Chapter 127 – Humorous
(Unknown POV)
Light.
Blinding, sourceless, the kind that didn't come from a sun but from existence deciding "here" should be bright.
Eight giants sat in a circle around it.
Not giants like tall men.
Giants like continents that had remembered how to bend. Vague shapes with edges that refused to resolve, more suggestion than flesh, each one wearing a different kind of presence like clothing.
In the middle of them floated a sphere.
Crystal, if you were being quaint.
A slow, turning globe filled with images that jittered and rewound and snapped forward again. Right now it showed a boy on his knees in a blood-soaked room, surrounded by corpses and a veiled woman.
"Pathetic," said One.
One's voice was a dry scrape, like rock grinding on rock. Masculine, maybe, if you insisted on human categories.
"I told you this subject was weak from the start," One continued. "He broke the first time his father was taken from him. Everything since is just… echoes."
Two lounged back—if you could call that posture. A long, lazy curl of shadow with a grin implied more than seen.
"Echoes are useful," Two purred. "They tell you where the original stone hit. Besides, he's entertaining. He flails. He thinks." A ripple of amusement. "He calls it 'morality.'"
Three and Four laughed in tandem.
If laughter could cut, theirs would have left grooves in the light.
"Look at him," said Three. "Clinging to people like they're anchors."
"Like they're not the easiest levers to pull," Four added. "We nudge one girl, and the rest of his world collapses. It's almost… elegant."
Five turned a metaphorical page.
Five always flickered around an outline of parchment, ink, threads. They spoke rarely, but when they did, the words hung heavy.
"Continue the experiment," Five said. "He's already abandoned himself once. Let's see how many times the pattern can be forced to repeat before it loses coherence."
On the far side of the circle, Seven leaned forward.
If any of them looked like a king, it was Seven.
Not the kind with jewels and laurels. The other kind. The one painted in old myths as a shape on a hill, crown sharp enough to cut eyes out, face always just out of frame.
"Whoever gave him that Authority," Seven said, voice dry with amusement, "must have thought he could stand at our height one day."
There were ripples at that.
Not quite laughter.
Agreement with teeth.
"What a joke," Seven finished.
Six, a towering presence that kept fracturing into different silhouettes—woman, man, child, beast—leaned her head on her hand, bored and interested at once.
"I like him," Six said. "He tastes of ruin and perseverance. He keeps getting up. And when he falls, he falls so beautifully."
Eight hummed in agreement.
Eight was smaller than the rest. Not in power. In shape. Almost human, if humans came with too many eyes and a halo of rusted chains.
"I want to see him break further," Eight said. "This was… good." A gesture toward the image of the slaughtered house. "Old God dead, friends torn apart, his failure shoved in his face. But it's only the first fracture this cycle."
Two chuckled.
"Let's see what they put him through next," Two said. "The lower functions are already improvising. Demon Queens. Old Gods. Human politics. We barely need to touch the board."
One sneered.
"The board is rigged from the start," One said. "He never reaches us. He never will. That's the point. Give the animal a mountain it can see but never climb."
"Cruel," Four said approvingly.
"Efficient," Five corrected.
Seven waved a hand and the image shifted.
The veiled woman's fingertips on the boy's chest.
His vision collapsing.
The corpse-littered room blurred into—
"Ah," murmured Six. "There we go. Back to where he first cracked."
"He thinks he's clever," Eight said. "Thinks he's self-made. He doesn't even remember how many times we've watched him die."
"Do we?" asked Three idly.
Silence.
Then Seven laughed.
"That," the king-shaped thing said, "is the funniest part."
The eight of them turned their attention back to the sphere.
The boy on his knees vanished.
A bus appeared.
***
(Somewhere else)
The Yellow King watched without a sphere.
He had no need for toys.
Where the others sat in light, he sat in a room that was all edges and no walls, an endless stage with peeling yellow curtains that never fully opened.
He wore tatters.
Rags the color of old parchment and dried marigold petals, hanging off him in strips that brushed the invisible floor and left no sound.
His crown was wrong.
Too many points. Too many angles. Every time you thought you'd counted them, one more appeared.
In front of him hung a thread of soul.
Tangled. Darkened in places like charred cloth. Thin in others, stretched near breaking.
Milton, this one read, if you knew how to read the script beyond language.
The Yellow King tilted his head.
"I see," he murmured.
His voice sounded like a late-night radio broadcast, intimate and too close.
"So you're the Milton boy they all whisper about."
He reached out with a long, lacquered fingernail and plucked the soul like a string.
It shivered.
Fragments of memory fluttered off.
A bus. A classroom. A sword. A girl crying. A queen kneeling. Old gods and new equations.
The Yellow King smiled faintly.
"Your soul is indeed corrupted," he said. "Layer upon layer. Worlds on worlds. Wounds on scars." He tsked softly. "Beyond even my clean touch, for now."
He let the thread swing.
"A pity," he said. "I do so enjoy soliloquies delivered on the edge of madness."
He stepped back.
The invisible stage rearranged itself.
"Go on, then," he said to nobody and everyone. "Play your little farce again. Break. Bend. Crawl. I'll be here when you finally reach my section of the script."
The thread vanished.
The Yellow King waited.
That was, after all, what kings did best.
***
(Erynd / Eren)
He wasn't in the tunnel.
He wasn't in the house.
He wasn't holding Gungnir or dripping Old God rot from his boots.
He was on a bus.
Rattling.
