Chapter 71: Back to the Starting Point
"So I stepped in. Who told me to be so devastatingly handsome and overwhelmingly kind-hearted?" Leon boasted, not a single trace of heat rising to his cheeks. With a smooth, practiced flick of his wrist, he produced a thick stack of bound paper from his pocket, offering it forward.
"This is...?" Cocolia murmured, her brow furrowing.
Beside her, Bronya mirrored her mother's bewilderment. The two women reached out hesitantly, taking the heavy parchment.
"The script," Leon explained, a brilliant, thoroughly unbothered smile stretching across his face. "When the Astral Express Crew arrives, you just need to hit your marks and act exactly according to what's written on those pages."
He had it all perfectly mapped out in his head. First, excise the immediate, fatal threat of the Stellaron's corruption from Cocolia's mind. Second, let Stelle and Caelus stumble through the original storyline exactly as intended. This way, the Trailblazers would still face the necessary crucible to grasp the true meaning of Preservation, earning Qlipoth's gaze and claiming the Flame Lance and the fire of Preservation he had safely tucked away.
To an outside observer, this might seem entirely pointless. If the plot was going to loop right back to its original trajectory, why bother crashing Qlipoth Fort in the first place?
The answer was simple. If the timeline remained entirely untouched, how many Silvermane Guards would be thrown into the meat grinder of the Fragmentum? How many lives would be needlessly sacrificed to Cocolia's corrupted decisions before the Express Crew finally solved the problem?
Leon was no saint. He didn't pretend to be the savior of the cosmos. But if a little bit of casual meddling could save thousands of lives from a frozen grave, he certainly didn't mind lifting a finger.
Honestly, he felt as if his entire body were practically radiating the golden light of karmic merit.
'I really am such a phenomenal person,'he thought, mentally wiping away a fake tear.'So kind-hearted. It's making me emotional.'
Letting Cocolia and Bronya play out the villainous climax was strictly to ensure Stelle and Caelus received their necessary character development. Leon firmly believed that a little trauma built character.
Somewhere out in the cosmos, Elio was probably weeping over his own prophecies. 'Good script,'the Destiny's Slave would likely beg.'Promise me you'll send a copy of your revisions next time! Stop giving me a heart attack!'
"Just like this..." Bronya muttered, her silver-armored fingers tracing the ink. "We just... act it out?"
The mother and daughter exchanged a deeply skeptical glance before flipping rapidly through the pages.
The events detailed within the margins... could this actually be the future? Both women possessed sharp, analytical minds, which was precisely why they found the concept so utterly absurd. Belobog had been sealed away beneath the ice for over seven hundred years. Beyond the lingering concepts of Preservation and Destruction, their understanding of the cosmic Paths had long since eroded into myth. Naturally, they couldn't comprehend the sheer scale of destiny manipulation at play here, assuming this was the work of the end itself.
Though, to be fair, Leon was far from being the end of all things.
"We just need to follow these lines?" Cocolia asked, her voice raspy. She forced her chin up, meeting Leon's amused gaze with heavy, exhausted eyes.
She didn't trust him. Not entirely. Yet, the overwhelming, suffocating power he had demonstrated just moments ago was burned into her retinas. For a being of his caliber, snapping Belobog's eternal crisis in half might truly be as effortless as breathing.
But that realization brought a bitter, hollow ache to her chest. If this mysterious stranger could wave his hand and fix everything... what did her centuries of agonizing struggle amount to? What were all the sacrifices, the sleepless nights, the horrific compromises?
The thought was too dark to entertain. Now that the Stellaron's insidious whispers had been violently severed from her mind, the sheer weight of her past mistakes crashed over her. Memories of her corrupted decisions surged forward like a suffocating tide.
'Just what kind of foolish, unforgivable things have I done?' she thought, her nails digging into her palms until the skin nearly broke.
But she was the Supreme Guardian. She refused to let the crushing gravity of her guilt break her spine. She had to survive. She had to atone.
"That's right. Stick to the script," Leon confirmed, crossing his arms casually. "The Astral Express Crew will be knocking on your door very soon."
He cast his senses outward, feeling the distant ripples of energy across the snow plains. Sampo had already pulled his signature vanishing act, ditching the crew in the snow. Meanwhile, Gepard had just wrapped up his obligatory misunderstanding-fueled brawl with the Trailblazers and was currently escorting them straight toward the city gates.
"But what if..." Bronya started, her voice trembling slightly. "What if the actual situation deviates from what you've written?"
Even now, the young heir was trapped in a surreal daze. Just minutes ago, she had been locked in a desperate, tearful argument with her mother. Then, this terrifyingly casual stranger had shattered the doors, casually exposed the Stellaron's parasitic grip on the Supreme Guardian, and unleashed a level of power that made the very air scream. Her mind was an absolute wreck.
