The smell of Ozone followed Luxinna as she stepped out of the smoking diagram. To her annoyance, what greeted her was a goddess hiding behind a weight set and a cookie-munching badger.

"Let me be clear," the elf's eyebrows twitched. "I don't want to be used as a lab rat again, buddy."

"Rem never complain," Cytortia pointed out, poking out from her impromptu barricade like she was checking for a sniper.

"That is because Rem is insane," Luxinna dead-panned. "Anyway, I have something to show you. It will be awesome, trust me."

Scathach coughed.

"Speaking of Rem," Scathach spoke. "He was not responding."

That grabbed their attention.

"How long is it now?" Cytortia said worriedly. "Five hours? Six? Luxinna's dive only took about 2 hours."

Luxinna was shocked.

"What? I was standing for that long?" She checked her leg. "Did my leg develop cramp-resistance or something?"

"You did," Scathach nodded. "Cytorta, can you check on Rem?"

"You don't have to ask," Cytortia said. "I will get my equipment."

Despite the tense atmosphere, the elf didn't panic. Instead, Luxinna strolled toward the cookie-jar and grabbed a handful. For her, any food from Cytortia's kitchen worth all her family's assets.

In retrospect, it was a good thing Magnolia inherited her position. The Drakokia would kick the bucket if Luxinna became the head. Proper elf mistress like Magnolia would deny the cookies and claimed it was below her. Ms. Starve-in-the-forest-for-three-years didn't care in the slightest. Food was food. Good food would disappear by the next morning; it needed to be eaten or else.

"Don't worry about him guys," Luxinna finished another cookie and washed them down with a carton of milk. "Rem will be okay. He won't go down that easily."

...

Rem wasn't okay.

That [Desolation] left him barely alive. He should be dead. Hell, he would already die If this place wasn't his Mana Core. Instead, he was stuck with a fate worse than death.

Rem's body laid in the deepest part of the trench. Both of his eyes were deep hollow sockets. His skin and scalp were in pieces. Thankfully, there was no blood.

Liquids maintaining his body already dried up when he got desiccated into a mummy wrapped in crumpled tissues.

And he was missing an arm as a bonus.

Yay.

Rem couldn't see, hear or feel in that pointless existence as a living corpse. He should not maintain his sanity. Yet, he did. He didn't know how he did it or why he even bother. The only things he could see were images.

Images seeped through the white crack in the black sky. Pictures of people getting executed in front of a castle, some of them were children. They cried against the injustice as they were put on a block and beheaded for the crime they didn't commit. He saw a woman getting drag into a prison cell, locked away from her two twins who vanished in the chain toward an unknown fate.

Rem saw all of that, and he made a single decision.

Those people didn't deserve a glorified executioner to give them hope.

Rem could not afford to lay on the ground and gave up. Those people needed to be able to look up into the sky and saw hope. If REM was the avatar of a brutal enforcer of the Center Force, then he just had to prove that the world didn't want an executioner.

Life was short and beautiful. People didn't need an absolute police force to tell them what to do or force them to conform to an overlord. They needed a light to guide them, and he would be damned if those kids picked REM as an example.

Rem's body might be dead, but his spirit refused to die.

Inside the hidden part where the soul might reside, Rem was shoving his True Magic into his body cell. The glowing particle rushed into the dead blood vessel, desperate trying to ignite the fire of life. Strands of light ran up the carcass's artery and sputtered out like a malfunctioning engine.

Rem cursed internally. Why wasn't this working? Was his cell so dead it couldn't accept any more power? Now that he thought about it carefully, the very notion he could reverse desiccation with reality filler was downright ridiculous.

Sadly, that idea was all he had left.

Rem thought deeply.

Every time he used his True Magic, it dissipated inside his body like a dust cloud. When he forced it to enter his body cell, it failed. Somehow, his cell rejected the True Magic like it was a foreign substance. The cell membrane refused to absorb his power.

There must be some tricks. Central said that this True Magic was a part of him. Why would a part of him reject itself?

Oh

Rem would nod if he could. He had been forcing [All Creation] into his cell. It was no different from how REM tried to push his ideology onto him. In doing so, his cells rejected his power as a foreign particle.

He had to accept it. He must diffuse the power into his body, instead of shoving it in like diesel fuel. Rem didn't know how to do that yet, but he had to try.

Another attempt came and failed spectacularly. 

