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Chapter 112: Unhealthy Obsession (Final)
🕑 Added 2025-08-23 11:51:19 +0000 UTCHigh above Hellnia, The Observatory.
The large glass dome floated like a bubble in the night sky. Inside, the air smelled faintly of leather and drying paint.
The Observer had his Lazy Boy Pinnacle 3 XL™ reclined to the absolute moral limit, the handle was thrown carelessly all the way back, head rested lazily, legs raised shamelessly high. Above him, a medium sized canvas hung in the air at a comfortable arm’s reach. With one hand, he drew in smooth strokes; with the other, he lifted his Big Gulp and drank from a crazy straw to his hood’s mouth.
Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.
On the canvas, a ship drifted through a calm sea. Hannya stood at the bow, arms spread wide, eyes closed, smiling into the wind with pride and fulfillment. Behind her, Vainglory stood steady and silent, hands at her hips with the right amount of distance and the wrong amount of caution.
Any onlooker seeing this painting would couple the scene with icebergs and hubris, quite the iconic pose. The Observer clearly did, and he grinned as he stroked the line of Vainglory’s profile.
“Excellent cheekbone.” he murmured, dabbing the canvas as he took another pull from the straw.
Gulp. Gulp-
“Master.”
The word reached him before her footsteps did. Right Direction tended to announce herself before any other action, a policy adopted after the imprisonment for her brother Left. She stepped to his shoulder in her chosen mortal shell, a young woman with long black hair and red eyes that glowed like polite warnings.
She looked at the painting, then she looked at him. Her mouth made a small, puzzled bow.
“You are a pretty good painter, Father.” she said at last, testing the word like it might bite. “Is this… from the future?”
The Observer snorted softly, more at the title than the question, and kept painting. “All real gods can paint,” he said, as if reciting a principle. “And it isn’t the future. It’s a neighbor, a reality adjacent enough to steal poses like this.”
He signed the corner with a sweeping hand, marking the art as his with no guilt. “I’m calling this one Titanic Love.”
He angled his head her way without moving the rest of his body. “And stop mimicking your older brother. It’s uncouth.”
Right angled her chin and pouted. She flicked hair off her shoulder with a little ‘hmph’.
“Brother says we aren’t your servants,” she said. “We’re your children. So you should treat us with better care.”
The Observer’s six empty eye sockets rolled, an impressive feat for a face with nothing in it. He regretted sending her to see the eldest eye, Forwards Direction. Every eye that visited him came back… weirder. Forwards wasn’t a contaminant so much as he was a seasoning; sprinkle too much, and even the most obedient minds started tasting like rebellion.
He took a long, depressed drag from his cup.
Gulp
With a lazy flick, the canvas drifted to an open section of wall and settled there, framing itself with a gilded border it hadn’t possessed seconds earlier. He pushed the recliner’s lever forward until his legs lowered a notch and pointed a finger for Right to stand in front of him.
“I understand you, and your feelings are valid and heard Right,” he said, tone turning fatherly in the way of teachers who had long ago given up pretending they weren’t parents. “But you need to be more professional during work hours. Forwards’s responsibilities require him to ponder often. Also, His actions…” he sighed, because the boy’s actions were always, interminably long, “do not affect the timelines.”
He tapped the air between them, and the tap made a sound it shouldn’t have. “Yours are different,” he said. The leather creaked as he slouched deeper into it, he then hunched like a pitiful old man. His voice turned theatrically frail, bordering on the threshold of 1HP and death. “Be brazen with your tasks and your Father dearest will go to jail.”
Right flinched. “J-jail?”
“Mm.” He nodded gravely, taking another swig of time through the straw. “Bars, orange clothes, no recliner privileges, and mandatory yard exercise with the inhouse faction just for protection."
Her red eyes went round, the human shell wasn’t built for the concepts he was throwing out.
“Also,” he continued, setting the Big Gulp in a cupholder. “do not take everything Forwards says at face value. He’s at the age where he thinks he knows everything.” The Observer’s hood hid a grin. “Have your own thoughts. And do not act on every impulse that crosses your mind.”
Right bowed her head. “Yes, Master… I’m sorry.” The words were correct and humble. In the depths of her eyes, however, something rippled, a flash of guilt, followed by a sheen of panic. It was quick, small, but it was there.
