Chapter 182: 1% Possibility
Park Siwoo exchanged glances with the others.
None of them looked well.
The conversation between Baek Hyun-joong and Yoo Seongwoo had simply been too shocking.
Even after hearing it, it was honestly still hard to believe.
A story from primordial times about the conflict between angels and demons.
But what was even more shocking than that was…….
Yoo Seongwoo’s hand was trembling faintly.
His expression was deeply distorted as he breathed heavily.
“Seongwoo……”
Park Siwoo tried to approach him, but he couldn’t.
Helena grabbed Park Siwoo’s wrist.
She looked at him and shook her head.
Yoo Seongwoo began walking.
He slowly moved away from Park Siwoo’s group.
“He’ll need some time alone. So will we.”
“Haa……”
A heavy sigh escaped.
They already knew that the End was sealed inside Yoo Seongwoo.
They had discussed it with one another before coming here.
Yoo Seongwoo had calmly explained his circumstances without giving up hope.
He had said that once they met Baek Hyun-joong, they might be able to find some kind of solution.
But the reality before them was unbearably cruel.
“Is there really no way?”
“Even Hero Baek Hyun-joong said there isn’t. How could there possibly be one?”
“Then are you saying we should just return to our original world like this and kill Seongwoo with our own hands?”
“There’s no way we could do that!”
Helena shouted angrily.
Dan Chun-woo, who had been listening, spoke.
“It is something we must do. He said so himself. If there is no other way, we must kill him.”
“Do you really have to say something that obnoxious?”
Helena glared at Dan Chun-woo with narrowed eyes.
But Dan Chun-woo remained completely unfazed, and his words were sharp.
“Then what can we do for him in this situation? Do you think some pathetic consolation will work on him? Until now, he has devoted everything he had to saving the Academy and saving himself.”
“……”
“All we can do is respect his decision.”
Neither Park Siwoo nor Helena could argue with that.
Baek Hyun-joong, who had been listening to their conversation, wore an unreadable expression.
His gaze turned toward Yoo Seongwoo.
Yoo Seongwoo stood far away from them, lost in thought.
Leaning against the Gate, Yoo Seongwoo raised his head.
The enormous Gate, whose sheer scale was impossible to comprehend, filled his vision.
At first, he had worried about what questions he should ask, yet now that he had received all the answers, his mind had only grown more complicated.
“Haa.”
It was a moment when he desperately wanted a cigarette.
He had learned that the true identity of the SS-rank skill 【Lamb】 was Metatron, but nothing had changed.
The power possessed by 【Lamb】 was not something that merely allowed him to borrow the power of demons.
It was only a powerful shield and safeguard that protected him from the End.
It had no effect beyond that.
The anger that had burned fiercely in his chest subsided, replaced by an overwhelming emptiness and helplessness.
“Was I always this attached to my life?”
He had clearly moved away from the others for a while to let go of his lingering attachments, yet the more he thought, the deeper those attachments seemed to become.
“I suppose I’m not the kind of person suited to some noble word like sacrifice.”
“I understand how you feel.”
Before he knew it, Baek Hyun-joong was sitting beside him.
“I’m sorry about earlier. I got worked up because I thought my last hope had been shattered.”
“I understand that too.”
At first, Yoo Seongwoo had been furious.
Because he thought Baek Hyun-joong had deceived him.
Baek Hyun-joong’s manner of speaking was more than capable of causing misunderstandings.
His brusque attitude, as though Yoo Seongwoo’s death were only natural.
But after thinking about it carefully, Yoo Seongwoo realized that Baek Hyun-joong had never intended it that way.
Before Yoo Seongwoo, he had been the hero who ended the Great War and the very person who sacrificed himself to seal the Gate.
In a way, he was a senior who had already experienced what Yoo Seongwoo now faced.
Looking at Baek Hyun-joong beside him, Yoo Seongwoo asked,
“How could you sacrifice yourself for the world?”
The answer he received was disappointing.
“There’s no such thing as a way to humbly accept sacrifice.”
“You seem to be missing quite a lot of things.”
“Well, what can I do? That’s the truth. Who in this world would want to throw away their own life? I simply did the best I could in that situation.”
“Is that so.”
“Yeah. Do you have any idea how much I left behind in reality? If there had been a way for me to stay alive and stop the Demonic Humans, I would’ve chosen it. There simply wasn’t.”
‘The best I could.’
Hearing Baek Hyun-joong’s words, Yoo Seongwoo fell deep into thought.
Suddenly, a thought occurred to him.
‘Have I truly done my best?’
Of course he had.
Yoo Seongwoo was confident that among the countless choices placed before him, he had always chosen something beyond even the best possible option.
But what about now?
The End hadn’t even revived yet.
And yet here he was, sitting around miserably and wallowing in self-pity.
How pathetic was that?
Yoo Seongwoo remembered when he had first possessed the game.
He had become the unfortunate Final Boss of a world where a Happy Ending might not even exist.
Back then, had he simply collapsed in despair and done nothing?
No.
He had struggled and fought desperately to change anything he could.
And the results were right before his eyes.
He looked at the countless screens displayed by the Gate.
People who should have died were still alive.
The Playable Characters beside him were powerful.
Wasn’t this situation closer to a Happy Ending than ever before?
He had no grand sense of duty to save the universe or anything like that.
He simply had to do his best.
Just as always, he only had to do what he was best at.
Struggle.
Fight desperately.
One of the countless screens displayed by the Gate caught his eye.
An empty hospital room.
Yoo Seongwoo’s eyes lit up when he saw it.
