Walking elegy (tensura/marvel): chapter 3: Corpses, humanity and the lesser evil

Some would say such but I think that it would be of the utmost arrogance to say the world below was painted in a palette of rot.

Arrogance implied a choice, an artist’s deliberate hand and what was before me was not art. This was the world peeled back to its fundamental, putrid truth, an unwanted lesson in anatomy, one written in the decaying flesh of tens of thousands.

The air itself had congealed into a thick, cloying syrup of death. It had a physical weight that made each breath a conscious, laborious act.

Corpses.

The word was a stone dropped into the stagnant well of my mind, but it did not send out ripples.

It simply sank like a leaden weight pulling all light and sound down with it into a silence more profound and terrible than any scream.

It wasn't just a word. It was a scent, a complex, nauseating perfume of iron-rich finality, the sweet, cloying tang of opened viscera, the acrid honesty of voided bowels, and beneath it all, the patient, inexorable smell of decay, of the earth finally, greedily, reclaiming what was always hers.

It was a symphony of despair played on instruments of meat and bone, and I, with my cursed, heightened draconic senses, was its sole, horrified, and utterly captive audience.

Corpses.

They were not abstract numbers, not statistics to be read in articles about atrocities a continent away, about atrocities done in a more barbaric past.

It was something painfully real, too real.

There were forms. Bodies. A vast, grotesque tableau of ended lives woven into the cold, unforgiving mud.

I could see, a child-sized kobold, its small, scaly hand clutching a wooden toy carved in the crude likeness of a fearsome warrior.

Next to it lay the form of a hulking ogre mother, her massive body curled around the empty space where her child must have been and where remained only bones. It looked as if she had died from a shattered spine, as if she had died trying to take a blow for another.

I could see an elderly goblin, his wizened face frozen in a look of not pain, but simple, profound surprise, as if death had been an impolite, baffling interruption to a story he was in the middle of telling.

Men, women, the young, the old. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. More. The numbers, the amount of corpses blurred, became meaningless, their sheer scale transcending quantity and becoming a quality of horror all its own.

Numbers like a hundred or a thousand don’t really seem much when you think about it. You realise how big they are when a mass grave of dozens of thousands seemingly goes on forever to the horizon.

Looking at them felt like grieving, grieving what could have been. It felt like holding the weight of a universe of stories, each one a unique and irreplaceable constellation of hopes, fears, and loves that had abruptly, violently concluded with a single, brutal punctuation mark, like watching something beautiful that may never be complete again.

None had been spared. No quarter given. No pity offered. The efficiency of it was its own kind of blasphemy.

And for what?

The question was akin to a worm, burrowing into the rotting flesh of my own thoughts. Because they were different? Because they weren’t human?

The hypocrisy of it was a poison I could taste at the back of my throat, metallic and sharp. It was a familiar flavor from a past life.

I had been human. I knew the dirty, open secret of humanity: it was not a default state of grace, a divine image carved from marble. It was a condition. A chaotic, messy, and profoundly un-special state of being.

Humans were just clever apes, armed with slightly sharper sticks and infinitely more complex lies, capable of breathtaking acts of selfless charity and bone-deep, calculated cruelty, often within the same hour.

Humans built breathtaking monuments to love and waged genocidal wars for the pettiest of reasons. Humans preached compassion from golden pulpits built on foundations of exploitation and blood.

To hold this one, flawed species up as a paragon of virtue, the sole inheritors of moral worth in a vast and teeming cosmos, was the greatest, most sustained lie ever told. It was a story we told ourselves in the dark to justify the subjugation of everything that reflected back a different face.

And these people—these so-called ‘monsters’—they were just the same.

They loved with a ferocity that could move mountains. They hated with a fire that could scar the soul. They dreamed of better days for their children. They yearned for nothing more than safety for their loved ones. They laughed, they cried, they felt the sun on their faces and dared to hope for a tomorrow.

What was the crime in that? What was the unforgivable sin in wanting to rise from the mud and the inherent suffering of a harsh world to build something—a home, a community, a future—that was uniquely, defiantly theirs?

I looked at the corpses, and I saw not monsters, but people. A nation. A potential future, stolen before it could even properly draw its first breath.

I had read the book, once. A lifetime ago, in between rooms of sterile white sheets and the constant, beeping reminder of my own failing body.

This world, its broad, sweeping strokes, had been a fantasy, an escape from the slow, internal rusting of my own biology.

