Chương 136: 135: The Error That Should Never Have Been Made

A moment later, she appeared high above Patagonia, hovering beyond the clouds as the wind whipped against her blindfold. Below her stretched an impossible sight: hundreds of millions of people scattered across the mountains and valleys, pulled from their homes, cities, workplaces, and ordinary lives without warning. They were confused. Terrified. Desperate for answers. Their dreams formed a tangled ocean beneath her, filled with fear, confusion, grief, and desperate hope. Sylvia extended her senses.

She searched through every mind. Every dream. Every memory. But she still could not find her. Butter. Sylvia's expression tightened. Something was missing. A familiar presence. A familiar source of energy. She could feel the absence almost physically.

"Where are you?" Her voice was carried away by the wind. Butter had always been difficult to perceive, but this was different. Sylvia could not find even the familiar traces she had expected to encounter. Her energy was missing. Sylvia slowly tilted her head. Perhaps Butter had finally exhausted her Gloom. Perhaps she had been forced somewhere Sylvia could not yet reach. Either way, the uncertainty irritated her. Sylvia felt something dangerously close to impatience. Her fingers curled.

"Very well." A faint smile returned.

"If you cannot be found…" She looked down at the hundreds of millions of people beneath her.

"… I suppose I shall simply have to make you come to me." She looked down at the crowd below her. Hundreds of millions of people had been gathered in one place, their minds exposed to the Nonagon's senses, their dreams spreading beneath her like an enormous, tangled field of unguarded thoughts. Fear, confusion, grief, hope, love, desperation. So many minds. So many dreams. So much potential. Sylvia's expression remained calm. How unfortunate. She understood what had happened. Thornburgh must have been responsible.

He was the only person she could imagine possessing the combination of speed, endurance, and sheer physical capability necessary to evacuate so many people before the catastrophe consumed them. He must have carried them away from danger one after another, refusing to stop even as his strength dwindled, exhausting himself to protect people who, in Sylvia's eyes, had never deserved such a sacrifice.

"Yes…" A faint smile touched her lips.

"He did." She still could not understand why he would do such a thing, nor did she particularly care to. Her senses moved through the crowd until she found him standing among the displaced masses, his wife and children gathered around him, along with the daughter he had once believed was dead. Kiri. The girl wearing the hummingbird suit. Sylvia's smile faded slightly.

"A pity." Her fingers curled. Thornburgh had taken Butter's head from her. Now she would take everything from him. Her attention drifted downward as people closer to the center of the crowd began noticing her. — A woman pointed toward the sky.

"Wait… what is that?" Someone beside her squinted.

"Is that a woman?"

"I think so."

"Why does she have tentacles on her head?"

"Those are way too long to be hair." Another person stared upward as Sylvia's living appendages drifted slowly through the air.

"What the hell is happening?"

"I was at home five minutes ago!"

"So was I!"

"Why are we in Patagonia?"

"Is this some kind of evacuation?"

"I don't know!" A man looked around at the enormous crowd surrounding them.

"Maybe we're dead." His wife turned toward him.

"What?"

"Think about it. We were somewhere else, and now we're suddenly surrounded by mountains."

"We're not dead."

"How do you know?"

"I'm breathing."

"That doesn't prove anything." A child pointed toward Sylvia.

"Mommy, is she a goddess?" The mother stared upward.

"I… I don't know."

"She has six arms." Another voice answered from somewhere behind them.

"Biblical angels have a lot of weird features."

"Well, the Bible is a fairytale. And why would angels look like that?"

"The Bible isn't a fairytale, and you don't know what angels look like."

"I'm pretty sure they don't have tentacle hair." Someone else shouted, "She has eyes on her body!"

"No, she doesn't!"

"She absolutely does!"

"Where?"

"I don't know! She's wearing a blindfold!" Another man backed away.

"Maybe she's a demon."

"Why would a demon look like that?"

"How the hell would I know?" A nervous laugh escaped someone nearby.

"Maybe she's some kind of alien."

"An alien?"

"She has tentacles, six arms, fins…"

"She looks beautiful."

"What?"

