Chapter 1384: Taking a Step Forward
“I’m heading out.”
Valkries walked out of her bedroom to find Fei Yuhan already at the front door, bag in hand.
“The Martialist Association?”
“Yes—we’re close to the final battle, I can’t afford to fall behind.” Fei Yuhan’s hands paused over her zipper. “Will you come later?”
Valkries took in the expression on the other woman’s face—that particular focus, unguarded, turned entirely outward toward a problem and not inward toward how she appeared while solving it. She found herself nodding before she had decided to. “If there’s nothing else.”
“Then I’m off.”
The door opened and closed, and the warmth went with it.
Valkries stood in the empty room and looked down at her open palms. Slowly, she closed them into fists.
Damn it. What am I doing.
A month in the Dream World. Thirty days of soft peninsula bread and afternoon tea and missions against the Fallen Evils in places the cities never saw—and she had integrated herself into it so completely that she could no longer pretend the integration was tactical. She had become a member of the Martialist Association. She had stood beside others and fought. She had stayed.
She understood the mechanism, she had always understood it: she could not bear the helplessness of being trapped here, unable to act, unable to do anything that mattered for the actual war. The battles against the Fallen Evils were a substitute—something to press her hands against so the walls didn’t feel so close. She knew exactly what she was doing and she kept doing it.
What disturbed her was the other thing.
She was getting used to this life. Not tolerating it. Not enduring it. Used to it. The bread was sweet and she noticed when it was. The company around the supper table was bearable and she noticed that too. And every time she noticed, the shame landed harder—her people were dying in a war she was not part of, fighting a battle that might already have turned against them, and she was sitting here noticing that the bread was good.
Her rationality, inconveniently, remained intact.
It told her that venting her rage on the people around her would not shatter the Dream World, would not help her race, would make her situation worse and accomplish nothing. It told her this clearly, in the voice she had always used to think—the same voice that had led armies, that had reasoned through the Battle of Divine Will, that did not distort under pressure.
She hated that the voice was right.
And underneath the shame, underneath the rage and the helplessness, was the other truth—the one she had been walking around the edge of for weeks. She did not loathe Fei Yuhan as much as she had expected to. The woman had eavesdropped on her conversation with Roland: a calculated act, done to understand her own situation. Valkries could not call that unreasonable. And afterward, when confronted with the reality that a demon Senior Lord existed inside the Realm of Mind and had observed everything she’d ever done—Fei Yuhan had not broken. She had been curious.
Pure. Determined. Clear about what she was and what she wanted.
Heathalese had been like that. The Transformer, who had crossed the gap between races on nothing but the quality of her thinking and been accepted into the Cloud School for it. A few people, in every age, were like that. Sufficient to prove the gap was not absolute.
That was ultimately why Valkries had not left.
But the recognition only added to the weight pressing down on her. Because she was faintly aware—had been aware for some time—of the single thing that could actually help her race. She could see the shape of it. She had been refusing to look at it directly, because once she looked, once she took that step, there was no return. All of the pressure, all of the risk, would become hers to carry alone.
She was still standing there when her phone rang.
Roland.
She stared at it for a moment before answering. “What do you want? If you’re going to give me another one-sided report on the battlefield without any confirmation from Hackzord, I will not—”
“I just wanted to ask: what’s the floating island?”
She stopped.
Rose Café.
Roland pushed a cup of coffee across the table. Valkries wrapped her hands around it and didn’t drink.
She had listened to him describe what the Witches had seen—the altitude, the distance, the column of red above the continent’s spine. Then she had sat with it for a long time, testing his face for calculation, for the shape of a trap. There was none. He genuinely hadn’t known what they’d found until they told him. Exposure of the Deity of Gods was an accident, the kind that happened constantly in war, and while it would not help the demons it would not fundamentally change anything either. The higher-ups had probably counted on the humans seeing it eventually—knowing the enemy possessed a weapon of that scale was its own kind of defeat.
But Valkries thought past that.
The Deity of Gods was a weapon built for one purpose: to contend with the Sky-sea Realm. For it to appear at the Western Front meant the Western Front had fallen into a position desperate enough to justify drawing the trump card early. The King would not have agreed to deploy it against humans unless the situation had become genuinely dire.
Which meant everything Roland had reported previously—the battles, the losses, the state of the war—was true.
His sincerity was confirmed.
Unless another Senior Lord had already told him about the Deity of Gods and this was an elaborate performance. She examined that possibility and discarded it. If another Senior Lord were willing to collaborate with Roland, there was no reason to construct a theater this complex.
Pain pressed through her ribs like a blade finding a seam.
Her rationality would not let her lie to herself. It never had.
She felt as though her feet were at the edge of a cliff, and the only way forward was a single log laid over nothing.
Then—in the precise moment the pressure became large enough to overwhelm her—she heard Fei Yuhan’s voice in her memory. The conference room door, slightly open, the other woman’s words carrying through:
To fear the future and give up on forging ahead is simply the mentality of cowards. Even if we know that defeat is the eventual outcome, we should do all we can to turn that around.
To do everything we can. And forge ahead.
Valkries looked at Roland for a long time.
Then she shut her eyes.
“The thing you saw is called the Deity of Gods.” Her voice was steady. “It is my race’s trump card against the Sky-sea Realm, and the legacy of the underground civilization, refined over centuries. Several hundred years ago we escaped dependency on the Red Mist as you understand it—the restriction of needing it present in the environment. One answer we pursued was a tower capable of producing Red Mist and moving freely, but the fundamental problem remained: you cannot move a massive tower, much less the God’s Stone mines beneath it.”
