My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode : 123

Chapter: 245

Ben Ferrum sat there. Not the clanking, terrifying iron-and-steel golem from the conservatory, but the broken boy from the corridor. He was back in his wheelchair, the woolen blanket once more draped across his lap, concealing his missing limbs. His face was pale, drawn, beads of sweat standing out on his brow, a clear testament to the immense strain his earlier transformation had cost him. But his single grey eye was clear, calm, and held no trace of the earlier animosity.

Standing beside him, a serene, silent guardian, was Inari. Her hands, resting on the back of his wheelchair, glowed with the same faint, golden-green light that pulsed from Lloyd’s bandaged legs. It was her magic, her healing, that was mending him. Her beautiful, gentle face held a look of professional concentration, though her blue eyes, when they flickered towards Lloyd, held a flicker of something… wary. Cautious. As if he were a particularly dangerous, unpredictable animal that had been temporarily tranquilized but might wake up and start biting again at any moment.

Lloyd stared, his mind struggling to process the scene. His enemy, the man who had brutally, comprehensively, defeated him, had not finished him off. He had not left him to die in the conservatory. He had… brought him here? Tucked him into a guest bed? And was now having his ridiculously powerful, shadow-puma-wielding fiancée heal him? This… this did not compute.

“What…?” Lloyd rasped, his throat dry. “What is this? The ‘gloat over your vanquished foe before you kill him’ part of the evening? Because if so, your bedside manner could use some work.”

A faint, weary smile touched Ben’s lips. “Hardly, Major General. If I had wanted you dead, you would be. As you well know.” He gestured with his remaining hand towards Lloyd’s bandaged legs. “Consider this… a professional courtesy. A gesture of… goodwill. I broke them. It seemed only right that I arrange for them to be fixed.”

“Goodwill?” Lloyd’s voice was a low, incredulous growl. “You call that ‘goodwill’? That was a beatdown, Ben. A curb-stomping. You shattered my legs. You nearly turned my internal organs into a smoothie.”

“A necessary lesson, I’m afraid,” Ben replied, his voice still quiet, still weary. “I told you. I needed to demonstrate the… disparity. To make you listen. To make you understand that the old rules, the old rivalries, they do not apply here. Not anymore.” He sighed, a sound of profound, ancient exhaustion. “My loyalty to Firefly, Major General, died with my original body. It died in a hail of gunfire in a corporate black-site raid you yourself ordered, if you recall. This… this second chance… this broken, painful existence…” he gestured to his own crippled form, “it has granted me a certain… philosophical flexibility.”

He met Lloyd’s wary, suspicious gaze directly. “I did not seek you out to continue our war, Evan. I sought you out because we are the same. We are anomalies. Ghosts. Relics of a forgotten conflict, washed up on the shore of a strange, new world. We are, whether we like it or not, two sides of the same, impossibly strange, coin. I sought you out not as an enemy… but as the only other person in this entire, gods-forsaken universe who might, just might, understand.”

Lloyd listened, the raw sincerity in Ben’s voice, the profound weariness in his single eye, slowly, reluctantly, beginning to erode his own fury. The soldier in him still screamed ‘threat’, but the eighty-year-old survivor, the man who had felt the profound, crushing loneliness of his own unique predicament, felt a flicker of something else. A reluctant resonance.

“Understand what, Ben?” Lloyd asked, his voice softer now, less aggressive, more genuinely curious. “What is it you think I need to understand?”

Ben leaned forward in his wheelchair, his expression becoming grim, urgent. “That we are not alone, Major General,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, chilling whisper. “That our little war, our Earthly conflict… it did not end when we died. It has simply… relocated.”

He let the words hang in the air, heavy with unspoken dread. “The forces that brought us here, whatever cosmic, careless entities are responsible for this cruel joke of a reincarnation cycle… they were not… selective. I have been here, in this world, in this broken body, for seventeen years, Lloyd. Seventeen years of pain, of study, of observation. And I have found… others.”

