Chương 164: 77 - TAKE A LOAD OFF

It's strange how quickly time can pass. Before anyone knew it, five years had gone by. Graceland had become a center for the world after Zero Day. It kept expanding and expanding until their little ocean island had grown to the size of a bustling metropolis, all out on the ocean. Tens of thousands from around the country would eventually flock to the illustrious place known as the Looter's Paradise—a legend where nothing was impossible, and they had staved off the end of the world.

Once there, all would be safe from the demons under the protection of the Redeemers. T'balt Ferrier looked over the city from the Redeemer's tower. A thin white, cathedral-like structure that had replaced the Bestower statue in the square. It was so they wouldn't have to hide underground anymore. If their people wanted them, they'd know where to find them. His face showed the first signs of aging. His hair had grown down to his shoulders, but was often contained in a dark bun.

He had let a dabble of a beard outline his thin jaw. His body was 30 years old now. Though it never felt like it. In many ways, he felt fresher now than he ever had in his life. He closed the window to the top floor of the tower, blocking some of the summer afternoon's heat. There was a radio on his desk, filling the office space with a man's low voice.

"Today in Graceland, it is a resounding 95 degrees with no rain whatsoever. Perfect day to take a trip out to the beach. But it may already be too late, if you didn't claim a space this morning because there are so many people out there that…" The radio's voice trailed off as T'balt left the room and walked down the stairs and unlocked a door. They kept their special loot in a special closet. That way the powerful stuff was never hogged by one person. It was one of the rules they agreed on.

But T'balt was mostly the only one who still used this room. After grabbing what he needed, he threw a traveling backpack over his buttoned T-shirt and started heading out the door.

"Hrrggghhh…" He stopped short at the sudden greeting of a flying bomb with a face on it. It kept its eyes squinted, and cheeks puffed out like a sumo wrestler on the toilet.

"Oh... uhh hey." Tyene walked into the room with the bomb's two brothers, floating next to her ears. One of them had a derpy, relaxed smile while the other one seemed to gyrate with a manic energy like it was gonna blow any moment.

"What are their names again?" he asked.

"Allen, Edgar, and Po… Po's the stupid-looking one," Tyene answered. The others approached him.

"Oh yeah. Cute." He tried to pet them, but when he touched them, their fuses would light at the spark of their excitement. So he thought better of it. Tyene leaned against the hallway wall. She had let her hair down, wearing a blue silk, kimono-like cardigan and baggy pants. Despite the heat, she always wore long, baggy sleeves to cover the prosthetics that replaced her leg and arm. One arm hung at her side while the other wrapped around her chest as if she were folding it with her phantom arm.

"Going out again?" She asked.

"Yeah."

"I wish you'd stop stressing about that stuff already."

"I don't tell you what to do with your free time, do I?"

"No… but those two are a lot better at hide and seek than you are. If you haven't found them after 5 years, then I'd say you lost."

"You think they're hiding from me on purpose?"

"Who knows? But if number 1 and number 2 wanted to be found, you would've done it by now." T'balt pursed his lips and walked past her, heading to the kitchen to get a few snacks for his trip.

"It doesn't matter if they want to be found. If they reset things, everything we built is gone. I can't live peacefully if those two Redeemers are out there doing who knows what?" She followed behind him with a slow, stiff gait.

"Probably taking a load off. If they haven't died yet, then let sleeping dogs lie. You should probably avoid bringing any bad juju into this place. I just got used to it."

"I'll just feel better once I know what their plans are. Okay?"

"You'll also feel better if you relax some and sleeping dogs lie." He paused just before entering the kitchen, sensing more of a proposition than a statement.

"Are you scheming something?" It was then that Uriel popped out from the kitchen with two extraordinarily large bottles of red wine in both arms.

"T'balt!" he said, excitedly.

"You'll never believe we just got a brand new shipment of wines." Uriel's hair had turned back to its natural dark brown and his body had filled out over the years inside his black and white robes, much more than the starved stick body of old. Now, some might even call him plump.

"These were worth a small fortune, and Tyene was able to get us a whole crate." It was hard to envision a man a thousand years old getting this excited over wine, but here they were.

"A whole crate, huh?" T'balt looked at Tyene skeptically.

"Yeah… But if you have to go, we understand. We'll just have to drink the whole thing and have a party just the two of us. Isn't that right, Uri?" Uriel showed his disappointment.

"You're not joining us?" Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Maybe later, I just…" he trailed off.

"I guess I'll just have to tell your wife that I couldn't get you to sit still like she asked… She'll be so upset with me, but I'll have to tell her how hard we tried, but unfortunately he just never stops…" T'balt felt all the heat leave his body, as a man did when presented the possibility of sleeping on the couch. Inwardly, he cursed Uriel for using Ellie's assertiveness against him.

"Ahh… maybe just one drink?" A full bottle later, all three of them were laughing uncontrollably around a kitchen table, feeling the buzz of the impromptu Redeemer wine night.

"I'm telling you, I was all ready to face the demon dragon and then it came out of its cave with the biggest set of tits I've ever seen!" Uriel cracked up, slapping the table.

"I couldn't do it. I got reset because I couldn't stop staring at them."

"You know there are people who would cream their pants to see something like that," Tyene added.

"Are you talking about furries?" T'balt asked through his gut.

"Come on, T'balt, don't act like you wouldn't fuck that busty lizard. I know you know what scalies are."

"I have no comment."

"WAIT SERIOUSLY!? I WAS KIDDING! You're a scaly, T'bag!?" Uriel pretended to put on his philosopher/therapist glasses.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's something that likely stemmed from an experience in your childhood. Would you like to talk about it?"

"You guys are laughing, but we've all had bad days on the internet. Sometimes you go too far, and you just don't come back."

