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

Chapter 125: The One Behind It All

Ryoki began to list them off with his voice rising in dramatic volume, echoing across the vast empty expanse of the ruined colosseum.

"I have seen warlords who regretted burning entire, thriving, beautiful cities to the ground..." Ryoki boasted, spreading his silver-gauntleted arms wide, as if addressing an invisible crowd of thousands. "I have stared into the eyes of conquerors who were haunted by the deafening screams of tens of thousands of innocents burning alive in the ash of their own homes... I have seen the souls of legendary kings who deeply, painfully regretted slaughtering their own infant children in their royal cribs, suffocating them with silk pillows just to secure their blood-soaked paranoid thrones."

Ryoki took a slow deliberate step forward with his pristine silver boots leaving a flawless impression in the yellow sand.

"I have seen brilliant, unmatched generals who regretted leading hundreds of thousands of fiercely loyal men into hopeless meat-grinders of war, watching entire generations of youth be swallowed by the mud and the steel. I have seen unfathomable horrors, Klaus. Horrors that would completely, instantly, and permanently break the fragile, delicate mind of a lesser god... I have digested the astronomical weight of historical atrocities."

Ryoki stopped pacing.

He turned entirely toward Klaus, planting his boots in the sand.

Ryoki raised his right arm, the interlocking silver plates of his pauldron sliding smoothly and pointed a single gleaming silver-gauntleted finger directly, accusingly, right at the center of Klaus’s broad chest.

"And you?" Ryoki sneered.

His luminescent, glowing white eyes flashed with contempt.

It was a look of pure disgust, as if he were actively examining a smeared insect on the bottom of his pristine boot.

"What is your great soul-crushing tragedy, anomaly?" Ryoki demanded, his voice dripping with condescension. "What is the massive, world-ending burden that broke your pathetic mind so thoroughly that the Trial itself had to drag your soul across the dimensional divide?"

Ryoki threw his head back and laughed.

It wasn’t an elegant chuckle... It was a harsh cruel sound that tore through the air.

"A house fire caused by a leaky fuel line in a primitive metal box?" Ryoki mocked, summarizing the entirety of Klaus’s trauma with a dismissive flick of his wrist. "A stupid unobservant teenage girl stepping carelessly into the path of a speeding carriage just because you were slightly annoyed and walked too fast on a paved road? You consider that a tragedy?"

Ryoki shook his head, his long flowing silver hair catching the pale light of the artificial sun overhead.

"Those are mundane, completely insignificant accidents..." Ryoki stated, his tone flat and clinical. "They are the baseline statistical inevitabilities of a fragile entirely meaningless mortal life. People die in fires every single day. Children are crushed in the streets by the thousands. It is the simple boring mathematics of existence."

Ryoki laughed again.

The sound echoed cruelly, bouncing sharply off the ruined towering stone stands of the bleachers, multiplying in the silence and filling the hot oppressive air of the arena with inescapable mockery.

"Your pain is so incredibly, pathetically small, Klaus," the Second King insulted, aiming his perfectly sharpened dagger directly and flawlessly for the jugular of Klaus’s foundational trauma. "It is microscopic... It doesn’t even register on the grand scale of the cosmos... You have committed no grand sweeping sins... You have orchestrated no epic, nation-toppling tragedies... You haven’t shaped history, and you haven’t altered the course of a single kingdom..."

Ryoki took another step closer with his eyes narrowing into glowing slits of pure disdain.

"You are just a fragile, weak-minded, endlessly self-pitying child who couldn’t handle a few mundane, everyday accidents..." Ryoki spat.

Ryoki lowered his pointing finger, bringing his silver-gauntleted hand back down to rest lazily on the jewel-encrusted pommel of his sheathed elegant rapier.

"So you locked yourself in a dark, pathetic little room," Ryoki concluded. "You nailed blankets over your windows, you refused to eat, and you cried into your damp pillows until your weak, fragile little heart simply gave out and the world forcefully dragged you here to fill an empty seat. You are completely unworthy of the supreme divine power of the Soul King. You are nothing but a minor, completely forgettable footnote in my eternal glorious reign..."

Klaus stood perfectly, completely still in the hot sand.

’Is he going to spend all this time talking?’

The blistering bone-dry wind howled mournfully through the shattered blackened ruins of the massive obsidian pillars high above them, kicking up small stinging clouds of coarse yellow dust that washed over Klaus’s heavy boots.

If Ryoki had delivered that exact devastatingly cruel speech a few hours ago, it might have worked perfectly.

It might have instantly triggered the suffocating insecurity that Klaus had carried deep in his bones, hidden in his marrow for a long time now.

It might have forced him to throw up a wall of bitter sarcasm, convincing himself that the god was right, that none of this actually mattered and that he was just a miserable, out-of-place fraud playing a pathetic game of dress-up in a fantasy world that didn’t belong to him.

