2024-12-27 14:36:43Kael arrived at the bustling airport, his coat slung over one shoulder and his hands stuffed casually into his pockets.
He scanned the terminal, a faint smirk tugging at his lips when he spotted Selene and her two towering bodyguards ahead. She hadn’t noticed him yet, which gave him the luxury of bracing himself for what he knew was coming. “Kael!” Selene’s sharp voice cut through the crowd as she turned and locked eyes with him. Her expression shifted from confusion to barely concealed annoyance. “Are you following me now? Can’t stand being stuck in your dirt pile?” Kael strode closer, his demeanor unbothered. “Good to see you too, Selene. And here I thought airports were for public use.” “Public use doesn’t mean stalking me,” she snapped, her hands clenched into fists. “What are you doing here? Looking to play the role of a hero again?” Kael tilted his head, a ghost of a smile on his face. “Heroes chase glory. I chase results. You wouldn’t understand.” One of her bodyguards leaned down to whisper something in her ear, but Selene waved him off. “Whatever. Just stay out of my way, Kael.” Kael gave her a mock salute. “Your wish is my command, oh mighty war hero.” Before Selene could retort, a commotion erupted at the far end of the terminal. Armed attackers stormed in, their faces obscured by masks. Panicked screams filled the air as they fired warning shots into the ceiling. “Everyone on the ground!” one of the attackers barked, waving his gun wildly. “Nobody moves, or we start shooting!” As chaos unfolded around him, he shuffled lazily, his expression unreadable. Selene, already on her feet, gestured for her bodyguards to shield her. “Stay sharp,” she ordered, her voice low. “They’re after me. Keep the hostages safe.” Another attacker, this one wearing a vest laden with explosives, stepped forward. “Selene!” he bellowed. “You killed my brother and left my family in ruins! Now you’ll pay the price.” Selene’s fists tightened, but her body remained still.Selene glanced at the bombs strapped to the attackers' bodies and sighed, standing up reluctantly.
Kael lazily glanced at her, sneering with disdain, "The great war goddess is asking for help from someone like me?"
"You! You’re such a coward!" Selene muttered under her breath.
"Say whatever you like, I just hope our great war goddess can handle this crisis on her own!" Kael didn’t even look at her.
Selene shot him a vicious glare, then slowly stood up, raising her hands high and walking toward the attackers.
"Yes, that's it! No tricks!" The leader of the attackers laughed arrogantly.
"Mommy, I'm scared!" A little girl cried out.
The leader of the attackers pointed his gun at the girl with malice, "Shut up! If you don’t, I’ll kill you!"
"Stop! She’s just a child!" Selene shouted loudly. "I’ll cooperate with you, become your hostage!"
The leader of the attackers sneered, "I didn’t expect the famous war goddess to be so kind! Then strip off your clothes, I’m afraid you might have weapons on you!"
The attackers laughed loudly, eager to see Selene humiliate herself in front of them.
Selene’s face turned pale. She did have weapons hidden on her, and she had planned to use this moment to attack.
"Such a coward!" Selene felt a surge of disappointment as she slowly walked toward the attackers, looking for an opportunity to kill the one with the bomb strapped to him.
"Mommy, am I going to die?" The little girl’s trembling voice echoed, and Kael slowly opened his eyes.
"Don’t worry, we’ll all be fine," Kael’s calm voice rang out.
His fingers twitched, and with a speed almost impossible to track, two playing cards flew from his hands, slicing the wires of the bomb’s fuse.
At that moment, Selene found her opportunity. She drew her gun and fired quickly.
Despite being a powerful warrior, she failed to hit the man’s heart and instead shot him in the shoulder.
"Bi... I’ll take you down with me!" The attacker, who was strapped with the bomb, shouted loudly, pressing the detonation button.
But the bomb didn’t react. The fuse had already been cut by Kael’s cards. The attacker’s eyes widened in disbelief, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
Selene reacted faster. Seizing the moment of confusion, she fired several more shots, killing most of the attackers.
