CHAPTER 98 DERELICT

I was getting tired of waking up in places I didn’t recognize.

My entire body throbbed with a dull ache as I stared at the ceiling from where I lay on the bed. I should probably heal whatever is wrong with my body, but I couldn’t bring myself to care at this point.

Why?

That’s a question a lot of people ask themselves. A lot of questions can be asked with that one word. It can help define warfare, philosophy, science, and art.

Such a simple word held a lot of power. It was also the hardest question to articulate an answer to properly. The intentionally vague question prevented specificity in something from being properly understood, which, in turn, could cause confusion.

Understanding the specificity behind the vague question allowed hurdles to be overcome and progress to be achieved. But just because you understand the ‘why?’ doesn’t mean you understand the personality behind it.

This last part was the hardest for me.

I understood why. I understood perfectly well why she did everything she did.

In her mind, she believed she could bring a wave of peace and prosperity to this world, the likes of which had never been seen before. According to her, she had a proof of concept in the form of an empire she had ruled previously.

In her mind, we were the selfish ones for preventing this from happening in the first place. She had an opportunity to solve all the world’s problems in one fell swoop, why would we fight her on that?

The worst part about that? I understood that mindset. I wasn’t one for ruling or leading. I didn’t like standing in the spotlight and being the focus of everyone’s attention.

But if the possibility existed that if I were to rule the world I could create a utopia, I owed it to the world to at least try.

That’s the part that annoyed me the most. I understood her, and that was probably by design on her part. Perhaps she had some way to determine the people she dragged through would be sympathetic to her cause, or at the very least empathetic.

I wasn’t sure how to address the issue in its entirety either.

Every time I turned around it seemed like I had another high-level entity I had to compete with, but a fallen divinity? That took the cake.

A tier-five royal guard captain with a chip on his shoulder? Something I could eventually handle on my lonesome, with a bit of work. A tier-four mind controller? I’d eventually be able to hit them fast enough and hard enough that I could kill them before they could react. Her tier-six boss? Same situation as the royal guard.

A tier-nine goddess that required the combined might of major deities and lesser to take down, and not even permanently? I was confident, not arrogant.

…

Okay, maybe I was a little arrogant. But even I understood my limits on this.

I didn’t even know gods were fully a thing in this world. I had some suspicions simply because of how the system worked in the first place. Although when people talk about intelligent design as a philosophy I highly doubt this is what they were referring to.

I swore that I would kill her. There was something from a work of fiction I was fond of, a saying that I think applied to my situation.

I would kill her. It was not a promise. Not an oath, or a malediction, or even a curse. It was inevitable.

Although perhaps taking the words of someone who had been willing to destroy the world to save it wasn’t the best play in the handbook.

The question shifted from why to how.

How was I supposed to kill her? The most straightforward solution would be to just get strong enough to do it myself.

But I wasn’t sure if that was a possibility.

Was there a particular reason she was sitting at the cap of tier nine? There had to be, I highly doubt there was a particular reason to end up delaying in her case. Normally I’d think that it would be because they were trying to farm up their skills to the maximum level before ascending.

But given that she had mentioned being around for at least 100,000 years I doubted that was the case. So that led me to believe that she was, quite literally, at the cap of physical strength in the mortal realms.

So that meant that tier ten and beyond was the realm of the gods? Possibly. I didn’t really have a way to determine that. For all I knew if you became a god you didn’t actually have a level to work with.

I let out a sigh.

I needed more information, I just didn’t know enough about this world. I didn’t know enough about its people.

I just didn’t know enough.

Arguably that was something that was easily rectified.

However, the results spoke for themselves. Every time I tried to do anything it felt like the world conspired against me. And isn’t it an ironic twist of fate to understand that the belief that people had it out for me wasn’t even that far-fetched?

The world was quite literally designed to oppress me. If it wasn’t so absurdly infuriating I might have actually laughed at that. I wasn’t even an elf originally. I got forcefully turned into one.

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I assumed this was just another thing intentionally done to… to what? Twist me to her side? Surely she knew that just because life sucked I wouldn’t be willing to work with her. And yet here we were.

What was her plan? She stated the end goal, but not the steps. Normally you’d think it’d be easier to work backward than it would be to work forward, but that’s not entirely true.

To be able to work forwards you need to understand the base problem. To give an analogy using math, this meant you needed to understand what all the numbers were for the problem and the order they were arranged in.

We’d essentially been told the answer to the problem and then been left with an infinite number of possible formulas to reach said solution.

Who even was ‘we’ in this instance as well? I planned to do something about it, would anyone else? Would Seltas get involved? I wasn’t sure.

This tied back to not understanding enough of the world around me to properly predict people’s actions.

I idly ran my hand over my shoulder where my arm was missing.

It wasn’t fair.

