Chapter Forty-Four
THE REGRETFUL TRUTH
"You are beyond insane. Are you sure you are not the one not thinking rationally?"
Veritas was unusually calm for the situation that he was stuck in. He was up against an opponent who knew everything about him, and he understood this fact, along with the fact that he knew almost nothing about the opponent.
Yet, he was retaliating at full force.
"To suggest retaliating against the heavens . . . I will not have it."
Veritas fully regained himself from the final attack that the silhouette had thrown before being thrown, itself, out of the castle. That was just physically though, and after hearing what Dionysus had to say, he recollected himself mentally.
"Looks like you're back."
Dionysus, with his hands at his side, started walking towards Veritas.
"I don't care if the rest of humanity gets wiped out, but to eliminate the capital is to erase my new home."
Dionysus clenched his fist tightly.
"So I'll say it once more, for the final time. Stop this. Just because you're too weak to retaliate against the heavens and stop all of this at the source, you'll kill countless innocents?"
Veritas wavered at the final sentence, but his resolution, after countless years of suffering, wouldn't stop carrying him there.
"You . . . take back what you just said."
By absorbing the abilities of multiple people, Veritas gained traits that he desired and didn't. One of them would be the pride of Ira, which would be better off referred to as arrogance.
'Damn you Ira, messing with me . . .'
Veritas felt anger he knew that he himself would never feel. The emotions, thoughts, and abilities of the others were getting in his way, the exact opposite of what they were absorbed to do.
"Give them back their abilities. Even with all the physical strength in the world, if you can't control it at all, you're nothing more than a rabid dog."
The words rang into Veritas, and he considered it for a second. After thinking about returning all the abilities to their rightful owners for a while, Veritas came to a decision.
'Even if I am able to control myself once I return them, I will not have the strength to fight back.'
He gazed in the general direction of Dionysus with an emotion that was alien to him, but he knew that this one was truly his.
It was the primal instinct named fear.
Even after committing multiple genocides and killing well over hundreds of thousands of humans, he had never experienced retaliation, or at least to this degree.
Yet, here stood a man that was pushing him back, and from the looks of it, without much effort.
'I do not know his life or experiences, but nothing ordinary could have elevated him to such a level.'
"Even if I am afraid and do not want to do it, spouting a load of crap at me will not stop me. Fighting back against the heavens? Blaming myself for being too weak?"
Veritas was purposefully letting go of his body this time. He couldn't control it, so he intended to let it go wild.
Along with that . . .
'I want to rest.'
He was tired to the point of desiring sleep in the middle of a battle. Even if they weren't currently exchanging attacks, Veritas understood just how ridiculous it was to doze off in the middle of a battle.
KSHH
At some point, muscles began to tear in the unstable body of five people combined, and it leapt at Dionysus.
'Grotesque.'
At first, the combined body looked like a really, really big human, very much comparable to a giant. Now, it looked like a lump of meat that was shrinking. At this point, it was three meters tall, and its arms were just flailing around. It had something that resembled a head, but the multiple eyes, noses, ears, and other features of the face got all jumbled up.
Dionysus truly pitied Veritas.
'Let me put you up.'
VISHWAM
It wasn't a contest. Dionysus bent his back to make it perfectly horizontal and watched as the lump of meat called Veritas flew over him. Once the stomach of the creature was above him though . . .
CRASH
Dionysus wrapped his arms around it and suplexed the entire upper body of the creature into the ground, thoroughly pushing it in and embedding it deep. After doing so, he stood straight, as if he hadn't just bent his back beyond the limit.
He dusted his hands off and turned to face the lower half of Veritas, which had tendrils shooting out of it towards him.
"Quit it already."
All seven of the tendrils wrapped around Dionysus' right arm, but that was only because he allowed them to. As they tugged on him, he didn't budge even a single inch.
He lifted his left hand and easily sliced through the tendrils as if they were butter.
Dionysus then proceeded to tug on the tendrils himself, tearing Veritas out of the ground.
"Two meters. At this point, you might also be physically weaker than you were at first."
Although his size was shrinking similar to a balloon with a hole in it, the form wasn't getting any less disgusting. Multiple facial features, limbs, and so on made Veritas a sight that could turn someone blind.
"Hurry up and return everything before I go ahead and chop it all off, making it impossible to return it at all."
Dionysus wasn't ignorant of the fact that Veritas had tried to fall asleep in front of a threat. He didn't feel offended at the fact that his opponent tried to fall asleep, but he was most definitely disappointed in Veritas.
The grotesque form was trying to retaliate, but it was weaker than the average ten year old at this point. Above all, it was still getting smaller and weaker, meaning that it hadn't hit rock bottom just yet.
Then, out of nowhere . . .
"Can't you act like a damned normal person for one second . . ."
Veritas spoke up, and in a tone that definitely didn't belong to the one that Dionysus had heard before. Dionysus, knowing what this meant, let out a faint smirk, but not long enough that anyone else would be able to see it.
"Veritas, from the beginning, you had no chance of winning. Do you understand that now?"
The whole battle had consisted of Dionysus beating on him with little to no retaliation in return. Even when Veritas transformed into the grotesque being, only in the first ten seconds before he started to degrade was he somewhat comparable to Dionysus.
"You couldn't just die quietly, without annoying me huh . . ."
His body was back to normal, lying on the ground. Dionysus walked over to the wooden chair that Veritas had been sitting on before being walked in on by Dionysus. He picked up the fragile creation and plopped it down right in front of Veritas before taking a seat and pulling out his pipe.
HOOH
PAH
"You know, it's been a while since I did that."
