Chapter 553 - Epilogue - Another Layer of Chaos

  Virillius Augustus lightly swirled his cup as he leaned on the edge of his balcony. The ice clinked around as the cloudy yellow-green liquid sparkled beneath the moonlight. It was late. The lunar deity was already halfway across the sky. Her usual witch hat had been replaced by a silly party cap covered in rainbow polkadots, almost as if to celebrate the end of the proxy war. The light she radiated was similarly affected; the night’s pale glow was replaced with a veritable rainbow of ever-changing colours, albeit only when one looked directly at her. Those who saw the pulsing, vomit-inducing light were subjected to an occasional burst of confetti, squeaky sound effect and all, as they continued to stare at the sky.

  It was precisely Griselda’s behaviour that drove Virillius’ choice of drink. Rather than the aged hay liquor that was his usual, he opted to pick out one of the colourful, fruity cocktails so frequently favoured by his men. It was a curious concoction featuring a liquor made with a dessert plant, finished with a heavy citrus flavour. The taste was too sugary for him, but he continued to sip at it regardless.

  He was too tired to nitpick the flavour; he’d spent the whole day discussing politics he’d wanted no part of. The only thing that’d kept him going was a sense of responsibility; he owed it to Ferdinand after striking him down, wrenching the nation from his grasp, and derailing his ten-thousand year plan.

  Virillius sighed.

  He still regretted it—his uncle had wanted to put an end to the fighting that the system so heavily induced, and Virillius had always been his most stalwart backer. He’d always disagreed with the policies in public, but that’d been nothing more than a means to curtail the bloodthirsty idiots that would’ve otherwise voiced their opinions. Of course, they could have always fallen back on violence, but it was far more efficient for Virillius to take the fools under his wing.

  His role was to curtail the fighting.

  It was almost ironic that he’d wound up challenging Ferdinand himself.

  He had no choice.

  His uncle had declared his intent and never budged, even at death’s door. The only way for Virillius to track down his brother was to remove the obstacle.

  “Why the long face?” There was a surge of magic as his daughter appeared in the place beside him. Transforming into a tiny, child-like form like the one with which she’d departed the manor, she swung her legs over the moose centaur-sized railing. Once settled, she cupped her face in her hands and joined him in staring at the moon. “You just won a war while keeping casualties in the single digits. You should be happier.”

  “Happier?” Virillius snorted. “The last thing I want is more responsibility, and the discussions were a nightmare and a half.”

  “You’ll live. It was barely half a day.”

  “Try telling me that again when you don’t deliberately avoid the negotiations.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, with a small smile. “Mother would’ve split her sides laughing if she knew that you became king.”

  “She’d probably clutch her stomach and cackle as she rolled around atop the carpet.”

  “While furiously slamming her tail against the floor,” said Claire.

  “While furiously slamming her tail against the floor,” agreed Virillius. He chuckled as he swallowed the rest of his drink. Swirling the ice remaining in his cup, he went back inside and approached the artifact mounted on the wall. “Do you want anything?”

  “Maybe some vekratt.”

  “Alright.” Giving the machine a few taps, he returned with two cups of the aged hay liquor and handed one to his daughter.

  Claire briefly stared at the glass, specifically at the giant ice cube suspended in the rich brown liquid, before floating it over to her side. Just like her mother, she flicked at it with her forked tongue and committed it to her lips only upon determining that she liked the flavour. “I can never quite get used to how real these taste. You almost can’t tell that they’re just hallucinations.”

  “You know, weirdly, that was also your mother’s fault. She nitpicked the flavour to no end and badgered Canterbell until he finally broke down and gave in to all her demands. He hasn’t dared to talk back to her ever since.”

  “That’s good to know.” A small smile crossed Claire’s lips—a familiar grin that had Virillius shaking his head and sighing.

  “You could at least pretend not to be up to no good.”

  “That wouldn’t be any fun now, would it?”

  “I’m not so sure I’d say that fun is exactly the priority.”

  “Maybe not for you.”

  He laughed. “What are you going to do, now that this war is over?”

  “I have a few things to take care of,” said Claire. “But when all that’s finally done, I think I’ll spend about half my time in Vel’khan.” She paused for a moment to sip on her drink. “I opened a shop with a friend in the capital. But I’ve been stuck managing it by myself ever since Pollux killed her.”

