I was ready to kill everyone here if it meant getting my freedom... and I know I wouldn't feel any regret toward them.
But now... this girl went beyond everything I expected.
I held 02 by her collar, and felt her life start to fade, like a candle flame at the start of the morning, that smile still drawn on her face, answering my resentful words.
"Because I want to."
What the hell does she mean by that?
With the strength she had left, she reached out her arms and wrapped them around my waist, then pulled herself toward me until our bodies pressed together, holding herself up to stay standing.
Before I could try to push her away, she spoke with the blood coming out of her mouth in crimson lines running down her chin. "If you feel anything toward me, even a little pity... take me with you. I want to see the sun before I die... I want to see the outside."
She put her forehead on my chest, her voice turning into a weak whisper. "That's my only request."
I hesitated, not knowing what to do... I didn't understand what I was feeling in those moments.
Then I did something I never imagined I'd do.
I put one hand behind her small back and my other hand under her knees as I lifted her into my arms, then I ran... ran toward the teleportation gate... our way out.
It was close, there was nothing stopping me from reaching it... all I heard was the sound of my footsteps mixed with her dying breaths in my arms.
Then 02 coughed, drops of blood scattering, and when she spoke I could barely make out what she was saying through her pained voice. "01... do you have a name?"
"Yeah," I answered without realizing.
"Then what's your name?" She looked like she'd die the next moment.
I clenched my jaw, feeling a lump in my throat. "If you want to see the outside, then save what strength you have left!"
But she only smiled, and buried her head deeper into my chest.
"Please..." she begged.
I bit my lip, cursing inside.
She was supposed to die in the explosion or by my sword... so why did we end up like this?
I took a hesitant breath. "My name is Caius."
"Caius... Caius..." She repeated the name like she was testing it on her tongue.
"A beautiful name... too bad, I don't have one."
I reached the teleportation gate, beside it was a screen for choosing the destination... I saw a lot of preset options, but I didn't recognize any of them.
Maybe they were other bases.
After searching, I found a place I knew. [Outskirts Forest].
I pressed it, and the gate started to ripple, while a bar appeared on the screen along with a message asking me to wait while the coordinates were set.
I stood there listening to 02's faint breathing in my arms. "Caius... have you seen the sun before?"
I found myself answering. "Yeah."
"What's it like...?"
I knew her next question, so I went on.
"It's a circle of light hanging in the sky. Something that makes you feel warm before your mind understands it... its light doesn't press on your eyes, it flows, like it's telling you the world wasn't always cruel."
"When you're under it, you feel that your shadow exists... and that you exist with it."
The words slipped out of my mouth, words I never imagined I'd say in my previous life... they sounded way too poetic for me.
"And... what's... the sky like?" she asked again, her voice like a melody that had reached its end.
I took a moment to think. "It's an endless emptiness of beautiful blue. When you look at it, you feel like none of your problems exist."
She let out a faint laugh, mixed with coughing.
"I told you, Caius... you're kind."
What is this girl saying now, I'm kind?
I remembered what I did a few minutes ago... how I slaughtered them without hesitation or mercy, how I was ready to kill her without hesitating... and now she's calling me kind.
After a moment of tense silence, the gate finally finished preparing.
Without hesitating or waiting, I stepped forward into the wall of distorted light.
I felt her head pressing on my chest as the world twisted around me. "You're warm... I wonder, who's warmer... you or the sun?"
I felt dizzy for a few moments, before the scene changed in front of me.
A breeze of fresh air hit my face, and the familiar warmth of sunlight I'd never felt in this life settled on my skin.
I was standing in the middle of a beautiful green plain, and in front of me was a line of trees forming the start of the forest.
Above me the sky was clear blue without clouds, it was a strange feeling seeing that, and the lump in my throat grew.
I looked down at my arms... at the girl I was carrying. "Do you see? This is the answer you were looking for—"
The words froze in my mouth.
There was no answer.
