"Silas..."
Altair uttered the name as if the syllables themselves secreted a vile poison onto his tongue. He cleared his throat with a shattered sound. His pitch-black eyes reflected memories painted in only two colors: vivid grass-green and blood-red.
"My brother Silas, Celine's son, was not initially infected by the same lust for power as the rest of my siblings... He migrated toward the dark continent... Africa."
"There, he witnessed exactly what humanity had inflicted upon the natural biome. He watched forests burn and entire biological species face total eradication driven by human greed. Can you believe it, Father? Silas... possessing such a fragile heart, could not compute the horrors he witnessed. He collapsed onto his knees and wept. He wept with genuine agony for every severed tree and every slaughtered rare beast."
The words seized in Altair's throat for a microsecond. He forced his trembling eyes upward to meet the Emperor's gaze.
"He wailed like an infant for days on end... calculating his ultimate countermeasure until he reached an absolute conclusion: to protect nature, 'Humanity' must be eradicated. Silas physically fused his chassis with the tropical African jungles. His roots plunged deep into the earth. He became the forest, and the forest became him. Then... he initiated the systematic extermination of all humans bordering his empire."
Altair swallowed hard, choking on the memory.
"He made zero distinction between a greedy poacher, a corrupt politician, or an innocent child. In his eyes, every human within his territory was a parasite requiring immediate biological purging. The roots of his forests and his mutated beasts devoured the entire population of the continent, save for the extreme northern sectors."
"He slaughtered with blind, unhinged devotion to protect his flora and fauna. In a few short years, he butchered over five hundred million humans... They were completely eradicated, transforming Africa into a flourishing green paradise fertilized entirely by the corpses of the innocent."
---
Altair's vocal frequency shifted, as if a freezing blizzard had suddenly breached the steel room.
"As for Victor, Eve's son... he possessed too much intellect to stain his own hands directly with the filth of his brothers' wars. He packed his research and his cybernetic hardware, isolating himself completely at the extreme edge of the world... the freezing South Pole."
"Surrounded by absolute ice and swarms of native penguins, he constructed his own isolated scientific kingdom. He formed a partial alliance with Ryu, supplying him with advanced military tech to fund the Asian war machine, strictly in exchange for being left entirely alone in his laboratories."
Altair's lips split into a terrifying, hysterical smile that structurally contradicted the suffocating gloom of the room.
"Once, he performed a genetic mutation on a miserable penguin. That specific penguin gained autonomous consciousness and violently rebelled against its creator. It stood on two legs and assigned itself a human designation: 'Ryu Enuma.' That penguin shrieked directly into Victor's face, swearing it would abandon the ice to become a supreme author!"
"Do you know how Victor reacted? He collapsed onto his back, completely paralyzed by hysterical laughter, and allowed the subject to escape alone into the blizzard... And there, the penguin marched into the freezing void, abandoning its flock to climb a mountain and dedicate its existence to writing."
But that hysterical smile was instantly erased, overwritten by absolute terror. Altair's entire chassis violently convulsed as he whispered the next name.
"Eris, Roxy's son... the most deranged, the most bloodthirsty, and the most savage of us all. Eris violently seized the western and northern sectors of Europe. He governed them exclusively with iron, fire, and blood."
"His tyranny operated devoid of any logical justification. Every single day, he mutated into something more monstrous than the last. One night, simply because he... felt bored... he incinerated an entire metropolitan zone. A city housing one million human subjects."
"He stood there, observing them burn alive. He consumed raw meat with his bare hands, thoroughly enjoying their apocalyptic screams as if analyzing a soothing acoustic frequency."
---
"And what of Malik?" the Emperor demanded. His tone remained perfectly calm, yet it carried the crushing gravity of a suppressed cosmic storm.
Altair responded, his pitch-black eyes expanding in terror: "Malik... Emperor of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Indus Valley. Malik, much like his mother, operated as a shadow... a phantom. No one ever laid eyes on him. He was the most intellectually terrifying and unequivocally the most lethal threat among us."
