First Intergalactic Emperor: Starting With The Ancient Goddess-Chapter 485: Angry Arlen

Meanwhile, in the hotel room.

The feed cut back to the Aurex entrance.

Smoke rolled across the screen as the camera zoomed in, stabilizers struggling to keep the image clean. A figure stepped out of the haze with both hands raised, clothes torn, face smeared dark with blood. The anchors started talking over each other, voices climbing, speculation bleeding into certainty.

Arlen leaned closer to the screen without realizing she was moving.

"That’s him," she said. "That’s him!"

Her hands tightened in Xavier’s jacket as the camera angle shifted, soldiers closing in, weapons raised, floodlights washing the scene white. She watched them surround him, watched scanners come out, watched his face turn toward the light.

Her chest felt tight.

"They’re going to shoot him!" she said, words tumbling over each other. "They’re going to decide he’s the attacker and—"

The bell rang.

Arlen barely reacted. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen, breath shallow, fingers gripping the fabric at her collar. Rin looked from the TV to the door and back again, already standing.

"I’ll check," he said.

Klatos nodded once and shifted slightly, positioning himself where he could move fast if needed.

Rin walked to the door, one hand sliding down toward the blade at his side as he brought up the camera feed. He leaned in, eyes narrowing for half a second.

Then he sighed. And he opened the door.

Xavier stepped inside like he belonged there, clothes still marked with blood, expression calm, posture loose, as if he’d just come back from a long walk instead of the center of the city’s biggest incident in years.

Rin didn’t say anything. He just stepped aside and let Xavier pass.

Xavier walked straight in.

Klatos was the first to turn, eyes widening before his body caught up. Arlen was still staring at the screen when Xavier stopped behind her.

"Hey," he said.

She flinched and spun around.

For a split second, her face was pure disbelief, the image on the screen colliding with the man standing right in front of her. Then it snapped into anger so sharp it almost made the air feel different.

"Are you out of your damn mind?!" she said, voice rising immediately. "Do you have any idea what you just did?"

"You should’ve seen your face."

She hit his chest with both hands, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make the point. "This isn’t funny! You went in there alone. Alone! We had a plan. We were supposed to move tomorrow, with backups and exits!"

"I had exits," Xavier replied.

"That’s not the point," she shot back. "You don’t get to decide this kind of thing by yourself and leave everyone else guessing whether you’re alive or dead."

She paced once, then turned back to him, words spilling faster now. "You walked into a fortified zone, triggered a city-wide lockdown, and somehow thought that was acceptable. Do you know what happens to people who pull stunts like that in Helior Prime?"

Xavier watched her without interrupting, letting it run its course.

"They don’t just disappear," she continued. "They get erased. Systematically. And you don’t even tell us where you’re going."

"I didn’t want you involved," Xavier said.

"That doesn’t make it better," Arlen snapped. "That makes it worse."

Klatos cleared his throat.

Rin looked at him, then back at Xavier and Arlen, and made a decision without saying it out loud. He turned toward the door.

"Yeah," Rin said. "I’m gonna go. This feels like a bad place to stand."

Klatos hesitated half a second, then followed. "Agreed."

They didn’t wait for permission. Rin opened the door and Klatos stepped through, both of them pretending very hard that they hadn’t heard the last thirty seconds.

The door had barely finished closing behind Rin and Klatos when things got more heated.

Arlen didn’t move right away. She stood there with her back straight, hands clenched inside Xavier’s jacket, jaw set so hard it looked like it hurt. The TV kept talking behind her, anchors still dissecting the Aurex footage, but she didn’t look at it anymore. She looked at Xavier like he’d personally offended the laws of physics.

"You don’t get to do that," she said.

Xavier frowned slightly. "Do what?"

"Don’t play dumb," Arlen snapped. "Don’t walk into a fortified zone alone. Don’t trigger a citywide response. Don’t vanish for hours while every screen in Helior Prime is showing smoke and blood and your face."

