The Extra's Rise-Chapter 797: Meaning of Love (3)

The moment Arthur smiled, I knew I was going to die.

It wasn’t the expression of someone who had gained new power—it was the serene confidence of someone who had transcended the very concept of limitations. The air around him shimmered with authority that made reality itself seem negotiable, while his eyes held depths that spoke to cosmic understanding far beyond anything I had ever encountered.

"Jack," he said, his voice carrying harmonics that resonated through dimensions I couldn’t even perceive, "thank you for showing me what I needed to become."

What he needed to become. The words hit me like physical blows as I realized the scope of what I was facing. Arthur hadn’t just broken through to Immortal-rank—he had transformed into something that operated according to completely different rules than the rest of us.

I launched my most devastating attack, weaving Nirvana and Abyssal Flames into spiraling combinations that should have incinerated anything within a hundred-meter radius. The dual flames erupted from my position with enough force to level buildings, their opposing energies creating feedback loops that made the air itself scream.

Arthur raised one hand, and my flames simply... stopped existing.

Not extinguished. Not blocked. They stopped being fire and became something else entirely—flower petals that drifted harmlessly to the ground, their purple and white colors beautiful and completely powerless.

"Domain Expansion," Arthur said with casual authority that made my blood run cold, "Mythweaver’s Garden."

Reality folded around us like origami being reshaped by invisible hands. The ruined plaza vanished, replaced by something that felt like a cross between a fairy tale and a cosmic library. We stood in a garden where every flower told a story, where the trees grew books instead of leaves, and where the very air pulsed with narratives that rewrote the fundamental laws governing what was possible.

"In this space," Arthur continued, his transformed presence making him appear more like a force of nature than a human being, "I determine what stories have power. And your story, Jack, is that of a villain who burns but cannot destroy."

I tried to summon my flames again, pouring every ounce of power I possessed into techniques that had never failed me before. The energies built within my magical channels, reached my hands, began to manifest—

And became butterflies.

Thousands of delicate butterflies in shades of purple and white, fluttering around me with mocking beauty while I stared in growing horror at the complete impossibility of what was happening. My power, my magic, my very identity as someone who commanded destructive forces—all of it rendered meaningless by Arthur’s casual rewriting of reality itself.

"You don’t understand," I snarled, desperation bleeding through my usual composure as I launched myself at him physically, abandoning magic for raw combat prowess. "I loved her! I loved Elara more than you could ever—"

Arthur’s fist connected with my solar plexus before I could finish the sentence, and the impact sent me flying backward through the mythical garden like a discarded toy. I hit one of the story-trees with enough force to shatter my ribs, the pain exploding through my chest while narrative fragments from the disturbed branches rained down around me.

"You loved her," Arthur agreed with terrible gentleness as he approached my crumpled form, "and that makes what you did infinitely worse."

I tried to rise, tried to fight back, tried to summon even a spark of the power that had made me feared throughout the magical world. But in this place, under the weight of Arthur’s Mythweaver authority, I was nothing more than what he decreed I should be—a broken villain whose story was ending.

’She was so beautiful,’ I thought as Arthur’s next blow shattered my left shoulder, the memory of Elara’s final moments burning behind my eyes like acid. ’So perfect and pure and everything I could never be.’

I had watched her die. Had seen the light fade from those violet eyes that had shown me the only glimpse of goodness I had ever encountered in my entire existence. The girl who had smiled at me during social gatherings, who had listened to my carefully crafted philosophical discussions with genuine interest, who had somehow managed to see past the charm and calculation to recognize that I was searching for something I couldn’t name.

Arthur’s boot connected with my broken ribs, and I screamed as bone fragments tore through internal organs that were already failing. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the agony of knowing that I had participated in destroying the only beautiful thing I had ever found.

"She deserved better than both of us," I gasped, blood spraying from my mouth as I struggled to form words through the damage Arthur was systematically inflicting. "But at least... at least you tried to protect her."

Arthur paused in his methodical destruction of my body, his transformed features showing something that might have been surprise. "What?"

"You were the hero," I continued, each word costing me breath I could barely spare, "and I was the villain. That’s how these stories are supposed to work, isn’t it? The hero gets the girl, gets the power, gets everything he deserves for being good."

I tried to laugh, but it came out as a wet cough that splattered more blood across the mythical flowers surrounding us. "You already had five incredible women who loved you. Five! And you still tried to save her too. Because that’s what heroes do—they protect everyone, save everyone, build happy endings for people who deserve them."

Arthur’s expression shifted to something approaching confusion, as if my words were challenging assumptions he hadn’t realized he was making. But I wasn’t finished. I needed him to understand, needed someone to know the truth before I died.

"I didn’t deserve her," I whispered, my voice breaking with grief that had been building for months. "I’m evil, Arthur. Genuinely, irredeemably evil. I’ve killed innocent people, destroyed families, served forces that want to end human civilization itself. What kind of monster falls in love with someone like Elara?"

The question hung in the air between us while Arthur stood over my broken form, his cosmic power making the very space around us vibrate with barely contained authority. In his transformed eyes, I could see him processing my words, trying to understand how someone could love purely while remaining fundamentally corrupt.

"The kind of monster who watches the girl he loves die because he’s too much of a coward to choose her over his loyalty to evil," I answered my own question, the admission tearing from my throat like a physical wound. "The kind who knows exactly what he is and loves someone anyway, knowing that love will only bring her pain."

Arthur raised his hand, and I could see energy gathering around his fingers—not fire or lightning, but something more fundamental. The power to simply decree that I should stop existing, to write me out of reality’s story with the same casual authority he had used to transform my flames into butterflies.

I closed my eyes and thought of Elara’s smile. The way she had looked during that museum exhibition when she explained her theories about healing social wounds. The gentle patience in her voice when she tried to help me understand why kindness mattered more than strength. The pure radiance that had surrounded her as she sacrificed herself to save millions of people who would never know her name.

’At least I got to see her,’ I thought as Arthur’s judgment descended toward me. ’At least I knew what perfect goodness looked like, even if I could never touch it.’

The killing blow never came.

Instead, a single black rose materialized between Arthur’s descending hand and my broken body, its petals darker than void and somehow more real than anything else in the mythical garden. The flower pulsed with power that made even Arthur’s transformed authority pause, its presence creating ripples in reality that spoke to forces beyond both our understanding.

The rose spoke with a voice like silk over steel: "Not yet, young Nightingale. This story requires a different ending."

Arthur’s eyes widened with recognition and something approaching alarm as he stepped backward from the impossible flower. Around us, his Domain began to flicker and destabilize, the mythical garden wavering like a mirage in desert heat.

As consciousness faded from my broken body, the last thing I saw was the black rose expanding into a portal of living shadow, its darkness promising escape from judgment and a continuation of the story I thought had ended.

The source of this c𝓸ntent is fr(e)𝒆novelkiss