Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 146: That Could Be

CRASH!

A broken flower vase.

Trembling hands.

Falling tears.

A delicate porcelain vase, once holding beautiful arranged flowers, hit the floor and exploded into a hundred jagged shards. Water darkened the rug, petals scattered.

Cecilia stood amidst the wreckage, her body locked in a tremor that seemed to originate from her very bones. Her hands were trembling violently, the fine muscles in her fingers twitching with a life of their own.

Tears fell. They tracked down her pale cheeks unimpeded, dripping from her chin onto the front of her dressing gown, leaving dark, spreading stains.

She didn’t sob. She couldn’t. The breath was locked in her chest, a solid, painful block of ice.

Her vision swam, the elegant script on the paper in her grasp blurring into sinister, inky worms. The message had been delivered moments ago, a sealed and nondescript report from Angelica’s deepest, most reliable source in the capital.

It was the confirmation she’d asked for, the truth she’d sought.

One trembling hand clutched at the edge of a heavy oak table, knuckles bleaching white with the force of her grip. But the lurching, staggering motion to reach out had been the one that sent the vase flying.

Now, she stood by one hand to solid wood, while the other held a fluttering piece of parchment that contained a black hole, her bare feet perilously close to the glistening shards of porcelain.

The paper in her grasp... the piece of a puzzle she’d been desperately hoping she’d misassembled. It detailed the meeting. The location. The witnesses. And the topic.

Dragon Lord.

Remains.

Ditch.

Weapons.

"Ha."

She sneered.

So that was what would’ve happened.

Either this vile plan sprang from a genuine prophetic vision granted by the gods to Ruby, sacrileging the title of a Saintess itself...

Or.

Or it was knowledge Ruby had carried back from a timeline that had already occurred. A memory of a world where Oathran had died that ignoble death, where his body had been plundered, where his essence had been forged into tools.

A future-that-once-was, now a blueprint for a future-that-could-be.

Cecilia closed her eyes shut. Both options were abominations.

"Cecilia...!"

CRACKLE!

Lightning in stark daylight.

Eastiel’s voice cracked, followed by the thunder of his footsteps as he charged into the room from the adjoining chamber. He took in the sight of her, not even seeing the shattered vase, the water, the petals, the paper clutched in her death-grip.

His arms wrapped around her, sweeping her up against his chest. "Baby, what’s wrong?" he asked against her hair as he lifted her, carrying her swiftly away from the glittering shards on the floor.

"Ha—" A soundless, wretched gasp was all she could manage, a half-sob choking out.

"Baby?" He laid her gently on the edge of the bed, his own heart hammering against his ribs. The corners of his vision tinged with red. Cecilia was in pain. And he—he couldn’t see the enemy. He couldn’t fight it.

It was a new facet of wrath. She had known anger. Sharp debating anger, fierce protective anger, the cold calculated anger of strategy.

But this—

This was a dizzying wrath. It was a nausea of the soul. It made the room tilt and her head swim, a vertigo induced by the sheer, precipitous drop into depravity the world had just revealed.

"Baby, tell me, please," Eastiel begged, dropping to his knees before her. His face was pale, etched with a horror that mirrored her own. The Sense Sharing was flooding him with too much... too much—

CRACKLE! BLAST!!!

Another lightning struck the capital’s sky.

His large hands were suddenly delicate, frantic. He caught one of her bare feet, his thumbs running over her instep, his eyes scanning for any physical wound, a cut from the porcelain, a scratch, anything he could clean, bandage, and fix.

Anything.

Anything to stop this pain.

"Ah—" Cecilia gasped, tearing itself from a place of raw agony. The wrath painted her features in terrifying strokes. Her cheeks, already wet, seemed to channel the flood of her tears into every fine line and crease of her anguished expression, making her grief luminously detailed.

CRACKLE—

Closer now.

Outside, high above the sprawling capital of Iondora, the clear sky convulsed. A spear of white-gold lightning jagged down from the empty blue.

It struck so very close.

On the streets below, people stumbled, clutching their ears. Horses reared in their traces, whinnying in panic. Merchants dropped their wares, their day bustle freezing into shock as they stared at the perfectly clear, lightning-struck sky.

A murmur of superstitious terror rippled through the crowd.

An omen, a divine warning, the wrath of a god.

Inside the chamber, Eastiel felt the power tear from him, a direct bleed from his soul into the sky. He couldn’t control it. This wave of emotion, her emotion, amplified and reflected through their bond...

Stop it—

It felt like the need to unmake all, to reduce the city below to glass and ash, simply because the world contained the source of her pain.

But why? What? The not-knowing was a torture worse than any wound.

"Baby, I beg of you," Eastiel rasped, his own tears now cutting tracks through the worry on his face. He clutched her hands, his own trembling as violently as hers. The lightning was his, but the storm was hers.

"TELL ME!"

***

Thousands upon thousands of miles to the north, where the eternal winter began to grudgingly give way to rocky, frost-bitten plains, Arkai Dawnoro stopped dead in his tracks.

He stood at the precipice of a vast, snowy flatland, the last pure expanse of his territory before the land dipped toward the greener, more temperate valleys leading south to the Iondora heartland.

One moment, he was a dark silhouette against the white, his stride eating up the miles.

But the next, he was on his knees.

"Ah—"

It was a collapse. A white-hot lance of wrath, alien, dizzying, and all-consuming, slammed into his chest, followed by a psychic blast of pain that felt like his skull was cracking open.

It wasn’t his own. It was a wildfire rushing through the bond.

"Cecilia—?"

He gasped her name into the frozen air, but the word was swallowed by the sudden, violent awakening of the land around him. The pure wrath resonated with the dormant fury of the north. Of him. Of his whole world.

The wind howled. It ripped across the plain, scouring up great sheets of powder snow in a blinding, furious vortex. The grey sky darkened in moments, a blizzard conjured from a clear day by the force of shared agony.

Pain and wrath were a clarion call.

In a burst of displaced snow and shredding fabric, his human form dissolved. In its place stood the massive, obsidian-furred wolf, his eyes burning like coals in the sudden storm.

Wrath given flesh and fang was a magnified wolf form beyond its usual formidable scale. Muscles coiled and rippled beneath the jet-black pelt like tectonic plates shifting, each sinew a taut cable of contained violence.

He seemed to swell against the very air, his silhouette blotting out more of the storm-whipped sky, a living shadow grown to eclipse the sun.

Power radiated from him, making the driving snow sizzle and vanish before it could touch his fur. This was no longer the Alpha of the Winter’s Keep running, this had become an incarnation of vengeance taking its first, world-devouring stride.

With a snarl that cut through the gale, he pushed off from the ground, powerful muscles coiling and releasing. He didn’t follow the road. He ran in a straight line, a black arrow shot across the whitening world, south towards the epicenter of the cataclysm.

What was this?

What?

Cecilia...?

He had to arrive. Faster than the storm. Faster than the lightning.

Faster than whatever had broken her.