Become A Character Who Dies Within Three Chapters

Mr. Aurellan had never truly understood his daughter. Even as his body gradually weakened, until this very moment facing Athena, he seemed to finally catch a glimpse of a future where the Aurellan family would rise to the peak—only for Athena's ambition and arrogance to eventually turn into dust, along with her very own ambition and arrogance.

Athena dismissed her father's words as nonsense:

"Then I will become that absolute monster, Father. The people in Zone 1 are only luckier than I because they were born there. One day, I'll prove it to you—whether in Heaven or Hell, jatch me."

The moment Athena finished speaking, Mr. Aurellan's body convulsed violently. He died in pain, his eyes wide open, staring at Athena until the very end.

Yet at that moment, Athena only found her father's words laughable.

The fear that the commoners and nobles of the other zones held toward Zone 1 was far too great. They never even considered a coup; they obeyed without question. Just as her father had said, everyone regarded the people of Zone 1 as if they were divine beings!

Foolish!

That was what Athena thought then—and what she had always believed. But now, standing before Sylus, Athena suddenly understood her father's fear, reverence, and despair toward Zone 1.

She was going to die. That was the only thought in her mind as she faced the ruined laboratory, littered with the corpses of countless bio-mechanical soldiers, while Sylus still stood tall and unscathed.

Now she understood. She finally understood. All along, the only reason she had been able to hurt him was because he had allowed it.

"You love me..."

And now, she clung desperately to Zone 1's technology—the people she had once dismissed as merely "lucky" to be born there.

She put her faith in memory-rewriting technology, something born in Zone 1. Until now, not a single person had ever been able to resist the instincts of rewritten memories!

But Sylus's steps did not slow.

He stopped in front of Athena, his gaze lowered, his voice cold:

"Louis isn't dead, is he?"

Athena forced a smile.

"It hurts me that you only care about an outsider... but perhaps by now Louis really has had his throat torn apart by G. Let me try contacting G for you—"

Bang!

Before she could finish her words, Sylus's figure shot forward like an arrow. His large hand pressed down on Athena's head!

Blood and flesh splattered; her skull was shattered into pieces.

Her body collapsed, drained of strength, devoid of any sign of life.

She died before she could ever write the glorious story of her own life, died before the grand ideals she dreamed of could even begin, killed without even the chance to resist.

A king dissatisfied with the empire she had obtained, yearning for the vast world beyond—yet never realizing she was nothing more than an ant among the swarm she so despised.

Sylus pressed down on her body. He looked at his hand, dripping with fresh blood and brain matter, and tears streamed uncontrollably down his face, pattering softly onto the ground.

Yet his expression remained eerily calm.

He stood, kicked Athena's corpse aside, and left the laboratory.

"Louis, Louis, Louis..."

Sylus kept murmuring the name in his heart. His stride was like an arrow—appearing slow, yet impossibly fast.

A searing pain throbbed in his head; every vein in his body pulsed violently, as if they could burst at any moment. The agony was unbearable.

Remember. Remember! Why could he forget? Why had he allowed himself to forget?!

Bang!

Unable to restrain himself, Sylus slammed his fist into the wall beside him. The entire structure shook with a deafening rumble, a massive crater spreading outward with cracks like a sheet of thin ice breaking apart.

Suddenly, regret welled up inside him. Regret. No—he shouldn't regret. And yet, he shouldn't have done this either.

He could have controlled everything. He could have ignored those memories...

His intuition told him it was nothing but a haze of fragmented memories. In the end, what had he done all of this for?

Louis... Louis...

Sylus looked at the blood-soaked, flesh-strewn room before him, his pupils constricting—yet almost immediately, he calmed again.

No. Louis hadn't died here. He would find him. They would leave this place together.

"Really... running around at a time like this..." Sylus muttered, the corner of his lips twitching uncontrollably, his hand trembling.

Bang!

The door suddenly burst open with violent force, sending the slaves inside into a frenzy of fear. They scrambled together, pressing tightly into one another as if huddling could shield them from the storm.

Sylus glanced at the cluster of naked slaves clinging to each other, and his eyes stung.

Louis wasn't here. Could it be that he was still with Joshua?

Sylus spared the slaves no more thought and immediately left.

The slaves stared wide-eyed at the open doorway, yet none dared move. Some sat there in numb despair, while others—even with yearning burning in their hearts—didn't dare step outside.

They were like a pack of dogs, already tamed. Even with freedom right before their eyes, they wouldn't dare to run.

Perhaps once, long ago, they had resisted. But to survive until today, they had no choice but to accept themselves as nothing more than insects—unworthy of living a life like real humans.

And at this moment, Louis—the young man who stirred Sylus's every thought—was following a map, making his way toward Athena's underground laboratory.

Except... he got lost. He had no sense of direction.

Paper maps still existed in this era, which, to Louis, was a truly baffling question.

He shook the paper map in his hand. Instead of using his uninjured hand, he held it with his left—the same hand that the heat of a gun had nearly roasted.

Blood and torn flesh smeared the paper. With each movement, sharp jolts of pain numbed his mind. The deep gash across his chest continued to bleed relentlessly, refusing to stop, and his entire face had turned as pale as paper.

Just then, Louis's eyes caught sight of a door violently smashed open. He smiled faintly, his swaying body staggering forward with a spring in his step:

"Finally found the right path. Just wait for me to rescue you, Sylus."

But his pace was slow, his face free of panic—only cold sweat dripping from the agony. He didn't look at all like someone worried about his best friend.

It was as if Louis followed wherever a door had been destroyed, like chasing after torn pieces of paper. Before long, a massive door appeared before him.

Louis glanced down at the blood-soaked map in his hand. After confirming it was utterly ruined, he tossed it aside and pushed open the laboratory door.

Inside, the scene was devastation itself—walls and floors riddled with bullet holes and fractures.

The hulking bio-mechanical soldiers lay crushed and scattered across the ground. Louis stepped closer, lowered his gaze to Athena's headless corpse, and couldn't help but laugh.

"My God, that must've hurt like hell."

"Sylus, look at you. You idiot—you wanted to run away. You wanted to spare the Aurellan family because of those stupid memories in your head. But in the end, didn't you still kill Athena? Things would've been so much easier if you'd just decided this from the beginning. Too bad you never listen to me, buddy."

Louis nudged Athena's headless body with his foot. The once-proud, beautiful woman had met such a bleak fate, dying even more miserably than she had in the novel.

In the original story, she ran rampant far into the future before Aboli finally dealt with her.

Louis looked around the ruined room, walking toward the laboratory table. Behind him—unnoticed—the fingers of Athena's supposedly lifeless, headless body suddenly twitched...