Chapter 991 (1/2)

Randidly sat with his legs crossed in the half-light of this strange place. In front of him, the Grim Chimera raised its head and howled until Randidly felt the vibrating hate of the noise in his diaphragm. Its hunger was a physical thing, tugging at Randidly’s clothes. Around the two individuals spiraled thousands of motes of ash, sucked upward into the endless maw of need that was birthed by fear and fury.

It seems that my senses were right, Randidly reflected. Something is… off here.

Then the Grim raised its wickedly sharp claws of its left hand and the ground beneath them was covered in a sea of ants. They marched in formation toward the horizon, commanded by a higher purpose to seek the edge of the world. All of this information flowed into Randidly naturally, connected as he was to the substance of the Grim Chimera.

Then the terrible monster at Randidly’s core raised the bone spear covered in dried blood that was its right arm, and the horizon shifted. One thousand towering pyres appeared like open mouths.

With a predictable fatalism, those innumerable ants marched into the fire without any complaint. Their population swiftly dwindled. The only proof of their existence was the small pops their body made as the air inside their thorax was heated to the point that their exoskeleton was torn open by the super-heated air. The howling of the ash grew louder as more and more drifted upward into the vortex.

Randidly smiled sadly at the Grim Chimera. “They were not mindless ants. They were people. Monsters that grasped intelligence after being exposed to Aether and opportunity. And although their nature drove them to refuse to concede… I hold the responsibility for their deaths. There is no need to try and comfort me with this pointless spectacle.”

Gnashing its invisible teeth, the Grim Chimera spun. Its body twisted and morphed, sucking the images of the ants and the funeral pyres into itself. In its place, the severed head of Ki-Kunot sat on top of a spear. Unlike the head that Randidly had actually received, the image projection that the Grim Chimera made was rotted until the lower half of its head was nothing but a bone and beak.

“You look similar to a very old image I had,” Randidly said quietly. Seemingly not caring that Randidly could see it moving, the Grim Chimera raised its left arm. Thin wires of ash wove themselves downward from its deadly fingers to connect to the skull. Then the dead thing that was meant to be Ki-Kunot began to speak.

With a clacking rotten beak, Ki-Kunot asked. “Why did YOU murder my people?”

Despite how contrived the situation was, Randidly softened somewhat. Until he understood why this was necessary, he would play along. “All blades belong to the King, even if he does not wield them. I will not shift blame to my Riders.”

Waggling the jaw of the dead puppet side to side, the Grim Chimera seemed to think about that. Then Ki-Kunot’s severed head opened its disintegrating beak. “Is humanity truly the most important thing? What is sacred in your crusade to save Earth?”

“All things have a price,” Randidly said tiredly. He had asked the number of monsters they had eliminated in that strange cave system. It was nine thousand one hundred and six. “I’m doing my best.”

“Ah, the conscious of a King is a broad thing, to shrug off the guilt of strangling an entire people in its cradle.” The skull said with a skeletal smirk.

“It fucking sucks,” Randidly said bitterly. The ash floating around them paused in its constant upward rotating. It began to drift without destination, filling the air with smoky butterflies. “It wasn’t a perfect solution because I’m not a perfect person. It hurts to know I could have saved those lives but didn’t. But I would do the same thing again.”

“Doesn’t your justification give you succor? You have continued for a week without stopping your Riders from slaughtering the other small rebellions. You must be confident in the price you would pay for their lives.”

“I’m not.” Randidly shrugged helplessly. His eyes studied Ki-Kunot then the Grim Chimera. Finally, he began to carefully examine those lines of ash that connected the two. “But I don’t have time and I am not a person who can afford to wait for certainty to take action. I offered them three choices. That was the best I was willing to do.”

“You don’t have time? HA! What do you have but time!” The puppet roared.

Shrugging, Randidly said. “I might be the first to possess an Aether Crossroads, but the System has dealt with enough Heretics that it has an automated response. The Judgement is coming.”

Ki-Kunot sneered at Randidly. “You have an eternity here, if you want it. You can minimize the danger-”

“I’m not so arrogant to believe that I’m the first person that has found this loophole. And also not the first to find a way around Aether Sickness. Yet what I find funny is that the Judgment sets a date and descends based on that timeline. Because I received the information on normal time, Dungeon time gives me room to prepare. Could I have gone into a deeper Dungeon while in that time accelerated jail and put off the Dungeon? I actually counted on the Judgment at that time, but if I had wanted to… was that an option?”

Randidly leaned forward. “If that’s the case, the System is built as though it's less important that it is coming, and more important that I know its coming. Which is the reason I have a hunch that this Judgment will be slightly more complicated than just another fight. I’m not in here just to prepare for the Judgment.”

For several minutes, the skull was quiet. The Grim Chimera didn’t move. Then, like cut power had finally been restored, it spoke again on a completely different topic. “Three choices? You gave us only two choices: join you as slaves or die.”

Randidly smiled. “There was a third choice. I urged them to leave that base and flee. They could have left and started a new life elsewhere.”

“Your Riders burned our homes and extracted the raw materials. Not just ore and lumber, but you also gather less intelligent species and use them to harvest food and textiles.” The expression on Ki-Kunot’s face was bitter. “What choice did we have? You would have steamrolled our culture and way of life. Without that, what would we be but monsters?”

“Culture…” Pressing his eyes closed, Randidly breathed out slowly. “Yours was a culture of violence before you achieved self-awareness. You killed each other heedlessly. LIkely for thousands of years.”

“It was tradition-” The skull hissed. But Randidly also sensed he was close to the core of the issue now and didn’t stop.

“And what you are saying now is that your lives meant less to you than your culture.” Randidly bared his teeth. His hands tightened to fists. “So not only do I need to spare your lives, but when you threaten to harm your own lives to protect other interests, I need to respect that as well? No. I will not do that.”

“YOU SPEAK SO GRANDLY OF YOUR VIOLENCE.” Ki-Kunot bellowed. The ashen butterflies were moving in a frenzy now, crashing into each other in small explosions of grey. “Yet how could we trust you? You came in a frenzy of fire and killing. You did not bother to learn about us. There is so much that we could have done for each other if you would have given us the chance!”