What would you do if you could go back in time?
That terrible question pierced my mind at that fateful moment. It was like that every day.
"Where did I fail? Where did I go wrong?"
The questions came as doubts or whining, intrusive and pessimistic thoughts, things so horrible that I refuse to say them out loud or even imagine that one day there will be the courage within my heart to mention such things to another person.
The cold sensation of my hands contracting against the hard, rough gravel floor, as blood ran down my face, reminded me of the strange feeling I had felt at the beginning of the final battle: Death.
I was dying.
"I already knew that."
I thought aloud with my eyes plastered to the vine ceiling.
The tears didn't take long to form.
Collecting between the thick lids in my eyes and refusing to descend among the spilled blood, the mixture of water and salt that oozed from my eye socket wondered if it had ever been worthy of mixing with the plasma below.
"Wasn't I brave enough?"
I thought again, this time placing my hand on the metal plate on my chest.
The metallic armor-plate was covered in my blood... and stained with the blood of my friends and comrades.
"Have the demons been defeated?"
I said, staring at the countless corpses of my allies exposed on the ground.
The dungeon was filled to the ceiling with the dead, both humans and demons, and completely unmanned by the living.
I no longer considered myself a living being, I was more like a dying animal left to the desert vultures.
I see my fallen friends, the companions I have faithfully followed in recent years, people I talked to for years, romances that were built, broken and mended, now lying lifeless between the pillars and the throne of the Demon King Baahl.
The sighs I sporadically let out begin to weaken. I notice when my heart rate slows drastically and the air that supports my lungs escapes as I try to breathe and force the muscle contraction in my chest.
"It's useless…"
I say to myself as I raise my arms in search of salvation, almost as if I expected that divine light so often mentioned in near-death experience situations to emerge and take me to the afterlife without all the suffering that awaited me.
"In the end I was…"
I choke on the words in my throat. I didn't want to say what I was about to say, but...
"I was weak."
I say without strength, this time suffocated in my own blood.
Suddenly I feel a chill.
A bad feeling, something desperately scary.
Every hair on my body is on alert, simulating a sensor. Everything emanated towards a single possibility: danger.
But how? They were all dead. Everyone died, but in the end, we won.
"We saved the world."
"No…"
The harsh voice reverberated throughout the room.
"You didn't save anything."
He exclaimed again.
I hadn't seen that person. I didn't notice him. I couldn't feel his mana.
"H, How?"
The question echoed in my mind like a burst of angry whining.
That divine figure, rising from the shadows and appearing among the countless souls bound to the throne of imbued darkness, a terrible being that regenerates before my eyes frozen in fear with his powerful presence.
"I, impossible…!"
Before me...
The Demon King was back to life.