Interlude: Gilded Cages, Scented Candles, and the Firewall of the Soul

(Point of View: Lucy)

Meanwhile, far below the floating interfaces of the Higher Realms, far away from the corporate spreadsheets of Ravenloft Holdings, and high above the celebrating, ignorant crowds of Oakhaven, another 'hero' was fighting a very different kind of battle.

But this wasn't a battle fought with holy swords or bureaucratic red tape. It was a battle fought in the absolute, suffocating silence of a gilded cage.

Lucy, the Immaculate Saintess of Aethelgard, the Chosen Vessel of the Goddess of Light, and currently the top-ranked Influencer on OnlySaints, lay curled into a tight, trembling ball on her massive canopy bed.

The Royal Suite inside the Cathedral of Heroes was supposed to be a sanctuary. It was a room the size of a small house, adorned with white marble, gilded trim, and draped in silks woven by master artisans. But to Lucy, the walls were slowly, methodically closing in.

The room was pitch black. She had drawn the heavy, opaque white velvet curtains so tightly shut that not a single ray of the rising morning sun could pierce through.

She didn't want the light. It felt like an accusation.

The air in the suite was thick, almost unbreathable, now heavy with the cloying, lingering scent of extinguished vanilla and sandalwood candles. They were the most expensive, artisanal candles money could buy in the capital, since vanilla was one of the rarest commodities.

She had purchased them a while ago, before Mordecai had arrived in this world, lighting them almost every night in a desperate, pathetic attempt to relax and escape the cruel role of the Fantasy Influencer she was forced to play. She was probably trying to recreate a phantom comfort or... to forget.

'I can't... I can't stop thinking about that...' she mumbled into the darkness.

She hadn't forgotten a single thing. And she hadn't slept in days.

Her eyes were wide open in the dark—red-rimmed, swollen, and glassy. She stared up at the ornate, frescoed ceiling as if she could somehow see straight through the plaster, past the marble spires of the cathedral, past the digital clouds of the System, and gaze into the very fabric of the universe itself.

Her hands were crossed over her chest, pressed so tightly against her own ribs that her knuckles were white. Her delicate, manicured fingers were tracing the exact, specific spot on her waist and back where he had grabbed her in the Adventurer's Guild.

The System had immediately categorized that moment as an attack. It had slapped a flashing red label on it: [Hostile Action: Malicious Edgelord Rizz Physical Edition]. The System had tried to code it as a dark, manipulative skill designed to break her mental defenses. It had flooded her UI with warning messages, urging her to cast a purification spell, to feel disgust, to feel the righteous, scripted fury of a holy maiden whose personal space had been violated by a villain.

But the System was stupid. It was a cold, unfeeling algorithm that didn't understand the terrifying depth of human muscle memory.

The System had tried to overwrite the sensation, but the firewall—the one piece of code it absolutely could not breach—had held firm. Because that firewall wasn't made of magic or mana. It was forged from the memory of a thousand cold nights spent in a cramped, poorly insulated third-floor apartment in Tokyo.

'Kaito...' Lucy whispered into the suffocating silence.

Her voice was raw, broken, reduced to a raspy croak from days of silent, breathless weeping.

She remembered the grip. It hadn't been a magical technique. Instead, it had been the exact, desperate, grounding embrace of a man who worked fourteen-hour shifts in flooded basements and dusty crawlspaces. A man who came home smelling of ozone, burnt copper, and exhaustion, who would drop his heavy tool bag by the door and bury his face in her neck like she was the only oxygen left in a dying world.

Kaito had never hugged her casually. He had held her like she was the only thing keeping him from drowning.

And in the Guild, when the simple level 35 Kaitoyama had stepped forward and crushed her against his chest, it hadn't felt like an act of dominance. Through the heavy armor, through the terrifying aura, she had felt the same familiar desperation. She had felt the ghost of the electrician who just wanted to come home.

'It can't be a coincidence,' she thought, her nails digging into her palms. 'The way he held me. The way his fingers pressed against my ribs. The way he smelled... like ozone and hard work. It's him. It has to be him.'

But she didn't know. Not for certain. The System had done its job well—it had hidden his true name, his true face, his true identity behind layers of stealth skills and fake status screens. She couldn't prove anything. All she had was a feeling. A memory. A ghost.