That was what being a Mob character was after all but Klaus was not the same man who had weakly walked through the glowing white double doors of the trial room.

He had just spent a literal agonizing time trapped in the suffocating prison of the white void.

He had literally sat on an invisible floor and became an older dying version of himself understanding everything.

He had sat there and listened to the soul-tearing sobs of his teenage self begging for just one more chance to see his dead mother...

He had faced the ugliest depths of his own broken psyche, and he had survived the integration.

Furthermore, he had felt Mirela’s warm loving arms wrapped securely, tightly around his frail, trembling, dying body on the cold obsidian floor of the ground level of the tower.

He had heard the demi-human maid’s fierce protective defense of his worth.

He remembered the exact sensation of Anya’s small, six-year-old hands glowing with bright purple Shinigami magic, acting as his literal crutch when his own legs had entirely failed him.

He had looked at those two girls, standing in the dark, and he had promised them he would come back.

He wasn’t running from his pain anymore...

He wasn’t hiding behind tall impenetrable walls of cheap sarcasm, and he wasn’t treating the living, breathing world like a disconnected pixelated video game designed to shield his heavily scarred heart.

He owned it... He completely owned every single ounce of his trauma...

His pain might not have burned an entire continent to the ground.

His grief might not have slaughtered armies or toppled ancient royal bloodlines but it had burned his world to the ground.

It had completely incinerated his family, his reality, and his future.

It was his tragedy, and surviving the agonizing weight of it had forged the unyielding iron of his current willpower.

He didn’t need to be an ancient, blood-soaked warlord to be dangerous. He just needed to be a man who refused to die so Klaus didn’t yell.

He didn’t scream in frantic outrage to justify his existence.

He didn’t try to frantically debate the scale of his trauma to an arrogant preening parasite wearing stolen armor.

"If my body is so unworthy," Klaus asked softly.

His voice cut cleanly through the howling hot rushing wind of the arena like a razor-sharp honed blade of ice.

It was terrifyingly calm.

It was completely lacking a single microscopic ounce of fear, insecurity, defensive posturing, or hesitation.

"Then why the hell are you trying so desperately hard to steal it, Ryoki?"

Ryoki’s mocking arrogant smile faltered slightly.

The flawless perfection of the god’s demeanor cracked as the elegant silver lips twitched, revealing a flash of genuine buried frustration.

The glow in his luminescent white eyes instantly hardened into a cold glare. T

he mortal had completely, entirely ignored the carefully laid psychological bait and struck directly, flawlessly at the god’s own pathetic hidden insecurity.

"And another thing," Klaus continued, refusing to yield a single inch of the momentum over to him.

He took a slow step forward in the yellow sand.

The coarse bloody grains crunched loudly, distinctly beneath the thick rubber soles of his dark combat boots.

He didn’t break eye contact for a microsecond as his dark gaze was similar to a suffocating anchor, locking the god in place.

"I saw the ground floor of this massive completely isolated tower you’re hiding in..." Klaus stated. "I saw the massive chains securely, permanently bolted deep into the solid stone altar at the very back of the room."

Klaus stopped walking.

He stood firmly, immovably in the shifting sand, having closed the distance between them to exactly forty-nine yards.

His dark eyes bored unforgivingly into the luminescent white, glowing eyes of the false cowardly god.

"Were you the one who did that to her?" Klaus demanded.

It no longer sounded like the voice of a mortal man from Earth.

The density of his actively suppressed rage began to literally warp the atmospheric pressure around his shoulders.

He didn’t use the generic title of ’Shinigami’... He didn’t refer to her as a vague distant deity of death...

He used the specific beautiful human name that he remembered... right before a desperately loving mother turned to fragile gray ash to save the life of her unborn child.

The name that he somehow knew perfectly belonged to the woman who had suffered in the suffocating dark for centuries so this preening parasite could continue to live.

"Did you torture Ilyana?"

Ryoki’s eyes narrowed instantly into tiny, glowing, highly dangerous slits.

The mere mention of that specific name... spoken with such reverence and undeniable accusation by a mortal caused a flash of irritation to violently cross his elegant flawless features.

It was the look of a tyrant who had just been forcefully reminded of a particularly stubborn annoying insect that he had failed to crush properly.

"That wretched, infinitely meddlesome woman..." Ryoki sneered.

All traces of his mock-politeness, his grace, and his elegant superiority completely vanished.

He didn’t try to deny it.

He didn’t try to offer a philosophical justification or a grand divine excuse for his actions.

He owned it with pride.

"Yes," Ryoki admitted freely, his dual-toned voice echoing across the arena. "I chained her... I broke her and I would do it again in a fraction of a heartbeat."

Ryoki drew his sword.

The silver, jewel-encrusted hilt hummed incredibly loudly as he pulled the long thin blade from the leather scabbard at his hip.

