Killed Me? Now I Have Your Power Chapter 498: Myself. My…Self

Chapter 498 – Myself. My...Self

"The Covenant of the Broken World."

The words were wrong, laced with something entirely foreign to the concept of a voice.

It didn’t feel like a mouth speaking. It felt like something within Sabine, something outside the realm of possibility, was speaking through her, using her as a conduit and vessel for wrongness.

And that was when Daela saw it — her eyes so wide they felt ready to leave their sockets; her lower lip a waterfall of blood and splintered flesh, her lower teeth fully exposed and stained red — looking through the crack in Sabine’s opened chest.

And through that crack, the Empress of Silence saw something that nearly broke her mind despite the Mind Rot at her disposal.

Inside Sabine was a world of blinding, searing blue with hundreds of blue-haired men and women, their eyes carrying the arrogance and pride of the Cerveau Family, once a high-ranked family of Waverith.

One stood at the front bearing the unmistakable appearance of Nuke Cerveau, the Cerveau Heir who had disappeared into the Fokay the first time he ever set foot inside it.

The sight made Daela stagger two steps backward, her heart hammering so hard her ears ached, her knees nearly giving beneath her.

And that was only the beginning.

Her domain shattered completely, reduced to nothing but motes of light dissolving into the surrounding air.

In its place, another domain spread outward like a hungry wave in a storm, filling the entire training ground in an instant.

The ground shifted. It became a landscape made of wrinkled, compressed brain matter — the minds of all those Sabine had manipulated and broken.

The sky above was a captivating blue, yet riddled with cracks, as if the heavens themselves were about to come down.

All around Daela, the members of what she assumed was the Cerveau Family — those same figures she had seen inside Sabine — surrounded her from every direction, forming a wide circle with her at its centre.

She felt like a lost soul about to be consumed by something inhuman.

Daela drew a slow breath, feeling something in her mind beginning to twist. To crack. And to her great horror, she realised she could do nothing about it.

"Is this to your liking?" Sabine’s voice echoed, but Daela couldn’t find her. The voice was projected through the hundreds of Cerveau surrounding her, making it heart-wrenching and deeply wrong to hear.

"Let me explain my domain to you, oh Daela, my sweet Daela!" This time it was Nuke who spoke, walking slowly toward her, his steps measured and steady, crunching through the brain matter beneath his feet. "My domain doesn’t trap the body of my opponent. Oh no. No, no, no. It traps only your mind — and your memories — inside it."

Daela, her lower lip still pouring blood, began moving back from the approaching Nuke.

The sight was wrenching.

He smiled with amusement. "Your body is outside this world, uninhabited by everything that makes you...you. And I should add, you have only a limited time to reclaim your body before it rejects you as something foreign."

Daela said nothing. Or more truthfully, couldn’t. Her heart was seized with a fear unlike anything before, and her mind was being shattered piece by piece, as if it were nothing but glass and someone was hammering it with relentless, patient determination.

Every crack felt like a loss. Every crack cost her something.

She could feel — subtle, dreadful, unmistakable — the dissolution of her memories.

At this rate, the Empress of Silence understood, she would lose everything that made her who she was.

Her face fell into something aghast, her half-lipped mouth trembling.

"Ah, so you have understood." Nuke said, watching her expression, halting, spreading his arms wide like wings. "Perfect. One thing remains then. And so to finish this wonderful presentation..."

He clicked his fingers.

Every Cerveau surrounding them transformed, taking on the exact face and frame of Kaden Warborn with no physical difference whatsoever.

It felt so real that Daela — with her mind already breaking — believed, for one moment, that her brother had come to save her. Like that time when he came for her during the Steelbeasts.

The thought dissolved like snow in fire when every one of those Kaden Warborns began killing each other in the most horrendous ways possible.

Daela shrieked — the sound like something damned to eternal suffering — her hands clamping around her head, eyes streaming blood.

"Yes, yes, yes!" Nuke said, his face flushed red with ecstasy, entirely consumed by it. "I will make you watch — until you are no longer yourself — your worst nightmare! The death of your brother! The death of Kaden Warborn! Again! And again! And again! AND AGAIN!!"

He laughed, loud and wrong.

"So watch, Daela! Watch this spectacle I created only for..."

He paused.

Satisfied with the sound, he finished:

"...you."

Daela’s cries were primal. Proof of a mind fracturing further. Yet to Nuke they sounded like sweet music, and he began to dance across the carpet of severed Kaden heads and bodies.

"More! More! MORE!!"

...

The sight in front of him was something Kaden had no words for, no matter how he turned it in his mind.

And yet it was, ironically, the most obvious thing that could have ever happened.

’Maybe...maybe that’s exactly why I couldn’t believe it even with all the evidence in front of me.’

On the altar before him — laid out like a sacrificial offering made to please a goddess — was Rea Thornspire. Black tears still rolling endlessly down her cheeks.

But was it truly Rea?

Kaden would have doubted it if the memory of Rea from the beginning of this quest weren’t still so fresh.

She looked nothing like he remembered. Her features were shifting, taking on the appearance of someone else entirely; someone Kaden could not recognise.

Only a wisp of the Rea he knew remained, her flesh and bones already becoming a stranger’s house.

And yet...

"Why are you just standing there?!" Pandora shouted.

She was sitting atop Rea. Her body was no longer flesh and bone, it had become pure sorrow energy, allowing her to take back her true appearance and her true age.

She was shouting at Kaden with a scattering intensity that snapped him back to the present.

Only then did he notice what was happening around him.

Blanche was hovering above, a barrier of blood holding back the howling, furious whirlwind of the Goddess — who wanted nothing more than to destroy both Kaden and Pandora for their blasphemy.

Everything inside the church was slowly being unravelled by Woeful’s rage.

"We don’t have much time!" Pandora continued to yell, her face now a perfect mirror of the Rea from before all of this began.

No difference. No difference at all, except for the tattoo of a tower etched on Pandora’s forehead.

"What do you need me to do?" Kaden asked, confused, though somewhere inside him, he already knew the answer.

The question sent Pandora further past her patience. She covered Rea with her own body, shielding her from adding more threads to the thousands of invisible connections already binding Rea to the heavens...to the goddess.

The goddess screamed at the action. The church trembled as if something enormous living inside the earth was trying to claw its way out.

"You took too long to bring me here!" Pandora bellowed. "Longer than you promised! How did you forget?! How did you lose yourself this badly?!"

"What—!"

"My ring!" She cut him off, sparing him a dark glance. "I need my Ring to become one with myself! I need it to sever my link with Woeful! I need my Ring..."

Kaden’s heart thundered.

"...to stay myself!!"

At those words — miraculously — the Quest’s two choices surfaced inside his mind, clear as they had ever been.

The first was to complete the Tower, obtain the ring, and that would result in making sure Rea stays Rea...stays herself.

The second was leave the Tower incomplete and watch Rea become one with the goddess and ascend into godhood.

And here he stood, Pandora demanding the ring so that Rea — or herself — could remain who they were.

Meaning...

"Pandora and Rea..."

Kaden muttered, dazed.

"...are the person?"

"BE FAST!!!"

—End of Chapter 498—