"..."
Kaiden woke up from the sound of Yumi's mourning.
Actually, he had been awake for quite some time now.
===
It was in the moment that Yumi shouted,
"No... No, no, no, no! NOOO!"
Despite waking up to Yumi's voice who seemed to be crying, he could not truly comprehend what was happening.
He was a bit languid and still slightly drowsy. His head hurt so badly. Feeling like everything was slow yet fast at the same time, it was actually a nauseous feeling to have.
He could feel that he was lying on an ice-cold floor with something preventing him from moving. Enduring the head-splitting pain, he tried to recall what had happened
'I thought I was protecting milady... Then, I was captured by the enemy... She awakened an unknown latent talent and..."
"Ugh... my head... The last thing, I remember talking to a young lady about my visions... Arghh... Then, what happened after...?'
It seemed that he could not remember the last act that he did of saving Victoria and breaking the space meant to isolate Victoria in an instant.
"Ugh..."
Then, he felt that his body was hurting. The rebound of using two successive berserk techniques had now finally caught up with him completely.
Earlier, being fueled by endorphins and adrenaline, he was able to ignore a majority of the damage that was actually being done to his body.
However, now that he is removed from battle and uninhibited from the pain, he could feel the true extent of the damages done in his body.
"A...r...g...h..." He could not even let out a proper sound as every movement felt like he was being eaten by millions of ants while being held together by the unrefined power of the True Restoration Pill that Yumi gave him.
'I really pushed my body beyond its limits...' He thought while enduring the excruciating pain that does not seem to settle.
Using his spiritual sense, he noticed that his spirit veins were a mess and some of it were even ruptured due to the intense and rampaging energies from the Starburst technique and Bloodline Ignition.
His entire circulatory system had been scorched due to Bloodline Ignition. There was a layer of scorched blood around his body and his very own blood flowing was causing him to feel the burn.
His insides are all overfatigued and overworked. All of his bones from head down had comminuted fractures. They were piercing through his tendons and muscles.
Kaiden was in so much pain and suffering right now that he thought dying would probably be his only form of salvation right now.
'This is too much... I'd rather die than... continue with this...' He momentarily thought.
But, he felt that there was a gently light-green force spread out through his body that was forcibly healing all of his wounds and keeping his body from completely tearing apart. It was the True Restoration Pill's energy.
'Right, that Yumi girl made me eat that True Restoration Pill. If it were not for that pill, my body would have probably already crumbled...' Kaiden suddenly remembered what happened upon his capture.
The True Restoration Pill truly stands as a pinnacle of alchemy and medicine. Its ability to completely reset a damaged body to its absolute primal state by inducing and initiating hyper-accelerated cellular recreation like what happened with Kaiden.
The only reason why Kaiden is still currently alive is that the rate by which the True Restoration healed him was way faster than the rate by which his body broke down.
'How lucky! I can't waste this luck I have to make sure that I live!'
Knowing how lucky he is, he decided to put all his attention to recovery.
He, then, focused on guiding that True Restoration Pill in his mangled-up Spirit Veins. He could only grit his teeth throughout the entire process as he healed himself.
Despite a significant portion of the pill's energy being subconsciously used by Kaiden's body, actively applying the healing energy and circulating it around his body showed the miraculous power of the pill.
In just a few circulations, Kaiden's body was no longer in a critical condition. He was still heavily injured but he was fairing much better than earlier. He prioritized mending his Spirit Veins and fixing his damaged internal organs, setting aside his muscle tears and bone fractures around his body.
The cleansing power of the pill also activated as it was removing the scorched layer of blood all around Kaiden's body.
While meditating, Kaiden could finally breathe more easily.
'Where am I?' He wondered.
Kaiden tried scanning everything around him, He saw that he was in an unfamiliar castle. Everything was dark and gloomy. It was filled with skeletal decorations of humans, humanoids and beasts.
He saw that he was wrapped around a cocoon-like structure like the Hell Threads. He remembered being trapped by Yumi as well,
'So, I got captured huh...' Kaiden immediately understood what was going on.
Then, he had a dreadful thought that made him tremble, 'Does that mean that something has happened to milady-'
But, the moment he thought about Yumi, he remembered something,
"Live"
"Noooo!" Victoria could only cry out helplessly because she was already going backwards.
"I finally saved you."
Kaiden was suddenly seeing these memories of him saving Victoria. He moved with incredible speed, a speed that he knew was far beyond any speed he should be capable of doing!
His body manifested an Asura-like Avatar, utilizing nine swords and proceeded to cut down space itself!
But then, it was ended by a sudden flash of pure white that devoured him.
The voice that came out of him kind of sounded like him and not him at the same time.
'Did that just really happen?! I don't think I did those things personally...'
Then, he saw Yumi's figure crying beside her Master whose aura seemed to be deteriorating at a concerningly fast rate.
Kaiden could not believe his eyes because he saw how and felt how strong Byron was even though his consciousness was fading in and out during the battle,
'Is that Half-Saint Malevolent Magnate dying? What happened?! It doesn't seem to be a long period since I lost consciousness... What could have possibly transpired in that short amount of time...'
Seeing the scene of Yumi crying, Kaiden did not have a semblance of pity at first. This was the person that killed his clansmen, violated their bodies and turned them into her undead minions, tortured him and Victoria with those same minions as well.
He felt like this was a rightful retribution for all the evil that these two have committed.
