Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP Chapter 408: Jax Consolidates

The scene in front of Jax and Athanasia ended with a green cloud blooming out of nothing and Loki stepping through it, and then Athanor and Lysia were gone along with her.

Athanasia kept staring at the spot where she had watched all of it happen.

It was an ending nobody in any realm would ever wish for.

But reality had never been the sort of place that handed dreams over for free, and everything inside it carried a price.

A loaf of bread demanded sweat. Peace demanded blood. Duty and responsibility came collecting your childhood. Love demanded the tattoo of vulnerability you never once had, and the more precious the dream, the heavier the price reality asked for it.

Her parents had paid that same price, in the worst way it could possibly be paid.

Then tears started forming in the eyes of a girl who hadn’t known those eyes were capable of it.

Behind them the scene kept replaying, her mother and father holding onto each other long after death had already come for them, and everything that came after.

Because the story she had been raised on started on a completely different day.

An apprentice magus had carried a child through the tower gates along with a message saying the girl was Archmage Rashida’s granddaughter, and with the last thing Lysia ever left behind for anyone, her sword.

He explained that Lysia had pressed the child into his arms and asked him to take care of her daughter, and then she had walked away and he never saw her again.

And that was when the soul crystal in Rashida’s pocket shattered.

Rashida had already been broken for five years by then, ever since the only person she had left in this world vanished without leaving a trace.

She had spent everything in her power hunting for her, dispatching search party after search party into a hunt with no source and no direction at all.

The one thing that kept her upright through it was that crystal, because the one bound to Lysia had stayed whole and stayed radiating, and that meant her daughter was still alive somewhere. That hope died in her pocket.

Later, once she was steady enough to sit a four-year-old down and ask her questions, Rashida took every fragment the child gave her and built her own version of events out of them, and the foundation she started from was the celestial research she had abandoned years ago.

Some celestial had taken Lysia as a slave and tortured her, then handed her to a duke as breeding stock to produce an heir. And when the child came out a girl, that duke decided the two of them were no longer worth keeping alive.

Then the child gave her the piece that sealed it, because Athanasia repeated the only fragment of that night she had carried out with her, her mother’s voice coming through a closed door, begging, saying that at this rate she was going to die and even at the last moment of her saying please let me stay.

So Rashida decided her daughter had been a victim of the dirty games of upper realm, and that before she went down she had made absolutely certain her daughter got out.

Then she passed all of it down, the story and the hatred bolted onto the side of it, handed to a little girl who swallowed every word and built an entire life on top of it.

That life had just finished collapsing.

Every year of it had been a lie, and Athanasia had nothing left to do with any of it now except mourn a death she hadn’t watched with her own eyes.

So she cried, and she kept crying in that domain until something warm pressed against the top of her head.

It was Jax.

He pulled her into his chest and let her stay there. "Jeez. Who the hell would’ve guessed I’d end up sitting through a story this miserable. I already knew your father wasn’t the monster you kept screaming about mid-fight, I could feel that much on my own. But this? This was a whole lot more than I signed up for."

He had every intention of comforting the girl and opened with the worst line available to him, because words had never once done what Jax actually wanted them to do.

It worked in a roundabout way anyway, since her sobbing hitched and stopped purely because some indignant part of her decided he was mocking her.

"I only wanted you to stop something, and it wasn’t the crying," he added. "Cry as much as you want. What I want you to stop is that tragedy looping behind your eyes, and the pity you’re aiming at the two of them with it. So please. Don’t."

His hand moved slowly against her hair. "Your parents were idiots who genuinely believed everything would work out in their favor. But past that, not once did either of them look at their own ending like it was something sad. The whole thing was coming down on top of them and they still held onto each other like they’d already gotten more than they ever expected."

"So don’t name it a tragedy. It was a love story with a heavy price on it, and your idiot duo paid it with a smiling death, in the most comforting place either of them ever found."

His voice dropped. "Because the second you call it a tragedy, you put yourself in the middle of it. The reason your parents died, because you existed."

"But you already know what you actually are. You’re the fruit of everything they chose, the only living proof their love was ever real."

He leaned back enough to make her look at him. "Their story didn’t end because of you, Athy. Their story reached its ending protecting you. Those are two very different things."

Silence held the white space after that, and it stayed until she had finished grieving and Jax finally let her go.

She looked up at him. "How did you know about my parents?"

"One glance at how Athanor was moving during your fight," Jax said. "You were too busy being furious to notice the man."

She frowned, and he kept going. "A friend of mine told me the one you were fighting didn’t have a soul in him, which means he died a long time ago and Loki has been wearing what’s left of him around like a coat."

"But here’s the part I could tell clear as day. Even a hollow body was fighting itself every time it had to bring you down. Nothing inside it, no soul, no mind, not one memory left, and the thing still reacted."

"It knew you. Its girl, the one it used to get down on the floor and play with, whatever reputation the rest of the world had stuck on him."

"That recognition is the only reason those attacks never fully connected the way they should have. Call it muscle memory, call it reflex, call it physical instinct. It was enough for me to work out everything, and enough to show you the truth."