Slowly, deliberately, Elio turned toward the statue. Each step was a conscious decision, each movent a declaration of faith.
'I trust you, Zara,' he thought as he extended his hand toward the stone figure. 'I always have.'
His fingers approached the statue's surface...
The god's form materialized in the chamber, his presence radiating chaotic and erratic energy.
"CONGRATULATIONS!" his voice resonated with genuine emotion upon seeing Elio. "AT LAST! Soone completed the ga 100% for the first ti in history!"
While the hologram celebrated...
The statue began to move on its own, sliding sideways to reveal a dark hollow beneath. The god, however, paid no attention to this. With a gesture, he drew Elio's floating book toward his hands and opened it eagerly.
His expression changed instantly.
"Level... 20?" His eyes scanned the pages again and again, as if expecting the numbers to change. "But that's impossible. How did you reach the world's final chamber if...?"
His voice cut off when he finally noticed Zala. The color drained from his face.
"You... What are YOU doing here with...?"
The silence that followed was dense, charged. You could see the exact mont when the pieces clicked in his mind. His expression shifted from confusion to understanding and then to pure indignation.
"NALA YOU CHEATER!" the shout made the chamber walls tremble.
Zala blinked, genuinely confused for a mont. Zara's consciousness instinctively withdrew at the confrontation's intensity, allowing Zala to erge completely.
"DIONZ YOU IDIOT!" Zala roared, her voice mixing millions of years of frustration.
"I'M NOT AN IDIOT!" the god waved his arms frantically. "Using so much processing power against my 'better than average' brain was completely unfair! You're the cheater!"
"Processing?" Zala let out a bitter laugh. "You could have used much more, but you preferred to spend millennia daydreaming about the past instead of accepting the present. You're the one who refused to see the reality of..."
"How could I accept it?" the god's voice broke, all his usual eccentricity replaced by raw pain. "You stole my daughter from !"
"I didn't steal anything, you asked for this yourself!" Zala stepped forward, her presence intensifying. "Accept it once and for all! I played along with you for too long, let you build this world in my domain, let you decide what kind of trials you would put through and..."
Elio and Zara's consciousness watched the confrontation, unable to fully process what was unfolding before them. God Dionz, whose statues they had seen all their lives, was acting completely different from his usual erratic and playful ssages.
They faced each other like ancient rivals, but there was sothing deeper there. It wasn't hatred that charged the air, but sothing more complicated, more personal.
"A ga for you," murmured the god, his voice now small. "It was easier to pretend it was just a ga for too. Easier than admitting that my own daughter..."
"That your daughter died," Zala completed, her tone surprisingly soft. "But you're wrong... And you don't want to see it!"
"It's impossible to see it!" Dionz waved his hands, his voice full of denial and pain. "She was just a little one! My little one..." His voice broke for a mont. "Of course her poor mind couldn't withstand your vast consciousness! Obviously your enormous mind completely stole her body! How do you expect to believe you didn't kill her!?"
Inside the shared body, Zara could feel Zala's frustration growing. It was strange; for the first ti, she could perceive sothing more than her usual calculating calm.
"What more do you want to be able to believe then?" Zala spread her arms in a gesture of exasperation. "You've already killed with boredom in this endless ga and still..."
"Oh, really?" Dionz's interruption ca loaded with a bitterness no one would have expected from the god who left nervous ssages about calculation errors. "Are you really dying of boredom? Or anwhile are you doing other things... 'outside'?"
Zala's sudden silence made even Elio, who had nothing to do with the argunt, tense. There was sothing about that 'outside' that seed to carry more weight than the entire system of levels and barriers.
"Don't tell it isn't true," Dionz stepped forward, all trace of his usual erratic behavior completely absent. "I myself managed to see 'outside'. And you didn't seem to be exactly wasting ti."
His voice mixed pain, betrayal and accusation. "Those domains you're building... Are they ones you planned to share? Or were you just making believe you were waiting here while preparing to easily dominate everything afterward?"
The silence that followed weighed like lead. Elio and Zara, unwilling witnesses to this ancient dispute, barely dared to breathe.
Until...
The black tal began to move by Zala's will, trying to trap Elio against the wall again before he entered the hole, but Dionz was faster.
With a gesture, Zala's control over the tal vanished, and before she could react, an invisible force pushed Elio toward the hollow beneath the statue.
"NO!" Zala's scream mixed with the sound of the statue sliding back into position, sealing Elio inside.
"CHEATER!" Zala launched herself at the statue, but the indestructible structure stopped her. "The ga is over! This is my last run! Don't you understand? It's not fair to make suffer more with this damn boredom!"
"Fair?" Dionz let out a bitter laugh. "You talk about justice when you yourself have broken all the rules? The goddess shouldn't be playing directly! Breaking into the ga is completely unfair! Getting more domains in secret is UNFAIR!"
"You don't understand," Zala shook her head, and for the first ti her voice carried a tone of pleading. "They're completely different things. I myself have no connection with the events outside. My subconscious body surely needed to act because sothing was..."
"LIES!" Dionz's roar made the chamber walls shake. "They're all lies! One of the golden rules was to be 'fair'! But you never have been!"
The temperature in the chamber seed to drop several degrees. Zara could feel Zala's anger growing.
"Fair?" Zala's voice was dangerously soft. "What would be fair according to you?"
"IF YOU GIVE BACK MY DAUGHTER!" Dionz's scream resonated through the chamber with such force that the indestructible black walls vibrated.
It was the cry of a shattered father, of soone who had built an entire fantastic world to avoid facing a truth too painful to bear.
"I AM YOUR DAUGHTER!"
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