"During that period of recovery, when I was finally stepping back into the light, Sora and Kaito decided I needed a massive distraction from my own head." Yuuya said, his voice carrying a strange, surreal weight. "They introduced me to a piece of work. A work of fiction. Before that, I never cared for stories, plays, or books. In fact, throughout my entire past life, it was the only piece of fiction I had ever known."
Hestia tilted her head, her hair shifting against her shoulders as she looked at Yuuya with genuine curiosity.
"A fiction? What kind of story could possibly catch your attention? What was it called, Yuuya?"
Yuuya looked around the room, a faint, deeply complex smile touching his lips.
"It was called 'Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?'."
The room fell completely silent for a single, long second before Welf burst into a sudden, loud snort. Throwing his head back as a look of disbelief washed over his face.
"Are you serious, Yuuya?" Welf laughed, shaking his head thoroughly. "That is easily the worst, most ridiculous title for a story I have ever heard in my entire life! It sounds like some desperate manual written by a lonely amateur who can't even strike up a conversation with a barkeep, let alone survive a monster attack. Who in their right mind names a book something that awful?"
(Ion know, ask Omori.)
"Lili must agree with Welf for once." Lili remarked dryly, a look of disapproval crossing her features. "It sounds entirely lacking in dignity. If a merchant attempted to sell a chronicle with a title so thoroughly absurd on North Main Street, they would be laughed right out of the market sector."
Hestia giggled, puffing out her cheeks as she looked at Yuuya with an amused grin.
"Your friends have some seriously weird taste in literature. Why would they force you to read a story about desperate guys chasing maidens through a cave? What does that have to do with anything?"
"That's the thing, Goddess." Yuuya said softly, his dark eyes losing every single trace of their previous humor, replacing it with a gravity that instantly froze the laughter in Welf's throat. "It wasn't a random, questionable story. And it wasn't about some fictional cave on Earth."
Yuuya leaned forward slightly, his gaze locking directly onto Hestia's wide blue eyes.
"That piece of fiction was about this world." Yuuya revealed, his voice echoing flatly off the stone walls of the bedroom. "Every single line of it. It was a story written by a normal human being sitting at a desk on Earth, who had never wielded a sword or seen a god in his life. Yet, he wrote down the exact layout of Orario. He wrote about the descent of the gods, the mechanics of the Falna, the secrets of the lower floors, and the names of every single Familia operating under the sky."
A sharp, terrifyingly unnatural silence instantly gripped the master bedroom.
Yuuya wasn't lying.
Hestia's jaw literally dropped, her face rapidly draining of all its color as her hands froze against the edge of the mattress. She stared at Yuuya, her mind fracturing as the cosmic weight of his words dropped into her soul like an unexploded magical device.
"W-What...?" Hestia whispered, her voice trembling with a sudden, overwhelming wave of existential dread. "Yuuya... what are you saying? Are you telling us that our lives... our divinities, your mortal struggles, the blood we spill in the labyrinth... it was all just a toy? A script written by a mortal in another realm?"
Bell blinked, his eyes wide with a total lack of comprehension, his body going entirely rigid. Mikoto's fingers on her clothes tightened so hard the fabric groaned, her worldview completely shattering.
"It sounds entirely insane, I know." Yuuya murmured, his hand remaining steady as Alfia monitored his pulse. "But that is the truth. It's how I knew the weaknesses of the monsters and the secret histories of the city. I didn't possess divine foresight, and I wasn't guessing. I had simply read the book before I died."
"Once I realized the contents are actually quite amusing despite the title, I became entirely consumed by it." Yuuya continued, turning his gaze toward the silver haired woman sitting beside him against the headboard. "I started exploring a massive digital archive created by the readers of the story back on Earth—a database we called a 'wiki.' And that is where I first discovered you, Alfia."
Alfia's heterochromatic eyes flared, her left gray eye and right green eye narrowing into slits as she locked her gaze onto his profile.
"You found my record? Even before you observed us as a soul?"
"Yeah." Yuuya nodded, a look of nostalgia entering his eyes. "And when the digital illustrations of your face loaded onto my screen, my heart completely stopped. It surprised me so intensely because, for some reason, you and Akari felt exactly the same. You shared a subtle, striking resemblance with Haruka because of your deep gray eye... but it was Akari who felt like a twin reflection. Looking at your silver hair and your green eye, it felt like I was staring at her long lost sister across a dimensional sea. It was too similar to the point it dragged me right back to the neighborhood sandbox."
Alfia remained perfectly motionless, her fingers still firmly intertwined with his knuckles, though her pulse labored slightly beneath her skin. To hear that her very visage—the physical traits she had loathed as a curse of theft from her sister Meteria—carried the exact likeness of the two women who had anchored Yuuya's soul on Earth sent a shockwave through her chest.
"But as I kept reading through the digital pages... my excitement completely died." Yuuya whispered. "Because that database recorded the fate of Alfia in the original version of the world. And on that script? You were already dead."
Bell clenched his teeth, his hands shaking as he leaned closer to the bed, his voice cracking with anxiety.
"Mom is... dead? In the original story?"
"She did, Bell." Yuuya said grimly. "In that version of Earth's script, Alfia was a monster of despair. Just like in this world, she aligned herself with Evilus during the darkest age of Orario. But the version of Alfia written by that author didn't hold back. She wasn't afraid to slaughter civilians. She wasn't hesitant to spill the blood of hundreds of adventurers. She deliberately forced the entire world to hate her very existence with a burning vengeance."
Welf's brow furrowed, a heavy sweat breaking along his jaw as he absorbed the grim shift in the narrative.
"Why would she do that? If she was as strong as you say, why turn the whole world into an enemy?"
"Because she had witnessed the terror of the One-Eyed Black Dragon." Yuuya explained, his voice echoing off the stone walls. "She carried a deep regret for the defeat of the Zeus and Hera Familias. She looked at the current generation of Orario—the young adventurers—and she acknowledged that they were far too weak to ever survive the final trial. So, she chose a cruel, bloody method. She made herself the ultimate nightmare, a villain, so the world would be forced to overcome its limitations, defeat her, and grow strong enough to slay the Dragon. She chose to be a stepping stone built out of corpses."
Yuuya let out a slow, ragged breath, his fingers tightening against Alfia's hand as he delivered the final chronicle.
"And her end was entirely tragic. On the eighteenth floor, amidst the white forests, she engaged in a battle against the Astraea Familia. She pushed her failing, diseased body to its absolute limits, unleashing her magic, Genos Angelus. The force of her own spell tore a massive, bottomless hole that we now know as "The Great Chasm," that landmark on the 18th floor. And when the battle concluded... she didn't choose to survive. She willingly let herself fall straight into the gashing hole she had carved. Her life ended as the flames of the lower floors completely incinerated her flesh into ash."
Haruhime let out a sharp, horrified sob, burying her face completely into her hands as the terrifying imagery of Yuuya words painted the bedroom walls.
"Though, there was a catch." Yuuya added, his eyes tracking a dust mote drifting through the sunlight. "There was technically a single, isolated timeline out there where she actually lived. But it wasn't part of the real chronicle. It was just an 'IF' story."
Alfia's eyes widened slightly.
"An 'IF'?"
"An alternate universe." Yuuya explained, his voice dropping into a tone of quiet pity. "A brief, hypothetical narrative spun by the author's whims to satisfy the curiosity of the readers, perhaps even himself. In that fragmented script, you never participated with Evilus and lived a quiet, hidden life raising Bell. But it was nothing more than a ghost of a concept. A cruel 'what if' on a piece of paper that held no weight in the main sequence of that world. In their reality, you were still nothing but ash beneath the labyrinth."
The cruelty of a life dictated entirely by a distant creator's pen left a chilling weight in the room. Alfia looked at her pale hands, realizing that in a vast cosmic design, her survival had been treated as nothing more than a fictional luxury.
"But luckily for everyone sitting in this room..." Yuuya suddenly smiled, a bright, rogue, and entirely unyielding light returning to his dark eyes as he broke the tension. "This alternate universe possesses an logic defying idiot anomaly. It has a Yuuya."
Bell looked up, his eyes shining with a sudden, soaring wave of relief.
"You changed it? You broke the book's rules?"
"I completely shredded the author's script." Yuuya grinned thoroughly, a familiar, carefree energy returning to his posture. "I didn't let her fall into that pit, and I didn't let the flames touch a single strand of her silver hair. As for the exact details of how I executed that intervention on the eighteenth floor... I'll explain that whole disaster to you later. It involved a lot of broken stone and a very angry goddess."
He turned his head fully toward Alfia, his dark eyes locking onto her heterochromatic gaze with devotion.
"Though even before I interfered, our Alfia have already changed a bit." Yuuya murmured softly, his voice full of warmth. "She is kind in her own unique way. She is remarkably mellowed out, heavily influenced by the pure, stubborn heart of her nephew Bell. Unlike her original counterpart, this Alfia didn't butcher a single civilian, nor did she execute an adventurer. During the final, bloody day of the Great Feud, she was actually actively moving through the shadows, controlling the damage and ensuring the fires didn't consume the city's helpless. If you look at the records of her life, her only real sin was her involvement with the names of Evilus—nothing more."