Too-bright fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, casting everything in sickly white. The fabric on the seats was that impossible shade of blue all city buses seemed to share, patterned with stains that had stories he didn't want to know.
His skin was darker.
His hands were slimmer.
His knees bumped the seat in front of him because the designer had never met a human with legs.
He knew this bus.
He knew this route.
He'd taken it a thousand times.
To the university.
Of course.
He was a professor.
Yes.
That was what he was.
He stared at his reflection in the window as the bus rolled past a blur of concrete and shops and people who would never know his name.
Brown eyes.
Tired.
Late twenties, maybe early thirties, depending on how charitably you counted the sleepless nights.
Hair too long on top, curling slightly in humidity.
A face he recognized.
And didn't.
Something tugged at him.
Under the breastbone.
Not pain.
Not exactly.
A sense that he was wearing the wrong size of himself.
The bus hit a pothole.
He bounced.
"This is normal," he told himself. "You're going to work. You have classes. You have office hours."
The thoughts slotted into place like furniture in a staged apartment.
Right shape.
No personal history.
He got off at his stop.
The university rose around him, concrete and glass, banners flapping with some slogan about excellence and community that made his teeth itch.
He walked through the gate with the other commuters, coffee cups in hand, bags slung over shoulders, phones out.
His bag was heavy.
Inside: papers. Books. His laptop. A packet of questionnaires he'd printed last night.
Yes.
Questionnaires.
He was going to give his students a diagnostic today.
Gauge their baseline.
Get a feel for the room.
He walked into his classroom.
Tiered seats. Whiteboard at the front. Projector hanging from the ceiling like a fat mechanical spider.
Students trickled in.
They looked… young.
Too young.
All of them.
He should be used to that.
He wasn't.
He put his bag down on the desk.
The movements were automatic.
Laptop out.
Marker uncapped.
He turned to the board.
His hand started writing.
He didn't decide what to write.
The marker squeaked.
Words appeared:
WHAT MAKES A BETTER LEADER?
COMPASSION OR CRUELTY?
He stared at the question.
Something in him hissed.
We've done this.
Haven't we?
Silence hummed in the room.
He could feel eyes on his back.
"Alright," he said, turning back to the class with a practiced half-smile. "Before we dive into the actual material, I want you to answer a few questions for me. No names, no grades, just… information."
He handed out the questionnaires.
Boxes to tick.
Scales to mark.
Words like "authority" and "justice" and "necessity" printed in neat lines.
As the papers passed from hand to hand, he caught fragments of faces.
A girl with a braid laughing quietly at something her friend whispered.
A boy scrolling his phone under the desk.
Another girl chewing her pen, eyes on the question at the top of the page.
Compassion or cruelty?
His heart beat a little too loudly in his ears.
He knew this question.
He'd asked it before.
He'd asked it in a tower, in a bedroom, with a princess kneeling on the floor and his hand on her head.
No.
No, he hadn't.
He taught Political Decision Theory and Introduction to Ethics…. Wait wasn't he a physicist.
He did not climb through royal windows to traumatize heirs.
He swallowed.
The air felt thick, like something was watching, waiting to see which version of himself he would pick.
A sound cut through the hum.
Not the usual classroom noises.
Heavy footsteps in the hallway.
Not running.
Deliberate.
The door opened.
A man walked in.
He wasn't security.
Security wore uniforms and bored expressions.
This man wore ordinary clothes: jeans, jacket, nothing remarkable. Which made the gun in his hand stand out all the more.
For a second, the class didn't react.
Brains tried to file "man with gun" under anything else.
Prank.
Film project.
Performance piece.
He knew better.
He didn't know how he knew better.
He just did.
The man didn't look at the students.
He looked at him.
Only him.
Like the rest of the room was wallpaper.
"Professor," the man said.
His voice was calm.
"Milton, right?"
His throat went dry.
He nodded before his mouth could lie.
The man lifted the gun.
The world slowed.
He should move.
He didn't.
Something heavy sat on his limbs.
An idea.
A memory.
A hand on his chest, cold fingers pressing through flesh.
My little Demon King… what are you doing all the way over here?
The first shot hit center mass.
Fire.
Shock.
He staggered back into the whiteboard, marker clattering to the floor.
Students screamed.
Some ducked.
Some froze.
Someone started crying loudly, hiccuping sobs that didn't sound real.
He slid down the board.
Red smeared the words behind him.
Compassion.
Cruelty.
He tried to breathe.
Air went nowhere.
He blinked.
The room spun.
In the blur of moving bodies and overturned chairs, he saw her.
Not the shooter.
Not a student.
A girl.
No—
a woman.
Standing at the back of the room, just inside the door, untouched by the chaos.
Older than he remembered her.
So much older.
Lines at the eyes that hadn't been there before. Hair longer or shorter or a different color—his brain couldn't decide, because recognition fought with the wrongness of seeing her here.
She shouldn't be here.
She belonged to another world.
To another life.
To a tunnel filled with flesh, to a bed in a tower, to a lab, to a street.
To him.
What is she doing here?
His vision narrowed on her face.
Her eyes met his.
There was no surprise in them.
No horror.
Just… grief.
And something like apology.
He tried to say her name.
He didn't know which one.
Tamara.
Lyra.
Noelle.
Julia.
Olivia.
Yue.
All of them. None of them.
"Y—" he choked.
Blood filled his mouth.
He slid sideways.
The last thing he saw before the world dropped out was her taking a step toward him, hand half-raised, as if to reach—
—and the eight giants above the world leaning in just a little closer.