'This is Karma... Life which you so effortlessly take from others have also caused others suffering... Now, its your turn to undergo the same grieving!'
Suddenly, Yumi's voice rung out with more sincerity...
"No, that's not true at all. You were the only one who was there for me..."
Kaiden could not understand at first how someone as evil as Yumi who could kill others on her whim and toy with the lives of others could possibly cry.
He wanted to deny it but the scene that he would witness from these two would change his perspective.
Yumi's voice was filled with heartfelt sincerity, regret, longing and most of all genuine, love.
He could not reconcile that this was the same Yumi who coldly laughed and was entertained by the death of other while having a twisted obsession with him since he was the "Knight in Shining armor" she was looking for.
As he lay paralyzed within the suffocating grip of the Hell Threads, Kaiden's spiritual sense remained wide open, acting as his only window to the unfolding tragedy.
He listened, entirely frozen, as the dynamic between the two dark cultivators laid itself bare.
Instead, what was heard was the weeping of a devastated child and the desperate, fading breaths of a protective father.
Through the heavy air of the hall, Yumi's defenses shattered completely. Kaiden heard her voice crack, carrying a weight of raw emotion he never thought her capable of. "Master, I am sorry for the way I treated you... I... wish I was kinder to you... I should have been kinder to you... You can nag at me all you want... I will train like you wanted me to... Please don't leave me too..."
"You are like a father to me... I don't want to lose another dad again. I have already lost my parents once. Please..."
The confession struck a chord not just with Byron, but with Kaiden himself. The image Kaiden had constructed of Yumi—a purely sadistic, irredeemable monster who toyed with human lives like playthings—began to crack. 'She... she is grieving just like I did,'
Kaiden thought, a deep, conflicting ache blooming in his chest. 'She isn't just an unfeeling demon. She is a daughter losing her father.'
Then came Byron's response, choked with unprecedented emotion. "That... That thought alone made my entire life worth living..."
Kaiden could hear the rasp in the Half-Saint's voice, the sound of a man using his absolute final remnants of strength just to keep the spreading decay from erasing his consciousness before he could finish speaking.
Byron wasn't trying to save himself; he was using his last moments to lay out a desperate survival path for his disciple.
"Yumi, heed my words. Within my treasury lies the Saint Blessing Pill; consume it, that you may ascend to the Half-Saint Realm... Only then can you rightfully inherit the breadth of my influence within the Tartarus Sect."
"Master, why..." Yumi tried to interrupt, her voice choked with tears, but Byron fiercely pressed on, his urgency cutting through the dark room.
"...Sit beyond the reach of their malice, where none may touch you, and you may taste true sovereignty. Live only as your own heart dictates."
A weak, raspy chuckle escaped the dying man. "Forgive an old man his pedantry at the threshold of death. Grant me this final indulgence. Hahaha."
"I will do everything that you've said!" Yumi cried out.
Through his spiritual sense, Kaiden felt the shift in the air as Yumi reached out, hugging Byron for the first and final time.
It was an act of pure vulnerability. Kaiden had viewed Byron Everdark as a monster of tyrannical evil, a ruthless Half-Saint who commanded the dead and crushed the living.
But hearing their final exchange, and sensing the heavy truth of Byron's tragic past, Kaiden's perception shifted drastically.
He realized that Byron was not born a monster; he was forged into one by a cruel world that had shunned and hunted him as a "demon spawn" for a power he hadn't asked for.
With his absolute final breath, Byron whispered a truth that sealed their bond forever into the stones of the castle.
"Like... how you regard me as your father, I too consider you as my own. I love you... my dearest daughter..."
The silence that followed the ash scattering across the floor was heavy and absolute. Only the echoing, hollow sobs of Yumi's mourning filled the dark castle.
Kaiden lay there on the ice-cold floor, his spirit veins slowly mending, but his heart profoundly shaken.
'They've been forced to the dark side of the world because of their talents...'
The black-and-white world he had known had collapsed into a complex, agonizing shade of grey.
He still harbored resentment for the atrocities they had committed against his clan, but the blinding hatred he once held was now tangled with a strange, profound pity.
They were ultimately just two deeply broken individuals who had found a fragile sanctuary in one another and now, one of them was left entirely alone in the dead of night.
Then, Kaiden heard a weird and foreign sound.
[Hm, where am I?]
He could not understand nor compare it to other sounds from before.
This is to be expected since Kaiden would have never encountered the existence of computers and robots.
'Am I going crazy? Did I just hear something talk?' Kaiden thought he was just hearing things.
[Yeah, no shit, dumbass. It's me...]
'Did you just read my thoughts? Where are you??' Kaiden was once again befuddled. There was too much going on today.
The voice snapped back, [Cause I'm in your head, duh. You're an idiot, aren't you?]
Kaiden was taken aback because of how rude this voice was.
'So you can hear my thoughts?'
[Correcto-mundo!]
'Huh?' Kaiden did not understand.
[Dumbass, I just said you were correct! You're one boring human. You don't seem to have humor.]
'Human? Does that mean you're not human? What are you? Are you a mystical spirit? A remnant soul?' Kaiden curiously asked.
[HAHAHA! Mystical Spirit? Remnant Soul?! You make it sound like you're in a fantasy world.]
'Fantasy world?'
[You're funny hahaha! I am the best super AI of the 21st century, no the 3rd millenia! I am Daedalus!]