Alfia slowly let out a long, shuddering breath, the freezing weight of her original destiny completely melting away under the heat of his words. She looked down at their joined hands, her fingers relaxing within his grip.
She was no longer the tragic ash of the eighteenth floor, nor was she a passing whim in an author's notebook.
She was alive, her hands were clean of innocent blood, and she was surrounded by a Familia that refused to let her go.
"A rewritten script..." Alfia whispered, her voice carrying a faint, beautiful trace of a smile. "To think... a mortal boy from an alien realm simply walked into Orario and tore the book of my fate to pieces."
"I don't regret it." Yuuya chuckled softly.
Yuuya slowly paused, his eyes tracing the intricate patterns of the floor as his mind drifted across the dimensional divide, fast forwarding through the years that followed his high school chaos.
"I grew up." Yuuya said simply, breaking the brief silence. "A few years slipped by, and before I knew it, I was twenty one. An adult. On the surface, honestly, nothing much had changed about my daily routine. I was still gambling, still dodging Akari's highly creative security measures, and still balancing the madness of my social circle. But underneath that familiar rhythm, the foundations of our lives had finally solidified."
He looked up, a soft, incredibly genuine warmth gentling his sharp features.
"Akari and I were engaged. After everything we'd dragged each other through, I'd finally put a ring on her finger. The date was set, the venue was locked down, and our wedding was scheduled to happen that upcoming December. For the first time in my entire existence, the future didn't feel like a series of calculations. It felt like home."
A sharp, audible intake of breath cut through the room.
Yuuya looked over to see Alfia staring at him, her heterochromatic eyes widening in shock. Her fingers, still intertwined with his, locked tight enough to make a lesser adventurer's bones pop. She had understood that Yuuya was a taken man—that his heart belonged to the ghosts of his past—but hearing that he was on the precipice of marriage, that he was supposed to lead a maiden down an altar to bind their souls forever, redefined the entire weight of his loss.
Alfia opened her mouth, her lips parting to voice the sudden, swirling torrent of questions burning in her chest, but Yuuya merely offered her a small, bittersweet shake of his head.
He didn't let her linger on the thought, smoothly continuing his narrative before the shadows could reclaim her mind.
"But the world doesn't care about December weddings." Yuuya murmured, his voice dropping into a flat, chillingly calm register. "Everything started going completely downhill during a random Friday night in May."
"Without warning, a heavily armed, highly organized terrorist faction arrived on the shores of Japan." Yuuya recounted, his eyes narrowing as the dark memories took shape. "To this day, nobody actually knows their true intentions or their motives. They didn't issue manifestos and they didn't demand ransom from the government. They just began to tear the country apart, establishing a heavily fortified operational base right across the borders of Saga and Nagasaki."
Welf's expression hardened, his jovial mood instantly vanishing.
"A foreign invasion? If your world had those luxury glass rectangles and automated carriages, your military forces must have been terrifying."
"They were." Yuuya agreed, nodding slowly. "By the time May rolled around, our domestic forces had been locked in a brutal conflict with them. Japan wasn't losing the war by any metric. Our weaponry, our armor division, and our air superiority kept them pinned down inside their sectors. But the terrifying part was that the terrorist group wasn't losing either. It was a complete, bloody stalemate. And then, the government did something completely inexplicable."
Yuuya's knuckles turned white against the edge of the mattress.
"Logically, the nation had more than enough military might to sustain the campaign and eventually crush the insertion. But for some unknown, deeply unsettling reason, the Ministry of Defense panicked. They passed an emergency executive decree. They began drafting ordinary civilians into the active frontline military."
"Drafting?" Lili whispered, her eyebrows knitting together in deep concern. "They forced untrained citizens to pick up weapons and march into a meat grinder? Even the Guild won't do that "
"Well they did give some basic training first." Yuuya said dryly. "But I think they just needed warm bodies to hold the defensive lines while the specialized units pushed the parameters."
"It was just a completely normal, unassuming night in the middle of May." Yuuya continued, his gaze drifting toward the window as if he could still see the pale moonlight of his old home. "The spring breeze was coming through the screen doors. My mother and father were sitting on the couch in the living room, and Akari was sitting right next to me, her head resting comfortably against my shoulder. She was flipping through a bridal magazine, tracing her fingers over lace patterns for her dress."
Bell watched Yuuya intently, his heart clenching at the contrast between the domestic bliss and the looming storm.
"The television was playing in the background." Yuuya murmured, his voice dropping an octave. "The news was broadcasting the latest grim updates from the frontlines. The screen was flickering with red warning graphics, showing shaky, low definition footage of artillery strikes and columns of black smoke rising over the distant hills. The volume was low, but the tension in the room was palpable. My father was frowning, his eyes glued to the casualties ticker at the bottom of the display, while my mother kept glancing over at me with this quiet anxiety in her eyes."
"Did she know?" Mikoto asked softly, her voice barely a breath. "Did your mother possess a premonition?"
"Every parent in the country was terrified during those weeks." Yuuya replied. "But we tried to ignore it. I remember reaching down, gently taking the magazine out of Akari's hands, and teasing her about how many layers of tulle she was planning to force me to pay for. She just pouted, her eyes shining under the living room lights as she pinched my side, telling me that the casino king could easily afford a palace if she demanded it. We were laughing. The house smelled like the tea my mother had brewed. It's peaceful."
Then, Yuuya's voice stopped entirely. The atmosphere in the master bedroom of the Hearth Manor seemed to drop five degrees in a single second.
"And then... a knock was heard at our front door."
"It wasn't a violent knock." Yuuya said, his dark eyes completely hollow as he relived the exact memory of the sound. "It was just a three beat, perfectly measured, and entirely unassuming rap against the wood. But the moment the sound echoed through the hallway, the entire living room froze. The laughter died instantly. My mother's teacup rattled against its saucer, and Akari's grip on my shirt tightened so fast the fabric groaned."
"You knew what it was." Alfia stated, her voice completely devoid of warmth.
"Everyone knew what a knock at nine o'clock on a Friday night meant during the draft season." Yuuya said, letting out a slow, heavy breath. "I stood up. Akari tried to hold onto my sleeve, her fingers trembling, but I gently patted her hand, gave her a reassuring smile, and walked down the short hallway to the entrance. I unlocked the deadbolt, pulled the wooden door open, and stepped into the cool night air."
He paused, his eyes staring blankly at the far wall.
"Standing on our concrete porch were three military personnel. Their caps pulled low over their eyes, their posture stiff and completely devoid of human emotion. The man in the center didn't ask for my identification. He didn't ask how my day was. He didn't look at the lit windows of our home or the shadow of the girl standing right behind the kitchen wall."
"What did he say?" Bell asked, his fists clenching so hard his knuckles turned entirely white.
"He just reached into his leather side bag, pulled out a thick, official white envelope stamped with a seal, and held it out across the threshold." Yuuya whispered. "He looked me dead in the eyes and delivered the script. 'Yuuya Mitsukuji. By executive order of the Ministry of Defense, your civilian status is hereby suspended. You have been officially drafted for immediate deployment to the active front lines. Your transport arrives at dawn.'"
Silence immediately followed after Yuuya finished speaking. But he didn't let it last for long.
"After that envelope touched my hand, the rest of the night became a fragmented blur." Yuuya said, his voice dropping into a low, hypnotic rhythm. "My memory is photographic, but the shock of that moment turned reality into a sequence of strobe lights. I don't remember walking back down the hallway. I don't remember my mother's tears, or the heavy, dead silence that captured my father's face. The very next thing I clearly remember... Akari and I were standing inside our bedroom, the door locked tight behind us."
The room remained entirely still, the warmth of the previous high school comedy completely evaporating, replaced by the suffocating weight of an impending tragedy.
"The moment the lock clicked, Akari completely snapped." Yuuya continued, his eyes darkening. "The fragile sanity she had fought so hard to maintain over the last few years just disintegrated. Her obsession returned in full force, deeper and more terrifying than anything I had ever seen from her in the past. She started pacing the room like a caged animal, her fingers clawing at her own hair, her eyes wide with a panic."
"What did she do?" Bell asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
"She was frantically looking for a loophole." Yuuya recounted. "She started rambling, her words tripping over each other. She was talking about hiding me in the basement permanently, about forging medical documents, about sneaking us across the border into another country before dawn. But as the clock kept ticking toward morning, she realized none of it would work. The military would hunt a deserter. They would drag me out of any hole she dug."
"I should've seen it coming. I should've asked Kaito for help to immediately get us out of the country the moment those terrorist arrived. Unfortunately, I'm just too complacent, too confident in our military, and too distracted by the joy of being engaged with Akari." Yuuya sighed. "I should've deserted with my family when I got that document. Though airports and ports are difficult that time—they have a data of who's drafted or not, Kaito's connections would have been enough to get us out of the country. I can just serve my prison time once we returned."
"..."
"Haha... I just don't know anymore. Perhaps, I'm just too shocked to even think about any solutions at that time." Yuuya let out a quiet, bitter chuckle.
"That's also when Akari's mind went to the darkest place possible. She stopped pacing. She turned to me, her body shaking violently, and she realized the only foolproof way to keep me from marching to the front lines was a physical exemption. A medical disqualification. She looked around the room, her eyes landing on the cutter on my desk, and she realized... she had to break me."
