I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 31: The Prophecy of Delft.

Even though he really didn’t want to admit to it, having a meal, especially something he liked, with people he didn’t need to pretend to be someone else, felt good.

Maybe too good.

He wondered what kind of horrors the world was going to throw at him later to make up for this.

To be fair, he was already battling with a horror greater than anything he could have ever met.

Human politics.

The disgusting thing was involving him in its affairs now.

They didn’t really speak about anything else for a while after they finished the meal, Silas went to dispose of the trash, while Virginia and Amari stayed with him.

Aris was a silent person by nature, true. But for the first time in a while, he was starting to get tired of the silence. He didn’t really understand why, or how it had started, but ever since he woke up after that short nap at his house, he noticed that he was feeling exceptionally social.

"How long do you think we’ll have to wait?" He was sitting on the bed now. He should’ve gotten out, but he wasn’t really ready to say goodbye to the surprisingly soft mattress.

"Probably until morning." Amari was the one who answered, who was resting her head on the now empty table, still looking at the drawn curtains around the Aureate’s bed.

The professionals had all left by the time they were done eating, it was just them four of them and Regulus Au Nyx in the intensive care unit. There were several of what looked like tubes protruding in and out of the mans body through various holes, and there was a few stands of drips, most likely nutrients, surrounding his bed.

Aris couldn’t help but wonder how an Aureate had survived in a dungeon like that.

True, Regulus Au Nyx was one of the first ever S ranks. But that was the extent of it. Even having reality shaping powers, they really didn’t have the research or training opportunities that the current era had. So the gap between them was big, big enough to not be able to survive in a dungeon like that.

And yet, here he was. Alive... well, barely alive.

But alive nevertheless. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

Virginia was looking at the bed too now.

No doubt, she knew more than both Aris and Amari combined did, and she definitely was holding back information. But he trusted her, if anything, the only person he could actively trust in this room was Virginia. So anything that she was holding back, he knew that she would eventually tell him.

Then there was the problem with the Aberrant dungeons.

Too complicated, he decided.

Thinking about it could wait until he had more information. Now that he was an S rank, he could easily access information and records that he previously couldn’t have even imagined about.

Silas had joined them after a while, which Virginia took as the signal to start briefing them about what was going to happen.

"Right now, the association is most probably discussing about how to deal with tidal wave of surprises they just got." She put her hand up and started counting. "One, they got a new S rank who also happens to be the last remaining Ahsborne. Two, this same S rank has somehow been involved in two Aberrant dungeon clearing two days apart. Three, the most important point, an Aureate, a lineage that is not supposed to exist today, has reappeared inside one of the Aberrant dungeons that was cleared by the newly awakened Ashborne. Four, there are now four individuals, the same amount from the prophecy of Delft now involved deeply with the affairs of the world, each of them a distinguished S rank."

She put her hand down, taking turns to look at each of them.

"You see where I’m going with this?"

Silas answered first.

"They’re going to use him for propaganda."

The silence settled deeply in between the four of them.

True, that the things that had happened in the last few days was enough to change the tides of world politics.

But this was still a world where dungeons and awakened existed. So it was fairly expected, for a day to different than the other.

What’s actually concerning was the people who had access to this information, and how they were going to use it.

It wasn’t unheard of, for the association to bind awakened in shackles made of propaganda so tight that some recklessly jumped into dungeons in order to find respite from the suffocation, only to end up dying one way or another.

The same was going to be true for the Aureate, if they didn’t step up.

An Aureate, in the simplest of terms, was someone acknowledge by mana to rule it.

It was a ridiculous thing to say, especially considering the state that Aris had found Regulus Au Nyx in—missing a hand, unconscious, held together by tubes and nutrient drips in an intensive care unit at three in the morning. Not exactly the image the word rule conjured.

And yet the classification existed for a reason.

Mana, in its natural state, was indifferent. It didn’t respond to want or will or the particular desperation of someone trying very hard to make it do something. It responded to compatibility, to the specific quality of an individual’s resonance, presence, the way water responded to the shape of the vessel it moved through. Every awakened had that resonance to some degree. S-ranks had it to a degree that made them exceptional.

An Aureate had it to a degree that made the mana itself change its behavior.

Not just respond. Change. Reorganize. Orient. The classified literature used the word acknowledge because the scientists writing it had run out of precise language and landed on a word that was embarrassingly accurate. The mana acknowledged an Aureate the way a room acknowledged the arrival of something that had always been its center without knowing it.

And the implications of it, politically, was not subtle.

There was a reason that the existence of Aureates wasn’t public knowledge. No one could tell what would happen if regular people got to know that such beings existed. In a world were mana was simply the highest form of material, a being that it submitted to was no different from a god.

Cults, Nations, Religions, Traditions could erupt forth when people huddle around an Aureate.

Which, ironically, would be the least of their worries, because then there was the prophecy of Delft.

"The prophecy-"

Virginia however, got interrupted midway through her sentence.

"From falling ash and rising dark, five hearts marked before their first breath, five names written in the ruins of a crumbling world. The world does not ask, it chooses. And what it chooses. It keeps."

The entire room went silent.

Everyone, including Aris, turned to Silas, who looked like he had just been sentenced to death.