Rem gritted his teeth in frustration. Maybe he had been doing this the wrong way. Wait. REM said this was a reality filler. If so, what did it fill? 

Rem's eyes widened. He remembered the quote very well: advance science is indistinguishable to Magic.

The majority of an atom was empty. Physical interaction was only possible because of the electrostatic repulsion force between electrons. What if the reality filter could fill those spaces. Maybe this wasn't a biology problem but physic. That would explain the link between [All Creation] and [Arrival of Dream]. He did not summon objects. He created them by monkeying with atomic information.

In that deep dark ravine, Rem's body glowed brighter than hope itself.

...

A thousand meters above Rem, a white-hair man was talking to a woman in the dressed of white fire. The conversation was far from cordial.

[You are an abominable jackass,] Central glared at REM disdainfully. [Why won't a fossil like you just go and die already.]

REM sneered.

"You should be counting yourself lucky that we can't kill each other, or else you would already be under the ravine."

Rem turned his back on her and walked away.

Central gritted her teeth. Her connection to their shared origin forbade her from punting him in the face. But she had to ask. She couldn't understand this at all.

[What did Center Force promise you?] Central said. [I know you before Rem made the deal. You are against helping humanity, and now you are joining our side. It didn't make any sense.]

REM laughed.

"Wow, you are as slow as those monkeys. But if those savages can discover calculus, then I believe you can understand this."

REM's eyes sharpened into thin, derange lines.

"I used to feel angry at those humans. They flaunt that their progress but yet didn't learn from the damned history. So I said why not; Let them drowned in their entertainment and congratulate their ignorance! It makes mocking the poor chimp when karma cash-in so much more satisfying. if the lemmings are content to dive into their self-destruction, why don't we give them a push?"

REM kicked the sand playfully.

"But Rem? He still cares. When a parent disciplines a kid, most of them want the kid to learn and be a better person. Rem is that kind of fool. Our late martyr would spank humanity for their screw-ups before fixing their mess. It's his way of showing his faith that we can change."

Rem lifted Central by her shin to meet his gaze. Disdain was the perfect word to describe those eyes, and it scared her.

"Center Force showed me that we are both dead wrong," REM announced to Central. "Humanity neither deserves to be reprimanded or encouraged to die. The entire race needs to be cordoned inside a dungeon to suffer for all eternity."

"You have an incredibly bad taste," spoke a familiar voice as a wind roared with cold momentum. "One thing for me to correct, I suppose."

The air chilled, and a tower of crimson petals rose from the ravine. The wave of air sent those two stumbling back as the nutty scent of poppies roared back to life.

The pure shock would be an understatement to describe the turmoil.

[Impossible,] Central's mouth hung open.

"It can't be," REM frothed in disbelief. It shouldn't be possible. Even if Rem was alive, [Desolator Bade] should have turned that joke into a broken husk. There should be no way in the world, real or mental, for him to return.

That was the moment Rem flew from the bottom of the ravine. His shirt and pants shredded, his left arm was missing, his left eye shut tight. He landed, not like a monster out for blood, but a dignify well-crafted weapon. Scars decorated the skin of his body, and his left leg was wobbling.

The fact he was standing was a massive insult to the concept of death.

REM responded by summoning his weapon and went to town.

"DIE!" REM screamed, waving the [Desolator Blade] and unleashing a tsunami of sand. "You freak of nature!"

Rem, with utter resignation, sprinted. It was no mere dash. His footsteps unleashed a sonic boom, carrying him away from REM's attack. He skidded across the sandy ground, weaving around towers of desiccating sand faster than it could hit him. The beaten body repositioned itself after an artful movement. Rem's foot grounded the floor, launching himself forward at Hypersonic speed. He flew like a sparrow, letting his momentum carried him like a rocket. The young man was clocking in at 6150 Kilometer per hour. It was a speed that should not be possible for mere human output. But impossible was coming, unstoppable to the tsunami of sand and barrages of the abrasive tendril slamming from above.

REM rode up a wave of sand, unleashing more and more jet of attack. He sweated desperately. His eyes were wide with disbelief and pure primal terror. Deep in his heart, the possibility of defeat finally took shape. Questions filled his head with each desperate attacks he poured out.

How did he survive? 

What was that speed? 

Why did this happen?

Those questions filled REM with madness. He slammed [Desolator Blade] in the ground in the brink of his fit. The circle of the desert beneath him exploded, blasting Rem and Central up into the air.

