Chapter 365
The meeting may have taken place somewhere ordinary, a café or a private room, where Alaric, with his spirit and trust still intact, spoke at length about plans, about hope, about a fairer world.
Every word from his mouth was a dull blade tearing at Myra's heart, because she knew what she was about to do.
While listening with a calm face that had now become the most painful mask she had ever worn, Myra slipped ten sleeping pills into Alaric's ordered burger.
Her movement was smooth, trained by her usual precision, yet this time used for betrayal.
When Alaric, without the slightest suspicion, ate the burger with hopeful confidence, the poison of unconsciousness began to take effect.
It did not take long.
The passionate conversation was cut off abruptly.
Alaric Syah's body wavered, his vision blurred, before he finally collapsed to the floor with a thud that thundered in Myra's ears.
Afterward, standing over the unconscious body of the man who had once trusted her, Myra was struck by a powerful wave of remorse.
Yet the choice had already been made.
With a heart frozen cold and hands that might still have been trembling, she handed the helpless Alaric Syah over to the religious leaders who had been waiting in the shadows.
That handover was a transaction of hell.
One rebel's life, exchanged for the freedom of the people she loved.
And the moment her closest hostages were released, still weak and frightened, Myra did not waste time embracing or mourning.
With vigilance sharpened by betrayal, she immediately instructed them all to move.
To a location she had determined beforehand, a hiding place, perhaps far from the city and the elders' surveillance, where they could, at least temporarily, remain safe from retaliation.
Her instructions were firm and swift, leaving no room for discussion.
Myra knew that every second mattered.
The freedom she had just purchased at the cost of profound betrayal was fragile, and she had to ensure that the sacrifice of her shattered integrity would not be in vain.
'A spectacle of cruelty.'
The Inverted Crucifixion ritual for Alaric Syah began before the gathered public, a horrifying spectacle used as a warning by the religious leaders.
His body, still weakened by the remnants of the sleeping pills, was lifted and mounted onto the inverted wooden structure, his wrists and ankles bound tightly with coarse ropes that left red grooves upon his skin.
The crowd roared, a mixture of ritual support, fearful whispers, and perhaps, buried within it, sighs of sympathy too afraid to be voiced loudly.
The religious leaders stood in places of honor, their faces calm and cloaked in false authority, overseeing each stage of preparation with eyes that ensured no error in their sacrificial process.
In the midst of it, when his body was already half suspended and blood began pooling in his inverted head, Alaric's consciousness surged back in a burst of pure adrenaline.
The heavy drowsiness was swept away by waves of panic, confusion, and then blazing fury.
His eyes flew open, capturing the blurred surroundings before focusing.
Among the crowd, he saw familiar faces, people who had attended his speech and once nodded in agreement.
Now they looked different.
Some of them, perhaps out of pressure or fear, laughed nervously and hurled sharp objects—small stones or shards of glass—at his hanging body, as if to prove loyalty to the regime or to release tension in the most barbaric way.
Beside them, the religious leaders smiled thinly, savoring his suffering, a visible example for all who dared to challenge them.
Yet the sight that struck him hardest was not the thrown objects or the elders' cynical smiles.
At the edge of the crowd stood Myra Astrielle, rigid and pale.
The short gray-haired girl's face looked like cracked porcelain, her bluish-gray eyes radiating deep sorrow and unmistakable remorse.
At that moment, a foreign yet familiar voice slipped into his mind.
A telepathic communication, subtle and heavy with pain.
Myra conveyed a sincere apology, a bitter confession that she had been the one who betrayed him, who had mixed the sleeping pills into his food.
Then came the heart-shattering reason, the horrific ultimatum that all those closest to her would be killed if Alaric continued to resist the ritual.
Each word in that telepathic message was like a nail driven deeper than the ropes binding his wrists, shackling his rebellion with chains more merciless than iron.
The responsibility for other lives.
'A super-cataclysmic cosmic fluctuation.'
Amid the uproar of the crowd and the pain radiating from every joint of his inverted body, Alaric Syah closed his eyes.
The gesture was not surrender or resignation, but a profound concentration, an extreme withdrawal from the horrifying external world into the fortress of his own mind.
Myra Astrielle, standing at the edge with a shattered heart and heavy remorse, did not know what was unfolding behind the eyelids of the man she had betrayed.
She only saw his hanging body grow still, as though accepting fate, and that perhaps deepened her wound even further.
Yet that stillness was merely the surface of a storm being forged within.
Alaric, the wielder of super dark cosmic energy from another universe, gathered the remnants of strength still lingering in his cells, strength perhaps not entirely suppressed by the sleeping pills.
He reached for the core of his darkest and most devastating knowledge, a discipline taught by the mentor he had loved.
'This is no longer revenge.
This is slaughter.'
When her consciousness returned after the lethal cosmic shockwave, Myra Astrielle opened her eyes to an unimaginable panorama of hell.
The entire crowd that had once filled the crucifixion site, the laughing and jeering spectators, had vanished, replaced by a sight that made her shudder to the marrow of her bones.
Before her, the ground and rubble were covered with something no longer recognizable as human bodies.
It was marrow pulp, a thick mixture of blood-red and bone-white that clung and still bubbled faintly, as though life had just been violently torn away.
The stench of iron and raw flesh filled the air, heavier and fouler than anything she had ever inhaled.
At the center of that abstract and horrific painting of death, one figure still stood—or rather, hovered.
Alaric Syah, yet no longer the man she had known.
His body was surrounded by swirling super dark cosmic aura, devouring the surrounding light and giving his silhouette a terrifying visage, like a god of death risen from the core of a dark galaxy.
With what remained of her strength and sanity, Myra screamed, pleading, repeatedly telling Alaric to stop.
Her voice may have cracked, filled with panic and tears, commanding the man who had become the embodiment of universal fury to cease the slaughter, especially not to harm her loved ones who might still remain alive or hidden somewhere.
Yet her screams and pleas shattered into fragments before absolute indifference.
To be continued…