Chương 205: B3 Chapter 205: The Funeral

The funeral was just as dreary as Aurelia had expected. She had tried hard to keep people away from him, yet they kept coming anyway, filing past her in black clothes with expensive flowers and carefully prepared condolences that meant absolutely nothing. Empty words. All air. Some had known him, some had barely spoken to him, and others were there because being seen at the funeral mattered more than whoever was inside the coffin.

Aurelia knew a few genuinely cared, but after enough handshakes and soft voices, they all started blending together. The cemetery was completely packed, which only sharpened her irritation. This was supposed to be a small gathering for the people who had actually known him, not an event. Everywhere she looked, black coats filled the grounds, polished shoes sank into the grass, and another line of people waited to approach her. When someone asked Aurelia to say a few words, she tried.

A handful came out before her throat locked and she could no longer look at the faces in front of her. She had taken too much pain in too short a time, and standing there while strangers watched to see how she handled another piece of it was more than she could stomach. She needed to leave. So she did, ignoring the people calling after her and the ones already moving to stop her.

A few genuinely cared and deserved better from her, but Aurelia had no interest in separating them from everyone trying to use his death as an excuse to get close. She wanted all of them gone. By the time she reached the parking lot, the Hyperion idiot assigned to babysit her was already standing beside the car. At least he was a good driver and had learned months ago that Aurelia had no interest in conversation unless she started it.

Unfortunately, her mother, Marielle, knew her too well and was already waiting beside the rear door.

"Aureliana, please talk to me."

"I am fine," Aurelia said.

"I just can't take this anymore."

"He would have wanted you to have this." Marielle held out a heavy signet ring. Aurelia recognized it before it fully cleared her mother's palm. The old Sorell crest was stamped into its face, another piece of supposedly ancient family heritage that had grown more important with every decade people repeated the story. Aurelia did not take it.

"I don't need it. He can take his crest with him to the grave. He lived like an asshole, got rich like an asshole, treated his family like an asshole, and now he can nap in that hole like the asshole he was."

"You don't mean that, my love." Marielle lowered the ring but kept it in her hand.

"I know how much you've been carrying. Meno, and now your father. But please, Aureliana. Don't let that turn into hatred for him. Your father had many flaws, but he tried in his own way. He cared about you dearly." The words remained the same once Marielle said them aloud. Her father. Carl Sorell. Asshole.

"You were his world," Marielle continued.

"Even if he was terrible at showing it. The companies and the money were his obsession, but they never replaced his family. He died because he cared too much."

"Yeah, right. Don't you think it's at least a little suspicious?" Aurelia asked.

"His heart was fine. I know what happened." Marielle closed her fingers around the ring.

"He never told you, but Feltforge gave him an ultimatum. I don't know how they found out, but his government dog tried to frame Meno at the City Hall. Feltforge waited for months, and then Dad drops dead out of nowhere." Aurelia's voice hardened.

"It was Feltforge."

"Stop speaking nonsense. It will only bring trouble we can't afford." Marielle lowered her voice.

"Your father was under enormous stress. The merger with Voltaic Motorsports fell through, you announced that you worked for Hyperion in some role he could not understand, and then you told him you had no intention of leading the family business. All of that happened at once. It got to him." Aurelia's grief snapped into anger.

"Oh, so you are blaming me for this? You don't seem the least bit heartbroken, yet you expect me to stand there and weep."

"Don't you dare," Marielle said.

"I am grieving. We simply cannot show weakness right now. Everyone is watching." Aurelia had nothing left to argue about.

"Yeah, right. Goodbye, Mother." She got into the car and told the driver to take her back to Hyperion Tower. She hated being far from Meno's bed, and she had Minesweeper to catch up on. Six months into Minesweeper Omega 5, Aurelia had only managed to reach rank two. Every time she closed the gap, Chadculator moved again, as if the bastard had some unlocked version of the game. At the higher levels, it was not even a pure skill anymore.

Boards increasingly ended in RNG locks where every deterministic line ran out and the remaining choice was a guess. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Then you clicked. Right square, run continued. Wrong square, everything vanished. It was the stupidest game ever made, and Aurelia hated it. Meno had told her to get rank one, and Aurelia had decided that applied to everything.

She had spent almost all of the last six months on Hyperion's guest floor, even after Thorn, Karmabeast, and Arayu moved back home. Leaving made no sense when Meno could wake up at any moment. The doctors kept giving her probabilities, recovery windows, neurological explanations, and increasingly careful ways of saying they had no idea when that would happen. Useless, every one of them. He could wake tonight, tomorrow, five minutes after she left the hospital floor, or never.

Aurelia refused to let that happen while Meno was surrounded by strangers in white coats and suits already calculating what he might be worth if he opened his eyes. After what he had done against the Olutron, Meno had become something close to a legend among the Hyperion employees who knew the real story. Outside the company, nobody knew any of it had happened.

