Chương 389: Chapter 384 - Meeting or none

The change came with surprisingly little fanfare. There were no more arrays unfurling overhead, no fresh storm of light to announce the shift. All Scarlett felt was a distilled, singular intent as Fate took her demand into itself and the geas strained to make it real. Then it struck a wall — a refusal so deep it might as well have been part of the world's marrow. Fate did not yield. It pressed harder. Reached deeper. Power bled from itself, siphoned from the innumerable threads that drenched this space in gold.

Each one cinched into a silent tautness that Scarlett felt in her very bones, thrumming with the burden, their combined chorus reverberating in a place beyond hearing. The ocean of threads rippled in answer, a motion too vast to truly witness. Far, far away—to the degree that distance had meaning here—the gold began to pale. The dimming spread, devouring entire tracts of the weave as if every possibility they carried was being fed into the same singular act. It kept working. Kept searching.

The pallor advanced from the horizon inward, whole swathes of the weave vanishing into nothing as the light was pulled into whatever mechanism Fate used to answer her. The closer it came, the more absolute the draw became — until there was no horizon left at all, only a collapsing expanse. The remaining threads shrank away into a narrowing ring around the platform. It closed in by degrees, the gold leeching from its own edges until what remained was a thin band of light girding them on every side.

Scarlett felt the weight of it. The demand. The refusal still holding, and the gathering focus as that final perimeter drew tight. The ring trembled. Not in weakness, but in preparation. She could taste the next beat of its pulse before it came. Then the band contracted again—one clean convulsion, a reach aimed somewhere beyond her reach—and with that ultimate effort, the last of the gold went out, leaving their platform alone in perfect, depthless dark.

Just like that, a power that had governed this world since its first sentence was gone. Scarlett found herself almost offended by the brevity of its end. But her attention was already on the silence that followed, straining for what might come next — the held-breath pause to see if the geas had succeeded, or if the demand had vanished with its 'underwriter'. Seconds passed. Long, stretching seconds. But nothing happened. A hollow sense of anticlimax settled in her. The geas had failed.

The Other would not—could not—be brought to her. Disappointment came. Her aim had been to overwhelm Fate. That had been accomplished. She had never truly expected more than that. So she had no right to feel disappointed. Which made it all the more irritating that she did. Footsteps approached behind her. She turned to find Yamina.

"Good job," the woman said. Scarlett studied the woman's face. There was relief there. An easing, as if some invisible weight had slipped from her shoulders. And yet she didn't look entirely satisfied either.

"…Is that all?" Scarlett asked after a moment.

"Was there more you wanted to do?"

"No. It simply feels…abrupt. That it is over." Yamina considered her.

"…The act itself is done, but we still have the wake. The average person might not notice Fate's absence, but some will. The gods among them. I wouldn't be surprised if we have made certain divinities very angry just now." Scarlett frowned.

"Do you expect that to become a problem?"

"It could," Yamina admitted.

"The gods are largely confined to their own plane, and I suspect Fate was one of the cords that helped bind them there. Not the only one, but a cord nonetheless. It's reasonable to assume their influence over the Material Realm will deepen after this."

"I see." That was something to be wary of, then. Though Scarlett wasn't sure how wary she should be. The gods were distant enough that she barely knew which might pose a real threat. Ittar and Itris were obvious names, with the former being one of the most influential in the Material Realm. But whether Ittar would oppose her for acting against Fate was unclear. Her gaze shifted to Slate, who watched them both without expression. [Eternity Made Whole] rested in her grasp, the scythe angled skyward.

"Do you feel anything out of order?" Scarlett asked. Slate shook her head.

"No."

"Good." Scarlett turned to Yamina again.

"How do we return?"

"If we deactivate the arrays, we'll be brought back to the Tower," Yamina said.

"Then let us do so." Yamina regarded her for a beat longer, then gave a faint smile and walked back to her own runic circle. Her spellbook appeared in her hands, opening of its own accord. Scarlett observed her, then let her eyes drift across the infinite dark now surrounding them. It was unsettling to look at directly. Pure, absolute nothingness. Perhaps the closest she had ever come to seeing a literal void.

"Oh, there was something I wanted to ask you, Baroness," Yamina's voice carried over.

"In the geas you made, you said something rather intriguing. You mentioned 'The Other', didn't you?" Just as those words reached Scarlett, a system notification flashed before her. She started reading — and stilled. [Main questline "What comes next" has been completed] [Objective completed: Decide] [Reward: —] It wasn't the completion that caught her attention, but the second window that bloomed beside it. [Curious decision] [It would be a shame to leave it at that] Scarlett stared at the lines.

A strange dissociation unfurled through her. Her ears rang. Her pulse spiked. It took a moment to realise Yamina's voice was gone. Another to realise the platform, the arrays, the void—everything—had fallen away. And another still to understand that she was now standing in amidst a sea of wind-stirred grass. Slowly, she turned. Her eyes found the only break in the green: a pale, lichen-spotted rock a few steps away. A lone figure sat on it. A man dressed in a simple brown vest over a white wool shirt.