"She wanted to harm you?!" Welf gasped, his jaw tightening. "To save you from the draft, she was going to deliberately cripple you?"
"Yes." Yuuya replied flatly. "She wanted to resort to hurting me herself. I don't know how she plans it. Maybe by cutting some tendons, ligaments—anything that would force the military doctors to reject my deployment paperwork on the spot. And the most painful part of that entire night?"
Yuuya looked directly at Alfia, his dark eyes carrying a unsettling honesty.
"I let her. I sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed, spread my arms, and entirely gave her permission to do it. I told her to take the blade, cut me, cut the tendons and ligaments in my limbs, and to ensure I wouldn't be able to walk out of that front door when the transport arrived at dawn."
Hestia clutched her hands to her chest, her eyes wide with horror.
"Yuuya... why? You were a fighter. You were the king of the tables. Why would you just sit there and invite that kind of agony?"
"Because I didn't want to go." Yuuya confessed, his voice dropping into a cold, heavy register that sent a shiver down Bell's spine. "The very second that military officer handed me the white envelope on the porch, a horrific sensation wrapped around my chest. It wasn't simple fear of combat, and it wasn't a aversion to war. It was a primal premonition. A dark, absolute certainty of impending doom. My instincts were screaming at me that if I stepped onto that transport vehicle at dawn, I was never, ever coming back alive. I knew I was walking toward my own execution."
He leaned back, his profile catching the dim light of the Hearth Manor.
"So I was entirely willing to take the pain. If Akari wanted to cut me into pieces, stab me until I'm bleeding all over the place, I would have endured it without a single scream. I would have taken the agony, and thanked her for keeping me in our room. I wanted her to stop me by force."
"But she couldn't do it." Yuuya whispered, a deep, sorrowful tenderness bleeding back into his tone. "She just... couldn't."
Alfia's heterochromatic eyes shifted, a rare, profound look of understanding crossing her pale features. As someone who had lived her entire life wrapped in the contradiction of destroying the world to save it, she understood the exact psychological wall Akari had slammed into.
"She picked up the blade." Yuuya recounted, his eyes fixed on his own palms. "She stood right in front of me, raising it high above my knee. Her teeth were bared, her devotion demanding that she save my life by taking my mobility. But the moment she looked down into my eyes... her arms froze. She stood there for three continuous minutes, her muscles straining, crying so hard she was literally choking on her own breath."
~~~~
"Yuuya, please..." Akari's memory echoed through his words, her voice cracked and entirely shattered. "Please run away. Please tell me to do it. But I can't... I look at your skin, I look at your face, and my hands won't move. I love you too much to break you. My body won't let me strike the only thing I live for."
~~~~
"The paradox of devotion." Alfia remarked, her voice unusually soft, almost comforting. "To save the object of your worship, you must desecrate it. For a maiden whose entire existence is built upon protecting your form, inflicting deliberate, crippling agony upon you is an impossibility. Her own mind would tear itself apart before her muscles could execute the blow."
"Yes." Yuuya murmured, nodding slowly. "She just could not do it. She dropped the blade onto the floorboards. It made a sound that seemed to signal the end of our options. She collapsed right between my knees, wrapping her arms around my waist, sobbing into my shirt until the fabric was completely soaked through. We spent the final hours of the night just holding each other in the dark, watching the sky outside the window slowly turn from black to a pale, unforgiving gray."
He let out a long, ragged breath, the memory clearly taking a physical toll on his current frame, though his grip on Alfia's hand never wavered.
"And before we could even find the words to say goodbye... the sound of a diesel engine rumbled down our quiet suburban street. The transport had arrived."
"More months crawled by after that morning." Yuuya said, his voice dropping into a steady tone that drew everyone closer to the edge of the mattress. "The green spring turned into a scorching summer, the summer bled into a bitter autumn, and before we knew it, the calendar pages had flipped all the way to December."
Hestia let out a soft, sharp breath, her eyes widening as she connected the timeline.
"December... Yuuya, that was supposed to be the month of your—"
"Yeah. The month of our wedding." Yuuya interrupted gently, his gaze fixed on the quiet flames dancing in the hearth. "But instead of standing in an immaculate white chapel wearing a tailored suit, I was crouching in a frontline, fighting for my life. By that point, everything about my life had completely flipped. I had been promoted. I was a commander."
Welf let out a low, impressed whistle.
"A commander in seven months? Damn, Yuuya. I knew you were a monster on the casino floors and in the boxing ring, but leading an actual military unit?"
"It turns out I'm just as good at handling guns as handling blades. Maybe because they are both due considered a weapon. Additionally, to a photographic brain, handling firearms becomes second nature." Yuuya explained, a small, humorless smile playing on his lips.
"Because of that ability, the high command kept pushing me up the ranks. By the time the winter snow started falling, I had exactly thirty soldiers under my direct command. Thirty lives completely reliant on my orders."
"Thirty people..." Bell murmured, his eyes shining with a deep, relatable anxiety. He understands the weight of holding the lives of his friends in his hands inside the deep floors of the Dungeon. "How did you manage? A stalemated war zone sounds completely different from a monster hunt."
"I didn't let a single one of them die, Bell." Yuuya said softly, turning his dark eyes directly toward his young apprentice. "For five straight months of relentless skirmishes and warfare, my platoon didn't suffer a single casualty. Not one. I used every single ounce of my cognitive abilities to predict enemy movements, map out extraction routes, and secure our perimeters. My men started calling me a guardian deity. They genuinely believed that if they stayed behind my shoulder, the bullets would magically curve around them."
"The morale in our group was sky high because of that record." Yuuya continued, his fingers lightly tapping at the sheets. "And somewhere around December, the upper brass called all the platoon commanders into the command tent. They laid out a massive, highly detailed map of the terrorist stronghold in Nagasaki, and they gave us an official, binding promise."
Lili leaned forward.
"What kind of promise could a desperate military make during a long stalemate, Master Yuuya?"
"An absolute discharge." Yuuya replied, his voice dropping into a hollow, echoing register. "The commanding general stood at the head of the table, looked every single one of us in the eyes, and gave us his word of honor. He told us that the Ministry of Defense was launching an infiltration offensive to completely weaken the terrorist group. He looked at my platoon's record and said: 'Give me one last successful push, Commander Mitsukuji. After this one last mission, your contract is fulfilled. Regardless of the result, every single member of your unit will be officially discharged from service. You will go back to your families, and you will never, ever be called back to the front lines again.'"
"A ticket home." Mikoto whispered, her concepts of duty and reward striking a deep chord within her chest. "An honorable release to return to the maiden who was waiting for you with her bridal magazine."
"Yep." Yuuya murmured, a faint, incredibly bitter shadow crossing his sharp features. "For the first time since that Friday night in May, the weight in my chest actually started to loosen. I looked at the maps, I calculated the odds, and I genuinely started to believe that my primal premonition of doom had been wrong. I looked at my thirty men, saw them cheering and crying tears of pure relief at the news, and I allowed myself to think that we were actually going to make it out of that meat grinder alive. I started picturing the wedding dress again."
Yuuya stopped talking, the silence in the master bedroom of Hearth Manor becoming so thick it felt almost physical. He looked down at his right hand, the hand that was currently intertwined with Alfia's, and his expression turned entirely cold.
"And that..." Yuuya whispered, his dark eyes losing every single trace of warmth. "Was my very first mistake."
Alfia's heterochromatic eyes flamed with a sudden realization, her fingers instantly tightening around his knuckles with a desperate, protective force. She didn't need to hear the rest of the chronicle to understand the grim reality of the universe.
"You let your guard down." Alfia stated, her voice completely devoid of its usual calm, replaced by a deep, resonant anger at the unseen author of his fate. "The moment a warrior allows the illusion of a peaceful tomorrow to soften their focus, the executioner strikes. You believed the script had relented."
"I did." Yuuya agreed. "I forgot the golden rule of the tables: when the house offers you a deal that seems too good to be true, it's because they've already loaded the dice against you."
He looked around the room, making eye contact with Hestia, Welf, Lili, Haruhime, and Mikoto, noting the pale, horrified expressions on each of their faces.
"All of you are sitting here right now, watching me breathe inside Orario." Yuuya said dryly, a rogue smirk cutting through the lingering tragedy of his words. "Which means every single one of you can easily guess the punchline. Something went completely, utterly wrong on that last mission."
"Well I'm not really fond of recounting the last moments of my life so I'll keep it vague as much as I can." Said Yuuya. "Like I said earlier, the objective was an infiltration mission. Our instructions were simple: insert deep behind the enemy lines and weaken the enemy forces from within before the main army launched the finishing blow. We moved out under the cover of absolute darkness, slipping into the sector exactly at nine o'clock on a freezing night."
Welf leaned forward, his hands resting heavily on his knees.
"An infiltration... into the literal jaws of the beast."
"We had the perfect layout, or so the intelligence briefs claimed." Yuuya continued, his dark eyes fixed on the pale moonlight slicing through the bedroom window. "Long story short, the enemies expected us. We were completely ambushed. Surrounded on all four flanks before we could even establish a defensive pocket."