Altair dragged a deep, ragged breath into his lungs, hallucinating the invisible spider web.
"His cunning defied all structural parameters. While my brothers were busy slitting one another's throats, Malik was the sole entity maintaining encrypted, open communication channels with every single sibling, even during peak hostility. He whispered into Caesar's ear. He leaked highly classified intel to Dante. He funded Ryu's war machine, and he psychologically provoked Eris."
"He operated as a supreme phantom, manipulating the entire planet like a bloody puppet theater from behind a veil of shadows no one could ever breach."
---
Altair's head dropped. Tears of blue blood slid from his exhausted, hollow eyes.
"That was the absolute endgame, Father. Greed devoured everything. After a few short years, the brothers rebelled and forged a unified alliance to murder you. They shattered the beautiful blue planet and terminated everything it held."
"As for the surviving humans? The fractional percentage that survived were surgically stripped of their humanity. They were brainwashed, their emotions and free will completely erased. They were transfigured into mechanical tools of absolute loyalty, slaughtering without mercy or cognitive function."
Altair raised his trembling hands. He glared at them with crushing self-disgust.
"And me? I was the sole failure among my eight siblings. I failed to conquer a single inch of Earth. I was too weak. And my punishment? You were the one who punished me, Father."
"You exiled me to the moon... locking me there to rot alone in the vacuum of space as a penalty for my pathetic failure and zero utility."
Silence.
A heavy, suffocating silence violently gripped the interrogation room. The only frequencies detected were the faint hum of the fluorescent lights and Altair's shattered, ragged breathing.
The Emperor remained anchored to his chair. His golden eyes did not blink. He was actively processing the catastrophic data. His own sons, his flesh and blood, had torn the world and each other to pieces. And he, himself, had banished this exact son to the moon.
Suddenly, the absolute silence shattered. A violent, agonizing sob erupted from the depths of Altair's chest. His chassis began to shut down, as if his very soul was being forcibly extracted.
"I... I truly calculated that my lunar exile was the absolute worst fate I could suffer..." Altair whispered. His voice fractured under the weight of cosmic despair. "But... after they united and murdered you, Father... they were not satisfied with Earth. They targeted me. They ascended to the moon."
Altair began to convulse violently. His pitch-black eyes locked onto the empty void, hallucinating the exact moment all over again.
"They breached my stronghold... they captured me... and then they crucified me!" Altair shrieked, tears flooding his scarred face like a torrent. "And despite that, they refused to kill me! They wanted to utterly shatter my mind! They brought her... They brought my mother... Oria!"
The Emperor's eyes expanded by a fraction of a millimeter. He observed the complete psychological meltdown of his son.
"They stripped her of her garments... entirely!" Altair roared, his vocal cords tearing from the sheer volume. "They suspended her upon a colossal crucifixion frame directly in my line of sight! Then... then they began driving spears into her bare flesh! One spear after another!"
"Dozens of spears violently pierced her tissue, shredding her limbs, while she screamed and stared directly at me...! And I hung there, completely paralyzed, forced to watch her blood drown the lunar ice!"
"They butchered my mother in the most agonizing method conceivable right before my eyes, purely for their own entertainment and to enforce my absolute humiliation!"
Altair's words violently cut off. They mutated into a deafening wail that shook the structural integrity of the entire room.
Outside the steel interrogation chamber, the Wives were monitoring everything... And Oria felt the agonizing wails of her son violently sever the strings of her heart.
In that exact second, amidst the echoing screams and shattered weeping of Mirai Altair, the Emperor remained utterly silent.
But behind his terrifyingly calm eyes, in the absolute deepest abyss of his soul, a pitch-black hellfire ignited—a destructive rage unprecedented in all of history. He was already calculating his next tactical maneuver, finalizing exactly what he would execute now that Altair had surrendered his ultimate confession.