Chapter 130: Exposed
Arthur clutched his head, feeling his world turning upside down.
"Ahh..."
The broken memories started to become whole. The past that he had buried deep beneath began to resurface, as if the voice finally had nothing left to hide from him anymore, ready to emerge.
’This can’t be real... No, no. What’s even the point of doing this in the first place? Wait, did this voice I summoned say that the Half-Possessive Manipulation Piece was something it owned?! T-then this thing is the one that caused the deaths of my guild!’
When realization after realization hit Arthur, he felt visibly enraged.
All this time, he had been manipulated into doing the bidding of individuals who had made this deal without his knowledge, until it was already too late, when all he just wanted was his family back.
His enraged heart wavered.
Then, a distant thought entered Arthur’s mind.
’I already knew it. I know that bringing my family back doesn’t guarantee that everything will be fine. Resurrecting someone from the dead isn’t something that can be done with a snap of the fingers... Maybe this voice could do it, but I highly doubt it’s going to. After all, it was the one who killed my family. After all, I’m just a mere... pawn.’
Soon, every fuzzy memory flooded his mind as they started to become clearer, as if they were being unlocked, until Arthur became fully aware of all his past actions, half of which were not done by him.
There was a memory where Arthur was only trying to bring back his family by making a deal with a ’God’, even if the cost was hurting himself.
He never meant for innocent people to be involved in it.
Then another memory entered his mind, where he killed people while researching the Ancient Ruins because they had discovered this open-view shrine. It was deliberately shown to him that he had done it, which made him paranoid.
However, it was revealed that the cause of it was the entity inside him, who was the perpetrator gaining a certain amount of control each time he said a prayer directed toward the entity known as the Hidden One.
One by one, those broken memories continued to be ’fixed,’ as if merging together, until Arthur couldn’t help but feel dread upon realizing that the actions he thought he was doing had been manipulated and engineered by the Hidden One.
He killed a lot of people. His most recent victims were the nine people who went to search for this ancient ruin, eventually reaching the shrine. Using the Manipulation Piece, he killed them without leaving their bodies behind, only the things left behind from their expedition.
The only time Arthur had gained some sort of freedom from his body and realized that there was a change inside him was when he had been writing the diary, ultimately leading him to ask for help from anyone who had noticed the changes in his actions.
In the end, he had left it at his house, in his bedroom, for everyone to see. Yet years had already passed since then.
No one had seen his plea for help.
After he had asked for help without the entity noticing what he was doing, Arthur couldn’t help but feel a sense of alienation.
’Just what happened to me...’
When those memories flooded his mind like a broken dam, Arthur’s mind shifted into quick thinking. He grabbed the blade from his pocket and tried to cut his throat to avoid causing any more problems, but he was stopped by ’himself’, or rather, someone resting inside him.
-"You can’t do that. I’ll be hurt as well."
Arthur painfully struggled to bring the tip of the blade to his neck, wanting to end everything right away.
Having become fully aware that the entity inside him had been heavily influencing him from the very start, Arthur chose to end it by killing himself.
Yet, he wasn’t even allowed to do that now.
-"Arthur, your role ends now."
’No...’
Arthur started losing consciousness, and his vision began to disappear before he completely blacked out.
His head hung low for a brief moment as the control he had gained over the victims he had chosen slowly disappeared, their hollow eyes briefly gaining some sort of clarity.
But all of them immediately turned hollow again. This time, the use of a much stronger force was apparent, as they were unable to fight against the thing that had been controlling them any longer.
Then, ’Arthur’ slowly raised his head and let out a strange laugh. The broken halo above his head brightened even further as he tried to complete itself.
"Hahaha!"
Then, his eyes darted across the different paths inside before looking toward the White Shepherds who were watching the entrances of the holes that led to this open-view shrine.
"Shepherds of Creation. I wonder which world you have managed to put your influence on this time."
His strange and eerie voice echoed through the entirety of that particular area, loud enough for everyone looking at him to hear.
This time, a White Shepherd answered. This particular Shepherd was none other than Carlos, the one who had been talking with the current mission leader Sylvia earlier.
However, because the leader of this operation was absent, Carlos had taken this role and spoken on behalf of everyone else who hadn’t been given the full details of this operation.
As long as they kill the ’God’, it is mission accomplished.
For that question, how are they going to do it?
They had already laid out everything for this operation, and this was still within the expectations that had been given to them by the Brown Shepherd.
So first... Carlos had to follow the script, the meaning of which he didn’t even know.
"Hidden One of the Higher Plane."
Just by the title alone, the Hidden One was an existence that demanded respect. However, the next words coming from Carlos did not follow the tone of his initial words.
"Don’t act so high and mighty by bullying people in the Lower Plane. You are nothing but a weak ’God.’ Don’t use the name of our organization and pretend like you know everything. You are nothing."
The entity behind Arthur, the Hidden One, couldn’t help but freeze once he realized that the Shepherds knew his true identity. They didn’t act afraid of him simply because of the title of ’God,’ as if it were nothing more than a self-given title by those who believed they were one.
’What...? I am certain that I made a deal with a Shepherd of weak status. I even confirmed it!’
The Hidden One was planning to escape from the sealed dimension he had been placed into by transferring his entire soul into this body. Then, he would escape from this world and explore the Lower Planes to rebuild his strength since he had to sacrifice a lot just to get here.
It was supposed to be an impeccable plan with no holes as long as he was patient... and patient he was.
But not only had his summoning into this vessel been somehow accelerated, the Shepherds were also aware that he was nothing more than a fraud.
Something had definitely gone awry here.
"Hidden One, hold the end of the bargain by summoning you here. Hand us over a Soul of a ’God’."
By the end of the script that had been handed over to them, Carlos couldn’t help but frown once he realized that he really didn’t understand anything in it.
However, the script that had been given to them was going to lead to two paths from this moment onward.
Retrieve the ’soul’ and kill this ’God’.
Or kill the ’God’ itself.
Either they were going to receive the right amount at the end of this whole bargain that had been going on for years, or they were going to double it by receiving two things. Either way, both outcomes would benefit them.
And somewhere within the holes that led to this shrine, two people and an artifact that had been listening to their conversation this whole time couldn’t help but frown.
’Lower Plane? Higher Plane? A Soul of a God? There are so many things to remember that I can’t even figure out what they are exactly...! What the hell...’
Cillian couldn’t help but find the conversation between the Shepherds and the ’God’ who had already taken over Arthur to be strange.
After all, the context was something that Cillian couldn’t put together, even with his previous knowledge from reading web novels.
If he tried to piece it together using common sense and absurd guesses, Cillian would definitely make a mistake.