  Taking a breath, he carefully observed her wistful expression. “...And the other half?”

  “I’m going to go adventuring,” she said. “There’s a whole world out there. And somehow, all I’ve seen, even after blowing up however many planets, is Cadria, Vel’khan, and everything in between.”

  “Better than me,” he said. “I’ve only ever left to conquer new lands.”

  “That was Ferdinand’s fault,” said Claire. “You don’t have to feel bad about killing him. And you don’t have to take responsibility for this sorry, barbaric excuse for a country either. He confined you to its borders because he was terrified of a change in your loyalties.”

  Virillius frowned. “It isn’t quite as bad as you’re making it sound. It was his duty as king.”

  “That doesn’t excuse his actions.” She took another sip from her glass. “If you really think about it, this whole debacle was all his fault.”

  “I know.” Virillius paused for a second to breathe. “That was half the reason I killed him. If he didn’t stop me from killing my brother, and if he didn’t fake his execution, your mother would still be alive.”

  “I doubt that,” said Claire. Leaving her liquor floating in the air beside her, she turned around and met his gaze. “The Eleven-Horned King was certainly a part of the problem, but Uncle would have lived either way.”

  “What makes you say that?” asked Virillius, his breath half stuck in his throat.

  “He was already thrice-ascended by the time you fought. And by then, he’d already gained the ability to trade lives and places with the monsters he tamed. He would’ve simply regenerated in some other place even if you struck him down,” said Claire. “Oh, and if it wasn’t obvious enough. He’s long become an Aspect. I doubt he’s strong enough to kill me, but I would hate to have to fight him. Putting him down for good is impossible.”

  “Even if you obliterate the planet?”

  Claire laughed. “His influence has been spreading across the stars for the last nine hundred years. He’s got a few mages that are capable of teleporting and opening portals, and they’ve been on distant worlds ever since.”

  Virillius bit his lips. He’d never even thought to look off-planet.

  “He would’ve killed her anyway then?”

  “He didn’t kill her. In fact, he’s not even responsible for her death.”

  “What?”

  “As I’m sure you always suspected, Mother never succumbed to illness.”

  Virillius bit his lips and took a breath. “That’s what you said earlier this morning.”

  Claire nodded. “I’m sure you had your suspicions.”

  “She was always sickly,” said Virillius, with a tremble. “But it was just supposed to be a quirk of her constitution, an annual reaction to changing temperatures,” he said, quietly. “She got it when she picked up her second ascension and her third offered nothing that fixed it.”

  “That matches what I saw when I looked into Aurora’s mirror. Her illness wasn’t something that was capable of causing any real harm, nor was it anything that could be fixed by treatment. It was just because she refused to brumate.”

  “That was what the healers and doctors always said.”

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  “But you didn’t believe them. You kept investigating because you were afraid of the future that Vella had shown you.”

  “And in the end, I found nothing,” he said. “There was nothing wrong with her. She shouldn’t have succumbed to illness.” He clenched his fists. “I even crippled the God of Death and completely overwrote his concept. It shouldn’t have been possible for her to pass.”

  “That’s because your powers don’t work when you misread the situation,” said Claire.

  Her father’s Ultimate granted the ability to overwrite the logic that governed the world and bend it to his will. So long as he fully understood the phenomenon at hand, he was capable of replacing it with a new block of code that would behave precisely as he had written it. In a way, it was like divinity, but divinity was internal to the system; one still had to work within its bounds and deal with its various parts reacting to one’s injected behaviour. Derived from the Phantom Blood, Virillius’ ability was more absolute. But that was not to say that it was without limitation. Unlike systemic code injection, which would allow one the freedom to do whatever they pleased, Virillius’ Ultimate could not pull the system’s references or even create new variables, only rearrange what was already there.

  “What you saw that day was not Mother succumbing to illness. It was the effect of a spell that was made to look like her illness. It was engineered to perfectly match her magic signature while producing exaggerated versions of all her usual symptoms.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Virillius. “There’s only one mage even remotely capable of something so contrived.”

  “Exactly.”

  Virillius slowly opened and closed his mouth. It took three attempts for his trembling voice to escape his throat. “She wouldn’t.”

  “She would.”

  “Why?”

  Claire smiled. “I don’t know, Allegra. Why?”

