Chapter 136: The Wounded Paradise [1]

The moment Freya stepped out of the portal, she felt that the ambient mana, or rather the quantimanas, were far more plentiful here than anywhere else.

It wasn’t really a surprise, because Nymeria teemed with beings that served as anchors for the quantimanas, from high-rank monsters like Upyr to divine beasts like Ymir, and even Kaguya’s own brothers and sisters, all of them holding a colossal favorability. It was surely the place most saturated with quantimanas in this entire world, with one possible exception: the territory of the gods, which Aria had once told her about, and which she suspected was heavier still.

She quickly set that thought aside, however, because when she opened her eyes on this new day, she found that someone was already waiting for her.

Before her stood a young woman, in appearance at least, much smaller than Kaguya, with grey hair tied into two pigtails, grey eyes and an outfit just as grey, without a single horn, her only dragon trait a slender tail covered in grey scales that swayed gently behind her.

She stood very straight, hands clasped behind her back, watching Freya step out of the portal with a smile on her lips.

This time, however, Freya had learned from her mistakes, and from what had nearly driven her to madness in the subspace before the girls pulled her out of it, so that she knew exactly what she must not do and never lowered her eyes any further than necessary, well aware of what was on those hands.

"I wasn’t expecting one of your visits, Freya."

Freya didn’t waste time on pleasantries and simply started walking through the palace, while the young woman fell into step at her right, hands still clasped behind her back.

"Did Kaguya tell you what happened?"

"Of course. And congratulations on your Ascension, by the way. From what I can see, it’s no small one."

"Save your sweet talk for someone else, Thalassa."

Thalassa’s smile vanished at once, giving way to an expression of absolute coldness.

"...Tch. That’s no fun. You should play along a little more."

"Do you even realize how deranged you are?"

"Hahahahaha!"

Thalassa burst into a shrill, disjointed laugh that bounced off the walls, while the two of them kept crossing the palace toward the exit, passing from one room to the next, each as lavishly decorated as the last.

"You’re one to talk, you, the most deranged of us all."

Freya stopped dead and turned her head toward her.

"Me, deranged? Do you hear yourself? Just how far is the burden of Nymeria pushing your mind toward madness?"

"And you, how far is a simple sin pushing yours?"

Freya raised an eyebrow, genuinely lost, because even if she didn’t like avarice and was maybe, fine, a tiny bit greedy, she really couldn’t see where the madness was in any of that, since it was perfectly normal, wasn’t it?

"...Well, whatever."

And she started walking again through this endless palace, the one Myrphes and Ogami had built in their lifetime.

"So, where is she now?"

"Probably with my brother and sister, on their little islands, enjoying the sun."

Thalassa let out a long, theatrical sigh and raised her hands in front of her, waving them in every direction as she spoke.

"Meanwhile, who has to manage everything in Nymeria? Me, of course. Playing regent, controlling the territories, keeping the monsters in line, finding solutions to every problem our dead brothers and sisters left behind, repairing their impact on Nymeria, and all the rest... Can you imagine, Freya, the weight I carry?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Freya saw her hands dancing in the air, covered in white rings on every finger all the way to the last knuckle, and she immediately looked away.

"It’s not as if you were pretending to help Kaguya, still too young and carefree to run Nymeria, just because the idea of ruling over others makes you shiver with pleasure... No, of course not. You, Thalassa, in the infinite kindness of your heart, carry all these so-called burdens against your will."

Thalassa burst out laughing once more.

Meanwhile, Freya thought about this woman who, with that little grey tail as her one dragon trait, had joined the demigods’ camp during the war, surely slandering Kaguya and her side along the way, since the other camp held the numerical advantage at the time. Then she had seen Aria arrive, that monster of power, and immediately seen in it the chance to overturn everything and take the head of Nymeria.

Because if the demigods and Aten had won that fratricidal war of succession, it would without a doubt have been Aten who seized power, and Thalassa, weaker, could only have watched from below, whereas now her remaining brothers and sisters, much like Kaguya, couldn’t care less about power.

