of them began searching for my sister. But in the end, I called myself forward and became the Emperor."
The round table was made of black oak, and it was as wide as a small lake.
Prince Aurelius stood in front of it in a royal garment of deep purple. His hair was amber, like his mother's, and his eyes were amber too, inherited from his father, whose hair had been dark violet. He was thin, and his skin was too pale. But he stood very straight.
The senate hall roared with arguments. Nobles stood and shouted over one another. The war with Solania had already taken many soldiers. It had also taken doctors and nurses, who had been seized from the field hospitals and brutalized by the filthy Solanian troops.
"Those pigs are doing that to our war doctors and nurses!" An orc noble slammed his fist on the table. "Can you believe it? We should hurry up and finish them now!"
"Fool!" A common elf noble stood up, trembling. "We can't beat them! They've marched in with ten million men, and their technology matches ours! I don't want to surrender either, but if we attack recklessly, we will bring more destruction and death on our nation and our people!"
Aurelius clenched his jaw.
He was surrounded by shouting men who hesitated to attack, and he could not honestly disagree with any of them. He was not a fool. He knew the numbers. He knew that frustration and fear were two sides of the same coin.
He lifted his hand, and the room slowly quieted.
"I will become the Emperor," he said.
Heads turned.
"I know you have doubts about me," Aurelius went on. His voice was clear and cold. "I am a terminally ill child. But you've seen what kind of advisor I have been. You've seen how I fight with a sword. I may not be worthy of the throne, but I will prove to every one of you here, and to myself, that I am."
"We don't doubt you, Prince Aurelius," a beastfolk noble said. Her tail twitched with worry. "We know you are wiser than your sister, and stronger, too, even though she's the best swordmaster after your father. But our enemy is Solania. They have ten million soldiers. How can we win against that many?"
Aurelius closed his hands into fists. He closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and slowly looked around the table, at every face in the room.
"Can you trust me?" he asked.
"We trust you, Your Highness, but..."
"I SAID, CAN YOU TRUST ME?!"
His voice cracked across the hall like a whip. The candles flickered. The nobles of Ravenia looked at each other for a long, silent moment.
Then they stood up, one by one.
"We will trust you even unto death," they said. "Emperor Aurelius!"
Aurelius looked at them and smiled.
But it was a smile of acknowledgment, not of joy. He had no desire for the throne. He had always believed that his sister was the one who deserved it, in the same way that his father had been chosen to rule their nation. But his sister had run away, for reasons only the gods knew, and he had no other choice. He would take up the crown. He would lead the army. And he would march on the impregnable empire of Solania.
"Duke Claudius Von Noctis," he said.
"Yes, Your Highness." A man with a human face stood up from his seat and knelt in front of him.
"Call our men, the Immortal Children. Call two hundred of them. That will be enough. We will march on Solania and bring the corpse of their general and the corpses of their other high-ranking officers. We will use them as war banners."
Claudius's eyes widened. A single tear slid down his left cheek.
"Glory to the Emperor of Ravenia!"
The senators gasped. Then they were all on their feet, shouting with one voice.
"For Ravenia!"
"For Ravenia!"
"For Ravenia!"
"For Ravenia!"
The chant rolled over the hall and shook the dust from the rafters. Aurelius gripped the edge of the table, and his other hand closed around a small clockwatch amulet that hung at his chest. Inside it, behind the glass, was a tiny photograph of his family.
'I will avenge my parents,' he thought. 'I will avenge my people and my friends. I swear to all of you, I will give them back every ounce of death they gave you. Every laugh. Every insult. Every corpse they disrespected. I will return it a hundred times over.'
"So that's how I became an emperor," Max said. He sat on the grass again with his hands resting on his knees. "But let me skip ahead a bit. I want to tell you what happened when I reached the capital of Solania, and confronted that illegitimate bastard of an emperor."
Bell nodded and gestured for him to go on.
Aurelius rode at the head of his small column, with Duke Claudius at his side and two hundred silent men behind them. Behind those men, tied to long poles, hung the corpses of the Solanian army, with their royal general at the front. Their bodies swayed in the wind as war banners. The sight of them made the crows overhead scream.
The walls of the Solanian capital rose in front of them, tall and golden under the sun.
Aurelius gripped the reins of his horse, whose name was Havanna, and drew a slow breath. Then he lifted his voice.
"EMPEROR XERXIAN EL-SOLANUS! SURRENDER NOW, AND I PROMISE ALL OF YOUR PEOPLE WILL LIVE! GIVE YOUR HEAD TO ME, AND YOUR PEOPLE WILL BE UNHARMED!"
His voice echoed off the stone.
High above the front gate, a man took off his helmet. A long mane of orange-red hair spilled out and caught fire in the sunlight. He leaned on the parapet and looked down.
"YOU AND WHAT ARMY, CHILD?!"
"THIS ARMY!"
There was a silence. Then Xerxian began to laugh.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! THIS ARMY?! ARE YOU DUMB AND DAFT AT THE SAME TIME, LITTLE EMPEROR? WHAT ARE THOSE TWO HUNDRED MEN GOING TO DO AGAINST MY TEN MILLION?!"
The soldiers on the walls laughed along with him, thousands of them, until the sound rolled over the plain like thunder.
"I ADMIT YOU KILLED MY ROYAL GENERAL WITH YOUR OWN HANDS!" Xerxian shouted. "I ADMIT YOU KILLED HIS MEN, AND I ADMIT THAT YOU ARE STRONG! BUT TWO HUNDRED MEN WILL NOT BE ENOUGH TO KILL ME! SO BACK OFF, AND BE THE ONE WHO SURRENDERS! GIVE YOUR HEAD TO ME!"
Beside Aurelius, Claudius's hand tightened on his sword. "Damn arrogant bastar..."
Aurelius raised his right arm, and Claudius stopped in the middle of the word.
"We will retreat for now, Duke."
"But, Your Highness!"
"Duke Claudius."
Claudius looked at his emperor. And in those amber eyes, calm and cold and clear as winter water, he saw something he had seen before only in Revan's. It was a plan. It was already fully formed. He swallowed his anger and lowered his head.
Aurelius turned back to the wall and held up three fingers.
"YOU HAVE THREE DAYS, EMPEROR XERXIAN. I GIVE YOU THREE DAYS TO SURRENDER."
He looked at them one last time and began to turn his horse.
"OR ALL OF YOU WILL DIE WITH THE HEAD OF YOUR EMPEROR!"
"ARROGANT BRAT!" Xerxian roared. He snatched a bow from a guard, nocked an arrow wreathed in the flames of the sun, and fired.
-WOOOSHHH!!
The burning arrow screamed across the distance.
Aurelius did not even look. His right hand came up and closed around the shaft in midair.
Flames roared around his fingers. They crawled up his sleeve and licked at his wrist, and the Solanian soldiers cried out. But the fire did not burn him. It did not even singe his cuff. It curled around his hand like a cat around a sleeping child and went out.
Xerxian's eyes widened. The sickly man below, the child with the pale face and the thin wrists, had caught an arrow of the sun without even a scratch.
Aurelius looked up at the walls and delivered one last word before the doom of Solania.
"Pathetic."
He snapped the arrow in half.
"And then, after the three days were up, I cut his head off," Max said.
He said it in the voice of a man reading a bedtime story to a child.
"I built a pyramid out of the heads of his people, and I put his severed head at the very top. Just like Genghis Khan did."
Bell blinked.
She blinked again. Her mouth opened slowly, and her eyes grew so wide that they seemed to take up half her face. The golden lights flickered over her stunned expression. For a moment, the only sound on the terrace was the wind.
"WHAT?!"