CHAPTER 134: EX 134. EXCUSE

The room felt distant. The clinic’s white walls, the low hum of healing devices, even the soft breathing from Adrian and Eden nearby, all of it faded.

Leon’s eyes locked on the figure standing before him.

He wasn’t surprised. Not entirely.

He had expected this.

Because back, when Eleanor exploded, and the strange man with timeless eyes, had warped reality like it was clay.

That alone had told Leon everything.

A man who could reverse time... yet chose to simply observe? That wasn’t a killer. That was someone waiting for something.

And now, here he was.

Leon didn’t flinch as the man stepped closer, time still frozen around them. Even the air had paused, like it knew this wasn’t a conversation meant for others.

The man offered a calm, unreadable smile.

"I’m sure you’ve guessed who I am by now."

Leon kept his posture relaxed, but his voice came firm.

"Yeah... I wasn’t sure at first. Not until you said those words before you left the cave."

A pause.

Then he said it, quiet but clear.

"You’re the Governor of the Federation... Lord Akira Yakomoto."

The man didn’t deny it. He didn’t need to.

It made sense now. Leon had grown up hearing the name, a legend wrapped in mystery. Akira Yakomoto, the man who rose from the ashes of the old world, united the fractured remnants of humanity, and pushed back the darkness during the Great Demon Tide.

But no one had seen him.

Not truly.

Only his avatars, projected like distant gods across the Federation’s screens, his face rendered in polished light but never in flesh.

And now, here he stood, not a broadcast... but a man.

Leon’s thoughts tightened.

’So why come to me now? In person, no less?’

The Governor’s next words answered the question before Leon could ask.

"That makes things a lot easier for what I’m going to ask of you."

Leon sat straighter.

He didn’t like all of the Governor’s rules. But he respected Akira.

You couldn’t not.

This was the man who dragged the world back from the brink. The man who held it together. If someone like him was here now, asking for a favor, it could only mean one thing:

He had no other option.

Akira looked directly at him, voice even.

"I want you to be the next Governor of the Federation."

Leon blinked.

Silence.

The words echoed too loudly.

And his mouth moved before his mind could catch up.

"...What?"

Akira gave no reaction. Just the calm of a man stating a fact.

"You heard me."

And Leon, for once, had no clever remark, or cocky comeback.

Only the sound of his heartbeat, pulsing against a future he never asked for.

****

The Governor of the Federation, Akira Yakomoto, stood in complete silence, eyes fixed on the boy before him.

Leon was still rattled by the request, and the gaze of the most dangerous man in the world didn’t seem to help.

Not even a little.

Akira narrowed his eyes.

"It has to be him," the thought pressed against his mind, heavy and certain. "Lost Time doesn’t work on him."

That shouldn’t have been possible. No one had ever resisted it. Not the generals. Not the demon kings. Not even that oversized lizard or the fat pigeon with dimensional displacement talents. No one remembered what happened after Lost Time was used, not unless he allowed them to. But this boy, this teenager standing there with blood on his boots and chaos in his shadow... he remembered.

Akira’s fingers flexed slightly, remembering the surge of power, the weightless moment when time itself unraveled like thread in his grip.

His Supreme Talent: Lost Time.

A gift beyond understanding. It allowed him to reverse time within a defined space, drawing back events by up to five minutes, no more. He could pause time, too, freezing a zone into absolute stillness. But there were limits. He couldn’t fast forward, and he couldn’t pause those on his level.

Which was the terrifying part. Leon was not on his level.

And yet Leon remembered everything. Even when Akira pulled back the flow of time, the boy retained memories that should’ve been erased. He moved like someone who had lived the same five minutes twice.

That was not supposed to happen.

Akira frowned, crossing one arm over the other as he studied Leon like a scientist staring at a strange organism under a microscope.

"This was my ace. My trump card. My checkmate. And this kid just... walked through it."

The silence stretched.

Leon remained still, still pondering.

Meanwhile Akira remembered how he first learned about the boy. The incident with his daughter, Nikko. Leon had rescued her from her own corrupt brother, unraveling a secret that had long festered in the dark corners of the Yakomoto legacy. From that moment, Akira had set his eyes on Leon.

And once the Governor focused on you, he knew everything.

It wasn’t just politics. It was an obsession. The Governor of the Federation didn’t sit in a golden office spinning words. He watched. He learned. He predicted. The Federation was a complex, dangerous machine, and he was its quiet, cruel god.

Some people might ask, if he knew so much, why didn’t he just wipe out the demon worshippers? Burn their cults to ash? Crush their cities? He could. In fact, he already had, multiple times.

But they always returned.

Because he let them.

Akira believed that true power could only be forged in strife. The demons were necessary. The cults were necessary. The chaos, the corruption, the strange laws, the ridiculous punishments, they were all threads in the same design.

"If humanity only had demons to fear, they’d become soft," Akira thought. "They’d forget what it means to struggle. And when the real enemy comes, they’ll all die."

Because the demons were only a tribulation.

The true catastrophe was still sleeping. Far beyond the veil. And nothing, not Leon, not Nikko, not the Federation, was ready for it.

So no, the Governor wasn’t bothered by a few rogue cults or twisted laws.

Because there were bigger things than people getting locked up for taking higher-tier trials.

Did this seem like an author’s excuse for bad writing? Yes, it did. But did it matter? No, it did not. Because that is how it is.

****

A/N: I will like to thank the readers that take their time to correct my grammar and Spellings it means a lot to me, thank you.

(There might be some grammatical mistakes in the thank you note)