Return of the Fallen Volume 10 Chapter 93
Kazuki suddenly had a thought.
(If Sephra didn’t see my face the whole time she was raising me then the time when her personality toward me, when it seemed to suddenly flip completely out of nowhere. This was when the magic disguise wore off?)
(Not quite Kazuki.)
The memories flashed once again to the day Lin adopted both Kazuki and Kai. The woman in charge of the orphanage had personally delivered Kazuki and Kai to Lin and Sephra.
(The moment you and Kai showed up to our home, the moment she saw you, there was a brief change in her expression.)
Fera was slightly older than Kai. When she saw Kazuki and Kai she immediately turned her nose up at the two.
“Mother, why are these two peasants here?”
Both Sephra and Lin gave her a glare and Fera pouted in defiance but said nothing else.
Sephra looked at Kai and liked him right away. Taking a look at Kazuki however, she found something odd. She could feel a tiny bit of power emanating from Kazuki’s face for a split second. Nowhere else but his face. She tried to sense what it was but she found that the magic she felt had vanished as if it were never there in the first place.
Sephra knelt down and held Kazuki’s face and turned his head side to side and inspected him with her aura but she felt nothing out of place.
“Honey, what are you doing to the boy, you’ll frighten him.”
Sephra thought she simply imagined it and she quickly gave Kazuki a kiss on his forehead and played it off.
“I was simply admiring how handsome our new son is.”
(Sephra’s instincts are not for nothing. That day I thought everything was fine but it was this very day that a seed of suspicion was planted within Sephra.)
The memories moved along.
After that Sephra was a mother to Kazuki and Kai. There were many days that she played with them, taught them, cooked for them, and loved them.
A few years flashed forward in the memories and it showed the day Lin returned the golden compass to Kazuki.
(Up to this point I had held onto the compass. Your memories around the time are fuzzy correct.)
Kazuki nodded.
(It’s strange, my memorization and recall are near perfect but when it comes to these early memories surrounding the compass, they are fuzzy. I remember having the compass in the orphanage but then there is a gap where I was taken it by you and Sephra where I don’t have it. This memory here though, the day you gave me the compass, I remember it distinctively. You had gifted a new sword to Kai because his skills with a blade were improving rapidly and you wanted to celebrate him. I remember crying that he had gotten something and I didn’t. That was when you brought out the compass. Why is there a gap? Why is my memory of having the compass and not having the compass feel so off?)
(That is my fault. The day I found you, after my argument with father. I wanted to see what happened. I wished to see your memories the day brother died. I thought if I just took a small look, there might be a clue as to who had killed him and his wife. There was a problem though. I had rarely traveled to the Lower Realms. As you know, a God can not exist within a Lower Realm. It is against the natural laws of the universe. There is a restriction, an invisible force that affects us all. When a God travels to a Lower Realm,t here body and powers are forcibly degraded and contained. They go from being a God to a Demigod. I don’t know why this is but it just is. Since I had only traveled to a few Lower Realms in the past, I was not used to my new body upon arrival. Because of that, the moment I tried to use my aura to take a look at the memories of your soul, I used too much power. With you being an infant your soul was already weaker than an average person and so, I accidentally damaged a part of your soul along with the memories around that time.)
Kazuki didn’t know what to say.
(My soul was damaged…But I’ve seen my soul far too many times to count by now. I should have noticed if part of my soul was damaged right? My soul appears perfectly fine.)
(You are right, now your soul is fine but before it wasn’t. I really did accidentally cause you harm. However, you would have been completely unaware at the time. Later on, when your Mage core formed, the part of your soul that was damaged was a part of your Mage core. Later on, well, you already know what happened.)
I remembered what happened; there was no way Kazuki could ever forget. The day his brother died and both of their Mage cores were stolen, forcibly extracted from their very souls.
(So the damaged part of my soul was fused with my Mage core and since that got stolen, the damaged part of my soul went with it. By the time I could actually since my soul, the damage was simply no longer there.)
(Exactly.)
The memories continued to play. Lin gifted the compass to Kazuki and in doing so, he caused the seed of suspicion within Sephra to grow further.
“That compass, where did you get it?”
Lin played it off.
“I told you I had my people out searching for brother’s body. We never found it but one of my people did manage to find his compass.”
Sephra’s eyes narrowed.
“How did this person of yours find a compass out of all of the Realms and all of the planets?”
Lin shrugged.
“It was simply luck. An old hunter found it. Apparently while out hunting the old man tripped and tumbled down a large hill and he landed squarely on it. After that, he brought it back and tried to sell it at a bazar as he had no need for it. It was bought on a whim by one of my guys who thought it looked familiar, turned out it was actually brothers. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to settle here. I wanted to find the person who killed my brother. I figured since he died here, someone must know something.”
Lin gently held Sephra’s hand.
“I didn’t want to tell you in case I never found the person or persons responsible, I didn’t want to get your hopes up. Now that I brought the compass out though, I can see this will be sensitive. I wanted to find out what happened so that brother could rest in peace but if seeing this compass affects you, I’ll simply put it away and never let it see the light of day again.”
Sephra was quiet for a while before she shook her head.
“Little Kazuki looks good wearing it. I…I have no more attachments to it. After all, I did love Genzuko but that love faded long ago. I realized after we married that my feelings for him were more of admiration, more of what a little sister would feel for an older brother. As a matter of fact, Fera has been bugging me since the moment he put it on. I’ll give her my old compass as well.”
With a thought, a black compass appeared in Sephra’s hand and she placed it on Fera. Fera jumped around in excitement before showing it off to Kazuki and Kai, bragging about how it was better.
(Again I didn’t even see through Sephra. Looking over this memory, her expression says the opposite of everything she does. Her suspicion grew further. She didn’t believe my story for a minute.)
The memories flashed forward several years later. Kazuki was now a young man hovering around the age of 16. Everything seemed normal as always. Kazuki was quietly reading under a tree and a little further away Kai was swinging his sword as per usual.
Fera was walking by and glaring at him. She couldn’t stand to see how content he was with something so simple.
“Reading again. Why bother with a book when you can use magic so well.”
Fera was condescending, and jealousy dripped from her voice.
Kazuki lowered the book and chuckled.
*Heh*
“Maybe if you picked up one once in a while, I wouldn’t be able to outclass my older sister in magic so easily.”
Fera’s eyes widened and she became pissed. The power of wind gathered around her as she threatened to unleash it upon him.
“You want to say that again you little shit.”
“FERA!”
Sephra shouted in her direction and came marching over. Fera’s power immediately dissipated and she quickly stood up straight and put on a false smile.
“Mother…I didn’t do anything, it was Kazuki!”
“How many times do you have to lie. You know I can’t stand it when y…
Sephra’s words froze in her throat as she caught a glimpse of a glow coming from Kazuki’s compass. It happened for an instant but she definitely witnessed it. Not even half a second later, she once again sensed that tiny amount of magic around Kazuki’s face, and the disguise hiding his real features vanished. He now had his normal appearance, which was almost identical to Genzuko and Orberus.
Sephra felt her knees grow weak and she couldn’t even move. Her heart started to beat harder and harder. She looked on in horror as if she had seen a ghost.
“Gen…”
She covered her mouth and looked at Kai and Sephra to see if they noticed, but the two just stared at her, curious what was going on. Not even a second later, the compass glowed with a tiny flash, something only she seemed to have noticed. Half of a second later, the disguise came back and Kazuki’s face was once again different.
Kazuki took a step forward and was about to ask what was wrong but Sephra quickly retreated a step as if she were terrified of something. She then turned around and vanished.
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