"It depends," William spoke up suddenly.
His voice had lost its earlier hesitation, replaced by a weight that seed to vibrate the very air. He looked at Anna, saying sothing that sounded unbelievable to the battle-hardened masters standing around them. "I need to know—what is your most desired goal and ambition in your life?"
After the gruelling minutes of debating inside his mind, William had reached a conclusion. He decided that the best person to decide her fate was Anna herself.
He knew she had already paid the full price of heroism once in his past life, losing everything to beco the woman who saved him. He felt he had no right to unilaterally decide which path she would take in this new lifeti.
If she wanted to live peacefully and simply enjoy the beauty of the world, he would instantly refuse to let her pass through this gate. He would keep her here, protected by the Purgators and his own growing influence, far away from the at-grinder of the apocalypse and the deadly struggles against the Fox.
Yet if her desire was sothing else—sothing matching the fire he knew was buried in her soul—then he would let her go, knowing that in this life, she would find more than just pain. This ti, he would be there to ensure she found amusent and victory instead of just bitterness, loss, and pain.
He would be here to support and protect her regardless of the future she chose.
"Wow, what a serious question to ask a girl you’ve t for the first ti!" Anna chuckled. She brushed off the intensity of his gaze, totally taking his inquiry as a re eccentric way of speaking. To her, he was just a talented, slightly strange boy who had done her father and the Blue Purgators a great service.
As for Bernard, he was this close to grabbing William by the arm, dragging him away, and asking him what had actually gone wrong in his head since eting Anna!
The social awkwardness of the question was enough to make the veteran commander wince. Yet, when he saw Anna taking the question like a joke, he decided to hold his reins back and wait a bit longer to see how this played out.
"Yet..." Anna’s voice softened, and her playful deanour shifted. "No one has ever actually asked that before."
Her face bead with a warm smile as she played absentmindedly with a strand of her long, curly hair. She looked out over the horizon of the dium World before turning back to William.
"I want to be strong," she said, her voice growing firr with every word. "I want to be strong enough to roam the world freely like my father, like everyone on his side. I want to be able to lead and conquer, and to protect my most precious people in the world... My beloved Blue Purgators."
As if her voice were trailing into a distant, ancient mory, she paused. She turned toward Bernard and gave a soft, weary sigh. In that mont, the tone of her voice shifted, becoming hauntingly close to the image of the Master stored in William’s mories.
"You know, Bernard, you were wrong about sothing earlier," she said calmly. "I don’t have a family. My father doesn’t have a family. That’s where your words were off. To , and to my father, everyone in the Blue Purgators is our family. We are one big family. And I want to grow and get strong enough to protect this family with everything I’ve got—exactly like my father does!"
Her words landed like heavy stones in a still pond, leaving Bernard with a face full of conflicted emotions. His casual ntion of the old tragedy that had befallen the leader’s house had clearly struck a deeper chord than he had intended. Anna’s declaration left a profound impact, not only on Bernard’s spirit but on every master standing within earshot.
"It’s settled then."
Out of the blue, William suddenly lowered his head in a deep, formal bow—a gesture of profound respect, as if he were greeting a sovereign of imnse presence.
"I, William of the lower world, will always be by your side," he declared, his voice echoing with a power that seed to draw from the very core of the planet he had recently attacked. "I will help you achieve your dreams, and I will see every one of them fulfilled."
"Hahaha! He really is so nice!" Anna laughed, taking his words as a unique, perhaps overly dramatic way of showing his support. She didn’t think much of it, chalking it up to the strange customs of the lower realm.
But no one else around them took that oath lightly. As William finished his sentence, a faint, dark-gold aura flickered briefly around his body—the unmistakable mark of a Spirit Oath. This wasn’t just a promise; it was an eternal binding.
The masters of the Purgators stared in silence. The youngster they had casually t in the depths of a deadly trap, the one who had miraculously saved their lives through his weird ways, had just taken a solemn, spirit-bound oath. He had committed his life to standing before and protecting their most treasured princess—the leader’s only daughter.
Without intending it, the perception of the experts sent by the Purgators’ leader shifted fundantally. They looked upon William with a deep and profound respect, a sentint that would only grow more rooted once they ventured further into his world and witnessed the sheer scale of the foundations he had built.
"So, you are saying that William truly belonged to this world of yours?" Anna asked, leaning forward with an intensity that belied her youthful appearance.
She had been listening to the fragnted stories of William’s life from his friends and the girls of the Fox Guild, and now she posed the most critical question her father had entrusted her with: was he a native, or a plant from a higher power?
"He was a porter in the sa academy I belong to," Berry answered, her voice soft but certain.
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