The Villain Is Destined to Die: But as the Creator, I know All Endings Chapter 239: Day - 2: The Encounter Between the Two of Us

Thinking without the restraint of actuality leads you toward infinite wisdom. Henceforth, logic is not always the key, sotis the opposite is.

And this is not foolishness. This is what a true genius does very often. To think from an entirely different angle is to see what you have always been looking at but never actually seen.

It is simply a matter of perspective. Ask the grass, and the deer is the monster. Ask the grass, and the lion is its only protector.

The truth does not change.

And sotis, one shift in angle is enough to overturn everything you believed you knew.

* * *

As the silence stretched beyond the rising waves, rain began to fill it.

Leon gazed down at the man bowing before him.

Bronze hair, a smooth scar-free face, and eyes that looked to have witnessed strokes of centuries. He looked completely different from the one Leon had rembered. Not a single trace of his facial features overlapped with the na he had always attached to that legend.

Leon’s heart started to beat faster and faster. A strange sense of warmth and an ancient connection that defied any logic settled between him and Bronze.

’What is this strange feeling?’

Leon kept asking himself.

Even Rumi was unable to reason it out. It was all strange, but it existed before their eyes, undeniable and sourceless all at once.

"Shin...? Is that really you?" Leon muttered that na once again in Lumina’s, looking down at the figure he added. "How are you alive...?"

He was indeed stunned by his own finding. And this was the first thing he had to ask.

Before now, Leon had believed there was so connection between himself and Shin. He had till now speculated that they might have been holding onto the sa thread of fate all this ti.

Yet here Shin Kataino was. Still breathing. Kneeling before a man wearing his lover’s face.

’Is he the sa Shin we all know?’ Leon couldn’t help but to ask himself.

If he went by the original storyline of the ga, Shin Kataino was supposed to be dead by now. So how did he still exist after so many centuries?

The answer arrived in his mind on its own.

"A regressor..." Leon muttered, eyes widening slightly.

He looked sharply at Shin, who was slowly raising his head.

’Shin Kataino was a regressor.’

The more the conclusion settled, the more unsettled Leon beca.

This was his ga. He had designed it. He should have known about every character, every thread, every secret buried inside this world.

Yet sothing like this had unfolded right in front of him without warning.

It made Leon begin to question sothing he had never seriously questioned before.

Whether he had truly created Rebirth of Fivefold Calamity at all? Because the ss quietly which was slowly unraveling inside his head was telling him otherwise.

Maybe it was all just the butterfly effect...?

’No.’

Leon rejected the idea imdiately.

This was too much to be a simple change. There was no way Leon’s influence in the present could have reached back this far. Whatever this was, it seed to have originated long before Leon Valentine was ever born.

He glanced at the status window still hovering faintly at the edge of his vision.

[Exiled Prince of Fate]

[Bearer of Death Wish]

Neither of those titles ever belonged to Shin Kataino. Those were not the titles of the man he had designed. They were the titles of soone who had lived an entirely different life across entirely different centuries and had paid for every single year of it.

’The Exiled Prince of Fate...?’ Leon thought about this for the ti being. ’He said that he was thrown away by the Upper Reality to the lower world. Then....’

’Shin Kataino had already reached the Calamity Rank.’

Don’t know why, but Leon was having a hard ti digesting everything.

’I am missing sothing.’

’I thought so too,’ Just like him, Rumi was having trouble as well.

Leon gripped the Moonblade again and pressed its tip against Bronze’s throat.

"Answer ." Leon demanded in Lumina’s voice, his voice felt cold and without room for negotiation. "How are you still alive? What happened to your face? And where have you been all this ti?"

There was no mistaking it. This person kneeling before him was once Shin.

Bronze slowly raised his head and t Lumina’s cold gaze. Whatever had broken in him monts ago had been packed back down. What remained was sothing quieter and much harder to read.

"Listen, Elizabeth—"

"Don’t address by that na."

Leon pressed the tip slightly harder. Just enough to make the point without making it a threat.

Bronze’s eyes widened. He bit his lip and looked down, his composure slipping for just a mont before he steadied himself.

