CHAPTER 242: DAMN YOU ALL... BUT TAKE CARE

The place was supposed to be a forest, but it was no longer a place of greenery.

Every second, every breath, every clash rewrote it. One heartbeat, the grove was collapsing in recursive spasms of past and the present colliding — the next, it was a marble courtyard Alex had declared into being, only to be shattered back into fragments of the past by the Deer Mask’s relentless pressure.

Neither landed a hit.

Every strike folded into its own denial.

The Deer Mask slashed, but before the blade could bite, the echo of Alex already dodging it appeared — inevitability catching up, cutting down the dragon from an angle no man could defend against.

And yet, each time, Alex displaced that inevitability. A wound became a misremembered branch, a stab became a ripple in water that had always been there, a strike turned into nothing more than a concept that was never valid in the first place.

Alex retaliated, but each thrust of will bent back on him. He pushed the world to accept that his fist was already at the Deer Mask’s throat — yet the mask’s principle reached backward, replaying the causes that would have prevented that future.

Suddenly, Alex’s foot slipped on ground that should have been stable, or his momentum was dragged into a loop where the punch had already missed.

The fight was... untouchable.

Squirrels fled for their lives, their acorn war abandoned. Birds circled high above, screeching warnings to gods that weren’t listening. Even the sun seemed to hesitate, its climb slowed, rays falling uncertainly across a battlefield where reality itself couldn’t make up its mind.

"Do you see now?" The Deer Mask’s voice trembled with both fury and exhilaration. "You cannot touch me. Every cause has an effect, every step of yours echoes into chains you cannot break. You can displace what you will — but I can always drag it back to what it was supposed to be."

Alex chuckled under his breath, too amused for someone who had just been denied his fifth strike in a row. "Cute speech. But your bluff makes me think otherwise."

"Bluff?"

Alex sidestepped another recursive slash, his form blurring across two different versions of himself — one cut down, one untouched — until only the latter remained. His grin widened. "You’re bending causes. I’m bending meaning. Guess which one runs deeper?"

The Deer Mask lunged, blade shimmering with recursive echoes. This time, the blade didn’t strike once. It struck a thousand times at once, the memory of every thrust, every slash he could have made in this moment collapsing together into one certain present.

And for the first time, Alex didn’t dodge.

The blade struck.

It tore through him — dozens of slashes carving him into pieces — only for each wound to scatter like broken glass. Because Alex wasn’t "Alex" in that instant.

The concept that had been cut was only a shadow, a placeholder.

It seemed as though the world itself blinked, unsure. Before reasserting, Alex was standing three steps to the left, completely untouched, as though the slashes had struck the idea of him rather than the man.

The Deer Mask’s grip faltered. "...Unimaginable."

"Not unimaginable," Alex corrected softly. His golden eyes burned brighter. "Just hard to do."

Now the tide shifted.

Alex’s steps carried weight. Not the weight of force — but of definition. Each motion rewrote the stage, pulling it out from under the Mask’s recursive loops. A tree branch replayed snapping — but Alex displaced it into marble columns that had no reason to break. Roots tried to entangle him, but he simply decided they had always been harmless ropes, drooping slack at his ankles.

The Deer Mask pressed harder, ether boiling off him in recursive convulsions, layers of futures and pasts collapsing at once. The battlefield became a maddening stutter: dirt exploding and healing, trees falling and standing, Alex cut and uncut, the Mask victorious and defeated all at once.

And yet, Alex walked through it. His grin was gone now, replaced by focus — dragon’s will blazing.

"You bend the ripples," Alex muttered, fists curling with crimson ether. "But I burn the river."

The Deer Mask roared, pouring everything into his blade. Recursive Causality unfolded in full: he summoned the entire chain of inevitability of this battle. Every swing he could have made, every counter Alex could have chosen, every path that might have led to his victory — all collapsed into a singular, overwhelming certainty.

The grove shook as though crushed under the weight of a hundred possible futures declaring Alex must fall here.

But Alex laughed.

Ether swirled around him, crimson fire laced with something heavier — the dragon’s will, dragging the world into submission. He raised his hand, and reality bent to the Conceptual Displacement of its own law.

"World says you’ve already won?" Alex’s grin returned, sharp as fangs. "Fine. I’ll rewrite what ’winning’ means."

The two principles clashed. One declared the other had already lost, but the other said winning means death.

The Deer Mask’s blade fell — a weapon of inevitability, every possible strike folded into one absolute conclusion.

Alex’s hand rose, not as a strike, but as a hand that transferred willful ether.

When they collided, the grove ceased to exist.

Light fractured. Sound inverted. For one blinding instant, the battlefield was neither forest, nor marble, nor ruin — but pure raw ether, boiling with the contradiction of two world-bending principles refusing to yield.

Then it shattered.

The grove fell silent.

Alex displaced the concept of destruction to grow a forest, as he had gotten the desired outcome. The Deer Mask’s body, once lunging forward, now belonged to the outcome of being struck down. A line was drawn, and reality had agreed.

The masked figure froze.

His perception spiraled wide. He saw it all, the way sunlight refracted off a dew drop trembling on a blade of grass, how the air tasted faintly of iron, how his blade carried a chip he’d never noticed before.

A child’s laughter from decades past bled into his ears, absurdly vivid. The mask pressed against his skin felt suddenly heavy, suffocating, ridiculous.

Fear lanced through him, something raw, electric, and absolute. Not fear of Alex, not even of pain, but of cessation, the unbeing that waited.

And then came the torrent: regret. He thought of the paths unopened, the debts unpaid, the conversations he should’ve had.

He thought of Lara, damn her and her ridiculous masks. He wanted to laugh and curse her all at once. He thought of the cruel world that had abandoned him, just like his family...

No, his real family had always been them, Lara and the others.

Damn you Lara

He had all the time in the world—time itself seemed to hold its breath, frozen in place, as if the world had paused just for him.

He wanted to smile, at least as a goodbye to this mournful yet sublime world.

Take care, everyone... You too, Lar.. no, Maya