Both chains shattered through his conjured shield and pierced directly through his forehead. Spectral golden matter spread outward as he tilted his head, eyes unfocusing momentarily, the impact sending ripples through his divine form that seemed to disrupt something fundamental about his composure.
A figure burst from the smoke. Orange life jacket. Dark swim trunks. Lucid emerged from the chaos, materializing like a specter given physical form. He looked at Mercyros with eyes that held no fear, only determination, a red thunder-like aura surrounding him with unshakable presence.
"You were the source of this structural collapse!" Lucid yelled, his voice cutting through the golden silence.
Mercyros laughed, the sound echoing through the void like thunder rolling across distant mountains.
Alice's voice cut through Lucid's mind with urgent precision. "Activate your Chain of Heart. His attacks seem invincible because they operate through threads invisible to normal perception. But you can see them. You exist above him now. Superior to him."
Lucid activated the Chain of Heart, his enhanced perception sharpening reality into crystalline clarity. He saw matter itself, ambient dust flakes, energy resembling fate essence, but beyond that, he saw threads moving in unison with Mercyros. Every gesture, every motion, every attack was preceded by these invisible strings, a puppet master's careful choreography made suddenly visible.
One thread drew too close.
He summoned the Midnight Spear and drove it toward an invisible hand suspended in the air, scraping along its forearm. The arm dwarfed him, six times his size, yet he walked alongside it regardless, tracking threads of movement, seeing a complex web of cause and effect governing every action within the Domain.
Suddenly a dark appendage wrapped around Lucid and yanked him away, the air exploding around his displaced position.
She laughed, a sound like breaking glass.
"I saved you," she said.
Another version of her stepped forward and crushed her skull beneath a boot. The figure split and multiplied, each copy wearing identical expressions of malice and desperation.
Lucid directed an attack toward one of them. Blood splattered across the golden floor in dark patterns.
"You can kill me," she said, voice carrying manic glee. "You can. You are stronger than all of us. There is no point in resistance, no point fighting what has already been written."
He grabbed the unconscious woman he had torn from her grip, eyes widening in recognition. This was the one from the beach, the one who seemed affiliated with pilt, the one who had sacrificed everything for a town that had forgotten her name entirely.
He moved quickly toward Pilt, feet carrying him through golden chaos, chains trailing behind like the tail of a comet.
He looked at Pilt directly. "You came here according to your one desires. Do not tell me there is something else."
Pilt stepped behind him, expression unreadable and pale.
Lucid stepped forward toward Mercyros, intending to finish what he had started, chains coiling around his wrists like serpents preparing to strike.
Pilt's voice rose behind him, force enough to shake the Domain's foundations. "You called him here! Do not tell me there is something else that could be so much more important than what I offering! Mercyros, oh son of Alisia!"
A voice responded, cold and dismissive, weighted with divine authority. "Be quiet, mortal."
But Lucid did not retreat.
He turned back.
"How much greed do you intend to continue harboring?" he demanded, looking back toward Pilt now. "Screw the woman. Screw the town. You really believe you're some savior, saving your partner while also reviving famine-stricken economies? You are wrong."
Lucid stepped forward in the heat of the moment.
"No, you are not," he said flatly.
"Oh Mercyros, I need the relic," Pilt continued, ignoring him. "The relic rumored to be worth more than diamonds, capable of reanimating any object."
Mercyros's face became spectral disarray, bleeding gold, glitching at the edges as though his form struggled to maintain cohesion.
"You are fortunate, mortal. I could have killed you." His voice carried genuine restraint beneath the anger. "But we Monoliths establish a sacrament among ourselves. Had I struck you down, I would have been persecuted by the Monolith of Nature for opposing human blood, by the Monolith of Companionship for acting against humanity, by the Monolith of Law, by the Monolith of Freedom for restricting human choice."
"I would have brought everyone against me."
His visage darkened further.
"But what was owed to me was denied. Taken." He pointed an accusing finger. "This mortal also refused to undergo transaction."
"Thus, today, I will collapse the very concept of COMMERCE!" he announced, voice reverberating through the space with theatrical finality.
Lucid remained focused, planning his next movement carefully.