"But my men didn't panic." Yuuya said, a fierce, protective pride cutting through the grim narrative. "They trusted my voice. They followed my order without a shred of hesitation. We dug our teeth into the concrete and fought back. We fought for three continuous hours. We killed countless insurgents but it didn't make a damn bit of difference. The moment we wiped out one fireteam, another squad rushed out of the dark. The enemy seemingly possessed an endless supply of manpower."
"The worst part wasn't the numbers." Yuuya murmured, his fingers twitching slightly against Alfia's palm. "It was the radio. The communication headset inside my helmet crackled to life. It was the headquarters. They told me that our backup—the mechanized division that was supposed to breach the walls and extract us—was experiencing severe operational 'problems' and could not arrive at our position."
Lili dropped was stunned, her expression complicated.
"They abandoned you? After forcing you into the front lines, they simply left your platoon to die?"
"They gave us bureaucratic excuses, Lili." Yuuya said dryly. "But the moment those words hit my eardrums, my strategy completely shifted. I stopped thinking about 'buying time' to 'how do I get these thirty boys out of this place alive?'
He let out a slow, ragged breath, his profile hardening in the dim light of the Hearth Manor.
"But despite the bleak numbers, we didn't sprint for the gates immediately. We couldn't. We were pinned down too tight. So we kept fighting, trying to stretch our resources. Deep down, despite my brain knowing the calculations were entirely zeroed out, a small, stupid part of me was still hopeful. I was hoping that the world would provide a miracle. That the high command would fix their logistical disaster, that a rescue convoy would crash in, or that the sky would open up. But the miracle never came. The universe didn't care about our survival script."
"Time passes on, by the time I came back to my senses, the situation was entirely dire." Yuuya whispered. "We were down to our very last ammunition. The sound of empty chambers locking back was echoing through our group. We had less than sixty rounds of ammunition left across the entire unit."
Haruhime buried her face in Mikoto's shoulder, her shoulders shaking with silent anxiety as the tension in the bedroom became utterly suffocating.
"Seeing no more way out of it, I was left with no more choice, I briefly told my plan to my platoon. Choosing a direction, I then deployed a smoke grenade to cover the path, obscuring the enemies line of sight. But we didn't immediately made a run for it. We waited. We waited until the hail of gunfire to calm down, right when the insurgents were reloading." Yuuya said. "I didn't hesitate. I immediately told them to run, run as fast as they can and never look back."
"Yuuya..." Hestia whimpered, her heart breaking as she realized the trajectory of the tale. "You stayed behind."
"I had to, Goddess. That's why I told them to never look back." Yuuya said softly, his voice full finality. "I know the risk if I didn't do it. If I didn't choose to be left behind, we would surely be chased down and executed one by one like hunting a wild boar in the wild. I couldn't afford that. I refused to let the boys I had protected for months to die."
He turned his head slightly, his dark eyes locking onto Alfia's wide, breathless gaze.
"So, I chose to be left behind. I deliberately stepped out and provoked them so that their focus is only on me. I forced every single searchlight, every automatic rifle, and every weapon in that place to focus entirely on my lone silhouette."
Welf's jaw was completely clenched, a sweat breaking along his neck.
"How did you survive the first five minutes alone against an entire army, Captain?"
"I used every possible method I know." Yuuya answered flatly. "Mainly guerilla tactics. I would fire rounds to a building, killing a terrorist, sprint thirty meters until I saw another one in the shadows reloading, and plunge my knife into a throat from behind before they could even register my position."
The imagery painted a brutal, blood drenched picture on the walls of the master bedroom. The Hestia Familia sat entirely frozen, listening to the chronicle of a mortal boy who had turned himself into a lone engine of slaughter out of love for his comrades.
"I kept moving." Yuuya whispered, his dark eyes staring through the walls of Orario, back to the cold concrete of his past. "I killed one after another. I stripped weapons from the corpses, drained their magazines, and used their own equipment against them. I lost count after dropping the fiftieth body. My mind became entirely focused to the slaughter. My muscles were screaming, my lungs were burning from the smoke, and my uniform was entirely soaked through with iron and ash. But I didn't stop. I just kept going, and going, and going into the deep of the night..."
Yuuya stopped for a second, contemplating whether to tell them his wounds of that fight.
"Fifteen." Yuuya said quietly, his voice cutting through the silence of the bedroom. "That was the exact number of times lead tore into my flesh during that final stand. Not a single one of those wounds killed me instantly. It was the bleeding that claimed me."
He reached up, his fingers lightly tapping against his left shoulder blade, exactly at the socket.
"The first major one ever since I told my platoon to run caught me right here." Yuuya murmured, indicating the precise spot to the wide eyed audience. "It completely shattered the joint, rendering my left arm entirely useless for the rest of the fight. I had to operate my weapon completely one handed from that point forward."
Alfia's gaze locked onto his fingers, her breath hitching slightly as she imagined the sheer, blinding agony of wielding a weapon with a obliterated shoulder socket.
Yuuya's hand then shifted downward, pressing flat against the center of his chest.
"This one was sustained during the initial ambush. A fraction of an inch to the left, and it would have pierced my heart instantly. It's pure luck that kept me breathing through the crossfire."
He then gestured toward his left leg, tracing a line along his upper thigh.
"And another one caught me down here, narrowly missing the femur. It completely sliced through the muscle, forcing me to drag and limp my weight through the as the night dragged on. The rest of the entries were scattered across my ribs, my flanks, and my limbs. I was completely full of holes, bleeding out into the dirt while the smoke swirled around me."
"When the shooting finally died down, the battlefield was dead silent." Yuuya continued, his eyes staring blankly at the far wall of the Hearth Manor. "I didn't have the strength to take another step. I dragged my ruined body toward the remains of a destroyed building. Every single one of its structures had completely collapsed into concrete dust under the artillery fire, except for a solitary wall that somehow remained standing amidst the rubble. I leaned my back against that lone wall, completely unable to move."
Bell leaned closer.
"Was it... over?"
"I don't know either." Yuuya admitted. "By that time, the dark sky was finally beginning to break. I remember watching how the rising sun slowly made its way over the horizon, painting the smoke filled sky in shades of pale amber and gold. It was beautiful. And the exact second the light touched my face... my life completely flashed before my eyes."
Haruhime pressed a hand over her mouth, a small sob escaping her lips.
"Every single one of the best moments of my existence played out in a brilliant, hyper accelerated sequence." Yuuya whispered, a deeply nostalgic warmth softening his voice. "I saw the sandbox where Haruka, Akari, and I used to build castles. I saw the bright neon lights of the first casino floor I ever conquered. I saw Sora and Kaito laughing at a stupid joke in our high school courtyard. And by the very end of it, I saw Akari. Along with the memory of the day that I knelt before her and asked her to marry me.'
He let out a long, slow breath.
"After that, everything went completely black."
The master bedroom fell into a profound, suffocating stillness.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The sheer weight of a mortal life ending in a cold battlefield thousands of miles away hung over the Hestia Familia like a physical shroud.
Welf shifted against the stone pillar, his brow furrowed as he stared down at his own boots. He swallowed hard before looking up at his captain.
"Hey, Yuuya..." Welf asked, his voice unusually rough and strained. "Did you... did you have any regrets when the dark took you?"
Yuuya looked up, a soft, incredibly bittersweet smile touching his lips.
"Of course I did, Welf." Yuuya replied softly, his voice carrying the faint echo of an ancient sorrow. "A man doesn't walk away from a life like that without carrying a list of unfinished business. My primary regret was that I never managed to see Akari in her wedding dress. I didn't get the chance to see her face at least one more time before the battle. And on top of that, I also never got the chance to visit Haruka's grave one more time to tell her that I'd tried my absolute best to survive. I died leaving them behind in the dark."
"I... died in solitude. In the snow, cold and alone..."
Alfia's fingers tightened around his knuckles, her chest tightening with an ache she knew all too well—the sorrow of a warrior leaving their loved ones behind to face a cruel world alone.
"But like I said before... my story wasn't finished yet." Yuuya suddenly continued, his tone shifting into a strange, surreal register. "When I finally opened my eyes again, the darkness was entirely gone. But I wasn't in a hospital, and I wasn't in a battlefield. In fact, I didn't even possess a physical frame. I was a soul. An observer, hovering weightlessly in an endless, formless void."
Hestia blinked, her divine mind immediately perking up.
"A soul? Without passing through the gates of heaven?"
"I was completely confused." Yuuya recounted. "Just a single moment ago, I was bleeding out against a concrete wall, feeling the freezing winter air take my breath away. And then, suddenly, a completely mechanical, emotionless voice echoed directly within my consciousness. It was the System."
"The System?" Lili repeated, her eyebrows knitting together.
"Yeah. Some type of cosmic interface." Yuuya explained. "The text boxes materialized right in front of my vision, detailing my exact situation in cold, calculated voice. It told me that my previous lifespan had been prematurely terminated, and that my soul had been selected for a cosmic transition or something."
"Just then, a voice cuts through my thinking. Instantly making me aware of my surroundings. I was inside a home." Yuuya said.
Bell tilted his head, a strange sense of familiarity tugging at his mind.
"A cabin in the mountains...?"
