Chapter 60: Confrontation with the past, part 1

"...Kaito."

In that exact moment, the world of Aethelgard stopped spinning.

For the first time since his reincarnation, the untouchable CEO was completely, utterly exposed.

Lucy’s voice echoed into Kaito’s ears, painfully. He felt a shiver running down his spine.

The silence that descended upon the VIP suite of the (alternate) Sleeping Basilisk Inn was not a natural occurrence.

It was a suffocating, absolute vacuum that swallowed every ambient noise.

The muffled sounds of the busy capital streets below vanished. The loud, rhythmic snoring of Valeria in the adjacent bedroom ceased to exist.

Even the magical, ambient hum of the mana-neon lights illuminating the room flatlined.

It was as if the universe itself had hit the pause button.

From Kaito’s trembling hand, a single kernel of goblin popcorn slipped through his fingers and fell in slow motion, hitting the plush carpet with a soft, pathetic thud that somehow echoed like a cannon shot in his own mind.

Up in the corner of his vision, the ever-present, omniscient LitRPG System began to glitch. The translucent blue windows wavered, flashing with frantic, contradictory error codes.

[WARNING: NARRATIVE INTEGRITY COMPROMISED]

[ERROR: HOSTILE EMOTIONAL OVERRIDE DETECTED]

[DISCONNECTING HIGHER REALMS CHAT...]

[Admin note: THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A PARODY, NOT A DRAMA! WE’RE RECEIVING RANDOM BAD RATINGS BECAUSE OF THIS!]

Even the Gods and VIP viewers of the Higher Realms, usually so loud, obnoxious, and eager for entertainment, were suddenly silenced.

The chat box completely dissolved. They didn't want to spam memes or comment on the cost-to-benefit ratio anymore.

They realized, perhaps for the first time, that they were no longer watching a fantasy LitRPG parody. They were witnessing the raw, bleeding autopsy of two broken human beings.

Kaito sat frozen in his ergonomic chair as the heavy, terrifying aura of the Supreme Necromancer—the dark, suffocating pressure of CEO Mordecai—had completely evaporated.

The poor electrician couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t summon anyone, and his telepathy skill was sealed for the moment due to “scheduled maintenance”

The only thing he could do was just staring at the girl in the white cloak, with his jaw slightly slack, and his purple cursed eye wide and erratic.

For the first time since he had opened his eyes in this miserable, trope-filled world, Kaito looked genuinely, profoundly terrified.

"Saintess... Lucy...?" Kaito whispered. His voice was hoarse, entirely stripped of its smooth, corporate baritone. It cracked painfully, sounding exactly like a twenty-something electrician who had just worked a double shift. "What... what are you doing here?"

Moreover, he wasn’t Kaitoyama. He was Mordecai.

He didn't know what else to say. His brain, usually capable of processing complex tax evasions, hostile takeovers, and multi-layered manipulation tactics in fractions of a second, had completely blue-screened.

Lucy didn't answer immediately. She just took another step forward, moving incredibly slowly, as if approaching a wounded, dangerous animal.

Her bare feet sank into the carpet. She pushed the heavy white hood of her cloak entirely off her head, letting her messy, golden hair tumble over her shoulders.

Her face was a portrait of absolute devastation. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and swollen from crying, and her pale skin tracked with fresh, glistening tears.

"I couldn't do it anymore," Lucy breathed, her voice trembling violently. "I couldn't sit in that Cathedral and pretend that everything was fine. I couldn't bear watching the man who held me in the guild hall playing the part of the redeemed adventurer, knowing... knowing that I'm the reason you have to wear that mask."

Kaito’s hands gripped the armrests of his chair since he had realized that he was in complete danger.

He tried to summon his administrative detachment. He tried to think of her as an asset, as an enemy NPC, as a liability. But the firewall was broken.

Every time he looked at her, he didn't see the Immaculate Saintess. He saw the girl who used to fall asleep on his shoulder while they watched cheap movies on a laptop with a cracked screen.

