Chapter 250
Humanity Within the Struggle
The flow of time unfroze, the tiniest specks of reality shaking, the color itself slowly returning. Cain was back at his own seat, a shaken look in his eyes that he desperately tried to hide. He’d gotten answers to a few questions that have always eaten away at him and even with a few of his suspicions confirmed... it was still much bigger than he had expected. Far broader.
He, as well as many others, have expected for the Tower to be a sort of a ‘dimensional hub’ for other worlds that, in fact, existed elsewhere in the universe, but to get a direct confirmation for it still shook him. This giant behemoth that pierced the sky was, in essence, a long row of consecutive wormholes connecting space and time in one, unified fashion. It was like an equalizer; after all, time was relative to the distance. Yet, somehow, all of these places across the universe, that likely began within billions of years of one another, are interacting within the same plane, at the same time.
That went beyond simply being an engineering marvel and into the status of a mega-fictional monolith. Though Dyon had claimed that nobody has hand over ‘time’, it was false; the Towers themselves were that hand. It’s likely that people from Earth would have never found any of the worlds within the Tower, perishing long before they even stood a technical chance of it. And it was partly due to time-- such mega scales that the universe operates by are incompatible with the localized scales of time on a singular planet and a singular civilization.
After all, for all the four and a half billion years that Earth has been around, people themselves, even including the most primitive ones, have at most been around for a million to two million years, inconsequential amount of time on such a large scale.
Cain sighed, losing himself in the thoughts; it was overwhelming, all of it. Even the notion of what the ‘Thief’ represented-- almost like those old myths of men stealing fire from the gods, but in his case ‘fire’ being ‘time’ -- bothered him. He understood the underlying implications even if Dyon didn’t outright state them: the further up he climbed, the easier it would be for others to see through him as a Thief... and the less inclined they’d be to do anything with him outside of ripping him apart.
It was like a cult-- nay, it probably was the penultimate form of a cult, religion orbiting a singular figure. A cult of personality taken to the extremes where seemingly everyone is doused in infernal worship of someone else, a mythical, ethereal figure. Only, in this case, there likely was a figure that fit the bill.
He was, however, still skeptical over it; it all seems smooth, perfectly narrated, as to fit a specific mould. Usually, unless it’s on a really small scale, there is never ‘one ruler’ -- there is a projection, and then there is a reality. Behind every Emperor were rich vassals and military that could flip as easily as anybody else; same so, behind every Dictator there are boards and boards’ members and military that could flip as easily as anybody else.
If anything, the notion that there essentially was that singular ‘Creator’ whom everybody worshiped convinced Cain that likely wasn’t the case. Then again, the scale he was looking at was similarly immeasurable within his experiences, so he was none the wiser himself.
“Yo, Earth to Cain!” a raising voice and the waving hand shook Cain out of his stupor. Looking around, he saw that everyone had gotten up, looking at him with faint smiles on their faces. The sun shone from behind them, bending into rays as the dust danced in them, forming a picturesque scene. “Let’s go.” Emma said, extending her arm and reaching out toward him.
All the stray thoughts dispersed at that moment, within that smile; it didn’t matter, in the end. He reached out and grabbed her arm as she yanked him up with the rest. Cosmic politics and the myths of creation didn’t interest him. All that he cared and held dear was here, around him, clearly visible and evident.
“Man, fighting until you almost die is cool and all,” Jamal said, sighing. “But I’m looking forward to just lounging about.”
“How long do will we stay out?” Daniel quizzed, turning to Cain.
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“... well, for me at least,” Cain said. “Until the fifth floor is opened.”
“...” everyone looked at him for a moment before shrugging. “Good enough,” Kramer said. “Should take a few years.”
“Man, won’t it be great if, while everyone else is chasing our ghosts in the Tower, we took like a collective vacation to Bahamas or something?” Sigmund proposed.
“We can just tell Rick to buy an entire beach there or something,” Daniel shrugged. “That dude is likely richer than the rest of the world combined at this point.”
“Eh, not really,” Emma said. “Tower in L.A. is just one of the seven. Though I don’t think there’s anyone richer than him, there are still some people within that orbit.”
“Good point,” Kramer nodded. “I think being stuck here for so long has skewed our perceptions quite a lot.”
“It’s not just that,” Yuki said. “We are just less concerned with it since we all realize the future is here, in the Towers.”
