Chương 125: Pleasant Chill

June entered Lilia's room and took a look around. The qualifying challengers, their backers, and their families were relocated to new residences until the second phase of the games began. To his surprise, Lilia's room wasn't too different from his own room. The furniture, of course, was of higher quality; Lilia was literal royalty after all.

So other than the occasional novel piece of furniture, her room was of similar layout to his, which was pretty much a large bed that occupied the majority of the room's space against the wall, an artificial window off to the side, and a subspace doorway that doubled as a closet and a bathroom depending on which way you twisted the doorknob. The bed was low enough to reach his shins, and at the foot of the bed was a wood-grain wall with horizontal grooves in it.

'Looks like a TV or a fireplace would go there, but there isn't one like my room, too?' His eyes shifted over to the artificial window, then over to Lilia, who patiently looked at him without a word. June lifted his limp hand with the tabloid device clutched in it and cleared his throat.

"Want to watch the finale again… together?" He didn't come to her room with the plan to watch the finale together; he visited simply to see her once and to ask her how the device worked, but a moment of courage welled up and let him make a move. She quietly nodded and plopped down on her bed and crawled over to the middle before patting the space beside her, and June indulged.

He wasn't the type to get anxious over small things; at least he liked to think so as he revelled in the short plushness in her mattress as he crawled over and made himself comfortable next to her. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. The moment felt like it was slipping away, yet pinned in time. It was bliss. Lilia shuffled her hand around underneath the mass of pillows and blankets beside her, and in due time she found a remote.

Funnily enough, despite the abstract tablet, the remote looked like a mundane remote. She pressed a rubbery button on the remote, and after a short moment the empty wood-grain wall hissed before emitting mist. She clicked another button on the remote, and the room's lights dimmed, allowing the screen of mist to shine better in contrast to its darker surroundings.

After a few moments, a small waterfall began to fall from the ceiling in thin single streams, and the wall hummed, making the streams zigzag in the air and shape into a type of screen. Bright lights billowed from behind the watery screen, slowly dimming until the screen finally had color, and with color, the UI of the device appeared.

'This also looks mundane.' June sat quietly as Lilia fiddled with the remote, going through what seemed like streaming services and saved recordings before eventually landing on a recorded file named VOD_D12_F. After selecting it, she began fast-forwarding to the final fight with a complicated and sour expression. June sat and looked at the screen with his usual goofy smile; being with Lilia alone was all it took to lift his spirits, but internally, he also felt complicated feelings about his loss.

He felt a bit bothered; he didn't know if he suffered some sort of trauma from his final fight, but that wasn't the thing bothering him. The thing bothering him was his own lack of fear or other emotions; his death played on a loop within his mind, and pain, smell, emotion, and thought remained burned within his mind.

He understood he was a bit of an eccentric; his death was more intriguing to him than anything else; it was just that when he saw the reaction of others to his death, he began feeling like he was missing something that the others had. Eventually, the video finally fast-forwarded to the point he screamed the first time. And June's thoughts in the moment flowed back to him.