Flashback
(A memory, shimmering like a phantom limb, stirred within Alucard's ancient mind. Not a memory of a distant past, but of a present that was… subtly different.)
The grand throne room was real, undeniably so.
The faces of the panicked human heroes, the king's anxious pronouncements, the glint of the knights' armor – every detail was sharp, tactile, immediate.
Yet, intertwined with this vivid reality, Alucard felt a peculiar resonance, a ghost of a memory from a parallel thread of causality.
It was a phenomenon he understood all too well.
When the Veil between worlds was rent with such raw, unrefined force, it didn't always yield a single, pristine pathway.
Sometimes, under immense magical stress, it would fracture into adjacent possibilities, momentarily allowing glimpses, or even partial experiences, of events unfolding just a hair's breadth away in the multiverse.
Alucard, whose very essence defied the linear confines of space and time, wasn't merely summoned. He was drawn through a momentary convergence of near-identical realities.
He remembered the king's desperate welcome, the heroes' bewildered shouts, the challenge of a knight, and his casual defiance.
But then, almost concurrently, another layer settled upon his consciousness.
The same scene, but seen through a slightly different prism.
Perhaps in that adjacent reality, the knight's aggression was more pronounced, or the king's apology more immediate.
The heroes' reactions might have been tinged with a different shade of disbelief, and Alucard's internal musings might have emphasized a different aspect of his ancient power.
It was not a true repetition, nor a temporal loop.
It was the simultaneous perception of two closely woven strands of fate, both born from the same powerful summoning ritual.
The universe, in its raw effort to bridge dimensions, had momentarily allowed him to experience the singular event from subtly different, yet equally valid, perspectives.
One moment, he saw the scene unfold with a focus on human fragility; the next, it highlighted the sheer arrogance of a mortal knight.
Both were fragments of the same truth, shimmering briefly before coalescing into the single, dominant reality.
A slow, knowing smile spread across Alucard's lips.
If this world's magic was so volatile, so prone to creating such multiversal echoes during a mere summoning, then its inherent instability promised an even more entertaining existence than he had initially anticipated.
This truly would be a delightful new stage for him to play upon.
His crimson eyes, once distant with the echoes of his arrival, sharpened, returning to the present moment.
The faint shimmer of the past, of those parallel perceptions, receded. The memory concluded, leaving only the tangible reality of his current path.
The games, indeed, were already more complex than anticipated, and now, he was fully present to play them.