The situation had reversed. He was above her. She was looking at him with a determined expression, her lips firmly closed.
Lucid pulled slowly away. Her hand reached upward and clutched his bottom forearm. She gripped his wrist tightly, apparently fearing his sudden absence. Lucid noticed his own internal hesitation. He just could not do it. Loving her was one thing, a monumental sin he could never allow himself to commit, but to give in and surrender all of his dignity was entirely different. To confide purely in the desires of his flesh and submit to her completely was a line he refused to cross. He would rather die.
His physical body, however, communicated an entirely different narrative. A dark, violent urge flooded his veins. He had a sudden impulse to clutch her throat, tear her white robes apart, and break her. He wanted to make her suffer. She had watched him get torn apart in his past life. She had watched him get impaled, cut down, and betrayed on the battlefield. She was not the direct cause of that past misery, but the mere thought that she had safely observed his suffering from some isolated divine vantage point boiled a vicious anger inside his chest.
For a brief moment, a vivid image flashed before his vision. He saw a woman standing in the mud. She possessed bright purple hair and piercing purple eyes.
Before he fully registered his own physical movements, his hands were wrapped tightly around a throat. He was strangling Alice. His grip was absolute, pressing her down into the soft green grass of the soulscape. A single tear rolled down from beneath her stained blindfold, tracing a wet path across her pale cheek. She did not struggle against his violent grip. She simply raised one hand and brushed his cheek with absolute, terrifying gentleness.
Lucid snapped back to reality with a massive jolt. He realized exactly what he had just done. He scrambled backward across the grass, breathing heavily, his chest heaving as he stared at his own trembling hands in sheer horror.
Alice sat up slowly. "No, why did you stop?" she asked.
She came crawling toward him on her hands and knees. The movement caused her loose white robe to slip further down her shoulders, leaving almost nothing to cover her pale skin.
Lucid shot a hand forward to ward her off. "Get away from me!"
He pulled his knees to his chest, clutching his legs as his mind spun entirely out of control. Memories flashed before his eyes with a violent, unrelenting intensity.
'Why now?' Lucid asked himself.
He had been perfectly fine all this time. He had survived from one disaster to the next, but these specific memories came rushing back without any mercy. They were hideous, vivid memories of him standing in a ruined battlefield. He saw himself holding a broken weapon, his hands covered in mud and blood. He remembered using his bare hands to tear at the unfaithful, desperately trying to save his fallen comrades.
He remembered the screaming civilians. He remembered the heavily armed militants, the burning urban settlements, and entire civilizations collapsing into ash while he stood utterly powerless to stop the destruction. The faces of his past flashed in front of his eyes once again. He saw the woman with the purple hair shouting commands. He saw a young man with dark hair and piercing red eyes charging into enemy fire. He saw another fighter with silver hair casting desperate defensive magic, a woman with bright red hair falling to the ground, and an old man wearing a tattered military uniform issuing a final, doomed order.
Lucid thought he had buried those agonizing memories far away in the deepest recesses of his mind. They were suddenly coming back now, flooding his consciousness with terrifying clarity. He wondered if this sudden total recall was the direct influence of Alice manipulating her soulscape. The divine environment had spiked a severe psychological reaction within his brain.
Perhaps the most disturbing revelation was not the fact that she had briefly overridden his repressed memories. The true horror was a quiet, insidious realization. Ever since he woke up in this cursed world, he had never once thought about his previous life. He had never formulated a single thought regarding his home planet. He had been so entirely caught up in surviving one catastrophe after another that it had never even occurred to him to ask if returning home was possible.
Was a return journey even an option? The Scattered Realms appeared to be a massive, shattered landscape floating in a cosmic void, entirely disconnected from the physical concept of a spherical planet. The local scholars kept talking about ancient prophecies. They spoke of a mythical place called Earth. They treated the Monoliths as divine rumors that predated time itself. The historical timelines of his home world were entirely foreign and incompatible with this current reality. Earth was spoken of as a distant, religious concept. It was described as an ancient script or a lost sanctuary rather than a physical location a person could simply travel back to.