Central stabilized herself and started floating gracefully. As usual, Rem was not so lucky. The explosion of sand sent him crashing into the ground like a meteor.

REM madly burst into laughter. He stood in the vortex of dusty wind, mustering an army of abrasive sand-blades and sending them all down on Rem. In return, Rem lifted both of his hands and smashed into the ground. His strength cracked the earth as he lifted the two pieces of the floor as an impromptu shield. The wave of sand crashed against the improvise shelter, and the explosion that followed sent Rem skidding across the battlefield.

The young ma wiped blood trickled down his face. His defeatless eyes sent a shiver of doubt down REM's spine.

The white-hair cynic couldn't comprehend this. The unknown powers, the inability to gave up and, the raw persistence; this was inhumane.

"Why?" REM said in a vain attempt to hide away his mental breakdown. '"you know this is useless! The gap between us is--"

"That gap is non-existence," Rem tensed his muscle, preparing for a jump. "Don't you see. We are a reflection of each other's extreme. And that is why you will lose: no one wants you."

Rem leaped, but he misjudged his strength. Instead of tackling REM into the ground, he overshot and crashed back down into the ground hard enough to leave a crater.

Central and REM looked at the epic failure in disbelief.

"You must be so embarrassed with yourself," REM smirked. "That just there was an epic..."

A high-velocity rock was flung into REM's face before he could finish. Rem replied with a blush of sand that easily block the stone. However, the pebble exploded on contact and knocked him off the sand vortex.

That opening started the fight's end game.

A supersonic object rushed toward REM before he could land. That objected reached out with its right hand and grabbed REM by the collar of his suit. REM knew he wouldn't like what was coming the moment he felt the tug.

REM felt his body went weightless as he was lifted like a pillow and smashed into the ground with enough force to create a crater. He felt a man sitting on his abdomen, pinning his body to the ground.

And those punches, so many punches, REM desperately enhanced his body with his power to tank the blow. It was no use. The discrepancy between thier strength was too large.

After watching how the battered knuckle crippled his teeth, REM finally deduced the secret of his opponent's inhuman strength, speed, and that darn exploding rock.

"You filled your Tu Macik into your chell," REM's words garbled from his broken teeth.

"Finally, you get smarter," Rem replied, lifting REM's arm and crushed it in half a dozen places. "You might have access to all our True Magic can offer. But all you did with [All Creation] is summoned a single sword and spammed it at me. What do you think this is? Checker?"

'Wut how?' REM threw the question out.

"Atom is mostly empty," Rem wrecked REM's other arm. "I just assume a miracle reality filler can fill that space up. It doesn't know what happens to an organic substance that got boost down to a subatomic level. But I believe it would correlate with my inspiration."

REM gritted his broken teeth. That bastard charged organic structure, like how Superman's cell absorbed yellow sun radiation. [All Creation: Divinity] improved on the very concept of his physical parameter to a superhuman-level. He probably used a variation of this trick to explode the rack. What madness? How could be defeated by such a ridiculous Skill?

REM conjured another [Desolator Blade] into his teeth. With it, he called upon a massive sandstorm, sending Rem flying away from him. The wind rose into the sky, forming into another [Desolation].

Rem landed facing the twister-blade and nodded in resignation, his cell charged with power. He had to get past the tornado. Running on the opposite direction of the spin sounded cool, but too bonkers. He had to enter the 'eye' of the storm, but how?

That was the moment the inspiration hit. Rem smiled thinly. A proverb once said two head is better than one.

The flying Central suddenly grew very afraid of that Hyena's gaze.

...

Sand swirled around him like a gullet of a beast.

REM climbed from the ground. Two of his limbs hung useless and broken. He had to wipe that fool out. It should be simple, spread the storm out, and ground everything touching the arid twister to dust. The only thing he had to do was getting the [Desolator Blade] and activating the command.

But before he could move an inch, a shadow fell over him.

There was no wind in the eye of the storm, and that was why REM could fully see his defeat.

The tattered man wearing rag was being carried by a girl in the dress of white fire. The duo flew at him with the speed of sound. REM could barely react as his mind assembled the pieces.

That bastard had Central carried him above the twister and into the center of the storm.

That was REM's last thought as a Mach 5 punch connected to his face, and the world faded to white.

...

In the Black Mercy, Rem's eyes opened up.

"Geez," he looked at the night sky above the windowsill. "That was sure a waste of time."

He dozed off, with a tiny frown on his face.