Author: So as I said on the last chapter, this one will explore Alfia's side on the crystal.
Also, I have some new arts that you guys can use as a reference to how Yuuya looks like. I used Google Gemini for this (cuz I'm a brokie and I can't afford to commissionđ check the comments after reading this.)
ââââ
âFirst Yearâ
The transition from the warmth of Yuuya's embrace to the abyss of her own mind was not a gentle descent. It was a violent, suffocating plunge.
One moment, Alfia was resting her head against his shoulder, listening to the steady, rhythmic beat of a heart she had thought silenced forever; the next, the scent of ozone and freezing crystal rushed down her throat, dragging her backward into the dark.
The dream did not begin with sleep.
It began with the weight of a memory she could never scrub from her mind.
"When this is over, when there are times you wake up and finding yourself in the dark... I don't want you thinking I was just a hallucination your mind made up while you were falling."
Those had been his words. He had pressed the piece of black cloth into her hands, his grip trembling but stubborn, before the crystal consumed her.
In the waking world, when Yuuya finally shattered the crystal on the seventieth floor, he found her with her eyelids closed, looking as though she had merely been resting in a glass coffin.
But the reality of her mind's eye was far more unforgiving. When the crystal had surged up her collarbone, swallowing her throat and locking her joints, her eyes had remained wide open.
She had refused to blink. She had refused to look away from him.
Through the translucent, shimmering barrier of the crystal, her vision had been locked onto Yuuya's retreating silhouette.
She had watched his expression, that reassuring smile of his, before his figure vanished into out of existence.
Then, the world stopped.
The initial shock of that first year was strange and in a way, a physical horror that defied the laws of mortality.
Alfia tried to scream his name, but her vocal cords were locked in stone. She tried to close her eyes against the harsh, refracted light of the crystal, but her eyelids were frozen solid, forced to stare eternally at the empty, dark corridor where Yuuya had disappeared.
'Move.' Her mind commanded, a desperate, screeching demand. 'Just a finger. Just a breath.'
There was nothing. No air entering her lungs, no heartbeat drumming in her ears. The absolute silence of the world outside filtered through the silver as a dead, hollow void. It was a coffin constructed of starlight and paralysis.
She was a living soul trapped inside a body that refused to move, completely awake in a realm where time had no meaning.
Hours bled into days, though she had no sun to measure them by. She only had the agonizing rhythm of her own thoughts.
As the months dragged on, she found herself dissecting every syllable of his farewell.
"When this is over... when there are times you wake up..."
She replayed the sentence over and over, anchoring her sanity to the rough cadence of his voice. His words hadn't explicitly stated she would sleep, but the implication was unmistakable.
He had expected her to drift. He had anticipated a state of suspended animationâa deep, merciful slumber where she might only briefly stir, tethered to reality only by the cloth in her hand so she wouldn't mistake his rescue for a dying dream.
That was clearly what he had been led to believe.
But she wasn't drifting. She was entirely, excruciatingly conscious.
"Why?" she questioned, her internal voice echoing sharply against the boundaries of her own skull. "If you intended for me to rest, Yuuya... why am I awake?"
The answer didn't lie with Yuuya himself, but with the unseen presence that had accompanied him. She remembered the urgency in his eyes when he looked into the empty air, the way those eyes looked like they were screaming at a force no one else could see. He had spoken to a voice in his head. A 'system.'
To force himself to save her, to manifest a crystal capable of halting her terminal illness, and to lock her away in a safe havenâit was an absurdity that defied the laws of the gods themselves.
"You asked for too much." Alfia realized, the cold truth settling heavily in her chest. "You demanded a miracle far beyond what a mortal should ever wield."
She deduced the grim reality of her confinement. To grant a spell of that magnitude, Yuuya had to borrow an astronomical amount of power from the voice in his head. He had pushed the boundaries of his own anomalous existence to the absolute limit just to keep her alive.
And because the demand was so immense, the spell had cracked under its own weight.
It was an incomplete miracle. A rushed, flawed preservation. The system had managed to seal her body and halt her death, but it lacked the power to fully subdue her consciousness. It had left her mind burning in the dark, stranded on the threshold of existence because the price Yuuya paid couldn't cover a perfect sleep.
The realization that he had given everything only to provide a flawed sanctuary quickly dissolved into a far more terrifying emotion: absolute, paralyzing worry.
If the spell was incomplete because he had overextended himself, what had happened to him after he turned his back?
The remainder of that first endless year became a psychological purgatory. Locked in place, unable to turn her head or close her eyes against the phantom images of her own trauma, her mind became entirely consumed by Yuuya's fate.
'Did he make it out of the deep floors?'
Every time the distant rumble of the dungeon vibrated through the crystal, her mind raced. She imagined him collapsing in the dark, his body torn apart by the monsters because he had expended every drop of his energy just to seal her away. She imagined him bleeding out alone on the cold stone, his sacrifice completely unknown to the world above, all while she remained trapped in a box, unable to reach him.
"Don't you dare die." She pleaded into the void, day after day, month after month, her eyes staring unblinkingly at the empty space where he had last stood. "If you die out there, Yuuya... if you leave me in this dark with nothing but your ghost, I will never forgive you."
ââââ
âSecond Yearâ
If the first year was a test of Alfia's mind against the suffocating silence of the dark, the second year was the exact moment the abyss began to stare back.
Her refusal to close her eyes before the crystal hardened had been a final act of absolute defiance, a desperate vow to keep Yuuya's fading silhouette burned into her retinas.
But down on the seventieth floor, within the crushing malice of the deep floors, that defiance curdled into a relentless curse. Because her eyelids were frozen wide open, she was forced to bear witness to every horror the deepest womb of the dungeon spat forth.
And eventually, the environment noticed the anomaly.
The seventieth floor was not a place of wandering strays or minor beasts. It was a hellscape of titans, a realm where the air itself felt heavy enough to crush a lesser adventurer's lungs.
The first creature to find her was a colossal, multi-limbed horrorâan obsidian plated aberration born from the absolute depths of the labyrinth. It dragged its massive, armored bulk into the jagged crevice where Yuuya had sealed her, its multiple rows of bioluminescent yellow eyes locking onto the foreign, shimmering monolith.
"Filth." Alfia's mind sneered, the freezing pride of the Silence Vatican echoing sharply within her own skull. "Do not dare look at me, vermin."
