This was a world of desolate cold.
Beneath one's feet stretched an endless ice field, barren beyond hope. Under the thick crust of ice, dark-blue seawater surged restlessly. In that abyss, something else seemed to stir—but shackled by the ice above, it could only knock weakly against the frozen surface, its eerie scraping mingling with the howling wind.
The stars gathered into a vast river of light, cleaving the night sky from one end of the horizon to the other, filling the entire field of vision.
Lloyd gazed at the figure standing with his back to the full moon. Countless emotions welled up inside him, yet in the end, he found himself unable to say a single word. They remained facing one another across the distance, until the man finally walked over, sat down beside him on the lone bench, and broke the silence.
"Don't you think this place looks like some artist's absurd dream?"
He sat casually, his tattered trench coat clearly offering no warmth at all—yet he seemed utterly untouched by the cold, appraising the world as if it were a painting.
This was a world between moments, existing in the narrow interval between life and death. Apart from the two of them, everything else was desolation.
"Maybe," Lloyd replied after a pause. "At least… I don't think it's bad."
He sat back down on the bench. Together, they faced the full moon rising beneath the horizon, as relaxed as if they were sitting in a park, watching stray dogs chase squirrels.
"By the way," the man said with a faint smile, "what should I call you now? Lloyd? And how's life been in Old Dunling?"
"Lloyd is fine… honestly, I really don't like the feeling."
Lloyd didn't bother masking his emotions with shyness or anything else. He was cold, through and through.
"I figured," the man said. "Who would've thought you'd actually take my name to commemorate me? You planned to remember the dead—only to find out the one you were mourning hadn't quite finished dying."
"Oh, I get that feeling all too well," Lloyd shot back. "Mortifying to death."
The man burst into laughter, delighting in the topic from every possible angle.
Then, suddenly, everything fell quiet.
Lloyd felt no amusement at the joke. He took a deep breath, as if enduring something agonizingly painful. At some point, his resolute eyes had filled with sorrow.
"I remember you dying," Lloyd said at last, breaking the long silence. "I killed you with my own hands."
He didn't look at the man. His gaze was fixed straight ahead, locked onto the enormous, brilliant full moon—so vast it looked as though it were rising from beneath the sea itself. The glowing surface revealed massive craters, faint but unmistakable.
Astronomers once said those craters were scars left by asteroid impacts. But to Lloyd, they looked more like countless sunken eye sockets. Perhaps once, there had been enormous eyes there—gouged out by some unknown force.
"Oh, right—if you hadn't mentioned it, I might've forgotten," the man said cheerfully. "You really went at it, didn't you?"
He spoke without the slightest regard for Lloyd's emotions, then pulled open his black coat. Beneath it was a chest of exposed, blood-soaked bone—no flesh, no organs, no heart—like something ravaged by ghouls.
"So," he added lightly, "how did I taste? I always thought I'd be something like vanilla cake."
Like a salesman asking for feedback on his product.
A large part of Lloyd's neurosis came from this bastard.
"You know," the man continued, "you looked awful when you were eating. Crying while chewing, smacking your lips."
…I really want to tear this lunatic apart.
Lloyd shot him a look. When one madman runs into another even worse, there's a particular kind of helplessness that words can't describe. Lloyd usually tormented others—but here, he was the one being tortured.
"So this place," Lloyd said coldly, "you called it the Gap. What exactly is that?"
"Exactly what it sounds like," the man replied, covering the grotesque wound. "The gap between all things."
He spoke slowly now.
"The Order has always studied matters of the mind—souls, to be precise. Alchemists divided the world into four elements, but beyond those lies something tied to life itself: the soul."
He turned his head. His face bore a resemblance to Lloyd's—yet it was unmistakably different.
The man had always been an optimist. So optimistic that even death couldn't quiet him. You could throw him in with demons, and he'd probably crack jokes with them.
"Think about the connection we know so well—the one tied to darkness," he said. "Lloyd, have you ever wondered what lies at its deepest point?"
"The deepest point?"
Lloyd shook his head. He didn't understand these things very well. To him, the deepest point was nothing but endless demons and corruption that could kill in an instant.
"That," the man said, "is exactly what the Order's later research focused on. What lies at the deepest end of a connection? Every experiment begins with a hypothesis."