"She looks too calm." The crowd's confusion gradually turned into fear. People pointed toward the sky, phones were raised despite the lack of signal, children were pulled closer to their parents, and some people began praying while others simply stared upward, unable to comprehend the impossible figure hovering above them. Sylvia watched them all. Their reactions amused her. They were trying to give her a name: angel, demon, alien, monster. They needed a category because the human mind hated the incomprehensible.

Sylvia had no intention of giving them one. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. She extended one hand toward the crowd, spreading her fingers slowly. The simple gesture silenced several nearby conversations. They had made her work easy. She would find Butter later. First, she would cleanse this plague. Sylvia opened her mouth, but for a moment, no sound emerged. She remembered what had happened before.

The last time she had spoken that word, reality itself had answered her, yet the result had been crude. Powerful, but incomplete. She would not make the same mistake again. This time, she built the command properly. Beneath the word, she embedded a silent understatement, concealing the true magnitude of her intention beneath the apparent simplicity of a single utterance. Around it, she constructed a palindrome, a conceptual structure capable of being read from either direction without surrendering its meaning.

If anyone attempted to reverse the command, negate it, reflect it, or redirect its effect toward its origin, they would find no weakness to exploit. The word would defend itself. The command would contain its own contradiction, and that contradiction would resolve in her favor.

Sylvia remembered the dreams she had experienced inside the pod, fragments of impossible imagery that had once seemed meaningless: a fulcrum, Tenebrae, a parasite intertwined with Katherine, and a presence existing between destruction and existence, negation and persistence. She had once believed those images were merely dreams. Now she understood. They had been memories of what she was becoming.

Tenebrae had been intertwined with Katherine, but Sylvia was the fulcrum, the point upon which the contradiction balanced. The parasite had not merely existed beside her. It had become part of her. The dream had been trying to explain it before she possessed the words to understand. Now she did. Sylvia's fingers slowly curled. The air around her seemed to tighten. Her voice emerged softly.

"Expurgation." — Butter's voice was a scream.

"No!" People nearby had already begun staring at her, their confusion briefly overpowering their fear. A woman whispered that she looked albino. Someone else thought she might be an athlete. Another wondered whether she was a cosplayer, because surely nobody could actually look like that. Her hair was completely white, as were her eyebrows and eyelashes, while her eyes carried an almost unnatural pink hue.

The muscles beneath her pale skin were more defined than anyone expected, creating the strange impression that she was simultaneously fragile and extraordinarily strong.

"What's with the bandages?"

"Those are definitely part of the costume."

"Look at her leg."

"Is that a prosthetic?" A faint purple glow leaked from beneath the trouser fabric of her left leg.

"Yeah. That's a prosthetic."

"Her hair has to be fake."

"No way. Her eyebrows are white too."

"She smells really good."

"What?"

"I'm serious. Like… butter. And popcorn." Someone beside him sniffed cautiously.

"Wait. No. It smells like warm bread."

"Caramel."

"Cake."

"Why are you people smelling her?"

"I don't know. She just smells sweet." A teenager stared at Butter's bandaged torso, then at the white hair, the pink eyes, and the strange prosthetic leg.

"She looks like that Ghost-girl meme."

"The one all over the internet?"

"Yeah."

"That cosplay is ridiculously accurate."

"Should we ask for a picture?" Butter heard none of it. Her attention remained fixed on the Aria in her hands as she frantically flipped through its pages. Her fingers trembled. Gloom was almost gone, and the Crescendo cheat technique had left her nervous system raw, every nerve screaming beneath her skin. She could feel the consequences waiting just beneath the surface. If she forced Crescendo again, even for a few seconds, she might lose control of her body entirely. She could not afford paralysis. Not now.

The word was already unfolding. Butter looked at the people surrounding her. Hundreds of thousands of them. She could not save everyone. She could only try.

"Ghost-girl?" The boy beside her shifted weakly in his hospital gown, the IV still attached to his arm. Butter glanced toward him.

"What's wrong?" His voice was frightened. Butter did not answer. She moved. The Sonata pendant flashed into her hand, and before the boy could react, she slipped it around his neck and secured it against his chest.

"Stay close to me." The boy stared at her.

"What's happening?" Butter looked toward the sky.

