Chapter 472
"There is one thing that bothers me."
Theo would not grieve.
Not because he lacked the capacity to feel sorrow, not because he was immune to the suffering he witnessed every day from a distance that never exceeded a few meters, but because sorrow was a luxury he could not afford in carrying out the role he had chosen.
Let alone attempting to comfort Ilux from his downfall, from the ever-deepening abyss into which the young man fell each day without a single hand reaching out, from the vortex of hatred that not only left him without the soul of Xavier XVII—once his only companion in solitude—but also continuously rained down bullying upon his body and soul every time he crossed the gates of the Star Academy.
And all of that was not without reason, not without careful calculation, not without full awareness that everything he witnessed each day—every firecracker that exploded around Ilux's body, every stifled giggle accompanying his hurried steps away from the cafeteria, every stain of food that never fully left his clothes—was part of a scenario that had been written from the very beginning.
A downfall that grew increasingly alarming, a condition so painful to witness for anyone who still possessed even a fragment of humanity in their heart, was a condition that was required to exist within the main scenario of the game Flo Viva Mythology in its first arc, at the end of episode eleven.
A necessity that could not be bargained with, could not be avoided, could not be altered even if every part of him wished to do otherwise.
But oh, even so, amidst his obedience to the predetermined scenario, among the lines of fate he had to follow without ever questioning why things had to be this way and not another, there was one thing that lodged itself in Theo's chest in a way he could not ignore.
A tendency in Ilux's behavior that he had carefully observed over the past two days, with the patience that had become second nature to a Great Writer accustomed to waiting centuries just to see a single page perfectly filled, made him let out a long breath every time he realized that something was not proceeding according to what he had written.
It was not overflowing anger, not rage that erupted and destroyed everything around it as he had imagined would happen after all the pressure that kept accumulating, but something far more unsettling, something that made his brows furrow unconsciously each time he drew conclusions from his nightly observations.
And the behavior of Ilux that irritated Theo, that made him sigh in a tone he could not conceal even though no one was there to hear it, was something that occurred every night, when darkness began to creep in and replace the light slowly retreating from the surface of the world.
A night that should have borne witness to Ilux's gradual transformation into the Void, a night that should have been the time when all the pressure accumulated during the day finally found an outlet in its most destructive form, a night that should have been the moment when depression, frustration, and madness crept into Ilux's soul and began to erode what little sanity remained—never unfolded as it was supposed to.
Not because Ilux was immune to the suffering inflicted upon him, not because he possessed a fortress strong enough to withstand the endless hatred raining down on him, but because on every night that should have witnessed his collapse, Ilux did something Theo had never accounted for.
He did not cry on his bed with a curled body and a heart shattered into pieces, he did not let the anger suppressed throughout the day explode into sobs that shattered the silence of the night, he did not allow himself to sink into the despair that should have been the gateway to the long-awaited transformation.
What he did—what he always did every night after days filled with food stains, exploding firecrackers, and relentless mocking laughter—was something that made Theo exhale deeply each time he watched from afar.
Ilux prayed.
Not a half-hearted prayer spoken out of habit or because there was nothing else to do, but a prayer that came from the deepest part of his heart, spoken with closed eyes and hands clenched tightly against his chest, a prayer believed with every fragment of faith still remaining in a soul that had long been trampled by a hatred he never understood.
And the content of that prayer, always the same every night, never changing even if the day he had just endured was worse than the last and perhaps nothing compared to the one yet to come, was a conviction that struck Theo profoundly.
That he was here at the Star Academy to make his parents proud, that all the suffering he endured—all the food stains clinging to his clothes, all the firecrackers exploding around him, all the mocking laughter that never ceased chasing him, all the deepening solitude—was something he had to endure for a single purpose that never wavered no matter how everything around him tried to break it.
And that conviction, which should have been the greatest obstacle to the scenario he understood, which should have irritated him in ways he had never imagined before, instead did something far more complex than merely disrupting the narrative.
"That feeling will continue to hold him back."
That disappointment crept into Theo's chest in a way he could neither reject nor conceal behind the expressionless face that had long been his most reliable shield, nor transform into something more neutral or at least less piercing.
Not a disappointment born of excessive hope or unrealistic expectations, but one born from precise calculations, from a scenario he had constructed with a level of precision attainable only by a being who had spent billions of years understanding how narratives worked, from the conviction that everything had been arranged so perfectly that nothing would deviate from the predetermined path.
Yet the reality he had witnessed over the past two nights—two nights when Ilux should have begun to show signs of irreparable fracture, two nights when the door toward his transformation into the Void should have begun to open wide—instead presented something entirely different from what he had calculated.
And within that difference, within the gap between what should have happened and what actually happened, Theo felt something he rarely experienced throughout his long journey across layers of reality: a frustration he could not direct anywhere, because there was no one to blame but himself, who perhaps had trusted too much that the scenario would unfold exactly as he had written it without ever considering that there might be variables he had never included in his calculations.
To be continued…