Something clicked in Lloyd's mind.
"You mean… this place," he said slowly. "The deepest point of the connection. You named it the Gap."
"As expected of my successor," the man said brightly, clapping his hands. "Correct."
"Then… am I dead?" Lloyd asked. "You died six years ago, and here you are—cheerfully telling me we're both in the deepest point of the connection. I don't understand this place, but it's not somewhere you can just wander into, is it?"
For a moment, Lloyd thought he might truly be dead—and the idea brought a strange sense of relief. He slumped back against the bench, gazing up at the Milky Way slicing through the sky, thinking that the afterlife didn't look half bad.
"You're not dead, my friend," the man said. "In theory, no living person can reach the Gap. But there are always exceptions. People like us."
He wrapped an arm around Lloyd. In the freezing air, Lloyd caught the faint scent of blood, seeping from the man's mangled wound.
"When I died, I woke up here. Sometimes I could sense you—but I couldn't see you. Just like the connection to darkness we know so well. Our worlds overlap, but I couldn't observe yours.
"Today, your connection to darkness reached its deepest point. That's when I finally saw you. So I grabbed you—and dragged you in."
He even mimed the act, swinging his arms as if hauling something with great effort.
"Do you know," Lloyd said flatly, "that right before this, I was fighting a Michaelite demon hunter? He'd crossed the threshold. The rising Purifying Flame could melt steel. For all I know, I'm already burned to death while you're busy chatting."
Any warmth from their reunion had long since been eroded by the man's nonsense.
"Huh? Well… sorry about that," the man said.
He apologized, but there wasn't a shred of remorse on his face.
"The Gap still holds too many secrets," he went on. "I don't understand it all yet. But at least we've proven it exists."
Another useless piece of information.
Lloyd's gaze turned icy.
"And what about you?" he demanded. "You died long ago. So what are you now? A hallucination? Some kind of soul?"
This place was strange. The things within it were strange. Everything was strange.
The man didn't seem bothered at all. He thought for a moment, then pointed at the ice beneath their feet.
"I'm probably like that. Just like six years ago—we failed to kill it, but we managed to trap it. You're the last person in the world who remembers its existence. So it lives on in your memory. As long as you don't spread its information, it remains forever imprisoned there.
"By all rights, I'm dead. But part of me became entangled with it. When you trapped it, a fragment of my consciousness was trapped too. That's how I've survived—barely—until now."
He grew serious.
"In other words, I really am dead. What stands before you is nothing more than an echo with memories—a wandering soul that belongs nowhere."
It was a sorrowful story.
As he spoke, the ice began to tremble. The scraping sounds in the wind grew louder. Lloyd didn't even have time to grieve before instinct took over and he moved to attack—only to be held fast by the man.
"Relax. It can't get out," he said calmly. "It does this every day."
Like someone admiring a familiar landscape, the man sat steadily on the bench, watching the ice below fracture as massive waves surged upward.
"Maybe this is heaven's final mercy," he added. "Most of us are dead, but getting to watch it struggle in pain every day… that's not so bad."
Lloyd listened in silence.
The deep blue beneath them erupted. Countless withered arms burst from the sea, bound by heavy chains, clawing desperately for fresh air as they let out muffled, wailing cries.
Hands scraped against the smooth ice, trying to pull themselves free—only to leave deep gouges before plunging back into the abyss.
How many were there?
Hundreds. Thousands. All trying to escape the frozen sea—none succeeding.
Massive iron chains stretched upward from the ocean's depths. Shapes gathered like a school of fish, merging at last into a colossal black orca that smashed through the glacier and leapt high into the air.
Countless faces overlapped, forming a hundred-faced abomination. Beneath the full moon, its unnatural darkness was unmistakably clear.
The roar of waves crashed in. Lloyd watched as the monstrous whale of faces dragged a waterfall of white spray into the air—only for the cold to freeze everything solid. It failed to escape once more, left standing like a sculpture in the wasteland.
In the next instant, everything shattered—breaking into fine snow, which the raging wind swept away until chaotic white swallowed all things.
The man showed no sign of panic.
Like someone watching a performance he'd seen countless times before, he remained seated, waiting calmly for the curtain to fall.
Then he began to clap—applauding this death, repeated more times than anyone could count.