Lloyd’s blood ran cold. “Others?” he breathed.

Chapter: 246

“Yes,” Ben confirmed, his eye dark with grim certainty. “Others from our time. From our world. Allies of yours. Enemies of mine. And,” his gaze sharpened, “enemies of yours, Major General. Very powerful, very ruthless, very bitter enemies.” He paused, then delivered the final, terrifying, world-altering blow. “They are here, Evan. Reborn, just as we were. Terrorists you hunted. Rival intelligence agents you dismantled. Soldiers you disgraced, whose comrades you killed. They are here. And they remember you.”

“And worse,” Ben added, his voice a near-inaudible whisper of dread, “many of them have been here longer than you. They are not fumbling teenagers rediscovering their powers. They are adults in this world now. They have had decades to accumulate power, to build networks, to nurse their grievances. Decades to prepare for the day they might, just might, encounter Major General KM Evan again. And not all of them, I assure you, are as… philosophically flexible… as I have become.”

He leaned back, the terrible warning delivered, his work done. “You think your fight with me was difficult? Major General, that was a friendly sparring match. A gentle welcome wagon compared to what is coming for you. Your recent victories, your little tournament triumph… you were fighting children. The real threats, the real ghosts from our shared past… they are out there. They are waiting. And they are already, in many cases, far, far stronger than you are.” He offered a final, grim, almost pitying smile. “Welcome back to the war, Major General. It seems it has followed you. And this time… you are no longer the one with the overwhelming force.”

---

The quiet, tastefully appointed guest room in the Ironwood Manor suddenly felt like the coldest, most confining prison cell in the world. Ben Ferrum’s final words echoed in the silence, not as a warning, but as a death sentence, a chilling epitaph for the brief, almost hopeful, period of peace Lloyd had naively believed he was building for himself.

They are here. They remember you. They are stronger than you.

The words were a bucket of ice water thrown on the nascent flames of his ambition, extinguishing the triumphant glow of his tournament victory, the warm satisfaction of his royal investment, the very hope that had begun to bloom in the ashes of his past lives. He wasn't just a reincarnated heir with a secret and a burgeoning soap empire. He was a hunted man. A man whose past, a past he thought buried under eighty-six years of time and an entire dimension of space, had not just followed him; it had gotten here first.

He leaned back against the plush pillows of the surprisingly comfortable bed, the faint, healing glow from his bandaged legs a mockery of the profound, soul-deep chill that was now seeping into his bones. He thought of the faces, the names, the designations from his long, bloody war on Earth.

Rashid al-Fulan, the charismatic, ruthless leader of the Crimson Crescent terrorist cell, a master of insurgency and improvised explosive devices. A man whose entire network Lloyd had systematically dismantled, a man who had sworn a blood oath of vengeance against him before being killed in a drone strike Lloyd had personally authorized. Was he here? Reborn as some back-alley brawler, some minor noble with a grudge and a sudden, inexplicable talent for explosives?

Colonel Ivan Volkov, his opposite number in the rival Neo-Soviet intelligence agency, a cold, brilliant spymaster with a penchant for poison and political assassination. Their shadow war had been a deadly chess match played across continents. Lloyd had outmaneuvered him, exposed his network, disgraced him before his own government. Volkov, it was rumored, had taken his own life rather than face a firing squad. Was he here? Perhaps as a guild master, a political advisor to some ambitious lord, his brilliant, strategic mind now turned to the intricacies of Riverian power games?

And the soldiers. The men he had faced in the grey zones, the special operators, the mercenaries. Men whose faces he barely remembered, but whose hatred would be sharp, personal, eternal. The survivors of squads he had eliminated, the brothers and sons of enemies he had killed. They would not have forgotten the name KM Evan. They would not have forgiven.

A cold, greasy sweat broke out on his brow. Ben was right. He had been fighting children. Kenta, Mike, even Rayan… they were ambitious, arrogant, but they were boys playing at power. These others… they were killers. Strategists. True soldiers. And they had been here for decades.