"You should go back to the chosen one Saintess," Kaito managed to say, his voice shaking, trying to inject some venom into his words to push her away. "You’re off script, and I’m not the person you’re looking for. You're ruining the broadcast."

"There is no broadcast!" Lucy cried out, her voice cracking as fresh tears spilled over her cheeks. She took another step, closing the distance until she was standing just a few feet away from his desk. "Right now, there is only us, Kaito. Just you and me. And you have to listen to me. Please. You have to let me explain.”

Kaito didn't speak. He couldn't. His throat felt like it was full with broken glass.

Lucy wiped her eyes with the back of her trembling hand, taking a deep, shuddering breath.

She had to rip the bandage off and expose the ugliest, most shameful parts of herself if she ever wanted him to understand.

"It wasn't what you thought," Lucy began, her voice dropping into a desperate, pleading register. "When you found us... what you saw that day... it wasn't the whole truth."

Kaito’s pupils shrank. The memory of that day—the heavy rain, the iron grip on his tool bag, the sight of her smiling, clinging to the arm of that rich, arrogant bastard—flashed behind his eyes with agonizing clarity.

His hands balled into tight fists, his knuckles turning pure white.

Without realizing, he unconsciously confirmed his identity.

"I know how it looked," Lucy choked out, seeing the shift in his eyes. "But Kaito, you have to understand where I was. You were working fourteen hours a day. You left before the sun came up, and you came back when it was already pitch black outside. I... I admired you so much. I loved you for it. But I was so incredibly lonely. You have no idea of how many times I cried when you weren’t coming home.”

Kaito’s breath hitched. He wanted to scream that he did it for her, that he broke his back every single day so she wouldn't have to starve, he wanted to tell her about the ring, but the words died in his throat. He just listened.

"I started hanging out with Nick a few weeks before... before everything happened," Lucy confessed, her eyes dropping to the floor in shame. "But it wasn't a date! It was in a group. He was friends with some people from my university. We would go out for drinks, or go bowling, or just... exist without having to worry about how to pay the electric bill."

She looked back up at him, her chest heaving.

"He offered me this fake, sparkling sense of freedom. A carefreeness that I desperately wanted to share with you, but I knew I couldn't, because you were busy carrying the weight of both our lives on your shoulders."

Kaito felt a dark, cold anger beginning to coil in the pit of his stomach. It wasn't the theatrical, explosive rage of a Dark Lord. It was the quiet, devastating anger of a man realizing his sacrifices meant nothing compared to a few hours of cheap entertainment. He was clearly about to stand up and slap her for all the ‘excuses’ she was finding.

"But every time I came home," Lucy sobbed, her hands clutching the fabric of her cloak, "the guilt was eating me alive. I would walk into our apartment, see your dirty boots by the door, and I felt like a monster. That's why I started acting so clingy, Kaito. Do you remember? I sometimes would beg you not to go to work. I would cry when you put your jacket on. Or… when I wanted multiple rounds during intimacy.”

Kaito remembered. He remembered feeling so guilty for leaving her to go to work, pushing himself to work even harder, taking extra shifts just to buy her things to make her smile.

He kept staying silent. The idea of a trap was lingering in his mind, and he couldn’t lower his guard.

"I wanted to trap you there so I wouldn't have to face the silence," Lucy wept. "Because every time you left, I wanted to run away from my own guilt. And that's exactly when Nick swooped in. He saw my weakness, and he manipulated it. He told me I deserved to have fun. He told me I was wasting my youth."

Kaito was visibly trembling now. The anger was rising, burning through the numbness as the leather armrests of his chair began to crack under the sheer pressure of his grip.

He was trying so hard to hold himself back, to not let the 'Mordecai' persona take over, because in the end, he didn't want to hurt her. But the pain was blinding.

’No point in lying anymore. This is my chance’ he thought.

