“They’re all being a bit dramatic, aren’t they?” the Overlord asked while looking over the reports his spymaster had given him.
His advisors, as well as his top generals and admirals, all sat about in that palace chamber room, a copy of the same report in each of their hands. Things had become quite tense in the western realms of late. Matthiaz’s diplomats in many of the states that neighbored Zarland had also reported a growing tension in the courts and forums of other states, especially when the subject was the Overlord and his burgeoning empire.
“Looks like you were right, Vozlo. War truly does seem inevitable,” the Overlord said, sounding somewhat humored. “Who was I to ever doubt the words of my chancellor?”
Vozlo, Zarland’s Chancellor and the most influential of the advisors in the chamber, was not as amused by the situation as his king. He was the only one who spoke to Matthiaz so bluntly, and also the only one who still occasionally spoke to him as if he was a child.
“I do not think this is a laughing matter, sire. The other states are very serious in how they see you and your empire as an existential threat to their security.”
Matthiaz snorted. “Me? An existential threat? What reason would I have to threaten them in the first place? I’ve only conquered in self-defense. I have no violent business with our eastern neighbors so long as they have none with Zarland.”
“Your constant campaigning year after year has encouraged them to bring such business to us. They fear that if they don’t stop you now they will be next on the chopping block.”
“Why would I bother will all these diplomatic acrobatics and concessions with them if I wanted war? I built new fortifications near the border, but the troops manning those forts are few. They’re paranoid.”
“Obviously. But they are thoroughly convinced that you are a menace that needs to be taken care of sooner rather than later.”
“Fine… But, my policy of only invading after the enemy has made the first move isn’t changing. If this Grand Coalition decides they want to take their chances against us, we’ll let them strike first and then make them regret it. After we repulse them, we’ll chase them into their own countries, and make them pay the bloody price of declaring themselves enemies of the Overlord.”
“Sire, wait…” Xandra, the Overlord’s spymistress, suddenly materialized from the shadows she had been hiding in, catching everyone but Matthiaz and Vozlo by surprise. “Have you not heard whom one of the marshals of the coalition force is to be?”
Matthiaz looked over at her perplexed. “Some famous mercenary captain?”
“No. It’s the lady adventurer who defeated the Witch of Calvidoria. The one who foiled the schemes of the rebellious Duke of Sicar. The one who saved the floating academy from falling into the sea. The one who resurrected the Paladins of the Silver Feather. The one who slew the immortal White Lich. The one they called the Heroine of Five Realms is among them.”
“She’s with the coalition?” one of the advisors muttered to another.
“But why would the Chosen One do such a thing?”
“Shouldn’t she be in the far north right now.”
Suddenly the room was abuzz with worried advisors. Vozlo was not so easily unbalanced. Matthiaz was even less so.
“Alright? So, what?” he responded to his spymaster flatly. “Is that supposed to be a major concern? It’s just one woman.”
“It’s one powerful woman who’s already made her name renown outside of her status as the Chosen One,” Xandra interjected. “They say she’s unbeatable in single combat.”
“They say the same about me. The secret to being unbeatable is as simple as not losing.”
“Xandra makes a good point,” Vozlo added. “The Chosen One is not to be underestimated. Especially not with that prophecy hanging over her head.”
“Just what are you saying? That I’m destined to lose against her.”
“I’m saying that the Chosen One has yet to ‘free the Realms of the West from an ambitious tyrant.’”
“I have only two western realms that I am sovereign over. The rest of the empire sits on the South side of the Obsidian Sea."
“True, but in the minds of Zarland’s neighbors you’re just getting started. This war might be the opportunity wherein the Heroine of Five Realms strikes another item from that lengthy and vague prophecy of hers.”
Matthiaz shook his head, almost in disbelief that Vozlo was this concerned over him.
“Vozlo… do you really think some swordswoman is gonna be the end of me? Just because some little prophecy is boosting her up; and a vague one at that? The tyrant could be a strict traveling tutor terrorizing students across the western realms for all we know.”
Vozlo sighed. “Sire, while your confidence has always been among your greatest strengths, it is good to remember that everyone has a natural enemy; even you. I am not telling you to fear this young lady. It is not that she is so dangerous; it is the irresistible ebb and flow of destiny which follows her which is dangerous.”
Matthiaz and his chief advisor exchanged a lengthy look. The Overlord was the one who broke eye-contact first. Vozlo was still the only man whose aura could overwhelm him.
