Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game
Chapter 185: Ch183. You start from there

Chapter 185: Ch183. You start from there

Silence clung to the forge like steam that wouldn’t lift.

Mara stood motionless near the glowing glyphs, leaning on the wall with her arms crossed tight. Her brows had furrowed so deeply they looked carved from stone. Beside her, Sarissa sat up in the cot with her back straight and her hands clenching the linens.

Her pale face was a mix of exhaustion and disbelief as she watched Miles with tired resignation in her eyes.

"You... What?" Mara finally said, staring blatantly from Sarissa to Miles, and then back to Sarissa, her brows so furrowed that they looked almost like one entangled line.

Miles remained seated near the foot of Sarissa’s bed, elbows on knees, his expression a mask of calculated anger and quiet surprise.

"The master of Luna Sea is a god." He repeated, calmly. "He’s not just a powerful entity from some forsaken place. He’s the god of war and progress. A lesser god, like Kurt once told me, sure, but divine all the same. You went toe to toe with that, Sarissa."

"I lost." Sarissa blinked slowly. "And I almost got killed by that thing."

"But you didn’t. You faced him and survived, that’s more than most of us will ever get to claim. Also, I know what you mean... You almost regressed, but..." He paused and then asked. "Even if you did, didn’t you get the reward for killing me when we fought? You know, that item or whatever that was capable of boosting your [Regression] skill?"

"No." Sarissa’s shoulders slumped down. "When I... Killed you, the system notified me about the clearing of the quest, although I wasn’t rewarded anything but some experience points, because the system said that I couldn’t earn an Artifact that was already bound to someone else’s soul."

Miles tilted his head, thinking for a little bit before saying.

"Bound to someone else’s soul?" He scratched his chin before a flicker of realization lit up in his mind. "I see... The system was probably trying to let you get your hands on the essence and the core of the [Clockwork Rabbit] that I fought back in Wonderland."

"How is it bound to your soul?" Mara intervened, curious.

Miles summoned the [Harbinger’s Scythe], its black surface glistening against the light of the glyphs in the walls.

"It originally had a blue gem at its heart, remember?" Both Mara and Sarissa nodded. "But when I was lost in the Horizon, Kurt took me to Luna Sea, and a crafter there was able to merge the Rabbit’s essence and core into a single Artifact, and when the merging was finished, my scythe simply got out of my inventory and... Absorbed it, becoming the way it is now, and that’s how I was able to go toe to toe with you during the duel."

Miles chuckled slightly, wanting to make Sarissa react to anything in a more frantic way than she was reacting to everything now, but it did not seem to be working.

"I was on the verge of getting the hang of it, when our emotions got in the way, you know...?" Sarissa looked up to him, a wry, faint smile on her lips. "But it does give me some relief, knowing that you needed cheat to go against me on equal footing." Her lips curled up a little bit more.

"Asshole..." Miles laughed, rolling his eyes. "Any time you want, but now, we need to take care of whatever’s broken within you."

"Everything." She looked down at her hands, flexing them as if checking whether they were still hers. "He broke everything I was."

Mara stepped forward slowly, placing a hand on Sarissa’s shoulder, her grip was firm but not harsh.

"You’re still alive."

"I shouldn’t be." Sarissa let out a defeated sigh.

"Want me to check your stories? Just to see if anything... If there’s anything I can do to help?" Miles inhaled.

"You can do such a thing?" Sarissa’s voice was barely a whisper covered in slight surprise.

"Yeah, I learned it when I checked the [Mouth of the Abyss] after you left, and I went to learn more about Dee’s egg."

He activated one of his new skills, [Story’s Eye], and the world peeled open before his eyes.

Sarissa’s body glowed with threads of luminous scripts, twisting and folding around her like silk scarves in the wind. Most were faded, others frayed almost beyond recognition. The ones Miles recognized as her Classpect-defining stories were broken. Not gone, but fragmented, suspended in a limbo between death and rebirth.

"Sarissa..." His eyes widened. "Did you-"

"You noticed it..." Sarissa’s eyes widened a little bit. "I didn’t know you could actually peer into someone’s story, but yeah."

There was something else entangled with Sarissa’s own story threads. Two threads glowing brighter than the rest, like alien stars in a darkened sky.

Not hers.

One was stitched with tea-leaf patterns and fractured, card-like runes. The other shimmered like ink in water, laughter etched into every glyph, punctuated by swirling riddles.

Alice, and the Hatter.

"You have their stories embedded in you, but how?" He blinked hard.

"What?" Mara tilted her head.

"Part of Alice and the Hatter’s stories are inside her. Interwoven. That... That shouldn’t be possible." Miles didn’t look away from the glyphs.

Sarissa finally spoke, her voice distant.

"I was supposed to die, to regress and restart from a different point in the past. After he crushed me, there was nothing left, not even pain. Just silence. And then, just before everything went dark, I heard her voice."

"Alice..." Miles guessed.

"She told me I wasn’t done yet." Sarissa nodded. "That if I really wanted to conquer Wonderland, to cleanse it from within, then I couldn’t just die there. Not yet. And then I was falling through the gate."

Mara slowly lowered herself onto the arm of the nearest chair, watching Miles with wide, calculating eyes.

"You said this Alice and Hatter were system-breakers, exempt from the rules, yes?"

"They exist beyond the system." Miles said. "They make Wonderland what it is, but they also oppose what it became, which means that they oppose the system itself. They’re not allies, but they’re not enemies either. And if they saved her..."

"Then I owe them." Sarissa exhaled.

"They don’t do charity." Miles said. "Whatever they gave you, they expect you to use it."

The room quieted again, the fire in the brazier near them crackling as if it, too, were nervous.

Miles deactivated [Story’s Eye] and sat back, rubbing his temples.

"We need to be careful. If you’re carrying fragments of their narrative, it means Wonderland is watching you now. Maybe even rooting for you."

"Rooting for me...?" Sarissa scoffed. "That’s a terrifying thought."

"Well, congratulations, leader. You might be the first half-Fable-bound paladin the world’s ever seen." Mara chuckled bitterly.

"I don’t know what I am anymore." Sarissa leaned back into her pillow, closing her eyes again.

"You’re alive." Miles said. "You start from there."