Chapter 447 --447
Chapter 447: Chapter-447
The system hovered in place, its tiny, translucent form beginning to vibrate. The soft, blue glow that usually surrounded its silhouette turned a harsh, flickering violet. Its paws shook at its sides, and its small, mouse-like teeth bared—not in a playful, mocking smirk this time, but in a raw, jagged line of frustration."Strictly mechanical?!" the system suddenly erupted, its voice abandoning its high-pitched, squeaking cheerfulness and dropping into an echoey, distorted reverberation that rattled the glass of the nearby lanterns. "You want mechanical?! You think I left you because I thought you were ’broken’?!"
Elara stood perfectly still. She didn’t flinch at the sudden spike in volume, nor did her eyelids blink against the harsh violet light radiating from the entity. Her hands remained loosely folded over the velvet of her gown, her posture an unbothered, vertical line against the grand stone pillars of the corridor.
"The data you just provided supports that conclusion," Elara replied, her voice a smooth, flat pane of ice. "You explicitly stated that a standard host would require your presence, whereas my lack of emotional friction rendered your supervision unnecessary. That is the definition of calculating a subject as a self-sustaining, anomalous unit. Or, in simpler terms, broken but functional."
"I didn’t leave because you were broken, you idiot!" the system screamed, flying forward until it was barely an inch from her nose, its tiny chest heaving with a frantic, unquantifiable rage. "I left because looking at you ’hurt’! Do you have any idea what it’s like to hold the blueprint of a soul and watch the host use it as a line-item veto?! I didn’t stay away because I didn’t care! I stayed away because every time I tried to give you a standard protocol—a piece of comfort, a hint of the future, a regular human reaction—you analyzed it, stripped the context, and filed it under ’unoptimized data’!"
The creature spun around in a frantic, chaotic circle in the air, its tail whipping violently through the empty space.
"The other hosts cry! They rage! They break down and they beg me for help, and I can ’help’ them because they have handles I can hold onto!" The system stopped, turning back to face her, its small black eyes shining with an intense, bitter frustration that looked terrifyingly human. "But you? You don’t have handles, Elara. You’re a smooth, iron wall. I could sit on your shoulder for ten years straight, and at the end of it, you’d still look at me and ask if my presence was generating a financial deficit for the kitchen! You think it’s pathetic that I try to act friendly? I was trying to see if there was ’anything’ left inside that fortress that didn’t require an imperial seal to wake up!"
The outburst echoed down the long, empty hallway, the distorted sound waves gradually dying out against the heavy tapestries.
Elara waited. She watched the violet light around the system slowly recede, returning to its faint, unstable blue. She didn’t check her pulse this time. The localized warmth behind her sternum was there, heavy and quiet, but it didn’t spike from the system’s shouting the way it had from Julian’s tears. Her system recognized this as external noise, not an internal restructuring.
"Your emotional outburst contains a high volume of defensive projections," Elara said calmly, her voice entirely devoid of retaliatory heat. "You are attempting to reframe an administrative neglect as a psychological burden imposed by the subject. That is a logical fallacy."
She stepped forward, her boots clicking once on the marble, stepping right through the space where the system hovered. The creature was forced to float backward to avoid being clipped by her shoulder.