"You think that makes it better?" Kaito hissed through gritted teeth, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "You think telling me you betrayed me because you were bored makes it hurt less? You'd been seeing him since your birthday, Lucy. I bought you that necklace and paid you that dinner with your ‘friends’ with overtime money while you were out with him!"

"No!" Lucy screamed, falling to her knees on the plush carpet. She grabbed the edge of his mahogany desk, looking up at him with desperate, bloodshot eyes. "No, Kaito, please! That's what I'm trying to tell you! I only started seeing him alone a few days before you found us! Not since my birthday! I swear to God!"

Kaito froze, his blazing purple eye narrowing.

"The night before you caught us..." Lucy continued, the words tumbling out of her mouth in a frantic, hysterical rush. "Nick took me out. He got me drunk. He kept pouring me drinks, telling me I needed to relax. He took me to a hotel, Kaito."

The air in the room instantly dropped twenty degrees. Frost began to form on the edges of the desk.

Kaito's heart stopped.

The ultimate nightmare, the thought that had tortured him during his final, dying moments on Earth, was being spoken aloud.

“…What did you just say?” He said. His voice dropped to a dangerous whisper.

The dark aura of the betrayed villain was beginning to awake.

"But nothing happened!" Lucy shrieked, seeing the murderous darkness flooding his eye. She desperately reached out, her fingertips hovering just inches from his clenched fist. "I swear on my life, Kaito, nothing happened! When we got to the room, the alcohol wore off, and the reality of what I was doing hit me. I completely panicked."

Lucy let out a pathetic, wet laugh that was entirely devoid of humor.

"I started crying. I cried so hard and screamed so loud that the hotel staff came knocking on the door to see if I was in danger. I grabbed my bag and I ran. I ran out of there."

She looked up at him, her face a mask of absolute disgust—not at Kaito, but at the memory of the "Hero" she had been forced to travel with in this new world.

"He didn't even try to stop me," Lucy spat, the illusion of Nick the Chosen One completely shattering. "He just sat there on the edge of the bed, looking pathetic. He had... he had taken pills, Kaito. For erectile dysfunction. He was so humiliated and desperate to prove he was a man that he tried to manipulate a drunk girl, and he couldn't even do that right. It was pathetic. The whole thing was just pathetic."

Kaito’s jaw went slack. The frost on the desk stopped spreading.

Nick. The glorious, blonde, Chosen Hero of the Light. The man who had taken everything from him, the man who paraded around with a harem of S-Rank beauties... was a manipulative, impotent coward who had to drug girls to feel powerful.

The absurdity of it almost made Kaito want to laugh, but the tragedy was too thick, too suffocating.

"If nothing happened..." Kaito breathed, his voice barely audible. "If you ran away... then why? Why were you with him the next day? Why were you holding his arm and smiling at him when I came looking for you? And… that doesn’t change what you did, Lucy.”

The Saintess buried her face in her hands. This was it. This was the most shameful, pathetic truth of all.

"Because I am an idiot," Lucy sobbed, her voice muffled by her hands. "The next morning, I called him. I told him it was over, that I was disgusted by him and by myself, and that I was going to confess everything to you. But he begged me, Kaito. He literally cried on the phone."

She looked up, her tears dripping onto the expensive carpet.

"He said some of his rich friends from the university were coming into town that afternoon. He said he had already bragged to them about having a beautiful girlfriend. He begged me, as a final favor, just to meet him at the station and pretend to be his girlfriend for ten minutes, just so he wouldn't lose face in front of his friends."

Kaito’s eyes widened. The world tilted on its axis.

"I felt sorry for him," Lucy wept, her voice breaking completely. "He was so pathetic, so desperate. I agreed. I met him there. I forced a smile. I held his arm because his friends were walking toward us. And that... that is the exact moment you turned the corner."

Silence crashed back into the room.

Kaito stared at her without blinking or moving.

His hands clenched into fists and his eyes were open wide.

He probably had enough of her. The damage was done.

Then, in that loud silence, Kaito remembered everything, again.

