Aurora Chronicle: Despair's Aftermath Left by a Fallen Ruler
My name is Ash. I was once the right hand of the world's most feared ruler, the Demon Lord Aurora Chronicle.
Three years have passed since that final battle. People celebrate Aurora's death and laugh together in a peaceful world. But every time I see those smiles, my heart is torn by a sharp pain. They don't understand anything. What Lord Aurora was protecting. What she was fighting against.
Three years ago, the world faced two threats. One was the horde of monsters visible to human eyes. The
Aurora Chronicle: Despair's Aftermath Left by a Fallen Ruler - The Demon Lord's Last Words and the Fracturing of Justice
The dust still felt like it clung deep inside his lungs.
How much time had passed since Thoma's laboratory collapsed? Ash couldn't tell. His sense of time had long been numbed—by the crystalline pain that continued to eat away at his right arm, and by the weight of Grue slung across his back.
The sewers stretching beneath Nova were a dark, damp labyrinth, utterly removed from the city's prosperity. Moss covering the walls emitted a faint phosphorescent glow, dimly illuminating the mire underfoot. The stench of putrid water clung stubbornly deep inside his nostrils.
Only the sound of water dripping somewhere far away, in steady rhythm, filled this darkness.
Ash finally came to a halt at a dead end in the old waterway.
He leaned Grue's body against a collapsed stone wall. The weight of the unconscious man bore down on his bones. Breathing roughly, Ash looked down at his crystallized right arm. Black geometric patterns had crossed his elbow and were now reaching toward the base of his shoulder. The erosion rate had easily surpassed forty percent.
(There's no time.)
Wordlessly, he stripped off Grue's outer coat. From the wound in Grue's side, dark, blackish blood had begun to seep out again. The emergency treatment Thoma had applied had been rendered almost meaningless by the rough journey.
"Don't die for nothing."
Ash muttered curtly, then looked at his own right arm. The crystallized surface gleamed dully, like a hard mineral. He placed his left hand against a sharp fragment of the crystal and, in one motion, put his strength into it.
A sickening *crack* echoed through the sewer.
A portion of the crystal shattered, and a shard roughly the size of his fingertip settled into his left palm. A fresh wave of pain shot up his right arm like searing heat, but his expression remained mask-like. The erosion spread several more centimeters toward his shoulder.
Without a word, he pressed the broken crystal fragment against Grue's wound.
"Code Art: Tissue Binding. Flux Control."
Ash's lips moved faintly. The crystal fragment emitted a pale light and, acting as a hemostatic catalyst, began to seal the wound. This was, by nature, a technique performed by a licensed physician with Code Reader qualifications. But as Oro's close aide, Ash had performed countless battlefield emergency treatments. All that was needed was a suitable catalyst and an unwavering will.
Grue's ragged breathing gradually began to settle.
Ash let his right arm—which had lost a finger's width of mobility to the crystal's erosion—hang limply, and leaned back against the wall. A faint, greasy sweat beaded on his forehead.
Only his left eye—a pupil glowing deep crimson—held an eerie heat within this darkness. Through that left eye, the presence of *Seifu* from a distant location stabbed at his senses in fragments. The residual thoughts of the Ashlands people, twisted in agony. And, confronting it, the radiance of a Code too pure, too righteous.
(Selen Halveth.)
Ash let out a small breath and closed his eyes.
He should head for the second seal immediately. Wasting time wouldn't just hasten his own death. It would hasten the end of the world.
But.
—If Selen were to die here.
Her righteous heart would be absorbed by the Seifu. Higher human emotions were the finest breeding ground for the Seifu. If the Seifu were to consume even the concept of justice itself and make it a part of its being—that would accelerate this world's demise even further.
In his cold calculation, Ash weighed the two options.
And then, remaining in that posture, he waited for dawn. Like a stone statue that had crushed all emotion.
---
The abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Nova was a decaying building, barely sufficient to keep out the rain and dew.
The cold air before dawn streamed relentlessly through the gaps in the walls. Amidst scattered, discarded wooden crates and rusted scrap iron, Ash had kindled a small fire. The firelight cast a dim silhouette of his dull silver hair against the wall.
Near the fire, Grue lay stretched out, eyes closed—whether asleep or unconscious, it was impossible to tell.
Suddenly.
"...Ah, damn it..."
With a beast-like groan, Grue stirred. His single eye slowly opened, reflecting the stains on the ceiling. His gaze seemed still unfocused, taking a while to settle.
"You're awake."
Ash spoke in a flat voice, not taking his eyes off the fire.
Grimacing at the pain in his side, Grue slowly raised his body. His single eye caught the figure of Ash sitting across the fire. The bizarre crystallization of the right arm. The burn scars running from his neck to his left cheek, now overlaid with fresh, crack-like Code erosion.
"...The hell happened to your arm?"
"Don't waste words."
Cut off sharply by Ash, Grue clenched his back teeth. It wasn't hatred. This was a different emotion. An irritation that burned deep in his chest, one he couldn't even name himself.
Silence dominated the space between them for several minutes.
Only the sound of sparks popping from the fire could be heard.
"...Hey, Ash."
Grue's voice had lost its usual anger. Instead, a hoarse resonance was mixed in.
"What... happened to Lord Oro?"
He forced the words out, as if wringing them from himself.
"Why did Lord Oro die? Why... were you the only one who couldn't protect her?"
Ash didn't answer.
A long silence. Thirty seconds? A minute? Or perhaps ten?
Grue recalled himself just days ago, trying to break this very stillness with nothing but hatred. He understood now, by instinct, that he could no longer press this man with hatred alone.
