Ultimate Gacha System: Reborn As A Mob in My Favorite Game

Chapter 123: A Way To Move On From Regret...

"When my memories awakened... when my disguise broke and I remembered I was the First Heir," Sylvia gasped, her voice completely devoid of any remaining pride. "I didn’t just walk away... I went to your old herb shop... I sat at that desk, and I wrote the most venomous hateful lies imaginable... I told him I was a noble and that I would never infect my lineage with a commoner... I called him spineless. I told him he only saved Serra to cash in on the Church’s gold... I deliberately wrote every single thing I knew would shatter his heart, just so he would hate me and never try to follow me... I know I broke him."

Aurelia stood over her, casting a long heavy shadow over Sylvia’s shivering form. The old woman slowly lowered the wooden sword with the tip resting silently against the moss.

"Yes," Aurelia agreed coldly.

Her voice offered absolutely no comfort. It offered no absolution and no gentle grandmotherly lies to soothe the girl’s conscience.

It was the brutal objective truth.

"You did."

Sylvia lay flat on the moss, her chest heaving violently as she finally managed to suck air back into her burning lungs.

The pain radiating from her bruised ribs, her deadened thigh, and her fractured shoulder was immense.

It was a searing white-hot blanket of agony that enveloped her entire nervous system but it wasn’t enough.

It hadn’t drowned out the guilt...

It hadn’t silenced the screaming voices in her head that replayed the moment she let that paper burn her own tears away over and over again...

It had only magnified it.

The pain had completely stripped away her defenses, leaving the festering rotting wound of her betrayal completely exposed to the open air.

The old woman was right... She couldn’t run from this... She couldn’t bleed it out in a forest and she couldn’t spar it away.

A sudden clarity settled over Sylvia’s completely shattered mind.

The frantic grief that had been blinding her for weeks suddenly stopped churning.

It didn’t disappear, but it violently crystallized.

It hardened into a sharp determination that felt as heavy and cold as solid iron in the center of her chest.

She wasn’t going to lie on her back and cry in the dirt...

She wasn’t going to let the guilt consume her and turn her into a pathetic shell of a woman who just stared out of a mansion window for the rest of her life...

She was a prodigy.

She was the First Heir to the greatest, most lethal martial lineage in the entire Erell Empire.

If she had broken him... then she had to be strong enough to drag him back by his collar the next time she met him and then fix him.

Sylvia stopped pushing her Aura outward as a protective shield.

The spitting golden light illuminating the clearing completely vanished as she stopped radiating the intense heat into the air around her body.

She pulled it all inward...

Sylvia clamped down on her own internal aura like a titanium vice.

’I...’

She pushed herself up off the damp moss. She ignored the screaming, tearing pain in her bruised ribs.

She ignored the dead, numb heaviness in her left thigh and she ignored the fractured grinding bone of her right shoulder.

She reached down with her uninjured left hand and picked up her fallen wooden sword from the dirt.

Her fingers wrapped around the cheap, splintered hilt with a promise... However she didn’t immediately attack.

She stood perfectly still as the wind in the clearing completely died.

Her striking gold eyes narrowed into predatory slits as she locked her gaze onto her grandmother.

As a once-in-a-generation prodigy of physical life force manipulation, Sylvia possessed a sensory capability that bordered on the terrifyingly supernatural.

She stopped looking at the surface world.

She completely tuned out the visual details of Aurelia’s loose linen tunic, the silver braid of her hair, and the rough bark of the oak trees behind her.

She looked deeper... She looked directly at the thermal and energetic signatures actively roaring beneath the old woman’s pristine skin.

Sylvia didn’t just sense Aurelia’s Aura... she literally saw the flow!

It wasn’t a glowing formless blob of magic.

She saw the precise microscopic pathways that Aurelia was using to route her internal life force.

She saw how the old woman didn’t just flood her muscle groups blindly like a novice.

Aurelia channeled the dense heavy energy through specific, microscopic capillaries.

She wrapped the pressure tightly around the individual tendons in her legs, compounding the stored energy at the exact pivot points of her joints.