". . ."
The two sat in silence for around half an hour, the only sound being the occasional loud and rough breath.
THUMP
After all that time, a similar being finally came back.
". . . Is that the thing that I threw right on out of here?"
"That's a creature, not a thing."
It had six legs coming out of its back, and was moving similar to a spider. It was most definitely the silhouette that Dionysus had gone through heaven and hell with.
'So that's the decision you've made.'
As he looked over it, nothing was different. Texture-wise, that was.
'The ears and eyes you had growing are gone, and now you're going around like a spider. You made your resolutions, huh?'
They were mentally connected, so the silhouette was getting all of this.
'Resolutions are set.'
It was the first truly sentient sentence that he had heard come out of it.
'Well, I guess it isn't. You and I had a nice conversation in my dream around five years ago when I first set out, right?'
Dionysus vividly remembered a colorful dream of sitting around a bonfire with someone else. At the time, he had no idea who the person was, and wondered if it was anyone that he should have known.
Now, he understood that the human man was the silhouette's human form.
After it had been thrown out of the castle, the silhouette truly awoke. It had regained all sentience, and had the decision to stop appearing as a silhouette, and to return to its human form.
As Dionysus continued to stare at it, he could tell which it picked.
"Well, I won't argue with you about the choices you've made."
"That thing understands us?"
At this point, Dionysus could sense many people running around in the castle, all of them trying to find the source of all this madness.
"I'm somewhat connected to this castle, so I can tell you that there are people coming. I'd suggest you get out."
As Veritas said that, he didn't move his body a single inch. Anyone with even half a brain would be able to deduce that he had given up.
"Oi, are you really going to throw away all the progress you've made? I'm sure you know what'll happen to you if you get caught, especially after everything that you've done at this point."
"I'm not stupid, you know. I know damn well that I'm probably going to die."
Feeling like the mood was finally light enough for him to do so, Dionysus took out his pipe.
"I'm not an old geezer with a vast amount of wisdom, but I'm wise enough to know that your life is yours. If you think dying is the only thing that can end this right, go on ahead. At the very least, I can tell you that the whole thing about having only one life is a lie, so you might be able to reach bigger heights in the next one."
"Though, the next life is the final one, so I'd suggest you be careful with it."
Dionysus stood up from the wooden chair and lifted Veritas up onto it. He made it look like he was sitting down on it, which he was now.
"It doesn't matter how they find me, you know?"
"Appearances matter, I learned that a bit too late into the game."
After tidying up Veritas, Dionysus could see that the people who were in the castle were finally inside of the corridor with the big gate that led into this chamber at the end.
"Later."
Dionysus jumped out of the hole that had been put into the ceiling of the castle when Veritas threw his partner outside.
"What, you got some final words for me?"
Veritas wasn't in the mood to keep up appearances. He tried to use the least amount of contractions as possible in his sentences before, understanding that it made him look like a pompous arrogant guy. Now that the end of the tunnel was in sight, he didn't think it mattered anymore.
The silhouette was staring him down, and hard at that.
"Your life has potential, keep it."
It was a deep voice, and it sounded mechanical. It was absolutely not something that belonged to a human, but what Veritas expected a mosquito to sound like if it could speak.
"Ha, I'll keep that in mind."
Veritas had fully lost hope in his goal. He didn't even have the energy to lift his head up, the only thing he could do being to keep it down.
The Silhouette continued to stare at him for a few more seconds before growing four wings out of its back and flying out after its partner, Dionysus.
At the end of the line, Veritas thought about many things while sitting on the wooden chair that had a large significance to him.
'It's a bit late to wonder about this, but . . . could I have actually retaliated?'
The second that he started to kill other species for humanity, he already knew that his ending wouldn't be a happy one. He knew, a little over a decade ago, that the second he started doing all of this, regrets would kick in.
'I was ignorant. I thought that my pride at being humanity's savior would overshadow my regret in the end.'
He didn't see himself as the hero anymore, and his regrets went beyond what he thought he would have. In fact, he stopped seeing himself as the hero only a year after starting this journey.
'Damn you to hell, Dionysus. You couldn't have just killed me without telling me what was obvious . . .'
BAM
The gate flung wide open, and many guards surrounded Veritas on the wooden chair.
But, he still wasn't paying attention.
'Was there anything I could have done better? Was having my granted ability at the fifth level not enough to cover it?'
At the end of the line, all the contracts had been shot. Besides Pactione and Ira, with Pactione already being dead, and Ira about to be captured alongside him, the other three would be free to go out and live their life. They had no obligation to him anymore.
Some very, very famous faces were beginning to walk through the gate, but Veritas still didn't care.
"I'll ask it simply. Are you the dipshit that's been causing all this?"
'But, for some reason . . .'
"Well, are you?"
'That man easily destroyed all of my preparations.'
"Yeah, I'm the guy behind all of this."
The scene was similar to that of an ending. Veritas, covered in a lot of guts, blood, and so on, was sitting in front of what may as well have been a miniature army, each and every single person here angry with him for killing plenty of innocents in the capital.
'Damn, has it always been this lonely?'
The saddest thing to Veritas was that he had never noticed that not a single person ever supported him. The heavens used him as a tool, the people he contracted with followed his orders out of their desire to live, and basically everyone else was probably a person that he had to kill.
'It took me way too long to realize I had no allies.'
"Ha"
"Then, by using the authority of being one of the generals of Eternia, I hereby sentence you to an execution due tomorrow at dawn."
Even through all of this, Veritas had only one thing running through his mind.
'An ending has to arrive at some point, mine just came a bit early.'