“Alright, so you’re preparing for war then. And I suppose we’ll doubly prepare for whatever this heroine pulls off,” Matthiaz said, finally getting to his feet. “What was even her name again? It was ’Jo’-something, I think?”
Xander answered. “My Overlord, the Chosen One’s name is--“
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Matthias’ snapped awake to the buzzing of his alarm. He wasn't unusual for him to be up before everyone else, but rarely did he do so in such a sweat. He found himself staring outside of his window once again, gazing intently at the room opposite his own.
“I was just seeing things… right?”
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Matthias and his older siblings all rode the RTD rail together on their trips to and from school. The twins reached the stop where they would walk to the rest of their junior high early, leaving their brother to take the rest of his lengthier trip alone. Matthias’s parents knew it was a waste to worry about whether their son could travel to school and back alone. Also, Matthias enjoyed the solitude. It gave him time to think.
In this case, he was thinking long and hard about if his mind had been playing tricks on him. The temptation to try and peak through his windows in hope of catching a good look was strong, but he was not so desperate. If they were neighbors, he would get to see the new girl’s face proper anyhow.
“Besides, them having the same face doesn’t mean anything by itself,” he murmured to himself.
The population of the US was just over half a billion. Out of half that population, there were bound to be girls who bore a crazy resemblance to Josephine. Redheads were rare, but not that rare. Matthias shook his head free of the thought as the train neared his stop.
At school, Matthias’s thoughts didn’t get any clearer. Even if he tried to push his new neighbor’s face out of his mind, he still couldn’t forget that dream. It wasn’t a particularly terrible memory save for its future implication about the War of the Grand Coalition. He and most that made up his council were confident in the results that would bear if such a war were to transpire. What he wasn’t expecting was the alliance’s secret weapon – destiny.
It was not the opposing generals, their armies, and their strategy that defeated the Overlord, nor was it conspirators from within his own camp. No, the ultimate vanquishers of Matthiaz Kornelia were the Chosen One and the “Thread of Destiny” as the people of Ein called it that subtly guided her along her journey. By Josephine’s own words, she never intended to do anything the prophecy had set out for her. It was just as vague and hard to properly read for her as it was for essentially anyone else. She just did what she wanted and somehow always ended up at the wrong place at the right time. Matthias was shocked when, during his imprisonment after the war, she confessed that defeating him specifically wasn’t her original goal. It was his sister, Francesca, who had made herself a good friend of Josephine while in exile, that motivated the Chosen One and several of her friends to join the coalition. For some reason, she presumed Francesca had been imprisoned and possibly killed on Matthias’s orders. When this was found not to be the case, destiny had already set itself in motion.
Josephine, already honored by many at that point as the ‘Heroine of Five Realms’ for her various exploits, had been unanimously elected as one of the marshals of the coalition. Her role wasn’t meant to be vital to the coalition’s grand strategy initially, but it was she, out of all the marshals, who salvaged a decisive coalition defeat and prevented its army’s destruction by leading one of the greatest cavalry charges the Overlord had ever witnessed. It was in that same battle that she and he first came to blows, and that the Overlord failed to prevail in single combat for the first time since he was an adolescent.
He should have known then there, with how drastically the tide of everything changed after he and Josephine’s clash, that destiny was out to get him; that some cosmic force that not even the greatest theologian in the Several Realms could comprehend had ordained that the Overlord could conquer everything in this world save this one annoying tomboy in armor.
“Matthias!”
He jolted at the call of his name before shooting Devin a look for shouting right into his ear.
“Relax, man. I was just getting your attention,” he said. “Ms. Pierce was taking attendance.”
Matthias announced his attendance to his teacher who apologized for needing to bother him. She didn’t treat her other students the way she did Matthias, but her other students also didn’t perform nearly as well as Matthias did effortlessly. While she liked to call on him often, he was also the only student that, if caught not paying attention or even napping in class, she would leave be. Such was the privilege of the fifth-grader capable of doing elite high school level math and English.
The prodigy didn’t need to be fully engaged to outperform his peers, so he simply checked out whenever he felt like it. As he was drifting off again into his thoughts, he heard the classroom’s door open. Glancing toward it, Matthias abruptly felt the most tense he ever had in a classroom. He gawked, eyes wide and mouth ajar, as his teacher introduced the young girl who had just arrived to their class.
“Alright, everyone, before class begins I want to introduce a new student who just moved to Denver recently. She’s all the way from DC! Go on – you can introduce yourself.”