"Something bad." Her voice trembled.

"But I'm going to try." Melody erupted. The black bandages exploded outward from Butter's body in every direction, expanding faster than sight could follow. They crossed the slopes in vast, whipping streams, wrapping themselves around civilians, children, families, animals, strangers, anyone they could reach. Layer after layer covered their bodies until the people disappeared beneath thick black wrappings, each person becoming a cocoon against the coming attack. Melody continued expanding. Farther. Faster.

Butter pulled the bandages around herself last. She could feel them resisting the world. Melody was still active. It could shield against concepts. It could absorb kinetic force. It could interfere with things that should have been impossible to stop. It would save them. It had to. Butter poured the last of her Gloom into the air around her, desperately trying to persuade reality itself to reject what was coming.

"Please…" Her voice broke.

"Just this once." The word arrived.

"Expurgation." Reality answered. The Palindrome within Sylvia's command immediately obstructed Butter's attempt to protect them. Every defensive action Butter had performed began reversing itself. The bandages recoiled. They snapped backward across the mountains, ripping free from the people they had covered and streaming toward Butter in a violent black torrent.

"No!" Melody collapsed back into her. The last microscopic residue of Gloom remained. It was almost nothing. Yet it was enough to interfere. Barely. The people should have been erased outright. Instead, Butter's remaining Gloom dragged the attack downward, forcing something that should have been absolute erasure to manifest as death. It was still not enough. The people scattered across the slopes folded inward. There was no time for them to scream.

Bodies became smaller, smaller, smaller, collapsing beneath the impossible pressure of Sylvia's command until flesh occupied spaces smaller than marbles, smaller than grains of sand, smaller than thoughts that had been forgotten before they were finished. Blood erupted across the mountains. The snow turned red. The valleys became stained with it. The air filled with a fine mist composed of what had once been hundreds of millions of living people. Butter stared.

Her eyes searched desperately through the crimson haze. The boy. She found the place where he had been. The Sonata pendant had cracked beneath the command. An amulet capable of surviving planetary-scale devastation dozens of times over had been rendered meaningless against something operating on an entirely different level. There was nothing left to protect. Only a corpse remained. His hospital gown was soaked through. The IV had ruptured. The thin arms that had reached toward her were gone. There was no grin.

No voice calling her Ghost-girl. No awkward compliment about how pretty she looked in person. No future waiting for him. He had been going to live. Butter had promised herself that he would. Now there was only blood beneath her hands. A hundred million people were gone. The space between two heartbeats had been enough. The time required for light to cross the width of a human hair had been enough.... Butter's knees struck the ground.

Her hands plunged into the snow, fingers sinking into crimson slush as she searched the place where he had stood, where he had laughed, where he had watched her with that stupid, wonderful grin.

"NO!" The scream tore out of her. It became another scream. And another. She no longer knew what she was saying. She was simply making noise because there was too much inside her for silence to contain. The sound was not merely grief. It was the sound of someone who had spent so long fighting to keep everyone else alive that she had forgotten she was allowed to break. Butter remained on her knees, her white hair hanging across her face. Her hands were red, her fingers trembling violently against the snow.

"Ghost-Girl…" A weak, choking sound came from behind her. Butter's head snapped upward. The boy was still alive. Barely. His body lay twisted in the snow, his hospital gown soaked through with blood. The IV line had ruptured, leaving plastic tubing scattered beside him, while every breath came as a wet, struggling rasp. Butter crawled toward him immediately.

"No, no, no…" She caught his hand between both of hers.

"Stay with me." The boy tried to breathe. His chest rose, shuddered, and fell again. Butter squeezed his hand.

"I'm here. I'm right here." She reached instinctively for Gloom. Nothing answered. Her reserves were empty. Zero. The Red State remained dormant as well. It would only activate when her intent to kill became absolute, when every part of her truly desired the destruction of her target. Katherine's memories were still inside her, buried beneath everything else. Katherine was still Katherine, and because of that, Butter could not force the Red State awake. There was nothing left. She could only hold his hand.

The boy's breathing became shallower. Butter's tears fell onto his face.

