Chapter 165: A Boy Made of Graves

[Elisabeth’s POV]

The silence after the illusion broke was so loud it hurt my ears.

I stood in the middle of the dark side chamber, watching the last bits of purple mist fade into nothing around me.

My hands were steady on my sword hilt, but my chest was heaving. My lungs burned as I pulled in the real air of the ruins — thick with ash and old stone, but real. My mana core ached with a hollow, burning pain. Forcing my will to break a high-level mental trap had pushed my body to its limit.

I looked down at my palms. They were clean. The blood, the shattered courtyard of the Noctis estate, the horrific sight of my sister and grandmother — it was all gone. A cruel trick made to break me.

A cold breath escaped my lips. "...That was unpleasant," I muttered.

I sheathed my blade with a crisp, echoing click.

I was exhausted, pale, and my limbs felt heavy, but the resolve forged inside that nightmare remained perfectly intact. I had survived the end of the world once. I wasn’t going to let some stone statue take my mind in this second life.

However, as a Regressor, this weakness irritated me.

In my past life, my blood affinity could have torn an illusion like this in a fraction of a second. Right now, in this younger body, I was still frustratingly far from reaching my true potential.

The gap between the power I used to wield and the limitations of my current rank was a dangerous variable — one I needed to fix quickly if I was going to rewrite the future and protect my people from the coming slaughter.

But I didn’t have the luxury of time to dwell on it.

The air a few meters ahead was screaming.

A wild, heavy gold light flared through the chamber, casting jagged, dancing shadows against the cracked stone pillars. Arthur had lost himself completely. His mana was flaring wild and deadly. Roan was out there alone, his boots sliding through the ash as he took hit after hit, trying to stop Arthur from destroying himself.

If Roan fell, Arthur’s wild power would bring the whole chamber down on top of us.

I pushed past the exhaustion weighing down my muscles. My grip tightened on my sword. I got ready to move.

_

[Roan’s POV]

Clang!

My boots slid backward across the grey ash, carving deep lines into the cracked stone floor. I spat out a mouthful of dark blood, my chest heaving like I had run a mile uphill. Even with an SSS-rank core, there was a hard limit to how much power my body could hold at my current rank, and I had been pushing past that limit for way too long.

My arms were shaking from the force of the last hit. The skin on my knuckles was split open and bleeding.

In front of me stood Arthur. Or whatever the statue had left behind. Arthur’s eyes were completely blank, wide and unblinking, locked on a tragedy only he could see.

But his light affinity hadn’t vanished; it had twisted. The bright golden glow of the Goddess had bent and mixed with the sick purple energy of the fog, turning into wild, jagged bursts of pressure. He wasn’t thinking anymore. He was just swinging.

Each strike of his sword carried the full weight of his Apostle power, no holding back. He was trying to kill us, fully believing he was "destroying the dark."

"Arthur! Wake up, you idiot!" I shouted, my voice raw as I spun my spear and deflected a downward slash that would have cut me in half.

Arthur didn’t answer.

He lunged forward again, his speed defying logic as he closed the distance in a fraction of a second, his blade aiming straight for my throat.

Out of the corner of my eye, a flash of motion cut through the dust.

Elisabeth burst from the shadows.

She was pale, her breath short from her own fight with the illusion, but her violet eyes were sharp and focused. She didn’t have the power for a big spell, but she didn’t need one. Her blade cut through the air, hitting the side of Arthur’s sword and pushing it away from my neck just enough for me to duck.

"Roan! We can’t just keep blocking!" Elisabeth hissed, her boots landing in the ash beside me. Her shoulders were shaking from exhaustion, but she held her ground. "His light affinity is getting stronger! He really thinks we’re the monsters!"

"I know!" I yelled, my teeth grinding together.

We were running out of time. If this kept going, we wouldn’t survive, and Arthur would have to live the rest of his life knowing he killed his own team — or at least attacked them. "I’m ending this fast. Keep his sword busy for one second!"

Elisabeth didn’t hesitate. Pushing past her exhaustion, she stepped into Arthur’s guard, her sword moving in a defensive flurry, taking the pressure off me.