"Yes. The voice was the high pitched, energetic voice of a child." Yuuya murmured, his gaze shifting directly onto Bell's ruby eyes. "I saw a tiny, white haired boy running across the wooden floorboards. He couldn't have been older than seven years old. He was laughing, completely full of life. And the person slowly following right behind him, keeping a watchful, protective eye on his clumsy steps... was Alfia."
Alfia just huffed from the side. She already knows this.
"Alfia and I have already discussed this seven years ago before all of you gathered here today, she was fully aware of a strange, lingering presence inside that cabin." Yuuya said, inclination in his voice prompting a quiet nod from the silver haired woman beside him. "She could always sense a stray spirit hovering near the rafters, watching as she tended the house and watched over young Bell. For a few months, I was nothing more than an invisible spectator, trying to wrap my mind around the bizarre development of my new existence."
"I instantly recognized Bell because of his hair and eyes. It was Alfia who surprised me when I first saw her." Yuuya whispered. "At first, I was completely caught off guard. Asking myself if I'm really in the world of Orario, which the system immediately confirmed. And the child that I'm looking at is indeed Bell Cranel. The main protagonist of Danmachi."
Bell's jaw remained loose, his mind completely reeling as he realized that Yuuya had been watching him before.
"But like I said, what completely blew my mind into a thousand pieces was the woman standing beside him." Yuuya said, turning his gaze fully toward the silver haired adventurer. "Alfia didn't make a single appearance in the animated television series back on Earth. But because I had completely browsed the wiki before, I knew her face, I knew her magic, and I knew her tragedy."
He let out a low, triumphant laugh.
"Right then, floating beneath the wooden rafters of that house, the truth flashed within my mind. I realized that I hadn't just been reincarnated into the standard world of Danmachi. I had been dropped into a specific, incredibly rare alternate universe. A 'what-if' chronicle spun by Oomori, the author of the story, purely as a hypothetical scenario for the readers."
Yuuya's dark eyes sparkled a bit as he looked at the living, breathing woman sitting beside him.
"A timeline where Alfia didn't choose the path of ash and blood. A timeline where she refused to side with Evilus during the Great Feud, chose to survive her illness, and spent her days in that small house, raising her nephew Bell with her own two hands. I was looking at a rewritten fate before I ever even took my first breath. But as time passes, I discovered a unsettling truth about the world we were occupying."
Hestia shifted closer, wrapping her arms tightly around her knees.
"A truth? What do you mean, Yuuya? I thought you said this was a universe where Alfia chose a peaceful life."
"On Earth, the author joked that if Alfia ever abandoned the dark path to raise Bell, she would somehow unlock this 'mother energy' that would keep her incurable disease entirely at bay." Yuuya explained. "In that theoretical script, she was supposed to live a long, fiercely protective life, eventually turning into the final boss for any suitor who dared to approach Bell when he grew up. It was supposed to be a peaceful, slightly comedic sanctuary."
Yuuya's expression completely hardened, the line of his jaw going tight.
"But this version of reality completely stripped away that luxury. There was no 'mother energy' waiting to stabilize her lungs. Her incurable disease didn't care about the peaceful script; it progressed with a aggressive acceleration. Month after month, I watched from the ceiling as her coughing fits grew longer, her breath grew shorter, and the porcelain skin of her face grew terrifyingly pale."
"Mom..." Bell whispered, his eyes darting toward Alfia, his heart clenching with an old, phantom sorrow.
"She knew her clock was ticking down to the final seconds." Yuuya murmured softly. "And because she loved you too much to ever let you watch her slowly rot away and die in a helpless, miserable sickbed, she made a choice. She left that house. She marched straight into the smoke of Orario, hoping that by playing the villain one last time, her actions would force the current generation of adventurers to shatter their limits. She wanted to build a world so incredibly secure that you, Bell, would never have to pick up a sword or taste the copper of a battlefield."
"My wandering soul followed her during that time." Yuuya continued. "I watched the entire battle play out. And as I mentioned to you all earlier, that was the exact moment I realized our Alfia was different in a lot of ways than one. She is a complete opposite of the villain she is said to be in the original lore. Throughout the entire clash, her hands remained entirely clean of innocent slaughter. She didn't execute a single civilian, nor did she murder the frontline adventurers; she merely incapacitated them."
Welf let out a slow, measured breath.
"And the city?"
"She avoided the civilian quarters." Yuuya replied. "The only infrastructure that crumbled into ruin was the masonry directly caught within the inevitable crossfire of her spells. But a body ravaged by terminal decay can only withstand so much momentum. When the Astraea Familia successfully withstood her magic Genos Angelus, the backlash tore her remaining vitality to ribbons. And to top it all off, she was hit by their counter attack."
He paused, a wave of profound solemnity washing over his sharp features.
"There were no severed limbs or outward mutilations, but the internal damage was done. Her organs were failing under the dual weight of the consumption and the internal hemorrhaging caused by the counter offensive. She stood at the precipice of the crater, offered her final words of acknowledgment to the young maidens who had bested her, and willingly stepped backward into the bottomless chasm her own magic had carved into the floorboards of the world. She accepted her demise."
"And you were just watching this?" Mikoto asked, her fingers digging anxiously into her clothes. "As a ghost?"
"At first, half of my consciousness wanted to let it happen." Yuuya confessed. "I mean, what can I do? I'm just a floating soul. I know she will die after the battle. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to just watch her perish, but I brought it upon myself. I chose to go with her and watch the battle. So I resolved myself to see it until the end."
Then, Yuuya's voice fractured slightly, a rare, raw trace of emotion breaking through his carefully constructed composure.
"But then... a glitch occurred. Perhaps, a cruel joke from the universe to torment the me, who cannot do anything but watch. As Alfia began to descend into the darkness of the pit, a sudden connection snapped into place. Somehow, someway... I heard her thoughts."
The master bedroom became so entirely still that the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway sounded like artillery fire.
Yuuya looked down at his lap, intentionally keeping his gaze away from Alfia's face as he chose his next words with care. He knew her pride. He knew she would never want her innermost vulnerabilities exposed to the light of a crowded room.
"I won't detail the exact architecture of what echoed inside my head." Yuuya murmured, his tone dropping into a quiet, deeply respectful register. "But beneath the facade of the Silence, there was no grand philosophy or stoic acceptance. Let's just say... she was afraid. The thoughts that were screaming through her mind were full of fear of the dark. This version of Alfia... she was a living, breathing woman who was deeply, entirely scared of dying."
Alfia's eye wavered, a sudden, sharp tremor running through her entire frame. Her fingers, which had been locked around Yuuya's knuckles, suddenly loosened. A wave of old insecurity crashed over her soul, causing her to slowly attempt to pull her hand away from his grip.
'He saw me like that.' The dark thought whispered within her mind. 'He saw the pathetic, weeping coward hiding beneath. He saved me out of mere pity. A person throwing a coin to a miserable beggar on the side of the road because I looked like the ghosts of his past.'
Before she could even retreat an inch, Yuuya's fingers clamped down around her wrist, his grip completely unyielding as he forced her to remain beside him.
He turned his head fully, his dark eyes locking onto her heterochromatic gaze with a fierce, sharp intensity that instantly silenced the doubts raging in her chest.
"Don't you dare think for a single fraction of a second that I stepped into that pit out of pity, Alfia. We've already talked about this seven years ago." Yuuya said, his voice dropping into an uncharacteristically stern. "And don't look at me like I saw you as some kind of substitute. Yes, the sight of someone terrified of death broke my restraint. Yes, your face carried a striking resemblance to Akari, and the image of a dying woman dragged my mind straight back to Haruka's quiet, sterile deathbed on Earth. But the decision to save you wasn't about them. It was entirely about you."
He leaned in slightly, his voice softening into a genuine, profound declaration.
"I didn't save a ghost, and I didn't save a concept from a book. I looked at Alfia—the stubborn, brilliant, and fiercely protective woman who had spent months sacrificing her own health just to take care of her Bell—and I decided that the universe was entirely wrong for demanding your ash. I wanted you to live. Just you. Plain and simple."
Alfia stared at him, her breath hitching as the sincerity in his eyes completely demolished her defenses. Slowly, the tension drained from her shoulder, and her fingers crept back into the warmth of his palm, locking together once more.
"So, my restraint completely collapsed." Yuuya said, turning back to the rest of the room. "I stopped being an observer. I dived after her and demanded the system to manifest my body, right there inside the chasm."
Lili's jaw dropped.
"You forced an unknown entity—system—to build you a body from nothing?"
"On my defense, it didn't say I cannot." Yuuya chuckled dryly. "It just asks if I'm sure, that there would be consequences, a penalty."
Bell leaned forward, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress.
"A penalty? What kind of penalty? What did it take from you?"
"That's the catch, Bell—it never specified." Yuuya replied. "It just says that there would be one, but it never says the nature of it."
"But as the flames of the lower floors approaches, I just tell it that I don't care about the cost, just put it in my tab. After that, I finally got my body back."
Yuuya paused for a second as he remembered something important.
"Oh and also, do me a favor, the things I'm telling you guys right now? Absolutely nobody in Orario should know." Yuuya said, his eyes scanning the gripped expressions of Hestia and the rest of his Familia. "Until this exact moment, it was a secret shared exclusively between myself and the woman sitting right next to me."