"Please…" His eyes slowly opened. His gaze struggled to focus on her.

"Don't…" Butter leaned closer.

"Don't what?"

"Don't cry." Her face crumpled.

"I'm not crying." The boy managed the faintest smile.

"You are." Butter laughed through her tears, but the sound broke halfway through.

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"I couldn't…" She could not finish. The boy's fingers tightened weakly around hers.

"You tried." Butter lowered her head.

"I should have saved you."

"You did."

"No."

"Yes." His breathing hitched, and Butter immediately leaned closer.

"Easy. Don't talk." The boy ignored her. His eyes drifted upward, squinting toward the sky. Far above the mountains, barely visible through the haze, was a tiny silhouette suspended against the clouds. A dark celestial diadem rested upon her brow, its midnight-blue metal rising into crystalline spires. A slender blue gemstone crowned the highest point above her forehead, while smaller silver-edged points curved toward her temples, giving the crown the appearance of a frozen constellation encircling her head.

Multiple arms were difficult to distinguish from the distance, while her enormous cobalt hair-tentacles spread through the sky like living strands of an alien sea. The boy stared.

"Is that…" Butter followed his gaze. The figure remained motionless in the distance. The blindfold. The pale body. The impossible silhouette. The thing that had erased everyone. Butter's jaw tightened.

"Yes."

"That's… the thing?" Butter nodded.

"Yes." The boy swallowed with difficulty.

"Can you beat it?" Butter looked toward Sylvia. There was only grief in her eyes. Sylvia had returned, and she was stronger than she had ever been before, powerful enough that this version of her could have knocked her former self from the planet with a single strike.

"She looks strong."

"She is." Butter's fingers tightened around his. The boy looked back at her.

"But you're strong too." Butter's lips trembled.

"I'll try." He stared at her for several seconds.

"Your best?" Butter nodded.

"My best." The boy smiled.

"Please win." Butter's tears fell faster. Death was something she had never been mentally prepared to bear, and now she could no longer hold back the sobs trembling inside her.

"I will." The boy's breathing grew quieter.

"I hope the afterlife is kind."

"It will be. I'll make sure of it."

"How?" Butter hesitated, wiping her tears with the back of her hand.

"I have a friend… Winter. Or Goth-Feline, as you might know her. She's friends with Death. Actual Death. I'll talk to her." The boy stared at her in wonder.

"Wow. So you're all real?" Butter gave him the smallest smile.

"Yes. We are." His smile returned.

"You're my hero, Ghost-Girl. I always knew you were real." Butter froze. For a moment, she could not answer. The boy squeezed her hand weakly.

"What's your name?" She blinked.

"My name?"

"I want to remember you." Something in Butter's expression softened.

"It's Nathan," he whispered.

"Nathan Hall." Butter repeated it quietly, as though committing it somewhere sacred.

"Nathan Hall." He smiled.

"That's right." She looked at him through her tears.

"I'm Elizabeth." Nathan's brow furrowed slightly.

"Elizabeth?"

"Elizabeth Paris." She hesitated, almost embarrassed by the admission.

"But… everyone calls me Butter." Nathan stared at her for a moment before his weak smile returned.

"Butter?" She nodded. He gave a tiny laugh.

"That makes more sense." Butter laughed softly through her tears.

"Why?"

"Because you don't look like an Elizabeth." She smiled.

"And what does an Elizabeth look like?"

"I don't know." His voice weakened.

"But I think Butter suits you." Her smile trembled.

"Thank you, Nathan." His eyes slowly closed.

"Please win." Butter held his hand tighter.

"For you?" His lips curved faintly.

"For me." A pause.

"And for everyone else." Butter nodded.

"I promise." Nathan's fingers loosened. His chest rose once. A shallow breath escaped his lips. And stopped. Butter stared at him.

"Oh… my." It was the saddest thing she had ever said. She squeezed his hand.

"Hey." Silence.

"Hey, wake up." Nothing. Butter gently shook his shoulder.

"Come on." Her voice became smaller.

"You said I was your hero." Nothing answered. She pressed her forehead against his hand.

"Please." Her shoulders began to shake.

"Please don't make me lie." Still nothing. Nathan was gone.