The rain soaking his work clothes, the sharp, agonizing pain in his chest that had radiated down his left arm, and even then sheer, overwhelming shock of seeing the woman he loved in the arms of another man... and then, the blinding, irrational rage.

He also remembered the glaring headlights of the oncoming truck cutting through the rain. He remembered how he hadn't just fallen. He had lunged forward with the last ounce of his failing strength, his hands closing like iron vises around both Nick and Lucy's coats, dragging all three of them directly into the path of the speeding vehicle.

He had died.

He had killed them all. He had dragged the woman he loved and the man he thought she was sleeping with into the afterlife, damning them all to this miserable, trope-filled LitRPG hell where they were the chosen heroes who had to kill their killer.

He had done it because he believed he was completely worthless, because his future and everything he had built until that moment shattered instantly.

And now? He still couldn’t believe what he had heard.

It was a ten-minute charade. A favor. A pathetic favor to protect the fragile ego of an impotent loser.

A choked, hollow sound escaped Kaito’s throat.

He didn't pull his hair, scream or throw a hysterical fit of rage.

Instead, a terrifying, suffocating calm washed over him. The Mordecai persona completely dissolved, leaving only the profound, crushing disappointment of a man staring at the ruins of his life.

"You're telling me..." Kaito breathed, his voice stripped of all malice, carrying only a heavy, icy clarity. "I killed us. I dragged all three of us under a fucking truck... for a ten-minute favor?"

"I didn't know what to say, Kaito! I’ve been preparing my confession to you when I would’ve gotten home!” Lucy screamed, crawling forward on her knees, desperately trying to reach him. "The fact that you caught us actually made me so in shock that I said the most pathetic excuse someone could ever say! I fucked up in every possible way! And the world ended before the truck even hit us! I died that day too! I've been dead every single day since!"

Kaito didn't back away. He just looked down at her, his chest rising and falling slowly.

The erratic purple glow in his eye stabilized into a cold, piercing stare. He didn't play the victim or raise his voice.

"That doesn't change what you did, Lucy," Kaito said, his words cutting through her sobs with surgical precision. "It doesn't matter if you didn't sleep with him. You lied to me. You hid things from me. You let yourself be manipulated by a pathetic coward instead of just talking to me." Kaito said, while standing up from the chair.

"Please!" Lucy begged, completely abandoning whatever dignity she had left. She pressed her forehead against the floor, her hands reaching out to grip the edges of his boots. "I was weak! I was stupid! I was a coward who didn't appreciate the man who was killing himself to keep me warm! But I never stopped loving you! Not for a single second! So punish me! Hate me! Make me your slave, Kaito, I don't care! Just... just please, don't look at me like that! Don't leave me alone again! I can’t bear the thought of you disappearing again from me!” She kept crying.

The Immaculate Saintess, the holiest figure in Aethelgard, lay prostrate on the floor of a cheap inn, crying so hard she was hyperventilating, begging for scraps of forgiveness from the man she had inadvertently pushed to murder-suicide.

Kaito stood perfectly still. He looked down at the girl who had been his entire world.

The anger, the corporate logic, the desire for revenge—it was all gone. There was only a gaping, bleeding wound where his heart used to be, and the exhausting realization of how utterly pointless it all was.

To be specific, he didn’t even know what to feel anymore.

After some instants of silence, Kaito simply spoke the one, undeniable truth that had haunted him since the moment he woke up in Aethelgard.

"I only asked you to wait," Kaito whispered, his voice heavy with finality. "And instead, you chose to destroy everything we had built."

The room remained perfectly silent, except agonizing sound of Lucy's desperate, broken sobs echoing in the darkness.

”Please… Kaito…” Lucy sobbed, her head still touching the cold floor, begging for forgiveness.

[HIGHER REALMS CHAT: SILENCED.]

[SYSTEM PAUSED. AWAITING NARRATIVE RESOLUTION FROM THE HIGHER REALMS.]

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