"Anyways, as we were falling straight into the abyss of that chasm, the wind howling past our ears like a chorus of executioners, the moment my newly manifested fingers wrapped around Alfia? A cold reality hit my brain. I had forced the System to give me a physical body, yes, but a body is just a vessel. I was entirely powerless. I didn't have a Falna, I didn't have any spell to protect us from the flames of the lower floor, and I didn't have the strength to withstand the impact once we reached the bottom."
Bell held his breath, his eyes darting between Yuuya and his aunt.
"So, I didn't waste another second." Yuuya continued. "I borrowed power from the system again. Something to protect us from the flames and cushion our impact. Again, it didn't tell me I can't do that, it just asks me if I'm sure, I said yes and just put it in the tab, and it gave me what I asked for."
"It's just on time too when the barrier manifested." Yuuya recounted, his fingers tightening protectively over Alfia's wrist. "The very second the barrier manifested, we arrived directly into the incineration zone—the roaring flames of the lower floors. Those were the exact same flames that the original script had designed to incinerate Alfia's flesh into nothing but history."
"The flames surrounded us entirely." Yuuya whispered, the memory reflecting in the dark depths of his eyes. "It was a wall of absolute hot, blinding heat that should have turned our bones to ash in a fraction of a heartbeat. But the barrier held. I wrapped my arms completely around her, keeping her close against my chest, and made sure not a single flame burned a strand of her hair. We cut straight through the inferno and slammed hard onto the solid, unforgiving terrain below."
Welf wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, his voice tight.
"Where exactly did you land, Captain?"
"The seventieth floor." Yuuya stated flatly.
"We survived the impact, but the Dungeon doesn't offer a welcoming committee." Yuuya said. "Before we could even clear the dust from our lungs or exchange a single syllable of conversation, the air was cut abruptly by a sound that made my hair stand on end. The darkness of the seventieth floor literally began to move. The monsters of that floor emerged from the stone walls, their eyes glowing with a hunger for fresh meat."
He turned his head slightly, looking at Alfia's calm profile.
"I glanced down at the woman in my arms. Alfia was severely weakened. Her injuries from the fight with the Astrea familia and the effects of her incurable disease is unforgiving. Her mana is also depleted, close to mind down I assume. She couldn't move a single muscle, and she didn't possess the focus to cast even a single syllable of her spell to fight back. She was completely defenseless."
"So you had to fight them off?" Mikoto asked sincerely.
"I didn't have the luxury to stand and fight an army of the seventieth floor monsters one handed," Yuuya laughed dryly. "I had no choice. I scooped her up, holding her tightly against my chest, and went right back to asking the system. I know I'm not fast enough to outrun the abominations of that floor, so I asked the system to give me something to repel the monsters. And to show me a path to a safe place."
"It does just that. Eventually, we finally managed to find a safe zone. We found a space, roughly the size of a bedroom, and rested there." Yuuya explained.
Lili leaned closer, curious of what happens next.
"And then?"
"We had our talk." Yuuya murmured, a deeply fond look returning to his features. "For a long time, we just talked. I introduced myself, we asked each other's questions, and asked things that we are curious about. We just sat there in that small room deep within Dungeon, listening to the distant roars of the monsters echoing outside our hidden room."
He let out a soft chuckle, a brilliant, teasing glint entering his dark eyes as he turned his gaze fully onto the silver haired woman beside him.
"I won't go into details of what we talked about. That's between the two of us. But if there's one thing I can share... I remember during that long conversation, Alfia was explaining her quiet life with Bell, and she brought up how she used to meticulously cook hot soup for little Bell."
Yuuya grinned thoroughly, his voice full of amusement as he leaned inward.
"The second she mentioned that, I couldn't help myself. I immediately started teasing her. I looked her dead in the eyes and told her that based on my source, the Silence of Hera was notoriously clumsy, utterly terrible at basic domestic duties, and a complete landslide when it came to cooking. Which, let's be honest, is probably still entirely true today."
Alfia's eye narrowed slightly, her posture stiffening with immense, dignified offense as she crossed her arms, her voice carrying a sharp, defensive edge.
"For your information." Alfia stated coldly, her emerald eye flashing with stubborn pride. "My soup is adequate. Bell never complained once."
Yuuya laughed softly as he gave her wrist a reassuring squeeze.
"See?" Yuuya laughed, looking around at his bewildered Familia. "That is exactly what she said as well back then. She barked at me seven years ago down in that hole when I said the exact same stuff to her face. Some things never change, even when you rewrite the entire book of fate."
Alfia just huffed in annoyance.
"Anyways, eventually, our small sanctuary was discovered." Yuuya said, his voice instantly dropping the lighthearted edge as his gaze fixed on the dark corners of the bedroom. "The monsters of the seventieth floor had found us."
"We were completely cornered in a room no larger than a standard bedroom, with absolutely no exits behind us." Yuuya looked down at his own palms, his jaw tightening.
"I have no more options left. Not that I have one in the first place."
"So you called upon the system again." Alfia murmured, her voice steady, though her eyes held the heavy weight of that memory.
"I didn't have a choice." Yuuya nodded. "I asked the system again to provide something, a barrier, that will hold back the monsters while I think of a plan. But it was nothing more than a temporary bandage on a severed artery. Every single second that passed, more beasts slammed their weight against the barrier. The barrier was cracking. I only have so much time before the barrier gives up."
"I stood there in the center of that small cave, racking my brain for anything." Yuuya continued. "Just then, the System's voice echoed again in my head. It has a suggestion."
Lili tilted her head.
"The System offered a direct alternative?"
"It presented a highly specific, desperate solution." Yuuya said. "It suggested that I can encase Alfia inside a completely indestructible, transparent crystal structure."
Welf's eyebrows shot upward.
"A crystal casing? Like a tomb?"
"Not a tomb—a preservation lock." Yuuya corrected, his dark eyes shifting directly onto Bell. "The system stated that the crystal would completely freeze her physical frame in place, halting every single biological process. Most importantly, it would entirely freeze the progression of her incurable disease. She would basically be in a state of a suspended animation."
"It was the only choice left." Yuuya murmured. "The System told me that if I encased her in the crystal, she would remain completely safe from both the monsters and her illness. Until I pay my penalty, get my own body, and return—she would remain there until I came back and free her.
"Did the system finally reveal the penalty for all of the power you borrowed?" Mikoto asked, her eyes full of deep concern.
Yuuya let out a short, hollow laugh.
"No. The house kept its ledger completely hidden until the last moment."
He paused, a dark, incredibly bitter glint entering his eyes as he looked at the stone floor.
"But the missing numbers wasn't the worst thing the System did that day. The truly unforgivable part was what the interface deliberately chose not to tell me. But I guess it was partly my fault as well."
The room fell into silence. Even Alfia turned her head slightly, her heterochromatic eyes locking onto his profile with sudden, intense curiosity. Until this moment, even she hadn't known the full mechanics behind the cosmic interface that had bound their fates.
"The way the system described the spell made me believe that Alfia would be in a deep, peaceful sleep." Yuuya whispered. "But the truth was that the crystal wouldn't put her consciousness to sleep at all. Alfia would remain entirely awake, fully aware, and completely conscious inside that transparent shell for every single second of the long, agonizing years it would take for me to return. It was a sentence to a solitary, unmoving purgatory in the dark, and neither of us had any idea."
"But back then, standing in that room with our time running out, it was the only choice." Yuuya said, bringing his gaze back up to meet the worried faces of his Familia. "All I knew was that the barrier was splintering into fragments, the monsters were roaring at our threshold, and if we didn't do anything, we would be killed."
He turned his body fully toward the Alfia sitting beside him on the master bed. He reached out, his hand moving with a slow, deliberate grace until his palm rested perfectly against hers, their fingers intertwining with familiarity.
"I walked across the small room." Yuuya murmured, his dark eyes locked entirely onto Alfia's gaze, completely ignoring the rest of the crowded bedroom. "I explained the spell to her. I told her about the crystal. I told her that I would have to leave her in the dark for years, but I gave her my promise that I would return."
His voice dropped into a quiet, incredibly intense register, replicating the exact tone of the question he had asked seven years ago in the deep of the earth.
"I looked her in the eyes and asked her a single question. I asked her if she trusts me."
"The moment she gave me her consent, I didn't waste a single heartbeat?" Yuuya said, his voice lowering as the memory fully took shape in his mind. "I casted the spell. I watched as the crystal locked into place, forming a transparent, indestructible crystal prism that enveloped her entirely, freezing her in time."
He closed his eyes, a phantom exhaustion settling over his features.
"Once the spell is done, it's time for me to pay my penalty. Almost instantly, my body became translucent. Not long after, I phased out of existence and returned to my soul form. The next thing I knew darkness swallowed my consciousness whole. I mentioned before that it was partly my fault why Alfia remained awake, right?"
Alfia and the others just kept their gaze in him, listening and waiting intently for his next words.
