"Argh... Ah... Ugh."
Azalea woke up to pain. All of it, radiating through every part of him like he had been used as a punching bag, which honestly was not far off from the truth.
He could not even move.
"Nice," he gasped, laughing bitterly at nothing in particular.
What else was he supposed to do? Cry? He had done so much of that it had started feeling pointless, and crying over unfair fate was kind of embarrassing when he thought about it.
"Argh." He groaned. "They really did a number on me." The words came out more like a mumble, and he tried to smile through it, tried to make it mean something.
Then the sobs came anyway.
Right. Still a big, stupid softie.
He tried to hold it in, tried to be tough about it, but he could not manage it. The whole thing just broke open and he cried, really cried, the ugly kind that hurts your chest more than whatever put you on the ground in the first place.
It felt like he had swallowed something sharp. The pain was bad enough that part of him just wanted to stop existing, not just the physical stuff, but all of it.
Damn. Damn it all.
How had it gotten to this point? Nobody had listened to him. Nobody was going to believe him now either, and hell, he barely understood it himself.
It was like the system had taken the wheel entirely. The only thing he remembered clearly was a sword, one he had no idea where it had even come from, going straight through Austin's gut. He had been horrified, shaking, stumbling back, staring at what he had apparently done.
His first thought had been to run. He had begged the system, practically pleaded with the goddess to follow through on her promise. He had always known this moment was coming, his cannon event, his scripted ending.
But there was nothing. Just silence.
"Haha... hah..." The broken sound came from a guy who was now completely alone, left out here to die.
Used. Again. Used once again.
Was this really all he amounted to? This? A pathetic ending on the ground?
Everything he had been holding together just came apart. He cried for an hour, maybe two, maybe three, and he could not tell when it got dark. He just lay there, barely moving, rain starting to fall on his face at some point like the universe wanted to pile on.
They say when someone cries that hard it is not really about the physical pain, but about how wrecked they are on the inside. Azalea was a pretty good example of that.
He was done.
He stared up at the sky, which was dark now.
Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop.
Of course it was raining.
He did not move, could not, so he did not try. He just let it fall, hoping in some stupid corner of his brain that it might wash something away, the pain, the memories, the weight of all that betrayal sitting on his chest.
He had tried his best, and that was the part that stung the most.
Even when the system kept pushing him toward the villain role he had still helped the people he had called friends, always in the background and always out of sight. He could not exactly tell anyone what he knew about this world, so he had carried it alone, and it had cost him everything.
He had saved them more times than he could count, Isabella included, and had taken a sword for her once, maybe twice, and she had never even known. The only one who had started putting things together was Carmella. He had bailed her out so often, usually in disguise, that she had begun noticing patterns.
Not that Azalea had realized that. Carmella had quietly gotten protective of him over time, something that had happened completely outside his awareness, because he was always off running some system errand or chasing down another way to keep someone alive.
Now, lying there with no tears left, he just wondered if any of it had been worth it.
Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop.
The rain eventually stopped. He stared at the sky a while longer, then slowly and painfully shifted his weight, and every small movement hurt.
But he was not dead, so he might as well do something with whatever was left.
Revenge crossed his mind. It was tempting, clean in its simplicity, the idea of making every single one of them feel what real hopelessness was like.
But he did not have that kind of power. Revenge was for people who could back it up, and he had been weak from the moment he had woken up in this world, never able to unlock what he should have had.
Scripted. It had been his fate from the start, and he had known it, and he had done nothing to change it.
"Sigh." That actually left his mouth as he pushed himself, slowly and painfully, to his feet. He pressed a hand to his left shoulder, which hurt even worse than the rest of him.
"Outside," he muttered, looking around. "They actually threw me outside."
He was past the academy gates, still technically on academy grounds but only barely. The real outside was through the transport, the one that led to Elflame, the city on the other side of the walls.
He looked at the academy one more time. It was quiet, students all in their dorms by now for roll call.
Then he started limping away.
It took about an hour to reach the transport. He handed over his student badge, the last thing marking him as someone who belonged here, and they gave him a one-time pass through the portal in exchange.
He stepped through.
Elflame at night. The city lights blinked at him like nothing had happened, cheerful and completely indifferent to his situation.
He sighed. He had no idea where he was going, but his feet kept moving anyway, limping forward with no plan, just the stubborn and stupid refusal to stop.
Then, "Stop." A voice cut through the dark.
"Huh?" He frowned. He knew that voice, but before he could turn around something filled his entire vision.
It was hot. It was red. It was fire, a wall of it, like a second sun right in his face, beautiful and absolutely terrifying.
"Fuck," he said, which about summed it up.