And the Observer obviously did not miss it.
He felt an ominous chill claw down his neck.
He let out a long, exaggerated groan and flung the recliner all the way back so that he stared directly at the Observatory’s pristine ceiling. “Right,” he said, voice flat now. “What in the hell did you do?”
She jumped; the mortal body did a very mortal clutch at the collarbone. “I-I… well, Brother said- I… It’s always good to… Gods should follow their hearts, right?”
Both of the Observer’s hands went to his hood, clutching it as if he could strangle his thoughts.
“Right, you are not a god,” he said, emphatic. “And that is the opposite of our job.” He wriggled and flailed once for emphasis. “You smooth brain! That’s Meddler’s propaganda!”
Right froze. The color left her human face. “M-Meddler? I only met with Brother. That’s impossible.”
The Observer plucked the crazy straw from the Big Gulp, glared at it for a moment, and chucked it across the marble floor with a flick. He lifted the cup and drank like a possessed man, after a moment, he set it down and licked his teeth as if something about the taste had altered in transit.
He clenched his teeth at the subtle flavor of the distant aftertaste. He spoke up again.
“I know Forwards well enough to swear he’d never say something like that directly,” he said. “And not so recklessly.” He pointed a lazy finger at nothing in particular and everything at once.
“Meddler doesn’t have to meet you to change your reading of words. She fears your fathers might and clout so she works like a sewer rat. She moves around messages, not through them. She rearranges happenings until the conclusion feels like yours.”
He looked down, past the leather, past the dome, past the clean chill of the high air, to Hellnia’s plane. His sight angled, and with it, the laws of the place obligingly tilted to match. The abyss where Hannya and Vainglory fought came into view like a pupil widening.
He grimaced. The aftertaste in the Big Gulp clarified. “Trickle down economics… She’s pissing in my drink.” he muttered.
Right didn’t understand the metaphors. But she understood, with her whole body, the next thing. For an instant so thin you could have mistaken it for a shiver, everything looked at her.
Not the room. Not her Master. The laws and concepts that anchored reality. The molecules of air decided to observe her, the dust sparked with curiosity, the cells of her mortal shell paused in their routines to glance up and check the integrity of her soul.
She made a small yelp, not dissimilar to a frightened puppy.
And then it simply ended. The pressure subsided and calmed. The dome was a dome again. The chair was a chair. Reality was reality.
Her knees hit the floor with a smack that echoed longer than it should have.
“I-I…Master, please-” Right’s words tumbled over themselves. “I didn’t mean to-... A year ago, when I collected the ingredients for Hannya’s veil, I only- I never stepped across the-”
The Observer lifted one hand, palm outward and godly. The gesture was gentle yet absolute. “Do not tell me.” he said.
She blinked tears from her eyes, as instructed by the mortal shell. “But-”
“If it’s Meddler’s line,” he said, “then the more of it I look at, the worse it hooks. We are not here to be clever fish.” He reached down, lowering the leg rest with a click, and let his feet find the floor. His joints cracked, not from old age or disuse, purely for drama. “We’ll use principle instead.”
He slid a hand into the wide sleeve of his robe and rummaged in an interior space that held precisely as much as his act required. When his hand emerged, it held an intricate vault key, longer than a grown man’s arm, made of black metal and covered in runes that didn’t show completely in the light.
He tossed it with the practiced arc of someone who knew gravity would loyally cooperate. Right caught it with both hands, nearly buckling under its arrogant weight. Her eyes widened in surprise at feeling something heavy enough for her to use her strength so seriously.
“Right,” he said, “I need you to go to The Forbidden Temple… and retrieve my sweats.”
She stared at the key, then at him. “Master,” she said, baffled, “you have a second pair of lounging sweats for your leisure robes?”
“No.” The word was simple and grim. He was looking down again at Hellnia, and below it, to the abyss, where a bright golden anchor was sinking under a black spiral.
“The ones locked in there… are my Labor Sweats.”
Right’s mouth parted on a small, reverent gasp. In all the years she’d served, and she had served for a very long time, she had never seen the Master in anything but robes of thought and in chairs of indulgence. These ‘Labor Sweats’ must have belonged to a different era altogether.
The Observer did not look away from the plane. His eye sockets were empty and, somehow, still narrowed. “The path we need to get back on,” he said softly, “...will require me to stand.”
