Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 835: Conviction beyond belief

Lila pushed off the counter and started walking, slow, unhurried circles around the small kitchen, the kind of pacing that had nowhere urgent to go and all the time in the world to get there.

"You know what’s funny," she said, stepping over a piece of shattered plate without looking down. "Everybody in this whole story thinks they’re the victim. Every single one of them. Reign thinks he’s the victim, doing what he absolutely had to for the greater good, sleeping just fine at night because the math worked out in his favor on paper. Albright thinks he’s the victim too, just a soldier following orders that came from somewhere higher up the chain, hands clean because someone else signed off first." She glanced at him, still frozen mid-reach for the communicator, jaw locked, eyes the only part of him still moving. "And you. Look at you. You think you’re the victim right now, don’t you. Poor old man, minding his own business, boiling water for tea, and some monster breaks into his kitchen uninvited."

She stopped in front of him, tilting her head, studying his locked expression the way someone studied a painting they weren’t sure they liked yet.

"Nobody ever asks who I was a victim of."

She turned and kept walking, trailing one finger along the edge of the counter as she passed it.

"You want to know what I was, before any of this? Before Purge, before Eclipse, before any of the tidy little labels everyone loves slapping on me the second they need a villain to point at?" She laughed, short, no real humor in it. "I was a gamble. That’s it. That’s the whole origin story, old man, no dramatic reveal necessary. My parents didn’t have a daughter. They had an investment. A weapon under construction for an organization that wants humanity gone, replaced, remade into whatever Arthur decided was cleaner, better, more efficient." She pressed a hand flat against her own chest. "You know what it’s like, growing up knowing your bedtime stories were actually training exercises in disguise? Knowing every hug you ever got came stapled to a performance review?"

She crossed back to him, closer now, close enough that her next words landed soft, almost intimate, like she was sharing a secret only he deserved to hear.

"No. You don’t know. Nobody in that stupid academy ever bothered asking. They just decided I was the villain the second the truth came out, and that was that. Case closed, book shut, roll credits." She snapped her fingers an inch from his frozen face, and the sound cracked louder than it should have in the small room. "Convenient, isn’t it. So much easier than actually sitting down and asking why an eighteen year old girl might have done what she did. Easier to hate a monster than to wonder what built one."

She wandered to the window, looking out at the quiet street he’d walked home through less than half an hour ago, kids still kicking their worn ball somewhere down the block, oblivious.

"Conviction," she said, almost fondly, rolling the word around like it tasted good. "That’s the real punchline in all this, if you actually sit with it long enough. Everyone’s got some. Reign was convinced. Albright was convinced. You’re convinced too, standing there right now, frozen like a garden statue, absolutely certain you’re on the side of good, dragging me off to some cell for the unforgivable crime of existing wrong."

She turned back to face him, arms loose at her sides.

"My parents are convinced, you know. Genuinely, deeply convinced. They think what they’re building is salvation. They think humanity, left to its own devices, just rots itself into extinction eventually anyway, slower, uglier, dragging out the same tired cycle for another few centuries before the ending arrives regardless. Arthur’s just offering a faster, cleaner version of something they already believe is coming no matter what anyone does." She shrugged, easy, conversational, like she was discussing weather patterns instead of the architecture of an extinction.

"Funny thing about conviction, old man. Everybody’s got some flavor of it. Which means, if you actually think about it for longer than five seconds instead of reaching straight for outrage, good has to be subjective. There’s no version of ’good’ floating around out there in the universe with your name stamped on it and everyone else’s crossed clean off."

Her laugh came again, and this time it carried an edge, something starting to fray at the corners of it.

"You think I’m crazy." She said it plainly, circling him slowly now, her boots crunching over broken ceramic with each step. "Go on. Say it. I know you’re dying to, I can see it even frozen like that, it’s practically leaking out your ears. Unstable. Insane. Broken. Deranged. Pick whichever one fits your mood, old man, I’ve heard every single flavor of it, usually from someone standing exactly where you’re standing right now."

She stopped in front of him again, closer this time, near enough that her breath ghosted faintly against his frozen cheek.

"But here’s the thing." Her voice dropped, quieter, softer, almost gentle. "I’m not crazy. I’m the only one who’s actually looking at this clearly. Everybody else just squints at the problem sideways and calls that wisdom."

Something shifted in her expression then, the humor thinning, something rawer bleeding up through the cracks underneath.

"Everyone else is just going through the motions, old man. Fighting the exact same war on repeat, generation after generation, patching the wound instead of ever cutting the rot out. Harbingers today, something else tomorrow, and in between all of it, humanity keeps right on doing what humanity does best. Tearing itself apart over borders, over money, over grudges nobody even remembers the actual starting point of anymore." Her voice climbed slightly, urgency creeping in underneath the calm. "You really think this ends? Any of it? You genuinely believe somewhere down the line, humanity just wakes up one morning and decides to stop being awful to itself and everything around it?"

She reached up without warning and dragged her fingers hard through her own hair, nails raking against her scalp.

"I saw a way out." Her voice cracked slightly around the edges, excitement bleeding through despite herself. "A real one. Not another patch job, not another decade of pretending the next fight’s finally the last one. An actual end to the whole miserable cycle." She dragged her nails through her hair again, harder this time, and when her hand came away, thin lines of blood traced down between her fingers, bright and stark against her pale skin. "And everyone just calls me insane for seeing it. Nobody wants to actually look at what I’m looking at, because looking at it honestly means admitting the whole system’s rotten clean through, foundation up, and nobody wants to hear that over breakfast."