The titan tilted its misshapen head. Sensing the dense, concentrated energy trapped within the crystal, it raised a massive arm tipped with razor sharp, pitch black talons and struck.
BANG.
The impact was an earthquake. The shockwave vibrated directly through the crystalline structure, rattling her frozen bones and echoing inside her mind with deafening force.
Yet, as the dust cleared, the surface remained completely unblemished. Not a single microscopic scratch marred the miracle Yuuya had left behind.
"Predictable." She thought, her internal voice cold, steady, and dripping with disdain. "You think a crude tool of the dungeon can shatter a miracle? A boy tore through your entire turf just to put me here. Step back into the dark where you belong."
She didn't fear it.
Not at first.
Her composure was an unyielding shield, forged from a lifetime of being the strongest, the most untouchable, the ultimate arbiter of silence.
The monster grew frustrated, striking the pillar a few more times before lumbering back into the darkness, seeking easier prey.
But it had left a scent.
The dungeon was a living, spiteful entity, and it utterly loathed anything foreign resting within its deepest flesh.
Within months, the isolated incidents dissolved into a ceaseless siege. The deep floors did not offer respite.
Horrors that defied descriptionâmasses of writhing shadow, armored behemoths with jaws wide enough to swallow a minotaur whole, and razor clawed predators of the deepâbegan to frequent her alcove. They were drawn to the monolith like parasites to a open wound.
Because she could not look away, she was forced to look at everything.
She watched the grotesque, dripping mucus slide down the translucent crystal just inches from her face. She stared directly into chaotic, unblinking eyes filled with nothing but a primordial hunger to destroy.
Then came the sustained violence.
A pack of deep floor hunters, relentless and cooperative, took turns battering the crystal.
Thud. Thud. Screeech.
The sound of their obsidian talons scraping against the crystal was an agonizing, high pitched screech that vibrated straight into her brain. Day in, day out.
Scritch. Scritch. Boom.
The rhythm was maddening, a constant reminder that she was entirely helpless, a stationary target in the most dangerous territory alive.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the armor of her arrogance began to erode.
The realization she had made during her first year returned to haunt her, mutating from a cold piece of logic into a venomous, suffocating whisper.
'The spell is incomplete. The miracle is flawed.'
If the mysterious system in Yuuya's head had botched the spell enough to keep her consciousness burning, what else had gone wrong?
What if the structural integrity of this coffin wasn't infinite? What if it had a breaking point?
"No." She told herself, her internal voice tightening, fighting to maintain its rigid cadence. "Yuuya wouldn't leave me in something that could fail. These are monsters you have faced already before, Alfia. Don't overthink. Trust him."
'But he was dying when he cast it.' A darker, frantic corner of her psyche argued back. 'He was coughing up blood. He was desperate. He was bargaining with an entity he couldn't control. What if the crystal is draining? What if it shatters?'
A massive, armored abomination slammed its horned skull directly against the crystal, right where her face was positioned.
Alfia didn't flinchâher physical body was incapable in the first placeâbut inside the cage of her frozen ribs, a phantom sensation of cold, suffocating panic flared.
For the first time in her existence, Alfia felt the icy grip of true vulnerability.
In her past, during her days with the Hera Familia, she had never feared the end. She had actively welcomed it. Death was supposed to be her ultimate releaseâa quiet, merciful escape from the agonizing consumption of her incurable disease, a return to the place where Meteria was waiting for her.
But everything had changed when she was falling down and the moment that reckless fool had intervened.
She didn't want to go to Meteria yet. She wanted to live. She wanted to see Bell grow up. She wanted to feel the warmth of the surface world, to hear the chaotic bustle of Orario, and to look into the eyes of the boy who had risked his own existence just to give her a second chance.
She had a future to claw her way back to, and that meant death was no longer a merciful release.
And that's what makes her situation worse.
Every strike against the crystal ceased to be an irritation and became a direct threat to her survival.
Every time a monster's claw grated against the surface, a wave of raw dread washed through her soul.
"What if the dungeon sent a monster specifically made to break the crystal?" The whisper grew louder, more insistent as the second year bled toward its conclusion. "What if the crystal cracks while I am still paralyzed? I cannot chant. I cannot raise a hand. I cannot cast Genos Angelus to wipe them out. I will be torn apart like meat in a cage, and he will return to find nothing but blood and bone."
"Silence." She snarled at herself, her internal voice trembling but refusing to break. "Hold your composure, Alfia. You are the Silence of Hera. You do not show weakness to lesser beasts that you already bested before."
She tightened her mental posture, desperately forcing the rising panic back into the dark corners of her mind. She anchored her sanity entirely to the black cloth still trapped within her frozen, unmoving fingers. It was her only connection to reality.
She was not broken yet. Her immense pride and her sheer, stubborn will kept the cracks in her psyche from spreading.
But as she stared through her translucent prison into the ravenous, chaotic eyes of a seventieth floor horror scraping relentlessly at her throat, the seed of worry had grown deep roots.
Fear had officially breached her sanctuary, and the quiet peace she had once known was gone forever.
ââââ
âThird Yearâ
The third year did not arrive with a change in scenery or a shift in the dark. It arrived when the absolute silence of the Silence of Hera finally shattered from within.
For two years, Alfia had relied on the firm fortress of her past to keep the encroaching madness at bay. She was a woman whose name was synonymous with the pinnacle of mortal power.
Her mind drifted back to the great catastrophes of her era, using those bloody memories as a shield to remind herself of who she was.
She had stood upon the scorched earth when the Behemoth rose, its rot choking the life out of the world. She had watched, unblinking, as Zald tore through the creature's defenses, wielding his blade with a monstrous ferocity, and she had witnessed the exact moment he consumed its flesh to claim victory.
Her hands had not shaken. Her heart had not wavered.
She had stood above the roaring, tempestuous seas when the Leviathan emerged, a calamitous titan of the deep that threatened to drown continents.
It was her own voice that had pierced through the thunderous storm. She had chanted her absolute magic, unleashing Genos Angelus without a shred of hesitation, killing the Leviathan.
Even as the ocean threatened to swallow her whole, her composure had remained absolute.
And she had been there at the end of all thingsâthe One-Eyed Black Dragon. She had personally witnessed the complete, utter annihilation of the Zeus and Hera Familia. She had seen her comrades, the undisputed gods of the mortal realm, crushed like insects beneath pitch black scales. She had watched her world crumble into ash and despair.
Yet, through all of it, Alfia had never flinched. Not once.