Taking a step forward was a redheaded girl with a bandage on her cheek. Matthias rubbed his eyes several times wondering if his brain was playing tricks with him.
“Yo! My name’s Josephine Holloway. I know it’s late in the year, but my family moves a lot because of my dad’s job. It’s cool to meet all of you.”
Matthias blinked. He almost felt delirious, like he was dreaming. He got ahold of himself when the object of his delirium pointed at him.
“Hey… I know you!”
Devin and several other students looked from her to Matthias and back, puzzled. Ms. Pierce shared in their confusion. Everyone seemed a bit lost save Josephine herself and the scowling boy she was pointing at.
The scowling boy sighed. “So, I wasn’t seeing things then, huh?”
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“Matthias is your neighbor? That’s pretty cool,” said Eli at PET class, lacing up his blitzball gear.
Josephine raised a brow. “Is it really?”
“Thing about Matt is that he’s… how do I put this?”
“Mysterious,” Devin chimed.
“Yeah! That’s it! He’s mysterious and all that. The way he acts, sometimes doesn’t seem all that fifth-graderish. He’s way smarter than everyone else, but he barely studies. He’s way better at sports, but he barely practices. There are like 20 girls between 3 grades who all have a crush on him, but he never gives them any attention. He’s just got this weird aura, y’know?”
“That aura’s not gonna save him today, though. Today we’re gonna mess ‘em up!” Devin declared
“Really? You guys are that good, huh?” Josephine asked. “Matthias must lose to you a lot.”
Devin and Eli paused. Their fellow Blue teammates gave them looks that would extinguish any urge they might have had to misrepresent their athletic success against the monstrous boy on the other side of the gymnasium with the Red Team.
Eli answered, looking very awkward while fitting on his headgear. “Well, Matt gets us more times than we get him, but we’ve developed moves to help us get a leg up on him.”
“Sounds cool. Wish I could play too,” said Josephine. “Your team’s already stacked though.”
“That’s not a problem,” Coach Ridland said while coming over to them. “You go ahead and strap on some spare gear. When the Blue Team’s lost about half their players, I’ll send you in.”
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The transfer student blinked. “What?”
“Cornejo is the kind of player we’ve had to make special rules to make the game fairer. Can you believe that kid told me that I should ‘give the other team an extra player or two to make it more even?’ Balls on that little punk. Granted, it’s not like he doesn’t have all that confidence for no reason though.”
“Wow. So, you guys have those type of ‘special rules’ too, huh?”
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Just let me go get my gear on. I’ll be back, coach!”
Josephine headed off to the girls’ changing room with an excited look on her face. The match started before she could make it out. She expected for both teams to be feeling each other out still, but the Blue Team had already lost 2 of its 6 players, including Devin.
“Geez… Is he in a bad mood today, or what?” a defeated Devin groused while removing his headgear. “Usually he waits ‘till the final moments of a match to go this hard.”
“Ah, dammit. I wasn’t expecting this,” Ridland griped. “The game’s probably not gonna last that long if Cornejo’s taking things this seriously right out of the gate.”
“What about those moves Eli and Devin had?” Josephine asked.
“He knocked me out before we could use them, and Eli can’t beat Matthias alone. We rarely beat ‘em even when we’re together.”
The coach side and gave his new student a strong pat to the shoulder. “Guess you’re gettin’ in on the action early, Holloway. We can’t wait until half Blue Team’s gone when the Red Team hasn’t even lost a player yet. Go get ‘em.”
Josephine’s eyes shone with a look that almost shook Ridland with its intensity. Grinning back at her, the coach blew his whistle and paused the game. He was about to have one of the platforms lowered so that Josephine could hop on and ride it up to where everyone else was, but instead of that, the girl pumped herself up for a few seconds, gave herself a running start, and bounded all the way up to the platforms by herself.
It left everyone else’s jaws hanging. Even Matthias looked confounded.
“Game’s back on!” the coach announced.
The announcement was meant more for the AI co-moderating the game with him than it was for his students.
The blitzball gear the kids wore did more than just protect them. It, in conjunction with various cog-amps throughout the gymnasium in tandem with the anti-grav field underneath them gave them a significant boost to their psychic abilities that allowed them to jump further, move quicker, and control their blitzballs seamlessly while they were playing. Even a mediocre young psychic who didn’t possess ESP would momentarily be superhuman.
But even with all that factored in, that leap of Josephine’s was something a girl her age shouldn’t have been capable. The only other person capable of pulling that off was on the opposite team staring keenly at her.