"That wasn’t my face," Xavier said.

"That’s what you’re correcting right now?" she shot back. "Not the fact that I was standing here watching soldiers line up to execute you."

He took a step closer. "They weren’t going to execute me."

"You don’t know that."

"I knew exactly what they were going to do," Xavier replied, irritation creeping into his voice. "I planned it."

"That’s not the same thing," Arlen said. "Planning doesn’t make it safe. Planning doesn’t make it okay."

Xavier’s expression hardened. "I didn’t ask you to worry."

"That’s not how this works," she said. "You don’t get to opt out of consequences just because you didn’t ask for them."

He exhaled sharply and ran a hand through his hair, leaving a faint streak of dried blood behind. "I did what needed to be done."

Arlen laughed, short and bitter. "There it is. That sentence again."

She stepped closer now, closing the space herself. "You always say that. Every time you cross another line, every time you decide for everyone else, it’s ’what needed to be done.’"

"And it’s true," Xavier said, voice rising. "Velkhar needed to die. The Iron Mandate needed to be broken. That city needed to see what happens when people like him think they’re untouchable."

"At what cost?" Arlen demanded. "You don’t even know yet. You don’t even care to check." 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Xavier bristled. "Don’t tell me what I care about."

"Then stop acting like nothing else matters," she fired back. "Stop acting like you’re the only one who has to live with the fallout."

He stared at her, annoyance unfiltered now. "I didn’t come out here to be told what I’m allowed to do."

Arlen’s eyes flashed. "I’m not telling you what you’re allowed to do. I’m telling you that dragging everyone else into your decisions without warning is selfish."

"That’s rich," Xavier said. "You knew who I was when you followed me."

"No," she said immediately. "I knew you were dangerous. I didn’t know you were reckless."

That landed.

Xavier’s jaw tightened. "You think this is reckless. This is what I came here to do. I didn’t leave Earth for some adventure or some moral exercise. This isn’t exploration. This is conquest!"

He gestured vaguely toward the window, toward the city beyond it. "Everything out there is built on power and fear and systems that eat people alive. I’m not here to fit into that. I’m here to break it."

Arlen shook her head. "You don’t conquer everything by burning it down."

"You do when it’s rotten," he shot back. "You do when leaving it standing costs more lives than taking it apart."

"And who decided you get to make that call?" she asked quietly.

Xavier didn’t answer right away.

"That’s the problem," Arlen continued. "You don’t even hear yourself. You think being right makes you immune to hurting people who stand next to you."

"I didn’t hurt you," Xavier said.

She stared at him. "I stood here thinking you were dead."

Silence stretched between them. He didn’t know what to say.

Xavier opened his mouth, then closed it again. His frustration didn’t turn into an apology. It turned inward, tangled and unfamiliar.

"I came back," he said finally. "That’s what matters."

"It matters to you," Arlen replied. "Because you don’t see what happens in the space between leaving and coming back."

She turned away from him, shoulders stiff, anger settling into something else. Without another word, she walked toward the bed, kicked off her shoes, and lay down facing the wall. She pulled the blanket up and turned her back completely.

"I’m going to sleep," she said. "I don’t want to talk anymore."

Xavier stood there, unmoving, watching her settle in like the argument had drained everything she had left. He waited for her to turn back, to say something else, to throw another accusation his way.

She didn’t.

Xavier rubbed his face once and let his hand fall, confusion edging in where certainty usually lived. He couldn’t quite understand why she was reacting like this, why doing what he believed was right had turned into something that felt like a mistake.

He stood there for a long moment longer, then sat down slowly at the edge of the room, still watching her back, still trying to figure out when doing what he wanted had stopped being enough.

’I don’t understand... why is she so pissed?’ he wondered. ’I understand that she was worried about me but... why all this... yelling and shouting?’

Xavier then recalled when he had pulled the same move during his raid in the village, where he had drugged Reva and Lyra and left them behind to face the army alone.

’But that was different. I didn’t do that this time.’