TRANQUILITY

Leonel frowned as the words descended to him. His body felt frozen in place, but his temper flared and the smokey heat of destruction coming from the corner of his eyes and his feet vibrated wildly.

However, before he shattered the intention of the old woman, he restrained himself and closed his eyes.

He was not happy, not happy in the slightest. He didn't believe for a second that this old woman wouldn't know what would happen when she spoke her name.

Even now, he didn't know that this was the true method of relaying her name. Instead, he felt that she had tried to distract him before levying this attack. Maybe she wasn't even interested in him at all and this was the original intention of these people to begin with.

Ruthless slaughter. Why would she⌜€“

Why was he mad?

Leonel pressed his hand against his forehead, ignoring the fact that he shouldn't have been able to move.

He had committed slaughter on an even larger scale, had he not? Did he feel bad about it all of a sudden?

Still no. Even with the changes caused by his Vital Star Force, he simply couldn't bring himself to care. He felt like he was slowly starting to find his own baseline.

He felt that he had his own justifications for doing what he did. Was he also throwing a tantrum? Yes, he was. But it didn't change a thing about how justified or unjustified he felt it was.

As for this slaughter here? Why did the old woman act at all? It was on a complete whim, trampling on caged animals that she herself had been a part of caging in the first place.

And the worst part was that she had actually dared to get Aina caught up in her madness.

Leonel was slowly starting to understand more about himself as the days went on. He wasn't some hero of morality, as much as he had tried to be in his youth.

Part of the reason he wasn't any longer was because the world had jaded him, but another part was that he was never this person to begin with. That shadow of his former self was in one part due to the culture of Earth- that being one filled with the philosophy of equality- and another part due to his father's teachings of Respect and Persistence.

Who was he, though?

As he had said, he was a selfish person. Where his bottom line was drawn was decided by his own self-interest.

He was a normal person who had delusions of grandeur, a person who had normal convictions, normal goals, normal drives, and yet was granted power he thought could make him some untouchable deity that could pass judgment on everyone else.

Leonel's breath became calmer and calmer.

This wasn't a depressing realization, it was just the right realization.

If for the largest segments of your formative years, you had your personality being torn in all sorts of different ways due to the strengths of things and people far beyond your own, how could you be anything other than "normal"? There had yet to be enough time for you to make anything unique of yourself.

His Scarlet Star Force pulled him one way. His Vital Star Force pulled him another way. His future self had pulled him yet another way. His father had an ideal of the kind of man he wanted to be.

And what was he left with, exactly?

Was his curiosity even him either? Or was that just his genes as a Wise Star Order talking for him?

He thought back to the scene of carnage. Those people had extremely strong convictions. They all died with their heads held high and their own thoughts of grandeur fuelling their final breaths.

How much of that conviction was truly their own? How much was it what their parents had told them to believe? How much of it was what their children hoped of them? How much of it was far more sinister, the puppet strings of organizations as terrible as the Four Great Families manipulating their thoughts and pulling at their emotions?Material © .

Was he even unique in this sense? Did anyone truly know who they were?

He imagined what life would have been like had he stayed on Earth. His career path was already chosen for him; he would become a multi-millionaire, probably marry some beautiful woman who was likewise elite in her field, and they'd have children who'd go off and do the same thing.

Even if he had been born on Ancient Earth, would it have been much different? There wouldn't have been the Gene Assessment back then, but there would have been plenty of people to push and pull him in all sorts of directions. Maybe his parents would have insisted that he become a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, anything that could have made them proud.

Who knew?

Leonel suddenly relaxed. The push and pull and everything around him suddenly felt meaningless. Even the callous disregard of lives Mo''Lexi had displayed didn't move him.

He wasn't special, not in this sense. He was so worried about how his Forces were manipulating him, how his future self was manipulating him, that he had neglected the fact that everyone dealt with the same things to different degrees. Even Aina had a voice constantly in her head telling her what to do; he wondered if she ever wondered who she truly was as well.

There was a fairly simple answer to all of this.

He thought back to how lazy and unmotivated he was back when his future self was a heavy influence on him.

Was it really laziness? Or was it a confidence in yourself, a confidence in knowing that no matter what you did or didn't do, it wouldn't matter because there was simply no one who could defeat you anyway.

That state... that "laziness"... it was a beacon. When you finally reached that level, it was the moment you could be certain that the only one that could influence you...

Was you.

Leonel's Dream Force vibrated wildly, but as soon as it appeared, it vanished in a puff of smoke, and he opened his eyes.

Within, there was nothing but the calmest reflections of tranquility.