Chapter 72: Responsibility

There is no such thing like complex matter. Or rather, the idea of anything complex was just a naive attempt of humanity to grasp things beyond their wholesome understanding. But no matter what one would project on the world, it was the law of the world that ultimately governed everything.

It was proved just a year ago when the sudden appearance of magic turned everything that humans believed in on its head. To this day the scientists continued to attempt unravelling the nature and laws governing this strange force, but ultimately only those who tried it themselves had any idea what they were talking about.

For the current earth, quantifying magic or in other words, putting it within the system describing a world that they could understand was outside of what the combined efforts of humanity could achieve. But as my consciousness floated through the endless darkness of the void, the images most likely produced by the bracelets from the apocalypse world continued to pour in my head. 

Once again, I couldn't claim to see the past or learn anything the way I learned the stuff required for the exams in the pre-apocalypse times. They just appeared in my head, instantly forcing my mind to not only burn them in its memory but also grasp the concepts behind them.

Magic was not foreign to the world. That was the single baseline I could agree if I wanted to preserve my own knowledge against the onslaught of deep science pouring into my head. But in the face of the insanely deep theorems that this collapsed world created, nothing that the civilisation I knew came up with managed to hold true.

In fact, even the simplest events that I could observe in my day-to-day life were all governed by magic. But there was something calming in the fact that the theories that the apocalypse world fed me with, were not complete either. There were many unknowns when it came to the past. With a mage powerful enough to influence the world around him to impose the founding rules of the magic on the entire world, it would be no problem to erase all the traces of such intervention. The fallen world assumed that all the forces we were experiencing physically were, in fact, some kind of spells so deeply ingrained in the laws of the world that they formed their own universe. 

But just as I was about to digest the mouthful of founding theories that attempted to explain the origin of that apocalyptic civilisation, my vision suddenly brightened up. Yes, instead of doing so uniformly, with gentle, white light, it constantly flashed with intense lights that seemed to pierce deeply through my eyes.

"He is awake! Bring him away from here!"

The distant noise of someone shouting silently rocked through my head. At the same time, the exact same kind of pain that made me collapse returned. Instantly overwhelmed with the intense pain, I could feel my mind barely managing to fight-off the dizziness that came with it.

"Fuck! Where are our men?! How could they not see this coming… This damned old man!"

Someone was pulling on shoulders. With the entire back of my body painfully scratching against the sharp items sprawled all over the ground I was dragged on I felt as if someone was ripping the skin off my backside. But in face of the onslaught of torture that my headache was, this kind of pain was simply nothing.

"Yes! They are here! Look past the ruins of the street!"

Bit by bit, my mind slowly continued to clarify. At this point, even despite the intense pain of my head, I could somehow make any sense of what was happening around me.

"Don't just stay and watch! Get him to safety!"

The shouting continued, just like my vision kept its efforts to return. Soon, I was able to make up the general shapes of the things surrounding me… When all the lights suddenly calmed down. No more sharp objects continued to wreck my back into a bloody mess. There was only one, obvious thing that had to happen for those changes to appear.

"What's going on… How long I was…"

Barely capable of whispering those words I had no idea whether my voice could reach whoever dragged me away.

"It's okay, our people are coming now. But heck, you nearly killed all those fuckers by yourself! Tell me, do you need anything? How can I help?"

As my health continued to regenerate, the pace at which my strength was returning was also greater and greater. With my eyes now fully open, I could tell that I was in one of those labyrinth-like corridors that the future church would be based on. But with the doors to this place already closed for safety, I had no way of telling what was going on.

"I was out… For how long?"

From how the fighting still seemed to be ongoing, it couldn't be much more than just a relatively short while. But there was a vast difference between being unconscious for a few seconds and a few minutes. What could happen in a short moment was often impossible in an instant.

"About a minute. It's a miracle that you survived that… From what I heard, once you resurrected the people…"

Taking a moment as if uncertain whether or not he could explain the situation, the man who pulled me inside stopped. Curious about whether my guess for this sudden pause was right, I forced my head to move a bit to the side, only to see someone that I hoped to see, but I never dared to openly believe I could see him again.

"Pavlo…"

My attempt at speaking quickly reminded me how bad was the shape of my body. With a sudden convulsion shaking my torso, I spewed out a mouthful of blood.

"To cut the details, while you didn't sustain any visible injuries, people who cultivate… They said that you looked as if your entire body turned into a sun for a brief moment. But the discussion of what happened can wait for later. Right now, our forces should start cleaning up the rest of the government's soldiers. What do you want us to do next?"

Right. No matter how pained I was, I still had to take both responsibilities for what happened and the leading role in what was about to transpire. That was the position I put myself in with my schemes, so right now, I had no right to complain.

Forcing my body up on my hands, I sat on the ground before shaking my head. Clearing my mind from the distractions for just a briefest of the moments, I looked at the nearby door. It was the only barrier that separated the two of us from the mayhem happening outside.

"Once the area is secured… Gather the troops. We need to march directly to the town' hall. Otherwise, they won't give us another chance."