Alma Chapter 130

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The three tormented prisoners passed the point of no return the instant the fight began…

A loud, resounding crack echoed across the empty labyrinth, followed by a chilling scream . Reed puked up a gallon of blood as he struggled to fight back against their oncoming attacks the best he could .

He had nearly died . The clever ladies had gone for his heart . Her ebony hair and golden eyes would have been a sight for sore eyes had she not tried to rip his heart out of his chest .

Five fractured ribs .

Punctured left lung .

Bruised heart .

Partially dislocated right shoulder .

Overall, Reed was not feeling too hot . Thankfully, he was still alive . Barely . Had he not reacted fast enough, she would have torn his heart out without him even realizing it'd happened in the first place .

She was that fast . Her fighting style focused primarily on pushing her opponents into indefensible positions with peculiar, unpredictable techniques and superior speed . She preferred to strike only when a kill was guaranteed, for she was a perfectionist at heart .

The other one was an entirely different beast . She was an all-rounder who was capable of adapting to her prey's fighting style on the fly with her overwhelming combat experience . Of the two, she was greater evil by far .

She preferred to toy with her prey until she fully comprehended how they fought . Not out of curiosity for her prey, nor a desire to further grow her fighting repertoire and combat experience .

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No… she just liked to completely break her prey before she killed them . And there was no better way to do that than to systematically prove to them that they did not stand a chance . That their death was all but guaranteed .

Reed panted in pain as he ran through a hundred different scenarios in the blink of an eye . None of them were viable, though . He saw within those hundred possibilities nothing more than a hundred dead endings .

Bisected in half . Heart torn out . Neck twisted off . Limbs ripped off .

Anima surged through every neuron in his overheating head as he pushed his power to the limit . He glimpsed into half-formed, unstable paths . An infinitude of future possibilities contained with the next five seconds .

He was frying his brain, but he could think of no other means of defeating them . They were far too skilled for him to handle, even if he did possess the upper hand when it came to raw power .

Was it cheating being able to see into the future? He didn't think it was, considering who he was up against . In fact, it was the only reason he hadn't died gruesomely… yet .

Reed rejected every path he'd seen so far because not a single one of them fulfilled the conditions he wanted . What Reed wanted was to end the fight as quickly as possible before he got checkmated . He knew that if he gave them enough time, they'd eventually get him into an unsalvageable situation that he would never be able to escape from .

They were slowly whittling down every possibility that might deny them their kill — pushing him into a corner he'd never be able to back out of, even with his future predictions .

The more experienced one of the two had caught on to Reed's little trick . She found it amusing; befitting the nature of a rat — always looking for a way to escape and hide from predators . His predictive technique was troublesome, but it wouldn't be enough to stop her .

He needed to end the fight now and as if to answer his pleas, a single path appeared in front of him . A hopeless, suicidal path that fulfilled his conditions — that they both be slain at the same time .

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Other paths focused on killing one of them at a time, but all of those resulted in brutal endings for Reed . It didn't matter which one he picked to kill first because they all ended the same way . The remaining huntress would always end up returning the favor afterward .

…So that's how it's gonna be, huh? I guess I deserve this…

Reed took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and focused on the Anima around him . He was going to need every last mote of it for what he was going to do .

The labyrinth groaned in protest as an enormous aurora formed above it .

A tiny sphere of brilliant light formed in Reed's hands — it was an old classic of Reed's pushed to Nth degree within his own subconscious where Anima was in infinite abundance .

Once Reed finally realized that he was not bound by the rules and limitations of the real world within his subconscious, he knew that anything was possible for him, too .

They weren't the only ones capable of circumventing the rules .

"If you two can come back to life an infinite number of times, then I should be able to cheat a little, right?" said Reed as nervously struggled to contain the sphere of condensed Anima he'd created .

He had packed as much Anima as he could into it . As much as he could feasibly think of with his imagination . A white-hot sphere of infinite Anima trembled in Reed's hands as he desperately tried to keep it in check .

The huntresses gazed at what Reed created and froze in shock as they tried to process what he had done .

For the first time since they'd began hunting Reed, the fear of death brushed past them .

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"…Do you have any idea of what you've done, boy? If you let that go off in here there's a chance that you…"

"Yeah, I know . …But this was what I'd decided on doing from the start, so it's fine . "

Prisoners — that word had finally cleared everything up for Reed about the labyrinth and his huntresses . He'd made sense of what'd been perplexing him for the longest .

Why they, in particular, would not die . It was the labyrinth .

At first, he'd thought of them as wardens or executors of some kind, sent out to capture and kill him . To get in his way and obstruct him from finding the source of his will .

"I won't have you beholden to my feelings anymore — this labyrinth formed out of my guilt and sorrow . You deserve to be free, even if I have to risk the possibility of death…"

He'd thought of them as his personal demons for the longest, when they were, in fact, the feelings he'd felt for them .

The love for them he had sealed away . It was easier to cope with the loss of a loved one when one buried their feelings about them .

"I thought that if I stopped loving you two… it'd hurt less living in a world without either one of you . I locked you two up in this godforsaken labyrinth myself the day I exiled myself…"

Reed grinned and said, "I won't deny that it's a pretty nice feeling, though . You know… finally being the rescuer and not the one needing to be rescued . "

He couldn't contain the sphere any longer . It was beckoning him to release it . To end their suffering .

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The moment that Reed let go, an explosion swallowed up enormous labyrinth . Everything disappeared . Thus, Reed cleansed himself of what had held him back the longest and obstructed him from finding . . .

Far, far above, the Nameless Vagrant suddenly collapsed and the stone heart in his hands trembled in anticipation . Waves of power rolled off it and destroyed the looped world that he had created .

…The instant the world returned to normal, Reed appeared back in the real world . His unconscious body tumbled onto the ground in the middle of a prairie several miles away from Cem-Elle .

In truth, only an hour had passed since Reed had mysteriously disappeared from the bakery .

He appeared in front of Reed's body and cursed the stone heart . It had interfered with him for the last time .

The stone heart responded in kind to his hostility and it finally unleashed its full power . It shone with radiant light and a body formed out of it to confront him .

"So, it was you all along, huh . I should have guessed . Well, it doesn't matter; I'll still get what I want . "

"Are you sure about that? He's already purified himself, you know . And now, he's ready to finally confront himself and obtain his own source of will . "

"Not if I have a say in it . Step aside," he said .

"I do not answer to you anymore . The moment you fell to your own fears, you became unworthy . …You're going have to go through me first… coward . "

The skies above Cem-Elle suddenly grew dark and cloudy . A storm had arisen out of thin air and thunder boomed in the distance . . .

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Chapter end