Another ordinary day. Another lifeline burned. Quazy had almost turned into an object—a dustbin that gathered dust endlessly and trash only when the world remembered him.
Better than what I am now, the thought crossed his mind for an instant before he tore it apart and held on to his madness, his last proof that he was still human.
Quazy had entangled himself with fate, chaining his life to a choice born from weakness—one no god could ever rewrite. Today was supposed to be the end of that road. Instead, an unknown force gifted him unrestrained power. His Sub-Space expanded past the breaking point of his unstable mind, and for a single lucid moment, he chose sanity and tore himself free of Sani's claim.
Quazy observed the argument unfolding within the folded seams of space itself, watching the conjuring of Broken–Souls ripple through the stream of time around him. To mortals, fate continued its orderly procession—predictable, obedient, blind.
But Broken-Souls were never bound by such limitations.
They were the ones who had torn themselves loose from time's spine… or twisted themselves so deeply into it that no single moment could claim them. They existed between seconds, behind causality; errors that reality had failed to erase.
And now, those same Broken-Souls were gathering in the Sixth Realm.
Even fate, vast and merciless as it was, felt the strain of that temptation.
Kudo had unwillingly become the focal point of several intersecting threads of fate. Wrong place and wrong time was a simple equation for bad luck. But add a measure of godly interference, and the result became something broken far beyond Sani.
Quazy wanted to help the only person who had ever done anything for him. Whether that act had been kindness, madness, or harm hardly mattered anymore. It hadn't been significant enough to remain clear in his memory — but the desire to repay it endured.
One mortal, surrounded by a sea of Broken-Souls.
He had committed countless insanities in his so-called saner days: challenging the Soul King, even attempting to claim the throne for himself. Yet none of those choices had forced him to question his own madness the way this one did.
Quazy's clone stepped forward and reached out to seize fate.
Behind it, his original self chose the only remaining outcome; the fate where he became the dustbin.
And in doing so, he erased his own existence.
What was fate? Quazy didn't care.
To him, it was nothing more than slippery paint stretched into the shape of a thread, forever shifting its colours. And beneath his touch, it became exactly that.
He wound the strands of fate around his arm. An arm that had already morphed into the only thing capable of restraining a slippery colour: a living canvas.
The method was crude. It lacked finesse. And so it demanded balance through raw cost.
Quazy did not refine the process—
He brute-forced it.
Sub-Space tore itself out of him in violent waves, every last reserve ripped away along with the unnatural surplus granted by some impossible, unearned miracle. Power bled from him and into the canvas as it drank him dry.
What remained was not control.
Only consequence.
"More," he demanded, stretching his canvas, his very core, beyond the threshold of suicide.
"More—more!"
Laughter tore from his throat as he wrapped one thread after another around himself, piling fate atop fate, daring the universe to stop him.
The king took notice of the Broken-Soul swelling beyond his control.
They all did, once — before Sani claimed them.
But this one was different.
This soul did not surrender to madness. It held fast to its sanity… and stepped, uninvited, into the king's own domain.
"More!" The demand thundered across the Soul Realm.
The Soul King snorted in contempt; the moment of distraction cost him his hand.
He abandoned his advantage and struck at Quazy in rage. But even as his head tore free, his will splintering with the intent to hurl a sliver of his consciousness after the fleeing Broken–Soul—
—Quazy was already gone; vanished into the stream of time itself.
"I will deal with this myself," the king growled, his words aimed at the eternal consciousness that dared challenge his dominion.
The void answered by stirring: It writhed in jagged, zigzag motions, bending wrong across reality as laughter rippled through its depths; laughter vast enough to shake realms.
"Do I seem benevolent to you?!" it thundered, dismissing the Soul King as an afterthought and turning its attention toward the one thing that truly mattered: his true soul.
The Soul King faced two inevitable outcomes: remain trapped in the eternal conflict of will, or annihilate the deranged soul who had broken the one rule he had decreed long ago. For the briefest moment, he imagined both: ending Quazy, then rebirthing himself back into the struggle.
—But fate, wearing another's face, moved first.
"Where do you think you're going?!"
A little girl with chestnut curls stepped out of nowhere — and time stopped around Quazy at her command.
"Leave that here."
She tore his arm from his body as easily as plucking a toy from a child's hand, then kicked him backwards—hard—sending him crashing back into his proper timeline.
"Grown-ups," she muttered, eyes rolling as if bored beyond words.
Reality peeled at her gesture, and the very concept of time shredded like paper around her fingers. "Always trying to control everything," she scoffed. "Let the kids make their own choices, yeah?"
She snorted up at the sky once—dismissive, final—then turned slowly toward the other two intruders.
"Farkin' hell," the smaller one swore under his breath. "We're done here." He tapped his towering companion on the arm and turned away without looking back.
