Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 170: His Secret Wish

DING!

[You’ve succeeded in the task: Make him claim you in front of everyone!]

[Reward Rank 4]

- [5 Stars Artifact: Transfer!Oathran’s Woven String Bracelet]

+50% CritDMG

[Unlock Rank 4 to gain this reward!]

[Would you like to roll?]

Cecilia frowned, the expression feeling itchy on her tear-stiff face. The notification floated in her vision, a garish mockery. She’d gotten the alert for Rank 7 just minutes ago, the final, awful reward for making him remember.

Now Rank 4? The ’public claim’ task?

Did something happen when she left?

He... claimed her. In front of everyone. In the aftermath of her slap, her tears, the journal’s revelation. What form could that ’claim’ possibly have taken? A declaration? A threat? Something violent enough to satisfy the System’s twisted sense of romance?

She sighed, the sound ragged in the high, still air of the clock tower. She turned from the ghostly prompt to look out the tall, arched window. The horizon was a smear of grey cloud, a perfect mirror of her internal landscape.

"Eastiel... Arkai..." she whispered into the stagnant, dusty wind. Names from another life.

She had done her due diligence in this fabricated world. Arkai held the role of Student Council President.

The ’student council’ here was less a governing body and more a prestigious, hyper-competitive honor society of the school’s absolute elite.

The top academic performers, athletes, and social luminaries, tasked with organizing major events, liaising with the administration, and essentially representing the pinnacle of Scholomance achievement.

Its president was the apex predator of the school’s social and political food chain.

But when she’d gone to the lavishly appointed council chambers...

She’d found only lieutenants. Polite, efficient students who informed her, with mild surprise, that President Dawnoro was currently abroad, representing the Athenaeum at an elite, month-long international symposium on inter-kingdom youth diplomacy.

Even during finals? Apparently, yes. With the magitech communication crystals and proctored remote-examination wards, such things were possible for someone of his standing. It was an ’official program,’ after all. A perfect, narrative-wrapped excuse for his absence.

So he was a ghost here too. A prestigious, faraway ghost.

She missed them. The solid, roaring reality of Eastiel. The deep, silent strength of Arkai. Their absence in this nightmare was a physical ache. But she couldn’t reach them. Not until the tasks were over, and the scenario spat her back out.

And right now... she couldn’t even think of completing them. The very idea of engaging with the System’s game...

She couldn’t face him.

She just... couldn’t.

Such a cruel... cruel man.

Tap, tap... tap, tap... tap, tap...

Footsteps on the spiral stone stairs. Two pairs. One familiar, hurried. The other... a heavier tread that vibrated in the stone itself.

"Cece...?" Angela’s voice, strained and thin, echoed up the tower.

Ah. Cecilia pushed herself up from the window ledge, her body moving on autopilot. She turned, expecting Angela with Stevan, the princess and her stalwart warden, a unit of two.

But it was Oathran who emerged behind her, filling the doorway. Of course. Angela, for all her ferocity, was no match for the gravity of him now.

This was no longer Transfer!Oathran, the polite enigma. This was her Oathran. The Dragon Lord.

"Are you okay?" Angela rushed to her side, hands fluttering, but her own eyes were wide, darting between Cecilia and the man by the door. They weren’t just worried. They were frightened.

Fear?

What actually did Oathran do after she left?

"Don’t make me leave," Angela blurted, her voice trembling as badly as the hands she wrapped around Cecilia’s arms. "Whatever you guys are going to talk about, I’m staying."

Cecilia didn’t immediately answer her friend. Her gaze locked onto Oathran. He met it for a second, then his eyes skittered away, fixing on a point on the dusty floor.

Guilt. It was painted there, in the downward cast of his lashes, the tight line of his mouth.

"You want to explain something?" Cecilia’s voice was flat, scraped, hollow, yet also mocking.

"I think..." Oathran began, his own voice low, "you already understand even if I don’t explain, Saintess."