As far as the public was concerned, PrayerBeadGod had disappeared after Veyrath died, surfaced in a few strange posts around Hyperion, and then vanished again. Six months was forever online. Meno Varsh was already fading. PrayerBeadGod was fading with him. Solver had become the number-one streamer. Even before Veyrath, he had specialized in speedrunning older games, and with Veyrath gone, older games were almost all anyone had left.

Several VRMMOs had launched since then, each arriving with significant marketing campaigns, huge worlds, and promises that this would finally be the replacement. They all flopped. The games looked fine. They felt fake. After Veyrath, scripted NPC conversations and handcrafted events felt dead. Players had gotten used to a world that reacted to them, remembered them, changed around them, and occasionally destroyed its own balance because the AI thought something sounded interesting.

Nothing else had managed to recreate that. Solar had turned out to be ridiculously underrated. Meno leaking the AI's name before disappearing had given the old Veyrath population something to attach itself to. Solar had fan clubs all over Connect now. Former players posted messages to it, made compilation videos, wrote theories about what it was building, and acted like enough collective psychic pressure might speed up the next MMO.

Nothing had been announced, and Aurelia could not ask Morlando Felt because they were not on speaking terms. So her life was Minesweeper and crying beside Meno's bed. What a life. Technically, Aurelia could have left Hyperion months ago and bought a floor nearby. She had already been rich before any of this, even if most of that wealth belonged to the Sorell family more than to her personally. Now she was a billionaire on her own. It changed nothing.

Credits could not buy Minesweeper levels, which was a tragic design flaw. She still did not understand how Chadculator was this good. In Veyrath, he had been a mediocre player who mostly orbited Meno's wider circle, yet in this stupid little game he seemed unbeatable. Every morning Aurelia woke in Hyperion's mostly empty penthouse and saw the same name above hers. Every morning it felt like failing Meno again. Sometimes that hurt more than her father being dead. Ugly thought. Still real.

The car descended into Skyline's foggy lower levels instead of taking the clean aerial route toward Hyperion. Aurelia had specifically requested it. A VTOL could have put her inside the tower already, but the inconvenience gave her something simpler to deal with. The haze sat heavy between the skyscrapers, swallowing their upper sections from street level while autonomous vehicles moved through the grey below.

Pedestrians appeared and vanished inside it, people on their way to jobs, shops, apartments, lives that sucked in smaller and more manageable ways than Aurelia's did. It was nice to see other people suffer too. Another ugly thought. Still real. She had mostly stopped pretending every thought needed to make her proud. Aurelia knew she was just as flawed as Marielle in her own ways, but her mother still bothered her more than she wanted to admit.

She had expected her to struggle through the funeral, not for so much of that struggle to look performed. She knew her. Marielle was not shattered underneath the controlled voice and carefully tired expression. There was sadness there, but nowhere near what Aurelia had expected from someone who had just lost her husband. Her parents had always seemed stable. Not romantic in any embarrassing way, but understandable enough that Aurelia had never questioned it.

Over the years there had been more business trips, more arguments, more nights spent apart, but she had assumed something still held them together underneath all of it. By the end, they might have just become extremely good at tolerating each other. Carl's death had also put effective control of the Sorell companies into Marielle's hands. Her mother kept insisting Aurelia needed to come home and help manage the family business, but those words felt rehearsed too.

Marielle said what a mother in her position was supposed to say. Aurelia had the sense that Marielle had been waiting for this for years. Not hoping for it, just waiting, and now she had it. Fortunately for both of them, Aurelia wanted absolutely nothing to do with the companies. Hyperion already gave her more responsibility than she cared for. Aurelia's position inside Hyperion had grown. She had an official title now, something long enough that she had already forgotten it.

As far as she was concerned, the title meant she could make things happen inside Hyperion without waiting for three levels of permission. It also served as a permanent reminder of the mission where everything had gone wrong. At the moment, the only thing she wanted to make happen was rank one in Minesweeper. The car reached Hyperion Tower, and Aurelia went straight to the hospital floor. She stayed beside Meno for an hour while the machines continued doing whatever they had been doing for six months.

Numbers shifted slightly across the displays. A nurse came in once, checked several values, adjusted something, then left. Meno did nothing. His face looked exactly the same as yesterday, the day before that, and the week before that. The consistency made every visit feel like the same failed roll repeated again. Aurelia clung to the idea that he could wake at any moment because the alternative was admitting he might not.

She stayed until her eyes started burning, then left before she started crying beside him again. Upstairs, the penthouse was too quiet.

"Steak burger and blueberry juice," Aurelia told the ordering system. The meal would take a while, which was fine. Aurelia crossed to the workstation, woke the display, and opened Minesweeper Omega 5. The leaderboard loaded with Chadculator still at rank one, so Aurelia sat down, cracked her knuckles, and started another run. Rank one was not going to take itself.