Lucid fell into a deep, suffocating despair. He had never stopped to ask himself why he was even transported here in the first place.
Suddenly, two soft hands settled heavily onto his shoulders. A figure rested on her knees right in front of him. A look of deep worry was written across her face, despite her eyes remaining completely hidden behind the stained cloth.
Lucid looked at Alice with a chilling, absolute despise. She was the only entity directly linked to his sudden departure from Earth. Maybe that was the foundational reason why he hated her so deeply.
That was not the most pressing issue at hand. He remembered the first moments of his arrival in the Scattered Realms. He remembered waking up, discovering his fog-covered face, and hearing Alice speak directly into his mind. He remembered a very specific sentence, something entirely akin to a confession of abduction.
"You said you carried my soul here," Lucid stated coldly, repeating the exact words she had spoken on that first day.
Alice looked at him in total confusion. "No, I never said that. You must be mistaken."
There was a brief hesitation in her voice. Lucid caught the micro-expression immediately. He knew she could not be trusted, but hiding such blatant, monumental details from him was a new level of psychological manipulation.
"Are you the voice that granted me a second chance?" Lucid demanded, his tone leaving no room for evasion.
Alice tilted her head. "Lucid, what voice are you speaking of?"
He stood up, his posture stiffening with defensive anger. "Has it never occurred to you that I had an entire life before this? I had people. I had a world."
Alice looked at him, completely and utterly confused by his outburst.
Lucid looked back at her. He stood there on the green grass and imagined a dozen different violent scenarios. He imagined gouging out her hidden eyes. He pictured ripping her divine intestines out and using her own hair as a method to strangle the life from her physical manifestation. He could not do any of it. He could not make her suffer. He could not lay a harmful hand on her, because at this point, he was entirely a slave to her existence. Without her power, he might as well kiss his chance of ever going home a permanent farewell.
He let out a ragged, defeated sigh.
In that exact moment, hot tears started to drop from his eyes. He put his hand against his face, completely confused by his own biological reaction.
"Why," Lucid muttered, his voice starting to break under the crushing weight of his realization.
Alice tilted her head in confusion at first. Then, her expression shifted into deep intrigue. She inched closer to him, her bare knees sliding across the grass.
"No, get away from me," Lucid warned, trying to push her away with a weak shove.
Suddenly, Alice raised her hand. Her palm grew bright with a vibrant green light. Lucid tried to summon the Chain of Heart to defend himself, but his own heart twisted painfully inside his chest. Total paralysis seized his nervous system. He fell completely still, unable to move a single muscle. He could not even crawl away.
Alice crawled over his paralyzed legs, moving with predatory grace. She reached out and brushed his forehead slowly, her touch agonizingly gentle against his skin.
"It is perfectly fine to cry," Alice whispered. "It is acceptable to feel weak. I am your sanctuary. I am your everything, and you are my mortal. Surrender to me."
She inched closer until her body pressed directly against his chest. She smelled like crushed medicinal herbs. The aroma was undeniably intoxicating, and soon a radiating warmth enveloped his entire body and soul, melting away the bitter cold of his despair. She pressed her lips against his mouth, pinning his back firmly to the trunk of the massive tree.
Lucid did not struggle. He could not fight the paralysis, so he simply endured her touch. She pressed harder against his lips, slowly enveloping his physical form within her embrace. She traced her fingers down his arms, feeling the rigid tension in his frozen muscles.
"You are confused because you just do not know anything," Alice murmured against his skin. "But I am here."
Lucid stared at her blindly, his mind racing behind his paralyzed features.
"I did not choose your soul," she continued, her voice echoing directly into his mind. "I did not bring you over here. We have always been intertwined. We are parts of each other. We have existed together even before the creation of this world."