HAND IN HAND

Leonel wasn't sure how he felt about this. It wasn't exactly the fault of the people. There was no way that Existence could last forever no matter what. It was the natural progression of the world to eventually fall into a silence, destroying itself before being reborn anew.

This was the cycle he had always known.

At worst, Existence's fall had been accelerated. But...

Even with this acceleration, it had been trillions upon trillions of years since then. Existence had still managed to continue for so long. If the Ancient Humans hadn't made this choice, would the result have been much different?

Well, at least right now, Leonel wouldn't be facing the end of the world. But even then, it didn't seem to change much about his life at all.

It was a shame, though, that Crafting wasn't the Path they chose to stick with.

Ultimately, the Weapon Force Path worked well for a short while and reversed the situation once again, but it was the Beasts who they thought would ignore Paths of Creation that ended up picking up the Path of Crafting, eventually becoming the God Beasts of Creation who lorded over the whole world for a long while.

In an irony of ironies, the God Beasts of Creation became harbingers of peace and allowed the world to live in harmony. As a result, the clashes between the Humans and Beasts came to a stop, and the Ancient Humans who chose the Path of the Weapon Forces were forced to cull their ambitions.

They were neither strong enough to make much of a difference, and even when they did try, they were ruthlessly suppressed by all parties.

Eventually, they were forced into hiding, and this resulted in the normal humans that remained being oppressed as well.

The Beasts had grown to become overlords. The Humanoids had forged out their place in the world, becoming powerhouses in their own right, leaving Humans without much room for growth.

That was when the God Beasts of Destruction appeared, forcefully striking a balance.

It seemed that the Path of Crafting had its own issues. When it was taken to an extreme, it too was taking from Existence in a way that was too violent. In the end, the Infinity Beasts had to be countered by the Void Beasts.

This gave Humans a chance to rise up again. The Ancient Humans had vanished, but their descendants were taken in by the God Beasts of Creation, eventually becoming the Envoys of Light. and Darkness, and the Fawkes and Four Great Families.

All the while, the Ancient Families were in the shadows...

Until they succeeded in creating their utopia.

The Idol Battlefield.

This occurred during the great war between the Infinity Beasts and Vold Beasts. The Ancient Humans thought it was the best chance to reverse their circumstances, and they were right. Using the corpses of Infinity Beasts, they built the foundation of this Idol Battlefield. In the end, the Ancestors of the Weapon Forces were tied to this Battlefield, pulled back from the dead and restrained onto this land.

They had no input into the plans of their descendants, and by now the Idol Battlefield was practically a minefield of its own, functioning with a rogue Regulator that only wanted to pump out more and 16:47 O

more powerful Weapon Forces no matter what it had to do.

Ironically enough, their descendants still hadn't seen the problem. Maybe they thought that if they brought their Weapon Forces to a high enough level, they could control the Laws of Existence well enough to reverse everything.

But in all these years, no one had been able to reach such a level, and it was nothing but a foolish dream to do so as well.

How could you ever reverse the situation with just one Weapon Force? If you wanted to undo the damage to Existence, you would need to control ALL of the Laws, not just a few of them.

That meant you would need every iteration here to find a successor capable of reaching a level beyond anything anyone in Existence's past had.

It was an absolutely ridiculous ask.

Even if Leonel had such a chance, it would only be with his Spear and Bow. And even then, it was likely only his Bow that might have a small chance at reaching such a level.

Wanting to do this was like asking the world to produce dozens of Leonels, each one as talented in their own Weapon Force as Leonel was with the Bow.

It was foolish.

At this point, it was maybe even beyond foolish. They weren't thinking straight and just accelerating everyone to their deaths.

But maybe this was everyone....

The Ancient Humans were obsessed with bringing Humans back to the top of the world through the Weapon Forces they trusted so much...

The Infinity Beasts had been obsessed with Crafting, thinking that they could create enough to forge the perfect world through their Path of Crafting...

And look at the Pluto now, they were trying to force themselves back into a state of Hyper Evolution, dancing on the edge of life and death in hopes that they could reverse the decline of their Race in these final moments.

No matter where you looked, of all three Paths, each one had ended in abject failure, and yet every one of them that still lived was scrambling for a chance to give it one more go.

Looking at it from a third party's perspective, Leonel realized just how ridiculous it all was.

They said that the definition of insanity was attempting the same thing over and over again while hoping for a different result...

Ironically, some of the strongest existences to ever step foot in reality were exactly like this.

However, there was something even more profound here, something that made Leonel chuckle bitterly.

If everyone was making the same mistake... was it really a mistake?

What Existence wanted most was for its children to evolve, and what were the Pluto, the Ancient. Humans, and the Infinity Beasts of the past doing... if not trying to evolve?

But it was precisely this drive to evolve that was leading to the end of the world.

They came hand in hand, and there was no escaping it.All text © NôvelD(r)a'ma.Org.

From the very start, this was always meant to be the natural progression of things, and maybe this exact scenario had already played out countless times before.

The end of the world was coming, and every attempt to stop it only made it come faster.