Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game
Chapter 196: Ch194. To kill a Story (3) - The One Who Moves Forward

Chapter 196: Ch194. To kill a Story (3) - The One Who Moves Forward

The wind howled as if the dream itself was cracking apart. Sarissa stood alone, bruised and bloodied, swaying in a wasteland of splintered memories.

Dust swirled at her feet. The sky above, fractured with hairline cracks of gold and obsidian, reflected the chaos within her soul. Memory shards blinked in and out of existence. Some half-formed, some screaming with voices long gone.

Ahead, her younger self rose again.

Still barefoot, wild-eyed, still holding the blade made of every scar, every failure, every loss she had refused to mourn.

Sarissa didn’t move. She simply breathed.

One breath, then another.

"You don’t get to stop. You don’t get to pretend this is over." The girl snarled, blood matting her hair, her posture sagging with exhaustion.

"I’m not pretending." Sarissa murmured, her voice quieter than the wind. "I just... Understand now."

"Understand?" The younger her barked a laugh. Dry, broken. "You understand nothing. You think pitying me makes this go away?"

"I don’t pity you." Sarissa said. "I remember you."

The girl flinched. It was a subtle thing, a twitch of the lips, a flicker in her stormy gaze.

"I remember every time you begged the system for another chance." Sarissa said, stepping forward slowly. "Every time you stared down death with nothing but spite. Every time you killed Miles... Because it was the only way forward."

The girl gripped the sword tighter.

"You liked it at first, but then, you began to hate it." Sarissa continued. "You hated him. But more than that... You hated yourself. Because every time you killed him, you thought maybe this time, maybe this run... Your parents would live."

The sword trembled in her younger self’s grip.

"And they didn’t." Sarissa whispered.

The wind stopped.

Silence fell like a hammer, thick and complete.

The girl went still, her lips parted, but no sound came out. Her shoulders shook ever so slightly.

Sarissa took another step.

"You never got to save them. Not once, no matter how many timelines you burned, how many people you sacrificed, how many stories you twisted. The quest [Sands of Time] never told you it was possible. Only that it would boost [Regression]’s power."

"I though..." The girl rasped.

"I know."

"I had to-"

"I know." Sarissa said again, gently.

Sarissa looked at her younger self. Not like a warrior, not like a monster or a mirror or a nightmare, but like a child.

A child who had lost everything, again and again, and believed that loss was proof of weakness.

Sarissa opened her arms.

"Don’t." The younger her staggered back, almost as if struck.

"I’m not here to kill you." Sarissa murmured.

"I said, don’t!" She lunged with a cry, swinging the blade wildly.

But Sarissa didn’t move.

The edge passed through her shoulder, but no blood followed, no pain bloomed. The blade shimmered, and sputtered out like a candle blown off.

The girl stared at it, at her empty hands.

"You... Let it happen." Then she looked up.

"Yes."

"Why?!"

"Because it wasn’t about winning." Sarissa said. "It was never about surviving, not really. It was about being seen."

"No. No, that’s weak. That’s-" Tears welled in the girl’s eyes, but she blinked them back with fury.

Sarissa stepped forward, slowly and deliberately.

"You were supposed to fight me! You were supposed to kill me and become stronger-!" The girl screamed and beat her fists against Sarissa’s chest.

"I don’t need to kill you." Sarissa said softly and wrapped her arms around her.

The girl froze, struck stiff, and then. She started shaking.

Violently.

"No!" She whispered. "No, do-don’t forgive me!"

Sarissa said nothing.

She only held her in her arms, tight.

She held her younger self, her cruel self, her desperate self, the version that clawed her way through hell on shattered knees and broken dreams. The one who paid the price, every time.

Who made the hard choice, every time.

The child who wanted to be loved... And knew no love could ever survive the things she’d done.

She wailed into Sarissa’s shoulder.

Screamed with all the rage she had stored behind iron teeth.

Screamed with every orphaned memory, every timeline where she had knelt at her parents’ corpses, alone.

Screamed until the dream warped around them, until the world cracked wide and light poured through.

And Sarissa kept holding her, whispering nothing. Just breathing.

The girl’s fists stopped pounding.

Her voice went hoarse, and her body sagged against Sarissa’s, no longer struggling, no longer fighting.

And then, she began to fade.

The form in her arms began to dissolve like fog in the morning sun.

First, the blade, gone from her hand. Then her legs, dissolving into motes of memory, then her arms, softening to gold and ash, and finally, her face.

Before it faded completely, she looked up at Sarissa.

There was something like peace in her eyes, along with a silent question.

Will you carry it now?

Sarissa simply nodded, and her younger self was gone.

Silence fell again, but this time, it was not oppressive.

It felt sacred.

Sarissa stood alone in the broken dreamscape, but it no longer felt like a battlefield. It no longer felt like a cage.

It felt like a graveyard.

Her graveyard.

She dropped to her knees, her shoulders trembling of no longer having to hate herself to keep surviving.

Her parents had died. Again, and again, and she had never saved them, but she wouldn’t forget that.

She would never forget that.

But she didn’t need to prove anything to their ghosts anymore. Not by dying, not by killing, not by chasing impossible systems and twisting the future around pain.

Her breath caught in her throat.

A shimmer rose around her, a pulse of light that came not from above, not from the System, but from deep within her chest.

It was like a heartbeat.

Then a second, and then a third.

She gasped, feeling like something cracked inside her.

Her Core Skill, the concept of her failing Story, once fractured, broken and dismantled by the god of war and progress, split between blades and resets and regressions, shattered like glass.

And from its ruin, something else began to rise.

New threads of gold and silver laced into her skin, weaving around old scars. Her breath came easier, and her eyes cleared.

And the world around her shifted.

The battlefield faded, the memories settled.

And in its place stood a field of wildflowers. Of all things, wildflowers.

Golden sunlight streamed through a clear sky.

There was no System window, no blaring notification. But she could feel it.

She felt alive, real.

Like her soul took a breath.

Something inside her clicked into place, gentle and firm as the turning of a page.

Not a reset, not an end.

A Beginning.

Sarissa rose slowly, watching the petals stir around her feet, and the silence around her did not feel empty.

It felt like it was listening.

She didn’t know where the road ahead would lead. She didn’t know who she would become. She didn’t know if she would ever find her parents in some far-off echo of time, or ever answer all the questions burning in her blood.

But she would walk that road anyway.

Because she was not running anymore. She was not trying to erase her pain.

She was not trying to be someone she wasn’t, not trying to kill the parts of herself she couldn’t save.

She was just... Moving forward.

And the dream, the Story, the world, everything... Breathed with her.

And from the center of her soul, a quiet light rose, gentle as spring rain, her new Story pouring with those five words into Sarissa’s heart.

[The One Who Moves Forward]