Someone much kinder than Zarek might have felt bad about what he was seeing. But honestly speaking, Zarek had never claimed to be such a person, and even if he was, he had every right to hate Thalion's guts.
Usually, he liked to get revenge on the sort of people that would do him wrong. But this Thalion was, well…
Pathetic.
It wasn't even worth his time.
He didn't even suffer any hardship. First, he tried to use Zarek to satisfy his curiosity, and then from a mere aura alone, he had broken his own brain.
Was an Eclipse Threat really such a shocking thing?
Zarek was about to say something when his eyes flashed.
He looked to his bracelet.
All this time, he had been doing his best not to pay too much attention to Priya. It wasn't that he wasn't worried about her, but he knew that he would have no chance to focus if he was paying attention to her, and he also knew that there was nothing at all he could do even if she was in danger.
However, right now…
…
Priya huddled to her knees, tears streaking her face. She didn't rock back and forth, and she no longer sobbed, but she was staring out into the distance.
It wasn't a fun thing to experience your own death. It was even less fun to experience three of them in a single sitting. And even less fun than that to realize the cause of it every time was often your own foolishness.
The echoes of Belladoll's words in her ears felt especially grating right now.
She had said that Zarek often protected her, and the only times she died were when she insisted on doing something she knew that he wouldn't approve of.
It was one thing to hear of such a thing in a figurative sense. It was another thing to hear it as a hypothetical of what could have happened after you survived another foolish choice. But… to see the end result play out three separate times, again and again…
Was she useless?
In her first life, she died because she followed her father when Zarek disapproved. It was her father—how could she refuse? She knew that he was just doing it to help.
But his naivete had gotten her killed, and there was little that Zarek could do about it. She had seen the helplessness on his face, but none of it had mattered at all.
In their second life, she could see how distraught Zarek was about it. She had seen that look on his face, how he begged and pleaded with her to believe him that an apocalypse was coming.
It was the sort of foolish thing without forethought that Zarek would never do normally, and she had rejected him because of that. She had thought that he was crazy, that he had lost his mind. She had tried to psychoanalyze him, thinking that maybe his childhood had left him with more trauma than she knew.
By the time the apocalypse came around, she was too embarrassed by the way that she had treated him. Although she had been trying to help him in her own way, what she had actually ended up doing was leaving him alone in his time of need, forcing him to weather the storm, carrying everything on his shoulders all on his own.
In that life, they didn't end up together. And because of her, Zarek ended up sleeping with Belladoll to fill a void she had left. And then she had the audacity to get mad at him for it when she was the one that had left him alone in the first place.
She could see Zarek's attempts to protect her from a distance, how he joined the government even though it was the last thing he ever wanted to do.
He had always been a free spirit. He didn't like the chains or the commands of others.
His growth had been restricted because of that, and his second life had ended up being his shortest because of her. Once again, her father's foolish naivete had ended up costing the both of them. There were only so many enemies they could face from the outside without also suffering from pig-like teammates on the inside as well.
And then came her third life.
Zarek wanted to fix it all. He didn't tell her about things in advance. He just tried to nurture her as best he could, grooming her to become far more athletic and coordinated than she had been in any of their previous lives.
He did his best, as he always did, and this time they were together for the long haul. He never left her side.
But once again, she insisted on helping her father. Even though Zarek disapproved, feeling that binding themselves to the government was a mistake, she was stuck between two stubborn men.
Her father insisted that maintaining the former structure of the world was the right way, that they should do things by democracy, that the rule of law would prevail.
They led crusades against the gangs trying to overtake the government, and it was in one of these many battles for the sake of the government that they were betrayed and she was captured by the Angels.
Those were some of her darkest days—sitting in those torture chambers as they forced her to use her powers for their goals again and again, her father once again becoming a weakness they pressed on.
She knew that out there, somewhere, Zarek was fighting to get her back, and that only broke her more and more every day. Until finally, she was pushed too far and died a tragic death.
Her—maybe one of the strongest 1,000 combatants on the whole of Earth—dying so pitifully in a fluorescent white lab filled with stainless steel, every ounce of her energy being peeled away by Suki one experiment after another until she had nothing to give.
It was always her fault. It was always her who dragged Zarek down.
The silent tears fell in heavier streams.