I had liked the story, followed the manga, even dabbled in the daydreams and what-ifs and what could have been of fanfiction. It had been a fun distraction, a set of tropes and plot beats to be consumed and discarded. But memory is a fickle, treacherous editor.

I didn’t remember everything. The details were blurred, the timeline like a vague suggestion sketched on a napkin.

It was just something I read to pass the time. I may have liked self-insert stories but I had never thought that I would have been one day self inserted too.

I remembered the major beats, the annoying and fuck ass villains, the satisfying triumphs.

If I had remembered… would it have mattered?

Could I, a single, weary variable, have altered this horrific sigh? Or would I have stayed just a spectator to the tragedy before my eyes?

The day I met Rimuru, a great, yawning part of me had wanted to die.

I still did.

I was still tired even though I shouldn’t have been in my current body. Who would have thought that clinical depression followed when you were isekaied?

Not me, not me at all. Would have hopped out of all of this if I could have.

After all, it may not sound like it but I didn’t like to be like this, to think like this. I didn’t like to feel as if my brain was wrong, broken. I didn’t like that I only wanted to die when I should have only wanted to live.

It was the same tiredness that had made me, in another life, look at the blinking lights of life-support and choose the quiet, the nothing and it was a choice, an action I hadn’t, didn’t want to make twice even that’s what I felt I needed.

I was a mess wasn’t I yet these people… these now-silent, dead people… they had looked at me, this blue-scaled, horned draconic thing, and they had liked me.

I wasn’t nice to them. I was rude, insulting even, uncaring and I had not tried to hide because what was the point of trying to be nice, kind, liked when you only wanted to zeroed yourself?

I was the worst that I could have been to them and instead of answering the same way, they didn’t. No, instead, they had been nice, kind, warm when I hadn’t deserved it.

I don’t know why but it’s like they had seen… something else. A symbol. A friend. A protector.

They had given me a title, a purpose, a place when I hadn’t wanted one. They had tried to smile and laugh with me.

They had offered a trust so simple and unwavering it felt like a physical weight on my shoulders. They had loved me, in their own way.

They had cared and I could see the corpses of a lot of them.

I didn’t, hadn’t think I was worth a single one of their smiles, let alone their blind, desperate faith. Disappointing myself was a familiar pastime, a habit as ingrained as breathing.

But disappointing them? After a while, I didn’t want to do so. I owed them nothing yet it felt like I did.

So, I had tried.

I had tried to live.

I had tried to smile.

I had tried to laugh.

I had tried to be kind. I had tried to be better.

I had tried to be the dragon, the viceroy they named me as even if I told them I hadn’t wanted to be such, to be the unshakeable pillar they believed me to be.

I had thought that maybe if I lied enough, faked enough to myself, to them, it would become true.

I had shoved the yawning void inside me into a locked box and thrown away the key, focusing all my immense, useless self on the day-to-day minutiae of building a nation, of weaving the fragile dream of Jura Tempest.

It was a pathetic, fragile attempt, a sandcastle yet it still had been something. It had felt like something.

It was only the two of us here now.

Rimuru had forbidden the others from crossing the security cordon. The survivors, those lucky or strong or who had simply been fortunate enough to have been elsewhere, did not need to see this.

No one should have to see this.

This was a sight reserved for demons and monsters. For architects of ruin. For failures like me.

“Had you seen this happen?” The voice was quiet, flat like a sheet of ice over a roiling, black ocean.

I turned my head, the movement feeling ponderous, as if I were moving my head underwater.

Rimuru stood beside me, his human form pristine and untouched amidst the filth, in a stark way that almost felt offensive with how it contrasted with the surrounding carnage.

The only sign that something was amiss was his eyes… his usually vibrant golden eyes, which could sparkle with manic energy or soften with gentle warmth, were now scarlet voids.

Empty.

Tears, silent and relentless, carved clean, glistening paths through the faint dust on his cheeks.

Rimuru was crying yet with the cold, absolute control in his voice, you would have thought him to be uncaring, unbothered.

This was the one who had found me when I was nothing but despair given form. The one to whom I had offered my own extinction as a solution when I knew he hated the idea itself.

He was the one who had given me his name, bound his soul to mine in a pact that felt more profound than blood or biology, and made me his family.

He had promised me a peaceful end, a quiet dissolution, if he failed to make me see the value in the cacophonous, painful mess that was living.

“I didn’t,” I said, my own voice a low, grating rumble, like gravels grinding against one another deep underground. “I already told you. It was supposed to be Falmuth. Clayman’s petty, theatrical manipulations. We saw the trap. We dealt with it.”

