Christopher took a deep breath and forcefully calmed down.
Although the encounter may be sudden, he had been preparing himself all this time for the event where he’d meet Braun again. So, while surprising, it didn’t take much for him to suppress his shock.
“Long time no see indeed, Braun,” Christopher said softly with a smile, yet his hand moved at lightning-fast speeds.
Space around Braun’s body immediately locked into place, sealing it in a cage.
As Braun flicked his finger, he saw that his ability to bend space was ineffective, rendering his greatest escape method useless.
“To think you’d become so decisive in just three months. That’s impressive for someone so aggravatingly indecisive like you,” Braun remarked and calmly leaned back on the bench he sat on, lifting his right leg to rest it on his other leg.
Christopher ignored the taunting sub-meaning of Braun’s remark and calmly walked up to Braun, his eyes glowing brightly with white light.
“Woah, you’re gonna kill me so soon?” Braun asked and helplessly shook his head. “Come on, I’ve specifically been created here so that we can finally talk.”
He remained undeterred and pressed his hands against Braun’s hand. In the next moment, bright white light flooded out of the tips of his fingers as they tried to encroach into the avatar’s mind.
“How evil!” Braun shouted and abruptly exploded into a bloody mist, stupefying Christoper.
“It takes a bit of effort to create an avatar you know?” an angry voice shouted from a distance as a young girl with fluffy brown hair and dark green eyes inched her way to the frozen bloody mist, stagnant and unmoving in the middle of the air, just a hair’s breadth away from hitting Christopher.
“And why did you try to read my memories, hmm? I know I’ve been an asshole but that’s so unlike you!” the young girl harrumphed and crossed her arms coyly.
“How many avatars are in the school right now?” Christopher’s eyes turned into slits as he asked with a cold tone.
“Enough to kill a tragic amount of people in the entire city.” She tilted her head to the side and grinned mischievously. “And there’s gonna be more of that waiting if you continue to be so unfriendly to your dear pal.”
Christopher was just about to walk up to the young girl and grab her by the neck when he abruptly paused upon hearing her words.
“You’re really going to sacrifice so many innocent lives just for this?” Christopher mumbled. “All of those lives gone… just because of your lust for power?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault an entire worldwide organization is planning on capturing me.” She shrugged with a helpless look on her face. “You know, back when I was still Lucas Hum, I was actually quite a peaceful individual!”
“I even helped protect the city for a whole month and shit. I was basically a small-time hero,” she said, grinning.
“Don’t try and fool me. I know what you did back there.” Christopher glared at her and raised an open palm.
The girl’s body uncontrollably flew through the air, landing in his grasp.
“All of those innocent families… and even children.”
“I thought killing your own brother would be the last, but how wrong I was.” Christopher gritted his teeth as he felt his rage bubbling within his heart.
“Shut up you whiny little bitch, was it my fault that I was so paranoid? If I didn’t do that, Aegis would have gone and fucked me up through some weird bloodline bullshit to kill me a thousand kilometers away.” She rolled her eyes.
“I was simply picking the most optimal route available for me,” said the girl. “If you really want to blame someone, then blame Aegis for being such a morally grey organization.”
“You know full well that you could have avoided doing that if you didn’t kill Uncle Albert. All of this happened because you, for whatever reason, just had to commit murder and irrevocably enter the path of no return.” Christopher’s eyes stared daggers at the girl.
“Irrevocably… Look at you, using big boy words. I wonder who’s the real writer between us here,” jested the girl. “And just to clarify, I was a mentally unstable bitch back then who just got baptized by the burning flames of hell, cleansing my flesh and soul from the inside out, so a guy with a gun made me act up a lil’ bit.”
“YOU!” Christopher gnashed his teeth. “Don’t you even feel remorse for what you did?! YOU KILLED YOUR PARENTS, YOU KILLED YOUR BROTHER!”
“Boohoo, is the baby bitch gonna cry?” The girl snickered.
Christopher tightened his grip around her neck, with veins protruding from his forearms.
“Ouch, fuck, you’re even hurting a girl now!” the girl moaned. “You do know that I’m just a parasite inhabiting the bodies of other humans. So if you kill me, you’re killing an innocent girl, just like how you made that other dude explode into a blood of mist.”
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“Doesn’t matter…” Christopher raised his hand and time warped.
The stagnant bloody mist floating beside them began to tread back in time, collapsing into itself to reform a human body.
“Are you sure? You’re not the only one capable of warping time here,” mumbled the girl.
Christopher raised his eyebrow and unfroze time.
Unexpectedly, the boy collapsed to the ground, their eyes vacant and dead. One look and Christopher saw that although their body was perfectly fine, they were just a soulless husk with no spiritual foundation.
“You bastard!” Christopher gritted his teeth.
“Just shut up already. You just whine and whine but that won’t lead anywhere!” she rolled her eyes, annoyed. “And if you just listened to me, he wouldn’t have had to die. I’m just here to have a nice little chat with you.”
Christopher ignored her words and quickly knelt on the ground. His eyes shone with white light as he used many of the powers he had learned in the three-month time span he had been with Aegis, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t come up with a way to let the corpse’s soul return.
“How funny. I knew you wouldn’t dabble that much in the domain of the soul with all of your self-righteousness. Now here you are, helpless against my detestable ploy,” mocked the girl.
