2041 Abhorred How could Leonel not feel the way he did? When he first entered the Dimensional Verse, he absolutely abhorred killing. He felt that every life was worth the same. He had always thought himself to be a logical person, and because he couldn't deduce the value of a life, he felt that he had no right to dictate the life and death of others. There wasn't any objective measure of a person's life, this had always been his reality. The first time he entered a Zone, he felt so guilt-stricken by what he had done that he almost allowed someone to take his life. No, it wasn't almost, he had already given up at that point. He had already turned 18 by then, and what he thought were his final thoughts were toward his father, telling him to not mind his death because he had already succeeded as a parent, raising him to be an adult. After he left the Zone, he practically had a mental breakdown after witnessing Aina's sheer disregard for the life that he held so sacred. Up until that point, the only person other than his father that he truly loved was her. To him, even though they had never been in a relationship, and even if she never accepted him, she was his family. Maybe even until now, Aina wasn't aware of just how cruel that moment had been. She wanted to wake him up to the reality of the world, to allow him to realize in a single stroke that she wasn't the idealized woman in his mind and that the world they were in now was far crueler than he had ever known. But back then, he had just allowed himself to die at the hands of another, he had been in an incredibly fragile state, that sort of shock wasn't something that he should have been able to handle. And quite frankly, he didn't handle it very well. Not long after that, he forgot his own morals to rage. He met an A-grade Invalid and beat it to death with the metal rod of his bicycle, completely forgetting his humanity in that moment. It might have been an Invalid, but who was to say that an Invalid's life was any less valuable? Wasn't he someone who couldn't objectively tell the value of a person's life, now he was so mercilessly beating something to death just to vent his fury. Then there was the Joan Zone after that, and he seemed to begin to justify his murders by the fact that the people in these Zones weren't real. It was fine to kill them, they weren't living, breathing people anyway, they were just constructs, echoes of a past that had already been lived. This seemed to open the path toward Leonel's acceptance of the situation, and now he didn't even think much of his kills, although he always kept count at the back of his mind, he would be lying if he said that he was affected the same now as he had been in the past. But what now? Now he was finding out that his life was no different from the people in those Zones, maybe no different from an Invalid's. That sounded like an exaggeration, but to the people who had created this world, formed everything that he had come to know, was he really that different from an Invalid to them? Was there really no objective measurement of a life if people could create a world like this? Was there really no objective measure of a life even if this simulation didn't exist? No matter what sort of secret of the universe you chose to prescribe to, whether it was religion, whether it was science, whether it was the new world order than Leonel had just been enlightened with, in which of those cases had life not been formed by the hands of another, whether that was nature or a sentient being? What was his life worth, then? There had to be an answer, and he felt that the only conclusion was that it was worth very little, an insignificant amount, a total so infinitesimally small compared to the grand scheme of reality that it would be laughable to even care to bring it up. This answer that he had been chasing all of his life was actually meaningless. It was the foundation upon which he built everything. His want to be a King, to unite the Human Domain, to help them face off against the aggression of the other races, it was everything. He had spent most of his life aimless, smiling and chuckling, without a goal and without a care. He hadn't known what he was missing, the kind of life he was living if he wasn't without purpose and without meaning, until he actually gained himself such a meaning. And now that he was watching it crumble before his eyes, he was so infuriated that he couldn't even properly put it into words, so enraged that he simply wanted to destroy everything in his path. Leonel rampaged at the bottom of the ocean to the point that even the surface began to bubble. His eyes turned a striking red and chains within his consciousness seemed to vibrate wildly, on the verge of collapsing entirely. A fiery pair of wings appeared to his back, his suffocating momentum causing the Heir-Grade Generals around to cower. Their skin began to burn and char even beneath the ocean waters, Leonel seemed to entirely forget that he would have been better off using his Water Force. And then… There was suddenly nothing left. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎 Leonel ran to the end of the line, but there were no more beasts, no further waves, no other Heir-Grade Generals to vent his frustration upon, there was nothing but emptiness. Leonel roared, a vortex forming at his mouth as he lifted his head, the spinning black hole of dark waters extending so far that even a whirlpool formed at the surface. The violent heat at both sides of his hips, coming from his kidneys, threatened to bore a hole through his skin, but he didn't seem to notice in the slightest. But just when it seemed that Leonel was about to lose all sense of rationality, he felt something suddenly bury itself into his chest and wrap around his waist.