Chapter 240 Sinking
The memories Kairos experienced worked in strange ways. Some of them were short, perhaps a few minutes at most. However, some of them were incredibly long, lasting days and on rare occasions months.
While Kairos had only been outside of his room for a few minutes, the countless images he had experienced had nearly added up to a lifetime.
In other words, he had experienced other people's lives more than his own.
The whole time Azami was trying to shake the two in reality, however, the few minutes that she had been yelling at them could not match the years that they were experiencing in their minds.
Despite knowing logically that it wasn't him, it was hard to keep on that rationale. The only thing that was barely helping him retain his individuality was the fact that the visions did not reproduce physical sensations.
Though he was also starting to forget that real life even had physical sensations in the first place.
...
Kairos felt like a great weight was put upon him. It was a slightly familiar feeling, but it felt much worse than usual.
The feeling of depression.
He himself had a hard time recognizing it at first, but the somehow normalized feeling of dread weighed down upon him. Despite how bizarre and new experiencing the emotion this way was, it still felt like he had been dealing with it for his entire life.
Kairos took on the memory of a teenager quite similar to him, sitting in the back of a car. The car itself was empty and in a parking lot. As for why he was just there was unknown, though it didn't seem to matter all that much.
The familiar, yet not lethargy assaulted him. It was a strange balance between making him feel sleepy and not at the same time.
Somehow, the emotions of just sitting there doing nothing were akin to the ones that were being ripped apart by monsters, or painfully transforming into one themselves. It was terrifying in a sense, but also gave Kairos a strange lukewarm feeling.
After all, there wasn't actually anything out there to be terrified of.
This feeling instinctively made him feel as though he was trapped, causing him to instinctively attempt to reach out and move. However, it was only a memory. In the end, his actual body reached out to nothing, in an attempt to escape something he wasn't actually trapped in.
While sinking further into this memory, the only thing was silence for a while.
It dominated all of the other memories, making it hard for him to even focus on the other people even if they were dying in various painful ways.
Time slowly passed, while Kairos saw his vision gradually narrow as the eyelids fell. But before that happened, there was a little girl passing by. She had the tip of her thumb in her mouth and curious eyes that were looking everywhere.
Naturally, her eyes ended up landing on his sorry state.
To put it simply, while he may have only been sitting there, it was needless to say that he didn't appear the most friendly. Frankly, it was the kind of look that would cause others to shift their own look away, or perhaps even make them flee.
However, the little girl didn't seem to mind. While one thumb was still in her mouth, she innocently waved at him with clear blue eyes.
Kairos felt the surprised emotions as his head tilted to the side ever so slowly. The urge to smile a wave back rose up in him. However, his body didn't react.
The few bubbles at the bottom of the ocean couldn't rise up no matter how much they wanted to.
He could feel the rising anxiousness from the fleeting moment. One that would last for a second at most. Kairos could feel in the memories that smiling would be unrealistic, to the point that the person in question knew that it would be impossible.
However, he could feel the desire to wave back to such an innocent soul, in hopes of nothing else not making her feel a bit disappointed when she walked away. Even if this would end up changing her life in no way, and the only thing it would ever be was a passing thought.
He wanted to at least wave back.
But his body wasn't able to move. It simply wasn't. The sinking feeling dominated everything. Saying that the limbs were tied to chains would be inaccurate. Unlike that, there was no way to struggle.
It could only be compared to when a doctor improperly administered anesthesia, making their patient unable to move, but still remain wide awake.
And that fleeting moment soon came to pass, with the little girl hurrying on with her own life.
In the end, the regret didn't really settle in, as the emotions more or less went back to how they were before. However, not too long later, was when everything turned strangely red. For a moment, Kairos felt mild confusion.
As the sunlight shone through the windows, patches of his skin turned red. A few moments later, someone slammed against the car window. With a lackluster expression, he turned to look, only to see the girl again.
But this time, she had almost entirely turned into a monster. The only real feature left that distinguished her was the clothes and clear blue eyes which were gradually turning yellow.
As the guy felt that his life was about to end soon, there was only a bitter smile that formed on his face as all of his regrets came back.
Of which, there was only one.
"Haha... I'm sorry for not waving back."
His eyes closed before the rest of his body transformed into a rather hideous monster, destroying the interior of the car just from his expanding body. The vision ended soon after that.
And with those overwhelming emotions, he himself felt as though he had already died and accepted it.
Without knowing it, his sense of self had been permanently changed, believing this to be one of his memories. Regardless of whether or not he would be able to recover from his current sticky Though in the end, with his struggle to move his limbs, he did end up falling off the wolf, landing on his side.
situation, that memory would affect him as though it were actually his experience.
Though in the end, with his struggle to move his limbs, he did end up falling off the wolf, landing on his side.
But while he was finally freed from the wolf's unintentional sabotage, it wasn't necessarily a good thing. After all, while the ability to feel emotions to a parasitic extent was gone, now his protection from the Abstract had suddenly disappeared.
The sudden pain that assaulted him woke him out of his stupor. He was confused for a moment, but the awfully familiar feeling of pain essentially forced him to remember. While he was still recovering his memories, he heard a hoarse call in the distance.
"Come back here!"
Kairos' eyes widened as he saw a straw to grasp onto. He ran over to her voice, but not without memories filling his mind in the process.
Since he could tell that his life was clearly at risk, he did everything he could to run towards Azami's voice. However, the pain was very quickly making him dizzy. It was nothing like how it felt while he was still in his room.
This time, he was starting to have difficulty knowing if his body was actually moving. In the end, among his visions, he kept his eyes down on his legs, trying his best to focus on his own image, but more so to push out all the other images inside of his head.
While he was no longer able to feel the direct emotions coming from the memories, and they were not nearly as vivid as before, he was still very much experiencing them.
In reality, while he wasn't trying to focus on any of them, it was also nearly impossible to do so with the pain in his head. Which also meant he occasionally would even forget that he was running forward anymore.
He could feel the blood pumping in his head, and the heat that was pulsing out.
On top of that, his dizziness was starting to kick in. Although he was still doing his best to run toward Azami's voice, he had forgotten where it came from. In his moment of confusion, another memory like the one last time dominated the rest, playing through and confusing him.
He suddenly took on a man in a suit.
It was an incredibly pale person that had a book open and was reading it. Kairos wasn't able to read the words both because he couldn't focus enough and didn't bother trying in the first place.
The man appeared to be on a bus, though its aesthetic was rather strange with red velvet seats that showed a sign of luxury, but they were fairly cramped without much space. Several other people were also on the bus, doing their own thing. Other than what appeared to be a child yelling about something they saw outside the window.
Kairos was doing his best to ignore the vision, as he was currently in a really bad situation.
Unfortunately, he simply didn't know where to go. Azami was still screaming at him, but he was suffering great difficulty in figuring out which way he should go. He couldn't tell where it was coming from.
The source of this c𝐨ntent is freewe(b)nov𝒆l