Maybe I was an asshole. Maybe I was the wretched, selfish creature I had always suspected resided at my core. But even I had my limits, a line in the sand beyond which my own despair would not tread.

I wouldn’t have withheld that knowledge. I wouldn’t have sat on the information of a coming massacre, using these thousands of lives as a mere stepping stone to expedite my own desired oblivion.

I hadn’t wanted to die. It didn’t mean that I had wanted others to do so.

The thought of using my foreknowledge to ensure that something as bad as this would happen so that Rimuru would snap, would realise what I had wanted him to do, kill me, absorb me was a vileness so profound that the thought of it made me recoil in disgust.

I was many things but I wasn’t that pathetic.

The death I wanted was quiet, personal, like the closing of a book. This… this was akin to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria.

We had used my foreknowledge not as a cheat code, but as a strategist’s map, illuminating the enemy’s movements before they had even left their council chambers. The moment we had a shred of legitimacy, a half-convincing reason the wider world would grudgingly accept, we moved. We became the preemptive storm. We became the consequence.

The Kingdom of Falmuth now lacked an army. Its soldiers, its so-called heroes, its mages and nobles and sanctimonious clergymen—anyone with a hint of involvement in the planned atrocity—found a new, final purpose.

They became fuel.

Fuel for Rimuru’s terrifying evolution, and a stark, unforgettable lesson for the rest of the now-protectorate.

We made brutal, public examples of them. We painted the streets of their capital in shades of crimson so dark they were almost black, inventing cruelties and efficiencies of slaughter that would have made history’s most renowned tyrants pause and take notes. We crafted living nightmares and made them real.

And the most chilling part? The part that kept me awake in the rare moments I allowed myself to rest? Most of the truly creative, psychologically devastating horrors had sprung, fully formed, from Rimuru’s mind.

The cheerful, dorky, slime-isekai-protagonist I thought I knew had a core of frozen, pragmatic steel that ran deeper than any ocean.

He could be endlessly, genuinely kind, but cross that invisible line, threaten what he considered his, and a switch flipped. A cruel, calculating, terrifyingly intelligent entity would emerge, one that saw sentient beings not as people, but as variables in a brutal, world-spanning equation.

We had slaughtered our way through Falmuth. We killed the undoubtedly guilty and inevitably caught the probably innocent in the bloody backlash. It was a messy, morally ambiguous business, but it had, by all accounts, secured our borders.

With my power and Rimuru’s… essential Rimuru-ness, we had even navigated the potential cataclysm of Milim with far more finesse and control than the original, chaotic narrative would have allowed.

Clayman, the pathetic puppet-master pulling the strings from the shadows, had, as snakes are wont to do, slithered away at the last moment.

But we had planned for that, too. His fate was not delivered with grand theatrics, but with the quiet, professional finality of Souei’s network, a poetic end for a creature who believed he controlled all the threads.

We had personally crippled his forces, and I had made sure the wound I carved into his essence would fester for an eternity, a gift that would keep on giving.

I’d wished for a more personal, satisfying conclusion, but the distinct, acrid stench of this new, larger catastrophe smelled unmistakably of his particular brand of grandiose, petty bullshit.

Because listen. With all we had done, the oceans of blood we’d spilled, the existential threats we’d identified and neutralized, you would have thought it would be enough. For a beautiful, fleeting, sun-dappled moment, it seemed that it was.

Blumund, instead of a simple, cautious alliance, practically begged to become a protectorate, just like the remains of Falmuth. They’d seen the gathering storm and made the rational choice to stand within its unnaturally calm eye. King Gazel of Dwargon, the eternally pragmatic dwarf, established formal relations, though intelligence reports included his muttered, grudging words about the “necessary wisdom” of dealing with two “walking Catastrophe-level” beings.

The Western Council fell in line, their bluster evaporating in the face of undeniable power. The secluded elves of Sarion signed extensive trade agreements and binding non-aggression pacts with a lot of them even migrating to Tempest.

It was good. It was working. Against all odds, we were building something that resembled a future.

Then the Western Holy Church attacked. This, I had expected. Their rigid, hate-filled dogma, their pathological need to demonize the non-human, was a canonical constant, as reliable as the sunrise. We had contingencies for their fanaticism.

What we did not have contingencies for was a Holy Church whose fervor was backed by the full, terrifying, industrialized might of the Eastern Empire.

