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"Accept it?"
...There was no choice but to accept this reality, was there?
Ouroboros knew exactly what he was disappointed about, but he also knew that what he wanted could never come true.
Yet what left him feeling most conflicted was that he was not actually all that sad now.
Perhaps it was because he had already seen his friend die twice. The pain of having a wound torn open again would certainly not be the same as the first injury. Even the irrepressible feelings of loss and grief were far calmer than Ouroboros had expected.
Because, in a sense, the outcome now was simply too good, far better than Ouroboros himself had imagined.
Fate had already told him that this was the best possible outcome. A soul corrupted by a Sefirah could not be restored. From the moment the City of Calamity swallowed him, the Medici he knew could never return whole.
As for this one-he might as well call him Medici, since that was what he called himself. He still addressed Ouroboros by the nickname he himself had come up with, still remembered the past, and seemed no different from before. Yet when he mentioned things the original Medici would have valued, there was no particular flicker in his eyes. The Red of War might count as a relatively elite force on Earth, but to the Calamity of Destruction, who was about to head into the Starry Sky, these elites from a single planet were nothing.
He had plenty of time and plenty of opportunities to gather new armies from countless places.
In the past, Medici had not undergone a drastic change in temperament because his contact had not been deep enough. Mere attempts had already left the mark of corruption.
But back then, he had thought