It was like looking at a network of tightly wound, supernatural steel springs, constantly compressing and releasing to maximize leverage and completely minimize physical exertion...

It was an internal masterpiece of martial arts engineering that took decades of bloody, grueling, lethal combat to master.

Sylvia didn’t have decades but she was a genius.

Sylvia closed her eyes for a fraction of a single second.

She reached into her own core.

She grabbed her own internal Aura... the raging grief-fueled overflowing river of her physical life force and violently commanded it to obey.

She didn’t let the pressure vent into the atmosphere... She forced it into the exact same microscopic pathways she had just witnessed inside her grandmother...

The pain was instantaneous and horrific. Her blood vessels bulged, straining against the sudden internal pressure.

She routed the hyper-dense energy down into the marrow of her legs, aggressively coiling it tightly around her own patellar and Achilles tendons.

She flooded her cardiovascular system with a highly concentrated pressure that supercharged her red blood cells, forcing them to carry oxygen at an impossible rate.

Her heart thumped against her ribs like a runaway war drum.

When Sylvia opened her eyes, the heat-haze that usually hovered around her body had completely vanished as the air around her was perfectly still.

All of the explosive energy was entirely contained within her flesh, waiting for a single trigger to release.

Aurelia’s piercing eyes widened in genuine surprise.

The old woman’s relaxed posture stiffened.

She recognized the technique instantly... It was her own proprietary compression method, stolen in the span of three seconds by a girl who was supposed to be bleeding out her grief.

"Well, I’ll be damned," Aurelia muttered as a fierce proud grin split her beautiful face.

Sylvia lunged.

There was no sound of footsteps kicking up the dirt... There was no warning whatsoever...

The sheer velocity generated by the internal Aura routing completely broke the sound barrier in a violent detonation.

CRACK!

A miniature sonic boom ruptured the air where Sylvia had just been standing.

She crossed the clearing instantly.

It didn’t look like she ran but rather she teleported, transforming into a terrifying blur of golden-blonde hair and singular lethal intent.

’Will...’

She didn’t swing her sword in a wide, sweeping arc.

She leveled the wooden tip directly at her grandmother’s chest and executed a perfect, blindingly fast, linear forward thrust.

She channeled every single ounce of her amplified supercharged physical power into the singular, tiny point of the wooden weapon.

’Defeat you!’

Aurelia didn’t have time to dodge.

The speed of the strike made evasion a physical impossibility, even for a grandmaster.

The old woman rooted her dark boots deep into the damp moss.

She drew heavily, aggressively on her own deep reserves of compressed Aura, hardening her muscles into solid iron.

She met the attack entirely head-on, thrusting her own wooden sword forward in a perfectly mirrored counter-strike to intercept the incoming blade.

The two blunt, wooden tips collided perfectly in mid-air.

KRA-KOOM!

The impact wasn’t magical... There was no flash of elemental fire or crackle of arcane lightning...

It was a catastrophic release of pure aura and physical mass meeting an immovable object!

A massive visible shockwave of violently displaced air erupted outward from the exact point of collision.

The concussive force of the impact completely flattened the tall grass in the clearing, pressing the blades flush against the earth.

It rippled violently through the dirt, tearing up chunks of moss and soil.

It slammed into the massive oak trees surrounding the terrace, violently shaking the enormous trunks and sending tens of thousands of green leaves showering down around them like a sudden violent storm.

For a single agonizing second, the two women held the clash.

Sylvia’s left arm shook violently, the muscles bulging and her veins pressing tight against her skin.

Aurelia’s boots dug deep parallel trenches into the dirt as she was pushed back half an inch.

Their opposing Auras warred for dominance in the tiny space between the wooden tips then, standard physics violently reasserted itself over the supernatural pressure.

The cheap training wood could simply not withstand the terrifying density of the life force being channeled through it from both sides as the structural integrity of the fibers failed entirely.

CRACK-SHATTER!

Sylvia’s wooden sword violently, explosively detonated into a thousand jagged, useless splinters of shrapnel.

The sudden loss of resistance sent Sylvia stumbling heavily forward.