"First, the penalty. The system finally revealed that the price for forcing my physical body to manifest ahead of schedule, as well as the powers I borrowed, was a seven year slumber. But that wasn't the hardest part." Yuuya explained softly. "After saying that, it told me because I have borrowed so much from it, the spell on Alfia had a flaw. The part where she is supposed to remain asleep during her stasis? Denied. The flaw is that her consciousness would remain awake for the entire time. While me? The final nail in the coffin is that not only would I be gone for seven years, once I wake up, I would also have no recollection of saving Alfia."
"Seven years later, the alarm clock finally went off." Yuuya said, a wry, humorless smile returning to his face as he broke the silence of the Hearth Manor. "I woke up in some place a few kilometer away from Orario. My memory of my past life was intact, but the memory of being an observer in that cabin? The memory of me diving into that hole to save Alfia? Gone. I didn't remember the crystal, I didn't remember the pit, and I didn't remember her."
Bell's eyes widened, his voice cracking.
"You... you forgot about mom?"
"Completely." Yuuya nodded flatly. "It wasn't until a few days ago, when I turned level 6, that I finally recovered my memory about Alfia. One thing leads to another, after giving Goddess and the rest of you a heart attack for my solo descent to the 70th floor, it all brings us exactly to the present moment."
A long, heavy, and complete silence captured the master bedroom. The story had reached its conclusion, leaving the members of the Hestia Familia entirely stunned as they tried to process the story of their Yuuya's existence.
Welf shifted against the stone pillar, his brow furrowing as his mind began to calculate the strange, overlapping timelines of Yuuya's dual lives. It was a simple question, but he feels like asking it to distract the others from the silence. Welf rubbed the back of his neck, staring intensely at the young man sitting on the bed.
"Hey, Yuuya..." Welf pointed out, his voice hesitant. "Let me get the numbers straight. Back on your version of Earth... you were exactly twenty one years old when you died in that harbor, right?"
Yuuya turned his dark eyes toward the smith.
"Yes. Twenty one. That was the number on my civilian file."
Bell blinked, his eyes darting toward the silent silver haired woman sitting rigidly against the headboard. A strange realization began to dawn on his youthful face, his voice dropping into a careful, respectful tone.
"And... Mom... if I remember correctly from the old journals and the things Grandfather muttered... she was exactly twenty four years old when she left the to march into Orario."
Hestia's eyes sparkled as her mind instantly connected the dots, a bright, completely innocent expression crossing her face as she clapped her hands together to finish the mathematical deduction.
"Oh! Then that means the math is actually super simple!" Hestia chirped loudly, entirely missing the sudden, terrifying shift in the pressure of the room. "If exactly seven years have passed since that day inside the crater, Yuuya is biologically and mentally twenty one, but since his soul existed through that entire gap, he's technically twenty eight! While Alfia... well, if she was twenty four when she went into the crystal and seven years have gone by, that would make her thirty one—"
Hestia's sentence didn't finish.
The words died completely in her throat as an icy dread slammed into the bedroom, causing the goddess's divine instincts to scream in immediate, primal terror.
The air inside the room instantly dropped by twenty degrees. A heavy, dark silver aura began to slowly ripple off Alfia's shoulders. The sheer suffocating pressure of the Silence causing the wooden bed to emit a low, ominous creak. Alfia's eyes narrowed into a sharp slit of absolute, icy wrath, her lips compressing into a thin, dangerous line that was usually followed by a gospel.
Everyone in the room—except Bell and Yuuya—learned a fact that day.
There was one definitive, absolute law in the universe that could never be broken: the Silence of the Hera Familia, absolutely, under any circumstances, did and will NOT, tolerate the slightest suggestion that she was getting old.
Eventually, the terrifying pressure radiating from Alfia slowly began to recede, though her emerald and gray eyes remained fixed on Hestia with a look that promised a very quiet, very painful lesson in divine etiquette later.
Hestia scrambled and shrank back behind Bell, using her captain as a human shield while Welf nervously cleared his throat, trying to find any possible way to break the tension.
Right on cue, a loud, undeniable rumble echoed from Welf's stomach, quickly followed by a softer, embarrassed gurgle from Bell.
Yuuya blinked, breaking the heavy atmosphere as he glanced toward the window. The sun had already climbed past its peak, casting long, bright slants of afternoon light across the stone floorboards.
"Well, look at that." Yuuya said, a smooth, easy smile returning to his face. "We managed to talk right through midday. I don't know about you guys, but explaining a literal lifetime of universal secrets really works up an appetite."
"Lili was just about to say the same." The small prum remarked, pulling out a small pocket watch and clicking it shut. "It is well past lunch. Master Yuuya is still recovering from the recoil of his spell for curing Lady Alfia, and Lady Alfia's limbs are still too fatigued to navigate the stairs."
"Right! Leave the cooking to us!" Hestia cheered, practically leaping at the chance to escape the bedroom and Alfia's lingering stare. She grabbed Welf and Mikoto by their sleeves, dragging them toward the door. "Come on, Haruhime, Lili! Let's whip up a massive feast. We'll bring everything back up here so we can all eat together."
Bell lingered for a moment, offering a warm, relieved smile to his aunt and his captain before following the rest of the Familia downstairs.
The heavy wooden door clicked shut, leaving the master bedroom remarkably quiet.
Within an hour, the room was filled with the rich, savory aroma of roasted meats, fresh bread, and steaming vegetable broth.
True to their word, the Hestia Familia returned with massive wooden trays, transforming Yuuya's bedside into a makeshift dining hall. The group piled onto cushions around the bed. The meal was loud, chaotic, and full of natural warmth. Welf made terrible jokes to ease the lingering shock of Yuuya's origin story, Lili meticulously sorted the best cuts of meat for the convalescents, and Bell looked back and forth between his captain and his aunt, his eyes shining with a profound, quiet happiness.
Eventually, the afternoon faded into twilight, and the twilight deepened into a quiet, star filled night.
The rest of the Familia had scattered to their own rooms, exhausted by the sheer emotional weight of the day's revelations.
But Alfia remained.
When Hestia had gently suggested preparing a separate guest room for her, Alfia shut the proposal down with a single look. She insisted that she needed to monitor Yuuya's health through the night, a medical excuse that nobody in the house was brave enough to challenge.
The bedroom was dark now, lit only by the faint, amber glow of a lamp in and the pale moonlight streaming through the glass pane.
Yuuya lay on his back, his dark eyes staring at the ceiling, while Alfia sat perfectly still beside him, her back resting against the headboard. Her fingers were still lightly wrapped around his wrist, her thumb resting directly over his pulse.
For hours, neither of them spoke. The silence wasn't uncomfortable, but the air felt heavy with the ghosts of the stories they had unearthed.
Alfia's gaze remained fixed on the blanket, her heterochromatic eyes reflecting the dim orange light of the lamp. Her mind was a turbulent storm, rewinding every single word Yuuya had spoken about his past life.
"Yuuya..." Alfia whispered, her voice so soft it was barely a breath against the quiet of the room.
Yuuya didn't turn his head, but his fingers twitched slightly against her hand.
"Yeah?"
Alfia hesitated, her grip tightening on his wrist just enough for him to feel the slight tremble in her fingers.
"Your past life... Earth. Do you miss it? Do you miss... Akari?"
Yuuya closed his eyes, letting out a slow, quiet breath that rattled slightly in his chest. He didn't answer immediately, contemplating the question.
"I'd be a liar if I said no, Alfia." Yuuya answered honestly, his voice dropping into a flat register. "How could I not? I spent twenty one years building a life there. I had a family, friends who would have taken a bullet for me, and a girl I was ready to spend the rest of my days with. You don't just erase that because you woke up in a new world with a different set of rules. A piece of me will always belong to that place."
Alfia swallowed hard, the copper taste of anxiety rising in her throat. She looked away, staring into the dark corners of the bedroom as the deep seated insecurity she had developed in her time in the crystal claw its way back to the surface.
She was a woman who had lived her life as a weapon of destruction, a tragic figure destined to be turned to ash. Akari, from what she understood, was a force of absolute devotion—a maiden who had loved Yuuya enough to want to break him just to keep him safe.
"If..." Alfia started, her voice fracturing slightly before she caught herself, forcing her tone into a strict, deliberate calm as she asked the question she had been dreading all evening. "If you were given the chance to redo everything... if a cosmic force handed you the script and allowed you to walk back to that Friday night in May... would you choose your past life?"
The question hung in the freezing air like an unexploded spell.
Alfia braced herself, her jaw tightening as she prepared her heart for the inevitable blow.
She expected him to say yes.
Logically, anyone would choose a peaceful home, a modern realm devoid of monsters, and a waiting fiancé over a brutal, blood soaked labyrinth and a broken, diseased woman.
Yuuya remained entirely motionless. The silence stretched for five seconds, then ten, until it felt like the very walls of the Manor were holding their breath.
"No." Yuuya finally said.
Alfia's eyes widened slightly, her gaze snapping back to his profile.
"There's no use dwelling in the past." Yuuya continued softly, turning his head to look directly into her heterochromatic eyes. "When I first recovered my memories a few days back... it actually took me an entire day just to compose myself. I spent hours in total denial, sitting in the dark because my entire world had just been turned upside down."
He let out a short, humorless chuckle, his eyes darkening with the memory of that mental breakdown.
