Chapter 78

Ashes to Light (III)

A man walked lonely beneath the sun, his footsteps echoing through the sands of time. His shadow was long and hazy, drifting across the hazy, unwhole shapes, dancing as though free from his strings--and yet it followed. In silence, in obedience, in awe.

A thousand swords ripped out from the dirt and flew out, but none toward him. Like a blooming flower, they flew outward and formed a storming canopy of death--shards of light bounced off of their edges, lost in the devouring reality. It was gray and it was overwhelming, like a mountain pressed against one’s chest, making it difficult to breathe.

Asher opened his eyes, gasping for breath, sitting upright immediately, his back doused in sweat. It took him a moment to realize he had escaped the steel prison in his dream and was back in the darkness of his cabin. In the gloating silence.

Getting off the bed, he went to the central room and chugged the jug of water, washing himself right after. It had been two days since he returned from the ‘journey’. Aside from the fact that nobody came to visit him, not even the goblin, he was unable to leave the cabin. Every time he tried to teleport to the central plaza, he was denied.

From one prison into another, he merely chuckled at the reality. He once spent a month in a dry, parched prison cell in a desert... and somehow, this felt worse.

Though he was no stranger to solitude, he was beginning to experience the first symptoms of it--an almost parasitic need to just... talk. And so, he talked. He talked to the wall, to his meals, to the mead, to the bed... and to himself. They weren't conversations of any importance, just hollow musings of a mind holding itself together. A quip or a joke, a cynical observation, and perhaps an inspiring or an insightful look into a circumstance.

He began his daily workout.

It was strange--his body had completely reverted back to how it looked when he was in his early thirties, surpassing it even, and yet his face remained the same. Aged, bearded, wrinkled. A paradoxical juxtaposition of two things--it ought to be impossible, and yet... there he stood, a proof of its existence.

Finishing, he collapsed on the ground, tired and bored.

“What the hell is going on...?” it would have been one thing if it were just a few hours--but it had been two days. It meant that his actions were far more destructive and consequential than he thought. Perhaps it shot so far up the ranks that it quaked the entire nation. As for how... he couldn’t venture a guess.

And so, days passed.

Two became three.

Three five.

Five a week.

A week soon became a month.

Thirty days without being allowed to leave the cabin, without being allowed to talk to another, see another, touch another.

He’d given into the anger by now as it was the best way to stave off the far worse demons that might awaken. Day after day, he would punch walls until his knuckles bled, and he would scream into the pillow until his throat burned, and he would drink until his mind was beset with darkness and forgetfulness took over. He’d stumble about the narrow cabin and curse and spit, passing out into a full blackout... only to do it all over again.

“Wake up,” a soft voice aroused him from his sleep. He felt his head split open at that moment, groaning, and the blinding light shooting in his eyes was hurtful... but he forced himself to keep them open.

Floating about his head was a familiar figure, her wings fluttering in a burst of colors, her lips once again stretched out into a grin, a gloating sneer.

Asher grunted as he heaved himself up and reached out to grab a jug of water, quenching his burning throat. He drank the whole jug in one go and stood up, feeling wobbly.

“You look pathetic,” she said. Asher glanced at her and looked into her eyes, realizing something--whatever decision was reached... he was about to have a rather bad time. No, based on that look...

“Yeah,” he said, washing his face and sobering up as much as he could. “Let’s go.”

Darkness swallowed him whole and a pang of pain shot through him, helping him wake up further. It took a while, and when he opened his eyes he found himself in an unfamiliar place--it was similar to the throne room that he was in before, but it did not have a throne.

Rather, it was a long, rectangular hall with a tiled floor beneath and a pair of lavish, bejeweled balconies on both ends looming over the hall itself. Thousands of phantomed silhouettes seated the stoned slabs, looking over the elongating hallway. Gems embedded into the fascia glistened in a holy glow, warming up the cold colors of the heartless prison.

Qyne disappeared, leaving him to wander alone, just like in his dream. But he stayed, looking around disinterestedly.

From the phantoms, a figure appeared--it was an unfamiliar one, human-shaped though with some extra appendages. Its face, however, was wholly human, handsome and youthful, bereft of blemishes. It fluttered gently down from the balcony and remained hovering above ground, facing Asher directly and unblinkingly.

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“Rotten human,” it spoke, its voice echoing out loudly. “For the crime of inflicting Demons upon the Noble Blood, a verdict has been reached.”

“...” Asher remained silent.

“You shall engage in a Death Duel with a Noble Champion, and let the Gods be the judges of your sin. Shall you live, you shall be locked in a dungeon for a thousand years. Shall you die, your soul shall be purged of all sins and washed clean. Here,” an ordinary, iron sword flew out from the space between and landed in front of Asher’s feet, as the ground began to quake--on the opposite end of the hall, another fogged silhouette emerged.

A hulking beast, well over twenty feet tall, appeared. It was muscular beyond reason, clad out in thick layers of plated armor, each hand armed with a different weapon, all of which shone with the brilliance of magic, very much unlike the iron one he was handed. It was hardly a duel--just an execution. After so much time had passed, he expected as much--however, the length he had to wait out also meant something else entirely. If it was just the matter of belting out a sort of punishment for him--an ordinary human--it should not have been that big of an ordeal. Especially if it involved Noble Blood, something he already suspected.

There was a roadblock somewhere, a reason why it took so long and why it was such a convoluted way of punishing him.

