After everyone had fallen asleep in the middle of the night, Elysia quietly rose and slipped outside.
Following the tire tracks along the lee side of the dunes, she traveled onward.
With a Herrscher’s constitution, she could cross dozens of kilometers in mere moments.
At the end of the road, she found a heavily guarded base.
Several searchlights swept back and forth automatically, casting a staggered pattern of bright patches across the ground.
Elysia deftly slipped into their blind spots, vaulted over the fence, and crept beside the only room with its lights still on, leaning against the window to listen.
Many people were gathered inside, their voices overlapping chaotically as they played cards with great enthusiasm.
During a lull in the game, a relatively young voice spoke up.
“I’m still not used to shooting civilians.” “That’s normal.
Everyone goes through it,” a deep voice replied as though it were nothing unusual.
“Those animals are there for us to kill for fun.
Terrorists aren’t that easy to find.
Follow the rules honestly, and you’d be lucky to fire your gun once a month.
“This damned place has nothing but wind and sand.
We’re stuck inside these tin cans all day.
If I don’t fire a few rounds to blow off steam, my whole body starts crawling.
Last week, one guy got so pent up that he stuck his own gun barrel in his mouth.
Fucking pathetic.” The moment he finished, voices of agreement rose from every corner of the room.
“Wouldn’t we be court-martialed?” A trace of fear colored the younger man’s voice.
Everyone inside suddenly burst into laughter, accompanied by the heavy pounding of fists against the table.
“Ha!
The fact that you can even ask that proves you’re still a rookie.” Someone let out a shrill whistle and mocked him.
“Want me to find you a lawyer?
Hmm?” “The higher-ups tacitly allow it.
When you get bored, just find a village and massacre it.
Everyone does it.” The moment the deep voice spoke, the entire room fell silent.
“We’re human.
Those animals aren’t.
Stay here long enough and you’ll understand.
We gave up the good food and easy lives back home to eat sand in this godforsaken place.
Don’t we deserve a little compensation?” “Besides, those people are like weeds.
Cut down one crop, and another grows back before long,” another voice said with raucous laughter.
“Isn’t there a settlement right beside the base?
When are we going there?” The young man’s unease had vanished, replaced by eager anticipation.
The more Elysia heard, the heavier her heart grew.
“They paid us, and that man is from Mu.
Understand?
Squeezing a few payments out of them is enough.
“Who you can kill for fun, who you can do business with, and who you need to treat like royalty—there’s an art to all of it,” the deep voice instructed patiently.
“Looking for entertainment?
Just wait.
We’re rotating out the day after tomorrow.
Once we reach the new post, we’ll look around and find something.
Hopefully the men there will leave a few for us.” Then came the practiced sound of cards being shuffled as they began another round.
Elysia silently leaned against the wall and raised her head toward the night sky.
The moonlight was a lifeless, deathly white, bleeding pale luminous fluid across the sea of sand and coating it in silver radiance, like bones strewn across the earth.
After returning, she sat alone on a dune outside for the rest of the night.
Elysia was not shaken by their wanton words.
She had encountered plenty of such scum during her travels and dealt with many of them as well.
Faced with the unreserved malice such people bore toward others, she had gone from trembling with rage at first to remaining entirely composed.
She was merely wondering whether she should stain her own hands.
The hands of the person named Elysia.
Back in the European Union, some truly heinous people had wielded such deep-rooted influence that no lawful path could ever bring them the punishment they deserved.
Elysia had therefore always followed the rules of the shadows and sent them straight to hell.
Her subordinates included a specialized department dedicated to handling such unsavory matters efficiently.
Throughout that process, Elysia had only ever issued the orders and then kept her distance.
She would not personally take another person’s life, nor would she watch as her subordinates carried out their punishments.
That was one principle she had always upheld.
Many people maintained a rule against killing because they feared allowing themselves to fall into the abyss.
Yet now, she had come here alone, just as she had been when she first set out, while the evil before her surpassed anything she had previously faced by a hundredfold, even a thousandfold.
That meant she could only deal with it personally.
The moment that thought arose, Elysia could not help frowning.
The mere idea of using Elysia’s appearance to commit slaughter stirred an instinctive resistance within her.
The original Elysia was both a goddess who loved humanity and a human who loved humanity.
During her journey around the world, she had experienced kindness that warmed the heart and malice that existed without reason.
She had witnessed the light within human nature shining like the stars, and she had also witnessed its ugliness, dark and fetid as a swamp.
At the end of that long journey, she had chosen to love everyone.
Elysia was supposed to love all humanity.
But she could not.
Elysia had descended from divinity and become human, while she herself had been nothing more than an ordinary mortal from the very beginning.
Both the values instilled in her during her previous life and her present understanding of herself told her that this scum deserved to burn in hell, never to find salvation for all eternity.
Yet she had usurped Elysia’s place—a position that demanded she love humanity.
Indirectly issuing orders and then closing her eyes to what followed was already the limit of what she could bear.
Amid her turmoil, she recalled a saying from her previous life.
“From this, we may see that one without compassion is not human, one without shame or revulsion is not human, one without courtesy or humility is not human, and one without a sense of right and wrong is not human.” In that instant, everything became clear.
Before one could love everyone, one first had to understand what it meant to be human.
Elysia embodied countless beautiful qualities of humanity, but she had never condemned her companions for cutting away its malignancies.
Whether it was Mobius purging MOTH’s opposition or Dr.
MEI leading one restructuring of the upper ranks after another, Elysia had never tried to stop them.
In fact, she had tacitly approved.
She had interpreted Elysia’s love for humanity as unconditional affection incapable of distinguishing right from wrong.
In truth, that interpretation itself was a desecration of Elysia.
The desert sunrise gilded the frozen waves of the sand sea in gold, revealing rolling dunes that stretched into the distance.
Hazy sunlight shone into the depths of her heart.
Within that flawless radiance, she seemed to see a hazy figure surrounded by a pink halo.
The figure tilted her head slightly, clasped her hands behind her back, and smiled gently at her.
Her anger and confusion receded like the tide.
Elysia found herself entering a state of absolute tranquility.
She could now calmly recall every word those men had spoken and calmly dissect their twisted minds and contemptible souls.
Then, with equal calm, she decided that tomorrow, she would personally send them all to the afterlife.
In her previous life, people sent to audit accounts in war-torn regions often died in plane crashes.
Presumably, a plane going down here would be nothing unusual either.
Then she smiled faintly and sat atop the dune, quietly admiring the magnificent desert scenery.