Chapter 242: Burden
Silence descended upon the grand court, heavy and suffocating.
Hide stood alone beneath the swirling nebulae, his mind completely unraveling.
Every single memory of his life rushed past his vision like a cruel, mocking carousel: the damp, moldy walls of their tiny apartment in Area 17; the agonizing poverty he live in after his mother passed away; the endless nights he spent hyperventilating, crying quietly in the dark; the day the calamity beasts smashed through their living room, plunging a hand into his stomach; the jagged, permanent scar across his abdomen; his awakening with a unique class and the system that had given him the confidence and power to do what he had so far.
None of it had been his life. None of it had been a human journey. He felt... so small. So weird calling himself human. Was he a human? He did not have a human father like other did. He was born from mana... was... was the lady in that dark alley right? Did she kill herself because she saw what he was? A monster.
His... his life was an engineered breeding project. A calculated, multi-generational retaliation maneuver in a war between celestial aristocrats.
Something inside Hide finally snapped.
"A counterweight...?" Hide's voice rose, cracking with raw, unvarnished fury. He stepped forward, his eyes burning with an intense, predatory violet aura that violently distorted the air around his boots. "You call my mother's suffering a counterweight?! She spent her entire life running in terror, terrified of the sky, hell even terrified of the people around her, only to be murdered on Earth while trying to protect a baby!"
Destracious's golden eyes flared, and the angel took a sharp, aggressive step forward, celestial mana coalescing around his palms. "Watch your tongue, mortal! You are speaking to the Sovereign of—"
"SHUT UP!" Hide roared, turning a glare of absolute, abyssal hatred toward the angel that physically caused Destracious to halt in place.
Hide turned back to the throne, his teeth gritting so hard blood dripped from his bottom lip.
"So you mean that I was never a son to anyone!" Hide yelled, his voice echoing across the infinite void. "I was just a container! A petri dish for your divine seed! You let my mother die! You let millions of people on Earth get slaughtered, torn apart by beasts, crushed under concrete, just so you could balance your fucking cosmos and a war between who knows what!"
The sheer weight of his grief, his vulnerability, and his profound loneliness laid completely bare beneath the stars. For all his power, for all his levels, for all the Calamity Lords he had butchered—he was still the terrified twelve-year-old boy bleeding out on the wooden floor of Area 17, screaming for a mother who would never answer.
Lord Wartz did not unleash his divine wrath. He did not smite the mortal who dared raise his voice in his court.
Instead, the sovereign slowly stood up from the crystal throne. His towering figure descended the nine tiers of starlight steps, his twilight mantles brushing against the obsidian floor, until he stood barely three paces away from Hide.
He was tall, taller than anything. Not even 50 floored buildings had felt this tall, as the god that stood in front of him felt.
"You are angry," Lord Wartz said softly, his deep black eyes holding no malice, only the solemn, terrifying weight of eternity. "You have every right to be. The mortal realms are fragile, beautiful things, and the wars of the heavens are undeniably cruel. But do not mistake your purpose for a passive tragedy, Hide Volter."
Lord Wartz pointed a finger directly at Hide's chest, right where his dark core was, collecting and reshaping the mana of this place against his ribs.
"House Wartz may have planted the seed, but the system did not choose how to grow," Wartz said, his voice carrying an unyielding gravity. "The Universal Adaptation System does not respond to divine programming. It responds only to the soul that wields it. You survived the extraction of your core because you refused to die. You forged an abyssal foundation because you bled through the darkness. You adapted to every wound, every poison, and every heartbreak through your own unyielding willpower."
Lord Wartz's eyes flickered with a faint, proud light.
"And above all else... I was not the only one who chose you," Wartz revealed quietly. "My son—the child who renounced his divine heritage, took the form of a beast and fled into the lower realms— who named himself Doom Overseer, gazed through the infinite branches of destiny with his gift of vision granted to him as the next lord of Wartz. Out of all the billions of souls across Earth, Rilth, and the Greater Realm, he chose to bow to you. He recognized that only you possessed the capacity to bear the weight of all creation."
Hide's chest heaved as he stared at the sovereign, his breath catching in his throat. He wanted to speak something, to protest maybe. To tell him no, no he was just a boy, why? Why should he have to know all this?
Then he remembered that once Maddox had told him that truth does not bring salvation and just more secrets and miseries. Now, he knew the old man said true.
"The balance of the entire cosmos now rests upon your shoulders, Hide," Lord Wartz concluded, extending a single hand forward. "The war between gods will not be settled by divine armies in the sky. It will be settled by the mortal who has adapted beyond the limits of reality. Reclaim the Boundary Pusher on Hubin. Strip the Authority over Space from your brother's corrupted hands. Collapse the dying corpse of Rilth, and execute the vipers of Odo and Mord who hide beneath your world."
Hide looked down at his trembling hands, slowly closing them into tight, iron fists. The pain and existential horror did not vanish, but beneath the sorrow, an unbreakable, terrifying resolve solidified in the depths of his soul.
He raised his head, his ocean-blue eyes glowing with an absolute, lethal brilliance.
"Send me back," Hide said