"In fact..."
Her voice was light, playful, almost dismissive, as if she were stating something obvious, something that required no thought.
"They don’t belong to any of the fruits. They are already beyond normal ascensions."
The words settled like a weight in the air. Thick. Unmoving.
I sat still.
My thoughts spiraled, unraveling over themselves, twisting in ways they weren’t meant to. The logic felt wrong. Not because it didn’t make sense, but because it slipped through my grasp the moment I tried to hold onto it.
Geralda and Geralt.
Not from any fruit.
That meant... what?
That they didn’t exist? That they did exist, but outside of what could be defined? Were they real or unreal? Both? Neither?
My jaw tightened. The more I tried to shape an answer, the less I understood.
"Could you explain more?" I asked. My voice was calm, steady. But beneath it, I needed clarity.
She paused, her eyes half-lidded as if momentarily lost in thought. But the expression didn’t feel natural. More like something almost teasing.
Then, she answered.
"What you saw was just an avatar of them."
Her tone was smooth. Almost too smooth.
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"They have been Ascendants ever since."
Her hand lifted, fingers brushing the ends of her white hair, playing with the strands as she continued, as if this explanation was nothing more than idle conversation.
"The fruit you saw them in? They were merely visiting."
I didn’t move.
"Though they’ve been there since the beginning of that fruit, that doesn’t matter. To them, age is worthless. Nonexistent. Nothing but a mere number lower beings count."
A pause. Then, her lips curled, just slightly.
"Time is meaningless to them."
The way she said it... it wasn’t just fact. It wasn’t just knowledge. It was amusement. Like the idea of me struggling to grasp something so vast was nothing more than an entertaining moment to her.
I exhaled slowly.
"Then why were they there?" I asked. My voice still calm, measured. "What did they want? What did they need?"
For a second, she simply watched me.
Then....
"I think you’ll ask them when you see them next."
Her voice was playful now, light, teasing. She tilted her head slightly, the motion fluid, intentional, but not quite natural.
"Because you might bump into them anywhere."
Her lips curled again.
"Alright, next question."
She was ignoring me. Or maybe dodging the answer. But I didn’t press. I let it go, kept my focus.
"The last mission the system is about to give me and my teammates," I said, pausing just slightly. "Do you have any idea what it is?"
For the first time, her expression shifted.
It wasn’t much... just a slight pause, a faint flicker in her gaze. A reaction so subtle it could’ve been imagined.
She laughed.
A soft sound at first, then something deeper, something wrong.
The empty space around us trembled, as if her voice itself pressed against the edges of reality. The air grew thick, the weight of something unseen pressing against my skin.
And then suddenly....
She stopped.
Abrupt. Instant.
And that silence alone, sent an unknown chill down my spine.
Soon after that, she opened her mouth to speak.
"What do you take me for?"
Her voice carried that same playful lilt, light and unbothered. But something in the air had changed.
"To think that I wouldn’t know what awaits you on your last mission on this floor..."
The words came slowly, deliberately.
The space around me shifted, tightened.
An unseen force coiled against my body... not quite pain, but something worse. Pressure. Like invisible hands pressing down, pushing inward, wrapping around my throat, my chest, my skull. The weight of something vast. Something beyond understanding.
Then in an instant, the tension vanished.
Like a tide pulling back, as if nothing had ever been there to begin with.
She sighed. A small, fleeting sound, barely audible.
Then, she spoke again.
"The last mission the system will give you..."
She trailed off, her head tilting slightly, her white hair cascading over her shoulder like strands of liquid silk. Her deep blue eyes gleamed.. too deep, too vast, something shifting in their depths that I couldn’t fully grasp.
"It will lead to everyone’s death."
A pause.
"No one will survive."
I didn’t breathe.
The words landed cold. Heavy.
Not because I hadn’t expected the mission to be difficult. That much had been obvious.
But I hadn’t expected this.
Not a trial. Not an impossible challenge.
A sentence.
"How will the last mission be passed, then?" I asked. My own voice sounded distant, like it barely belonged to me.
"What’s waiting for me and my teammates?"
She didn’t answer right away.