'Kaito... is that really you? Or am I going insane?'

During her agonizing, lonely isolation in the dark, the news of the outside world had finally trickled in.

Through the thick oak doors of her suite, she had heard the cathedral scouts returning hours ago. Their voices had echoed down the marble corridors, their boots clicking joyously as they reported the Hero's "glorious, triumphant victory" at the borders.

She had laid there, paralyzed, as she heard them say the name 'Kaitoyama' over and over.

And then, she had heard the magical broadcast. The capital’s public address crystals had broadcast Nick's speech live from the city gates, with his voice filtering through the cracks in her windows, clear as crystal.

She had heard Nick's voice—that smooth, perfectly modulated, media-trained voice—crack artificially as he lied to the masses.

"There is no Dark Lord! Kaitoyama was just a poor, lonely man consumed by pain who wanted to feel the warmth of our Saintess!"

Those words had hit Lucy like a physical, devastating blow to the stomach, knocking all the air from her lungs. She had violently doubled over on the bed, gasping for air as the sheer, sickening irony of the statement washed over her.

'A lonely man consumed by pain... who wanted to feel my warmth...'

Nick had said it to sound magnanimous. He had said it to play the role of the merciful, forgiving Hero who took pity on a pathetic, unrequited villain. He thought he was writing a generic backstory for a low-level boss.

But Lucy knew—or at least, she suspected—that there was far more truth to those words than Nick would ever understand.

'If it really is you, Kaito... then you weren't trying to hurt me. You were trying to... to feel something. To feel... me.'

She pressed her hands tighter against her ribs, exactly where he had grabbed her.

'And I pushed you away. I ran. I let them call you a monster.'

But Lucy knew the truth. Lucy knew exactly why that man was lonely. She knew exactly why he was consumed by pain.

It was because of her.

The System had forced her to play the Saintess's script. When she first arrived in Aethelgard, she was terrified, disoriented, and profoundly lonely, with the last memory of her ex-boyfriend dragging her under a truck.

The System had isolated her, placing her on a pedestal of purity. It had offered her a script: 'You are the chosen one. You can forgive the sins of men. You are loved by all.' And then, Nick, her 'lover' had appeared with her.

Nick was shiny, new. He was the golden boy with the perfect smile, the high stats, and the unending adoration of the crowds. He was now the protagonist.

In their previous life, he offered her the intoxicating dopamine rush she had been desperately craving.

In this one, the System had pushed them together, generating romantic prompts, showering them with affinity points, making every interaction feel like a cinematic masterpiece, but with one single restriction: the quest for the 'purification of their souls,' where they couldn't engage in any kind of physically intimate contact, because of their sin.

It was easy to fall into the script. It was easy to let the System's passive skills numb her guilt, making her forget the boy she had left behind in Tokyo. The System had practically whispered in her ear: 'You deserve this. You are a Saintess. He was just an electrician. This is your destiny.'

But lying here in the dark, the systemic illusions were finally, violently burning away.

She thought about Nick's embraces. Nick's touch had always been light, calculated, performative. When he hugged her, he was always subtly adjusting his angle for the best lighting, making sure his heroic profile was visible to the crowds or the floating interface cameras. He held her like a prop. Like a trophy. He was afraid of holding her too tight, afraid of wrinkling his cape or messing up his gravity-defying hair.

In simple terms, Nick was completely, fundamentally fake.

Kaito, on the other hand, had been terrifyingly real.

His hands had been rough, heavily calloused like stone, permanently stained with industrial grime that no soap could wash away. But those callous, strong hands had touched her with a reverence that Nick could never even comprehend.

Kaito had worked double shifts in silence until his spine felt like crushed glass, just so they could live together. He had been slowly, methodically killing himself to build a future for them—a house with a garden, far away from the smog of the city.

And she had thrown it all away. She didn't know why he was slowly dying for her. She had absolutely no idea of the living hell he was passing through.

The life she was having 'forced' her to choose the cheap, momentary novelty over a lifetime of absolute, unwavering devotion.

Lucy had just decided to give in, just to escape for a moment, to the temptation of a wealthy, charming American boy who offered her a fleeting spark.

A sob escaped Lucy's lips.

It wasn't a delicate, picturesque anime tear rolling down a flawless cheek. It was a raw, ugly, visceral sound that tore through the silence of the massive suite. It was the sound of a human soul breaking under the weight of its own irreversible mistakes.