She exhaled.
“Until Mask—Nassaupelle—obtained a complete command of the underground civilization’s magic power technology and built further on that foundation. What changes occurred inside him, I cannot say with precision. But in essence, he is capable of refurbishing a Birth Tower into a gigantic magic power core and amplifying the core’s effects. With sufficient magic power input, the result approaches what your language would call a miracle. That is why the King named it as he did. The Deity of Gods.”
Roland’s face was very still.
“You were slow to react,” she said, and there was something that might have been dark amusement in her voice.
“I—yes.” He scratched the back of his head. “You’ll have to forgive me. A Transformer who lived a thousand years ago was unable to hold a stable connection to the Realm of Mind. The information you’re giving me—I don’t understand how she—”
“Don’t explain it to me. I know what I’m doing.” She opened her eyes and looked at him flatly. “And I am not betraying my race. I am acknowledging that the Battle of Divine Will cannot ensure our survival—it can only ensure we remain chess pieces for God. Stopping God is the correct objective. Which is, I believe, also your position.”
”…Yes,” Roland said. He composed himself, and to his credit he did it quickly. He extended his hand across the table. “Though you’ve arrived at it from a different direction. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s too late.”
She looked at his hand without moving.
“Before that. I have a question.”
“Ask.”
“If the end comes out as the Oracle described—what are your plans for the relationship between our races?”
The question landed between them like a weight placed deliberately on a scale. Roland’s expression shifted: he understood exactly what she was asking, understood that the answer would determine whether the log bridge held or snapped, and understood—she could see it in the small stillness that came over him—that she was genuinely asking. Not testing. Asking.
He was quiet.
Then: “To be honest, I haven’t thought it through.”
Valkries frowned. “So everything you said before was on a whim. You never seriously believed I might cooperate.”
“No—I did consider it.” A rueful sound, not quite a laugh. “But the problem is genuinely complicated. I’m not good at making excuses that sound better than they are, and you’re not a fool.” He turned his cup in his hands. “A war that has lasted a thousand years doesn’t end with a handshake. The hatred between our races cannot be dissolved in a year or a generation. The Dream World isn’t something that can be recreated in reality. The only answer I can see at the moment—the only temporary one—is separation. Your people leave the human world. Permanently.”
“Leave to where?”
“That’s what we’d have to determine. But the world is larger than either of us has mapped. There will be somewhere.”
They sat with that for a while. The café’s ambient noise moved around them like weather.
Valkries spoke first. “If you had answered instantly—if you had assured me with perfect confidence that you had a plan and everything would be taken care of—the probability of a trap would have been extremely high.” She set down her cup. “The fact that you don’t have an answer is the thing that makes me believe you mean to find one.”
”…Not having a plan is the correct answer?”
“You could say that.” She exhaled slowly. “I’ll acknowledge that this is a long, narrow bridge, and neither of us can see where it leads. But I have to make the attempt.” A pause. “I am the only one in my race who could.”
Roland noticed her hands tighten around the cup when she said it.
She was not as certain as the words sounded. He did not say so.
“I won’t pretend the odds are good,” she continued. “God has noticed us both. If the entire world was constructed by God, there may be no version of this that ends in survival for either race. You understand that.”
“I do.” He extended his hand again. “Which is why we’re both on the bridge.”
This time, Valkries extended hers.
The handshake was brief. Businesslike. It meant everything.
“Then—the Deity of Gods.” Roland signaled for a fresh cup of coffee for her and turned back to the matter at hand. “Do you have a way to contact Hackzord? If we could persuade him to move the island back, or better still allow the First Army to garrison within it—that would align well with our plans for the Bottomless Land.”
“It’s too late for that.” She shook her head.
“What do you mean?”
“I had hoped to bring Hackzord into the Dream World—to give him access to information about the real situation and persuade him toward reason before the worst happened. I misjudged how far things had already gone. He believes in Ursrook’s judgment. It was most likely Hackzord himself who petitioned the King for the Deity of Gods. The decision has already been made; the island is already moving. Recalling it is beyond him. Frankly, I doubt I could convince the King and the other Senior Lords either.” She shrugged. “The Deity of Gods is not Hackzord’s to recall once it has been deployed. It belongs to the race.”
“Then—”
“I am the only one who is willing and able to cooperate with you. For now.” She watched him register the qualifier. “Yes. For now. I understand Hackzord. You cannot make him defy the King in an unclear situation while bearing all the consequences himself—that is not who he is. But there is a difference between defiance and caution. He is, above all things, concerned with keeping himself alive.”
Roland’s mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile.
“If I write to him—and you deliver the letter—there is an eighty, perhaps ninety percent chance he listens. The letter tells him to remove himself from the Deity of Gods, to step back from the direct engagement. That is the most I can do from where I am.” Her gaze shifted—not away from him exactly, but past him, at something only she could see. “But the letter alone is not enough. If the war erupts before it reaches him, your only option is to destroy the Deity of Gods. Only when Hackzord watches it fall—only then will he be convinced that the Battle of Divine Will cannot be won by this path. Only then does the probability of swaying him become real.”
She looked at Roland directly.
“He has to survive until the Deity of Gods is destroyed. That is the foundation of everything I’m proposing. If you cannot hold to that—” she moved her gaze away, shielding her expression— “then treat this conversation as though it never happened.”