Officially, then, Kaguya was the regent of Nymeria, but unofficially, in the shadows and even in broad daylight if you looked closely, Thalassa was the true regent, the one who ran and controlled everything under the guise of helping a sister too immature to do it herself.

Freya was pulled from her thoughts when Thalassa finally stopped laughing, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye with a fingertip before going on.

"You see, that’s why I love spending time with you so much, Freya. Even if you’re less playful and gloomier than usual, deep down you’re still the same."

"Mhmm..." Freya simply replied, just as they finally stepped outside.

Thalassa didn’t waste any more time, and her whole body began to change, lengthening and stretching again and again until an immense grey dragon, several hundred meters long, unfurled in front of the palace.

It was a serpentine dragon, like those in old Eastern paintings, wingless, its sinuous body covered in matte grey scales rippling gently through the air, while two long whiskers floated on either side of its maw and a grey mane ran the whole length of its spine down to its tail.

Freya climbed onto its back without a word, and the dragon rose above Nymeria.

From up there she could see everything, and while Nymeria’s beauty was still there, the biomes had changed, along with a host of little things. The water, for instance, was far less present, even though Thalassa held the law of water and nature, because yes, this dragon queen controlled the laws of water and nature despite that grey color that made her look dull, almost lifeless.

Anyway, that wasn’t the point.

The water had dropped by half compared to what she had been told and to what she had seen through the streaming butterfly in the Tower of Artalia, so that the vegetation had dried out in places, while elsewhere the traces of a gigantic battle, or of several, could still be made out. That explained why the divine beasts were fighting over territories, since some had been destroyed and they naturally had to claim others.

And yet Nymeria remained wild, in places almost untouched, with entire forests stretching out without a single path, mountains no road ever crossed and plains where great shapes moved slowly, far from everything, caring about no one.

Then, all at once, an unpleasant feeling knotted her stomach, because she had made the mistake of looking down for too long, and vertigo seized her so brutally that even as she snapped her eyes back up, she could feel her head spinning.

"Damn vertigo!"

"Did you say something?" the dragon asked, its voice resonating all around her.

"No... no... nothing... Just focus on the road, please."

And so the dragon continued on its way through a Nymeria as beautiful as ever, but far less idyllic than it once was.

The journey lasted only a few minutes, so fast did the dragon streak across Nymeria, and the whole time it kept part of its long body raised against the wind to shield Freya from it, until at last they reached the place Thalassa had called "the island where you could enjoy the sun."

Freya saw it from afar first: a blinding glow resting on the horizon, round and white at its core, radiating above the sea and seeming to make the air quiver all around it, like a second sun come down to settle there. But above all she felt it, because just like on the ninth floor, her body began to heat up as they drew closer, the air grew so heavy it was almost unbreathable, and despite herself, sweat began to bead on her skin.

The dragon then began its descent toward a simple little wooden house standing at the edge of the shore, which looked far more like a cabin than a house.

Freya climbed down from the dragon and set foot on the cabin’s wooden terrace, but not once did her gaze leave the horizon, nor the place all that heat was coming from.

That was where one of the thirteen parts of Aten’s body lay, the body Aria, with all her Machiavellian cunning, had cut into pieces before hiding them in every corner of Nymeria. And that was where his heart was, which, despite that body sliced into thirteen and scattered, still tried again and again to break free and regain its liberty, burning ceaselessly with a pure heat, far too strong, so much so that Freya, with her rank-B body, couldn’t get within a few kilometers of it.

"And to think this man is sealed, weakened and cut into pieces... and he can still make an entire region unbreathable, and kill just through the presence of his heart."

She pulled out one of the chairs around the wooden table on the terrace and let herself drop into it, never taking her eyes off that distant glow.

She could only imagine what that battle must have been like, and even then she knew that however hard she tried, she would never truly grasp how violent and colossal the clash between Aria, Kaguya and Aten must have been, nor how powerful those three monsters were.

She kept staring at that sun for a long time, and her eyes began to turn even more golden, a gold far more dazzling than the sun itself.

"So that’s what I’m aiming for."