She smiled then, and it kept stretching, wider than it had any real right to, wider than her face seemed built to hold, something manic bleeding fast into the edges of it now.

"Oh." She tilted her head, studying his strained, silent fury. "You want to say something, old man? Go on. I’ll allow it. Consider it a professional courtesy, one educator to another."

She flicked two fingers lazily in his direction, and the stasis around his jaw eased, just barely, just enough.

"You," Anng managed, voice strained and rasping, forced out through a throat that clearly didn’t want to cooperate, "are a child. Playing with forces you cannot possibly comprehend the weight of."

"Mm. Cute." She smiled wider. "Try again, old man. You can do better than a lecture."

"Whatever they told you," he pushed on, teeth gritted, "whatever pretty excuse they dressed this up in, this is still murder. Still slaughter, dressed in the language of mercy. You cannot rename a massacre and expect the dead to thank you for the wordplay."

Her smile didn’t waver at all.

"See, that’s exactly the kind of thing someone says when they’ve never actually had to make the hard call themselves." She flicked her fingers again, and his jaw locked back into silence mid-syllable, whatever else he’d been building toward swallowed whole and gone. "Easy to moralize from inside a system that’s already comfortable, old man. Much harder to actually fix something broken when fixing it means getting your hands filthy in ways nobody wants to watch."

She started pacing again, faster now, energy climbing visibly through her whole frame, blood still tracking slow down her fingertips where she’d torn at her own scalp.

"You know what the actual tragedy is?" Her voice pitched higher, quicker, words tumbling faster than before. "It’s that everyone’s going to keep calling me the monster in this story, right up until the day they realize I was the only one who actually did something. Not talked about it in some committee meeting. Not filed a report that got buried three departments deep and forgotten by lunch. Did something." She laughed, high and a little unhinged now, the sound scraping at the edges like something tearing. "History’s real generous to people like that, eventually. Once enough time passes. Once the bodies stop being fresh enough to properly grieve and start just being numbers in a textbook instead, tidy and distant and easy to swallow."

She stopped in front of him one final time, close enough now that her breath ghosted warm against his frozen face, and the manic edge in her voice finally smoothed out into something quieter, almost tender.

"I know how this looks. I know exactly what you see when you look at me right now. Someone broken. Someone who lost the plot somewhere between betrayal and grief and turned all of it into something monstrous instead of just sad." She tilted her head, studying him with something that almost looked like genuine curiosity. "Maybe you’re even right about that part, old man. Maybe I did lose something real, somewhere along the way, and this right here is just what’s left standing in the wreckage of it."

Her smile crept back slowly, less manic now, colder, settled.

"But you know what everyone always forgets to ask, in stories like this one?" She reached up and wiped blood absently across her own cheek, leaving a thin red smear she didn’t seem to notice at all. "Whether the ends justified the means. Everyone’s so obsessed with judging the means. Nobody ever wants to actually sit with the ends long enough to decide if they were worth what it cost to get there."

Her hands began to glow, faint red bleeding slow into white, twin threads of light climbing steady up from her palms.

"The ends justify the means, old man." She said it soft, almost like a lullaby, raising both hands toward the sides of his frozen head with something close to reverence in the motion. "You’ll understand eventually. Or you won’t. Either way, it stops mattering to you in about five seconds."

She pressed her palms flat against his temples.

Anng’s eyes rolled back, pupils bleeding out into pure, hollow white, his whole body going slack within the stasis field still holding him upright, whatever had been him a moment ago simply gone out, quiet and complete, like a flame that had never had the chance to fight the wind at all.

____

Lila stepped out of the apartment and pulled the door shut behind her, soft, careful, like she was leaving a sleeping baby rather than a hollowed-out man slumped somewhere in his own kitchen.

She practically bounced down the steps.

Each footfall landed a little too light, a little too buoyant, like gravity had eased off her specifically for the walk home. Her face had gone bright, open, genuinely joyful in a way that looked completely wrong stacked against the blood still drying dark on her fingers.

Then out of no where, an object came flying.

It was the ball the kids in the street were playing with that came flying in her direction, arcing wide off someone’s mistimed kick, and sailed clean over a fence, vanishing into a tangle of overgrown shrubs against the side of a building.

"Aw, man," one of the kids groaned. "Toma, that’s the third time—"

"It wasn’t even my fault, the ground’s uneven—"

Lila lifted one hand without breaking stride, and the ball tore itself free of the shrubs, arcing back out in a smooth telekinetic pull, spinning lazily through the air before dropping neat and gentle into her waiting palm.

The kids went quiet, staring.

She smiled at them, warm, easy, the kind of smile that belonged on a stranger helping out on a nice afternoon, and crouched slightly to hand the ball back to the nearest one, the boy Anng had called Toma.

"Here you go."

Toma reached out and took it with both hands, already grinning, already halfway turned back toward his friends.

Then he stopped.

His eyes caught on her fingers first, the thin red lines still tracking down from under her nails, drying dark at the tips, and then on her palm where a faint smear had transferred straight onto the ball’s worn surface.

He looked up at her.

Lila’s smile dropped away, clean and immediate, no fade to it at all, just gone, replaced by nothing, a flat, empty stillness that hadn’t been there half a second earlier.

Toma took a step back without seeming to decide to.

She held his gaze a moment longer, saying nothing, and then turned and walked on down the street, footsteps light again, bounce returning to her stride like the interruption had never happened at all.