It was different from when he had used it, but the scenery was unforgettable.
It was the hospital room he had stayed in until before he was transported into the game.
Something swelled within his chest.
It almost felt as though he had been given proof that his arrival in this world had not been mere coincidence.
Yoo Seongwoo rose from his seat.
Then he bowed his head toward Baek Hyun-joong.
“May you finally find peaceful rest.”
Baek Hyun-joong gave a faint smile and patted his shoulder.
“At last, I’ll be able to rest. I’ll leave what comes next to you. And don’t give up. I told you there was no way to stop the revival of the End. I never said that you absolutely had to die.”
At those words, Yoo Seongwoo felt sparks erupt inside his mind.
Baek Hyun-joong’s body gradually began to sink into a cluster of light.
Seeing that, Park Siwoo and the others hurried over.
“What’s happening all of a sudden?”
“Could this be an attack from Pandemonium?”
Baek Hyun-joong smiled faintly at them.
“It’s nothing like that. I’m simply returning to where I was meant to be.”
The others’ faces filled with shock.
“My physical body already perished during the Great War.”
Baek Hyun-joong was not alive.
He had merely bound his soul to the seal of the Gate in order to maintain it.
Just like Lia.
He had spent an unimaginably long time alone within the seal.
The density of time in reality differed from that inside the Fragment, and decades had passed in reality since Baek Hyun-joong’s death.
It was impossible to even estimate how much time he had spent here.
But now that the trials of the Fragments had been cleared and the seal on the Gate was being undone, he could finally find rest.
“Yoo Seongwoo. I have a gift for you.”
When he extended his hand, light burst forth and a girl appeared.
Yoo Seongwoo’s eyes widened at the sight of her.
“Wol-ah?”
The child he had asked Cheon Ga-eun to search for after she betrayed Pandemonium, yet whom they had ultimately failed to find.
To Yoo Seongwoo, Wol-ah was practically his final connection to the Heavenly Demon.
“The feather. You were the one who left it behind.”
“I thought you would’ve figured that out much sooner.”
At those words, Yoo Seongwoo smiled awkwardly.
Truthfully, even after seeing the feather, Wol-ah had never crossed his mind.
Baek Hyun-joong gave Yoo Seongwoo and the others his final farewell.
“A 1% possibility. That is the path you must walk.”
With those words, he scattered into countless motes of light.
Where Baek Hyun-joong had disappeared,
Yoo Seongwoo and the others observed a brief moment of silence for the great hero of the previous generation.
Chaos erupted throughout the Academy.
Kuuuuung!
The earth shook with a tremendous tremor.
Every time Tamuz the Giant took a step, the buildings around him shattered like toys.
Screams and despairing voices rang out from all directions.
Serphin’s formless nightmares shattered the minds of countless people.
The howls of beasts echoed.
The Beast King Robo’s kin appeared and began carrying out a massacre.
The enormous tree summoned by Kobal, the Sage of the Forest, extended its roots deep into the Academy.
The Leader of Pandemonium watched the sight with satisfaction.
The promised land he had returned to after several decades.
History that had repeated itself time and again was unfolding once more.
The Great War had occurred three times until now.
In the ancient past, when all continents were still one, there had been the Great War between angels and demons before the ‘Gate,’ the crossroads of worlds, was destroyed.
Then came the Great War between heroes and Demonic Humans, when Pandemonium, which had remained hidden for an unimaginably long time, finally revealed itself.
And now came the war that would become the last.
He had witnessed every one of those wars with his own two eyes.
Memories of the distant past resurfaced.
When the Heart of the End had been sealed by Metatron, he had opened his eyes.
It had been a long wait.
Not everything had proceeded according to plan, but in the end, all of it had merely been part of the process leading toward the time of prophecy.
Watching their desperate struggles had been entertaining in its own way.
At that moment, an enormous slash came flying from somewhere.
A colossal slash that tore across the world as it advanced.
Its sheer size rivaled even Tamuz the Giant.
The slash aimed directly at the Leader of Pandemonium.
A killing sword intended to slay only a single existence.
By the time the other Pandemonium executives noticed it, they were already too late.
Clang!
The Leader swung his black hand and deflected it.
The deflected slash changed direction and split open the grounds of the Academy.
The Leader’s lips curved upward.
He saw a welcome face.
“Sword Emperor.”
“…….”
The Sword Emperor did not respond to the Leader’s words.
The culprit behind the Great War several decades ago.
The Leader of Pandemonium, who had supposedly perished together with Baek Hyun-joong, now stood before him.
“So you were alive after all.”
In truth, the Sword Emperor had suspected the Leader’s survival even before Yoo Seongwoo told him.
“You have grown quite old. It has been difficult to hear news about you.”
“It seems I’m not the only one who has aged.”
The Leader of Pandemonium looked down at his hand.
Blood flowed from the hand that had blocked the Sword Emperor’s slash.
‘Is it because I haven’t fully recovered my strength?’
The Sword Emperor drew his sword and pointed it toward him.
“You have no idea how long this old man has waited for this moment.”
Baek Hyun-joong, who had ended the previous Great War and been revered as the hero of heroes, no longer existed, while the sprouts of the new generation had yet to fully mature.
That was why the Sword Emperor had prepared.
Continuously, ever since the end of the Great War.
For a moment exactly like this.
Even if today proved to be the day his life ended, the Sword Emperor intended to cut down the existence standing before him.
Brilliant light erupted from the Sword Emperor’s blade.
Kugugugugu!
At that moment, along with a tremor that shook Heaven and Earth, an enormous pillar of light erupted from the center of the Academy.