An orb appeared in the middle of a void.

  It was an incorporeal, illusory and completely alien in the surroundings of its dark depths.

  Er- It thought.

  It was pretty sure that they were… dead, but the memories of what had happened leading up to that was… a little fuzzy.

  In fact, it wasn’t even sure if it was conscious. He couldn’t see, hear, or talk. In fact, he felt something… missing.

  Then, the orb shattered.

  With chunks of strange crystal dissolving into the very fabric of the blackness of space itself, the orb disappeared, and in their place was an illusory mass of gold.

  The ‘consciousness’ that had hidden inside the orb just moments before now felt itself more clearly, more tangibly.

  It was… human…

  Strange golden dots started to collect into this mass of gold, creating a bigger, and more tangible body. It coalesced once more into a humanoid form.

  And as the entire mass grew bigger and bigger, memories, pain and horror came all flooding back.

  It was Au…Aurelius… Aurelius Vennor!

  Holy mother of Dragons.

  What.

  Was.

  That.

  Aurelius’s mind raced with horrible thoughts, many directed at the fact that he just could not escape such terrible deaths.

  He wished that his death could be normal, like some sort of heart attack, or brain aneurysm. Compared to the ravaging of his mental state, as well as the sheer absurdity of the situations that he kept getting into moments before his death, these more ‘natural’ methods seemed much more preferable.

  The last thing he remembered was dying, of course, but as the memories filled out his very shape and body, he recalled more and more of the details of the last loop.

  …To be perfectly honest, it was actually lucky that these divine beings had just actually gone out of their way to kill him and reset the loop.

  If Aurelius’s DUMB strategy had not worked, Aurelius might have been trapped in some sort of horrible, horrible torture chamber for the next decade or some horrifying thing that would have made him wish for death!

  For the Dragons’ sake, there were 4 LICHES in the room with him!!!

  First, he had once again run into the terrifying powers of the Fae Queen. And this time, She was even more creepy and enigmatic than the last time.

  He had never heard of deities being so petty as to completely break the implied nature of contracts, and agreements.

  Although this may have been a result of the fact that most divine contracts and spirit realm contracts were written thoroughly due to the costs, it still seemed to decidedly go against Aurelius’s image of the divine beings, and spirits.

  Since the spirit world denizens valued contracts with humanity, perhaps it was merely that the Fae Queen was a special case of a divine being, given that She freely walked the material plane Herself.

  At least, that was Aurelius’s speculation.

  And there was also that part about stealing the name of Mr. Tona through his wife.

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  Aurelius was once more affirmed of the absolute horror of fae-kind.

  He was almost sure that the Commission had almost iron-tight ways to counter ‘name-stealing’, and it seemed to Aurelius that the Fae Queen had subverted every single one of their methods through the usage of Mrs. Tona as a conduit.

  And the whole, ‘dying woman on the ground part’ was nerve wrecking! While he hadn’t considered it a priority because of the Fae Queen, her death had been horrific, with Aurelius bearing witness to blood actively seeping into the carpet over the course of more than half an hour.

  …Thinking this through, he had actually watched two people die directly in front of him within the last hour.

  It had to be said that the possession of Mr. Tona’s body was absolutely horrifying too. Even though the man had sold him out, Aurelius would much have preferred not to see his body making that strange patchwork smile.

  And it was kind of romantic that he would sacrifice a kid to save his wife.

  Actually, scratch that, Mr. Tona deserved every bit of his death.

  Moving onto the next unbelievable part, the Commission had actively gone out of their way to summon Oscarion in the process of combating the fae in whatever plans they had.

  …Was the Commission that trigger happy?

  They would have sacrificed most of the prisoner population in the world to actively incorporate Him into the world in the first place.

  And likely have enticed Him to stay with more human souls!

  The divine care little about humanity unless we had something to offer them, and this would clearly have been such a case with the summoning of the literal Devil King.

  Actually, why couldn’t they summon something less… horrifying in the first place!

  What necessitated the summoning of an Archangel to stop in the first place!

  With these kinds of horrifying questions, Aurelius took a step back to reflect on everything that the Fae Queen had said.

  For example, what role did Aurelius exactly play in all of this chaos? The Fae Queen did not seem too happy to do whatever prompted the Commission to level the entire city of Tlacualtzin, suggesting that Aurelius may have been a catalyst.

  But Aurelius could not understand how he himself could have reasonably gotten in the way of the Fae Queen, as She suggested two loops ago.

  And in this loop, The Fae Queen clearly set in motion a plan in which Aurelius was much more actively involved.

  Perhaps… it was the fact that he was under the purview of the Commission?

  This seemed to make more sense in Aurelius’s mind.

  His death at the hands of the Fae Queen 2 loops ago was after being kidnapped from his own life independent of outside influence.

  And it seemed that the Fae Queen was plenty happy in extracting his soul in that particular loop, where Dr. Varian was commanded to use a magic circle to kill him in a specialised manner.

  However, just now, it seemed that he was kept alive for a different process, where that damn crystal fused with his skin…

  …Wait. He was some sort of… orb just now, wasn’t he?

  Aurelius felt terror running through his spine when he recalled his time between consciousness and ‘non-sentience’ as an… orb in this void just minutes before.

  Was that actually him? Had he become the crystal in those moments?

  What had that… thing meant by the suggestion that they didn’t need his soul to be whole?

  Actually, what was that THING in the first place?!

  Their horrifying appearance suggested to Aurelius that it was Oscarion, but they had denied it to be true.

  Aurelius could think of no possible alternative to them being Him.

  And… there were still 4 liches left in the world?

  That was far too many!

  Aurelius had not expected the Fae to have such firepower in the modern age.

  Aurelius knew from history that there had been at least five liches that had been captured and killed in the Greenwich War.

  While not as strong as Archsages in the traditional sense, each lich was supposed to be capable of devastating magic through sacrificial rites.

  In fact, the liches were the force in the besieging of the cities in the war, many being able to penetrate through the fortifications within terrifyingly short periods of time if left on their own.

  And there were still 4 left? What was the Commission doing?! They should have taken care of such a problem ages ago!

  “Pop” A strange noise pierced through his mind.

  AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Aurelius screamed internally, the void still restricting his ability to speak as always.

  His eyes had materialised, sending a horrendous wave of sensory horror into his brain.

  He hallucinated all sorts of shapes and colours in the background of the void…

  At least he finally realised the usefulness of the void. It was meant for some sort of ‘reconstruction’ of his body. Or something along those lines.

  With his newfound eyes, he could actually make out how the skin was growing over the bones of his nose, tissues and blood mending themselves in an absolutely vomit inducing display of gore.

  And once again, Aurelius cursed his ‘sponsor’.

  Could He not have made such a horrific process… not visible?

  Maybe wake him up after it was done?

  He did suppose that such… considerate actions were not to be asked of this strange god.

  And soon he felt his tissues scrape against bone, and nerves as his whole body and its feelings returned slowly.

  The process was mildly ticklish, and took almost no time, or whatever the standard of ‘time’ was in this horrifying void of blackness.

  And Aurelius now had… 14 hours to wait…