  She drained the mana from her surroundings as she spoke and undid the rabbit’s invisibility spell. It’d worked on her father, but Claire had known that the rabbit was there the whole time; she could feel her pleading gaze boring into the back of her head.

  “Allegra,” said Virillius, quietly. “Please tell me this is some sort of misunderstanding.”

  The cottontail said nothing. She simply clutched the wand in her hands and stared at the ground while her giant, pointed hat covered her eyes.

  “Allegra!”

  Again, no response. There was no need for a response. Her inability to meet his gaze spoke volumes.

  “Say something, Allegra.” Virillius destroyed his cup in his grip as a ragged breath leaked from his lungs. “Please.” His voice was hoarse, low enough to be practically a whimper. “I trusted you.”

  “...I was under Constantius’ control.” She fell to her knees, her face in her hands. “I couldn’t help it.”

  Virillius opened his eyes wide, but a shrill, hysterical cackle rang through the room before he could ask for details.

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t help it?” Claire laughed so hard she fell off the railing. “And you, Father, you of all people should be able to see straight through her bluff.”

  “I can sense his mana on her,” he said, quietly. “It’s faint. But it’s there.”

  “Only because she’s letting it show on purpose.” It took a moment for Claire to fight back the last bits of her laughter and pick herself up off the ground. “She’s been masking it for the better part of a decade. Worse, she asked hi—”

  “Claire, please.” Allegra clasped her paws together, only to be frozen by an ice-cold glare.

  “She asked him to tame her, just so she wouldn’t feel guilty. He was an excuse, a way for her to lie to herself and feel better about venting her jealousy.”

  “Her jealousy?” Virillius took a breath. “Why would she be jealous? Violet faced nothing but difficulty. The other nobles hated her, for no other reason than that I loved her. They were always trying their best to crush her, to make her life hel—”

  “You’re mistaken, Virillius,” said Allegra, quietly. “I wasn’t jealous of her.” The cottontail balled her fists. “I was jealous of you.”

  “Of me?”

  “We’re supposed to be cut from the same cloth.” She took a breath, a slow shaky breath. “But somehow, nothing ever works out for me, even though it always goes right for you. The whole world always seems to warp and bend out of shape, just so that everything somehow works out in your favour. It happened when we held against the Screeching Swarm. It happened when we killed the Lord of Thunder. And it happened when Sthenia fell.” Allegra finally raised her eyes and met him with a fiery gaze. “You couldn’t just leave it at stealing the spotlight. You managed to charm the officer who was meant to order your death and turn him to your side. You transformed the prince of Kryddar into a powerful ally and eased the southern border’s tensions. And somehow, the barmaid that you happened to fall in love with turned out to be a princess. When I heard that, I thought you’d finally stop getting everything you wanted. I thought that maybe, just maybe, you’d finally understand what it was like to be like me. She was an enemy princess, Virillius. But somehow, somehow, it all worked out. You found your happily ever after, even though my lover wound up dead and buried.” She gritted her teeth, biting hard enough for them to sink into the flesh of her jaw. “I was able to take some solace in the fact that you were unable to have a child. But then you just had to go ahead and brute force your way to a solution. You didn’t even do anything intelligent. You just kept trying and trying and trying again until you happened to get lucky. Do you understand just how maddening it is, Virillius, to watch you succeed for no rational reason? To have to pretend to smile while you get everything that you could have ever wanted, even as I suffered for a full thousand years?”

  Virillius took three deep breaths. He clenched and loosened his fists a dozen times over as he took in her words. He tried to stay calm.

  But he couldn’t.

  He smashed his fist into the wall, completely obliterating not his room, but the entire castle. If not for the Boris sleeping on the castle’s outer wall, he certainly would have obliterated the city as well.

  “You killed her,” he snarled. “For that!?”

  “Yes, for that.” she said, with a calm smile. “I don’t care anymore. Just execute me and be done with it. Killing is the only thing you’ve ever beat me at, after all.”

  Virillius grabbed one of the spears by his desk and immediately delivered a thrust, but stopped just shy of running her through. His hands were still trembling. Just like the voice he’d trapped deep within his throat.

  “If you don’t, I will,” said Claire.

  The words were impetus enough. Virillius lashed out. He drove his blade deep into her chest.

  Knowing that it wouldn’t finish her.

