Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 416: The Effort of Stillness

The Hero picked up another stone, tossing it into the air and catching it as he continued. "If, when you ask ’why?’, you mean why I keep coming back, then it’s because I wanted to understand why someone like you, who clearly sees so much, chooses to sit here and do nothing.

Why do you still choose the effort of stillness over the ease of action?"

She looked at the ripples spreading across the lake’s surface, her face remaining blank except for the faintest trace of confusion in her eyes.

"Effort of stillness?" she repeated softly, her voice barely more than a whisper. "...I’m making effort?"

"To sit here for months doing nothing takes just as much effort as it does for me to walk through this forest day after day to reach this lake," the Hero answered.

"Yes, you are making an effort. You’ve been sitting and staring, but you’re still breathing, still alive... all of which shows the effort you put into staying alive despite whatever heavy burden makes you choose to do nothing."

Hearing his response, she turned her head slightly toward him, remaining silent for a moment before finally forcing words from her mouth.

"Effort... It’s only effort if the outcome matters. You think I make effort to stay still because you think ’action’ is the default act of an existence..."

She trailed off, falling into silence for several minutes while the Hero continued skipping stones across the lake’s surface.

Eventually, she spoke again, her voice a quiet murmur.

"...when every path leads to dust, the choice between running and standing is the only illusion. There is no ’ease of action.’ Action is just the labour of the self-deceived."

At this, the Hero froze, the stone slipping from his fingers as he turned to her and replied.

"But if that were true, you would’ve just killed the soldiers who attacked you. You chose to spare them, and that took more restraint and effort. That’s a ’choice’ you made that contradicts what you’re saying."

"To kill them is one meaningless rearrangement of matter. To spare them is another. The end remains unchanged; their atoms will scatter, and their lives, which are less than a flicker in the Cosmos, will still fade.

They live, or they die. I kill, or I spare. It’s all meaningless anyway."

"If that’s the case, then why stay here?" he asked, rising to his feet. "Why not use your power to end all of it? Why not erase this world and prove your point that everything is pointless? Why endure the silence?"

She looked up at him as he stood, and though she didn’t realise it, a faint trace of annoyance flickered in her gaze.

"Destruction is effort. An act born of a passing desire for finality. But that, too, is pointless. Nothing truly ends.

I would only be replacing temporary stillness with temporary effort. In the end, I’d find myself somewhere similar, staring into another lake.

I endure the silence, as you say, because there’s no point in breaking it."

"If there’s no point in breaking the silence," the Hero countered, tossing another stone and fixing his gaze on her, "then there’s also no point in enduring it. You claim that action is self-deception, but your stillness is just a reaction, a fortress you built to keep everything out. A fortress takes effort, doesn’t it? You’ve chosen the hardest path possible."

Angela frowned lightly, the first sign of emotional change in the entire exchange, if it could even be called that. As she looked at him, her eyes lost their distant haze for a brief moment of clarity.

"You speak of effort and path as if they hold any inherent worth. They don’t. My stillness, as you call it, is simply the natural state when all outcomes amount to zero.

You mistake the cosmic equivalent of a hiccup for a monumental decision."

"I see that hiccup every day," the man replied, brushing the sand from his trousers. "I see the difference in the eyes of the man who gets to return home to his family and the man whose life is scattered. You chose to create that difference for my men when you chose the path of greater exertion.

You simply don’t find value in the path you chose."

She scoffed softly at his words. "What you call ’value’ is nothing more than a fragile illusion born of minds desperate to justify their fleeting spark of existence, self-deception that fades the moment their atoms disperse. It matters not beyond the moment it is imagined, for all is meaningless in the end."

"Maybe so. Maybe not," the Hero said with a shrug, his gaze meeting hers as he went on. "But if you believe nothing matters in the end, then that means you’re free to do whatever you want before that end arrives.

And still, you choose to sit here, motionless. That isn’t clarity, it’s self-imprisonment.

If nothing matters, why not choose to do the thing that stirs even the smallest spark within you?

You speak as though you’ve reached the limit of understanding, but in truth, you’ve simply stopped seeking it, and right now, you’re only searching for an excuse to stop hiding behind the silence you’ve built around yourself."

"Sparks are fleeting," she replied. "They’re nothing but frantic bursts before inevitable dispersion.

