Kronos looked older than Neo remembered him to be.
His face had wrinkles, and his back was hunched. He had long grey beard.
“Are you surprised by my appearance, grandson?
“Well, what I can say, it is but the result of my age catching up to me. Hohohoho—cough, cough.”
Suddenly, the Kronos in the projection coughed blood.
His frail body shivered.
The projection glitched, and the blood disappeared from the corner of his mouth.
‘It’s a pre-recorded message.’ Neo realized.
“Congratulations for reaching this place.”
Kronos patted his head.
His hand – the hologram’s hand – paused at Neo’s head as if it could touch Neo.
“Why are you looking at your granpa like that?” Yaleth asked.
“He is not my grandpa.” Neo shook his head. “He is talking about Arthur who was supposed to come here. I guess this message isn’t a responsive one and that’s why it doesn’t realize that the one who came here isn’t Arthur.”
Yaleth didn’t ask why Neo had a complicated gaze if he was not the grandson. The Outer God understood it was something personal, and stayed quiet.
The projection of Kronos kept talking.
“I know you have a lot questions. Why do I look like this? Who is your mother? Where is your father? Why are you only capable of overturning the prophecy?
“Don’t worry. I will answer your questions one by one.”
Kronos snapped his fingers.
The location changed.
To be exact, it looked like the location changed. They were still in their original position.
Neo and Yaleth were standing on a hill. It seemed to pierce the clouds and reach for the skies.
A child in his early teens was pulling up a gargantuan manticore uphill.
The young Arthur had blood all over his body from his battle with the manticore. He took the hunt to the hut that was built on the small plateau near the hill’s top.
He fell to the ground as soon as he completed the delivery, too exhausted to move.
The door of the hut opened and a man in his forties – Kronos – came out.
“Hoh? You are exhausted by hunting a weak beast? I suppose you need more training.”
Arthur twitched but he didn’t retort. He couldn’t. He had no energy.
The Kronos’ projection standing next to Neo laughed.
“How does it feel like revisiting your younger days?”
Kronos and Neo watched the training of young Arthur.
Arthur was, for the lack of a better term, a monster.
He was able to fight with monsters without awakening God Blood. It was becoming harder to say who was the monster and who was the ‘human’.
Human because until the Godblood was awakened the demigods were no different from regular humans.
After awakening their Godblood, they would slowly gain physical traits of their bloodline.
Their hair color and pupils might change.
They could get a tail or grow wings.
After watching months of training of Arthur, the projection of Kronos sighed.
“I must say those days were quite eye-opening yet fulfilling. I never expected you to be able to fight mystical creatures without awakening your God Blood.
“As for the one training you, that was my clone I was controlling from here – inside the Sky Barrier.”
Kronos snapped his fingers.
The scene changed.
Inside it, the real Kronos was scribbling something over the paper under the darkness of the night.
His brows were creased and he looked as if he had seen a nightmare.
“The Advent of the End,” the projection of Kronos said. “Several Fate users and Time users saw an Eldritch God descending on our planet.
“He called himself Yaleth. Our people weren’t very strong so we couldn’t predict the future properly after Yaleth appeared in it.
“But from the bits and pieces we collected, Yaleth would destroy the world.
“We called the day when Yaleth would descend as the Advent of End.”
The voice of Kronos’ projection was somber.
“But I saw something else. A vision where the future was not destroyed. A future where ‘he’ appeared.
“The One Above All. The Sin of Humanity.”
Kronos snapped his fingers.
Neo and Kronos appeared in the sky.
Below they saw a continent engulfed by flames. The ‘humans’ of the continents were in chaos.
Most of them had been corrupted by Void. They were turning into eldritch entities, attacking others, and corrupting the unaffected humans.
Neo turned his gaze to locate the ‘thing’ that started this.
He saw a giant tentacle of Outer God Yaleth fallen over the continent’s end, which crushed several countries.
As for the true body of Yaleth, it was submerged far away into the ocean.
“In some of the visions, the One Above All defeated the Outer God Yaleth, and in others, he lost.
“But there was something that never changed, even if he won or lost.”
“The majority of the humanity was corrupted by Void.”
Neo completed Kronos’ words.
The projection nodded.
“I bet you thought majority of humanity was corrupted.” Kronos chuckled. “If you did, you are wrong.
“It was the entire humanity that was corrupted.”
Kronos’s eyes grew melancholic.
“The only people left alive were those who lived on the Moon. As for those on Earth? No one was left uncorrupted.
“And by how things were going, the humans on Moon would be corrupted too.
“The corpse of the Outer God was that powerful. Even in death, its corruption didn’t stop.
“The One Above All might’ve been able to deal with it normally, but at the death’s doorstep, it was something far beyond his capabilities.
“So…”
Kronos turned to Neo.
“To protect humanity, he combusted his Core.
“The energy from his self-destruction destroyed the corpse of Yaleth enough that it could no longer corrupt anything.
“But it also hit the humanity.
“Nine trillion, seven hundred eighty-five billion, thirty-six million, four hundred thousand, twenty-three.
“Whether the human was corrupted completely, partially, or not corrupted at all, they were killed in the explosion caused by The One Above All.
“His desperate measure saved the few hundred thousands on Moon, but he had forsaken the souls of those who could still be saved.”