At first, it was a proxy war. Annoying, costly in resources and lives, but ultimately manageable. Then, the masks came off.

The proxy war shed its skin and became a real, honest-to-god war for survival. And our so-called allies, the nations we had traded with, treated with respect, shown our strength to deter… they folded.

One by one, like dominoes made of paper, they either eagerly joined the Empire’s holy banner or declared a coward’s neutrality, hiding behind platitudes and false regret. They preferred conquest by a distant, foreign power to the continued existence of a strong, successful monster nation on their doorstep. Our very existence was the greater sin.

Rimuru, Milim, a resurrected and slightly more focused Veldora, and I… we were strong. The weakest among us could unmake mountain ranges with a stray thought. We were forces of nature given consciousness, walking apocalypses.

But that means less than you’d think when the enemy numbers in the hundreds of millions. The Eastern Empire boasted a population of over eight hundred million souls, and intelligence suggested nearly half a billion of them were warriors, mages, and killers, honed by two thousand years of relentless, perfected militarism.

Add to that the vast armies of the opportunistic human nations who saw a chance to finally erase the ‘monster’ problem, and we were not just outnumbered. We were a single, solitary pebble facing a planetary tsunami.

And they had a True Dragon of their own. Velgrynd. Older, more experienced, more disciplined, and arguably stronger than Veldora or I were individually. A sister against whom our own power seemed, at times, almost childish.

Learning I was a True Dragon had been its own special, unique hell. It wasn't just about raw power. It was like a life sentence, a life tenure in a prison of my own existence.

I had learned that was a pillar of reality, a fundamental constant. Immortal. Unkillable in any meaningful sense. The universe itself would bend and warp to keep me existing, to maintain the balance my existence represented. The one solace, the one fragile, desperate shred of hope I clung to in my darkest moments, was the knowledge that True Dragons could, under the right circumstances… reincarnate.

A new ego, a new consciousness, another me who would eventually form from the scattered essence, inheriting the mantle, the power, the cosmic role.

It wouldn't be me. The "me" that was so utterly, profoundly tired could finally end. And I still believed, with a desperate, fervent faith that bordered on the religious, that Rimuru absorbing me would achieve that.

So, for seven months, we had fought. Seven months of holding back an ocean of pure, undiluted hatred with our bare hands. Seven months of watching Rimuru, the brilliant, bullshit-generating protagonist, be worn down, piece by piece, by the sheer, grinding, logistical horror of a total war against the entire world.

When he was unavailable, pulled away to manage some other front or devising a new, terrifying plan, the strategy was brutally simple: Veldora and I would throw ourselves at Velgrynd which was the greatest threat in this war other than the sheer numbers of enemies we had.

We would stall, we would distract, we would bleed her, and we would bleed in turn. We were in a sense the anvil against which the Empire’s finest hammer was meant to break, over and over again.

We used conscripts, dragging citizens from their new homes and putting spears in their hands. We developed and deployed wide-area mind-control magics to make human soldiers fight shins st their comrades, kill, betray and betray each other through activated kill switches that left a foul, greasy taste in my mouth.

We did things, made decisions, that would haunt me for whatever cursed eternity I was destined to endure.

We became the monsters they already believed us to be, because the alternative was annihilation.

It wasn't enough. We were overwhelmed, surrounded, attacked from every conceivable angle, both physical and political.

We were fast, adaptable learners, but the Empire had two thousand years of institutional knowledge on the fine art of slaughter. They had forgotten more about war than we would probably ever know.

Sooner or later, something had to give. The sight before us, the broken, defiled corpses of our citizens, the very people we had sworn oaths to protect, the people who should have been reaping the rewards of peace and prosperity was in a sense the inevitable, logical result.

It was a failure we saw coming from a mile away, a slow-motion train wreck we were utterly powerless to stop, despite all our world-ending power.

We were strong, we weren’t doing our best but we couldn’t be everywhere.

“I don’t understand.” Rimuru’s voice fractured the thick silence, the ice in it cracking to reveal the raw, wounded, childlike confusion beneath.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” He was crying openly now, the tears no longer silent tracks but a quiet, helpless weeping, the kind that comes from a place of fundamental, worldview-shattering betrayal. “It was supposed to be a fun adventure. Like the isekai I read. A power fantasy. Building a city. Making friends.”

I said nothing. What was there to say? Sorry was a hollow, insulting syllable. Rimuru was right. It shouldn’t have been like this. In a world where I hadn’t been isekaied, this wouldn’t have been.