Why exchange a stable, constant zero for a flickering, temporary zero? The effort of chasing a spark is greater than the illusion it gives. It requires no effort to watch the flicker fade, and even less to simply remain here."

The Hero slowly shook his head, taking a step toward the lake’s edge.

"Your constant zero is a deception you’ve chosen to buy into. If the outcome is always zero, then every single nanosecond between now and that end is a moment of pure, unadulterated freedom.

And still, you use that freedom to chain yourself to a cycle of stillness, watching time slip by because you think the effort of moving isn’t worth the cost."

His gaze fell to her reflection in the water as he spoke with finality.

"Why don’t you face it? You’re afraid of choosing a path that might actually feel meaningful before it, too, fades away."

"..."

The woman stared at him blankly, then, without a word, turned aside and waved her hand, sending a wave of cosmic energy, unseen by the Hero, over him.

The light of teleportation wrapped around him, and just before it fully consumed him, he wore a knowing grin, proof that his last words had hit their mark.

◇　◇　◇

The Hero wasn’t entirely wrong.

Deep down, buried beneath the void that had hollowed her heart, lingered a small fear of setting out again to free herself from Chaos’ grasp, of starting another journey that might seem to lead toward success only to crumble into the same futility as before.

The next day, the Hero came to see her, just as he always did, and she ignored him completely, her gaze fixed on the still lake surface.

He stood there for a while, waiting as if expecting her to acknowledge him, and when she didn’t, he finally spoke.

"You pissed off because I was right the last time?"

Her eyes turned toward him in a cold glare, and though she said nothing, the air around felt heavier than before.

Unfazed by her reaction, he continued speaking.

"You’re not sitting here because nothing matters, but because you’re waiting for something to matter again. You just refuse to leave this spot until it does."

Her expression barely changed as she muttered, "That again? Your persistence is annoying."

"Persistence," the Hero replied, stepping closer to the edge of the lake, "is action without sight of an outcome. If all is meaningless like you say, then why does my persistence annoy you? Why do you sit here and endure the sound of my voice when you could erase it with a thought?

Or is it because you think I’m rig—"

Before he could finish, she waved her hand and expelled him once again, light swallowing his body as the forest fell silent.

When he reappeared the next time, he wore a grin that bordered on smug amusement.

"You chose an awfully nice moment to kick me out last time," he said, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve.

She glared at him again, but he only looked away and began to whistle a simple tune, completely unfazed by her stare.

With a small click of her tongue, she turned back to the water, her silence returning, though this time she made no move to expel him from the forest.

Had his presence somehow grown on her without her knowing? She couldn’t say.

’Oh well. I had ignored him for months before. Doing that again isn’t exactly a herculean task.’

Oh, how wrong she was.

It might have been different if she’d never spoken to him at all, but the fact that they’d shared that one conversation made it impossible for her to ignore him forever.

Especially when he kept saying things that hit a little too close to home.

It only took a week before she began quipping back at him, and soon, their routine changed from his one-sided conversations to actual exchanges between them, even if her replies were curt.

But even though she was engaging with his presence far more than before, her outlook remained the same.

She still found no point in doing anything or making any effort to leave the area around the lake.

Nature and the elements couldn’t affect her, and no monster or even the most daring creature dared to come near because of the existential dread her mere presence caused.

She also couldn’t grow physically tired.

Each time he came, he would speak about random events happening in his life and across the planet, things she had no interest in but which he continued to share regardless—his usual talks.

Many times, he tried to get her to leave the forest, and every single time he made that suggestion, she expelled him immediately.

During one of their conversations, while he was rambling about some foolish act of a world leader, she watched the reflection of the stars on the lake, her attention drawn to one that shone brighter than the rest, a star she recognised as one going supernova.

"Oh, yeah. There’s thi—"

"!Silence!"

She abruptly cut him off, her eyes widening as she lifted her gaze toward the trees across the lake, and when he turned to her with confusion and tried to speak...

"What’s w—"

"Silence! Get out of—never mind."

She stopped herself midway and expelled him from the forest without a word of explanation. Once his body vanished in light, she glared at the trees before her and demanded,

"Show yourself, Drifter."

A moment passed in silence before a voice echoed from the direction she was glaring at.