Death had been an old friend back then. It was a guaranteed release from the agonizing, terminal illness that consumed her flesh from the inside out. She had faced the greatest monsters in existence with a cold, hollow apathy because she had nothing to lose, and a part of her had desperately craved the quiet of the grave.
But the seventieth floor did not care about her past glory. And the crystal had introduced a variable that completely dismantled her psychological armor: she was utterly, terrifyingly helpless.
The shift in the third year began when the deep floor horrors stopped merely testing the monolith and began a coordinated assault to reclaim their territory.
A collective horde of seventieth floor monstersâmasses of jagged obsidian armor, writhing tendrils of shadow, and beasts with jaws designed to crush the strongest metalâdescended upon her hidden alcove.
They didn't just scratch. They slammed their entire, massive bulks against the crystal in a ceaseless frenzy.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The vibrations were no longer just sounds; they were physical tremors that reverberated through her frozen skull, rattling her brain within her unmoving head.
Because her eyes were wide open, she was forced to watch every single strike. She could see the cracks in the cavern ceiling shifting. She could see the mindless, ravenous fury in their glowing eyes, inches away from her own face.
And then, the internal wall she had spent two years reinforcing finally gave way.
"Get away from me." Her mind screamed, a sudden, violent franticness replacing her usual cold disdain. "Move. Step back. Go away!"
The realization of her complete paralysis hit her with the force of a tidal wave.
In the past, during the Three Great Quests, she had her limbs. She had her voice. If a monster approached, she could blast them into oblivion. She could fight, she could choose how she died, and she could dictate the terms of her own end.
Now? She couldn't even blink. She couldn't draw a breath to form a single syllable of a counter spell. If the crystal crackedâif even a hairline fracture appeared in the miracle Yuuya had left behindâshe would be completely at the mercy of the beasts.
They would tear into her paralyzed flesh, ripping her apart piece by piece while she remained fully awake, fully conscious, and utterly incapable of screaming.
The fear of death, amplified by this absolute, suffocating imprisonment, tore through her composure like a blade through silk.
"I don't want to die." The thought erupted in her mind, raw, ugly, and stripped of all pride. "Not like this. Not in a cage. Not when he's still out there."
She didn't want to go to Meteria anymore. She didn't want the peaceful release of the grave. The innocence of Bell and his vow to become a hero, the memory of Yuuya's warmthâthe desperate promise he had made when he is about to fade, had given her a reason to look toward tomorrow.
For the first time in her life, she was desperately, hopelessly in love with the concept of a future.
And that desire to live made the prospect of dying an absolute nightmare.
The complete collapse of her composure was not a loud event to the outside worldâthe crystal remained as silent and pristine as everâbut inside her mind, it was a cataclysm.
The legendary Silence of Hera, the Incarnation of Talent, was reduced to a terrified, weeping child locked in a dark room.
"Yuuya!" She cried out internally, her mental voice cracking, breaking under the weight of a panic she had never known in life. "Where are you? Please... the beasts are right here. They won't stop hitting it. It's going to break. It's going to fail. Yuuya, please, I can't move! I can't fight back! Save me... don't leave me to be eaten in the dark!"
She replayed his final words over and over, but they no longer brought comfort. They only fueled the terror.
What if he had already died on the lower floors? What if the reason the spell felt so flawed and incomplete was because his life force had completely extinguished shortly after he disappeared? What if she was trapped in this box for eternity, staring at the dark, waiting for a savior who was already a corpse?
Hyperventilation was a physical impossibility for her frozen lungs, but her mind spun into a dizzying, suffocating spiral of panic attacks.
The world narrowed down to the deafening sound of claws against the crystal and the frantic, chaotic imagery of her own violent demise.
Her pride was gone. Her dignity was gone. For the remainder of that third agonizing year, the strongest mage of the Hera Familia spent every single second in a state of raw, unmitigated terror, her open eyes staring through the crystal at the jaws of the monsters, her mind screaming for a boy who wasn't there to hear her.
ââââ
âFourth Yearâ
The transition into the fourth year did not bring relief from the terror of the third; it merely altered its shape.
The raw, screaming panic that had reduced Alfia to a trembling wreck eventually exhausted itself, leaving behind a hollow, echoing void. Her mind, pushed past the brink of psychological collapse, could no longer sustain the high pitched frenzy of absolute terror.
Instead, her mental state regressed. It shrank, collapsing inward until she was no longer the terrifying mage who had struck down the Leviathan.
She was a child. A small, defenseless child locked alone in a pitch black bedroom after the candle had flickered out.
She had seen the shadows shifting in the corner, she had glimpsed the claws of the monster reaching out from the cabinet, and she had cried out for her protector with everything she had.
But no one came. The door remained locked. The room remained dark. And the absolute silence that followed her internal screams became a far more agonizing torture than the striking of the beasts against her coffin.
To understand the depth of Alfia's torment in the fourth year, one had to understand the exact manner in which Yuuya had vanished.
He hadn't simply walked away into the shadows. He hadn't turned his back and stumbled down the dark corridors of the seventieth floor.
The temporary body he had forced his "system" to manifestâthe physical vessel that had ran through hellâsimply began to unravel. Right before her eyes, his form grew translucent and then eventually, gone.
"When this is over, when there are times you wake up and finding yourself in the dark... I don't want you thinking I was just a hallucination your mind made up while you were falling."
Those words still vibrated in her memory, spoken just as his fingers began to phase out of existence. She had watched his physical presence dissolve into nothingness, leaving behind absolute emptiness. He hadn't left; he had ceased to be.
Unbeknownst to the frozen mage, Yuuya was currently locked in a deep, seven year slumber elsewhere, his soul entirely unconscious as it paid the steep, agonizing penalty in exchange for rewriting her fate.
He wasn't walking, he wasn't thinking, and he wasn't living. He was asleep.
But Alfia didn't know that. And in the absolute isolation of the fourth year, her mind began to fill the blanks with poison.
The monsters still frequented, their misshapen, obsidian forms casting grotesque shadows through the crystal. But the miracle Yuuya had invoked held perfectly firm. It was an indestructible cocoon.
And that was exactly when the overthinking returned, mutating into something far more corrosive than the fear of the monsters.
"Four years... Perhaps more..." Her internal voice whisperedâa voice that no longer carried the commanding resonance of her youth, but sounded fragile, small, and entirely broken. "It's been years since you dissolved into light, Yuuya. How long could a penalty possibly last?"