“Woah, that was crazy!” one of Matthias’s teammates exclaimed.
“Is this new girl actually really good? I thought coach was putting her in later because she was a weak player!”
The squawking of Matthias’s teammates were just white noise to him. There was once a time when he was more a team player and even tried strategizing to bring out the best in his teammates, but soon realized that doing so just meant needless extra work since his team was always gimped and would leave him carrying the lion’s share of effort anyway, hence why he preferred to just do as he pleased and leave his teammates to fend for themselves. Sometimes they would over perform and do decently.
The Red Team quickly realized that today would not be one such time the moment one of them tried to hit Josephine. She nimbly sidestepped the shot and threw a countershot of her own that knocked the player off their platform with ease. This stunned everyone more than when she hopped up on the platform. The only person they had seen able to move and shoot simultaneously that skillfully was Matthias.
At once his teammates looked to Matthias, hoping that he would quickly make the problem go away before it got out of hand. Instead, he did something they had never seen before: he leapt away from Josephine to engage with someone else. This was easily the most stupefying thing they had seen thus far. It was so shocking, they barely had time to process Josephine closing in on them. She essentially came at the team alone, much like Matthias typically did. Two of Red Team tried to catch her in mid-jump, but the transfer student was shockingly aerodynamic – twirling and flipping through the air almost as if she had wings. Her trajectory changed just enough for both her attacker’s shots to miss. Before touching down on another platform, she shot one of them down with precision.
“She took him out before she even landed…” one girl muttered in astonishment.
The astonishing continued when Josephine chased after her other attacker’s thrown ball and snatched it from the air before it could return to them. She then sent it back to its owner with gratuity, taking them out and then pumping her fist triumphantly.
“Alright!” she roared.
The Red Team was now down to 4 players, with three having been taken out by a single player in short order. This would have been great news for Blue Team were it not for the rampage Matthias was himself carrying out. Just as quickly as his new next door neighbor was obliterating his team, he was doing the same to her own. It was a bizarre sight for Ridland and the rest of the class watching as the two chewed through each other’s team without going after each other.
Soon there were no players besides each other for them to deal with.
Josephine looked genuinely confused by this. “Uh… Where’d everybody else go?”
“They’re all out of play. It’s just you and me now.”
“Seriously? You knocked out everybody on my team?”
“You did the same to everyone on mine, so why’re you so shocked?”
“I did, but… your team kind of sucks. It felt a little bit like bullying, to be honest.”
“It’s on purpose. Whenever I play, coach makes me play with the worst players we have. He says it evens it out.”
“Ah, so you guys really do have rules for that too?”
“What?”
“The schools I’ve been to have made rules like that for me too. I go a little too wild in sports so the coaches always either put me with the weaker players or just take a player or two off my team.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised. If this Josephine was actually who he believed her to be what she told him was right in line with what he should have expected.
“Hey… Were you peeking on me yesterday?” Josephine asked out of the blue.
Matthias blinked. “What?”
“You’re one of the neighbors kids my family just moved next to aren’t you? Yesterday when I came out of the shower, you were peeking at me through my window.”
Matthias stared at her a moment before starting to snicker. “You think I was trying to sneak a peek at you? I didn’t even know that room was yours until that evening.”
“W-well, you were still staring!”
“Because I was shocked to see you. You caught me off guard is all. Do you really think I was trying to catch an eyeful or whatever? That’s assuming an awful lot on your part. Especially when you’re the one who left your curtains open in the first place.”
“I didn’t know somebody was gonna be peeping through my window!”
Matthias snorted. “Wow, you really think I wanted to actually ogle at you, don’t you? You might wanna curb that ego. I don’t even like redheads.”
Josephine face became an angry flush, not much less red than her hair.
“Hey you two, get on with it!” the coach barked from below. “You gonna yap until the timer runs out?”
Matthias eagerly complied.
Using psy-energy, he suspended his blitzball in midair and made it telekinetically hover near him. While he had no full-proof way of proving this Josephine was the same Josephine he thought her to be, the Overlord had one strong method in mind to test his theory.
Extending both of his arms, Matthias telekinetically levitated two balls that previously belonged to now knocked out players and brought them to him. Blitzballs were programmed to automatically return to the player who threw them, but this function ceased the moment a player was knocked out of a play, so any balls left in play were considered ‘free’. The normal rule against holding another player’s balls did not apply in such a scenario. Matthias now kept all three of the blitzballs floating about him. Normally, he wouldn’t possess telekinetic powers of this degree, but in this gymnasium and while wearing his blitzball gear, he could pull it off with relative ease.