He was bald, with soft, slightly sagging skin and a faint shadow of stubble, and a small mole just above his right lip. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. It was the sort of face you might pass on any market and forget moments later. He leaned forward, one elbow on his knee, watching her with a mild, knowing smile. Scarlett regarded him, cataloguing every ordinary contour. There was something familiar in the ordinariness.

It reminded her of The Gentleman, but the affinity here was different.

"What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?" he asked in a tone that matched that feeling of familiarity.

"And here I was, happy you'd sent for me after all this time." Scarlett stayed quiet, eyes narrowing.

"Come now, is the glare necessary?" The man straightened, raising his hands as if in surrender.

"I was looking forward to this moment. I'd hate for it to amount to nothing more than you standing there in silence."

"…Who are you?" Scarlett asked. The smile returned, looser now, though no less deliberate. There was something in it. Something inherently unsettling.

"All that effort. All that trouble. You even erased what remained of a primordial deity well beyond the ken of your kind. Twice. Are you truly going to squander this opportunity on questions you already know the answers to?"

"…The Other," she said. He clapped once and leaned back.

"Quite right. That's the name I've picked up of late. I might have hoped we were familiar enough to drop the 'The', but I can't fault you for clinging to formality."

"Familiar?" Scarlett's voice thinned.

"This is our first meeting." His brows ticked up. He looked her over.

"First meeting? Are you sure?" He flicked his wrist. Suddenly, a knife was there. He rolled it across his knuckles with lazy ease, then drove the point into the rock beside him. One finger lifted, then a second.

"I seem to recall at least two." Scarlett frowned — then her eyes widened. That face. She thought she'd seen it before. A faint, half-forgotten memory surfaced from her first visit to Elystead. Of a man at a jewellery stall. She'd asked for directions to the inn where she later found both Fynn and Rosa, and he'd sold her a map of the city. And if that was him… Another memory followed. Her first trip to Darkshore. A brief stop at a small bookstore.

A shopkeeper who had just so happened to sell a volume that helped her access a set of Zuverian ruins containing one of Thainnith's seals.

"Seems I've sparked a recollection," The Other said.

"I was almost afraid I'd slipped your mind entirely. Like some common, disposable NPC." The term—so comfortable yet jarring—snapped her attention fully back to him.

"You have been watching me."

"I thought that went without saying. But yes."

"Not merely watching," Scarlett said, her voice gaining a sharper edge.

"You have been interfering. I always found it suspicious that Rosa happened to be there the day I sought to recruit Fynn. That Raimond was in Crowcairn when Anguish's Citadel emerged. That Arlene was a Hartford." She fixed him with her hard stare.

"That was you." He spread his arms.

"I won't deny it. I may have dabbled in the occasional nudge."

"Why?"

"Why not? It keeps the board lively." His smile tilted.

"And in the end, were those nudges not to your benefit?"

"So you claim you only acted to help me?"

"Help? No. But it has suited me better to have you hale than otherwise." Scarlett held his gaze for several seconds.

"…Why did you bring me here?" The Other rested one hand on his knee, tapping a slow rhythm.

"I found your use of the geas to reach me curious. Endearing, even. There were a litany of other paths you might have pursued to achieve the same result, but you chose that one. While it failed, I thought I might grant you the smallest slice of what you wanted — as thanks, if you like."

"Thanks?" He nodded.

"For putting what was left of Sarisa—or Fate, as you know her—to rest. Say what one will, Sarisa was once something like a friend. Other circumstances aside, I'm glad to see her find an ending."

"You were the one who conscripted her remains into the Fate of this world in the first place," Scarlett said. He shrugged.

"I did say other circumstances aside." Anger surged up, raw and unfiltered, but she forced it down. Forced it down alongside every other untempered emotion that had been building since the moment she realised what sat before her.

"…Regardless," she continued tightly, "you did not answer my question." The Other tilted his head.

"Didn't I? I thought that was a fairly tidy answer."

"My question was not why you brought me here." Scarlett gestured at the endless grass.

"I asked why you brought me here. To this world. As Scarlett Hartford." He went still. For several long seconds, he simply watched her, then leaned forward with a quiet, breathless chuckle.

"Tell me — what do you think?"

"I do not know."

"No? Not even an inkling?"

"…I have surmised that I was brought here as a counterstroke to Time's interference, when he introduced the Anomalous One's existence into this world." That was why the creature sealed by Thainnith's Seals had been different from what she remembered. Time had supplanted another entity in its place, one less bound to the mechanisms of Fate.

"However," she said, "I cannot see how that directly ties to my presence. If I am your answer to Time's interference, that implies my role was to counteract the Anomalous One's influence and preserve Fate's design. Yet many of my actions have opposed that outcome — and you have even aided me in doing so." Fate's fracture had shown her the wager between The Other and Time. If anything, her being here seemed to tip the balance in Time's favour, even if he'd already lost in practice with Fate's demise.

