100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 473 - Aftermath

When Seran arrived at the battlefield, he understood the scale of it at once.

The land itself had been rewritten by violence.

The air still burned with fading law-residue. Chunks of earth had been turned over like pages ripped from a book.

In the distance, the last remains of a circle-like formation were dissolving into ash-light and spent essence. He did not know why, but the remnants of it struck him with a familiarity so sharp that his breath caught.

His eyes lowered.

And then he saw the body.

It was barely a body anymore.

Broken beyond dignity. Ruined beyond recognition. A young man reduced to aftermath, lying in the place where too much of the world had tried to kill him at once.

Seran stopped.

He did not know why his body stopped.

He did not know why his hands had suddenly become cold, or why his chest had tightened so violently that for one impossible second, he thought he might have been struck by some hidden attack.

He stared.

The face was gone.

The features were destroyed.

There was no proper way to identify the dead.

And yet—

something in him broke.

His knees felt weak.

That should have been impossible. He was Eternal. His body did not fail him. Not like this.

Not from grief. Not from shock. Not from a corpse he could not even name.

But it was failing him now.

Seran’s hand moved stiffly to his coat. He took out a notebook. The motion was slow as though he already knew he would hate whatever he found inside.

He opened it.

The notes were his own handwriting.

He turned several pages and found the entry he had not been able to stop thinking about ever since the strange unease began.

Bait strategy. Origin Rewrite. Mimic target’s appearance. Take the fall if necessary.

Seran stared at the words for a long time.

The letters did not change. The ink did not blur. The meaning remained.

But the memory attached to it was missing.

He remembered writing it.

He remembered planning something.

He remembered Convergence.

But there was a wound where the center of the plan should have been. A missing shape. A person he had clearly intended to protect or deceive for, and yet whose name, face, and place in the strategy had all been torn cleanly out of him.

His grip tightened on the notebook.

Then his gaze returned to the dead young man.

And his body shook.

Not his mind.

His body.

His instincts. His muscles. His pulse. His breath.

All of them reacted as if something in front of him mattered more than memory had permission to admit.

Seran’s eyes widened.

That was when the real horror of it reached him.

Memories could be tampered with.

Names could be stolen. Faces could be blurred. Thoughts could be redirected.

But the body—

the body remembered things the mind could not always hold.

It remembered familiarity. Protectiveness. Debt. Attachment. The shape of someone important standing too close to loss for too long.

Seran lowered the notebook slowly.

And then tears began falling from his eyes.

He did not understand them.

That frightened him more.

He did not know this man. He could not name him. He could not pull the missing truth back into full light.

And yet his whole being was screaming that he had come too late.

Seran took one step forward.

Then another.

Then his knees gave way and he sank to the ground before the dead young man, not because he had chosen to kneel, but because some deeper part of him had decided that standing would be wrong.

The tears kept falling.

"I’m sorry," he heard himself whisper.

And that frightened him even more, because he did not know who he was apologizing to.

...

It did not take long for the ancient beasts to arrive.

The Void Disc had run dry after the transfer into the Void, so they had descended under their own power, carrying Shadow with them through the final stretch. They had returned because something in all of them had insisted they must.

A pull. A pressure in the soul. A thread without a name.

When they touched down and saw Seran kneeling before the corpse, Shadow recognized him first.

"The leader," he breathed.

He was about to call out—

then his gaze followed Seran’s.

And he saw the dead man.

The ancient beasts stopped.

Every one of them.

For creatures who had lived through more than ten millennia of war, ruin, sovereignty, and the long erosion of wonder, their stillness was more telling than any shout could have been.

Something was wrong.

Not with the battlefield.

With them.

Their core reacted before their minds did.

A pressure gathered under old instincts. A disturbance deeper than memory. The dead youth lying there should have been nothing to them, and yet every honed sense they possessed was informing them that this absence was personal.

Grave felt it first in the language of his own law.

Burden.

There was weight between them and the body.

Thal’voryn felt something different.

Depth.

A vertical pull in the soul, like staring into a trench that had been part of his life for longer than he could currently remember

Condoriano’s smile died without him noticing.

Aurvang’s nostrils flared once.