He charged forward toward Josephine. His blitz caught her off guard, but she was still able to evade the first shot fired. The second sent Josephine into the air in an effort to dodge, and the third was meant to be the kill shot, but she was able to deflect it with her own ball. Thinking her opponent now defenseless, Josephine tried sniping him before she landed. Matthias just caught it and threw it back at her. She dodged and hopped to another platform, her blitzball curving its trajectory to return to her. Matthias telekinetically brought the two balls which were not programmed to his vest back to him while his own ball returned on its own.
He then reengaged with Josephine. Each of their skirmishes went similar to the first, with Matthias performing a relentless assault to force Josephine to make a mistake while she would make it out by the skin of her teeth each time and managed to counter. The game was phenomenal to watch from the sidelines. This wasn’t Matthias bulldozing through helpless other players like usual. For once, he was facing someone his equal. At times it was easy to forget that they were both only eleven-year-old.
Eventually, the moment everyone predicted inevitably happened. As the timer was about to run out, Matthias forced Josephine into a perilous position. It was the usual case of Matthias clutching victory at the last moment.
But rather than give up and be devoured by defeat, Josephine focused and looked as though she could only see victory glimmering within its jaws. And it was then Matthias, for the second time that day, did something nobody had ever seen him do before – he flinched. That look on Josephine’s face, he still remembered the first time he saw it on the face of the young female marshal leading a charge that caused him to lose a winning battle.
Matthias made a rare error at that moment and shot two of his blitzballs too early. Josephine bound straight at him, narrowly weaving around the first blitzball and then punting back the second like it was a soccer ball straight at Matthias before he could shoot the third. His speed wasn’t enough to beat her timing and precision, and he was struck against his headgear and sent flying down.
“Winner: Blue Team!” the AI moderator announced.
Everyone, including the coach, looked up at Josephine with genuine bewilderment but the girl was too busy catching her breath to notice.
“Man, that was a close one... Matthias is actually scary good,” she sighed. “I don’t know how I pulled that last move off.”
Matthias, who was yanking off his headgear in agitation, had an inkling just what the secret behind her dramatic clutch victory was – the Thread of Destiny. Back in his previous life, Matthias had recognized this trait and called it “Hero Privilege” which would always give her an avenue of victory against him no matter how poor her odds or perilous her position. While his teammates were coming over to console him, all Matthias could think about were his former self’s chancellor’s words:
Everyone has a natural enemy…
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Matthias ate his dinner in sullen silence. He was typically good at hiding his mood, but that night it was fuming off him in waves that probably would have been visible had anyone in his family had ESP.
“You alright there, Matt?” Carlos asked in the living room after dinner.
“Fine. Just got a few ugly memories bugging me is all,” he said, lazily doodling on the couch.
Gabby who was about to head upstairs abruptly stopped with a surprised look on her face.
“You have bad memories?”
“What? Of course I have bad memories. What type of question is that? Everyone has a few ghosts from their past haunting them.”
“I just don’t remember anything particularly bad happening to you is all. Maybe it was something that happened at school, but your grades have always been good and I really can’t see you getting bullied by anyone.”
“It’s stuff you wouldn’t know about.”
“Like?”
“You would be even more confused if I tried to explain. Just take my word for it.”
Gabby was still deeply curious. Matthias had ironically found himself in the Chosen One’s predicament where his story of being reincarnated from another world was simply something so unbelievable he would have to take it with him to his second grave or risk being designated a complete loon.
“Hey, Dad, what do you know about this Rockies Ripper guy? Wasn’t he supposed to have stopped killing a while ago?” Jonny out of nowhere asked.
Jonathan had projecting from his phone a headline about the recent murder that his father was investigating. Marissa disliked Carlos discussing the more macabre aspects of his work at home, but that didn’t stop her children, especially Jonny and his general lack of decorum, from trying to get him to open up about cases from time to time.
“While most serial killer’s go cold after a while if they’re never stopped, some just can’t help themselves,” Carlos answered. “These types will come out of retirement for the thrill of killing again. The Ripper might have thought that he could go unnoticed if he started killing in an entirely different state and in a big city like Denver where missing person’s cases are more common. It’s also possible he’s deliberately trying to taunt the authorities; saying I’m still at it, and you still can’t catch me or something like that.”