I glanced toward the shadows near the archway, raising my voice over the noise of the fight. "Amelia! Get ready! The moment I bring him down, you move!"

"Just give me the opening!" Amelia called back, her knuckles white around her staff, her expression grim as she watched the madness.

I shifted my weight low, dropping my stance as Arthur pushed Elisabeth back and swung his blade toward us in a wide, blinding arc.

Spear Art: Silver Crescent — Third Form

My spear became a blur of silver light.

I didn’t try to block his sword head-on. Instead, I struck the flat of Arthur’s blade three times in a row. The hits forced his guard wide open. Before he could recover, I spun the weapon and slammed the blunt end of my spear shaft straight into Arthur’s chest.

The impact sounded like a cannon shot. Arthur was sent flying backward, his boots dragging through the dirt before he crashed hard into a massive pillar.

I closed the distance instantly, giving him no room to breathe. I threw my spear aside and dove forward, throwing my whole body weight into him, pinning him against the cracked stone. With a hard burst of strength, I kicked Arthur’s legs out from under him, forcing him to the ground.

My left hand clamped down on his sword wrist, locking the weapon in place. My right forearm pressed down across his throat, cutting off his movement and holding his upper body to the ash.

"Now, Amelia! NOW!" I screamed. The veins in my neck were bulging.

Amelia didn’t waste a second. She lunged forward, slamming her staff against the stone floor. The ring of impact echoed through the chamber.

Deep inside her soul, her contract spirit answered the call. There was no soft healing light this time. Instead, a thick, green spiritual energy burst from her palms, woven with dense nature seals meant to lock things down.

Amelia’s hands hovered over Arthur’s forehead for a moment. Her silver-violet eyes flickered with pain. She hated doing this to him — forcing her power into his body like a blade, cutting off his light, taking away his control.

But there was no other way.

Then she pushed forward.

"Suppress!" Amelia commanded. Her voice dropped to a hard, sharp tone as she pressed both hands directly onto Arthur’s forehead.

She didn’t try to talk to him. She didn’t beg him to wake up. She knew it wouldn’t work while the illusion still had him. Instead, she used her spirit’s power like a wedge, forcing it straight into Arthur’s broken mana paths.

It acted like a sudden dam, cutting off the flow of his wild, twisted techniques and freezing his muscles in place.

Arthur’s body locked up.

A choked, rough gasp escaped his lips. His empty, lifeless eyes began to shake under the pressure of the seals.

_

[Arthur’s POV]

Heroes and hope.

What are they, really?

The world loves those words. They carve them into stone pillars, sing them in crowded taverns, and write them into history books to keep people from losing hope when the night gets too long. They treat a hero like an answer to a prayer.

A perfect, golden shield that exists just to take the pain of the world and smile through the ash.

A savior isn’t supposed to have doubts. A savior isn’t supposed to bleed out in the dark, wondering why they were chosen to breathe while better people were left to rot in the dirt.

But I had learned the truth a long time ago.

Heroes are not born from courage or strength or noble hearts. They are born from graves. They crawl out of the wreckage of their own lives, dragging the bodies of everyone they couldn’t save behind them, and the world looks at the blood on their hands and calls it glory.

And hope?

Hope is a lie the desperate tell themselves so they don’t have to look at the dark. I hated those words. I hated what they demanded of me.

And deeper than that, buried under layers of worship and expectations, I hated the Goddess.

I knew how ungrateful I sounded. I knew how foolish, how arrogant it was to curse the divine being that the whole Holy Kingdom knelt toward. I was the Apostle. I was the boy given the SSS-rank core, the holy light, the divine favor that millions begged for on their knees.

But to me, that light had never felt like a blessing. It felt like a brand.

It felt like a sick, twisted joke played by a god who looked down at a ruined town, saw a pathetic, bleeding child crying over the broken bodies of his family, and decided, "You. You will carry the weight of the world now."

Why did she save my pathetic life back then? Why did my mother have to smile as she died? Why did Lilia’s fingers have to go cold in mine while this stupid, useless golden light flickered in my palms, unable to mend a single wound? If the Goddess had all this power to give, why couldn’t she have given it a few minutes earlier?

