Chapter 527
Theo could no longer walk.
He could no longer crawl.
All he could do was shift a few centimeters to the left or right by moving the only part of his body that remained mostly intact: his hips, which had already begun to crack down the middle like porcelain falling from a table that had stood far too high.
Even so, every single attack struck him, from the tips of his filthy hair to the toes of his left foot, which were shorter than those on his right.
He did not scream.
He did not wail.
He did not beg.
He simply remained silent, silent like someone who had grown accustomed to pain because pain had shared his bed ever since he was born into a world he had never chosen.
Theo's abdomen burst open.
Not like a tire slowly losing air, but like a dam collapsing after forty days and forty nights of relentless rain.
Its contents did not spill out all at once, but in wave after wave.
And what poured out was not merely blood, intestines, or organs whose names he had never learned because he had never attended medical school.
Something else emerged as well.
Something gray.
Something that shimmered like sand upon a beach that had never known sunlight.
Something that might have been the remnants of his humanity dissolving together with the bitter gastric fluids whose taste seemed to linger even in the air itself.
"My stomach... is empty," Theo murmured.
The voice came not from his torn lips, but from the gaping wound in his abdomen.
The opening had become his new mouth, one incapable of speaking clearly because it was made of torn flesh and shattered bone.
Yet, strangely enough, the youngest understood every word while standing three meters away, his blazing eyes fixed upon Theo, his breathing ragged.
The youngest stared into the hole in Theo's abdomen.
It was nearly empty, leaving behind only a few thin strands of flesh dangling like curtains ripped apart after a violent storm.
Behind those tattered curtains, Theo's spine was visible.
White.
Clean.
Pulsing with a slow rhythm.
Far too slow.
Like someone calmly savoring their final meal before an endless fast.
And the youngest felt something strange stirring within his own stomach.
It was not pain.
It was not nausea.
It was pleasure.
A horrifying pleasure.
The pleasure born from realizing that he had accomplished something he had never managed against any enemy before.
He had hollowed someone out from within.
He had turned a person into an empty vessel.
A shell without anything left inside.
The youngest slowly raised his right hand.
His thin fingers curled into claws ready to tear flesh apart.
At the tip of each finger, a dim light pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
Slow.
Far too slow.
Like someone savoring the final seconds before a grand feast began.
"You know, Inspirator," he said.
His voice tried to sound graceful, yet failed, dissolving instead into forced hoarseness, like an actor forgetting his lines in the middle of the stage.
"At first, I intended to prolong your suffering. I was going to leave you sitting between the two prostrations for days... months... years... until your own bones forgot they had once belonged to the body of a famous author. But I've changed my mind. I'll cut off your head right here, right now, before these pillars of atonement waiting for Erietta Bathee. It will stand as proof that the true ruler of the Land of the Gods has no need to tolerate the existence of a filthy creature like you—"
Yet before those words had even settled into the fractured air, cracked apart by countless overlapping Sa, a voice emerged from deep within Theo's consciousness.
From the deepest place where four unseen entities had long resided, invisible even to the eyes of every god.
The four extensions of the Great Author, the one who had written and brought Last Prayer to readers throughout the modern literary world.
It was not a voice heard by the ears.
It seeped directly into the pores of consciousness.
Into the cracks of logic.
Into the hidden place where the youngest had locked away every memory of birthday cakes as hard as stone and cold marble tables.
"O Most Honorable Great Author, who gave birth to us through ink, paper, and dreams that never sleep," declared RWIA, Resolve.
Its voice carried the weight of a gravestone freshly lifted from a grave that had long forgotten who lay beneath it.
"Permit us, Your faithful servants, to deliver the report from the battlefield You entrusted to us."
Before the youngest could even blink his crimson eyes, another voice followed.
Will.
Its tone was as sharp as a razor blade freshly removed from its wrapper, a blade that had never cut anything before yet already hungered to do so.
"We give thanks to You, Great Author, for granting us the chance to serve, to move, and to become more than mere words imprisoned between pages no one has ever read."
The youngest opened his mouth.
Perhaps to scream.
Perhaps to unleash another Sa.
Or perhaps merely to ask what was happening.
But the third voice had already filled the space between them.
Intent.
Its tone was gentle, like a mother's whisper to a child unable to sleep.
Yet it was a terrifying gentleness.
A gentleness impossible to resist because it came from a place deeper than every authority the youngest had ever gathered.
"We are unworthy, O Great Author, yet You still chose us. You still placed Your trust in us. And for that, we shall forever serve You, forever fight for You, forever answer Your call whenever You need us, whether in this world, another world, or in the countless worlds You never wrote because You were too busy writing horrors that taught humanity to fear even its own shadow."
Then came the fourth voice.
Ambition.
Unlike its three siblings, it was neither heavy, nor sharp, nor gentle.
It was empty.
Empty like the hollow space inside Theo's abdomen after the youngest's assault.
Empty like the heart of a god who had never once been loved.
It emerged from the depths of Theo's consciousness carrying the strangest, most unexpected, and most unfitting emotion an ambition could ever possess.
Resignation.
"We have received the transmission, Great Author," Ambition said.
Each word fell like droplets of water echoing through a cave so silent it seemed forgotten by time.
"From the fourteen Disturbers whom You rescued. And from Aldraya Kansh Que, the former Highest Angel who has now witnessed with his own eyes that this world is far more chaotic than he had ever imagined. They all—"
It paused.
Not out of hesitation.
But because it wanted every word that followed to be heard clearly by the Great Author, who still sat between the two prostrations with an empty abdomen, missing eyes, and a spine that continued to pulse ever so slowly.
"They all deliver the same message. They have reached the condition You requested. The Disturbers have brought chaos. Aldraya has endured. And now they await Your command, Great Author. They await Your words to step into the next act."
To be continued…