1576 What Ifs
Nothing made sense.
"It's a lie, it's a lie, it's all a lie!"
Varian punched the mirror, breaking it into pieces.
He didn't even respond to the pain the special glass dug into his palm and spilled the blood or when the blood glowed with a brilliant light and vaporized.
"No, no, no." He crouched his head and knelt down.
There was no power in his knees and no confidence in his voice. Despite being the strongest he had ever been, Varian felt the weakest.
"B-But there's no other way, no other way..."
He extensively dug into the dungeon records after becoming the ruler. The data revealed nothing. The case was weird.
No one really understood why the fire wolf managed to do what it did. They gave it the angle of unlucky coincidence. But if really viewed through the rational lens, then there's no way for such a thing to happen.
They lived in a shabby area, yes. However, it wasn't so shabby that a dungeon creature would just bypass every security measurey implemented by the city guard and attack.
In the first place, while dungeon breaks were rare and when they happened, the creatures faced significat injuries for breaking out of their supposed cages.
But the wolf was at its finest condition.
The application of space and time used for the dungeon break was so exquisite that Varian couldn't even imagine the mastery one would need. Forget aiming for it, the feat seemed beyond imagination.
A being of such skill and mastery in space and time?
And not just that, Humanity had been hidden away from the eye of civilization. No one from the Jai Empire should know about its existence save for the abyssals who learned it by pure accident.
Which divine ranker of the Jai could learn about a place as remote as this which had nothing of value for them except the slivers?
But if it's him, if it's the man who reached the peak of
"God Emperor…"
Varian pulled his hair and blood leaked out of his scalp. His teeth chattered and ground against each other.
"God Emperor!"
The eyes which were hollow and confused just a few seconds ago were now glowing with anger and hatred.
[Host, it's not the best time to be ang—]
"You will regret it." Varian punched the mirrors in front of him without even giving them a glance and shouted at the top of his lungs. "You will regret everything!"
[Watch ou—]
"Huh?"
Following Logos' warning, Varian tilted his head.
A beam of blue light flashed on his right, burning away his ear and the half of his cheek.
Varian stepped back in vigilance.
As if time had been reversed, the shards of the broken mirror pieced back and from it, a figure emerged.
His hand was glowing with the familiar blue light.
Almost at the same time, the three-dozen mirrors he broke all were restored to their original state with a man coming out of them each.
"You…"
Forty 'Varian', each born in a different time period in the same space.
Ten were ordinary humans of the pre-blink era.
Ten were devas.
Ten were mortal rankers in the initial phase of humanity's aura discovery.
And the final ten were…
"Why are you four wearing the military dress of Pala? And you six, Nexus? What's going on?"
Varian didn't jump to fight with his alt selves and asked in a calm voice. At least as calm as he could make in his current situation. It sounded like a threat to the audience and they collectively frowned.
"Do you dare question my loyalty, imposter?" Varian, the military saint of Palastepped forward.
"How dare you insult my alleigance? Nexus is not something you can insult." The high-ranking soldier of Nexus didn't fall behind in stepping up.
Varian's eyes widened his eyes in disbelief. Did he got brainwashed if he's born in other time periods or what?
"And what did it do you for?"
""They gave us refugee when solar system was occupied by abyssals!""
Both of them yelled at the same time and then turned to each other, their jaws dropping in confusion.
"Oob transferred you all out?" Varian lowered his head and muttered. "To Pala and Nexus?"
Boom!
""Don't insult the holy messenger!""
A beam of red and blue light reached Varian who dodged them with ease.
"Yeah, yeah. The guy with a halo and wings?"
The two of them looked furious and launched even more attacks.
""He died to protect us!""
Varian's eyes narrowed and his gaze moved to a floating text.
[All The Alternate Timelines Are Merely Calculations. The 'What Ifs' created by extreme extrapolation. They do not exist. There is only one space, only one time.]
His breath relaxed and he clenched his fist to finish them off all at once. But his clenched fist loosened and he lowered his power.
It'd be a real shame if he couldn't fight the different versions of himself, even if they're mere creations of a complex time machine.
And so, the next few minutes, an intense fight took place.
Varian fought against himself in the most bloody, brutal and ruthless manner. And he won each version of himself using equal power and path as his opponent.
They were all killed after defeat without mercy.
Finally, he reached the normal versions of himself, those that were not even awakeners.
Instead of fighting them, he exchanged the experiences they went through, the valuable insights they gathered through their lives and their philosophy of life.
And then, they too died, but painlessly.
After ending them, Varian raised his head and closed his eyes.
"Logos."
[Yes.]
"Did you know?"
[…Yes.]
"I see. I guess it can't be helped. No wonder you're afraid of him." Varian shook his head with a helpless smile. "Did he plan everything?"
[No. It's not like that. The interference is causal. He doesn't even need to know your location for it. Perhaps he does not know about you until you really emerged.
But what he's thinking, what he's planning…no one knows.]
