The Star of Annihilation - Chapter 86

The Star of Annihilation
Chapter 86 – Friction (1)
Written by : eleven

* * *

Could he come clean to Nate?

Roy didn’t know if he had the courage to do so.

So many things had happened since his regression, and the biggest impact on him thus far was the fact that he had friends he could rely on.

But was he even relying on them?

Clearly he wasn’t trusting them in full and Roy felt just how hypocritical his thinking had been as Nate stood behind him, tears rolling down his cheeks.

[Nate.]

After some time, Roy finally spoke up.

His voice slightly cracked as he sent the mental message, but it was just tantamount to how difficult it was for Roy to talk about.

How could he say that he wasn’t really 14? That he was really 35 in mental age from his two lives.

The fact that there would be a war that drove humanity to extinction and that he was trying to stop it?

He didn’t know.

There were so many things Roy couldn’t understand even with his regression. Even if he had regressed, Roy only felt like he knew less and less about the truth of the world after regressing.

How his father had died- or maybe was even still alive somehow. His sister he had never met. What the voice was that he heard when he came back in time and why it had called him ‘my descendant’. Roy’s family was practically in shambles and he was barely able to protect his mother who had died tragically in his past life.

He was stronger than he was in the past, but he still couldn’t break through the 4-star gap to 5-stars.

What could he even be proud of?

These thoughts swirled around in his mind and barraged his conscience with guilt.

[I don’t know how to talk about it.]

[Then why even talk?]

Nate spat back.

[Because…. I know.]

[How can you know?! How can you know what I feel or what anyone else feels? All you do is selfishly push forward each time without even looking back and still call us your friends?]

[….]

Nate’s words stung with malice and anger.

[I don’t know that. But… I do know what it feels like to be left behind.]

[If you’re saying that because-]

[No. It’s not because you reached 5-stars and I didn’t Nate. It’s nothing like that.]

Roy shut down Nate’s speculative anger.

Hearing this, Nate felt confused.

‘He knows what it’s like to be left behind?’

[What kind of bullshit are you talking about?]

Nate couldn’t accept it. He felt that if there was anyone who knew Roy the most, it would probably be him. Although there was clearly a lot that Roy never talked about and clearly some huge secrets he had, it didn’t make sense that Roy would know what that feeling felt like.

Roy gulped nervously as he turned around to face Nate.

Nate’s hair was now a completely dull platinum unlike how it was when they had first met. His identity as Varpulis’ apostle was becoming more and more abundant as he accepted the power.

[I….. can’t do it yet. It’s not that I don’t want to. But I don’t even know if words can even explain to you what it is.]

[….]

Nate felt a surging rage start to boil up inside of him. One so full of anger and frustration that he felt like at any moment he was going to pull out his spear and attack Roy to force the answer out of him.

[Instead, I can show you.]

[….huh?]

Nate felt as if cold water had splashed over his face as he heard Roy’s acceptance. As he was about to grow more confused by this since Roy wasn’t doing anything, the mana in the air started to fluctuate silently and calmly around Roy like a lake.

It started to ripple around him and change the very scenery around the two of them.

[Memory Replication]

A spell that did not have a rating. It was a spell that served as a utility type and could vary in difficulty based on the memory and images being replicated from the caster.

However, for Roy… all of his memories of that time were as fresh as ever.

[From now on, what I’m about to show you. Please don’t tell the others yet. You’re the only one I’ve ever shown this to. So… please.]

Roy’s image started to blur as it slowly disappeared from Nate’s view along with the surroundings of Ezrest.

The first thing Nate noticed after that, was the sky turned dark.

No… it was still lit with light, but it wasn’t lit with sunlight.

It was dark, incredibly dark, and the little bits of light that poured through the ashy clouds of smoke were red and green.

Slowly, the sounds of people could be heard.

No, these weren’t sounds that humans should be making.

WWRAAHHHHHHH!

Blood-curdling screams and shouts echoed out in the world around Nate.

The ground was ravaged and uneven; the color of the brown dirt was no longer brown and was instead a dark blackish red.

Nate kneeled down and rubbed his fingers along the dirt.

‘How is this in Roy’s memories? I don’t recognize this place at all and I know where Roy’s been and this doesn’t look like the Demon Territory based on the descriptions that I’ve heard about the place. If so… where is this?’

As he rubbed his fingers together, Nate brought his hand to his nose and sniffed it.

‘Blood.’

A Lot of it too. Each of his senses were slowly coming to him as the memory was still materializing.

Sounds of soldiers marching could be heard in the distance and there were craters all along the ground in front of Nate.

Nate took a few steps forward and immediately backpedaled as soon as he saw what lay inside one of those craters. Inside of the crater was something so grotesque and horrific that it was hard to describe.

It was a battlefield. Nate started to be able to deduce that much as soon as he had heard the marching and the screams around him. But what he saw inside the crater was hard to describe as a battle.

A massacre.

That was the easiest way to describe it.

Several decapitated limbs, brain matter, crushed bones lay in the bottom of the crater. It was enough to say that at least 300 or so people had died from a single attack.

‘What caused these craters though?’

There were traces of mana present in the crater and Nate tried to think of a spell that could possibly cause this kind of massive damage.