Instead, her lips curled, a slow, knowing smile. Playful. Sharp.
"What you’ll face..."
She let the words hang for a moment, as if savoring the weight of them.
"You’ll find out when you enter there."
She leaned forward slightly, resting her chin against her palm.
"But before you enter..."
Her smile widened.
A fraction too much.
"I have a second date... This time for you and your teammates."
I blinked.
"Second date."
The words repeated in my head, but the meaning behind them felt distant, unclear. I opened my mouth to ask.
But she had already continued.
"From then on, you’ll figure out what to do."
She said it so simply. Like none of this mattered. Like the future of my survival, of my entire team’s survival, was nothing more than a game to her.
I exhaled. Slowly.
"Alright."
I didn’t press further.
Not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew.
There were some things she wouldn’t answer. Some things I shouldn’t push. Not with her.
She hadn’t threatened me. Hadn’t given me a reason to fear her.
But something in my gut told me that it was best to play it safe.
To not find out what lay beyond that playfully unreadable gaze.
A silence settled between us.
Then, she straightened.
"I think our time is up for now."
The moment she spoke, the space around us shifted.
The nothingness began to dissolve. Unravel. The darkness thinned, like ink being washed away from a canvas.
It was time to return.
I felt it.
A pull.
The sensation of my body slipping away, like I was being unmade from the inside out, drawn back into whatever place I had come from.
But I remembered something.
Something I needed to ask.
My lips parted.
But before I could speak, she did.
Calmly. Softly.
Her voice was the last thing I heard, settling deep into my bones, resonating through my dissolving senses.
"You can address me as..."
A Pause..
UNKN???
And Everything went blank.
***
Nothing.
I saw nothing.
No light. No shapes. No color.
My eyes were open, I was sure of it. But the darkness didn’t waver. It wasn’t the absence of light, nor the blindness of closed eyelids. It was deeper than that. Vast. Limitless.
I couldn’t see my hands. Couldn’t feel my body.
I tried to move.
Nothing happened.
I wasn’t standing. I wasn’t floating. There was no ground beneath me, no weight to my limbs. It was as if I had been stripped of everything that made me me, left as something less than flesh, less than thought.
An empty soul.
Drifting.
Weightless.
And yet..
I could still think.
Could still be aware.
And hear.
A sound that didn’t exist, yet was. Like the ghost of an echo in a place where no voices had ever spoken. It wasn’t noise in the way I knew it, yet something told me it was there, just beyond reach.
But none of it felt wrong.
I wasn’t afraid.
I wasn’t anything.
The worries that had once clawed at my mind, the burdens I had carried, the pains I had endured...
All of it was gone.
No weight. No ache. No fear.
Just emptiness.
A strange, impossible peace.
I could have stayed here forever.
But something pulled me..
A force, unseen but undeniable. A tug, faint at first, as if a thread had wrapped itself around my very existence and begun to reel me in.
The emptiness wavered.
A ripple surfaced.
Like a stone cast into a still pond.
And suddenly...
Pain.
It surged in all at once.
A crashing tide of sensations. Memories.
Sharp. Brutal. Real.
A thousand thoughts, a thousand sufferings, flooding into the void where nothing had existed before. The weight of my body, the ache in my bones, the sting in my lungs, the scars that had never faded... all of it came roaring back, too fast.
I gasped.
The sound was ragged, torn from my throat like something drowning, something dragged from the depths, lungs burning from a breath that should have come too late.
I lurched upright.
My vision blurred, shifting from black to something else. Flickers of color, of movement.. distorted, unfocused.
The world returned in pieces.
Shapes sharpened. Light settled.
A dim glow.
Flickering.
A loose campfire.
Its embers swayed in the air, fragile and unsteady, casting long, restless shadows against the earth. The scent of charred wood lingered, mingling with the cold bite of the wind.
My breath came fast. Unsteady. I pressed a hand to my chest, feeling the frantic rhythm beneath my fingertips, the rush of being alive.
Then I heard..
A voice.
"Agon, are you alright?"
Soft. Familiar.
I didn’t need to turn to know who it was. the voice was already familiar to me.
A smile tugged at my lips, unbidden.
Celia.