  That it wouldn’t even count as a wound.

  He fell to his knees, his whole body still shaking as he wheezed. “You were my best friend, Allegra.”

  “I know,” she said. “And that only made it worse.”

  He didn’t say anything. He simply sat there, his hands without any of their usual strength. It was only as he finally wrenched his spear from her breast that he finally found his words again. “Allegra Cedr, I hereby banish you from Cadria.” His voice was quiet, barely audible. “Leave this nation and never come back. Never show yourself before me again if you wish to live.”

  “Vi—”

  “Now.” His voice was still quiet, but commanding. “Before I change my mi—”

  The rabbit exploded. Claire appeared behind her and kicked her with such force that she exploded into a thousand pieces of blood and gore.

  “I told you,” she said. “If you don’t, I will.”

  Virillius was frozen. For a while, he did nothing but stare at the place where Allegra had been.

  “Don’t worry,” said Claire, with a sigh. “She’s too much of a cockroach to die that easily.”

  The cottontail’s body reformed as she spoke, clothes and all. If she wasn’t unconscious, it would’ve been like she’d never been struck. A frown on her lips, Claire grabbed the cottontail by the neck and launched her through the broken wall—a full-forced pitch that sent her flying off-planet.

  “Unfortunately, Rubia likes her too much for me to kill her without it weighing on my conscience," said Claire. She briefly glared at the many guards who’d gathered outside the window. Those that got the cue evacuated, while the rest joined Allegra in crossing the heavens. “But I still did need to get rid of her. And everyone else, for that matter.”

  Virillius said nothing. He simply sat where he was, his hands balled into fists.

  “Snap out of it, Father. We’re not done talking.”

  Even when addressed directly, he needed a moment to respond. “Can we pick this up later, Claire? I need some time to myself.”

  “We can bring Mother back.”

  Again, he froze. The wrenching sensation in his chest was gone in an instant, replaced with a distinct pounding as his eyes widened like disks. “If this is a joke, it isn’t funny.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not that mean.”

  “You better be absolutely certain that whatever you’re suggesting will work.”

  “I am, and I do think I make a fairly convincing case, given everything I knew about that whole situation with Allegra.”

  “Go on.”

  “Honestly, getting her back is the easy part. The problem is making sure this never happens again. And the key to that is putting an end to Vella’s scheming.”

  “That is a lot harder than you’re making it sound.”

  “It’s really not that hard. We just have to give her what she wants.” Claire’s eyes began to glow. “We’ll just have to kill her.”

  “Unfortunately, Flitzegarde is likely to stop us, even in the unlikely case that we’re able to defeat her.”

  “Flitzegarde is incredibly powerful, but she’s not entirely omnipotent. There are only so many places she can monitor at once.”

  “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

  Claire laughed. “And as it turns out, not all the gods get along. Many are itching to go at each other’s throats. All it’ll take to break their chains is the tiniest bit of goading.”

  “Claire…” Virillius tried to take a breath, but it was stuck in his throat. “Are you insinuating that we should end the world just to create a distraction?” His words were hollow, barely audible. “That’s insane. Do you know how many lives we’d ruin? It won’t just be our people who will be caught in the crossfire. The aftereffects will echo through all seven realms and kill more people than we could possibly fathom.”

  “Do you want Mother back or not?”

  Virillius bit his lips and clenched his fists.

  He already knew his answer.

  He’d known his answer from the day he learned of Vella’s scheme.

  He took a breath. One small breath as everything came back into focus.

  “What do I have to do?”

  If ending the world would bring her back, then he would happily herald its destruction.

  Hey everyone! We've finally reached the end of the seventh volume! I hope you all enjoyed how Claire broke the power scale, turned Boris into a literal god, and mostly got over her daddy issues.

  The next book, Beyond the Guise of Divinity, marks the start of the story's final arc. I'm going to be taking a 2~3 week hiatus in order to organise, wrap up some publishing obligations, and polish (read: replenish) the backlog.

  In the meantime, if you've enjoyed the series, I'd really appreciate it if you could leave the first book a rating or review on or , and maybe even recommend the series to a friend/internet predator. It helps a lot more than you'd think. Thank you very much to everyone who's already done this, and thank you all for following Claire's (mis)adventures!

  See you in 2~3 weeks!