THE BEST

After Aina killed Urlgan, Leonel hadn't really bothered to check on the situation, and since Anastasia hadn't said anything about it, he assumed that nothing of real importance had happened either.

And honestly, what could they do? They probably sat there, despairing their outcome.

Aina had killed Urlgan quite publicly, or else it would have never stopped the tirade of the demons. Most didn't even know who she was as Leonel had been at the forefront of pretty much everything until now.

As for the humans, they hadn't even been present at the time, so all they knew was that an extremely powerful woman suddenly descended and put a stop to the chaos.

At that point, they could only sit there and hope that things would be different.

The timer continued to tick down while Leonel and Aina rose into the skies. From the looks of it, it really did seem that they were the only group with any intention of entering while everyone else was hoping for a miracle.

Or so it seemed.

At the very least, one ship came flying in from a distance, stopping not too far away. Out from within it, a familiar old woman stepped out.

Mo''Lexi.

Her gaze landed on Leonel, a flicker of emotion dancing through her old eyes.

Leonel himself raised an eyebrow. There was an age limit for the Gathering of Kingdoms, and she certainly didn't meet it. If she tried, she could end up getting minced to pieces as she stepped through the portal, so he didn't really understand why she had come at all.

"So it was you..." she looked at Leonel, and then shifted her gaze to Aina. "... And you didn't die."

Seeing how the two were standing high in the skies, wearing white, holding one another's hands and looking as though they didn't have a care in the world, Mo''Lexi felt that she had truly been missing something.

"You..."

Mo''Lexi's eyes widened. "It was you... you did all of this..."

The realization came tumbling out from her.

If Aina survived, that meant that she could have only been bait to lure her attention away from Leonel. And if that was the case, it couldn't be a coincidence that everything that happened following that occurred.

He had destroyed everything. From the very beginning, it was him.

"You... destroyed... everything..."

The old woman seemed to have aged considerably. Although she looked old before, she never really acted her age. Her eyes were bright, her personality was somewhat sharp and oddly cheery despite her murderous streak, and she always had a pep in her step even though it came mostly from pissing off everyone around her.

But now, she truly looked old. She felt like life had passed her by and her era was long gone.

"... They said that your father was the greatest danger to us and that he had to be eliminated... Maybe we should have listened and treated you the same..."

Leonel looked at her, then his lips slightly parted.

"Whether you did or not wouldn't have changed anything."

Mo''Lexi felt her heart shudder and almost give way. She could sense the confidence in those words... no, it was something deeper than confidence. It was one, an acknowledgment of their strength, and two, a conviction to blow by any obstacles they might have put in his way regardless of what it was.

And indeed... she didn't know if she could even refute it.

He had fooled her, a supposed Dream Force expert, preying on her emotions as though she was a child. He had run circles around the Godlens, leaving Vivak in such a manic state that the entire city was plunged into a seclusion, cutting themselves off from the outside world. And since he was standing here... didn't that mean that the Dream Pavilion was already his own?

She looked toward Aina somewhat weakly, remembering those reports of what happened to Urlgan.

It was her greatest shame, but it was something that she had swallowed and accepted because she felt that there was no other way. If there weren't enough deaths before that timer hit zero, there would be no chance of them surviving this culling. So, she turned a blind eye, hoping that the Demons would do the dirty work for them...

Until a woman wearing a dress of white appeared and decapitated him in a single blow before his vast armies.

By now, she was fairly certain that that woman was Aina.

She lowered her head as the two began to float away. Long after they entered the portal above, she still just stood there, her eyes somewhat lost. Material © .

The weight of everything was crashing down around her, and she couldn't even manage to be happy that they actually had a chance to survive.

Just what was the point of everything she had done?

She thought of her name, the sheer carnage she carried around with herself all the time. That heaviness played on her soul and threatened to rip out her heart.

Her body subconsciously drifted upward, and by the time she realized what she was doing, she was already hovering within arm's reach of the portal.

'I guess this is for the best...' she thought to herself. 'I have no more role to play in this world.'

She drifted into the portal and in a single instant of time, she was shredded to pieces.

Her ship fell out of the skies and not even a single rag or drop of blood remained from her.

However, there was a familiar Black Tablet that was suddenly spit out, falling through the skies like a meteor and yet crashing down below with hardly a hiss.

The world fell into an eerie silence until a shadowy figure swept by and picked it up, looking around before vanishing into the night.