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“What did you do?! Stop it from happening!”
“Keep playing chess. If you beat me, I will let you go. But of course, I don’t have any mind to return time and change the past.”
Still, he could stop the boy from going crazy. At Xian’s words, Gabriel sighed.
“Okay, let’s begin.”
She answered confidently, but the results were revealed in no time. It was terrible. Her experience and skill were insufficient for her to beat his proposal. She was surrounded, each of her moves was countered. Like a butterfly stuck on a spider web, her situation was hopeless. Plus, it didn’t work out because she grew impatient.
Even though she did her best to focus, she couldn’t win the bout. Xian, who was laughing at her, made a mistake, and she had an opportunity to win, but it ended in a draw.
Gabriel glanced at Xian as he laughed at her. Annoyed, she caressed her forehead.
“Sigh.”
Her head felt stiff. A considerable amount of time had passed. They only had seventeen chess pieces, but Xian took a break for an hour or two, saying that he was tired every time the game was over.
Meanwhile, she tried to call another holy monarch, but she couldn’t do anything with Xian’s power holding her down. She was helpless.
Even though the first lord of the demon world was in the celestial world’s deepest layers, no one could feel it. She felt a headache coming, which she only felt a few times in her life.
The magical power covering her body brought her to her best condition. Gabriel took a deep breath as the fatigue in her body disappeared, starting with the headache in her head.
Sooner or later, he would have gotten used to the power of the fragment, and he could control the madness on his own.
No.
With her arms folded, she turned to Xian, who seemed to be meditating. Gabriel opened her eyes. Xian’s fierce eyes squinted in laughter.
“Should we play again?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
Gabriel whistled as he watched Kain and Judah fighting. Kain was stained with the madness of the fragment and was unable to use the power of being an apostle at all, but he was seen cutting down the orcs that flocked around him with tremendous power and drawing the great sword against Judah.
It was certainly not something she had heard wrong. Nor was her memory mistaken. He certainly said so.
Why did Xian call the boy ‘Him’?
Judah Arche… He was special.
What Kain had to go through, he worked it out himself, and everything in the future that she knew around the boy was changing. It changed before her very eyes. She couldn’t say exactly what happened, but she could see the flow changed. If she asked Xian, who must know something, will he be honest with her? Gabriel narrowed her eyes.
“Why are you staring so much?”
“That is true. Are you saying that you know him well, even though you were indifferent to him all this time?”
At Xian’s words, Gabriel flinched. If she asked what was different, she didn’t know exactly how to phrase it. -Judah Arche- was outside her interest. She was a little interested in him after Xian told him to watch him, but she had no idea before that.
She thought that he was just one of the humans around Kain. However, his mood, values, personality, and behavior all seemed different from the Judah Arche in her memory, unlike anyone else.
He wasn’t like that before, so why did he become like that this time?
What does Xian know?
Gabriel did not take her eyes off Xian, waiting for his answer.
“If I knew that, would I ask you? I don’t know.”
“Please tell me your guess, at least once. It’s okay if it’s not the correct answer. I’ll tell you the right answer, whether you get it or not. Even if you know, it doesn’t change.”
“…”
The curtain dispersed with a dull sound. For them, only a few minutes passed, but she didn’t know how much time had passed in real-time. Confused as to what was going on, Xian looked back at her. l
And once again, the surrounding environment changed. She came to her senses, and there was the fallen Kain, with Judah Arche and his third fragment. Kain, chosen by the sword, had died.
Soon afterward, he died as his body is split into two. This was a natural result. Judah Arche, who lacked both skill and experience in all aspects, had no choice but to beat the Wielder of the Sword. As she played chess against Xian, it was difficult for the results to change unless they played the match repeatedly.
“The wheel of destiny. It’s the absolute power that keeps a person in the same plane.”
Ah.
She opened her mouth like an idiot and stared at what was happening around her. The world stopped as Xian muttered bitterly. And then, time began to turn backward. It happened instantly. In a blink, she realized that they had come back to the scene she watched before.
What he said was different than before when he ran back to the battlefield. A recurring phenomenon, but he died differently each time. He avoided the face of death against the Wielder of the Sword by performing differently each time. Xian spoke up as she watched him continue without being broken down by death, over and over again.
“You can see it change, right? We can’t change our fate, even if we have our old memories, but he can.”
“For us, destiny is a wheel. It’s like a wagon that we have to repeat over and over again. But for him, destiny is a river. We have a will that allows us to live however we want, not just along the road, compared to him.”
“…Who the hell is he to make this possible?”
“Our Creator, our one God, whom you so longed for and eagerly sought.”