Inverse System - Chapter 103

“Your mother, she used to work here, at the Echo company. During her time here, she met the CEO and his right-hand man, being your father. The two seemed to fall in love instantly, and they started a family together shortly after getting married. Back then, multi-race marriages had just been newly accepted into the law in Orthlys after the King married a dragonborne.

Nonetheless, they gave birth to a healthy half-elf girl, which was you. Your father took her back to the Elven Forest, which the CEO, Alen Tincer, had granted them so that they could raise their child. But around that time is when it happened.

As you know, a mysterious book began appearing around the continent, written by a ‘Albert E.. Nobody but the church of Silwin knew about its contents, but it wasn’t always like that. Those who managed to get their hands on the books and read them became targets, and your mother was one of them. One day, when you were about 4 years old, both of your parents were called back to Naji.

The church forced Alen to request them back into the city, not knowing why. Alen greeted them as they arrived, and noticed their daughter wasn’t with them. That day, they made the right choice leaving you behind in the Elven Forest.

I was sent in as a spy by my lady a few years prior and was a simple apprentice in the Echo company. I was also ecstatic to see them, particularly your mother. With her Spring, I knew it had the potential to be of great use to my lady, so when I heard that the churchmen took her and her husband away, I secretly followed them.

That was when I saw it. They forced them into an underground bunker, 3 churchmen dressed in all white, and the married couple. I could only imagine that they heard about their possession of the mysterious book, and checked their memory for them. When finding nothing in Voron’s memory, they pushed him outside of the underground dungeon and shut the door on him.

I saw him as he struggled, with tears in his eyes, banging on the door repeatedly, yelling at them to let him back in. He even pulled out a black hammer and smacked the door with it repeatedly, but nothing worked. He eventually ran away to get help, yelling Alen’s name. As he left, I heard him mutter something under his breath.

‘I’m not gonna let you die!’ he said. When I heard that, my heart dropped. The Spring that I’ve been going for is about to be killed, so I knew I had to do something about it. As I was trying to think of a way into the room, I heard the churchmen inside talking amongst themselves. When finding out about her Spring, the churchmen also didn’t want to waste it.

As I also felt it to be a waste to get rid of her, so I called out to them through the door. They heard me, and my proposal, let me in,  and we had discussions about the future of the woman, and that was when the churchmen invited me to Silwin, to further discuss the matter. Of course, we brought your mother with us, and by then, Alen and Voron had already thought her dead, but in reality, she was still alive. In Silwin, that was when I introduced them to my savior, my queen, my goddess. She proposed that we use a slave ring to bind her and rid her of free will, but they somehow didn’t work on her.

That was when my lady deployed this mysterious gray-haired man. The aura he exuded was unlike anything I’d ever felt. To this day, I still have no clue what he did. The gray-haired man told us to exit the room that your mother was staying in, then emerged with a red ring in hand, and the woman dead on the ground.

We took custody over the ring, and my lady granted it to me to keep watch over. I eventually climbed up in the ranks in the company, and eventually gained the assets to begin producing my own products. I was able to infuse the ring’s power to different machines that I kept secret from the company, and handed them over to my lady. Of course, to this end, I used the companies assets, so this information could be detrimental to the entire state of the organization.

These machines could produce a powder with the ring’s power imbued into them, and with time, I eventually became the general manager of the company, earning Alen’s trust. Eventually, this led me to meeting you, and as soon as I saw that machine, I instantly knew what I had to do…” He stopped talking, the mind control over his eyes fading away as he re-awoke to his own conscience, despair beginning to loom over him as he realized what he had just said.

“No… I betrayed her… I… betrayed my lady…” Ginald began weeping facing his head to the ground.

Saphrilla also collapsed and began crying profusely, Rein’s scowl strengthening as he grabbed the man’s neck.

“Thanks for that moron, you gave us some really valuable info. I already scanned through your mind as well and turns out that’s all you know. Guess this is the end for you then,” Rein stated as he lifted him up by the collar.

“Wait! No! Please don’t kill me! Please spare me!” He begged as Rein looked at him with a glare of mercilessness.

He suddenly jumped out of the building with Ginald in hand, using the fire under his feet to hover over the lake, holding Ginald above it by the collar.

“Let’s see how your fortification does against drowning. Even if you can swim, those broken arms aren’t gonna do you shit,” Rein said, letting go of him, sending him plummeting into the lake.

“N-no! Someone! Save me! My lady!” He shrieked as he fell.

“Don’t worry, your lady is joining you soon enough. In the depths of hell,” Rein stated as he looked back at the palace, seeing his aunt in the distance looking in his direction, smirking at him devilishly.

Beside her was the king, frantically panicking as he pointed at Rein, who assumed that he was ordering the royal guard to go arrest him.

Rein scoffed, then turned back to the Echo company building. He landed back on the top floor, seeing Saphrilla still weeping into her arms, sensing a great sadness emanating from her small body.

It was too much for her. The information she learned about her mother, what happened that day when her mother and her father left together, the fact that her mother saved her father when they scanned their minds, it was all too much to digest at once. She felt scared and confused and didn’t know what to do.

Suddenly, she felt a hand rest on her head, then pull her closer, looking up to see a now white-haired boy comforting her.

“Rein… Why… Why did you come back..? After what I said… ” She wept as she looked up at his yellow eyes.

“What do you think? You think I can just abandon my little sis?” He said, which made her tears flow out even more.

“B-but, you were right there… You were on the cusp of accomplishing your goal… I felt it when Xenia inverted my Spring… When I called out for you… Why would you throw that away just for me? Are you stupid?” She tightened her grip on his shirt as she asked that question.

“You’re the stupid one,” he laughed.

“How many times have I told you? I’m not here for Emria. I’m not here for Voron. I’m here for you, Saphrilla. You’re my family, and you never turn your back on family,” he tightened his hug on her as she cried into his chest, her weeps becoming louder as the sun finished setting, covering the city in complete darkness.

As Saphrilla continued to cry into Rein’s chest, heard the elevator ping as it arrived at the floor, Raxo and Quint hastily emerging in a panic, looking at the two on the ground, then letting out a sigh of relief. Quint, however, continued looking around, seeing Xenia laying on the couch, unconscious.

The 2 rushed over to her side as Raxo frantically took off her inverse ring, returning her Spring back to normal. The same Spring she used to nurse Quint, which allowed her to heal any living thing to a certain extent, but any machine or system she touched would break. She used it to heal Xenia’s arm back to normal, her blue, dislocated arm returning to it’s usual position and color.

Rein stood up after Saphrilla dried the last of her tears and lifted her up, sensing the presence of a crowd of heavily armored men at the bottom floor as he could feel the elevator rising, with more armored men inside.

“We’re surrounded. I’m assuming those are the guards the kind sent after me… If it were only Saphrilla and me, I could just jump out the window here. But it’s not… How do we escape this?”