Novel Lived
Chapter 359 Consequences (4)
"What did you want to talk about?"
With her chin resting atop her cupped hands, Irene looked right in my face with a sleazy, ironic yet also perfectly empty smile.
An expression of a predator amused by the struggle of the prey it could finish at any given moment… Or, that's how it looked to me at the very least.
"Are you seriously asking about it?" I asked, raising my left eyebrow while leaning back in my chair, never turning my eyes away from Irene's face.
Even now, with Cassie gone, this damned girl continued to act her role, either clueless that I knew about her real identity already…
Or maybe the things were a lot more complicated than I'd expect them?
'What if there's another Irene, and this lass has nothing to do with that damned darkness?'
For a moment, I doubted whether or not I was morally allowed to go through with my plans.
But then, a single memory of mine flashed through my mind.
The pile of corpses of my own making that vanished overnight, consumed by the greedy influence of the celestial forest.
'I've killed so many. With that in mind, one soul more or less, how would it matter?'
"Why are you so silent?" Irene asked, her chin pushing her fingers so far they arched down. "You wanted to talk…" her eyes sparked with the vile amusement I knew so damn well from my relatively recent past. "Could it be…"
"Now that you are face to face with an actually beautiful woman, you forgot how to speak?!"
Irene's eyes widened and so did her wicked grin.
For but a moment, I could swear I saw her real face.
The face of a bully about to introduce a brand new form of abusing their victim.
"Or wait, maybe you think I'm the one at fault for Cassie breaking up with you?!"
The amusement in Irene's eyes only grew…
But I was long past the point where such words could anger me. After all, I was the one to decide whose words would affect me. And given how Irene insisted to keep her act up…
"Allow me to fix some of your misunderstandings," I spoke out, as calmly as humanly possible. "First, in my eyes, you are average-looking at most. Your face's too sharp, your fingernails look more like a torture device for when you need to wipe rather than a decoration and both your voice and your smile make me sick."
I raised my chin and looked right into Irene's eyes.
"Secondly, it wasn't Cassie who broke up with me but me who broke up with her. Plus, it's not something you would miss given how close you were with Cassie, so you really need to do a better job at hiding who you really are."
I took a deep breath as I leaned back in my seat.
And then, upon calling forth all of my focus and attention, I blinked my eyes a few times. Yet, by the time I was done with my preparations and pushed my eyelids up again…
I no longer looked at the human reality. I paid attention to Irene listening to my rude remarks with a chillingly cold smile.
"How rude," seemingly oblivious to what I was doing, Irene retorted. "I guess this foul mouth of yours is why…"
Unleashing my own aura and allowing it to swell around me, I opened my eyes up and peered right into it, gazing as hard as I could, forcibly recalling the sensation of perceiving reality that was made up of particles so small one couldn't normally observe it.
Right now, I needed to put all my focus on the task, not on listening to whatever poisonous gibberish Irene wanted to feed my ears.
If this were my first time, I would likely fail. If it was my second time, peering into the darkness would still be a challenging task. But by now, doing so wasn't anything new for me. And while still not a part of a skill set I could fully claim to be my own…
My eyes started to hurt, unused to having this level of burden placed upon them. Soon, a powerful wave of migraine threatened to tear my brain into pieces…
Ultimately though, my eyes reached the very depths of the darkness, allowing me to gaze straight into the realm weaved from the flows of aura so minuscule I could hardly perceive it.
With my eyes directed straight ahead, right at the bridge of Irene's nose, I finally saw her.
The true Irene, comfortably resting in a hammock weaved into existence from the flow of darkness in the mirror dimension of her domain.
'I guess that's what happens once one goes beyond the level of supreme and their domains,' I thought, staring right into Irene's face.
"Aren't you a bit too comfortable, resting like that?" I asked, blinking my eyes once the burden of staring across dimensions grew too big, forcing me to look away.
And at this moment, the very first crack appeared on Irene's act, with her eyes widening up a little.
She no longer looked down at me with her slightly squinted eyes that oozed a sense of mental superiority. Her entire presence no longer made it feel as if I was merely an amusing worm dancing on her palm all according to her wishes.
And for the first time, Irene's eyes betrayed a hint of… curiosity?
"I can see you," I added, blinking my eyes a few times to push aside the pain of pushing them a little bit too hard. Still, I kept my sights right on Irene's face, refusing to let even a single hint of emotion escape my attention. "The real you."
The air of the cafe suddenly grew stale. And within the silence that suddenly surrounded us… Irene started to glitch, her entire body shifting half an inch to the side for a single instant only to revert right back to how it should be… And for the whole process to then repeat a few more times.
Irene calmly closed her eyes. She then parted her hands and lifted her chin, just to turn her right hand towards me and point at me with one of her fingers.
And when she opened her eyes up again… I've finally seen them.
Her real eyes. Two perfectly black and circular pupils surrounded by perfectly crimson irises.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om
"You've wanted to speak with me. So now that I'm here…"
The slight whisk of aura I'd let go vanished when an ocean of dark aura suddenly exploded all over the place, drowning everything around the two of us in the flood of near-endless power.
But this wasn't the same kind of aura that I've seen others use to power the constructs of their spells.
No. It was something much closer to my elemental darkness, forming up and condensing into semi-solid shapes only to then disperse and merge with the rest of the flow, only to endlessly repeat this process over and over again.
Irene's aura clearly pushed to turn into something tangible, yet a force I couldn't even perceive continued to deny her aura its wish.
"Now that I'm here, don't you think it's rude to make a lady wait?" Irene asked, her hand still directed at me and her eyes once again shut closed. "What did you wish to speak with me about?"