"No wait. Is Ellie secretly a lizard person?" Tyene asked, wide-eyed. T'balt pretended to clear his throat.

"I promised not to tell anyone her biggest secret, but… yes. Every full moon… she can't control it. She grows horns, a tail, and a big pair of slimy lizard tits."

"Oh fuck you." They all laughed for a long while. Uriel opened their second bottle and filled each of their glasses.

"So Uri, any more riveting stories from your past lives?" Tyene asked.

"Too many to count," Uriel said.

"Ask something more specific?"

"There was something I was curious about," T'balt spoke up, head resting in his arm.

"Do you remember fighting the Redeemer? The Prime Redeemer, I mean."

"Oh, I'd never forget."

"Apparently I would, and Tyene never saw it, so I don't even know what the fuckin thing looks like," T'balt was far drunker than the other two. He never could hold his liquor very well. Tyene frowned and took a long drink. Uriel grew thoughtful.

"Well, it was an immaculate beast. But I couldn't strictly tell you what it looked like. It has so many forms. It's malleable, always changing, looking far different every time you encounter it."

"Really? Is it really the strongest creature in the apocalypse?"

"As far as I know."

"Then how'd you beat it?"

"With an army. I had raised Graceland to be even larger than it is now. We were functionally a small country with the goal of wiping every single demon off this planet. The Prime Redeemer was so strong that we naturally assumed it was their leader. So with the Bestower, I armed everyone with the strongest loot I could think of. Then we charged at it in its lair. Even though it was thousands to 1, it was still a violent fight. And I managed to land the killing blow and came out an immortal."

"But you said it looked different every time you saw it. Did you try to fight it again?"

"I did… Monan hadn't made himself known to me yet. I thought I was resetting alone, so I thought if I killed it again, I could give the loot to David and selfishly conscript someone with me. But when I went back, it had its own army. It had somehow produced a thousand Seraphs to meet me. Needless to say, my strategy didn't work a second time." Uriel lowered his eyes, deep in thought.

"But enough about me. Tyene, how did you manage to kill it without even looking at it? That's a story I'd like to hear."

"Pass," she said lazily.

"Oh… can you not remember, like T'balt?"

"Nah, T'bag's still an anomaly." Uriel leaned back in his chair.

"I still haven't been able to figure out why that is. The fact that we keep our memories is the only thing that makes us different than everyone else. So why that time, didn't it apply to T'balt?"

"Beats me," T'balt said, scratching his head.

"Though I really wish I could remember. From what I gather, I must've been quite something then." There was a silence for a moment.

"Wait, didn't you die on your first try?" Tyene suddenly asked like it was an accusation.

"What?"

"After you lost your memory. I remember you telling me that in your first conscious life you got unalived by some huge deer furry."

"The Crimson Deer King and I demand you put respect on his name. He was my first kill. That was the day I became a man."

"Just answer the damn question."

"Yeah. he killed me. So? I didn't know a thing that was going on then."

"Oh, I see…" Uriel posed with a finger to his chin.

"You see what?"

"That means that iteration where you died would've been functionally the same as the Pure Line for you."

"Meaning?"

"Probably for ten thousand lives straight you got capped on Zero Day." Tyene pointed at him like she was making fun of him for it.

"That was until someone changed that. And the only people capable of changing the future are Redeemers." T'balt paused, an epiphany coming to his eyes.

"So one of you must've saved me!" He suddenly stood up, excited, nearly knocking over his glass of wine. Tyene and Uriel simultaneously nodded their heads in agreement. He switched his gaze between the two of them.

"Wasn't me," Tyene shrugged.

"I had no idea who you were till the sex dungeon."

"From where my prison cell was, I doubt anything I could do would even indirectly affect you in your city," Uriel answered his unsaid question. T'balt sat back down, deflated.

"Hmmm… I don't think it was Monan either. He didn't know me at all when I first met him. And that's probably the possibility that I least care for."

"You think it could've been the mysterious number 2?" Uriel asked.

"Maybe." That's when they noticed Tyene quietly giggling in her chair, actually more like she was a second away from bursting into so hard a laugh that it would explode a kidney.

"What is it?" T'balt said.

"I don't know…" Tyene squeaked out between snorts.

"That was like, right before that long string of week-long iterations, right?"

"Yeah…"

"And you were a delivery driver, right?"

"Yeah…"

"Well what if I said… that around then I decided to pig out… and order a shit ton of delivery."

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me." All of her laughter came vomiting out of her mouth with the foul stench of T'balt's shame. Her little bomb pets even joined in on the laughter, looking like their little fuses were gonna pop. Her mansion wasn't too far from him, and that morning, he did go out to deliver food. However, he remembered getting pissed off at that one All One Burger order and then stopping. But if, say, he'd gotten a different order, he might not have gone home early.

Which meant he likely wasn't at home when Zero Day happened. Which meant he likely didn't get killed by the Deer King. Which meant he could go on and kill the Prime Redeemer. He groaned as even Uriel couldn't help but laugh.

"That's my origin story. Tyene's damn stress eating."

"Oh yeah, no worries. I just errantly create Redeemers when I get hungry," she gloated.

"I can't believe you're proud of this. You need to control your appetite."

"Hey, don't talk to me like that. I made you." T'balt got up, no longer feeling like drinking, and walked away to drain the busty lizard. When he got back, he didn't encounter the same laughing storm he expected to return to. Someone new stood by the table. It was Acelin, 16 now, and just as tall as T'balt, if not taller by an inch. He'd kept his hair short and had grown into a slim but burly young boy. But thankfully, he still had those same pinchable cheeks.

Though there was something off about him, he looked a little panicked.

"What's up, Ace? Is something wrong?" The young man looked frantically at the floor.

"Yeah… It's umm… there's something wrong with T'tania."