After everything was settled, Selene marched angrily toward Kael.
"You coward! If that bastard’s bomb hadn’t malfunctioned, we’d all be dead because of your cowardice!" Selene shouted, her voice filled with fury.
"Is that so? Wasn’t it your lousy aim that caused the problem? You’re a war goddess, but you couldn’t even hit the enemy’s heart?" Kael mocked, his tone dripping with sarcasm.
"You!" Selene was infuriated by Kael’s mocking, but clearly, the surrounding people hadn’t seen what had really happened. They all firmly supported their familiar war goddess.
"This man is a disgrace! The war goddess saved his life, and yet he was just playing with those useless playing cards!"
"He’s just a coward! He didn’t dare fight those bad guys but blamed everyone else!"
The murmurs around her gave Selene even more confidence. She sneered at Kael, waiting for him to say something.
However, Kael ignored all the chatter. He calmly stood up and began walking toward the boarding gate.
"I don’t have time to play this debate game. My flight is about to take off."
Just then, the little girl who had been crying earlier whispered softly, "I saw that man throw two playing cards..."
Her words caused a ripple of laughter from the crowd.
"Playing cards? What can those do? Is he going to kill people with playing cards like in the movies?"
"We didn’t see him do anything, but the war goddess killed the attackers!"
Selene assumed the little girl was still shaken by the event, so she didn’t take her words seriously. Instead, she focused on helping her subordinates clean up the scene.
"War goddess, we found two playing cards in that corner over there..." A soldier stammered as he reported.
"Playing cards?" Selene thought back to what the little girl had said, but she soon chuckled bitterly.
"I must be crazy. No one can do anything with playing cards. If he were really that skilled, why didn’t he just use the playing cards to kill the attackers?"
Selene regained her composure, then ordered, "Forget about those useless things. Go investigate the identities of these people and how they infiltrated the airport!"
"Yes!" The soldier saluted, then immediately turned to carry out his orders.
Selene shook her head, addressing her bodyguards.
“Let’s go. This day’s been long enough.”
But as she started to leave, her gaze fell on two playing cards lying on the floor near the attackers—a king and a joker.
Her brow furrowed as a flicker of doubt crossed her mind.
Outside the terminal, Kael strode toward a waiting cab, oblivious to Selene’s growing suspicion.
In the shadows of the parking lot, a figure watched him intently, a phone pressed to his ear.
“He’s moving toward Cresmont,” the figure whispered.
“Everything is in place.”
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Chapter 255
The tear widened.Not like paper. Not like sky.It screamed open, as if reality itself had reached its breaking point and could no longer hold its seams together. The margins howled with it—bleeding chronology, bleeding memory.And from that wound came everything the world had once forgotten.Whole timelines—long buried, discarded, pruned from the Tree of Plot—came crashing through like collapsing wavefronts. The bleeding margins quaked, and Subtext warped like a glitching dream.One by one, the alternate realities fell into the world like glass shattering in reverse.A kingdom appeared on a hill that hadn’t existed a second before.An entire species blinked into life—then burned into ash.A river rewound into a volcano, erupting upward from the soil like it was angry to have ever cooled.A child, playing with chalk on a cobblestone path, blinked—then became an old man, screaming, weeping, grasping at memories of parents who had never existed.“This is wrong!” Selene cried. “It’s rewr
Chapter 254
It stood between realities like an ink blot defying grammar.The figure—Draft Zero—wasn’t a man, or a monster.It was the part of a story you were never meant to see.The discarded voice.The original fracture.The wrong sentence, left unspoken for so long it became its own echo.Kael felt its presence like a splinter in his thoughts. Something ancient and misremembered, a half-erased whisper at the foundation of his being.“Who are you?” he asked.But even as the words left his lips, part of him knew.The figure straightened, parchment skin fluttering in nonexistent wind. It had no eyes, no face—only a blankness wrapped in folds of obsolete narrative.“I am what came before, Kael,” it whispered. “Before the first story. Before the first quill. Before the Library carved truth into shelves.”Its voice didn’t travel through sound—it pressed directly into the mind, like a childhood memory reemerging with the wrong details. It turned toward the others—Selene, Pamela, Elias, Riva—and with