Noctryn looked away, then back, as if trying to catch the dead through another angle and force memory to cooperate.

Ashkara’s tongue flicked, then stilled.

Saber said nothing at all, but his hand tightened so hard around his waist that the surrounding air groaned.

And Astraea—

Astraea was the most shaken.

She stared.

Not at the ruined body.

At the wrongness around it.

The instant she looked at him, something in her chest twisted with a violence that none of the others seemed to feel quite the same way.

As if she had lost someone who belonged to her side of the sky.

Then another thought struck her.

The man who had once named her.

That mattered.

More than it should have.

Her eyes widened.

Because she could remember the importance of that person—

but not the face.

Not the voice. Not the name.

Her thought process froze.

"This..." Astraea said and even her composure cracked around the word. "Are they connected?"

Grave suddenly said to the others...

"You feel it too."

Her gaze never left the dead youth.

"There is a bond here. Something old enough to survive memory’s ruin. Something I should know."

Thal’voryn’s voice was low and cavernous.

"The world has hidden a depth from us."

Saber took one slow step toward the body and stopped.

"Then the world is wrong."

No one argued.

They were ancient beings. They had survived eras by trusting what endured longer than thought.

When instinct, law, body, and soul all recoiled from the same absence, they did not dismiss it simply because memory came back empty.

So they gathered around the dead man with the solemnity one reserved for a truth too painful to name.

...

Then another came.

The Verdant Ark descended badly, too fast. Marie all but forced it down onto the broken earth before the hull had even properly settled.

The door opened.

They ran.

They ran like people whose souls had already understood the answer and were still hoping their bodies might arrive in time to prove them wrong.

Eirene was first.

She saw the others already there. Seran. The ancient beasts.

She ignored all of them.

Her eyes found Lucien.

And the whole world narrowed into denial.

"This isn’t possible," she said.

Her voice was too calm.

That made it worse.

She reached for the necklace at her throat with trembling fingers and activated Equivalent Exchange immediately.

Her breath shuddered.

She asked the world a question.

Is Lucien truly dead?

The cost came.

Her face turned paler.

She paid it.

The answer arrived.

It was not the answer she wanted.

Eirene asked again.

A different question this time.

Then what is he now?

More cost.

More pain.

Still not the answer she wanted.

Again.

And again.

Each time, the world answered only with truths that did not save him.

Her breathing became uneven. Her fingers shook harder. Her posture remained straight only because she had not yet accepted that she was already collapsing.

At last, Eirene’s expression broke.

It shattered.

Tears spilled from her eyes as she asked the next question anyway:

How can Lucien Lootwell be returned to the world?

Nothing.

No answer.

Only cost far beyond what even her life could purchase.

She changed it immediately.

How can he be revived?

Nothing.

Equivalent Exchange did not reject her.

It simply priced the knowledge beyond her.

That, more than anything, broke her.

Because it meant the world itself did not see the path as something she had the right to know.

Lilith arrived one heartbeat later.

She stopped so suddenly that her knees struck the ground hard enough to bruise.

She recognized him immediately.

By the armor.

Her hand moved to the Beloved Bastion with the tenderness of someone touching both her greatest pride and her greatest failure at once.

Her fingers traced the surface.

Then she started crying.

Not loudly.

That would have been easier to bear.

Her tears fell in a steady, helpless stream as her shoulders shook and she folded over him, wrapping herself around Lucien and the armor as if warmth, guilt, and grief together might still make a barrier where her craftsmanship had failed.

"It was supposed to protect you," she whispered.

Then again, weaker:

"It was supposed to protect you."

Marie arrived and froze.

For one full second she simply stared.

Then all the fight went out of her face.

"No," she said.

It was like a child’s denial.

Then she began crying.

Kaia came up beside her, looked once, and turned away violently. Her fist slammed into the ground hard enough to crack stone and send lines racing outward beneath her.

"Damn it," she hissed.

Sylra did not collapse.

She stood rigid and closed her eyes because if she kept looking, she knew she would lose control completely.

In her mind Lucien had always been the one who turned absurd things into solvable problems. The one who stood where logic ended and somehow kept going. She had not truly believed this shape of ending would ever reach him.

Not like this.

Marina lasted even less time than Marie.

