Chapter 110: Mad Shrike (11)

Tabo watched her in silence. The damp, heavy air of the dark prison cell clung to them both. He waited as she finished her grim task, then quietly followed Theresa out of the subterranean gloom and back into the biting sunlight. In her arms, she carried the lifeless body of her former guard.

“I thought you would strip her of her Arts and spare her life,” Tabo remarked, his voice a flat, unreadable drawl. “Or at the very least, tell her that you forgave her while she still had breath in her lungs.”

Theresa paused, tilting her head. With a candid, almost vulnerable gesture, she motioned toward her own face. Tabo reached out, his thumb gently brushing away the glistening tears pooling at the corners of her eyes.

“As Theresa, the woman,” she murmured softly, “she was not just my guard. She was a friend who stood by my side through decades of life and death. But precisely because of that bond… Theresa wanted to grant her a final, honorable glory.” Her expression hardened, carrying the crushing weight of a monarch. “However, the Lord of Fiends must hold her accountable for the lives lost to her treason.”

A brief, heavy silence fell between them.

Tabo withdrew his hand, the moisture of her tears cooling against his skin, and turned on his heel. “I don’t get it. I’m leaving.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I truly admire the innate, masochistic philosophical thinking of the Sarkaz.”

Theresa wasn’t angered by his dry deflection. She simply followed behind him, still cradling her fallen friend. “Even though you claim not to understand,” she said, a faint, sad smile touching her lips, “you still went out of your way to leave us time for a proper farewell. You even contacted the Undertaker at the Rose Riverside in advance, didn’t you?” She watched his back. “Doctor, you really are a particularly contradictory person.”

You floated like a silent phantom beside the two of them as they walked.

To the rest of Terra, the Six Heroes of the Sarkaz were nothing more than untouchable, mythical legends. But to Theresa, they were living, breathing people—her brother, her teacher, her closest confidants, her sworn companions. The brutal internal schism of Kazdel made outsiders forget that the very people she now pointed her blade toward were once the ones she held dearest.

You raised a translucent hand and rested it on the shoulder of your past self. Just as you expected, you could hear his inner voice.

‘The most game-like aspect of this wretched world is actually everyone’s absurd stress tolerance and their capacity for misery…’Past Tabo thought coldly.’It makes me seem quite despicable by comparison.’He kept walking, his internal monologue completely devoid of the empathy Theresa saw in him.’Betrayal truly is an eternal theme. Unfortunately for them, as a pragmatic atheist, I couldn’t care less who comes to judge my so-called crimes.’

You let out a heavy breath. A heart as cold as forged iron. You shook your head in sheer disappointment at your past self’s retreating figure, gliding after him without stopping. Rounding the stone corridor, Tabo finally parted ways with the Lord of Fiends.

After all, he had a clandestine tryst waiting for him tonight.

A dimly lit tavern. On the scarred wooden table sat a peculiar spread: cheap wine, roasted beast scales, fresh oranges, and coarse flatbread. For some inexplicable, deeply chuunibyou reason, Tabo closed the menu after ordering a meal perfectly mirroring your memory of The Last Supper.

“I have long heard of your name…” a deep, gravelly voice broke the silence. “The mysterious Commander. The rumored, awakened evil spirit of Babel. Before tonight, I hadn’t even entertained the possibility of cooperating with you.”

The Sarkaz man sitting across from him shared the same short, pale pink hair as the Lord of Fiends, concealed beneath a coarse, weathered cloth cloak. His face was obscured by the grime and dust of the road, rendering him deceptively unremarkable. Only the massive, exceptionally heavy broadsword resting at his waist betrayed his true identity.

No sane person would dare believe that Tabo, possessing such a frail, thoroughly un-combat-ready body, would casually sit across from a Royal Court-level powerhouse of uncertain allegiance. Just as no one would believe that the iron-fisted Chairman of the Sarkaz Military Commission would infiltrate Kazdel entirely alone, all because of a vaguely worded, cryptic text message.

Tabo held his wine glass in one hand, swirling it with slow, deliberate ease. The bright red vintage clung to the crystal like fresh blood before slowly trickling down the sides. “Like-minded people will inevitably find a way to cooperate sooner or later, won’t they, Mr. Theresis?”

The flickering tavern light hit Tabo’s pale jaw, casting long shadows that made him look more like a predatory Vampire than a frail human.

“Our ultimate goals don’t conflict in the slightest,” Tabo continued, his voice a smooth, hypnotic poison. “I need the Sarkaz to sow Originium across the entirety of this land for me. Infection by Originium can grant your people exemption privileges; it will provide Kazdel with a limitless, stable energy source. And while a highly active Originium environment becomes an absolute paradise for the Sarkaz…” He took a slow sip. “…it will completely and utterly expel those accidentally created ‘little animals’.”

Tabo smiled, a chilling, hollow expression. “You can’t refuse me, can you?”

Theresis subconsciously swallowed hard, the sheer scale of the proposed genocide catching even the hardened warlord off guard.

The ghostly apparition of your current self let out a long, agonizingly tired sigh behind him. You finally realized the horrifying truth. Your past self, operating entirely without a script or a wiki, had immediately recognized a massive, fundamental problem with his transmigration.

Question: You wake up in a brand new, post-apocalyptic wasteland world. The inhabitants are almost biologically identical to you, except they sport random animal ears and tails. At this point, after hearing fragmented lore snippets like ‘you were frozen by the Previous Civilization’, ‘the Previous Civilization was entirely pure human’, and ‘Originium stores all the genetic data of the past’, what is your logical deduction?

Option A: This is your home planet, Earth, tens of thousands of years into a ruined future.

Option B: You’ve transmigrated into a niche tower defense gacha game full of beast-eared waifus—one you’ve never actually heard of—which specifically included Earth-based architectural designs just to enhance the player’s sense of immersion.

Especially since Hypergryph was simply too lazy to invent a completely original sci-fi setting and modeled the Previous Civilization entirely after modern Earth! Isn’t this just getting completely, disastrously led astray by your own airtight reasoning?!

He didn’t want to conquer Terra. He truly just wanted to go home. He wanted to resurrect the Previous Civilization!

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent! 🙇‍♂️):

Massive thanks for reading and supporting the operation!]