Chapter 253
The door opened like a wound.It didn’t swing outward or inward—it simply peeled, like memory detaching from bone, like a truth slowly being admitted. As it parted, light spilled from within—not radiant, but revealing, the kind of light that doesn’t illuminate the world so much as strip it down to the shape of its making.Pamela was the first to move.Despite the warnings in her bones, despite the twitching of glyphs along the corridor walls as if trying to signal “do not enter,” she crossed the threshold with the cautious resolve of a historian walking into a page that should never have existed.Beyond the door was no room, no chamber, no vault.It was a loop.A recursive sphere of memory, repeating endlessly in all directions like an echo locked in glass. In the center of it—curled, flickering, radiant and trembling—was Kael, or rather, the moment Kael first knew himself.⸻It was not a moment of joy. Not triumph. Not even clarity.It was terror.There, at the primal origin of his s
Chapter 252
It began with glyphs.Symbols not etched, but remembered—carved not into stone or bark, but into the soft pliable clay of the world’s forgotten thoughts. They pulsed in the margins like veins beneath a translucent skin, glowing faintly with an inner phosphorescence, casting long shadows that shouldn’t have been possible in a world that had no consistent light source anymore.Elias crouched low near the base of a hill where language itself seemed to weep. His fingers traced the symbols reverently, his brow damp with sweat. He wasn’t deciphering language so much as listening to the sediment of meaning. This wasn’t text—it was subtext. A code carved into silence. A whisper woven beneath the page.“They’re instructions,” he murmured finally, eyes widening. “Or… a confession.”Selene knelt beside him, her own breath shallow. “What do they say?”Elias blinked slowly, as if the words ached to be spoken aloud.“The fusion didn’t end the recursion. It started a descent. There’s another layer…
Chapter 251
The margins bled. They always had—but now the bleeding was slow, syrupy, unnervingly rhythmic. As though the world had found a heartbeat again, and that heartbeat pulsed through torn sentences and decaying metaphors. The stitched edges of reality no longer held neatly; instead, they frayed like threads at the cuff of a forgotten draft. The world wasn’t dying. It was… reconsidering itself.And in the center of that strange, shifting non-place walked Kael.Not the god. Not the mortal. Not the child nor the memory. But the fusion.Gold and grey spiraled in his irises like opposing galaxies caught in collision. His skin shimmered like something written and erased and rewritten. Where he walked, words bent around him—trees leaned to avoid narrative alignment, clouds hovered low as if eavesdropping on a story they couldn’t quite grasp.And he was silent.Not just silent in sound, but in presence. Where Kael walked, conversation fled. Wind forgot to howl. Footsteps muffled themselves. Selene
Chapter 250
The sky was ink.No longer a canvas or a dome, no longer even a concept of weather—the sky above the burning margins bled words. Letters tumbled like ash, catching fire midair, sentences dissolving before they were read. Somewhere, a clock tower chimed without gears. Somewhere else, an ocean recited poetry backwards into salt.In the center of this madness stood Selene, surrounded by the fraying edges of the world. The ritual circle had been drawn in molten ink, each glyph traced from memory, not instruction. The old magic—if it could even be called that—was never meant to fuse two selves from separate narrative threads. But then again, the world was never meant to survive Kael’s story.Selene’s hands were burned black with metaphor.In one, she held the broken quill—Kael’s, the one that ended the war, the one that sealed the Library. It still trembled with the memory of finality.In the other, she held the bleeding pen—Kael-0’s, or perhaps a relic from the first word ever written in
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