“It’s the new ‘whoever controls the atomic bombs controls the world’,” Kramer sighed. “Only probably even worse since we have a guy who can whoop an entire city into nothing all by himself... on the Tower’s second floor. Sheesh.”
“Oi, don’t look at me like that,” Cain shrugged, putting on a pained face. “The fuckin’ Tower nerfed me, man.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean literally that,” he whined. “Not only did they literally take away that Skill from me, they nerfed the living shit out of the weapon Taima crafted for me. I’m basically a neutered dog at the moment. Not to mention the fact that they didn’t even rescind the effect that makes the weapon unusable for eight months after I activate the core. Fuckin’ twats.”
“...” surprisingly, however, Cain didn’t receive the words of encouragement he expected, so he looked around. Everyone was looking oddly at him for a moment before suddenly nodding.
“Clever,” Jamal said. “So the Tower’s kinda fair, actually.”
“I was actually scared,” Daniel added. “That if someone ticked him off he’d use that thing on the outside and probably, like, wipe out an entire state or something.”
“The Tower is right,” even Emma joined in, though her playful smile noted that she was just piling on for the hell of it. “No one man, especially Cain, ought to have so much power.”
“Humble him,” Senna noted. “A good choice.”
“...” Cain’s eyebrows began to twitch, even if he knew they were just messing around. Lately, it’s become harder and harder to garner vocal support from his friends. And, well, it stung. “Maybe I should get a new party.”
“One that worships the ground you walk on and treats you like a God?”
“One that doesn’t shit on me every opportunity it gets.”
“Eh, weak.” Cain chuckled, sighing. In reality, it wasn’t hard to see through what they were doing-- trying to keep him humbled and grounded as to not let the power get to his head. Well, except Senna and Emma, who were merely making fun of him.
After all, as far as they knew, Cain was just a previous drunk who’d gotten extremely strong and powerful in such a short period of time. None of them knew of the twenty-five years of extra experience he’d gotten previously. As such, they feared that all that newfound power would get into his head and that he’d start seeing himself as a messiah. While he did think it’d be funny to indulge that fantasy of theirs for a while, he decided against it. It wouldn’t be that funny and he mighty genuinely drive them away from him.
In reality, he might have let the power actually get to him; after all, he wasn’t infallible. Just because he had experience with the Tower hardly meant he was above it. Without Rick warning against his actions and asking him to reel it in, he might have already started several wars. Without Emma and Lana around in his life, just like Dyon, he might have become monolithic in his pursuit of the higher power, ignoring what his actions did to those around him.
And without the party that followed him around, he might have forgotten why he was doing what he was doing to begin with. His reason for return, for the struggle and for all the hell he put others through, wasn’t because he was desperate to be the strongest Conqueror and to conquer the Tower itself. Rather, he didn’t even think that to be a possibility back then.
Merely, he wanted to use the Tower as an opportunity to solidify his future with Emma and Lana and provide them both with the happiest lives they could lead. It was the same with others who’ve joined along the way; if he wanted, he could easily shoot past them and continue climbing like there’s no tomorrow. But he didn’t want to. He never wanted to.
“I’mma say something corny, guys,” he suddenly said, causing everyone to stop in their tracks at the far edge of the throne room, beneath its arched entrance. They looked toward him with quizzical expression as he smiled. “There’d be no me without you.”
“...”
“Not in the abstracts, anyway,” he added. “Old or new, I’ve made friends for life in each and every one of you and I wouldn’t have any other faces in this party. As I’ve told you lot numerous times before, Tower or no Tower, I don’t want you out of my life. We have fought for a good while now and likely made world’s headlines again. It’s time we rested. Got our deserved break. And, yes, fine, went to Bahamas.”
“Hell yea’!” amidst the roaring laughter of the group, Cain chuckled and shook his head.
“All in all,” Jamal said, walking over and putting his hand on Cain’s head. “As a speech, it was quite lame. But we understand.”
“You’re lame.”
“Yo’ mama’s lame.”
“... really?”
“I haven’t made a ‘yo mama’ joke since Yo mama was a Vice-president. Gimme a break.”
“Aaah...” Cain audiably sighed and shook his head again as everyone departed, both from the Palace and the Kingdom, ready to return to the City of Mirrors and settle everything before leaving the Tower completely, for quite a lengthy period of time.