"Oh, O-Of course," he said quietly. "I will be careful."

He paused. Took a breath and brgun.

"I... cannot tell you the reason behind all of it. But believe . Everything was for a purpose. For and for you both." He exhaled. "If we succeed then we could... we could finally save you."

Leon’s eyes stayed still.

’The hell is he spouting.’

"Who is ’we’?" Leon asked. "Is there soone else with you?"

"I cannot answer that." Bronze said without hesitation. "I am sorry. But you don’t worry about them. Their goal is the sa as mine."

Leon said nothing.

His mind was already running at full capacity, he was pulling every word Bronze had been saying. Every sentence was landing sowhere between familiar and completely foreign.

He was growing impatient.

"What do you an by saving ?" Leon asked. "What is going to happen to ?"

The mont those words left his mouth, sothing changed in Bronze’s face.

His pupils contracted.

"No," Bronze said. His voice had dropped to almost nothing. "I cannot tell you that either."

’This...!!’

Leon was this close to driving the Moonblade forward when Rumi’s voice cracked through his thoughts like a whip.

’Haru, don’t! What are you doing?!’

Her voice jolted him from the inside out. His grip stayed tight around the blade but his arm didn’t move.

’Haaah... sorry, but he is really pissing off.’

’I can tell. But first, try to find out where he was all this ti.’

Leon inwardly exhaled and let his mind settle. Rumi was right. Getting angry would close every door that was currently sitting open. His first priority had to be information. As much of it as Bronze was willing to give, and maybe a little more than that.

He pulled his thoughts back into order.

In the original storyline, Shin had gone missing during the Calamity War. Leon and Alice had encountered traces of him through the Shattered Swordmaiden book in the AstralTale Library, where they discovered that he got captured by Zenith and beca a ghoul under her command. Leon had assud that was the real end of him. A background tragedy. But the person kneeling in front of him right now was not a ghoul. He doesn’t look dead either.

There were more pieces to this puzzle than Leon had ever been given. And that fact alone was beginning to irritate him in a way that had nothing to do with Bronze.

He steadied himself and asked the question.

"After you left ," Leon said in Lumina’s voice, quiet and carrying the particular weight of soone who had waited centuries to ask for it. "Where were you all this ti?"

It was the question Lumina had never gotten to ask. The one she had carried alone until the very end, dying in an abandoned place with no one beside her.

Leon felt the anger stir every ti that image surfaced. It was not his anger exactly. But it lived in him anyway.

’If only I had been there. If only I had been alive in her era. Then I would never have let her suffer this painfully.’

A woman who had the power to shake the foundations of this world, dying alone in a place no one thought to look.

At the very least, that much. She deserved soone beside her at the end.

And in the end she closed her eyes not to the sound of her most cherished voice but to the sound of nothing at all.

Bronze responded this ti. He looked up and spoke directly, and Leon watched his face as the words ca out.

"I had gone to war. I stood alongside those Twin Calamities. I have fought the Calamites." His jaw tightened. "And there, I ca to know that ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ had a goal of ▒▒▒▒▒. I could not just sit there and do nothing. I just... could not."

Leon almost took a step back.

Sothing had just happened to Bronze’s words.

Not all of them. Just certain ones, dropping out of existence mid-sentence, replaced by sothing Leon’s mind could not hold onto no matter how hard he reached for it.

He looked at Bronze’s lips during the gap and found no help there either. Whatever his mouth had ford, Leon’s eyes refused to read it.

’What was that?’ Leon asked inwardly.

Rumi was the sa.

’I heard the sa thing as you,’ she replied. ’Or rather... I heard nothing. As if those words were never spoken at all.’

Leon couldn’t hold it in and asked again, "you ca to know what?"

Bronze answered the sa, "...That, ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ was after the ▒▒▒▒▒, and when I find out who ▒▒▒▒▒ was referring to, I found out that ▒▒▒▒▒ want nobody else but you."

"....?!"

At this point, Leon’s entire body shivered. He could not help but repeat it.

"?" His voice ca out in Lumina’s cadence but the disbelief underneath it was entirely his own. "What does that an?"

