The realisation hit Ricky like a lightning bolt. His eyes widened, and the terrifying answer presented itself to his mind.
"That ans... This isn’t your first regressing cycle in the academy, as I thought. You’ve regressed before. We two t in that previous tiline... Did we fall in love back then? Is that why you’ve been so cold to here?"
"Fall in love? With a snake like you?! Hahaha! Don’t push your luck, you damn pathetic loser."
As if she had finally found the opening she needed to pay him back double for his earlier words, Cissel broke into a ferocious, mocking laugh.
"We two will never be together, never," she spat, the words dripping with lava. "And we would have ended up being sworn enemies in this tiline too, if not for him..."
The re thought of John acted like a potent sedative to her frayed nerves. Her face flickered for a brief mont, her expression softening. It was as if calling his na in her mind worked like magic on her soul, anchoring her to the present.
"John again."
Ricky gritted his teeth, his jaw tight enough to crack a bone. At that mont, John seed to transform into his deadliest enemy, not because of a lack of power, but because of his influence.
"He is definitely not a Paragon, yet his potential is far superior to any Paragon I’ve ever encountered! I can’t fathom him. Even after all this ti standing by his side, I can’t read through him at all. He shouldn’t exist; his presence doesn’t follow any rule of our world."
"Hahaha! That’s because he isn’t a loser like you are."
Cissel began to regain a part of her forr composure. She slowly stood up, her movents stiff but purposeful, as she shook the dirt from her clothes. She wiped a smudge of blood from her lip, her eyes returning to their icy sheen.
"You aren’t even close to half the man he is, Ricky. So drop it already. You and I will never be together. Not in this life, and not in the next hundred regressions."
Ricky’s face twisted as the rejection landed. A significant portion of the burning resentnt he felt toward John stemd from pure, great envy. He had sniffed out Cissel’s identity since their first day in the academy, recognising her true identity just as she had recognised his. Driven by a mixture of curiosity and attraction, he had investigated her true origins.
In the world of Paragons, secrets were the ultimate currency, but it was still a small, interconnected world for those who were naturally part of it. He had unearthed a lot about her history, and the more he dug, the more astonished he beca.
A figure like the Fate Goddess Paragon was always a focus of contradiction and strife, especially since she belonged to a faction opposed to his own.
Yet, he had never expected her to have done the sa to him, to have investigated his own origins so thoroughly. He was certain he had buried his trail deep within the academy’s encrypted archives. There was only one explanation left that made sense: they had been intimately entangled in the previous cycle of her regression.
Realising this drove a weird, suffocating heat into his heart. His mind was a storm of mixed feelings and disturbed thoughts. If they had been together before, why had everything changed this ti? The answer was standing between them like an unbreakable mountain: John.
"You need to stay away from him," Ricky growled, his voice dropping into a low, threatening rumble.
"If you don’t, I swear I’ll tell him everything! I’ll tell him his loyal companion is a sneaky Paragon who has been playing him from the start. What do you expect a normal human to do when he realises he was outplayed with your Paragon’s unique ability? That his whole journey was orchestrated by a girl who already knew the future?"
"Knew everything about him? Hahaha! You are a f*cking idiot!"
Cissel suddenly broke out into a weird, hysterical laughter. Ricky had expected her to fly into a fit rage again, but all he received was raw mockery.
"Do you think he was here before? Do you think I’m following the path from the past regress?" she asked, her laughter dying down into an amusing, wide smile. "No. John is different. Very different from anything you could ever expect or predict."
She paused, her face twisting as she recalled mories that clearly tasted like ash. "I don’t know anything about his past, because he wasn’t part of the cycle before. But believe , I do know everything about you, Ricky.
You, son of a b*tch, backstabbed in the previous tiline just to secure your own damn Paragon spot! I ca back to the academy this ti with one goal: to tear you apart piece by piece. And yet, I ended up finding John, the one man whose every step tears your silly illusions and your destiny to shreds! Hahaha!"
"I’ll... I’ll kill you!" Ricky roared, and this ti, he was the one to initiate the assault.
He didn’t know if what she said was true or false, but it didn’t matter; he knew his own self very well. He was exactly the type of person who wouldn’t hesitate to backstab anyone to get what he wanted. That inherent ruthlessness was the very reason he felt such a toxic, maddening envy toward John.
This normal human had shattered every taboo Ricky understood about the world’s power structure and rules. John seed to make reality bend to his own whims and desires, playing the world like a master musician, as if he were the Paragon and not Ricky.
Everything about John’s existence smashed the foundations of what Ricky took for granted. What drove him even madder was their shared experience in this pocket trial; he had seen where John started, watched him grow exponentially, and now found himself left in the dust, eclipsed by John’s endless string of achievents.
On top of everything else, he was losing the girl he had set his sights on since day one. It wasn’t about love; Ricky wasn’t the type to be led by his heart. During his investigation into Cissel’s origins, he had unearthed a persistent rumour: the Dream Bringer Paragon.
It was said that anyone she sided with would eventually obtain whatever they desired most. Her words just now, accusing him of backstabbing her to secure his Paragon seat in a past life, were simply further proof of how truthful that legend was. The more he thought about it, the more he couldn’t restrain himself. I want you, he repeated the mantra in his head until he lost count.
"And in case you run your mouth to him about , I can also run my mouth to him about you," Cissel said with a sharp chuckle, effortlessly weaving through Ricky’s increasingly clumsy attacks. "Let’s see who he chooses to embrace, and who he decides to kill."
"F*ck you!" Ricky roared, his movents becoming more dangerous and erratic the more she spoke. "He will never harm ! I’ve done nothing wrong to him..."
"Yet," Cissel interrupted, her voice cutting through his fury. "You haven’t done anything to him yet. But I know you, you bastard. You’ll do anything to secure that pathetic seat. The Kraken God Paragon? What a pathetic Paragon you are!"
"Shut up! My Paragon status is leagues higher than yours, you pathetic Evolutionist Paragon!"
"Hahaha! Spoken like one of those damn greedy Architect Paragons," Cissel retorted.
For hours, the two continued to clash fiercely back and forth, their powers lighting up the northern fog in violent bursts. They traded insults and blows until they were finally spent.
Realising that no matter what they said or fought, no one was going to win this, the two broke apart and turned away from one another. Without a single parting glance, they began walking in opposite directions.
"What’s going on? Why are they taking two different paths all of a sudden?!"
From a distance, John had been keeping a close eye on the situation via his map. He had witnessed the entire weird encounter from beginning to end, but he still couldn’t fully grasp the context of the struggle. Seeing them fight wasn’t entirely surprising; they had been hostile toward each other since the mont he t them.
The timing, the way the fight concluded, and especially the sheer duration of the battle, combined with hours of shouting, made him realise sothing far deeper than a hostile first impression; hatred was at play. There was a history there, a subtext he was missing.
"Is it related to PARE, perhaps?" John’s thoughts drifted toward the one term he hadn’t been able to decipher from Ricky’s academy file, the alien word that had remained a mystery to him for a very long ti.
He was sprinting toward their location, hoping to arrive before they split up. However, after a few hours, he saw their icons diverge on the map. Ricky decided to head East, while Cissel turned toward the West, the two of them walking away from each other as if the other didn’t exist.
As he was sprinting directly towards Cissel, sothing totally unexpected happened!
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