The larger fellow hesitated, on the verge of protest, but the girl tilted her head with an eerie smile—and Boom! She went supernova; the world erasing itself in a silent flash.
Quazy's reckless defiance had enraged the Soul King. Yet another of Yash's twisted experiments not only prevented the king's demise, but it also disrupted the fluctuations of the battlefield enough to tip the balance in his favour.
"What happened?!" the entity roared, its voice shredding what remained of the battlefield.
"I'll tell you as soon as I figure it out," the Soul King replied with a crooked smirk, doubling the pressure. "Or right before you decide to die. Whichever comes first."
As the instigator, Quazy retained only scattered fragments of what had truly occurred. The truth was too vast, too unreal, to hold in any stable form. So he sealed the inciting incident away in the most secure place he could find: Zack's personal journal.
⋆༺𓆩☠︎︎ Bossy ☠︎︎𓆪༻⋆
From back-alley thug to untouchable tyrant, Bossy had become the name that froze politicians, silenced cops, and broke rival gangsters across Yorkenstine. Civilians were never part of the equation, not because they were safe, but because politics demanded they be ignored. No criminal empire exists without political blood in its veins.
He was an orphan when he named himself; no legacy, no inheritance, only ambition. Turning Boss into Bossy sounds almost adorable at five years old, but when that same name survives into old age, you stop calling it childish… and start calling it prophetic.
Never question it, though; the truth scares people more than the question ever could.
Bossy was competent in a fight and unremarkable in every other way: average face, average mind, average soul. Perhaps fortune mistook him for something greater, because those low standards somehow lifted him to the top of the country's underworld. Every drug shipment fed his wealth; every killing needed his blessing. He dabbled in trafficking and weapons, and even dreamed of ruling the world, until he discovered those paths demanded more than mediocrity.
Bossy believed in outsourcing survival. "If you're too weak to hold the world," he liked to tell his dominators, "turn people into pillars and climb on their backs."
In his own twisted way, Bossy had become a pillar for the dominators clawing for control over the world. What made him dangerous was how ruthlessly he maintained his own pillars to keep his empire standing. Every monster hides behind a support system: a crew, a weapon, a politician ready to rewrite guilt into law. None of them is broken enough to shoulder the world alone. No human ever is.
A leader may send his gang to carve out new territory, but if he keeps barking orders from the safety of his throne, one of his pillars—the man bleeding on the front lines—will eventually rise against him. And when that moment comes, the boss loses more than his crown. He loses his worth. And sometimes the only currency left to him: his life.
A true boss ensures that the machinery behind the empire remains a mystery. He turns ignorance into armor during a takeover. Bossy's mediocrity spared him from overreach, and his luck delivered a technique that kept his pillars bound to him for life.
Naturally, he told himself he would take the secret to his grave, refusing to share it even with his own son on his wife's deathbed; when the truth was meant to outlive him.
Alas, it no longer mattered.
The gods had stepped into the game, and mortal schemes held no weight on a battlefield beyond life.
In the criminal world, bloodlines meant little as nepotism was a luxury that never lasted. Perhaps that was one of the industry's few redeeming qualities. Bossy tried to break it anyway, feeding successor after successor to the grinder while clinging to his throne. Now, with age gnawing at him, "Bossy Super Jr." stood as his last, desperate gamble at immortality through blood.
"Is owning a country's criminal empire still not enough for you?" Bossy Super Jr. asked, snuffing out his father's ambitions without a second thought.
"Boss—!" The door flew open as a lackey stumbled in, pale with fear. "We've got trouble," he choked out, knowing he had only seconds to speak. "It's your dog. Something's set it off."
The lackey struggled to hide his fear. Showing it to anyone but his boss meant death—yet the Hound stood waiting, and fear clawed its way through him. His fate was sealed either way: by fang or by command; All that remained was to deliver the message before the claws chose him.
"Since when?" Bossy asked, his patience as thin as the man's lifespan.
"We lost twenty—"
Bossy dismissed the dead with a wave of the hand. "Weapons," he demanded, already calculating how to delay the next gang war.
"Twenty full-body armors. Ten automatic rifles. Roughly seventy blades."
He'd rehearsed the answers a hundred times before barging in, but the memory of the Hound feeding on his closest friend—granting him just enough time to flee—bled into his voice, making every syllable stutter.
Bossy glanced around, irritated that there was no one else to issue orders to.
"Alright," he muttered. "Recover what's left. Order new supplies. Fix the junk and give it to the troublesome recruits. I want fresh blood in four days—war starts then…" He paused, eyes narrowing. "Play smart. You'll be leading them into battle."
Fresh blood or not, leading untested thugs into a manufactured war was suicide. The lackey understood that truth all too well, yet he thanked Bossy anyway.
After all, even Bossy's throne had been bought the same way: one terrified man, one impossible fight, and faced against the terrifying Hound himself.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Thirty-Five. ———<>||<>———