Her whole body shook. Then she made one broken sound and started sobbing without restraint.

"My prince," she said through tears, voice muffled and helpless.

Then she stumbled toward Sylra and buried herself against her, clinging hard.

Sylra opened her eyes just enough to put a hand on Marina’s head.

She was crying too now.

The grief moved through them all in different shapes, but it was the same wound.

Lucien’s death had hit like an impact wave.

...

Then came an unexpected pair.

Luke and Cienna.

They had remembered Lucien through a different path.

Because some of the oldest connections tied to Lucien had remained knotted too deep to be completely severed.

Skillpedia and the Magic Book still knew them. Once, their own souls had been linked closely enough to those systems that when the bindings around Lucien trembled, something in Luke and Cienna trembled with them.

When they arrived—

Luke stopped moving entirely.

Cienna covered her mouth with both hands.

Their son.

They had only just begun to touch his life again properly. Only just started believing there was still time left to stand near him, speak with him, protect him in whatever late and insufficient ways parents still could.

And now this.

Cienna’s knees weakened. Luke caught her before she could fall fully.

His own face had hardened so badly it looked carved.

He stared at Lucien’s ruined body and the truth hit him in waves.

He should have protected him. He should have been stronger. He should have reached him sooner. He should have been the wall, not the latecomer.

All of those thoughts were useless, and he knew it.

That made them worse.

Cienna’s body shook against him.

"We were supposed to be there," she whispered.

Luke swallowed once.

His voice came out rough.

"I know."

But he also knew another truth.

Even had they arrived sooner, they would have been no help against that battlefield.

That knowledge did not comfort him.

It only humiliated him more deeply, because parental grief was cruel enough to demand impossible strength and then condemn you for not having it.

He closed his eyes for one brief moment.

Then opened them again and continued holding Cienna upright while his own heart broke in silence.

No one spoke for a while after that.

There was only the battlefield. The smell of blood. The fading heat of laws. The quiet sound of crying that no one was trying very hard to hide anymore.

Some rubbed at their eyes. Some lowered their heads. Some stared too long.

And all of them, eventually, saw the same thing.

The smile.

That was the cruelest part.

Not merely that Lucien had died.

That he had known he was dying.

And still chosen to meet it smiling.

The expression told them too much.

He had seen the ending come. He had understood it. And he had still denied fear the satisfaction of shaping his face.

That smile made grief heavier because it meant he had been brave in the worst way possible. Alone, already broken, and still unwilling to let death see him beg.

Just then—

Luke and Cienna felt it.

A thrum.

Skillpedia and the Magic Book were calling.

Both of them stiffened at once.

Their eyes met.

They understood at once.

Something had been prepared.

Lucien had left them something through the old channels still tied to them.

A "magic skill" had been bestowed upon them... one that could only be activated when they acted together.

Soon, they clasped hands.

Their figures began to glow.

And suddenly—

Dark radiance burst outward.

And everyone on the battlefield was struck by it.

...

Those touched by it felt something enter them.

Recognition.

A rightness returning. A name reclaiming its place. A relation reattaching to the wound where it had been severed.

The light did not overpower Oblivion so much as overwrite the missing shape with a truer claim. What had been lost returned all at once.

And everyone remembered.

It hit them like a second grief.

Because now there was no more uncertainty left to hide behind. No protective confusion. No merciful blur.

Only truth.

The ancient beasts went utterly still. Whatever wrongness they had felt before now found its face, its name, and its full weight.

Astraea’s breath caught sharply.

"Little brother," she whispered.

Then she closed her eyes as if the words themselves had become blades.

Seran was hit hardest of all.

Everything snapped into place at once.

The notebook. The plan. The second communicator. The body remembering what the mind had been denied.

He remembered Lucien.

He remembered choosing to stand in for him if necessary. He remembered the strategy. He remembered what he had failed to do.

Seran’s hand shook violently.

Then he laughed once.

A broken, disbelieving laugh at himself.

This time he knew exactly who he had come too late for.

And that knowledge destroyed whatever discipline he had still been holding together.

The battlefield felt fuller now that the truth had returned.

Fuller— and infinitely lonelier.

Because the name was back.

And Lucien was still dead.