Despite my best efforts to distract myself, the scene was burned into my eyes.

A city burning with the corpses of my friends mutilated and then placed on display for all to see.

My vision grew misty and my eyes started burning. It took me a moment to realize I was crying. My whole body shook as I silently wept. Everything hurt, but my chest hurt the worst. And no amount of mana spent helped even the smallest amount.

I wanted to scream and break things, I wanted to hurt the world the way it hurt me. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that I was at the focus of all of this. That I was the one being targeted and hurt. I hadn’t done anything to deserve this.

I tried to pull my emotions together and pushed myself into a sitting position.

My body still ached so I poured some more healing through it as best as I could. The aches and pains slowly faded, although despite the lack of physical pain my body still didn’t feel great.

I glanced around the room. I hadn’t quite noticed before but I wasn’t in a singular room the way I had been when I had woken up in Vinwood. It was a wide open area, almost like how you would see communal hospital rooms. Tons of beds, lots of them sectioned off to give a degree of privacy, mine had not been.

I was not alone in the room, there were lots of other people despite how quiet it was. Some of them looked like they were hurt pretty badly as well. The room was fairly spartan, designed more for function than aesthetic, which I understood.

I rotated my feet over the edge of my bed, finding my boots on the edge of my bed. I was still wearing the tunic the elves had given me as well.

The sight of it made me sick.

There was a commotion outside the door leading into the room, but it didn’t seem like anything important.

I instead began trying to tear off the tunic I was wearing. I didn’t want to wear it any longer than I had to. I didn’t want to have to wear it ever again. It was pretty difficult to do with one arm though, not only that, but the tunic was pretty damn tough. I guess that made sense given how durable it had been up to this point.

It wouldn’t stop me from trying, if necessary I’d make a knife or something and cut it apart, and then I would burn it just to make sure that it stayed gone.

“Alex?”

My head snapped up, locking on to the voice that had spoken.

It was Fiona.

Something must’ve shown in my face because her expression changed from one of concern to that of pity.

I hated that look. I hated it so much, why did people keep looking at me like that?

“Stop looking at me like that,” I mumbled angrily.

Fiona ignored me and took several quick strides over to me and wrapped me up in a hug. I squirmed at first trying to push her away, I didn’t want anyone to touch me right now. I wanted to be left alone, I wanted people to stop looking at me like I was pathetic. I just wanted things to stop.

“Stop struggling,” Fiona commanded in a soft voice, “I’m stronger than you anyways so you can’t get out unless I let you.”

I stopped trying to fight her as she held me there.

“I’m sorry,” She whispered to me.

I didn’t understand why she was apologizing, but something inside me hurt when she said that. The ache in my chest grew with every moment. Almost subconsciously I reciprocated her hug, a soft whine built up in the back of my throat as my eyes watered over again.

I’m not sure how long we stayed like that, but eventually, she separated from me and helped fix my clothes.

I felt useless.

Just another self-deprecating emotion to heap on all the others.

She eventually pulled back and looked at me for a moment, her eyes hardening slightly, I wasn’t sure what she was looking for but it was hard to meet her eyes. So I just looked down at my knees instead.

“We need to talk about what happened, Alex. Are you up for that?”

I didn’t answer so Fiona kept going.

“People have a lot of questions, and they’re hoping you have answers to those. Given that I know you I offered to work with them in talking to you.”

“How long?” I asked, looking up at her.

She frowned, “For what?”

“How long was I asleep?”

“Not long, maybe a day and a half at the most?”

I just nodded.

“What…”

My voice died in my throat before I could fully get the question out. It closed up, thick with grief.

“What did they do with them?” I managed to squeeze out in a whisper.

Fiona’s gaze softened.

“All the bodies were burned. There weren’t many survivors from the city and they couldn’t risk a scourge happening. Not now, not after all the problems that have already happened to Seltas recently.”

Scourge? Not something I’d heard about before, but I could guess as to what it was referring to.

I just nodded again.

“Who was she, Alex?”

“You were there, you heard what she said.”

“I know what she said, but you seem to have a further relationship with her.”

For a long while we didn’t say anything as I tried to formulate an answer. If possible I wanted to avoid advertising that I wasn’t from this world any further than I had. But it was bound to come out at some point. Especially because I had all but explicitly confirmed it while talking with Ili’kithari.

I sighed again.

“Is there a way we can go about this that doesn’t involve me repeating the answers to the same questions dozens of times?”

Fiona started to say something and then hesitated and looked around the room. She probably only just now realized that we weren’t alone in the room.

“Yeah I think there is, it’d probably be better to talk about this somewhere else anyway. I’ll let the people in charge know you’re up for talking.”

I just nodded before reaching down to put on my boots.

I would be replacing this damned outfit as soon as possible.