Chapter 178: Choice
My choice remained unchanged.
White light burst from the monitor and swallowed me.
I gladly accepted it and closed my eyes.
Soon, I felt strength surging throughout my entire body.
Power welled up from deep within my chest.
When I opened my eyes, I found myself back in the maze.
The scenery of the maze had changed from before.
I could now see the end of the maze that had once stretched endlessly.
A Gate radiating brilliant light.
I had cleared the second trial.
At last, I could escape this shitty place.
It felt quite different from when I had cleared the first trial.
This was a place I never wanted to return to again.
I immediately walked toward the white Gate.
I think I cleared it faster than expected.
I wonder how the others are doing.
I threw myself toward the Gate radiating brilliant light.
Soon, white light swallowed me, and the scenery before my eyes changed.
Wait, the scenery changed?
The trial was over, wasn’t it?
When I saw what lay before me, I was momentarily at a loss for words.
Red.
The sky, the ground—everything within sight was red.
Countless corpses were tangled together, forming mountains.
Death permeated the entire world.
What the hell was this?
Everything before me was surreal.
It felt like I was watching a scene from a movie.
But there was something that made me doubt my eyes even more than everything else.
Amid the utterly surreal scenery before me, there was one familiar thing.
A Gate.
A Gate whose sheer size was impossible to comprehend was collapsing.
Fragments of the Gate disintegrated into light and scattered throughout the world.
Without realizing it, I thought that I had to go toward the Gate.
No other thoughts entered my mind.
How long had I walked like that?
I saw someone standing before the enormous Gate.
Someone wearing armor over white robes.
He had driven his sword into the ground and hung his head low.
He looked like an Angel.
Countless questions swirled through my mind.
At that moment, the Angel who had planted his sword into the ground slowly raised his head.
Our eyes met.
“Metatron…….”
The Angel was crying.
“Huaak!”
“Kyaa!”
“What? What’s wrong?!”
I abruptly sat up and looked around.
Familiar faces surrounded me.
Helena stared at me with worried eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t look well.”
“Leave him be. He probably needs some time to organize his thoughts.”
“Well, the second trial was pretty rough.”
My mind was in turmoil.
First, I slowly retraced my memories.
I couldn’t understand where things had gone wrong or what exactly had happened.
Had I been dreaming?
I clearly remembered clearing the second trial.
Then what was it that I had just seen?
A battlefield of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, along with Angels and Demons.
And the collapsing ‘Gate’.
At first, I wondered whether the trial hadn’t actually ended.
But something about that didn’t make sense for a trial.
The second trial created its questions based on ‘my’ past.
But the scenery I had seen at the end was something I had never witnessed even once in my entire life.
Then had it really just been a simple dream?
Even so, the collapsing ‘Gate’ and the crying Angel I had seen there bothered me.
“Metatron…….”
It was a name I had never heard before, yet it somehow felt strangely familiar.
“Guys, are we sure Seongwoo is really okay? He even seems to be talking nonsense now.”
“The trial must have been that difficult for him. He’s someone who hides so many things, after all. We should take good care of him.”
Helena and Park Siwoo’s chatter beside me snapped me out of my thoughts.
“I can hear everything, you brats.”
“Feeling better now?”
“My mind was fine from the beginning. I just needed some time to think.”
“What could you possibly have been thinking about for that long?”
I stared at Park Siwoo and the others for a moment.
Despite their curt responses, they were looking at me with concern.
“Did any of you see something else after clearing the second trial?”
“After clearing the second trial?”
They tilted their heads at my question.
Was I the only one who had seen it?
Then my eyes met Eunha’s.
She didn’t avoid my gaze and stared directly at me.
Golden Eyes identical to mine.
I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“Do you have something to say?”
“No.”
She turned her head and approached Helena.
The distance between us had narrowed considerably since entering the Fragment, but I still couldn’t understand what went on inside her head.
She rarely expressed her emotions to begin with, and she hardly spoke unless necessary.
Still, she looked like she knew something.
Eunha was genetically identical to me, having been created by replicating my DNA, and she was also a Playable Character who would undergo her Awakening in the next trial.
In other words, it wouldn’t be particularly strange if she had seen what I had seen.
But it was awkward to interrogate her about every little detail.
After all, I didn’t even know whether what I had seen was a dream or something else.
What I had seen certainly bothered me, but ultimately, it had been nothing more than an illusion.
I pushed my thoughts about the vision aside and looked at the others.
What mattered right now was clearing the trial.
Only one trial remained.
Once we cleared that, we could meet Baek Hyun-joong.
Then I would finally be able to learn how to remove this damned End from myself.
It had to be that way.
Clearing the Fragment’s trials meant that the final war would begin.
And when it was all over, I wanted everyone to be smiling.
Even if I failed to find a way to remove the End from myself.
“Haa.”
“A sigh? That’s unlike you.”
Dan Chun-woo reacted to my sigh.
His eyes seemed clearer than before.
Come to think of it, they had all cleared the second trial before I did.
I didn’t bother wondering how.
It simply meant they had undergone far more emotional growth than I had.
