Not long later, Leonel had appeared before his father again, his uncle by his side. His gaze flickered as he looked at the man, his rage threatening to bubble up again.
Montez's gaze flickered with its own complicated light. The words that Leonel had spoken had truly weighed heavily on him. His relationship with his elder brother had once been very good. If he thought about it, it was indeed his fault that it had reached the state it had.
He clenched his fist. 'I swear I'll kill whoever did this to us...'
Although he thought this, the amount of self-blame was palpable. He didn't say anything for a long while, and it was only after he felt the coldness emitting from Leonel that he remembered how things had reached this point.
He actually hadn't been lying; Velasco had indeed left something behind. The only lie was that it wasn't exactly meant for Leonel, although it would benefit him greatly.
"Your father... Val said that after a Ninth Dimensional expert died, there would be a great phenomenon. The land they stood within would gain a great boon, even more beneficial than a world entering the Eighth Dimension. Depending on the strength of the expert, it might even be better than a world entering the Ninth Dimension.
"I didn't have much of a reference for that until recently, but if he's right, the change would be enormous. Do you know why there isn't a phenomenon here?"
Leonel wanted to hope, but his uncle's eyes painted a completely different story. There was truly no use in him having hope. His father was indeed... dead.
"Your father has always been a selfish man; how could he allow others to benefit from his death?"
Montez opened Velasco's shirt with shaking hands and revealed a necklace. He slowly took it off and handed it to Leonel.
"Give this to Anastasia. Tell her that Val said he always keeps his promises."
Leonel's jaw clenched as he took the necklace. It looked as though an entire universe was spinning within the gem that hung from it.
In this state, he could vaguely remember some things. Back when he had lost to Amery, Anastasia had nursed him to health, swearing about how he was holding her back and how he was just as useless as his father. She had also mentioned something about his father promising to bring her back to the Ninth Dimension, implying that she had once been there before.
"... What happened to Anastasia?"
"I'm not sure, but when she fell into father's hands, she was already heavily injured. But after Val lost himself to rage after father's death, Anastasia fell even further, descending to the point that she was barely at the Third Dimension anymore; she even had to fall into a deep sleep. Your father was slowly nursing her injuries until he left her to you."
Montez hesitated for a moment, but in the end, he decided to speak.
"Your father... has been very powerful for a long while. Back then, he had already broken free of the restrictions of the world."
Leonel frowned.
"You're wondering why he died this time, but not back then? I think you're already smart enough to know the answer," Montez looked down at the necklace.
Suddenly, Leonel understood.
His father had already broken free of the restrictions of this world, but if he had continued to do so, he would have died that day. He probably relied on Anastasia to avoid punishment back then, causing her to be heavily injured and almost die.
Thinking about how angry Anastasia was when his father hadn't come to say hello after so long, Leonel felt he understood his father even deeper than before. It wasn't that his father was so aloof... he didn't want to see Anastasia so that she would remain angry, continuing to ignore him. That way, when he acted this time, she wouldn't do something as foolish as trying to protect him again.
Because this time, if she really dared to interfere again... she really would die.
Leonel clenched the necklace in his hand. Without a word, he sent it into the Segmented Cube and crushed it before Anastasia could understand what happened.
A large amount of energy rushed forward. As though the skies were filled with golden blood, what once were blue and expansive became bold and beautiful.
Anastasia rushed out, seemingly focused on something in the lab. She looked into the skies in a daze before her senses extended outside of the finger sleeve Leonel always wore. She had indeed not been paying much attention, but when she saw the state of the Void Battlefield, and then rewound the events play by play, she froze.
Her little face became ghastly pale, and her big, larger than life blue eyes reddened. Even the adorable little blue cloud that made up her lower body darkened, rumbling with arcs of lightning.
Her aura surged, quickly approaching the pinnacle of the Eighth Dimension and then shattering a path through to the Ninth, but this only caused the tears she was holding back to spill forth.
"Idiot! Idiot! IDIOT!"
Her small body rushed out of the finger sleeve, her little fists pounding against Velasco's body.
Unfortunately, Velasco's body had already lost all of its strength. The power holding up was no longer there, the necklace having already been taken.
Anastasia panicked when the body began to fall, forgetting all about the huge amount of power at her fingertips. She balled her eyes out, helpless and weak before the changes.
Leonel took a step forward, barely catching his father's body before it crashed, catching it. His gaze carried a frigid cold within them, looking off into the distance. He seemed to peer through the veil of reality, looking toward the enemies and marking each one of them in the heart. Whether it was the invaders, or the cowardly humans who remained on the sideline...
'I swear I'll kill them all.'
Leonel barely had this thought himself before he too collapsed, his body exploding with clouds of blood.
This content is taken from fr(e)ewebn(o)vel.𝓬𝓸𝓶