Dimensional Descent

Leonel dropped the final skull from his hands. It looked so small in his palms, so insignificant.

His head tilted up to the air. The white of his eyes had become entirely violet, his irises a deathly sheen of crimson. His face looked just as demonic as the rest of his body, his vision sharper than it had ever been.

The Ancestor was right to worry; it only took a moment and a single glance for Leonel to see through what he wanted to see through. He took a step forward, ready to pursue them, but before he could, his raised foot stopped, slowly lowering back to the ground.

Before him, a man wearing valiant golden armor had appeared. That stalwart face, that determined expression, that complex look, there was only one person it could be. It was none other than Leonel’s Uncle Montez.

Leonel didn’t say anything, he simply looked at the man. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, time wasn’t an issue. He had all the time in the world to send everyone in this Dimensional Verse to hell. He didn’t need to use much effort to find them again, and then again. There was no one that could hide from him, nothing.

”It seems you haven’t lost your rationality,” Montez said lightly, realizing that his nephew had no intention of speaking to him first.

He didn’t blame him. He had done nothing as his own elder brother died, but there was truly nothing he could have done. He wasn’t as good as Velasco, he wasn’t as strong, he was always chasing after his elder brother’s footsteps, and yet continuously only able to watch him get further and further away.

Leonel had seen that frustration on his Uncle Montez’s face before. It happened the day he taught him his grandfather’s way of the spear. He had tried to paint a spear, and it had looked beyond perfect in Leonel’s eyes. But after he had finished, drained and sweating, Montez shredded it to pieces, enraged by the result.

Back then, Leonel could tell that if not for the fact his nephew was right before him, Montez’s reaction would have been one of even greater frustration.

Not long after that, Montez had left Leonel to his own devices, going off to who knows where, and now he had suddenly appeared before Leonel once again.

”I’m perfectly rational,” Leonel spoke slowly.

His voice carried an edge of biting cold to it that didn’t quite seem to be human. But just hearing it made Montez completely shocked. He had truly thought that Leonel had completely lost his mind, even the echo of the howl still reverberated in his ears. Just to stand so close to Leonel, over 50% of his Force was used to protect his orifices so that he didn’t vibrate to death.

But this... this made the reality worse than he had originally thought. He thought that maybe he could try to risk his life to wake Leonel up, or maybe help him to awaken enough rationality to stop this madness. But reality was very much different.

Suddenly he understood. The closest Domain to Leonel hadn’t been the Cloud Race at all. In reality, it was the Human Domain. If he had lost his mind, why would he go to the Cloud Race first and now the Human Domain? If all he wanted to do was kill indiscriminately, what point would there have been in going so far away? He had never lost his mind at all, he wanted to kill, he knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn’t care much about the innocence of those that fell beneath his blade.

”Leonel, you’re killing women and children.”

”So what?” Leonel asked.

Montez didn’t know what to say. He had never been good with words. Someone like Leonel was already far beyond him in this regard. The only saving grace was that it seemed that Leonel didn’t have any intention of killing him, but even that was still up in the air. Someone so cold, so distant, so unfeeling... seemed to be the kind of person that could do anything.

”Why not just target those responsible? I’ve heard about what you’ve done in the past before, I know the kind of young man you are. You gave up the chance of having two Ability Indexes all for the same because you saw the humanity in the child of another race, what you’re doing now is not like you.”

”Wrong. I didn’t kill that child because the ability was worthless to me, I had no need for it, it served me no purpose, no function. The trash of the Void Palace would never be able to match up to me regardless and it was more worth it to gain a favor from the Rapax than it was to obtain something I didn’t need.”

Montez was shocked by these words. Looking into Leonel’s eyes, he didn’t know how much of it was true and how much of it was nonsense. But what struck him was that Leonel didn’t seem like the type that would lie in this sort of circumstance, what would be the purpose?

Montez shook his head, gritting his teeth.

He was on his backfoot. He was very much used to interacting with Leonel as the one in the superior position, but now he could hardly tell who was the uncle and who was the nephew. He almost felt that Leonel had simply casually allowed him to take the lead in the past because he felt that it was what most others would do.

Just how much of his nephew’s personality was real and how much of it was manufactured for the sake of appeasing those around him? How much of his charisma was real versus fake? How many of his actions were just calculated chess moves to make those around him feel the way he wanted them to?

Montez didn’t know what to do or say, his flustered appearance only growing as Leonel raised his foot once more to leave.

Suddenly, his mouth opened.

”Aina is pregnant!”