Hadn’t they always told me the same thing?
Stop treating them like children.
Before us, the Gate leading to the next trial stood open.
I gathered Park Siwoo and the others.
“You’ve all worked hard until now. Once we deal with that trial, it’s over. We’ll be able to return to the original world.”
“…….”
Contrary to my expectation that they would react enthusiastically, their response was strangely lukewarm.
“What happened to all that complaining about wanting to leave? Why are you so quiet now? Don’t tell me you want to stay here longer.”
“Of course not.”
The response was immediate.
“Then why do you all look like that?”
“Because it feels like you’re still hiding something from us.”
“…….”
This time, I fell silent.
I had always known this day would come.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have had anything to say even if they had brought it up much earlier.
Even the incident with Oliver Raiders had been an extremely dangerous crisis.
Even from my own perspective, there were many suspicious things about me.
“I thought that if we waited, you’d eventually tell us. But throughout the three years we spent undergoing these trials, you never said anything.”
It wasn’t that they hadn’t brought it up because they were unaware.
They had simply waited for me to speak on my own.
Judging from everyone else’s reactions, they seemed to feel the same way.
I thought about it for a moment.
Should I tell them my secrets?
There were still things I had kept hidden from them.
The existence of the End and the fact that I was its host.
And the fact that this world was actually a game, while I was someone who had possessed a character within it.
None of those were things they would benefit from knowing.
And even if I didn’t tell them now, they would eventually learn about them naturally.
Knowing would do nothing to help them in the next trial.
If anything, it would only get in their way.
“Don’t be so impatient. Even if you don’t want to know, you’ll eventually find out naturally.”
Park Siwoo immediately objected.
“I don’t want to find out naturally. I want to hear the truths from your own mouth. As your friend.”
“.....”
For a moment, I was speechless.
‘As your friend.’
Those were words I had never once imagined I would actually hear in my life.
But his unwavering eyes seemed to be urging me to tell him the truth.
Seeing that, I sighed.
“Do you really want to know?”
It seemed a rather long story was about to begin.
Pandemonium’s Hidden Stronghold.
Five figures occupied the towering Thrones within.
Serpin, the Empress of Nightmares.
Lobo, the Beast King.
Tamuz, the Giant.
Kobal, the Sage of the Forest.
And their master, the Leader of Pandemonium.
The Leader of Pandemonium, who had begun recovering his strength after the battle against the Heavenly Demon, opened his eyes.
His gaze fell upon the High-ranking Executives.
The High-ranking Executives he had dispatched to break through that place as quickly as possible before the Gate’s seal was released were in terrible condition.
Every one of them bore considerable injuries.
“It seems you struggled greatly.”
At those words, all the High-ranking Executives lowered their heads deeply, expressing their shame.
The Leader of Pandemonium did not become angry.
He had expected this outcome.
The original plan had been to occupy the Academy in a single stroke and make contact with the Gate the moment its seal was released.
But as always, someone had prevented things from going according to plan.
That damned traitor, Devil Knight.
Just as he had disrupted the Heavenly Secrets, he had accurately predicted their actions and prepared countermeasures.
The Sword Emperor, Oliver Raiders, and Chun Ga-eun.
Each of them possessed strength surpassing even Pandemonium’s High-ranking Executives.
Under their protection, the Academy had still not fallen.
They were certainly troublesome opponents.
But did he know?
No matter how desperately he struggled, Fate could not ultimately be changed.
In the end, he was nothing more than a rogue rampaging along a track whose destination had already been determined.
Rrrrrumble!
At that moment, the space shook with an inexplicable vibration.
A vibration that should have been impossible inside the Hidden Stronghold, which was isolated from the original world.
It was a vibration they had experienced before.
After all, this was the second time.
“The countdown has begun.”
The Leader of Pandemonium spoke.
Everyone present knew.
This was the signal that the Gate’s seal was being released.
This was the second time.
Only one remained.
Soon, the mass of Demonic Energy that served in place of the Leader of Pandemonium’s physical body began to surge.
The tremendous waves of power threatened to collapse the space within the Hidden Stronghold.
The original purpose of the Hidden Stronghold was the recovery of the Leader of Pandemonium.
Although the restoration of his power had remained incomplete due to Devil Knight’s interference ever since the battle against the Heavenly Demon.
The time of the Prophecy had arrived.
That meant the egg—the shell known as the Hidden Stronghold that had protected him from the outside world—had fulfilled its purpose.
The enormous sphere of Demonic Energy erupted with tremendous power and began breaking apart the cocoon known as the Hidden Stronghold.
At the sight, the High-ranking Executives knelt and welcomed the return of their king.
Soon, the space within the Hidden Stronghold began collapsing, and its fragments were absorbed into the mass of Demonic Energy that constituted their leader’s body.
With each fragment absorbed, the power emanating from him grew even more immense.
Eventually, only a condensed mass of Demonic Energy remained upon the ground.
Crack.
With a sharp cracking sound, the sphere of Demonic Energy split apart, and someone emerged from within.
“Today, we take the Academy.”
In a single instant, the scales of the deadlocked war tipped to one side.