Her massive forward momentum carried her wildly past her grandmother’s flank.

She couldn’t catch her footing as she hit the dirt hard, her shoulder taking the brunt of the impact.

"Umph!"

She tumbled aggressively across the damp moss, rolling end over end before finally sliding to a rough halt near the thick base of a massive oak tree at the edge of the clearing.

The clearing went completely silent.

The violent rush of wind died instantly as the only sound left was the soft, whispering rustle of the thousands of falling leaves slowly drifting down to blanket the torn earth.

The fight was over...

The massive surge of adrenaline that had fueled Sylvia’s breakthrough completely, instantly evaporated from her bloodstream.

It washed out of her system, leaving behind a hollow emptiness that felt worse than the physical exhaustion.

The pain of her bruises, her fractured collarbone, and her strained muscles returned tenfold, burning through her nervous system but it was absolutely nothing compared to the complete collapse of her emotional dam.

The adrenaline had been holding the tears back... Now, the dam was gone...

Sylvia lay on her side in the dirt. She slowly opened her hand, dropping the small, splintered wooden hilt from her trembling fingers.

She didn’t try to stand up. She didn’t try to salvage her pride.

She pulled her knees tightly up to her chest, curling into a tiny defensive ball against the roots of the oak tree.

She buried her face deeply into her dirt-stained, bruised hands.

The fierce untouchable heir to the clan was gone.

The genius prodigy of Aura had vanished...

She was just a heartbroken, deeply remorseful young girl who realized, with crushing finality, that she had made the absolute worst mistake of her entire life.

She began to sob...

"I just wanted to hold him..." Sylvia cried.

Her voice cracked and broke into harsh pieces as she rocked herself back and forth on the damp moss.

"We finally had each other! We slept together and it was beautiful! I wanted to wake up next to him and know that he was real, and that he was mine! But the curse broke, and I ruined it! I ruined everything just to protect our stupid lineage and because of that damn letter, he’s going to die thinking I was utterly disgusted by him!"

Aurelia stood perfectly still in the center of the ruined clearing, holding her own perfectly intact wooden sword.

She looked at her shattered weeping granddaughter curled up in the dirt.

The dangerous feral grin completely vanished from the old woman’s lined face.

Aurelia tossed her wooden sword aside. It clattered softly against a stone.

She let out a long sad sigh.

It was an exhalation that seemed to carry the crushing weight of her own unfixable regrets.

She walked slowly across the moss ith her dark boots crunching softly against the displaced dirt and fallen leaves. She stopped right next to the sobbing, rocking girl.

Aurelia didn’t offer a harsh lecture on emotional control.

She didn’t tell her to swallow her tears and be strong for the reputation of the clan and she certainly didn’t tell her that commoners weren’t worth crying over.

In fact she could understand... because she had once done the same.

The old woman simply lowered herself down with a quiet grunt, sitting cross-legged directly on the damp dirty grass.

She smoothed out the fabric of her loose trousers, patted her own lap softly with a calloused hand, and looked down at Sylvia.

Sylvia didn’t hesitate.

The desperate need for comfort overrode everything else.

She uncurled from her defensive ball and practically crawled across the dirt on her elbows and knees.

She laid her head down heavily onto her grandmother’s lap and she buried her tear-soaked, dirt-streaked face directly into the fabric of Aurelia’s trousers, crying so hard her entire body shook with violent spasms.

Aurelia looked up at the thick canopy of the massive oaks she had grown herself.

She raised her scarred hand and gently, tenderly began to stroke Sylvia’s messy dirt-stained golden hair.

"I know, little bird," Aurelia whispered softly.

She continued to gently, rhythmically pat the girl’s head with her fingers working through the tangled blonde locks, letting the girl bleed out the last of her toxic, rotting poison into the earth.

"I know. Just breathe. Let it all out. Relax..."

For a long, long time, the only sound in the private twilight forest was the soft, heartbreaking weeping of a girl who had finally admitted the truth to herself, and the gentle rustle of the thousands of fallen leaves settling over the clearing.

...

The synchronization was absolute.