SHING!

It wasn’t made of mundane steel, folded iron, or even enchanted mythril.

The blade was forged entirely from highly concentrated blindingly pure white Soul Mana.

It was an elegant impossibly thin razor-sharp rapier that was visibly tearing and distorting the very fabric of the air around the glowing metal.

"I was the Second Soul King..." Ryoki explained, slowly raising the weapon and pointing the glowing tip of his rapier directly at Klaus’s chest. "I conquered this entire Endless Tower... I slaughtered the guardians... I claimed the throne by right of conquest but upon taking the seat, I learned the terrifying truth of this world, Klaus."

Ryoki took a slow step to his left, keeping the tip of his rapier perfectly leveled at Klaus.

"When a Soul King’s designated time is up, when their lifeforce begins to wane, the world forces them to pass on the divine mantle to the next pathetic candidate and simply fade away into the cold nothingness of the abyss. It uses us, it drains us, and then it replaces us without a second thought."

Ryoki gripped the hilt of his glowing sword tighter.

His knuckles turned completely white beneath the joints of his silver gauntlets.

A sudden vivid flash of genuine cowardice flickered deep within his luminescent arrogant eyes.

It was the paralyzing fear of death.

"I refused," Ryoki spat. "I am a god! I am a supreme being of magic and will! I will not be casually discarded by a mindless system! I decided, entirely of my own volition, to live eternally... I researched the darkest arts... I used a highly forbidden volatile technique to forcefully fragment my own soul, permanently separating my supreme consciousness from my rapidly dying physical body right before the world could reap me."

Ryoki gestured to the massive ruined colosseum around them with his free hand.

"I hijacked the foundational architecture of this trial room. I built this pocket dimension specifically to trap the next designated candidate and completely steal their prime mortal shell so I could walk the surface of the world again, free from the world’s control."

Ryoki lowered the glowing tip of his blade slightly with a cruel sadistic smile returning fully to his flawless face.

"But maintaining a massive detailed pocket dimension for centuries requires a massive, continuous, astronomical source of raw energy..." Ryoki continued, clearly relishing the sheer horror of his own twisted tale. "Ilya... the Shinigami... the supposed warden of death... she tried to stop me and she tried to intervene. She tried to enforce the rules and maintain the pathetic ’balance’ of the cycle. She looked me in the eyes and told me to accept my death like a good little mortal."

Ryoki’s smile stretched wider, showing his perfect white teeth.

"So, I ripped her divine wings right off her back."

Valeria, who was still sitting perched on the top of Klaus’s head, gasped quietly.

The tiny, spectral Chibi’s hands flew up to instantly cover her translucent mouth in horror.

"I dragged her bleeding body down to the ground floor, on that altar and I chained her securely to the obsidian altar of my own tower," Ryoki boasted. "I used heavy hammers to drive massive, jagged spatial spikes directly through the bones of her delicate knees. I reached into her chest and shattered her divine core into a dozen pieces, and I continuously siphoned her energy for centuries."

Ryoki let out a dark satisfied sigh, as if reminiscing about a fond memory.

"I used her very essence, her pain, her tears, and her blood as an infinite, constantly regenerating battery to passively fuel this entire trap room, keeping the lights on while I waited in the dark for a suitable person like you to finally arrive."

Klaus completely stopped breathing.

The hot howling wind of the arena seemed to instantly die completely as the ambient noise of the dimension was cut off.

The ambient temperature entirely surrounding Klaus’s body plummeted drastically, defying the sun burning overhead.

The hot yellow sand directly beneath his heavy combat boots rapidly crystallized, turning instantly to thick, jagged, freezing white frost as his Frostblood Aura began to leak aggressively from his core.

His mind violently, painfully flashed back to the ground floor of the Endless Tower.

He clearly remembered the haunting tragic figure of the Shinigami woman with the long flowing silver hair.

He remembered the incredibly pure love shining in her ancient eyes as she looked at him, right before her physical body completely crumbled into fine, gray ash, sacrificing the very last painful dregs of her existence just to give birth to her daughter.

He remembered Anya...

He remembered the sound of her crying softly with tears streaming down her emotionless face, begging him not to die, begging him not to leave her alone in a world that had already taken her mother...

This preening arrogant cowardly bastard standing in front of him wasn’t just a powerful boss monster to beat for system experience points or rare loot.

This was the exact monster who had brutally tortured an innocent loving woman for centuries in the dark.

This was the vile tyrant who had sadistically ripped a mother away from her child before they could even meet.

This was the exact unforgivable reason Anya had been born from a pile of ash and profound tragedy instead of a warm embrace...

Klaus’s dark eyes went completely dark.

The pupils aggressively, violently expanded, instantly swallowing the brown iris entirely, turning his gaze into two bottomless voids of world-ending hatred.

"Enough," Klaus whispered.