Why did life always have to be so cruel?

I didn’t ask to be the Chosen One. I never wanted to be a hero. I was just a boy who wanted his sister back. I was just a tired, broken kid who was forced to grow up with a mountain pinned to his shoulders.

The purple fog of the statue poured into my throat, thick and heavy with the scent of copper and old regrets, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to fight it. The burden was too heavy. Every nightmare I had obsessively trained to run from had finally caught up, and my will was just... snapping.

Slowly, I let myself go.

The sounds around me began to fade. The crackle of the orange flames of Oakhaven, the desperate screams of the students from the exam, the ringing of steel — it all began to drift away, muffled as if I were sinking into the deep, dark ocean.

The black slime rose over my shoulders, freezing and absolute, pulling me down into a bottomless abyss where nobody expected me to be perfect. Where nobody needed a savior.

I closed my eyes. The warmth of the world vanished, and I just let myself drown.

"...Arthur."

The voice didn’t echo in my ears. It rang directly inside my soul. It was quiet, clear, and carried the weight of something ancient and endless.

"So this is the choice you are making? This is what you truly wish to choose?"

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I just floated in the silent, purple dark of my own mind, letting the slime swallow my chest.

"I will not stop you, Arthur,"the Goddess whispered, her presence manifesting not as a grand entity, but as a soft, sorrowful light illuminating the dark water around me.

"If you wish to lay down your sword and let the darkness take you, I will allow it. But is this truly what you wanted? To give up like this? To let your story end in a grave dug from your own guilt?"

"You chose the wrong person," the bitter voice in my mind snarled back, a hollow confession that I had buried for years.

"Your light is useless in my hands. Look at what happened at Oakhaven. Look at the exam. I have all this power, and yet people keep dying right in front of me. I’m not a savior. I’m just a coward who survived when the real heroes died. Why didn’t you just let me die with them? Why give this burden to me?"

"Because I saw a boy who wept for the fallen, even as the world collapsed around him,"she answered softly. "I did not choose a god, Arthur. I chose a... human."

"Then you made a mistake!" I screamed back in the silence, the dark water churning with my rage.

"A human breaks! A human gets tired! Look at me — I am drowning in my own skin! I can’t carry the Holy Kingdom, and I can’t carry your expectations. Every single day, I train until my bones ache because I am terrified. Terrified that the moment I stop, someone else will end up like Lilia. I am forcing myself to be a hero, but underneath it all, I am completely empty. I don’t deserve this core. I don’t deserve to breathe."

"...And do you believe dying here fixes that?"the Goddess asked. Her voice wasn’t angry; it was heavy with sadness."Do you believe that sinking into this abyss honors their graves? Do you truly believe your worth is measured only by the people you could not save?"

"...It stops the failure," I thought, my consciousness shivering as the purple slime crept higher. "If I’m gone, nobody else has to rely on a broken shield. Nobody else has to put their faith in an apostle who doesn’t even know if he’s worthy of the light."

"Is that what you believe?"The light rippled, and suddenly, the dark water around me fractured, turning into a mirror."...Look outside your own sorrow, my Apostle."

Through the glass of my consciousness, the scene of the side chamber forced its way into my sight. I wasn’t looking at Oakhaven anymore. I saw my own body, locked in place, my hands trembling violently under a heavy seal.

...And then I saw them.

Roan was leaning over me, his face pale, his teeth gritted in pain as fresh blood seeped through his clothes where my wild, twisted light had burned his skin. He was taking the force of my wild power, his muscles tearing under the pressure, but his grip on my wrist didn’t loosen for a second.

Behind him, Elisabeth stood with her sword drawn, her body swaying from exhaustion after breaking her own illusion, yet she stayed on guard, watching the ruins.

And Amelia — her hands were pressed hard against my forehead, her eyes wide and wet with tears she hadn’t let fall, as she pushed her spirit’s power into my body to act as a dam. Her knuckles were white. Her voice was cracking as she held the line.

They were bleeding because of me. They were breaking themselves just to keep me from tearing my own soul apart.

"Look at them,"the Goddess whispered.