Ash opened his mouth just after a log in the fire collapsed, sending a shower of large sparks dancing upward.
"Lord Oro chose death herself."
His voice was low, cold, devoid of any emotion. As if mechanically reading aloud a record from three years ago.
"...What did you say?"
Grue's single eye widened.
"On the day the Falgram War ended. Lord Oro offered her own chest to the sword of the Hero Selen. In order to seal the source of the Seifu's erosion into a dimensional rift through her own death."
Ash paused there, gently pressing the fingers of his left hand—the one not crystallized—against his left eye.
"On the verge of death, Lord Oro summoned me, gouged out her own left eye, and entrusted it to me. Within this left eye, a fragment of the Chronicle Code and the keys to the seven seals are locked away."
"Then... she is, even now..."
Grue's voice trembled.
"Lord Oro is not dead. She converted her own existence into Code, and even now, within the sea of Seifu, she continues to maintain her consciousness. In the midst of hell, alone, she became a coffin that protects the world."
Ash's tone remained cold and detached to the end.
But Grue saw it.
Ash's right eye, amber in color, twisted for just an instant in violent agony. The crimson glow of his left eye flared with particular intensity, like tears of blood.
"The last words Lord Oro left me were—'Do not hate the world. Hatred itself is the Seifu's most favored fodder.' That was all."
The air froze.
Something inside Grue crumbled with an audible crash.
It was the castle of hatred that had supported his heart for four years.
Oro was not a tyrant who had trampled the people of the Ashlands.
Ash was not a traitor who had abandoned everything and let his master die.
They were—in a place none of them knew—simply protecting the world.
"Why... damn it..."
Grue's voice had turned into a sob.
Tears spilled from his single eye. Pathetic. Miserable. But he couldn't stop them. Every swing of the blade he had directed at Ash. Every single word with which he had cursed him as a traitor. It had all been based on misunderstanding and ignorance.
"Why... didn't you say so..."
"What would it have changed if I had? Fueled by your hatred, the Seifu would have eroded the world even faster. Your hatred was the finest fuel for ending this world."
Ash's voice was cold, dismissive.
A realism to the point of cruelty.
"Keep directing your hatred at me. If that keeps the world intact even a little longer, then so be it."
"Don't screw with me... Don't screw with me!"
Grue buried his face in his knees, his shoulders shaking.
It was a cry of anger and regret, cursing his own foolishness.
Ash turned his back. As if to say he had no further business with Grue.
Yet, his back seemed, ever so slightly, to be trembling too.
---
The southern part of the Savel Plains. In a place once called the continent's greatest granary, now only a rusted wind blew wildly.
The Ashlands—a land where the people of the former Demon Lord's territory, once called the Ash Folk, lived quietly.
In a third abandoned village on its outskirts, she was there.
The wind gently caressed her platinum blonde hair, intricately braided with gold and reaching down to her waist.
Selen Halveth. Her azure eyes, which anyone would admire, were now sharp, glaring at the bizarre scene before her.
This was a village where people had lived until just a few days ago.
The houses were all intact. On a table sat a bowl with half-spoiled soup still inside. In the livestock feed box, relatively fresh hay remained. It was as if time alone had stopped, with the people simply gone.
"All the villagers... melted while still alive..."
She looked down at the blackened, discolored human-shaped stains left on the ground.
The dissolution phenomenon caused by the Seifu. The true threat that Ash was fighting, whittling away his own body.
"—Dawnlight Code Art: Wide-Area Expansion."
Her right hand traced a pattern in the air with a delicate gesture. A holy light spread out from Selen like ripples, enveloping the entire village.
In that instant.
"—Aaaaaaaaaaaah!!"
A deafening chorus of countless screams tormented her consciousness directly.
"This is... residual thought...!"
Her azure eyes widened in horror.
She saw it.
The truth that the consciousness of the dissolved villagers had not completely vanished. That their thoughts, memories, fear, pain—all of it had been absorbed into the Seifu's network, and without ever being digested, they continued to writhe in agony within that hell for eternity.
"It hurts... It's hot... Help me..."
"Why... why did this happen to us...?!"
"Hero... why didn't you save us...?"
Fragments of residual thought flowed directly into Selen's righteous heart like a muddy torrent.
"No... I..."
She staggered, putting a hand to the ground.
Was *this* the hell that Oro Chrony had been sealing away?
Was the Demon Lord she had vanquished not the one who had brought ruin to the world, but the sole breakwater protecting the world from this hell?
Her victory from three years ago.
Her pride in having saved the world.
Now, with a resounding crash, it was being overturned from its very foundation.
"Hero of Justice."
At that moment.
A bizarre voice, as if countless voices were overlapping, rising from the depths of the earth, called out to Selen.
The space before her warped, and a pitch-black mist converged. Residual thoughts and high-concentration Seifu combined, forming a gigantic humanoid silhouette. It had no face. Only countless mouths, twisted in agony, opened chaotically across its entire body, each spinning words.
"Why did you let us die?"
"Because you killed Oro."
"Your justice is hypocrisy."
Seifu Walker—a collective entity of Seifu.
It was an incarnation of curses, condensing the pain and hatred of the villagers.
"No... I never intended...!"
She desperately deployed a defensive Code Art. But the Seifu Walker's attack was not physical. It was mental contamination. It pressed in, trying to directly parasitize her soul—the soul that possessed the purest heart of justice.
Just as the tendrils of black mist were about to entwine around her limbs—
In the abandoned warehouse, Ash's left eye throbbed with an unprecedented, intense pain.
"—Abnormal Seifu activation in the Ashlands...!"
His left eye was projecting the distant scene in the Ashlan
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