'He can't kill me directly,' he thought. 'But he can extort. He can't restrict human will directly, but he can misguide it. Such foul games end today.'
"She caused this," Mercyros said, gesturing toward the multiplying copies still scattered across the floor.
Lucid stepped forward. "Bullshit. You are the only one to blame for this entire mess."
"Just because you couldn't find your ancient lover, whom seemed to be reincarnated into flesh, doesn't give you the right to entrust your duties to a mortal like me."
"You wanted to become mortal, to trade for the one thing humans value most. Love."
"Certainly admirable," Lucid conceded, tone hardening. "But I cannot let you step down as one of the sole governors of a concept that serves as a pillar of human society."
"Lucid, is it?" Mercyros asked, something almost curious entering his tone despite the tension.
"You will learn soon enough that most of this isn't your fault, even though it might seem that way."
He announced with sudden gleeful malice, "Now die. At last, I will pay my debt through mutual destruction."
Mercyros lifted his hand.
Lucid observed the gesture carefully, tracking every thread of movement his enhanced perception revealed.
"My spouse left you something important," Mercyros continued. "I believe it was one of the things I negotiated with my long lost brother, Tianqi."
"You have the relic."
Everyone turned to look at Lucid. The cultists. Pilt. Their gazes carried predatory intensity, hungry and calculating.
Lucid looked down at his own hand.
He smiled.
Alice's voice sharpened immediately. "Why are you smiling?"
'I have an idea,' he thought back, though something in the tone of his own internal voice troubled even him.
He took the ring and placed it on his finger.
Pilt looked at him with envious eyes that felt like they burned against Lucid's skin, jealousy radiating from every line of his expression.
He turned toward Pilt.
"Your desire, your true intent," Lucid said in a cold tone, "was never actually the town."
He flashed his hand forward, the ring catching golden light as it moved.
"It was this."
Pilt glared, jaw tightening visibly, the accusation landing with obvious weight.
'This ring,' Lucid thought, examining it more carefully now that it sat upon his finger, feeling something stir within its structure that went beyond simple ornamentation. 'This is what everyone actually wants. Not the town. Not the economy. This specific object.'
An idea began forming within his mind, something distinctly separate from his usual instincts toward protection and sacrifice. Something colder. More calculating. Something that felt, disturbingly, beyond what any single mortal consciousness should be capable of conceiving.
'If Mercyros collapses commerce entirely,' he thought, 'then everything built upon that foundation crumbles alongside it. Every contract, every debt, every obligation tied to currency or exchange, all of it simply ceases to exist.'
'Including whatever binds me to Queen Elara. Including whatever obligations tie Ayame to her clan's expectations. Including every transactional relationship that has defined my existence since arriving in this realm.'
The thought carried dangerous appeal, layered with implications that stretched far beyond the immediate crisis. If commerce as a concept dissolved, so too would every debt, every leash, every invisible thread of obligation currently binding him to people and powers he had never chosen. The queen's hold over him. Arthur's contract. Even, perhaps, whatever cosmic bookkeeping tracked his own soul's worth against Neptune's death.
'If this relic can reanimate any object,' he continued, the idea unfolding in layers he hadn't consciously constructed, 'then perhaps it doesn't simply restore. Perhaps it redefines. Perhaps I could use it not to fix what Mercyros broke, but to rewrite what value even means, according to terms only I understand.'
Alice's presence within his mind sharpened into alarm. "Lucid. What exactly are you considering?"
He didn't answer her directly, letting the silence stretch, the ring warm against his finger, pulsing faintly in rhythm with something he couldn't yet name.
'If I hold this,' he thought, 'I hold the only thing in this domain that outranks a Monolith's authority. Not power to destroy. Power to rewrite the terms everyone else is forced to live under.'
The ambition felt distinctly alien, sitting somewhere just beyond the boundary of what he recognized as his own thinking. Too vast. Too selfish. Too far past what any mortal, however Enlightened, should reach for.
Mercyros watched him with something knowing in his expression, as though he recognized exactly what calculations were unfolding behind Lucid's eyes.
"You understand now," Mercyros said quietly, "why I sought to trade it away rather than wield it myself."