She began to calculate, her brilliant mind turning against itself in the dark. She knew he had bargained with an otherworldly entity. She knew he had paid a price. But to her, a penalty was a transaction. A toll. Surely, a mortal body could not endure a penalty that lasted consecutive years.
She assumed, with absolute certainty, that the debt had long been settled.
"You are already back." She realized, the thought striking her chest like a physical blow. "The penalty ended months ago. Maybe years ago. Your soul returned to the physical world, your eyes opened, and you started your own path. You are back on the surface."
The image of the surface worldâa place she had long grown to despiseânow felt like a distant, unattainable paradise. She imagined him walking through the bustling, sunlit streets of Orario, free from the crushing pressure of the seventieth floor. She imagined the warmth of the sun on his face, the crisp breeze clearing the scent of dungeon ozone from his lungs.
And with that assumption came the daggers.
"If you are up there... if you are finally safe in the light... why haven't you come back down for me?"
The overthinking spiraled out of control within the confines of her skull, feeding on her complete and total helplessness.
"The surface is beautiful." She thought, a phantom tear burning behind her frozen eyelids, unable to shed. "The surface has warmth. It has laughter. It has people who aren't broken by the past, who don't carry the stench of ash and the Hera Familia. Once you tasted the light again... did you realize how heavy I truly am?"
She replayed his fading smile over and over. He had been so young, so full of a terrifying, reckless potential.
"You left me in the dark because I was a weight." A fractured corner of her mind argued, the logic warping into a cruel, self-destructive narrative. "I was a dying woman. A ghost of an era that had already failed. You ruined your soul and bartered with a monster in your head just to pull me from the abyss. You paid your debt to me. Why would you ever choose to descend back into this hell?"
"No." Another part of her whimpered, trying to hold onto the faded black cloth still gripped tightly in her paralyzed hand. "He wouldn't. He promised. He gave me this cloth so I wouldn't think he was a hallucination."
"A promise made by a boy who thought he was going to die." The darkness countered instantly. "But he lived. And people change when they live. They look back at their desperate choices and they regret them."
The overthinking dug deeper, searching for the ultimate vulnerability, until it found the one thing she feared more than abandonment: oblivion.
"What if you didn't choose to leave me here?" She questioned, her mental voice trembling so violently it felt as though it would shatter into static. "What if it's worse? What if... you simply forgot?"
The human mind was a fragile, fleeting thing. She had seen adventurers lose pieces of themselves to trauma, watched old comrades forget the faces of the dead just to keep moving forward.
"It's been years, Yuuya." She pleaded into the empty space before her, her eyes wide, staring at the exact spot where his temporary body had phased out of reality. "Years of new faces. Years of new battles. Do you still remember the color of my hair? Do you still remember the sound of my voice? Or has the memory of the woman you saved faded into a blurred, distant dream? When you look at the black cloth, do you even remember whose hands you pressed it into?"
The thought of being forgotten was a living death.
(Imagine what Peter Parker felt when everyone forgot him.)
It meant she was a secret buried so deep within the earth that no one would ever look for her. She was a relic in a crystal box, left behind by a boy who had moved on to a brighter, happier story, completely unaware that his incomplete miracle had left her burning alive in the quiet.
The child in the dark room stopped calling out. The parent wasn't coming. The parent had walked out of the house, closed the door, and forgotten that there was a child locked inside.
For the remainder of the fourth year, Alfia's composure did not return. The frantic terror of the monsters was replaced by a heavy, suffocating despair that weighed more than the seventieth floor itself.
She remained frozen, her open eyes staring blankly at the dark corridor where he had vanished, her mind entirely consumed by the terrifying certainty that she was completely alone, completely forgotten, and that the light would never return for her.
ââââ
âFifth Yearâ
The frantic terror that had once reduced her to a weeping child had hardened into something cold, heavy, and absolute. The crystal did not shatter. The monsters could not reach her. And as that realization solidified, her brilliant, broken mind stopped searching the dark corridor for a savior who was never coming.
Instead, it turned completely inward, shining a harsh, merciless light onto the wreckage of her own soul.
"This is not an accident." Her internal voice whispered, the tone hollowed out by years of isolation. "This is a verdict."
The silence that made her the Silence of Hera was no longer a title of pride; it was her executioner.
She began to see the poetic cruelty of her confinement. She had spent her entire life demanding silence, loathing the chaotic noise of the world, and pushing away anyone who dared to knock against her frozen exterior.
Now, the universe had granted her wish in the most absolute, agonizing way possible. She was completely enveloped in an eternal, unbreakable silence, left alone with the one person she hated most in existence: herself.
This was her karma. This was the cosmic debt collected for everything she had done, her involvement with Evilus, every cruel word she had ever spat at the world and the people around her.
But as the phantom months dragged on, her self-flagellation dug deeper, bypassing the blood soaked streets of Orario and the ash of the Great Quests. It sank all the way down into the dark, wet warmth of the womb.
The root of her neurotic existence, the foundational trauma that had warped her personality long before she ever had her falna, returned to haunt her with a vengeance.
"I am a thief." She thought, the realization twisting like a rusted knife in her psyche. "A parasite."
She remembered the twin bond. She remembered Meteria.
They had shared the exact same flesh, the exact same blood, and the exact same incurable, debilitating disease.
Yet, when they emerged into the light of the world, Alfia was a monster of talent. She possessed a terrifying, unparalleled magical capacity. She was the pride of the Hera Familia, a legendary prodigy whose name made empires tremble.
And Meteria? Meteria was left with nothing. She was a frail, hollow shell of a girl, perpetually bedridden, her fragile lungs burning with every breath she took. She couldn't walk across a room without collapsing. She couldn't look out at the sun without coughing up crimson.
For her entire life, Alfia had harbored the terrifying, unshakeable assumption that she had stolen that talent. In the dark of their mother's womb, where space was limited and resources scarce, Alfia's instinct had been greedy.
She had consumed everything. She had drained the vitality, absorbed the magical affinity, and stripped away the strength that should have been divided equally between them, leaving her twin sister to rot in a bed while she conquered the world.
"You got to stand." She told herself, the guilt suffocating her more than the prison of her crystal. "You got to chant a spell. You got to hear the applause of the masses and command the battlefield, all because you starved her before she was even born. And now, you are exactly where you belong. Paralyzed. Helpless. Static. A invalid in a glass box."