"You have to understand, Alfia. For the entire time that I'm here—for four months—that I've been exploring Orario, my north star—the single motivation driving me to get strong, to clear the floors, to break every limit—was the subconscious belief that if I reached the bottom of this world, if I reach a certain level, I might find a way to go back. I wanted to return to Earth. I wanted to find Akari. When I first arrived on Orario, I had asked the System if Earth's timeline moved at the same pace as this world, and it told me yes. That single answer gave me a horrific amount of hope."
Yuuya's hand shifted, turning within her grip so that he was now holding her fingers, his touch steady and grounding.
"So when I recovered my memory of you and me, that seven years had already passed... it left me completely shattered. Seven years, Alfia. On Earth, that means the war is long over. It means my parents have grieved a dead son for nearly a decade. It means Akari has had to move on, to bury the memory of her fiancé, and live a life without me. The world I wanted to return to doesn't exist anymore. The timeline moved on, and it left me behind."
He squeezed her hand, his dark eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that made her breath hitch.
"But eventually, reason won. The shock faded, and I looked at the reality right in front of me. I remembered the chasm. I remembered the seventieth floor. And most importantly, I remembered the promise I made to a silver haired woman seven years ago. I promised her I would return. I promised I would save her. So I chose to fulfill that promise. I chose you."
Alfia's chest tightened, a fierce, overwhelming wave of emotion rushing through her veins. Yet, the logical, cynical part of her mind—the part that had spent a good amount of time in that seven years of stasis making "what if's" and overthinking to the point her mind almost collapsed—refused to let go of the terror.
"But Yuuya, the universe is twisted. What if..." Alfia whispered, her emerald eye flashing with a desperate, overthinking panic. "What if you reach the deepest floor of the Dungeon? What if you become strong enough to challenge the gods themselves, and the universe presents you with an explicit opportunity? A miracle that can reverse time, rewrite the tragedy, and place you back in that living room before the knock at the door ever happened?"
Yuuya stared at her for a long moment, a look of genuine surprise crossing his features. Then, slowly, the heavy solemnity vanished from his face, replaced by a brilliant, teasing smirk that instantly cut through her panic.
"Well, well." Yuuya murmured, his voice full of light amusement as he propped himself up and leaned slightly closer to her. "The infamous Silence of the Hera Familia... I never took you for the type who needed constant reassurance, Alfia. Are you really that desperate to keep me around?"
Alfia's face instantly flushed with a faint, beautiful trace of pink. She stiffened her posture, crossing her free arm over her chest as she gave an offended huff.
"Are you mocking me, brat? Do not be ridiculous. I am simply evaluating the logical details of your commitment."
"Right, right. Details." Yuuya laughed softly, his tone instantly shifting back into a deep, unyielding warmth that completely demolished her defenses. "Then let me make the details absolutely clear."
He reached up with his free hand, gently placing his palm against the side of her face, his thumb lightly brushing across the pale skin just beneath her gray eye.
"The moment I decided to dive into that bottomless pit again to come back for you, I stopped living for the past. I didn't jump down there to save a concept or a replacement. I jumped because I wanted you to live. I wanted the stubborn, brilliant woman who raised Bell to have a future."
Yuuya's expression softened even further while still filled with certainty and conviction that tells he isn't lying. He is committed to making her erase any of her remaining doubts.
"If the world offers me a miracle at the bottom of the labyrinth, I'm not using it to turn back the clock. I'm using it to build tomorrow. I choose to live for today, and I choose to live for the future. I repeat my words again, Alfia: I chose you. I choose the path where you are right here beside me, breathing, alive, and where you never have to die afraid of the dark ever again. Plain and simple."
Alfia stared at him, her lips parting slightly as the final, lingering shadows of her insecurity completely melted away under the heat of his declaration.
Slowly, her rigid posture softened. She leaned her face into the warmth of his palm, her heterochromatic eyes closing as she let out a long, peaceful breath.
For the first time in her entire existence, the Silence felt completely secure.
Suddenly, the realization of her own vulnerability hit Alfia like a sudden splash of freezing water.
As soon as she felt the warm, solid contours of Yuuya's palm against her cheek, and realized she was actively leaning into his touch, her eyes snapped wide.
A sharp crimson flush spread across her neck. Pulling her face back with an abrupt, defensive jerk, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest and let out a sharp, aristocratic huff.
"Hmph."
Turning her head away completely so he wouldn't be able to see the lingering color on her cheeks, she fixed her gaze on the dark window frame.
"Sleep." Alfia commanded, her voice regaining a bit of its icy, authoritative edge, though it lacked any real venom. "The spell you utilized to purge my disease... the recoil from that spell has completely left your body exhausted. You need to rest, not waste your breath whispering absurdities to me."
Yuuya didn't pull his hand back immediately. Instead, he let his arm drop lazily back onto the mattress as he sank back down the bed, a soft, incredibly amused laugh vibrating deep in his throat. Even with his body completely drained and his muscles aching from the backlash of rewriting her health, his spirit remained entirely intact.
"Tsundere." Yuuya murmured, his eyelids fluttering with a heavy, profound exhaustion.
Alfia's ears twitched. She immediately turned her head back around, her left gray eye and right green eye narrowing into dangerous, sharp slits as she glared down at his half closed profile.
"I am not a 'tsundere' you infuriating brat." Alfia replied coldly, pronouncing the alien term with precision and immense dignity. "I am Alfia of the Hera Familia. I do not possess whatever ridiculous, theatrical personality traits your strange world invented to categorize emotional weakness, mortal."
"Yeah, yeah... sure, sure." Yuuya mumbled, a weak, teasing smile playing on his lips as his consciousness finally began to drift away into the dark.
He didn't have the energy to sustain the banter anymore. His body is still too exhausted from the recoil, combined with the exhaustion of recounting his life, was pulling him under like a lead weight. But right before the darkness claimed him completely, his dark eyes opened just a fraction of an inch, locking onto her with a quiet, stubborn insistence.
"When you sleep... make sure you actually lay down completely." Yuuya whispered, his voice dropping into a low, raspy tone. "Don't you dare spend the entire night with your back propped up against that wooden headboard. If I wake up tomorrow morning and find out that you stayed in that uncomfortable position just to watch my pulse, I am going to nag you from dawn until dusk. I'll make Welf's loudest smithing hammers sound like a lullaby compared to me. Understand?"
Alfia didn't answer, merely offering him a quiet, unreadable stare.
"I'm serious, Alfia... lay down." Yuuya muttered one last time.
With that final, caring threat hanging in the air, his breathing suddenly leveled out. His fingers relaxed against the white sheets, his jaw softening as his mind completely surrendered to a deep, healing slumber.
The master bedroom fell back into silence.
Alfia remained perfectly still for several minutes, her heterochromatic eyes fixed entirely on Yuuya's sleeping face. The steady rise and fall of his chest was the only movement in the dim room.
Slowly, the strict, defensive barrier she always maintained around her expressions completely disintegrated.
A faint, incredibly fragile trace of a smile touched her lips, so subtle it would have been completely invisible to anyone else.
Inside her chest, a profound, overwhelming wave of happiness was washing over her soul.
She would never admit it aloud—she would barely even acknowledge it to her own reflection—but the long, agonizing years she had spent trapped inside that transparent crystal prism on the seventieth floor had left a horrific, invisible scar on her psyche. During that endless stretch of isolation, a deeply rooted fear had formed within her instincts: the fear of abandonment.
She had spent thousands of nights terrified that the boy who had dropped from the heavens to save her would eventually wake up, realize the absurd cost of his intervention, and simply choose to walk away.
Alfia was terrified that once he realizes he values his past life, his family, and the maiden named Akari who held the ring of his commitment more, he would look at a broken, cursed weapon like Alfia and realize she wasn't worth the burden. It had become a silent, terrifying instinct that clawed at her heart every time he looked away. A dark, whispering anxiety had threatened to tear her apart.
But tonight, he had shattered that fear entirely.
Hearing him say the words 'I chose you—knowing that he had explicitly looked at a theoretical miracle to rewrite his own past and deliberately thrown it away just to build a tomorrow with her—had completely calmed her wary soul. He wasn't going to leave her behind. Even if the universe handed him a ticket back to his past, he had chosen to stay in the dark of Orario, simply to ensure she didn't have to face the dark alone.
Remembering his strict, lingering threat about the headboard, Alfia let out a quiet, defeated sigh.
Moving with care so she wouldn't disturb his resting frame, she slowly slid her body down the pillows, shifting until her head was resting flat against the mattress beside him. Her legs were still mostly unresponsive, but she managed to pull the thick blanket up over both of their shoulders, sealing out the chill of the midnight air.
Turning onto her side to face him, she looked at his closed eyes.
After a long moment of hesitation, Alfia reached out beneath the blanket. Her pale, slender fingers moved slowly across the sheets until they found his right hand.
Instead of a tight, desperate grip, she simply rested her palm against his, lightly weaving her fingers between his knuckles in a quiet, protective lock.
Leaning her head slightly forward until her forehead was almost touching his shoulder, she allowed her eyelids to slowly close.
Surrounded by his warmth and the steady rhythm of his breathing, the Silence of the Hera Familia finally let go of her vigil, drifting off into the truly peaceful sleep.
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