I didn’t remember much but I’m sure that in the light novel, Tempest didn’t fight against what felt like the entirety of the world in an ongoing war for longer than half a year.

It will be okay was a lie so transparent I couldn’t force it past the barrier of my own teeth. I just stood there feeling like a failure, feeling guilty.

I was well-acquainted with the feelings.

“We tried to be the kind ones,” he whispered, his gaze locked on the endless carnage, as if searching for a single face that would make sense of it all. “We tried to be better than them. To build a place where that mattered.”

The Empire had learned. Three months into the conflict, they adapted with a chilling, pragmatic speed. Their soldiers became walking, talking bombs. If they were losing an engagement, they would detonate, sacrificing themselves in a final, spiteful act.

A brutal, mathematically effective tactic designed for one primary purpose: to deny Rimuru the nourishment and power-up of absorption.

No bodies, no skills, no strength to be gained. It was monstrously, horrifyingly smart. We may be strong, stronger than the majority of them and I would bet that when it came to battle, fighting, no matter how unlikely it would seem, there was little few if anything that Rimuru couldn’t beat, it didn’t change that the other characters weren’t dumb, couldn’t learn.

Some explosions were standard, designed to merely vaporize a single body. Others were complex, fueled by the life force, magic, and unique skills of the bomber, creating magical blasts that made bigger and more dangerous explosions that could even injure some of tempest most durable top-tier fighters.

It was the kind of explosion that sundered to nothing the soul of the suicide bomber. It was a tactic of pure, unadulterated spite, a declaration that they would rather cease to exist than allow us to benefit from their end.

“I think it’s time for it to change,” Rimuru said. The tears stopped, cut off as if by a guillotine. His voice was different now. Hollowed out, scraped clean of its former vulnerability, and then filled with something dark, solid, and terrifyingly final.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked, though a part of me couldn’t help but feel as if it knew what would come.

I could feel it in the shift of the air, in the new, grim resonance in his aura, in the way the very particles of magic around us seemed to recoil in anticipation.

“Necromancy,” he listed, the words dropping like stones into a deep, dry well. “On a massive scale. Plagues tailored to their genes. Magically induced, rapidly metastasizing cancers. Chemical attacks. Mustard gas. Curses that blight their crops for a thousand years and kill their livestock in the womb. Indiscriminate psychic attacks broadcast across the continent. Even in their civilian population centers. There will be no more front lines. Their entire nation will become the battlefield.”

A harsh, ugly sound escaped me, a snort that was half disbelief, half sheer, unadulterated despair. “You’re going to add turning their rivers to blood, sending swarms of locusts to consume what little remains, killing their firstborns in their sleep, broadcasting the endless, creative torture of their political and military leaders to every household on the continent.”

I was being sarcastic, painting a picture of biblical, almost cartoonish villainy. A final, desperate attempt to illustrate the absurd, monstrous cliff we were poised to leap from, to shock him back from this precipice.

I hadn’t expected him to answer with a “Yes.”

The word was so simple, so flat and devoid of affect, it took a full second for its meaning to register in my frozen mind.

“What did you say?”

“I said yes!”

The confirmation hit me like a physical blow to the chest, driving the air from my lungs. “Rimuru, I was being sarcastic! That was fucking hyperbole!

“You may have been,” he said, turning those void-like, scarlet eyes on me, and in their depths I saw no jest, only a cold, terrifying certainty, “but it doesn’t change that these are, objectively, the most effective and efficient ideas we have left. The only ones that guarantee a swift end with minimal further loss of our people.”

“Bullshit.” The word was a roar, fueled by a sudden, hot spike of anger that burned away my numbness. “That’s bullshit, Rimuru, and you know it! Worse than bullshit, it’s the easy thing! The evil thing! We just have to topple Rudra! Behead the snake! This entire, fucking, pointless war ends with him! It’s always been about him!”

His head snapped toward me, a movement so fast it was a blur, a predator’s reflex. “You speak as if it’s easy! As if we haven’t torn the world apart looking for him! As if we haven’t bent Ultimate Skills to their breaking point and invented entirely new branches of divination magic to scry for his location! He knows that defeating him is our one and only win condition. He’s not an idiot! He’s hidden himself behind layers of deception and conceptual power we can’t even begin to penetrate!” A smile twisted his features, a cruel, mocking rictus that didn't belong on the face of my friend, my brother. “And seriously? The ‘easy and evil thing’? Since when are you, the dragon who prays for death every waking moment, suddenly worrying about the easy and evil thing!?”