Her resentment to her own self is so heavy, it manifested. Her unblinking eyes, forced to stare eternally out into the dim, violet hued twilight of the seventieth floor, caught a movement in the shadows.
It wasn't an obsidian titan. It wasn't a pack of monsters.
The pressure of the deep floors seemed to ripple, and from the heavy, sulfurous fog, a figure stepped forward.
She was small, her frame so delicate it looked as though a strong gust of wind would shatter her bones. Her hair was faded, her skin translucent and pale, draped in the loose, white hospital linens of a perpetual patient.
Alfia's heart would have stopped if it were capable of beating.
Meteria.
The gentle, infinitely forgiving sister from Alfia's memories was gone. The hallucination stopped just inches from the crystal, her pale skin translucent, her hollow eyes locking directly onto Alfia's trapped face. She raised a trembling, bony hand and pressed her palm flat against the outer surface of the crystal.
Alfia tried to close her eyelids, tried to look away, tried to scream for the illusion to vanish, but her paralysis denied her even the mercy of ignorance. She was forced to look directly into her sister's face.
There was no kindness in those eyes. There was no gentle, forgiving smile that the real Meteria had always worn. This was a projection of Alfia's ruptured sanity, a cruel manifestation of her own guilt.
"Why you, Alfia?"
The voice was soft, but it cut through the silence of her mind like a razor.
"Is it cold in there, Alfia?" Meteria asked.
The phantom leaned closer, her pale hands pressing against the outer surface of the crystal, right over the space where Alfia's trapped fingers held the faded black cloth.
"It looks so small." The phantom whispered, her head tilting slightly as a cruel, mocking smile touched her lips. "It looks a lot like the room you left me in. The one with the four white walls. The one where I spent my entire life staring at the ceiling, waiting for someone to open the door."
"Stop..." Alfia's consciousness panicked, a frantic, silent plea screaming against the walls of her own brain. "Please, Meteria, don't look at me like that."
"You always knew what you did to me, didn't you?" Meteria continued, her quiet tone beginning to harden, a sharp, venomous edge bleeding into her words. "Before we ever saw the sky. We shared that small space. We had the exact same sickness, the exact same curse in our blood. But you didn't want to share, did you? You took my strength. You reached out with those monstrous hands of yours and you drained the magic straight out of my veins so you could be special."
The hallucination pressed her face closer to the silver, her expression rapidly shifting from quiet malice to a raw, twisted sneer. The voice in Alfia's head began to grow louder, vibrating with a rising, tempestuous anger.
"Why did you get the talent?!" Meteria suddenly shrieked, her voice cracking with a fierce, raging bitterness. She slammed her frail fist against the indestructible crystal, the sound detonating like a thunderclap in Alfia's mind. "Tell me, Alfia! Why did you get to stand?! Why did you get to explore the world, see the grand mountains, and cross the oceans while I couldn't even walk across a room?!"
"No... please..." Alfia's mind wept, completely defenseless against the onslaught.
"We had the exact same incurable disease!" Meteria roared, her face turning a furious, mottled red, her eyes wide and burning with hatred. She began to beat both of her fists against the crystal in a frantic, aggressive rhythm, her white linens fluttering wildly. "We carried the exact same rot! But you got the fame! You got the glory! You got to hear the applause of the masses and command the battlefield as the great genius of the Hera Familia! Everyone looked at you with awe, while I was always on the bed! My movement was limited to a single mattress! I spent every single day suffocating on my own blood, completely trapped because of your theft!"
The phantom lunged forward, pressing her nose flat against the glass, her breath leaving no fog, her furious glare drilling straight into Alfia's frozen pupils.
"Look at you now!" Meteria spat, her voice rising to a frantic, piercing pitch that tore through the final remnants of Alfia's sanity. "The untouchable mage! The Incarnation of Talent! What a joke! You're nothing but a parasitic freak who drains the life out of everyone who touches you! You ruined my life, you brought ruin to the world, and you thought a pathetic boy like Yuuya could save you from your karma?!"
"No..." Alfia's mind whimpered, a desperate, silent plea echoing against her skull. "Please, Meteria... no..."
Meteria let out a harsh, mocking laugh that quickly snapped back into an aggressive snarl.
"He isn't coming back for you, Alfia! He finally realized what a disgusting monster you are! You forced me to spend my entire existence paralyzed in a bed, and now the universe has put you in a coffin! You are an invalid! You are helpless! You are exactly what you made me! Enjoy your sickbed, sister! Nobody is ever coming to visit you!"
The hallucination did not vanish. She remained right there at the glass, her chest heaving with a phantom, angry breath, her fists pressed against the crystal as an eternal, unblinking accuser.
Inside the monolith, the complete collapse of Alfia's composure turned into an absolute surrender to despair. She did not fight the accusations. She did not try to rationalize the lies of her broken mind.
She had harbored this self-loathing for decades, and hearing it screamed at her with such raw, venomous wrath by her own sister completely annihilated her soul.
The heavy, suffocating weight of her guilt swamped her psyche, burying her so deeply in a prison of remorse that she completely stopped praying for the light. She accepted her fate. She was a criminal in her rightful cage, condemned to burn in the quiet for the rest of eternity.
For the remainder of that year, Alfia's composure was completely extinct. She was a prisoner in a dual hellâforced to watch the monsters battering the outside of her cage, while the ghost of her own guilt stood at the glass, tearing apart whatever pieces of her mind were left to break.
ââââ
âSixth Yearâ
For years, her eyelids had been welded open, forced to bear witness to the terrifying monsters of the seventieth floor and the savage hallucinations of her dead twin.
But on one unremarkable day, the absolute strain on her mind reached a breaking point. With a phantom shudder that echoed through her frozen nervous system, the world went black.
Her eyes had finally closed.
For a single, fleeting second, an overwhelming surge of relief washed through the wreckage of her soul.
The crystal, the dripping mucus of the monsters, and the oppressive, sulfurous glow of the abyss were instantly snuffed out.
She was wrapped in total, unyielding velvet darkness. She thought, in her desperate naivety, that her mind had finally granted her a sanctuary. She thought she was finally allowed to rest.
But the universe had no intentions of being merciful to the Alfia.
The darkness was not a shelter; it was simply a fresh canvas for her torment.
From the quiet void of her closed eyes, a familiar scent began to driftânot the smell of dungeon ozone, blood, or sulfur, but the rustic, crisp scent of fresh hay, woodsmoke, and mountain air.
The darkness fractured, revealing the interior of a small, isolated house nestled far away from the madness of Orario.