There were over 30 craters within his eyesight, and that was only the ones he could see. There were likely to be even more where the sounds of noises were in the distance.

There were only a couple of spells that Nate had heard of that could cause this kind of damage, but those were spells amongst 8-star spells- not even 7-star Arch-mages could produce spells of such mass destruction.

Was it the spell meteor?

That just didn’t make sense though.

Meteor could surely explain one or two of these craters, but who could cast over 30 of them like this? 8-Star Great Wizards couldn’t even cast more than 3 or 4 in a single 20 minute battle from what Nate could gather because of the massive consumption of mana needed to cast even one of these catastrophic spells.

Nate decided to walk towards the noises he was hearing in the distance- the source of the screams and the area where the marching could be heard.

Although Nate normally wouldn’t ever risk going towards the source of a battle where dozens of meteors could be cast, he was only witnessing a memory from Roy’s memories. Although he could feel things like the ground, he wouldn’t be able to interfere with a memory since it was only playing a recollection of what had already transpired in the memory.

As he walked around the craters to avoid the horrible stench that came from the bodies at the bottom of the pits, Nate finally made way to the edge of a small cliff.

As he looked over the horizon, Nate saw it.

Something that didn’t make any sense.

There were no active wars currently in the entire Northern Continent as it had just been out of a warring period between each other.

But Nate was seeing something odd.

Giants, Demons, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Beastmen….

An army made up of all these different races was marching and its number was too large to even count.

It was easily over hundreds of thousands of soldiers and all of them were marching towards a location slightly to the left of where Nate was looking.

As Nate turned his head, his eyes widened in shock.

Beings that covered the entire skies.

Only 5 of them could be seen, but each of them was a powerhouse and was razing the ground and the remnants of another army that had probably just been fighting against them.

They looked to be a part of the same army as the one that was marching, but they were being almost abandoned like moths rushing towards a flame.

There were a few individuals locked in combat with the large beasts that were barely holding on, but they were far too few in number and the beasts were almost playing with them as if they had found an interesting toy.

Each of those individuals were at the level of Swordmasters, Arch-Mages, Spirit Masters and much more. They were all different races too, so it could be said that some of Humanity’s strongest forces were fighting against them.

But there were too few to keep up with their opponents.

And those opponents were beasts that Nate had been coming across more and more recently in the past few years ever since leaving the dull and boring village of Kerto.

“Dr-Dragons….”

Nate stuttered as he couldn’t believe it. There were even more Dragons behind the 5 that were gathered and not moving as if they didn’t care what was going on but were occasionally glancing at the new army that was approaching.

But if Nate’s past experiences were an indication of anything…. There was no way this army that measured hundreds of thousands strong would win even if they had 100 Transcendent level humans in the army composition.

It was because there were thirty or so dragons and that was only what Nate could see.

Beyond them were probably more that he couldn’t even see.

Roy’s image suddenly started to materialize in front of Nate up on the cliff.

[This is just a part of them. Please take your time and understand this is not something I will ever want to explain with words either.]

The images started to change once more, and this time Nate was much closer to the Dragons and he noticed a group of mages and knights that were scurrying around as their battalion was getting absolutely decimated.

Amongst the group in the backline of mages, Nate thought he saw someone familiar.

‘Is that…’

“AGH!”

A meteor descended from the air and the man had been lucky to use the blink spell and get away from the meteor.

However his body was in shambles and one of his legs had been clobbered by it and was left with only right leg.

As the man fell from the sky as his mana was exhausted, Nate ran closer to the man.

‘It can’t be.’

Nate couldn’t believe it.

The long black hair, the bangs that covered his forehead and the same sharp jawline and lips that reminded him every day of why it was a good idea to leave the shabby village of Kerto.

It was Roy.

But he was much older and right at death’s door.

Before he could think much longer about it, the sky above Roy started to grow dark as more magic circles started to materialize above him.

The older version of Roy started to weep.

Nate felt something within his heart drop as he saw this.

The version of Roy in the memory had the same look in his eyes as when Nate had met him for the very first time in Kerto.

Over the past years, Roy’s overall look had turned into one that was more lively but Nate remembered the look in Roy’s eyes very clearly.

Nate had been beaten by his drunk father and his mother had barely been called a mother and he had long given up on having much of a life before he started to hang around with Roy.

He found Roy interesting in that sense because Roy had a very similar look in his eyes to Nate at the time.

Eyes devoid of emotion, a mind that seemed to have been through everything horrible life had to offer.

Nate had been malnourished, never had someone he could love for family and nothing to even call a future.

He thought Roy had a similar past to him, but was confused when he met Mathilde, Roy’s mother, since she was such a loving person.

But it started to make sense now.

Nate looked up at the sky and a large meteor was falling down at a tremendous speed.

Right as the meteor was about to land, Nate saw a bright and binding green light suddenly burst out from Roy.

Nate squinted his eyes and then the surroundings went dark once more as the meteor made impact with the earth.

[This is only a part of it all.]

Roy’s voice echoed out once more.

Nate couldn’t think straight and stood in the darkness quietly.

Then…. He heard Roy’s voice once more.

[Do you want to see the rest of them…? My memories, that is.]

Nate gulped his saliva down his throat and nodded slowly.

With that, things would never quite be the same as the surroundings started to shift once more.