She pressed her face deep into her expensive silk pillow, her shoulders shaking violently as the dam finally burst.

Lucy cried for the cramped apartment in Edogawa. She cried for the smell of cheap curry, and she also cried for the rough hands she would never hold again.

'E-Eh... what is happening to me? Why am I suddenly remembering all these things?' She thought, before the crying intensified.

She tried to stop the tears, but that was useless.

It seemed like every suppressed emotion returned to her like a boomerang and hit her like... a truck.

'I'm sorry, Kaito,' she sobbed into the pillow, her fingers digging into the mattress. 'I'm so sorry. I was so stupid. I was so blind. If that was really you... if you're out there somewhere... please know that I never meant to...'

She couldn't finish the sentence. She didn't know how.

The words were entirely useless. She knew that they meant nothing now.

They couldn't undo the past.

They couldn't unbreak his heart.

They couldn't bring back the boy who had fallen asleep with a tired smile, lulled by the scent of vanilla and sandalwood, believing he was the luckiest man in the world.

He was gone. And in his place was someone else—someone who looked at her not with love, but with cold, dead eyes. Or at least, that's what she feared. Because she couldn't be sure. She couldn't be sure of anything anymore.

'Kaito... if you can hear me... I don't expect you to forgive me. I don't deserve it. But I need you to know... I now remember. I remember everything. And I'm sorry.'

She whispered the words into the dark, into the suffocating silence, into the cosmic void, desperately hoping that somehow, someway, across the vast distance between the Cathedral and Fort Blackstone, he could hear her.

But she would never know. And that uncertainty—that agonizing, endless uncertainty—was perhaps the cruelest punishment of all.

High above the world of Aethelgard, beyond the clouds and the physical realm, the glowing, monolithic interfaces of the Higher Realms were broadcasting the live feed.

Usually, the chat was a chaotic, unending waterfall of toxic commentary, degenerate requests, and meme-fueled mockery. Just minutes ago, they had been ruthlessly, mercilessly tearing Nick apart, laughing hysterically at his pathetic, trembling lie at the city gates. They had spammed the chat with laughing emojis and corporate memes.

But as the omnipresent cameras shifted feeds, lingering on the dark, opulent Royal Suite, the atmosphere changed.

The audience watched the Immaculate Saintess—the girl who was supposed to be the untouchable, perfect waifu of the server—curled in a ball, sobbing with a raw, visceral grief that completely broke the genre conventions of their entertainment. They heard her broken, whispered apologies to a man who wasn't even there.

For a few, incredibly rare seconds, the millions of viewers watching the stream fell strangely, uncomfortably silent. The relentless scrolling of the chat slowed to a crawl.

[VIP] GoonerKing: "...oh."

[User] Waifu_Appraiser_EX: "Man... that's not... that's not acting. She's actually broken."

[VIP] NTR_Lover69: "Wait, guys. This isn't funny anymore. Like, the NTR tag is supposed to be spicy drama, not... not devastating psychological trauma. This feels too real. I feel bad."

[User] CorporateSlave42: "CEO Mordecai won the encounter. He crushed the Hero and secured the monopoly. But looking at her... did he actually win, though? Or did everyone just lose?"

[VIP] 👑 Lord Dibbs57: "A high cost for efficiency. The past is a debt that can never truly be audited."

[User] Lukas_The_Great: "Mordecai, don't you fucking dare to forgive a cheater. I don't like where this is going."

The silence lingered, heavy and uncomfortable, forcing the gods and the premium sponsors to briefly confront the genuine human tragedy underlying their reality TV show.

But the attention span of the cosmic internet was notoriously short. The moment passed. A new notification popped up regarding a dungeon boss in the Southern Reaches, and the chat slowly resumed its chaotic scroll, the viewers quickly moving on to the next meme, the next joke, eager to distract themselves from the uncomfortable pang of empathy.

But down in Oakhaven, Lucy remained in the dark.

She was entirely alone with her tears, her crushing guilt, and the lingering, phantom scent of vanilla and sandalwood. She was trapped in a gilded cage of her own making, haunted by the ghost of a man who had once loved her more than anything in the universe—a man who was now, without her knowing, just a CEO, doing business in the dark.