And there, standing in the center of the wooden floor, was a seven year old boy.
He had snow white hair that stood up in soft, unruly tufts, and large, round ruby eyes that were currently brimming with thick, trembling tears.
He looked so small, clutching the hem of his oversized tunic with tiny, shaking hands.
Bell.
Alfia's consciousness seized. The sight of the child she had left behind in that quiet village tore through her chest with a pain far more acute than anything she had experienced.
"Mom...?"
The small, fragile voice broke the silence of her mind. Bell took a hesitant step forward, his ruby eyes searching the darkness, looking directly at the space where Alfia's consciousness hovered.
"Why did you leave?" Bell whimpered, a tear finally spilling over his cheek and tracking down his flushed face. "You... you told me stories. You held me when the fever was bad. I thought you chose me. I thought you looked at me and decided that I was worth staying for... that you chose me over the bad things. So why did you go to Orario?"
"Bell... no, please, my child..." Alfia's mind wept, desperately wishing she could reach out, wishing she could wrap her frozen arms around his tiny shoulders and pull him away from the void. "I had to leave. I'm dying, I don't want to die in front of you. I had to pave the way for the future..."
"I kept my promise." Bell sobbed, his small shoulders shaking violently as he buried his face in his hands. "I practiced every day. I told you I was going to be a hero. The last hero. Your hero, so you wouldn't have to be sad anymore. I was going to protect you until you found your own hero... but you didn't wait for me."
But unlike Meteria, who had attacked her with raw, burning hatred, the boy did not scream. He did not curse her name. Instead, his small voice crumbled into a devastating torrent of self-blame.
"It's because I was too weak, wasn't it?" Bell cried out, looking up with an expression of pure heartbreak. "It's my fault you left! If I was stronger, if I didn't get scared of the dark, if I could have cured your cough... you wouldn't have abandoned me. I wasn't a good boy. I wasn't fast enough, or smart enough, and I let you walk away into the monsters. I'm sorry, Mom... I'm sorry I wasn't enough to make you stay!"
Every single word from the weeping child was a lethal strike to her psyche.
The guilt mutated, expanding until it suffocated whatever fragments of her sanity remained. She had broken him. She had taken an innocent, pure child and laden his shoulders with the crushing weight of an abandonment he did not deserve.
Her self-loathing reached unprecedented depths, drowning her in the realization that her sins had corrupted the only pure thing she had ever tried to protect.
And then, the cruel joke of her mind spiraled into absolute malice.
From the shadows behind the weeping boy, the air rippled with a sickening, familiar heat. The white hospital linens materialized first, followed by the pale, furious face of her twin sister.
Meteria stepped out of the dark, her eyes wide, bloodshot, and locked onto Alfia with a venomous, unhinged rage that eclipsed everything from the previous year.
"You really are an insatiable thief, aren't you, Alfia?!" Meteria roared, her voice a screeching tempest that shattered the rustic image of the cottage, plunging the scene back into a twisted, dark vortex.
Meteria violently shoved her way past the hallucination of the crying child, standing directly at the forefront of Alfia's mental prison.
"Hadn't you had enough?!" Meteria screamed, her chest heaving with an aggressive, trembling fury. "Did you truly have to steal every single piece of my existence?! You took my talent in the womb! You took my health, my strength, and my right to see the world! I died on a bed with nothing to my name, leaving behind a single, precious boy! And you couldn't even leave me that!"
"Meteria, please..." Alfia's mind shattered, caught in a crossfire of absolute agony.
"You stole my son!" Meteria fiercely accused, pointing a trembling, bony finger directly at Alfia's core. "Look at him! He looks at you when he thinks of comfort! He calls you Mom! He treats you like the mother who gave him life, completely erasing me from his heart! You couldn't handle the fact that I had one thing you didn't, so you crept into his life and stole the last remaining relic of my existence! You took my boy and made him yours!"
Meteria lunged forward within the darkness, her face contorting into a terrifying mask of possessive spite.
"You are a parasite through and through!" the twin shouted, her angry voice echoing in a ceaseless loop. "You drain the talent, you drain the family, and you drain the love until there is nothing left but hollow shells! You deserve this dark, Alfia! You deserve to sit in this crystal and listen to the boy you ruined blame himself for your selfishness! You took everything from me, and now you have absolutely nothing!"
The darkness offered no sanctuary.
Closing her eyes had not brought peace; it had simply locked her in an inescapable room with the two ghosts of her greatest failures.
Alfia remained entirely broken, trapped between the heartbreaking sobs of a child who thought he was abandoned because he wasn't enough, and the furious, screeching wrath of a sister who claimed she had stolen his love. Hope was no longer a distant memoryâit was completely extinct.
ââââ
âSeventh Yearâ
The year arrived with a total shutdown of her consciousness.
The human psyche, even one as monstrously powerful as Alfia's, possessed a definitive breaking point.
For years, her mind had been a violent, ceaseless tempest of panic, overthinking, and predatory hallucinations.
She had been battered by the ravenous jaws of monsters, broken by the screaming fury of her dead twin, and thoroughly dismantled by the weeping self-blame of the child she had abandoned.
Her soul had been flayed raw, over and over, until there was simply nothing left to tear.
And then, the energy ran out.
The frantic, screeching accusations of Meteria began to lose their volume, dissolving into an unintelligible, watery static. The heartbreaking sobs of little Bell flickered like a dying lamp, his ruby eyes fading into the shadows of her mind.
The hallucinations vanished.
The tormentors left the room.
What remained was an absolute, terrifyingly pure silence.
It was a quiet deeper than anything left by spell, a vacuum where even her own heartbeat was a forgotten concept.
Her mind was utterly, completely exhausted.
She could no longer weep.
She could no longer even sustain the weight of her own self-loathing. She simply existed as a spark of awareness floating in a dead universe, a quiet invalid waiting for the end of time.
But in that absolute vacuum, where every layer of her psychological armor had been stripped away and her pride lay dead in the dust, her mind began to drift.
It was a slow, aimless current, floating through the wreckage of her memories until it bumped against a solitary, unyielding anchor.
The black cloth in her hand.
The memory of Yuuya.
The transition was subtle, but entirely transformative.
In the depth of her utter despair, the cold poison of her previous years began to twist, reshaping itself into a new, terrifyingly absolute psychological fixation.
