Chapter 365 - 365: Information and Explanation

Rubedo stared at the glowing green digits projected across his obsidian console. The timeline data refused to align with basic logic. He ran the calculation three times. He attended the Miami reunion in 2024.

If Reviel Vane was in her early forties in 2077, she was born in the mid-2030s. That meant she was conceived over a decade after the Royal Mage ripped his soul into this server.

He dragged his armored fingers across the smooth crystal interface. The developers treated human lives as disposable batteries. Fabricating a fake lineage to keep a trapped consciousness anchored to the physical world fit their twisted methodology perfectly.

They could have easily implanted false memories into a random orphan and named her Reviel.

However, another possibility gnawed at his thoughts. The studio might have manipulated his actual life on Earth long before the summoning. They could have erased his memory of a wife and a child to ensure he entered the void without any mental tethers.

Connor shifted his weight on the cold floor of the sanctuary. The teenager kept his hands visible and watched the shifting shadows obscure Rubedo's face. Leo and Ophelia stood rigidly beside him.

Rubedo dismissed the timeline projection with a flick of his wrist. He turned his violet eyes toward the seven high school students.

"The architects of this server are playing a complex game with my past," Rubedo stated. His voice vibrated against the floating glass walls of the chamber. "They either fabricated a daughter to secure their financial cover-up, or they mutilated my memories before dropping me into this cage. I require the truth, and I cannot extract it from inside this dimension."

Connor swallowed dryly. "We can keep digging into the corporate shell companies. We just need access to the real world to do it."

"You will have it," Rubedo replied.

He tapped a sequence of keys on his terminal. A golden holographic parchment materialized in the air between them. The document glowed with the binding authority of the game engine.

"I am officially offering you a vassalage contract," Rubedo declared. "You will surrender your sovereignty over your remaining territories, but you will retain full administrative freedom over your avatars. I will spare your surviving mortal populations. In exchange, you become my operatives on Earth."

Lucy stared at the floating contract. "You are just letting us go back? What if you exterminate our remaining population while we are away?"

"I am enlisting you," Rubedo corrected her. "You exist in the physical world. You possess the mobility to track down Harrison Sterling and the rest of the Aether-Conglomerate board. You will uncover the true origin of my supposed family. Whenever you log into this server, you will report your findings directly to me."

"And if I wanted to kill your remaining followers, I would have done that long ago when you were busy with your exams and utterly useless to me. For you, it might sound ridiculous, but I see every living being in this game as a real being," Rubedo added.

Ignisar stepped forward and read the glowing text. The terms guaranteed their digital survival. It offered a perfect shield against the automated dungeon outbreaks currently ravaging the Fourth Continent.

Connor reached out and pressed his hand against the golden parchment. The digital signature locked into place. The other six teenagers followed his lead, placing their palms on the glowing contract. The document dissolved into a shower of golden sparks to bind them to the Red Spiral.

"The pact is sealed," Rubedo said. "You have your lives. Go back to your exams and your corporate galas. Find out who built this prison."

He severed the forced summons protocol. The seven teenagers dissolved into pillars of white light and vanished from the orbital sanctuary, logging back out into the physical world.

Rubedo exhaled a long breath and sank back into his throne. He opened his secondary monitors to check on the progress of his empire.

He pulled up the visual feed for the Morval foundries. The temporal acceleration had done its job. The twenty-four Earthling Heralds shuffled across the concrete floor as broken, aged husks. Marcus dragged a push-broom across the grating. His gray hair hung in greasy strands over his hollowed cheeks. His hands resembled mangled claws.

A tiny obsidian-claw troglodyte scurried out from behind a sorting track. The creature poked Marcus in the ankle with a sharpened stick. Marcus yelped and hobbled backward, dropping his broom. Elena sat nearby, gnawing on a piece of stale bread with missing teeth. She offered zero help to her former leader.

A cruel smile stretched across Rubedo's face. The sight of his former bullies reduced to terrified, geriatric janitors provided a highly satisfying form of entertainment. They rightfully deserved every single blister and fractured bone. He kept the feed running in the corner of his screen just to watch them suffer minor indignities.

He shifted his primary focus to the Gildreath palace courtyard.

The biological maturation rate of a void deity defied all systemic logic. Eon now resembled a ten-year-old boy. His ash-silver hair fell around his shoulders. He wore a scaled tunic forged from harvested monster hides.

Eon stood in the center of the ruined marble tiles. He held his dense tungsten teething ring in one hand. The boy tossed the alloy toy into the air. A spatial rift tore open above his head to swallow the ring. Eon giggled, pointing a glowing finger at a distant sandstone pillar. A second portal ripped open near the ceiling. The tungsten ring shot out of the void like a cannonball, shattering the top half of the pillar into dust.

Krug walked into the courtyard and dodged the falling debris. The Apostle crossed his arms and observed the destruction with a proud nod.

Rubedo watched the ten-year-old anomaly prepare another spatial strike. The child possessed the destructive capability of an entire siege engine. The game engine had thrown an apocalypse at the Seventeenth Continent, and Rubedo had turned it into a weapon.

"Grow strong, Eon," Rubedo whispered to the monitor. "We have a world to burn."