Her eyes were closed, a small smile on her beautiful face, her head resting comfortably on my chest... like someone who'd found a warm place to sleep in the winter cold.
She died...
She died without seeing freedom.
But for some reason, that smile was saying something else.
...
Inside the laboratory, 5 minutes left until the explosion.
Chaos filled the place, on the floor that used to hold the monsters, the corpses were scattered and the blood covered the walls of the gloomy corridors.
The screams of the monsters and the guards went on in the corners of this floor, while contact with the monitoring room was cut and any form of order disappeared from the underground facility.
But on the top floor of this laboratory, there was a place the chaos hadn't touched... cut off from the screech of weapons and the boom of explosions.
Inside one of the equipped rooms the complex projections from the advanced computers flickered, showing strange diagrams and data, and among all that an old man moved here and there wearing a clean white coat... it was the same doctor who'd been running the analysis on Caius.
He finally stopped in front of one of the projections showing new data with every moment, he read the contents while carelessly holding a glass tube in his hand, containing a black liquid.
The next moment, the tube fell from his hand and shattered on the floor, and its contents splattered like deep ink.
But the doctor didn't care, his eyes full of shock behind the frame of his small glasses as he opened his mouth in disbelief.
"How?... how... didn't I see this before...?"
3 minutes left until the explosion.
"But this doesn't make sense... they... they all died thousands of years ago!" he muttered to himself, a tremor running through his old body.
2 minutes left until the explosion.
"01 was— but how is this possible? I have to report to the leadership now!" His trembling hands moved across the keyboard, like he was typing the most important secret in existence.
5 seconds left.
His hands finally stopped.
2 seconds left until the explosion.
He reached out a finger to press the send button, but before it got there, the time bomb exploded and with it the reactor core itself.
In a moment every sound in the world went quiet, and from the depths of the earth the explosion rose in a wave of pure white brilliance, sweeping through the fortified layers like they were just paper thrown onto flames.
In a moment every boundary between the floors and the rooms was erased... the metal, the concrete, the humans and the monsters.
Everything that existed between the layers of the underground laboratory was wiped out... wiped out and turned to dust, not even the shadows of living things stayed on the walls... because there were no walls anymore.
All of it became part of the past.
Above all this, a muffled sound spread and the mountainous ground on Solaria's northern border shook... like a natural earthquake, cracks spread everywhere, glimpses of blinding light and waves of heat from the explosion rising out of them.
...
Far from that place, separated by hundreds of kilometers, a dense forest stretched out and behind it a wide plain of green grass.
On top of a beautiful hill, a lone tree stood with its leaves swaying in the breeze, and under it a young man was digging a rectangular hole big enough for a grown person to sleep in... all of it with his bare hands.
And beside the hole, a girl lay on her back, her black hair spread under her in shining strands... a soft smile settled on her beautiful features and her eyes closed in perfect peace.
Finally the young man finished digging, with heavy steps he climbed out of the hole and went to where the girl lay... for a few moments he stood there looking at her with an unreadable expression. Then hesitantly he lifted her and laid her carefully inside the hole before he started filling the dirt over her.
Caius scooped the dirt in his hand and poured it over 02's dead body, handful after handful until her peaceful features finally disappeared.
He sat in heavy silence for a few moments, staring at the grave under the shade of the green leaves before he stood up and came closer to the tree trunk.
With his bare finger he carved words into the living wood, like he was writing them in sand.
"Beneath this soil, her last dream remains alive...
To see the sun."
For a while he leaned against the trunk in silence, his face turned to the grave and the vast stretch of green plain beyond it, he opened his mouth, muttering to himself, because there was nobody to hear him except himself.
"All I can do for those who died, is live... I'll live... I'll live and grow stronger... much stronger."
Hatred leaked from his voice, cold and unfiltered.
"Then I'll come back... I'll come back for them, and snuff out their souls forever, all of them. None of them will be left alive."
He gritted his teeth, trying to hold back the anger in his throat.
"They want to revive their god... I'll make sure that never happens."
"Nobody will stop me."