For years, she had tortured herself with the assumption that he had moved on, that he had tasted the light of the surface and willingly left her to rot, or that he had simply forgotten the heavy, parasitic ghost of the Hera Familia.
But in the barren wasteland of the seventh year, those doubts withered away, leaving behind a raw, primal obsession.
"It doesn't matter why you haven't come back yet." Her internal voice whispered, the tone no longer carrying the fragile sound of a child, but a heavy, quiet intensity that bordered on madness. "It doesn't matter if you are hurting, or if you are fighting, or if you are simply waiting. You are the one who built this box. You are the one who locked me in this room."
She replayed his final words, replayed the exact second his temporary body had phased out of existence, dissolving into fractures of light right before her open eyes.
He had rewritten reality for her. He had exhausted his own flesh, his own blood, and his very existence to pull her from the jaws of death. He had forced her to live.
"You made me want a future." She thought, her consciousness tightening around his image like a vice. "You ruined my quiet grave. You stripped away my peaceful release and left me burning in this dark, entirely dependent on your hand to break the glass. You made yourself my everything, Yuuya."
And with that realization, a severe fear of abandonmentâbeing abandoned by himâtook root, and bloomed. Officially solidified into a permanent vow.
The legendary, independent Silence of Hera who had always walked alone, who had pushed the world away with an icy disdain, was gone.
In her place was a woman who had been hollowed out by the abyss and filled completely with the ghost of a single boy.
"When you return... when you finally shatter this crystal and drag me back into the light... I will never let you go."
The thought was absolute. It was an immutable law written into the fabric of her remaining sanity.
She would never allow him to walk away from her again.
She would never tolerate a single inch of distance between them.
Her mind drifted back to the fragments of stories he had told her before the end.
He had talked about a world beyond the dungeon, beyond the gods, beyond the very sky of Genkai. A place called Earth. A realm called Japan. He had spoken of an invisible, calculating entity that governed his stepsâthe System that had demanded a penalty.
"I don't care where you go." She swore into the emptiness of her soul, her resolve hardening into something far more terrifying than her old magical destructive power. "If your path takes you back into the deep floors, I will walk beside you through the teeth of the monsters. If your soul is pulled back across the stars to that Earth of yours, to that Japan you left behind, I will tear through the fabric of dimensions to follow your silhouette."
She wouldn't care about the rules of the gods.
She wouldn't care about the logic of the world.
Even if the mysterious, otherworldly System in his head tried to claim him again, demanding another price, another penalty, she would weaponize her magic against the concept of reality itself before she allowed him to fade into light a second time.
"You kept me alive, Yuuya. You are the caretaker of this invalid."
But obsession also comes with desperation.
She had made her vow, all that is left was the person she had made that vow to.
For a fraction of a second, her old desperation came back.
And in that fractured mind of her's, it all came crashing down again.
"Please don't forget me Yuuya..."
"Yuuya... Please... Come back..."
"I beg of you..."
"Please..."
"Come back..."
(Reference to the final scene in Chapter 19 - Duty)
The seventh year had cured some of her panic, not by giving her peace, but by giving her an absolute, unhinged purpose.
She was no longer waiting to be saved.
She was waiting to claim the one who had saved her, ready to become his shadow, his protector, and his inescapable tether, no matter what world they had to burn through next.
The seventh year continues on.
And she returned back to the only thing she knows that could protect what remains of her mind: numbness.
The darkness had grown dead, heavy, and beautifully silent. She had anchored her entire remaining sanity to the singular, obsessive promise of Yuuya's return, adjusting to the static rhythm of a timeless purgatory.
The absolute vacuum of the seventh year had given her a fragile, hollow peace.
Trapped within the frozen core of the silver crystal, her exhausted mind had also finally run entirely out of fuel to sustain the screaming phantoms of her past.
The agonizing images of Meteria's rage and little Bell's tearful heartbreak had drifted away, dissolving into a bottomless, mercifully silent void.
For months, her consciousness had existed as a mere ember, floating in a dead universe, entirely suspended within the timeless purgatory.
Then, the bedrock of hell itself began to shudder.
It did not arrive as a recognizable sound, nor did her broken senses register the specific nature of the magic detonating far above.
(This is the time when Yuuya casted Genos Angelus on the 62nd floor on the colosseum.)
Instead, it was a sudden, colossal tremor that rippled through the deep layers of the earth.
The ancient stone of the seventieth floor groaned under the weight of an immense, distant cataclysm.
The shockwave vibrated directly through the crystal, striking her frozen nervous system like a physical blow.
To a mind that had been completely cut off from reality, drifting in a state of near total shutdownâand since the attempt of monsters on breaking her crystal have stopped for a long whileâthis foreign event was a terrifying intrusion.
The sudden, violent movement of the world acted like a brutal jolt to a stopped heart.
Her resting consciousness was aggressively forced awake, the protective numbness she had settled into shattering into a thousand jagged pieces.
The engine of her mind, previously too spent to function, was violently jarred back into a frantic, hyper alert state.
But with that awakening came no clarityâonly a renewed, tempestuous wave of absolute panic.
The silence was gone, and into the raw vacuum of her awakened thoughts rushed the venomous "what-ifs" that had been festering in her psyche for years.
The realization that the external world was still moving, that massive, violent forces were shifting outside her cage while she remained entirely paralyzed, triggered a terrifying wave of insecurity.
Her severe fear of abandonment, forged in the darkness of the isolation, flared to life with unprecedented ferocity.
"What was that...?" Her internal voice frantically whispered, her thoughts racing in a chaotic, disorganized spiral. "Why is the earth shaking? How much time has truly passed? Am I still counting correctly, or has the world forgotten I am even here?"
The fragile anchor she had placed in the memory of Yuuya began to twist, mutating into a source of profound agony.
If the world was still turning, if great battles were being fought in the deep dark without her, then the terrifying possibility of his absence became an absolute certainty in her broken mind.
"You moved on." The thought materialized like an icy blade, piercing through the remnants of her composure. "You went back to the surface. You tasted the light, you found a new life, and you realized that a terminal, parasitic ghost from the Hera Familia was a burden you didn't need to carry. You left me behind."
The mere concept of being erased from his memory completely broke her.
And with her fear of abandonment flaring, so does her desperation.
The Alfia people have known was entirely gone once more, reduced to a terrified, desperate soul trapped in an unbreakable coffin, screaming into an unhearing void.
She could not cope with the isolation if the promise that kept her alive was nothing more than a lie she had told herself to survive.