“Tell me how to get his soul back, or else…” Christopher’s voice dropped to a chilling somberness. “This will be the point of no return for the both of us.”
“BITCH!” The girl laughed loudly as if she had just heard the funniest joke she had ever heard. “The point of no return my ass. WE HAD PASSED THAT THREE MONTHS AGO YOU FUCKING KID THAT STILL GRASPS FOR HISTORY.”
“I knew you were always the sentimental kind, but get a brain!” she sighed. “We’re never gonna return to normal again, Christopher. We’re enemies, destined enemies.”
Her eyes twinkled as she emphasized the word destined.
“ANSWER ME, YOU BASTARD!” Christopher roared and slammed his fist into her stomach.
The girl coughed loudly as she gasped for breath, but her smile never left her lips.
“I’m telling you, the secret I’m about to reveal is gonna blow your brains out.”
“Tell me how to get his soul back, or else!”
“Or else what?!” The girl shouted back with a crazed smile. “What will you be able to use to threaten me, huh? My parents? My brother? That you’ll swear to the heavens that you won’t rest until you have put a stop to me?”
“Bro, you’re not even the main antagonist of my story anymore!” she lifted her head to the sky, gazing off into the stars. “Aegis is my main antagonist in this tiny little volume of my life!”
“Fuck, they should probably be called the protagonist and me as the budding final boss antagonist or some shit!” she laughed raucously.
“So, calm down, and listen.” She looked back down, staring calmly into Christopher’s eyes with an unnerving coldness.
Christopher, although still angry, knew that Braun wouldn’t do something as useless as just pointlessly arguing with him here, sacrificing some of his avatars in the process.
So, he took a deep breath and loosened his grip.
“Finally,” she sighed.
She then cleared her throat and wore a serious look, as if she was readying herself to drop the biggest revelation of all.
“I’m pretty sure Aegis has issued a task to you, and the nine other Demigods currently hunting my other avatars, to hunt me down because I’m a source of turbulent fate, right?” she asked softly.
Christopher remained silent, but his lack of an answer was an answer in of itself.
“Well, I assume I was right on the money.” She licked her lips and smiled. “Well, what if I tell you that the thing you guys call turbulent fate, is simply the concept known as destiny.”
“Destiny…” Christopher repeated the word, his eyes glimmering brightly as he quickly understood what Braun meant.
“Yes, fate and destiny; two sides of the same coin.”
“And yet, when you look around you, all you can see is fixed destiny—fate. The couple over there is fated to break up as the girl would have to leave for a different city. That cat over there is meant to die tomorrow because of a car crash. That boy over there is meant to fail his exams because he’ll learn his father would die due to an accident on an airplane.”
“Those unfortunate series of events are fixed in place, an end that cannot be altered even if one strives for a different future.”
“However, why don’t you try peeking into the future for me, hmm?” the girl asked gently.
Christopher remained silent and did just that.
The girl fought back against her parent’s wishes, and they decided to let her live in the same apartment with her boyfriend, causing their love for one another to deepen.
The cat survived by a hair’s breadth as a man rushed in to save it from getting crashed into by the incoming car.
The boy’s father survived due to the intervention of an expert engineer who was on board the plane, fixing the malfunction.
Three fixed fates altered by the turbulence of destiny.
Christopher returned to the past, his eyes staring deeply into the girl he was grabbing by the neck.
“Isn’t it strange? Why is Aegis so insistent on stopping me from spreading destiny and letting fate continue to take away the free will of the masses? Why do they want the gift of freedom to remain stolen by some higher concept?”
“It’s because the reason is simple.”
“They are the ones who locked destiny in place in the entire world, taking away the freedom of humanity. Without destiny, they can fully control the fate of humanity as a whole!”
“They’re much worse than dictators that rule over humans with an iron grip. They rule over humanity by taking away their future, their choice, their decision!”
“Is this really the organization you want to fight for? The organization you would want to believe in? The organization you deemed worthy enough to act as humanity’s sword, shield, and shepherd?”
Christopher remained silent for a while as he processed the revelation Braun had dropped before him.
However, in the end, he came to a simple conclusion.
“Working with you to defeat Aegis and allow humanity to regain its freedom does sound great on the surface, but I know you too well, Braun.”
“You’re an entity capable of harnessing multiple superpowers at once, a being with a terrific growth rate that reached the peak of Level 3 in mere months.”
“It won’t take long for you to reach Level 4, and then Level 5, and Level 6 wouldn’t be that far off even for you.”
“Heck, you even have the ability to reach Level 4 already if you wanted to… But you’re waiting for something, you’re waiting for something perfect, something desirable, something that you really want to get.”
“For a being who’s a plague of destiny, what better ability to get for one’s ascension to Level 4 than an ability that can control destiny, right?”
The girl’s smile deepened as she said lightly, “Spot on as usual. That’s why I used to envy your talent.”
“But I’m surprised you’d side with Aegis even though you know that they’re scumbags.”
“Their imposed fate has its merit. After all, the biggest example of what destiny can bring to the world is standing right before me.” Christopher’s smile slowly disappeared. “In a mere three months, you’ve embroiled this country into utter chaos.”
“So, I’d rather sacrifice a few lives and let humanity survive than to help a scum like you.”