“Carlos, don’t answer so casually...” Marissa griped while coming in from the other room, a cup of tea in hand.
The detective chuckled. “He’s already got the article open, Marissa. And just about everyone who keeps up with the news a little knows who the Rockies Ripper is by now.
Marissa shook her head. “It’s just terrible, though. I’ve read about some of his victims, and there were ones that are boys about Matthias’s age. It makes you nervous sending your kids out of the house when there are people like that walking the streets. I know Donald and Sarah have to feel the same about their daughter.”
“Oh yeah, the neighbor girl. She’s Matthias’s age, isn’t she?” Jonny asked. “What was her name again? You said it was Jo-something, Mom. Was it… Jolene?”
“It’s Josephine,” Matthias corrected.
Jonny furrowed his brow.
“And how do you know before I do? You haven’t met her, have you?”
“She goes to my school and attends my class. We’re probably gonna end up going the same way to school starting tomorrow.”
The thought of such a thing made Matthias’s stomach lurch. Josephine was now his next door neighbor, would join him on his way to and from school, and would be a student in his class. He wondered if he actually was still dead and this was just him being punished in the afterlife.
“…Oh. I get it now,” Jonny said, a smile coming across his face. “Something happened between you and her at school that’s got you so bothered, right? So, what was it? Did she tease you in front of the class? You told her you had a crush and she rejected you in front of your friends?”
“Shut up and get out of my face, Jonny,” Matthias hissed, pulling his face away from his brother who was pushing his own face closer to him.
“Oh, wait! I know what it was. She beat you in something, didn’t she?”
Matthias’s frown turned into a full-on scowl as he physically pushed his brother out of his face. Jonny just laughed triumphantly.
“That’s seriously what it was? I was half-joking, Matt! Man, you really aren’t used to losing, are you? I should have never stopped putting you in headlocks. Look at how soft you got.
“You couldn’t put me in one if you tried, Jonny. You don’t even take judo seriously anymore since you started focusing on soccer.”
“You think 6 years of judo experience vanished just like that? I can still Okuri-eri-jime the breath out of you, lil’ bro.”
The boys then began tussling in earnest, throwing no strikes but trying their best to put one another on the floor. Matthias possessed more natural finesse and battle IQ, but his brother’s reach advantage and experience had him on the ropes for most of the altercation. Carlos headed to the backyard for a smoke, apathetic to his sons fighting. Gabby was equally uninterested in Matt and Jonny’s squabble and continued up the stairs while on a call with her friends.
Marissa was also unbothered and sat down while calmly enjoying her evening tea. She was rather happy actually. Matthias was the most independent child she had ever known. There were times where she wondered if he needed parents to raise him at all, or if his independence would keep him from ever developing any friendships. She was glad that her worries had been (somewhat) elevated. While Josephine and Matthias’s relationship wasn’t quite what Marissa had in mind, she still was contented to see her son had taken an interest in someone amongst his peers.
“So, Matt finally made a friend at school,” she said to herself. “Good for him.”
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Matthias couldn’t remember the last time he went to bed feeling so tired. Whether it was Josephine, Jonny, or his own cloudy thoughts that took the most out of him, he was never happier to lie in his own bed before. He laid there in serene silence for a few minutes.
Then a sudden thought struck him. A thought that was so intense and powerful, it made him jolt up as if a lightning bolt had hit his room. Juana, who was sleeping near his feet, was startled and jolted up herself.
Matthias got to his feet, turned on the light at his desk, and then withdrew his journal from his desk’s bottom drawer – the journal full of the stories of Josephine he had recollected. The one near the very end of the journal was a very short entry because of how little importance Matthias had placed on it until just now. It read:
Josephine had a childhood friend who she claims looked like me. He went missing and was never found. She believes that he was murdered by a local killer.
There was currently a serial killer, the Rockies Ripper, who was loose in Denver, and all of his victims had exclusively been minors, many of whom were around Matthias’s age. In no lifetime would the Overlord ever consider any version of Josephine his ‘friend’. She was his natural nemesis if anything. Still, she was at the moment his next door neighbor and classmate. Was that friendly enough for him to be considered her ‘friend’ just as his tenure as Overlord was tyrannical enough for him to be considered an ‘ambitious tyrant’ from whom the western realms needed to be freed from?
Was Matthias Cornejo the unfortunate friend of Josephine who went missing and murdered by a serial killer?
“Well… shit. Guess destiny still has it out for me.”