Chapter 317: Theo! Please, stay awake!
Alias’s heart was hammering more tragically now.
They were bandits but they had all died to one man’s effort, brutally hacked down with an axe.
Alias’s gaze whipped toward the house. A part of the wooden wall he had watched Theo carefully carve was completely wrecked, splintered outward as if from a heavy impact. Another dead bandit lay slumped against the broken beams, his chest caved in.
And in the middle of the ruined yard, kneeling in the blood-soaked grass, was Maya.
She was sobbing hysterically, her entire body shaking as her hands pressed desperately against Theo’s stomach.
Theo had collapsed on his back, his tanned face a ghostly, bloodless white, his blue eyes glazed and staring blankly at the sky. Beneath Maya’s small, trembling fingers, a deep, jagged stab wound was pouring hot, heavy blood over the grass.
"Theo! Please, stay awake! Theo, look at me!" Maya screamed, her voice breaking into a ragged shriek.
Alias’s breath caught in his throat. He looked around the clearing, his silver eyes wide with frantic terror, searching for the small, blue-eyed boy who should have been right there. But...
Kael was gone.
The space was completely empty of the child’s presence, the quiet sanctuary turned into a slaughterhouse while Alias had been looking away.
Just how did this happen?
Alias staggered backward, his heels catching in the blood-slicked grass.
How? He had only been gone for a minute.
A single, sixty-second stretch of time to speak with Norx. His divine senses were tethered to this earth; he could map the fluttering pulse of a desert beetle or the approach of a traveler from a hundred kilometers away.
There should have been a warning.
There should have been a shift in the wind, a disturbance in the sand, the heavy, chaotic vibration of violent men approaching his borders. He should have felt them hours before they even reached the dunes.
But even then, a minute was not enough for all this chaos to happen.
So then how—?
He quickly looked up at the sky.
The sun wasn’t where it had been when he left. It was no longer casting the soft, long shadows of early morning under the palm fronds. It was at its absolute peak, brutal rays baking the desert floor from directly overhead.
Five hours. Five hours had passed down here while he stood in that cold, frozen projectile space.
He didn’t go up there in person, so the time shouldn’t have been distorted like that.
That was when he realised this must’ve been Norx’s doing.
Norx had manipulated the flow of time within the pocket dimension, stretching a sixty-second argument into half a day in the mortal world.
He had intentionally blindfolded Alias, locking his senses away in the heavens just long enough to let the wolves tear his sanctuary apart.
It was a calculated, divine trap designed to ensure Alias could not intervene until the blood was already drying.
"Mister Alias!" Maya’s voice pierced the stupor, a broken, desperate shriek as she caught sight of his silver hair. "Mister Alias, help him! Please, he’s... he’s not breathing right! I can’t stop it!"
The god in him died a little more as he sprinted forward, dropping to his knees beside Theo. The metallic stench of blood was overwhelming, drowning out the scent of the lilies he had just been standing by.
The grass beneath them was a swamp of mud and deep crimson.
Theo’s large frame was terrifyingly still. The vibrant, tanned skin that had pressed so warmly against Alias just nights before had turned the color of ash. His chest was barely moving, shallow, trembling hitches of air rattling through his throat. His blue eyes, usually burning with that fierce protective fire, were dull, half-lidded, and fixed unseeingly on the blinding sun.
"Theo," Alias choked out, his hands covering Maya’s smaller ones over the wound.
The stab wound was wide and jagged, delivered by a rusted scimitar that had torn through muscle and deep into his abdomen.
Every time Theo’s heart gave a weak, struggling pulse, more hot blood leaked through their fingers, staining Alias’s pale skin. The sheer force required to fell a man of Theo’s stature was evident—the four dead bandits scattered across the yard were broken, their skulls crushed by the blunt end of an axe and their chests caved in by a desperate, monstrous strength.
Theo had fought like an animal to protect the house, but he had been outnumbered.
"Maya, let go," Alias commanded, his voice tight and cracking with an emotion he had never designed. "Let me."
He pressed his palms directly over the torn flesh, letting his silver light flare against the raw, red wetness of the wound. He tried to knit the muscle back together, to command the blood to flow backward, to force the life to stay.
But the healing was slow, agonizingly slow because Alias was not using it properly.
He was scared. Scared of revealing himself. But that fear was nowhere near the fear of losing Theo.
Theo’s eyelids fluttered. A tiny, painful gasp left his lips, his hand twitching weakly in the dirt until his knuckles brushed against Alias’s knee.
"K... Kael," Theo rasped, his voice barely a whisper, a bubble of dark blood popping at the corner of his mouth.
He wasn’t begging to be saved. His glazed eyes tried frantically to focus on Alias’s face, filled with regret. "They... they took him. They came and... went for him and Maya. I... I had to..."
"Don’t speak, Theo. Stay still," Alias pleaded, the pearl-like tears finally spilling over his cheeks, sizzling as they hit the hot, blood-soaked grass.
"No... listen," Theo choked, his large hand trying to grip Alias’s tunic, his fingers leaving thick, red smears on the white fabric. "The leader... he told me. He said I could give them the boy... and they’d leave us alone. They’d leave Maya. He said... I had to choose and I..."
And he chose Maya.
While it was frightening for a child to be kidnapped, it was the worst case scenario for a girl.
They were all men and thinking about how they would abuse Maya once she was in their clutches... so many men.
He could not bring himself to let them take his sister. To be fair, be contemplated giving Kael away and then going after them to get him back but then what if he failed?
His mind reminded him of the times he had spent with the child. How innocent and pure he was. That child should not suffer.
So, he did not want to give either of them away so he fought but protecting them both was drawing at his strength and there were just so many of them.
He protected them both with all he had but they managed to get their hands on Kael. While trying to go after them, they grabbed Maya as well.
He was torn. He had to protect one of them. He had to... save one.
And his body moved to save Maya. He managed to beat the four men surrounding her but while protecting Maya, he got stabbed and this happened.
He could not go after the bandits who took his son.
