I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 33: A Different Interpretation.

"Checks out." Silas shifted, stepping away from Virginia. "Just to clear things up, i hate those guys more than you do. It’s the entire reason I’m working as an awakened in the first place, i would rather be a homeless junkie than jump into those godforsaken dungeons, i just needed to make sure that he wasn’t roaming around with a new identity."

The statement sat in the room with the particular weight of something that had been waiting to be said out loud for a long while. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Silas didn’t move for a long time. He had the expression of someone who had grown up with that sentence living in the background of everything and had long since made an uneasy peace with it.

Then he sat back on the bed, making sure that Aris gave him a nod of approval before he did.

"Right." He looked at his hands, beginning. "Considering all that, i think it’s important that you guys know that my father’s interpretation of the prophecy was different."

"What was his interpretation," Aris asked.

Silas was quiet for a moment.

"He said the prophecy wasn’t about ending the world, he said it was about ending what was wrong with it." He paused. "The foe unheard. The Order believed that wasn’t a monster. Wasn’t a dungeon. Wasn’t anything the association’s ranking system had a bracket for."

"What did they think it was," Amari this time, interested now.

Silas looked up.

"A rot," he said.

The silence after the word felt a little uncomfortable.

"Its something that had been in the bones of things for a very long time. Something that the five were supposed to find and pull out by the root." He exhaled. "They weren’t trying to end the world. They were trying to prepare the people who were going to save it."

The silence that followed had a different shape than the ones before it.

Aris thought about two Aberrant dungeons in three days.

He thought about the rot metaphor.

About entropy.

His command over it.

About the nature of things that broke down from the inside before they showed it on the outside.

"The association purged them," Virginia said carefully, confirming that she already knew what Silas was talking about. "because a group that believes it knows who the five are, and believes the five are supposed to tear something out by the root, is an extremely dangerous group to allow to operate."

"I know," Silas said. "I’m not defending them." Something crossed his face. "I’m just telling you what he believed."

Virginia looked at him for a long moment.

"Your father," she said, quietly. "Did he know who the five were."

Silas met her gaze.

"He had guesses," he said. "By the end."

"And?"

A pause.

"He used to talk about the Ashbornes a lot... before the incident that is" Silas said. He wasn’t looking at Aris. He was looking at the floor, the particular angle of someone delivering information they’ve been carrying for a long time and are finally putting down.

"Said the chaos that ended things was also the chaos that cleared the way for something new." He paused. "Said whoever carried it was going to have a very hard time of things."

The room was very quiet.

Aris said nothing.

Silas finally looked up at him, and there was something in the look—not pity, not the reverence that most people deployed when they found out what he was, something simpler and considerably more difficult to deflect.

Acknowledgement.

"I didn’t know it was you," Silas said. "When we met. I want to be clear about that."

"I know," Aris said.

"I’m saying it anyway."

Aris looked at him for a moment.

Then he looked at the curtained bed where Regulus Au Nyx was sleeping through all of this, the fifth piece of something none of them had agreed to, the fifth name written in the bones of the world according to a dead man’s faith.

"The association," Aris said, "cannot know about your father."

"Obviously," Silas said.

"Or the Order."

"Also obviously."

"If they connect you to Baphomet’s Order—"

"They’ll either use it or bury it, meaning i will die along with my family," Silas said. "Depending on which is more convenient."

He said it flatly, without bitterness, the tone of someone stating a fact they’d had a long time to arrive at.

"I know how they work."

Virginia had sat back down at some point. She was looking at Silas with an expression that had lost most of its sharp edges, replaced by something more complicated and considerably harder to name.

"I’m sorry," she said. "About your father."

Silas looked at her.

The vulnerable plea that had been in his eyes a few minutes ago had been carefully put away. What was left was the expression he usually wore—easy, slightly guarded, the expression of someone who had learned early that the world moved faster if you kept the weight of things off your face.

"He made his choices," Silas said. "He just made sure we knew why."

Amari closed her notebook.

"The morning meeting," she said, "is going to be significantly more complicated than the association currently anticipates."

"Yes," Virginia agreed.

"We should decide now what we’re walking in with."

"Yes."

"And what we’re leaving in this room."

The four of them looked at each other in the low light of the medical ward, the city outside beginning its gray transition toward morning, the weight of everything that had just been said settling into the space between them with the particular permanence of things that couldn’t be unsaid.

"Everything about the Order stays here," Aris said.

Nods.

"The fifth stays here."

More nods.

"The weird behavior of the dungeon," Amari said carefully, "I recommend we share that. Selectively. It gives the association something to work with that isn’t us."

"Agreed," Virginia said.

Silas was quiet for a moment.

"My father," he said, "used to say that the five would know each other by the fact that the world kept putting them in the same room."

Nobody replied.

Outside, the dawn was coming whether they were ready for it or not.