“Pick up the weapon and fight,” the creature said with a sneer on both its lips and in its voice. “Prove your innocence in front of the Gods.”

Asher glanced down at the iron sword as the creature disappeared, leaving only the two in the hallway--him and that grotesque thing on the other side... but that thing remained unmoving, seemingly waiting for him to pick up his weapon.

Though he was tired and somewhat prone to hallucinations, Asher's mind still retained a trace of sharpness it always had. There was a simple story here, but the key point was that he had to be a willing participant. All he had to do was bend over and pick up the sword, and his fate would be sealed. He would die. There was absolutely no way he could go toe-to-toe with that monster. Even if he was given special abilities and magic to use, it still wouldn't matter.

This was an execution--an execution with a simple caveat... he had to walk into it.

“No,” he replied rather simply and dispassionately, looking up at the two balconies laden with misted figures. “If I must die for, as you say, my sins... then just fucking kill me. What the fuck is this, huh? This clown show? What? Did you honestly think I’d actually pick up this fucking toothpick and try and fight that thing over there that even a mother could not love?! Are you that insanely stupid, so rancidly idiotic, so deeply entrenched into smelling your own farts that you actually thought I’d just walk into my own execution?!” his voice was the only thing that could be heard, echoing vastly against the gilded walls.

"You're big, badass motherfuckers, aren't you?" he sneered. "Then go ahead. Get off your high seats and chop my head off. Shouldn't be an issue, right? I'm just a human, after all. A blob of flesh, blood, and bones, missing all that juice that makes you fuckers so special. I'm nothing. Certainly not worthy of all these fucking theatrics. God, you're a fuckin' disappointment. All this talk about how above us humans you are, and yet, lo and fucking behold, it's like you're eating the raw garbage we shat out and claiming it's your own invention."

"Silence!!" an angry voice bellowed out as winds whipped up violently. A familiar silhouette emerged and turned into the appearance of a man. The Emperor floated some twenty yards from Asher, his handsome face contorted and twisted into one of unabashed anger. "How dare you, lowly creature?! Pick up the sword, at once! Or face a death a thousand times worse than your most terrifying nightmares!"

“Oh, wow. Well, when you put it that way.”

“...” there was expectance in the Emperor’s eyes, prompting Asher to suddenly burst out into laughter.

“Oh my God, are you really that moronic? Jesus. What is this? How in God's green Earth are you shitheads the ones enslaving us? Man, talk about unfair."

“You--you--”

"Alright, let me break it down," Asher interrupted. "I imagine that whoever tried to trap me in my 'nightmares' is somehow related to you, no? They got their shitty ego hurt because they couldn't break me, threw a tantrum to their daddy, and you had to then figure out how to punish me. But because I didn't do anything wrong, for some reason, you couldn't just outright kill me. Or even punish me, really. So, you spent a fucking month looking for a loophole--I imagine this isn't even a Death Duel, and instead, it's something completely unrelated that, if I were to accept, you wouldn't be punished 'cause of my death. So, how on track am I?"

“...!”

“Right. I don’t know how or why or by what machinations, but in some way, all of you are restrained in what you can actually do. I imagine that in order to kill me outright, the price you’d have to pay is so monumental that it isn’t even remotely worth it. You know, whoever set up this whole system sure had the foresight to greed-proof it for you little shitheads. So, you can interject into the games, you can bend them, you can curve them, but you can’t outright break them. And every time you increase the difficulty of the Stage that I’m in, you also have to offer the equivalent rewards. But, at the same time, for some reason, you aren’t allowed to make the difficulty of it outright impossible.

“And after a month of deliberation, after a month of all the greatest minds in your world coming together to figure out how to kill me... this is what you thought up? Honestly, I’m half-tempted to pick up the sword and die just so I can stop feeling this embarrassed for you. This entire thing is sort of like a fake version of the military, where you try to break us from the onset and remove all sense of personality and individuality so we can't conjure up rebellious thoughts. Clever, something we stupid humans would have never thought up. Except, unlike in the military where if you fuck up, they actually can punish you, you lot... can just watch. This entire thing is like an automated reality TV show, and the best you can do is throw money at it to make small changes.

“So, for the love of the fuckin’ God, just do that, okay? Stop dragging me here, stop trying to shove some sense of fear down my throat, and just leave me alone. Watch me, wank off to when I’m in deathly danger, mock me when I fail, throw a tantrum when I succeed, and curse me out ‘till your throats burn. But, y’know, just do it without dragging my ass here.

“Ah, one more thing,” Asher, having already set fire to everything and everyone, decided to throw a barrel of oil into it. “The last time I was here, the lovely Emperor and that random, old-ass Duke threw quite a performance for you lot. Yeah, performance. It was entirely staged. Why? I dunno. Maybe so you lot can see the old guard bow down to the new and recognize this child of an Emperor as someone worth fearing. Now, why would the old Duke do that? Money. Lots and lots of money. So much money that the weight of it was enough to bend his old-ass spine and force his rancid lips to kiss the Emperor's flat ass."

“ENOUGH!!!”

“See ya~~” Asher threw out a wave as the darkness swallowed him, and he quickly found himself between the familiar walls of the cabin. The weight upon his chest that was pressing down on him like a mountain was finally lifted up. For the first time in a long while, he felt like he could freely breathe.

It felt good, getting it off his chest.

Consequences? They be damned.