"Gaa-ah!"
My eyes fluttered open as I woke up to the unfamiliar sight of a white-marbled ceiling above me.
Inhaling deeply, a ragged gasp escaped my lips, and my chest heaved up and down with the sudden rush of awareness.
Frantically, my pupils darted around as I tried to assess my surroundings. I seemed to be in a hospital room on a sickbed.
Wires and nodes clung to my arms, chest, and the sides of my forehead, monitoring my vital signs and injecting supplements.
The memories of what happened earlier flooded into my mind, almost to the point of overwhelming me.
The Hydra, that enigmatic woman, and the dream that I saw after I agreed to take her up on her offer and help her.
Was that dream… a fragment of my own past locked somewhere deep in my mind? The unsettling realization gnawed at me.
Did I truly do all that? Did I kill them? How could I… How could I kill them in cold blood like that?
As that question reverberated through my thoughts, I felt my chest tightening. In the next moment, a sharp wrenching pain erupted somewhere around my heart.
Beep, Beep, Beep, Beeeep, Beeeeep—!!!
The machine's insistent beeping intensified with the rapid rise of my heart rate.
As the pain in my chest started growing, becoming almost unbearable, I shook my head and diverted my focus to taking deep breaths.
Finally, after a few long breaths, the welling pain in my chest subsided and my thoughts cleared up.
"Calm down," I said to myself, my voice raspy and hoarse as a result of my parched throat. It felt as if I hadn't had even a single drop of water for days. "Think rationally."
That's right. I prided myself on being a smart, calculative thinker who dissected situations with a calm, logical mindset.
So that's what I needed to do right now. Think calmly and logically. With each deep inhale and soft exhale, I cooled my head down.
"That's right," I reassured myself. "I will analyze everything I know systematically, one piece at a time."
First, let's think about the Dragon God. By now, I know that he's some kind of an evil, malevolent entity somewhere out there in the endless expanse of the universe.
From what I know, the Dragon God seemed to have some kind of vendetta against our world… or maybe against some people in our world.
In the dream that I saw, I killed Nero, Anastasia… and Amelia. I don't know why I did that. But while killing them, I said that I was doing it to save the world.
But how would killing them equate to saving the world? Wait, among the three of them, two were the chosen champions of the Heavens.
I still don't know what being chosen by the Cosmic Womb entails, but I know enough to deduce that the prophesied heroes are fated to save the world.
That snake woman said that Akashic Records are the physical manifestation of the universe. It is sort of a failsafe system that protects and runs the universe in the place of gods.
It chooses its champions who are destined to neutralize the threat that endangers the existence of one or several universes.
But who could be that? I mean, surely, the Vampire Lord is strong but not as strong as to threaten the entire plane of existence.
No, Kiara said that the threat this time is the Dragon God… Samael Gracefell.
Maybe… and just maybe… I killed them first so the Dragon God would not destroy our world in an attempt to vanquish them.
After all, as long as they were alive, our world would never have surrendered in front of the Dragon God.
…And how could one hope to live after defying the will of a God?
The heroes would've fought till their last breath, leading to the destruction of the world.
To prevent that inevitable outcome, I stepped up and killed the heroes, allowing the villain to win and indirectly sparing the lives of countless innocent people.
"Pathetic," I scoffed, an inexplicable feeling stirring up in my heart. What was I feeling? Rage? Sorrow? Regret? No… this was pure, unadulterated self-hate.
"Killing your own people… that's the best outcome you could reach?" I sneered at my own past self. "How pathetic."
However, there are still two things that I couldn't really understand.
First, why was Amelia present there? She was not supposed to be one of the three chosen heroes.
Could it be possible that she was among the chosen ones in the past, but then as the timelines progressed, Lucas was put up to the task in her stead?
No, that's not possible. These timelines should be identical to one another. After all, aside from a certain few, no one should even know that we all are trapped in some sort of a giant Groundhog Day.
What I basically mean to say is, that the prophecies, which describe Lucas as one of the three heroes, should be the same throughout all the timelines.
So no matter what timeline it is, only Lucas was supposed to be the third chosen hero.
"Wait, maybe since Lucas never stepped up to his role as a hero, the universe chose someone else in his place instead. Maybe it chose Amelia."
That's… Wow, that's actually possible. n(-1n
But then we come to the second point. Why didn't it all end? Why are these timelines still going on?
If I killed the heroes, allowing the Dragon God to win by default, then why are we all still in this loop?
Wait, is it even a loop? Or are the timelines just resetting? But why are they resetting?!
Did the universe not like that ending? No, it couldn't be that. Because if the Dragon God won, then the entire existence should be under his rule.
It must be something else. Perhaps… it didn't work out. In the end, something happened and we were all killed anyway.
"That's… even more pathetic."
So… my killing them didn't even matter in the end? Huh.
Shaking my head, I smacked both my hands on my cheeks and pulled me out of my daze. This wasn't the time to dwell on such thoughts.
However, before I could continue thinking any further, the door to the room's door swung open.