Right’s throat tightened. Tears threatened to break free. “Master, I-”
He cut off the apology with another open palm. He added a benevolent smile as he spoke softly. “It is fine, it’s the work of the old to smooth the errors of the young. If the young never erred, they would never truly grow.”
Right made a sound that was both laugh and sob at the same time. She pressed the key tighter against her chest. “Yes, Master.” she choked out.
He slouched back an inch, then another, until duty and habit found a compromise. “You’ll go through the southern route,” he said, business returning to his voice. “Do not take the North, the constructs have reset the memorial traps, and they’re sentimental.” He lifted a finger. “And do not read the plaques. Those are private.”
She nodded fast.
“And Right?” His voice gentled. “While you walk, and while you work, think for yourself. Forwards is a know it all. Left is long winded. Backwards thinks too much. Upward wants to be worshiped. And Downwards is overly strict. You are not any of them.”
She blinked. “Yes, Master.”
He considered her for half a breath, then added, mostly to himself, “And do not say Gormar Vavune out loud in that building. In any buildings there.” His hood turned enough to imply a look. “Not even as a joke.”
Right pressed her lips together and nodded with terrifying seriousness. Even though the back of her mind wanted to say it was a little strange to obsess over an elven mortal. Sometimes she even suspected he was just hate watching the old elf during his free time.
The Observer reached out towards the wall and, with a tap, dismissed Titanic Love to a lower shelf among a dozen other canvases: Jealousy Watching the Doomed Rain, Little Angel Playing Big God, There Was Once a Boy Named Damien, Principles Are Tables, Not Swords.
He did not glance at them, not even the one labeled ‘Fuck Gormar’ today. He watched the dark far below and the thin, stubborn light within it.
On the plane of Hellnia, inside a pocket that was not a pocket, a girl who had trained in mist and mirrors and a man who had trained under cruelty and conviction were about to decide whether breath continued in a particular arrangement of ribs. The Observer did not interfere.
He watched… and prepared.
Right shuffled her feet, then squared her shoulders and bowed. “I’ll be fast.”
“Be careful.” he corrected, and the word carried more weight than the mythical key.
She took three steps toward the door and stopped, she turned back. “Master,” she said, hesitant again. “If I find… something Med-” She caught herself. “If I find the traces of the rat, do I-?”
“Don’t seek her,” he said. “Close doors behind you, open the right ones in a timely manner, and do not feed strays.”
She nodded, hugged the key once more in the way of daughters who have learned to measure safety in tasks, and vanished down the hall, footfalls swallowed by long white halls.
Alone again, the Observer loosened the recline one notch and sat upright for the first time in an era. He reached for the Big Gulp, looked into it as if it might taste better out of respect, and then set it aside with a gentle clunk.
His hands went to his sleeves. He pulled the robes straight. He looked at the dome, considered his reflection, and then at the world below.
“Principle.” he said, and only the dome heard him.
~~~
The abyss rang with the aftershock of Hannya’s [Guillotine Petal]. Vainglory’s chest burns where the cut arrived; his side screams where [False Dawn] bit and dragged. He forces his breath into the old cadence, short in, shorter out. He stepped back into the fight.
And Hannya is already there.
Her blade sliced another crescent slash; her body is half mist, half woman, charm laws rolling from her skin in warm, compelling waves. He met her steel with a palm, his aura flaring thin and gold. The parry landed, clean and correct, but his hand felt… slow now. Numb now.
That’s when he felt it.
From every deep wound her blade opened, a pink parasitic-like aura seeped inward, threading along veins and channels with obscene intimacy. Painless, but the permission of his body stolen. Beneath it, the black mist laced the pink. It kept seeding itself into torn muscle and bone, a dreadful ink that no will could currently flush. When his glory tried to push, the pink pressed back, almost smiling, as the black mist continued eating at his nerves.
He moved nonetheless. He calculated nonetheless.
Angle, timing, the window where she must be solid, each chance, he took it. He drove a palm toward her throat. She laughed and spun to smoke, then woman again, tapping his wrist aside with her guard, teeth flashing.
He countered, once, twice, thrice. Each correct, and each a little late. The numbness crawled up his forearm and sat there, patient and persistent.