"Look at the people who love you. Look at the ones who care for you. Do you truly wish to leave them behind in the dark? You carry the guilt of those you lost, yet you blind yourself to those who are standing right beside you, fighting to keep you alive."

I stared at them through the fractured glass, but the warmth didn’t rush back into my soul. The sight didn’t magically cure me.

Instead, a cold wave of panic and intense self-doubt washed over me.

"No...," I whispered inside my mind, pulling back.

"No, you don’t understand. Seeing them like this... it makes it worse. I’m doing it again. I’m hurting them just like I hurt everyone else. If I open my eyes, if I take back control, what happens next time? I’m going to make a mistake again. I know I am. I’m not perfect. I’ll hesitate, or my power will flare, and instead of a fake ghost, I’ll be the one who kills Roan. I’ll be the one who fails Amelia. I cannot guarantee their safety! I am too weak to protect them from my own failures!"

The purple slime surged, responding to my rising terror, wrapping tightly around my throat.

"I’m a danger to them," I cried out in the dark. "If I stay with them, they will die because of me! Every person who gets close to me ends up in a grave!"

"...They might,"the Goddess said softly, her words cutting through my panic like a sudden, chilling frost.

I froze. "What...?"

"They are mortal, Arthur. They fight in a war against demons and monsters. Whether you stay or whether you go, they may die. Roan may fall. Amelia may bleed. Elisabeth may be lost. That is the cruel truth of the world you live in. I did not give you my light to make you a god who can control fate or stop tragedy from happening. I gave it to a boy who, even after losing everything, still had the ability to care. If you choose to run from the chance of failing them, you are leaving them to face the dark alone."

The golden light pressed gently against the purple slime, but it didn’t force it away. It left the choice to me.

"...Your light affinity is versatile, Arthur,"she continued, her presence enveloping my form.

"It is a reflection of your inner self. It takes the path you command it to take. It can become a weapon of pure, blind destruction, born from your terror and your desperate need to isolate yourself so you can never be blamed for failing again. Or it can become the shield you always wanted to be. The burden of worthiness is not about being flawless, Arthur. It is about choosing to stand, even when you know you might fall."

I stared at the mirror, the self-doubt still clinging heavily to my mind. I was terrified. The fear of failure wasn’t gone; it was roaring in my ears.

The realization didn’t magically make me feel strong or worthy. I knew with absolute certainty that the future would be full of blood, that I would make mistakes again, that I would make wrong calls, and that I would bleed.

...And as I thought of that terrifying truth, a name flashed through my mind, sharp and striking.

Leo.

I had spent years running from my own shadow, trying to be perfect so no one else would die. But Leo? Leo just walked. He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t wait for a sign. He just kept moving. And somehow, that stubborn fool was still standing.

A sudden, sharp realization hit me. Wasn’t I doing the same thing as Leo?

No... that wasn’t right. We were two boys who had both lost something. Oakhaven burned for me. His name — his reputation — his place in his own family burned for him. Two survivors left behind in the ash.

But while I had spent every day since then running from the dark, trying to become a perfect hero who never made a mistake, Leo had done something different.

Leo didn’t care about being a perfect hero. He didn’t ask for a goddess to tell him everything would be okay. Even when he was a stubborn, hot-headed kid who didn’t know how to give up, he had always been the one to move forward.

He was an anomaly.

A terrifying hunger. But whenever the world tried to crush him, he just gritted his teeth, forced a foolish, stubborn smile onto his face, and kept walking. He made mistakes. He bled. He fell. But he never let the fear of the next mistake chain him to a grave.

I realized then, with a strange twist of clarity, that I had always been chasing Leo.

To me, he was the brightest star in the sky — not because he was perfect, but because he was real. He knew how deep the darkness went, yet he refused to let it dictate his steps. He was a fool who didn’t know how to submit to fate.

...And here I was, the chosen hero, drowning in a puddle of my own fear of messing up, while my friends bled to save a coward.

I am not better than him, I thought. A wave of shame burned in my chest. If he can face the dark without a goddess, knowing he might fail, then I have no right to break while carrying her light.