The Other's smile widened, teeth showing.

"Contradictory, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"And that," he said, "is the name of the game for existences such as I."

"…What does that mean?"

"It means you'd do well to be content with the shape you see before you, and not try to map what lies beneath." He rose from the rock. The grassland blinked out. They stood in a dark chamber of carved stone that Scarlett immediately recognised as Beld Thylelion. She froze. A handful of bodies lay slumped against the wall, breathing but unmoving. Leon. Dame Smythe. Ovethatake. Princess Regina. And Skyler. Her eyes caught on her younger sister's face.

Close by, the Countess crouched, hood low and hands braced — but the robed woman didn't move, didn't seem to notice them at all.

"The hero's journey has its tidy set pieces," The Other said, coming to stand beside Scarlett, looking down at Skyler's still form.

"The call to adventure. The refusal. The threshold. The trials, the ordeal, the reward. And, of course, the road back." Scarlett didn't look at him.

"My reasons for what I do are my own," he went on.

"But I'll admit a fascination with the patterns of human narrative, in all its shapes. The hero's journey is one I find especially interesting. Rarely do you see it play out in reality, yet your kind has embraced it, woven it into your myths and media until it's as much ritual as story. Canonised it. So one might ask — how does it fare in reality, if you provide all the relevant scaffolding?" He waved a hand, and the world turned black. Scarlett was suddenly standing in her room. Her old room.

The one Fate's fracture had shown her, half-made bed and all. Her desk monitors glowed, their light falling across an empty chair. On the screens, the menu of Chronicle of Realms was frozen in place.

"The question you want to ask," The Other said, sitting on the edge of the bed with a gold coin rolling idly over his knuckles, "is why you. Why the character of Scarlett Hartford. Why a third-rate villainess. Why this world. Why the system. Am I right?" Scarlett turned to him, lowering her head slowly in a nod. He met her eyes.

"Do you truly wish to know?"

"Yes."

"No, Amy. You don't." She paused at the name.

"The truth—" he caught the coin in his fist and opened his hand to reveal it was gone.

"—the simple truth, is that you don't. Because you're afraid. Afraid the answer will be too mundane. Afraid it will be too monumental. Afraid of a hundred things that ignorance spares you from. And as ever, I'll be generous — and spare you those truths."

"Generous?" The word scraped. Some of the anger Scarlett had corked bled free.

"Do you call it generous to drag me from my world? To bring my sister here? To consign an entire world to your whims? To mould who I am with your system's quests and traits?"

"I suppose you'd have me called a monster for any of that?"" Yes." He studied her, then raised a finger.

"One. A question, Amy. Are you fond of your newfound companions? Rosa? Fynn? Allyssa, Shin, Kat, Evelyne? Arlene, may she rest in peace?" Her expression went cold. Hearing him speak their names so casually made her blood boil.

"The answer—despite your occasional efforts to pretend otherwise—is yes," he said.

"You hold their lives to be worthy. Then tell me: what do you make of the being who ensured those lives could exist at all? The shape of this world, though not crafted by me alone, was very much decided by me. That includes the lives of those you now cherish. Am I a monster for arranging it so they—and every other being here—can live and choose? I've done little to make this a paradise, but neither have I made it a hell. I claim to be neither saint nor devil." A second finger rose.

"Two. Bringing you here, though far from consensual, may be the most generous thing I've done for you. And I know that you know what I mean by that." A third finger.

"Three. Your sister's arrival here, unlike yours, was entirely voluntary. I would very much appreciate it if you didn't place that blame on me." Scarlett's eyes widened.

"How—?"

"If you'd like to know more," he cut in, "then I suggest you ask your sister. Though that may be difficult at the moment. Perhaps after she's grown stronger. Fortunate, isn't it, that she has such a fine foil in the infamous Scarlett Hartford." He smiled again as a fourth finger joined the others.

"And four — yes, you accuse me of moulding your personality through the system's traits. This is completely true. I offer no defence. But I do want to ask if you are certain it was such a terrible thing?"

"It unquestionably is," Scarlett said, drawing in a slow, deliberate breath.

"And you believe that completely, do you?"

"Yes."

"Then do you think Scarlett Hartford was a poor fit for you?" She didn't answer that. She could see the trap he was laying and had no intention of stepping into it. The Other eyed her, then let a soft, amused breath slip through his lips.

"I'm afraid you're not quite on the mark there, Amy," he said.

"Perhaps you expect me to argue that you adapted admirably to those traits, or that they've served you well. No. While that is true, my point is this: you yourself no longer make any real distinction between the traits of Scarlett Hartford and those of Amy Bernal. If anything, I think you prefer it that way." Scarlett's brow tightened.

"What makes you say that?" He smirked.

"The simple fact that you haven't been bound by the System's traits since the moment you stood before Fate's fracture."