Listening to Cocolia's broken, tearful confession had shattered Bronya's worldview. For the first time, she truly understood the crushing, impossible burden her mother had carried alone. Belobog was bleeding out, standing on the absolute precipice of annihilation. Putting herself in the Supreme Guardian's shoes, Bronya realized with a sickening twist in her stomach that she wouldn't have known how to break the deadlock either. The sheer anxiety and powerlessness threatened to swallow her whole.
And then, this man simply declared the apocalypse canceled.
In that fleeting second, a wave of indescribable, desperate gratitude had flooded Bronya's chest. But before she could even process the relief, he had shoved a theatrical script into her hands and demanded they put on a stage play. The emotional whiplash was giving her a migraine.
"Not a problem at all. Feel free to improvise the minor details, just keep it natural," Leon waved a hand dismissively. "As long as you hit the major plot points, we're golden."
He eyed the young heir critically. Bronya was still far too green; her honest nature meant her acting skills were likely abysmal. Cocolia, on the other hand? She was a seasoned politician who had ruled a dying city for years. Her ability to lie with a straight face was practically professional-grade.
"But is this truly enough?" Cocolia pressed, her grip tightening on the paper. "You haven't actually explained how you intend to save this world."
She had skimmed the dialogue and understood the general flow of the impending climax, but the pages completely omitted the most critical detail: the actual salvation of Jarilo-VI.
"Simple," Leon replied, his tone as casual as if he were discussing the weather. "Once the curtain falls on your little performance, I'll step in and wipe out the vast majority of the Fragmentum zones across the surface. As for the Eternal Freeze... I won't melt it entirely. Instead, I'll adjust the planet's rotation and axial tilt. We'll bring back the four seasons."
He didn't bother hiding his intentions, laying out the cosmic-scale terraforming project like a basic chore. In the game from his past life, the exact ecological mechanics of how the Express Crew fixed the planet's climate were left rather vague. But since he was physically standing here now, he had his own aesthetic preferences.
Ice and snow were the defining characteristics of Jarilo-VI. The frozen wastelands possessed a stark, haunting beauty that he rather liked. Completely eradicating the snow would ruin the planet's unique charm. Besides, the world was massive, and Belobog was nothing more than a tiny speck on its surface. He possessed the power to completely rewrite the global climate, confining the bitter cold to the polar regions while breathing warmth back into the temperate zones, restoring a natural, healthy cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
"Then... how are we supposed to contact you afterward?" Cocolia hesitated, her eyes darting to a specific line on the page. "And this section here... it mentions me merging with the Stellaron..."
She bit the inside of her cheek. She still couldn't bring herself to trust him unconditionally. It wasn't that she doubted his ability to help. A being capable of shifting planetary orbits had absolutely no reason to lie to a dying civilization. What she doubted was his charity. She refused to believe he wanted nothing in return.
It was a perfectly rational paranoia. As the Supreme Guardian, the naive, idealistic girl she once was had died centuries ago. Decades of cutthroat politics and desperate resource management had carved one absolute truth into her bones: there was no such thing as unconditional kindness in this universe. Every move this man made had to serve a hidden agenda.
The terrifying part was that she simply couldn't see the angle. She racked her brain, trying to calculate what meager assets Belobog possessed that could possibly tempt a god-like entity.
Could it be... herself?
Cocolia almost let out a bitter, self-deprecating laugh at the thought. Absolutely ridiculous. A man who treated the stars as his playground could summon galaxies of flawless beauties with a snap of his fingers. Why would he ever look twice at an aging, exhausted country girl ruling over a frozen rock?
Yet, if offering herself could genuinely buy Belobog's salvation, she would strip off her coat and kneel before him without a second thought. She would pay any price.
But what if the cost was higher? What if, once the snow finally melted and the sky cleared, this smiling savior produced a contract demanding the absolute subjugation of her people? If she traded their frozen doom for eternal slavery, she would forever be remembered as the ultimate sinner of Belobog.
"What's so difficult about that? We just exchange numbers," Leon said, completely shattering her dark, dramatic internal monologue.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out two sleek, high-tech smartphones, and casually tossed them into Cocolia and Bronya's hands.
"Alright, the Express Crew is just about at the gates. I expect a stellar performance from both of you," Leon clapped his hands together, his eyes gleaming with mischievous anticipation. "Oh, by the way! You're going to need a prop. I'll lend this back to you for the time being!"
Without any warning, Leon casually lobbed the glowing, apocalyptic core of the Stellaron straight at Cocolia's chest like a baseball.
With a blinding flash of golden light, the Cancer of All Worlds sank effortlessly back into her flesh.
Deep within the void of her consciousness, a sentient, infinitely frustrated sigh echoed out.
[Stellaron:...Back to the starting point...]
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