Leonel's mind was in a state of turmoil. His memories had become fragmented. Thoughts that he hadn't had in years, memories he hadn't touched in even longer, floated around in pieces of broken glass akin to fissures in space.
It felt like his entire mind had completely collapsed under a power he had little to no understanding of. And the worst part seemed to be that he couldn't quite think his way out of it too.
He was stuck in limbo, his thoughts just as fragmented as his memories. It was impossible to deduce anything if he couldn't complete a single sentence.
All he could see was that single pair of lingering eyes, but the irony was that while everyone else was thinking about the eyes of the Void Beast, Leonel was thinking about a completely different pair of eyes.
The eyes of that woman, the eyes of the person he hated more than anyone else in this world, the eyes that he had wanted to slash apart, and yet found staring at him even more intently as a result.
It was like everything that his father had done to give him a chance to break free of her had been worthless. He was right back at square one. No, he was in an even worse spot than square one, a place where the Demoness had more control over his life, his thoughts, his existence now than she had ever had before.
Then there was the rage.
It was just as omnipresent as the eyes, lurking in every corner of his mind. Everything seemed to only enrage him further and the glass and mirror fragments of his memories became tinted with red at their edges.
The shade of red was all too familiar. It was a red that had followed him for years, a red that had been with him ever since he awakened his Metal Synergy Lineage Factor.
But now it felt even more potent than before, and it fed off his rage, growing larger and more substantial.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
The word echoed in his mind again and again, and for a moment, he felt that he had been transported back to the first time he had heard Mo'Lexi's name... that woman that seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
It was the answer to this question that had left him so shaken and confused for so many years. It led him to treasuring every life, then to a pursuit of Kinghood, and then to a complete disregard for life entirely.
It could be said that this one question and his varying changing answers to it had dictated more of his life than almost anything else.
Sometimes, the destruction of a life could truly be so fleeting and unimpressive. In fact, it often was.
The annoying part about the answer to the question was that there probably wasn't one... or worse than that, that the answer changed based on the situation.
To a mother, the life of her baby was worth more than the world itself.
To a meteor falling from the skies... a tsunami hitting a coastline... a hurricane sweeping through the ocean...
A life wasn't worth very much at all, now was it?
So fleeting, so fragile, so tragic...
Maybe when you reached a certain level of power, this was always bound to happen.
Who cared about lives when you could crush Stars in your palm?