Beast Gacha System: All Mine

Cecilia smiled.

He had woken up, and the first thing he did was find her. She knew that was exactly what had happened.

Whatever had broken inside him during the rampage, whatever truth had shattered his heart and sent him fleeing into the night, he had come back. To her.

That was enough. Cecilia couldn’t ask more from the world.

"Did you dream?" Cecilia asked.

Arkai nodded.

Cecilia turned her back to him and continued staring at the empty ground. The snow was pristine, untouched except for the footprints she and Rhett had left behind.

"Perhaps the Dragon Tongue is that effective. He told you to dream, and you did." She said.

Arkai didn’t say anything.

His mind was... surprisingly caught in the memory of that other world. The alternate magic world where he had been nothing more than a human student at a magic academy, without the biological weaknesses of rut or rampage, and the wolf blood that had made him vulnerable to his own sister’s machinations.

In that world, Sienna had been caught. Her crimes had been addressed, and her disgrace exposed. She had been pulled from the academy by their father and sent far away from the family.

And crucially, she was a girl who had never killed Cecilia’s mother.

In that world, Summer Silver’s body had been intact. She had been buried peacefully, the way she wanted, her will honored, her grave marked with a physical headstone that Cecilia could visit and touch and kneel before.

And he had stood in that hilltop cemetery, looking at Cecilia from a distance, and listening to Sienna’s confession. But the truth in that world had been survivable.

It had been painful, yes, but not catastrophic. Not world-ending. Not the kind of truth that made him look at his own reflection and see a failure of a man.

That moment and today... They were the same moment, somehow. But different too. Like the difference between heaven and earth.

Because in this world, the real world, Sienna was long dead, her name preserved as honorable and just. The beautiful Snowflower of Dawnoro, ruined by an evil Strongest Beta, her own brother’s most trusted right-hand man.

Roarke had been exiled for her sins, and her reputation had remained pristine, a tragic victim rather than a predator.

Wasn’t that ironic? No, wasn’t that humiliating? A mockery of just itself?

Summer Silver had died with her body ripped apart, cremated against her wishes, her ashes scattered at an unknown location by relatives who had never loved her.

And his sister dared to die without seeing her truth exposed? She dared to die leaving a son who would hate himself if he found out what she had done?

So.

Wasn’t that alternate world better? Much, much better?

There, the scales had been balanced. There, justice had been done. There, Summer had been buried whole, and Sienna had been exposed, and Arkai had been able to look Cecilia in the eye without feeling like his very existence was an insult to her grief.

But here, in the real world, the opposite had happened. Sienna’s name was clean, and Summer’s body was ash, and Arkai had spent years protecting the memory of a sister who had murdered the mother of the woman he loved.

What a perfect world that other place had been.

And at the time, he had thought it was only thanks to knowing what kind of person Sienna truly was, and how his father had still been alive in that timeline to intervene.

He hadn’t known that this real world was so much worse than he ever imagined.

He hadn’t known that the truth would be so ugly, so irreversible, so beyond forgiveness.

"Do you know what’s in my mind right now?" Cecilia asked.

Arkai flinched.

Whatever she was about to say, he deserved it. He feared the next five seconds more than he had feared anything in his entire life, even more than Sienna’s voice through the bathroom door, more than the northern wilderness, and more than the moment he had learned the truth.

But Cecilia didn’t turn around. She just kept staring at the empty ground.

"I think I just found out how I would have died in the world where Ruby didn’t disappear before the Saintess Coronation."

—die—?

Arkai staggered backward. The blood drained from his face so fast the world swam around him, the white snow and the gray sky and the black branches of the old oak all bleeding together into a blur of cold and horror. "What—?"

He had known she would say something that would blame him. Something that would hurt, something devastating, something that would drive the knife of his guilt even deeper into his chest.

But this—

This was not what he had expected. This was...

"Cecilia..."

Another layer of revelation.

Something more sinister—

She turned to him, and her eyes were cold.

Anger would have been easier. Hate would have been simpler. Just cold. But this chill...

"I was wrong," she whispered. "I was angry that you hurt yourself. I acted like I wouldn’t blame you, trying my best to find a way to tell you without hurting you. But maybe it was my own way of not hurting myself with the truth."

She paused, and the silence was unbearable. The wind stirred the snow at their feet. The old oak creaked above them. And then she spoke again, her voice barely more than a breath.

"I do blame you, Arkai."

The snow crunched behind them. Two sets of footsteps stopped.

Eastiel and Oathran had arrived at the worst possible moment, their approach masked by the wind and the consuming focus of the two figures standing beneath the old oak.

They had come looking for Arkai, tracking him here, and they had found him.

But they had also found something else.

Eastiel’s golden eyes went wide. Oathran’s grey eyes darkened. They had heard everything.

The coldness in Cecilia’s voice.

The atmosphere around them was frozen in place, suspended in the moment like a held breath. The wind had died and the snow had stopped falling.

"Your... death?"

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