Wonderful Insane World
Chapter 127: Calm Morning

Chapter 127: Calm Morning

The morning sun pierced the mist—not like a triumphant conqueror, but more like a timid visitor. A pale light, golden and cold, that did not yet warm the ravaged earth but outlined the ruins and the bodies. The fog, more subtle than usual, drifted in translucent tatters, like the last sighs of the night.

Dylan rose.

It wasn’t a sudden motion, but a slow emergence, like a drowning man finding footing on an unfamiliar shore. His body was a landscape of dull pain—bruised muscles, rusted joints, the ghost-memory of every fracture inflicted by Élisa and healed by... the other. He no longer had that monstrous regeneration, only the heaviness of an exhausted and sullied flesh.

He blinked, chasing away the last streaks of a darkness no longer fully within him, but whose imprint remained—viscous. The clearing was a silent battlefield. Patches of scorched grass, steles snapped like twigs, the ground scarred by dark, sticky impacts where the corruption of the Lady of Midnight had spread.

Then his gaze fell on them.

A little further, leaning against a half-broken and charred rock—Maggie. Her face was ash-pale, her eyes half-closed, glassy. The side of her shirt was soaked in dark crimson, nearly black in the newborn light, a red that still seeped, slowly, inexorably. Her breathing was short, wheezing, each inhalation a visible struggle.

And Élisa.

Élisa was kneeling beside her, her back to Dylan. Her hands—those same hands that had shattered his bones with implacable will—trembled slightly. They pressed a torn piece of fabric—likely a scrap of her own jacket—against Maggie’s gaping wound. Dylan saw her shoulders rise in stuttering jerks, not from effort, but from a contained sob. A strange glow, faint, golden like the morning light but warmer, emanated from her hands, mixing with the blood on the cloth. Not a miraculous healing, no. More like a cauterization, a desperate dam against the red tide threatening to carry Maggie away.

The weight that fell upon Dylan’s mind was heavier than Élisa’s invisible hand had ever been. It wasn’t him. Not really. Not consciously. But it had been his hands that held the knife, his arms that struck, his legs that chased Maggie through the night, driven by that foreign, vicious will. He saw again the twisted grin on his own face reflected in a shattered window, heard the echo of the harsh, cruel laugh that had come from his throat. His fingers, ending in long claws, had plunged into her side like a blade.

A violent nausea twisted his stomach. He bent forward, hands on his knees, retching bitter, acidic bile into the cold grass. No food—only the taste of guilt and horror. Even freed, he bore the stain. Maggie’s blood in the fresh morning air clung to his skin, his lungs.

He straightened up, wiping his mouth with the torn sleeve of his shirt. His gaze finally met Élisa’s. She had turned her head toward him, drawn by the sound. Her eyes, reddened, shadowed with abyssal fatigue, locked onto his. There was no longer that cold anger, that diamond-hard resolve that had held firm against the possession. In its place: infinite weariness, raw pain, and... something else. Distrust? Pity? A silent, terrible question: Who are you now? Him? Or you?

Dylan looked away, unable to hold that gaze. His attention was drawn to a darker form, a bit further off. The Guardian. Lying on his back, unmoving, his hand still clenched around the hilt of the blackened Jian. The blade seemed to absorb all light around it. He was nothing more than an empty shell now, a shattered armor encasing a final silence. The morning mist brushed against his cracked helmet like a last farewell.

The silence was deep, broken only by Maggie’s ragged breathing and the faint rustling of Élisa’s hands over the wound. Dylan felt words forming in his throat, rough, foreign after so long under the entity’s control.

"She..." His voice was a scraping of stone, unrecognizable even to his own ears. He cleared his throat, painfully. "Maggie... is she...?"

He couldn’t finish the question. Hope was a commodity far too dangerous.

Élisa didn’t answer right away. She lowered her eyes to Maggie, her face tightened with both physical and mental strain. The golden glow around her hands flickered for an instant.

"I... I don’t know," she finally murmured, her voice as hoarse as his, but charged with raw emotion. "I’m doing what I can." She looked up at him, her eyes shining with a moist gleam. "Her blood won’t stop flowing. I’m really trying to stop it, but if I push too much... I might twist her flesh."

"The natural regeneration of the Awakened doesn’t really work on a wound this deep."

"She might die..."

Dylan clenched his fists, feeling his nails dig into his palms. Guilt, sharp and clear, pierced through him. He wanted to protest, scream that no, it hadn’t been him, that it was the thing, that filth that had inhabited him. But Maggie’s gaze—even veiled, even dying—pressed on him. The blood on the ground was real. His presence here, alive, while she bled out... it was an obscene injustice.

"I... I wasn’t in control," he managed to say, the words like crushed glass. "But it was my hands. My body." He closed his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed by violent, invasive images. "I’m sorry." The words were ridiculous, laughable in the face of what he’d done.

When he reopened his eyes, Élisa was still staring at him. The distrust hadn’t vanished, but it was laced now with a painful glimmer of understanding. She knew. She had fought the thing inside him. She knew how thin the line was, how vile the possession.

She didn’t intend to let Dylan pin it all on his own consciousness—after all, he had nearly died in that fight. You could even say that Maggie had failed to kill him.

It had been either her or him.

Dylan stepped closer to Maggie, his commander’s eyes staying on him—still caught between wariness and the relief that he was himself again.

He slowly ran his hand along the woman’s arm in a gentle caress that made her shiver. His usually distant commander seemed so vulnerable in that moment.

"Please step back," he said to Élisa, his beautiful grey eyes shining with a determined light—the kind that belonged to someone who had gathered every shred of courage to attempt the impossible.

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