The fear didn’t leave me. The doubt was still there, heavy and sharp, whispering that I would make a mistake again in the very next fight. But my will hardened around it, hammering the weakness into a stubborn shield.

"...I will make mistakes," I whispered into the dark. My thoughts were tight, but steady. "I am going to fail again. I know I am. But I won’t let a stone statue decide when I give up. I will carry the weight, even if I am not worthy."

I looked up through the dark water, toward the distant, blinding surface where the emerald seals were still humming.

"Goddess," I spoke, my voice no longer a child’s cry, but the steady resolve of a man who accepted his own flaws.

"I... I have made my choice. I will find my own purpose to live. I will not be a hero because you told me to be perfect. I will be a shield because I choose to stand between the dark and the people who refuse to let me go, even if I stumble along the way."

I pushed my hands against the bottom of the abyss.

The golden light inside my core didn’t just flicker. It exploded. The twisted purple energy in my mana was burned away, wiped out by a wave of pure holy light. I pushed myself upward, tearing through the black slime, breaking through the layers of purple mist that had held my mind.

The deeper I climbed, the louder the real world became. The muffled silence shattered. I could hear the heavy, ragged breathing of Roan, the strain in Amelia’s voice, the groaning of the cracked stone pillars.

I saw the dead end of my past, and I blew right through it.

My eyes flew open.

The blank, empty look vanished from my face in an instant. The green seals faded away as the pure gold light returned to my eyes — steady, warm, and sure.

"Arthur—!" Roan gasped, but before he could even finish his sentence, his forearm was pushed away as the heavy tension entirely left my muscles.

I didn’t even have the chance to sit up properly before a weight slammed directly into my chest. Amelia threw herself forward, her staff clattering against the stone floor as she buried her face into my shoulder.

She was shaking, her fingers gripping my torn clothes so tightly her knuckles were white, and a raw, breathless sob escaped her throat.

"You idiot! You absolute idiot!" she cried, her voice cracking as she hit my shoulder with a weak, trembling fist. "Don’t you dare do that again! Don’t you dare leave us!"

The raw emotion in her voice melted the last traces of the ruins’ chill from my bones. Slowly, I wrapped my arms around her, holding her close against my chest as I let out a long, shaky breath.

I could feel my own hands trembling slightly — the self-doubt was still there, a lingering shadow whispering that I would mess up eventually, that I wasn’t the hero they thought I was — but as I held her, I knew I would face that failure when it came.

"...I’m sorry," I whispered, my voice rough but entirely clear. "I’m back. I’m not going anywhere."

Over her shoulder, I looked up at Roan and Elisabeth.

Roan had dropped to one knee, leaning heavily against his spear, a tired, relieved smirk cutting through the blood on his face. Elisabeth sheathed her sword with a slow, approving nod, her violet eyes acknowledging the clarity in mine.

"...Thank you," I said to both of them, the words carrying the full, honest weight of my gratitude. "For not letting go."

Roan let out a dry, tired laugh, wiping a line of dark blood from his mouth. "Next time, just tell us if you want to kill yourself. Saves us the bruises."

Before I could answer, a loud boom shook the whole room. It came from the main archway that led to the inner sanctum. The purple fog in the air didn’t just fade — it was burned away by a blinding flash of black lightning and black soul flames.

The entire dungeon shook, the stone beneath our boots cracking under the sudden, terrifying pressure of an aligned affinity.

Roan’s smirk vanished, his hand instantly tightening around his spear. Elisabeth’s eyes narrowed as she looked toward the entrance.

"Leo...," I muttered, standing up and pulling Amelia with me, my golden light flaring safely around us. "He did it."

_

Author’s Note

Hey everyone.

I know the Chapters have been a bit late lately. Honestly, it’s because of my schedule. For the past few days, I’ve only been sleeping like 4 to 5 hours. It’s not just because of the novel — my exams are starting next week, and I’m very busy this week.

So I hope you understand if the Chapters get delayed a bit. I don’t want to drop the quality of the Chapters, and that’s why it’s taking a little extra time.

I’m sure these two weeks will be very busy for me, but I’ll try to upload 2 Chapters every day. If not 2, then at least 1 Chapter per day.

Thanks for your patience.