The words were akin to being stabbed in the chest.

I didn’t know why but I flinched, a full-body recoil that I couldn’t hope to hide, my tail lashing involuntarily against the ground.

The pang in my chest was so sharp, so acute, it felt like he’d reached inside my ribcage and torn something essential loose.

I wondered what it did when he only said this due to the circumstances. Even then, I should have gotten used to this, things said in confidence thrown back in my face.

It wasn’t anything new yet it still hurts.

I tried to hide it, maybe play as something else.

He saw it.

Whether it was my body language, a flicker of pained shock in my golden eyes, maybe something else, he saw it.

The cruel, mocking smile vanished, erased as if it had never been, replaced by a wave of shame and immediate regret so potent I could feel it emanating from him like heat from a forge.

“I… I am sorry, Nanana,” he stammered, the hollow certainty in his voice crumbling into dust, replaced by a frantic, stumbling regret. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean that. It’s just… all of this…” He gestured weakly, helplessly, at the valley of death, his hand encompassing the entire scope of our failure. “It’s too much. The pressure… I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” I said, the words automatic, hollow like a script I was reading from without feeling.

“It’s understandable.” And it was. We were standing in the open, stinking grave of the people we were supposed to protect. Civility and emotional etiquette were the least of our concerns.

“I apologise, Nanana, but I still think the same,” he said, his voice softer now, pleading, begging for understanding, for validation.

“Maybe—no, you’re probably right. It’s probably the easy and evil thing. But isn’t a lesser evil better than a greater one? Isn’t it necessary when it’s the only path left that leads to any good at all? The only path that prevents this—” he swept his arm out again, “—from ever happening again?” His scarlet eyes bored into mine, desperate for absolution, for a shared burden. “If there had been any other choice, any other way, I would have taken it. You have to believe that. But we can’t. We can’t let this happen again. We can’t.”

He took a step closer, the gore-slicked ground squelching under his boot. “Hey.” His voice was a whisper now, stripped bare, raw and vulnerable. “You are the closest thing I have to family in this world. No. You and Veldora are my family. The only one that matters. I need you at my side. I need you to trust me. To believe in me. To believe that I only want things to get better, that I only want to protect what’s left, no matter how dark the path to get there seems.”

A sigh escaped me, a long, shuddering exhalation that seemed to come from the depths of my soul.

I was so tired.

So fucking tired.

What I wanted, more than anything, was the quiet, the nothing, the end of all thought and feeling.

I wanted to sleep forever, to sleep without dreams, without the constant, grinding awareness of being.

But what I wanted was a luxury that had been burned away on this field of corpses, its ashes scattered to the foul wind.

These people, who had believed in the beautiful, hopeful fiction of “Nanana Tempest,” had died for that faith.

Letting that faith be in vain, allowing their sacrifice to be just another meaningless data point in a war of attrition, felt like the ultimate, unforgivable betrayal. My own desire for personal oblivion was a selfish, petty, insignificant thing next to the monumental scale of this loss.

I looked from Rimuru’s desperate, tear-streaked face, so full of a love that was terrifying in its intensity, to the silent, accusing eyes of the dead, and back again. The box inside me, the one where I kept the yawning, welcoming void was slammed shut again with a final, resonant thud.

The lock clicked into place.

For now.

“Bury them,” I said, my voice flat, all emotion spent, leaving only a grim, final acceptance in its wake. There was no force behind the words, only a statement of fact. “Use whatever power it takes. Burn whatever resources you must. And then… let’s do what is necessary to end this war. So they can be safe. So they can live without this fear. And so I… so I can finally, earnestly, rest.”

A flicker of something, profound relief, staggering gratitude, a terrifying, all-consuming kind of love crossed Rimuru’s face. He nodded, a sharp, decisive movement, the leader reasserting himself.

“Thank you for staying at my side, Nanana,” he said, his voice gaining a sliver of its old, formidable strength, now tempered in this fresh hell. “No matter how difficult it is. I’ll do my best so that you don’t regret it. I’ll show you that this world, no matter the ugliness and the pain in it, is worth living in. I’ll show you. I’ll show them all.”

He turned back to the valley, and his power began to gather, a vortex of impossible potential that made the very fabric of the air hum and scream in protest. I did not look at him. I kept my gaze forward, out at the sea of the dead, my brilliant blue scales reflecting in the puddles of stagnant, blood-tainted water.

Such a sight would become something familiar.