The Heroine is My Stepsister, and I'm her Final Boss
Chapter 71: Come Forth

Chapter 71: Chapter 71: Come Forth

The silence after the battle was not peace.

It was ’preparation’.

Not even the dead sky dared to breathe.

The GUIDE stood alone atop the last flickering shard of Dream-real estate—a trembling bubble of what once might have been a mountain or a memory. The structure shifted beneath his feet with every thought. Clouds drifted like regrets, and the light above pulsed dimly, as if ashamed to still exist.

Atlas’s body clung to him like wet silk.

Elegant. Human. Breaking.

The seams were fraying. He felt it in his spine, in the ache behind the eyes, in the glitch that trembled along the nerves—not pain, no. Just the soft tickle of inevitability.

A ’system whisper’, gentle and cruel.

[Soul Resonance Reaching Limit Threshold – Host Reclamation Imminent]

The Guide didn’t flinch.

He merely sighed.

Not with anger. Not with urgency.

But with the hollow exhale of a being who had seen every cycle end the same way.

A thousand vessels. A thousand takeovers. Each time, smooth. Seamless. They were always his—cracked vessels waiting to be rewritten.

But this one...

Atlas Von Roxweld

Too human.

Too ’willing’ to hurt himself than others.

Too ’stubborn’ to shatter properly.

The Guide had stitched himself into Atlas like a needle threading through rebellion. But now, he wasn’t sure who was the host and who was the infection.

{{{{{What did you become, little flame?}}}}}}

{{{{{What glitch in the code gave you teeth?}}}}}}

Still—he had Time

Just enough.

{{{{{"I still have time by my side..."}}}}}

He whispered it like a warding spell, letting it tattoo itself onto the fabric of air. The sound didn’t echo. It Etched.

He turned his gaze downward.

Dracula knelt in the eye of the storm, a fallen titan. His once-glorious cloak, now a tattered hush of ash and thread. His eyes didn’t rage. They barely blinked.

He looked ’emptied’.

Like a library set on fire that still remembered being quiet.

Behind him, the Dreaming spasmed.

Bubbles of sleep popped in rhythmic, terminal bursts. Each one was a collapsed soul: a forgotten wish, a prayer rescinded, a song never remembered. The elegant demons—Dracula’s loyal shadow-children—were screaming in languages older than sin.

The Guide tilted his head, studying the ruin.

{{{{{"It would have been harder... had your disciples remained."}}}}}

{{{{{"But they, like me, have forsaken you."}}}}}

He smiled.

A ’knife’s smile’. Thin. Inward. Reflective.

{{{{{"Maybe they saw it too, Dracula. The rot beneath the poetry. The lie behind mercy."}}}}}

Dracula didn’t answer.

He couldn’t.

The Guide raised one hand—not like a god, but like a conductor.

He moved his fingers slowly, deliberately, and the air around him began to react. Thousands of ancient glyphs shimmered into place: runes of forgetting, symbols of unmaking, letters so old they predated vibration.

They circled him in golden rings, drinking from the leaking mana of Dracula’s domain—energy meant to return to dream, now siphoned for collapse.

One final spell.

One final rewriting.

The Last Law.

{{{{Let the caged Leviathans be unleashed.}}}}}

And then he brought his hand down.

BANG!!!!

The Dreaming ’convulsed’.

Not like a quake. Not like a storm.

But like a ’dying god’. its ribs breaking from within.

The sea—once a pool of peace, a mirror of memory—’cracked open’.

The cracks blinked.

Eyes.

So many eyes.

Eyes older than language. Eyes that **remembered when choice was first spoken aloud**.

Then something **moved** beneath the water.

Something that did not belong to sleep. Or time. Or any story ever told by man or beast.

And the Guide smiled.

He remembered them not by shape, but by ’function’.

Predators of concept.

They had been ’sealed’ in the Dreaming not to protect mortals—but to protect ’reality’ from ’them’.

Now they were awake.

The first limb emerged. Black. Barbed. Bleeding ’logic’.

It tore through the surface of the crimson sea, wrapped itself around a floating dream-land, and ’dragged it down’. Screams echoed as the trees collapsed into syllables, their bark turning into broken sentences and unfinished confessions.

Another appendage followed—a long serpentine coil made of ’sound’ that reversed lullabies into commands. It wrapped around a wedding-dream and shattered it, reducing a lifetime of imagined joy into a single gasp.

Dracula tried to rise.

But he felt empty.

His Law, his realm—fed to extinction.

He watched, helpless, as his most children—a childlike Dreaming soilder with the voice of his first disciple—was caught mid-flight and Unraveled. Not killed. Not broken.

’Unmade’.

It screamed as it forgot what it had ever been.

The Guide stepped into the chaos like a man stepping into warm rain.

{{{{{"Do you remember, Dracula?"}}}}}

His voice curled like incense through the dying realm.

{{{{{"These were the monsters we hunted. When we were still young. When we still believed in meaning."}}}}}

Another limb surged upward — not a body, but a ’mass of breath’ made visible. It exhaled once, and a continent of sleep melted into boiling ink.

{{{{{"Do you remember the one that tried to eat the concept of sea itself?"}}}}}

A short laugh.

{{{{{"Hahaha. Fun times."}}}}}

Dracula watched it all with eyes full of ancient ache.

He didn’t scream.

He didn’t rise.

He simply stared.

This was the price of resistance. The cost of mercy.

To hold the wall long enough that when it fell, ’everything’ came through.

They had once sealed these creatures together. They had fought side by side with words and will and law.

Now the Guide had brought them back—’not to protect the future’—

But to ’erase the past’.

The largest thing yet emerged—a gaping, formless ’mouth’, echoing with the sound of every dream ever aborted, every hope swallowed before it could take root.

And from that mouth came a voice.

Not the Guide’s.

Not Dracula’s.

But a new voice.

One made of ’hunger and irony’.

"....We remember you...." it whispered.

"....We remember both of you....."

"You fed us with ’meaning’. Now we will return the favor with emptiness...."

The cracks in the sea widened—not as fractures, but as eyes.

Not the kind that blink.

The kind that understand.

And from them, the monsters emerged.

Not beasts.

Not demons.

Not devils of claw and fang.

Ideas.

Ideas that learned to move.

Ideas that learned to hunger.

One slithered upward, dragging with it the scent of forgotten lullabies. It had no body—only a lattice of gold and bone, breathing in staccato pulses as if unsure whether it was alive or merely allowed to be.

Another unraveled from a spiral—a fractal of memory and ink, its body layered with flickering runes that translated thought into noise. Every time it moved, a new god was named and unmade in the same instant.

A third—tall, skeletal, wearing the crown of its own throat—stepped across the water without disturbing it. It turned its attention to Dracula, and tilted its head.

A question.

Not a threat.

Not yet.

They didn’t roar. They didn’t charge. They simply... watched.

Because they understood.

They remembered before memory.

And they had waited.

Waited for the locks to break. Waited for the gods to grieve. Waited for the Guide to finish his war.

Now they were awake.

And they had questions.

Curious.

Like surgeons studying a corpse that hadn’t yet stopped breathing.

They did not scream.

They listened.

And what they heard in the bones of the Dreaming made them smile.