"Yuuya...!" Her mind wept, the silent, frantic wail echoing uselessly against the interior of the flawless crystal.
"Where are you?! You promised me... you held my hand and told me you were real! You forced me to live! You took away my quiet grave and told me to wait for a future... so where are you?!"
The tremors slowly subsided, the distant vibration fading back into the heavy, suffocating silence of the seventieth floor. But her mind would not return to its restful slumber. The frantic engine of her panic was running at full capacity, burning through her remaining sanity as she begged for a salvation she could no longer see.
"How much longer do I have to wait in the dark? It has been so long... it has been so terrifyingly long! Please... I beg of you, Yuuya... do not forget me. Do not leave me alone in this room. Please... just come back..."
The frantic, howling storm of her panic eventually ran itself ragged, collapsing back into a tense, hyper vigilant quiet.
Trapped within the deepest recesses of her own recollective nightmare, Alfia remained suspended in the dark, her mind raw and defensive.
She braced herself for the return of the phantom screams, waiting for the universe to unleash another cruel trick to mock her isolation.
But the darkness did not restart its typical torment. Instead, an entirely different anomaly gripped the seventieth floor.
Slowly, the baseline rhythm of her prison began to alter. For seven years in her subconscious timeline, the crystal had been a beacon for the abyssâa monument subjected to the relentless, aggressive scratching, slamming, and screeching of deep floor abominations desperate to tear through the stasis barrier. The sound of claws scraping against the flawless surface had been a permanent fixture of her purgatory.
Today, the scratching stopped. Entirely.
The heavy sound of monstrous appendages against her glass cage died out completely.
The distant, territorial roars that usually echoed through the grey limestone corridors faded into nothingness. It was a stark, eerie shift that made her fractured mind instantly recoil.
"Did they give up?" She thought, her internal voice tightening with an intense, paranoid suspicion. "Or is the Labyrinth simply preparing a worse horror to finish me?"
Then, cutting through the unnatural quiet of the dead floor, a sound resonated.
Thud.
It was a sharp compression of airâthe unmistakable sound of a heavy leather boot striking the solid bedrock.
Alfia's consciousness seized.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The footsteps were slow, deliberate, and perfectly even, echoing loudly off the stone walls.
In the barren wasteland of her mind, the sound was entirely foreign.
It carried none of the chaotic, multi-limbed dragging of the floor's native monsters. It was the stride of a mortal walking through the throat of hell.
"A hallucination." Her mind instantly rationalized, the defensive mechanism of her trauma kicking in with a bitter, defensive sting. "It is just another trick. My mind is completely broken from the tremor, and now it is inventing the sound of a savior to make the eventual descent into madness even more agonizing. Or it is a new predator. A monster that walks like a man."
Yet, despite every logical defense her pride tried to erect, a fragile, terrifyingly desperate spark of hope ignited in the center of her chest.
She fought against it, trying to suffocate the warmth before it could burn her, but her hearing remained entirely locked onto the progression of the steps.
They were getting closer.
The sound didn't falter, didn't hesitate, navigating the twists of the unmapped layout with absolute purpose.
Then, the footsteps stopped.
Right in front of her.
The silence returned for a single, agonizing heartbeat.
She waited for the phantom claws to strike, waited for the illusion to shatter into another lecture from Meteria or a sob from Bell.
Instead, a voice cut through the absolute dark.
It was deep, raw with an overwhelming, suffocating emotion, and carrying a distinct warmth that she had carried in her memory for seven long years.
"I'm back, Alfia."
The words vibrated directly through the silver stasis matrix, striking her core with the force of a physical impact.
"I'm so sorry..." The voice cracked, a profound, heavy guilt bleeding into the dead air of the abyss. "I'm so sorry it took me so long."
The pale, ethereal light of the crystal flared violently.
A sharp, microscopic snap rang out, followed instantly by the sound of thousands of brilliant fractures webbing across the flawless surface.
The structural integrity of her seven year cage dissolved entirely, bursting outward in a silent, spectacular cascade of shimmering crystalline dust.
With her sanctuary gone, her body fell forward into the void.
Her eyes snapped wide open.
The cold, suffocating walls of the seventieth floor vanished in an instant.
The oppressive pressure of the deep dark disintegrated, replaced by a sudden, rushing influx of crisp, clean, and beautifully cool air.
Alfia let out a sharp, ragged gasp, her chest heaving violently as her mind scrambled to orient itself.
Her heterochromatic eyes, vision clouded with the residual terror of the nightmare, rapidly blinked against a soft, gentle light.
There was no stone.
There was no crystal.
Overhead, a vast, lush canopy of leaves filtered the radiant, comfortable glow of the Under Resort's ceiling crystals.
The soft, dappled shadows of a hidden forest glen danced across her peripheral vision.
She hadn't been abandoned.
She wasn't alone in the dark.
Alfia was still resting securely within the quiet glen on the eighteenth floor, entirely cocooned within the massive, protective folds of the dark grey Goliath scarf.
She was sitting directly in Yuuya's lap, her fragile frame pinned safely against his torso by the locked vise of his powerful arms.
She looked up slightly, her gaze tracing the sharp line of his jaw and the dark strands of hair falling across his forehead.
Yuuya was still fast asleep. The heavy lines of exhaustion that had marred his features before they drifted off were slightly softened, his breathing maintaining a deep, slow, and perfectly rhythmic.
Even while completely unconscious, his physical grip around her waist and thighs hadn't loosened by a single millimeter.
His body had remained a warm, impenetrable fortress throughout her entire slumber, ensuring that no matter how far her mind drifted into the horrors of her past, his reality would be waiting to catch her the moment she woke up.
Slowly, the frantic racing of her heart began to quiet down. She leaned her head back against his chest, her sensitive ears pressing flat against his shirt.
Ba-thump. Ba-thump. Ba-thump.
The heavy, steady symphony of his heartbeat resonated within her ear, a powerful and constant reminder that the nightmare was officially over. The seven years were gone. The silence was conquered.
Alfia closed her eyes once more, a soft, genuinely peaceful breath escaping her lips as she curled her fingers tighter into his inner shirt, letting his continuous warmth pull her back down into a rest that was no longer haunted.
ââââ
Author: my shaylađ
Anyways, so that's Alfia's side of story on the crystal.
And I know, you guys saw year seven, you guys saw her promise, and I can see you guys asking if I'm gonna make her yandere even if a LITTLE bit in the future.
I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not.
...
Should I? :P