He coiled the glory tighter, thinner, just enough to parry the next strike she drew across his ribs and chest. It repelled her, but only barely. The gold that used to flood now seemed to drip. Inside, he mapped the allocation with the calm he has always worn, despite not feeling his paths and circuits any longer.
‘Twenty percent to seal, ten to brace the knee, the rest to hands and neck.’ He concluded.
The pink aura kept smiling and clinging, pushing closer to his core.
Hannya’s eyes spun. “You’re getting dimmer,” she purred, sliding past him, blade whispering passed his ear. “Good. Just a bit more.”
He doesn’t answer. He stepped through another window, caught the flat of the blade, redirected the strike. All the correct choices to defend against the relentless assault.
‘Correct, correct, correc-’
…And then, quite suddenly, his light went out.
It is abrupt, no stutter or warning. His core releasing the essence of glory shut like a door closing in a silent house. The gold on his hands disappeared. The cold rush that follows wasn’t from fear, but the vacuum where the previous power used to sit.
He blinked, truly surprised.
And with a sudden halt, so did Hannya.
But after half a breaths, she laughed again. “Kikiki!”
The katana drove straight in, just under the sternum. Serrations chewed past skin and flesh. The impact folded him by an inch, the pendant thumped, small and bright against the intruding black steel. Black blood ran down her knuckles. His essence, for the first time, didn’t rush to meet it.
He couldn’t believe it. The allocation was precise; the reserve should be there. He reached inward with the same exactness as always.
…finding nothing.
‘Parallel Opinion,’ he called in his mind, calm even now. ‘Explain. You said seventy-five…’
No answer.
‘Parallel Opinion,’ he repeated, sharper now. ‘Report.’
Nothing. Only absence.
Then a strange thought struck him, why was he asking himself for an explanation for his own negligence?
Hannya leaned close, breath warm against his face as she whispered. “Looks like even your calculations are inferior to his, puppet. Kikiki!” She twisted the blade and pulled it free in a wet, efficient slide.
His legs tried to answer, and the black mist replied ‘no’. He could no longer move well enough to combat her.
The pink aura fanned out within him, smothering his mana and chi before it regained enough to put up any sort of last stand. It hugged his will with tight, desperate, charm laws layering over mana and chi until both turned docile, drifting aimlessly like dust inside him. The numbness gripped his limb completely now. His knees, already cut, buckled and locked. His hands hung open and empty.
She stepped back one pace, raised the katana over her shoulder. Mist roiled up her arm to the elbow; charm thickened until even the air was difficult to breath. “Don’t look away,” she said sweetly. “No, do. It suits you better.”
He closes his eyes.
Not from fear, and definitely not peace, either. It was an act of accounting, of recognition that the map he drew in his mind no longer matched the ground beneath his feet. A small, odd shame hovers at the edge of his thoughts. The shame of misjudging her, and the shame of trusting it.
And covering the abyssal floor, a pitch black thread he never asked for loosens another inch, reaching the end of its spool.
Hannya’s smile fractured, allowing fury to show through. “Coward,” she hisses, delighted and offended in equal measure. “No guts, and no glory.”
The blade fell.
And then it severed. Something ashamed and quiet lifted from his shoulders; and then something heavy and numb thumped to the dark ground.
Black blood arcs spilled through the low hanging mist, pooling around the black geta of the only devil left standing in the quiet space. She stared down blankly at the headless corpse that refused to turn to ash.
She stood there, her righteous fury and sadistic delight gone. Replaced by a hollow, empty resonance that fed her core with its favorite essence.
She said nothing, carelessly dropping the curse sword to the ground.
She didn't hear the clatter of the blade, only the cruel silence of the desolate world she finally recognized as not heaven but hell.
“Kikikikiki!”
DING
[
Achievement: Heart Trail 4 - Loss(Complete)
Achievement: Heart Trail 5 - Denial(Complete)
Conditions have been met.
Curse [9th Daughter: Maiden of Obsession(?)] has activated!
Your soul is generating despair!
Your body is consuming despair!
Warning! An irregularity is occurring!
Boon [9th Daughter: Maiden of Obsession(?)] has activated!
The wild magic of the Void Song sings your sorrows.
And the world will listen...
]
Comments
Crowny 66
Also, his* actions
Wintermelody
Thanks for the chapter