Lumina was the cause of sothing. Of what, Leon could not piece together.

Bronze looked up at her.

He gave her a bitter smile. The kind that has long since stopped finding anything funny.

Then he nodded, slowly "We still could not find out how to stop it from progressing. For that we needed as much knowledge as we could gather. From everywhere, even from every era if necessary."

He exhaled through his nose, and then for the first ti, he grinned.

"And then we ca up with an idea. It was sothing brilliant. Sothing that even ▒▒▒▒▒ would never dream of thinking of."

Leon listened without blinking. His eyes were fixed entirely on Bronze’s face, on every microexpression that surfaced on.

Whatever this idea was, Shin believed in it completely. That much was clear. A man who had lived across centuries carrying a corrupted dark core and two titles that no version of Shin Kataino was ever supposed to have, and he still believed the idea was brilliant.

That ant it was either genuinely extraordinary. Or it had already failed in ways Bronze had not yet allowed himself to admit.

Leon opened his mouth to ask which one.

CRACK–!

The sound ca from inside Bronze’s chest.

"Hm?"

Leon’s brow furrowed.

Bronze did not finish his sentence.

He looked down at his own chest. Both hands ca up slowly, hovering just in front of it without touching. His face had gone completely pale in the span of a single breath.

"...ah. Looks like I broke the rule set by us."

Bronze slowly lowered his hands from his chest.

He looked up at her one more ti.

And for the first ti since he had collapsed to his knees, his expression was completely calm. Not the forced composure from earlier. Not the bitterness of a man pressing grief back down into a manageable shape.

Sothing quieter than all of that. Sothing that looked, uncomfortably, like relief.

"I am glad," he said softly. "That the last thing I see is your face."

His chest started to shine with dark and white ambient light, and the cracking sound beca natural.

After taking a long breath, Shin looked at Lumina, with a serious look, he added at last.

"You will be eternal till the last versions of ’us’ remain," he winked at her, and slowly the cracking sound intensified. "Until the next cycle."

That was the last word of Bronze.

Or perhaps, at last, of Shin Kataino of this Cycle.

Leon still had questions, he hurriedly opened his lips and asked.

"Wait, what do you an by ’versions’?"

Leon kneeled down to his level, the Moonblade still in hand. The mont the dark mana touched his skin, his skill flickered and gave out.

His disguise dissolved.

The form shifted back to Leon Valentine. Wet black hair catching the wind. Those sharp golden eyes. The fra of a young man who had no business being on this ship on this night.

"...?!"

Bronze’s eyes widened in shock.

Then they stopped.

Because sothing beneath the surface of this stranger’s appearance had reached him before any word could. His shattering body went still for just a mont.

His wide eyes moved slowly across Leon’s face. A sense of recognition similar to what Leon had felt earlier traced his mind and body.

"T-That fragnt inside youl...?" he stuttered between the sounds of his cracking core.

Leon nearly moved to hide his face. Then he stopped. Because Shin was not looking at him with fury.

He was looking at him the way a man looks when sothing he stopped believing in a very long ti ago walks through the door anyway.

His expression had gone surreally calm. The bitterness was gone. The exhaustion was gone. And what remained was sothing Leon had not seen on his face once during this entire encounter.

Hope.

"Hahahaahaha...!!" Bronze laughed. Loud and broken and completely unguarded, right in the middle of his own cracking chest. "Haaah... looks like... looks like we succeeded."

"What...?" Leon uttered.

Black cracks were spreading now. Across his arms, up his neck, across his face. The inside of him was becoming visible through the fractures, purple and dark bleeding through the seams of a body that had held together through nothing but will for longer than it should have.

But despite the pain and everything else, he was smiling.

Bronze’s eyes began to close. A crack traced slowly around his face, following the line of his jaw, threading across his cheekbones, reaching the corners of his eyes.

He whispered just enough for Leon to hear.

"This is your Cycle now... Creator."

.

.

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A/N: All my exams and interviews are over. Thanks for your patience. The updates will be regular from this month. Hence, I will also adding Daily goals. I have also reduced the price of last 2 Priv tires.

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