When the bony dying hand of Prime Klaus grasped the trembling desperate fingers of Regret Klaus, there was no violent explosion of magical force.

There was no blinding flash of elemental light and there was no tearing friction within the fabric of his psyche...

Instead, it felt like two halves of a perfectly machined iron gear finally sliding seamlessly into place after being forcefully separated for an entire lifetime.

WHOOSH!

The endless white void... the pristine featureless prison that the Second King had constructed as the stage for their psychological torture could no longer contain the unified crushing density of the True Soul King’s completely integrated consciousness.

KRA-CRACK!

A massive ear-shattering fracture spider-webbed violently across the empty white "sky" directly above them.

The sound was identical to a massive glacier splitting apart under immense pressure.

Klaus didn’t close his eyes.

He didn’t flinch...

He stood tall...

He was back!

He was beautifully back in his own body.

A massive, sweeping wave of intoxicating relief washed violently through his entire system.

He was healthy.

He was heavily muscled, his broad shoulders easily stretching the dark, familiar fabric of his long-sleeved combat shirt.

His thick raven-dark hair fell naturally over his sharp, intensely focused eyes.

The heavy bone-deep exhaustion that had plagued his every single waking moment since he first failed the trial was gone.

The dark, bruised bags under his eyes were gone... The phantom aches in his joints, the stiffness in his spine, the constant dull throb of his overworked heart... it had all vanished.

Klaus took a deep breath.

For the very first time in years, his lungs expanded fully and completely free of the invisible weight of his own rotting guilt.

There was no rattle... There was no wheeze... He could feel the terrifying vitality rushing through his veins.

He could feel the Beast’s Vitality passive skill purring deep in his marrow like a dormant engine that had just been fully fueled and ignited.

He slowly clenched his right hand into a tight fist. He unclenched it, then clenched it again as the tendons in his forearm bulged.

The raw physical power residing in his own bones was intoxicating.

"I’m fucking back baby!"

He wasn’t a frail dying husk anymore, entirely dependent on a maid to wash his back.

He wasn’t a traumatized, powerless, weeping teenager trapped in a nostalgic illusion.

He was a walking breathing weapon of mass destruction. He was the Soul King and he was very, very pissed off.

A fierce genuine smile of absolute relief and anticipation spread slowly across his handsome face.

He rolled his broad shoulders, relishing the smooth glide of his own cartilage.

’I never thought I would miss having a young body this much...’ Klaus thought.

SHATTER!

The white void violently exploded.

It completely dissolved as billions of jagged brilliant shards of pure digital light rained down around him like shattered glass before instantly evaporating into absolute nothingness.

The dead silence of the void was instantly replaced by the low mournful moan of a hot, dry wind.

The odorless air was violently pushed away by a heavy gust of stale dust.

Klaus inhaled sharply.

’Where the fuck am I?’

He smelled scorched earth.

Klaus blinked against the sudden, harsh glare of a pale jaundiced sun burning high in a bruised, iron-gray, cloudless sky.

He looked down.

The invisible perfectly smooth floor of the void was gone.

His heavy, dark combat boots were planted firmly, deeply, in a thick layer of coarse heavily blood-stained yellow sand.

He was standing in the exact center of a colossal crumbling gladiatorial battle arena.

The architecture surrounding him was magnificent, brutal, and thoroughly ruined.

Towering, monolithic stone bleachers rose hundreds of feet into the hot air, forming a massive, inescapable circular perimeter around the vast killing floor.

The stone rows were completely empty, cracked, and heavily weathered by centuries of complete neglect.

Massive towering obsidian pillars, identical in make and design to the ones currently supporting the ceiling on the ground floor of the Endless Tower, lay violently toppled and shattered across the high stands, as if a titan had ripped them down in a fit of rage.

It was a grand monument to slaughter, perfectly preserved within the isolated pocket dimensional space of the Second King’s trap room.

Klaus slowly raised his head. His dark eyes tracked across the vast, undulating expanse of the sun-baked, bloody sand.

Standing exactly fifty yards away, directly on the opposite side of the massive arena, was his executioner...

It was the Second Soul King...