"Well, of course I do," Cecilia spat, another hot tear breaking free and tracing a path through the dust on her cheek. Her face twisted with scorn. "You don’t have to explain that you want to be erased after you die. You want everyone to forget about you after you die!"

The tears came again, bursting violently with her wretched breaths.

Oathran didn’t stand against it. His knees buckled. He fell to the stone floor with a soft thud. "I didn’t mean to want that, my love!"

His voice fractured, the first true tremor of emotion cracking through the calm. I just... I don’t want you to be sad."

He bowed his head. A single, perfect teardrop escaped his closed right eye, falling to darken the grey stone between his knees. "Please don’t blame me for wanting you to not be sad... Please... Cecilia..."

In the real world, his memory would remain. His legacy would endure, for better or worse.

Just as Eastiel’s deepest secret, his fear of weakness, his terror of being unable to protect her, his dread of helplessness, was reflected and inverted in this world, granting him the strength and agency he craved...

So too was Oathran’s secret reflected here.

His secret was his wish to be erased after death.

In the real world, or rather, in the other timeline Ruby remembered, Cecilia knew the truth.

Oathran’s remains would be desecrated, mined, and forged into weapons. His desecration would ignite a draconic war of vengeance that would scorch the continents. His name would become a battle cry, a cause for apocalyptic conflict.

He would not be forgotten. His memory would wage a war. A bloody, endless war fought in the name of his honor.

But in this world, his deepest wish manifested. To be erased.

For what?

So she wouldn’t grieve?

But there was more.

So his legacy would be forgotten, and become no one’s burden. So his name could not be used as a banner for slaughter. If he was forgotten, truly, completely erased, then nothing of him could be weaponized.

Not his bones, not his history, not his memory.

Even if some scavenger someday stumbled upon his lost, anonymous remains, no one would rise to complain. No one would wage a war for a ghost no one remembered.

His own oblivion would become a shield for the world.

But Cecilia couldn’t accept that.

"You are a cruel, cruel man, Oathran," she snarled through her tears, the words blistering. "No one in this world will ever be more cruel than you are to me."

"But what if it’s the only way?" Oathran’s head snapped up, his grey eyes blazing now, meeting her fury with a pain of his own. "You have Arkai and Eastiel. The world will be saved. No one will go to war for my fucking corpse. And you will stay happy!"

"I DON’T WANT TO BE HAPPY!" Cecilia roared, the sound tearing from her throat, echoing in the stone tower. "I WANT YOU!"

She took a shuddering step forward, her voice dropping to a ragged, sobbing whisper that was somehow more powerful than the shout.

"I want you. I want the memory of you, I want your life, I want your death, I want your corpse, I want your legacy, I want your sky and your world, I want all of you. Everything about you. All. Mine."

She refused to let him go, even into nothingness.

Oathran stared at her, the pain in his eyes hardening into something colder, more resigned. He pushed himself to his feet, unfolding to his full height, suddenly towering over the two girls in the confined space. The air grew dense.

"Well, that’s an awful shame, then," he said, his voice dropping back into that chilling calm, his earlier tremor gone. A scowl settled on his features, not of anger, but of bitter, immutable fact. "You don’t have a choice."

He looked down at her, his gaze impersonal, final. "I will die in five days, and there’s nothing we can do about it."

The sentence was absolute.

Then his focus shifted, sharpened. The personal tragedy was set aside. The pragmatist, the dying man with a mission, took over. "Now," he commanded, the word leaving no room for her grief, her declarations, "tell me how to get you out of this world."

Cecilia didn’t answer. She just looked up at him, her tear-streaked face pale but devoid of fear.

"TELL ME HOW TO GET YOU OUT OF THIS WORLD."

Oathran snapped, the pressure of his voice made the dust motes in the sunbeams seem to freeze.

She flinched.

Oathran—

...had just raised his voice at her.