You Died

The unknow make us afraid, what we don't know make us uncomfortable and anxious. It's in human nature.

Death is an unknow for most people, so aside from the instinctual fear every living being has toward it, its only natural to fear death.

But for Julian, death wasn't an unknown. He had already been there. Since 17 years ago, it was stalking him and watching the every steps of his daily life.

No, even before that. Since he emotionlessly made the choice to give up in his previous life. Death was an helper, a friend and maybe even a future lover.

It was needless to say, but Julian wasn't afraid of death.

So, as the witch of envy grasped his heart in her frigid grasp. Julian thought.

'Show me what you got, miss Envy.'

*BOOM!*

In the darkness of this frozen world, a dark scarlet light flashed and clashed with the shadows around.

Julian internal was flooded with destruction power and attacked the foreign shadow magic around his heart.

Pushing it back from the vital organ, the destructive magic corroded the shadow hands who seemed frozen from the recent attack.

But just as it was about to completely vanish, it suddenly became frenzied and fled out of his body and disappeared in the shades outside.

Just as Julian was confused on why a disembodied hand fled from him.

A short feminine figure veiled in pure darkness stepped out of the shadows, two glowing eyes glowering at the still paralysed Julian.

Tilting her head, the figure asked in a monotone voice. "Subaru?"

Answering to herself, she followed with her eyes something only she could see from the immobile Julian to the equaly frozen Subaru. "You're not HIM..."

Beginning to mumble in a progressively faster, maddening manner. Envy took her head in her hands. "No... No! Why do you have it!? My gift! It was for HIM only! You filthy thief! Give it back!"

Shrieking in rage, countless giant hands and spikes made of darkness converged at lightning speed on Julian. Aiming to shred him to piece and crush him to paste.

Taken by surprise by such an all out attack and out of his league. Julian only had the time to unleash some of his Trinity magic in a formless way to melt the grip of time over him before dodging backward and dodging the spears but still being slapped away through a building by an unseen hand.

Even though his body was not as great as in DxD, it was still enough to survive such an impact with the majority of his bones broken and a couple of organs ruptured.

Blood flowing from his face's every orifices, Julian body glowed amber for a second before he was back like new.

Much tired by the feat, he still got up as fast as he could to toss little concentrated balls of destruction toward incoming spikes of darkness all around him.

As he was still in a domain of darkness, it was a futile endeavor in the end as a spear soon passed his hazardly made defence and pierced his thigh.

And right then, he lost a fight for the first time. As even as he tried to circulate destruction energy in his body, the pike's darkness spread across his body in blink of an eyes and ERUPTED.

Spears blotted out of his body by dozens. And his conciousness rapidly collapsed toward an all encompassing darkness. But just as he was dying, Julian used his trinity energy in an impulse, not for restauring his body, but for constantly restauring his consciousness to an alive state.

His body was effectively dead, but his mind was not.

It was strange, being a conciousness. Living without any of his physical sense. There was only two things he could do, see with a totaly new sight everything around him, and think.

Time was not a thing in this state too, or maybe it was because of his energy affecting him.

But it was strange all the same, why could he he use energy whitout a physical body? Weren't his reserves stored in it?

But this thinking was irrelevent isn't it? He had no wings in this world, the rules weren't the same here compared to DxD.

Here, mana was a thing given by the world itself to the soul of every living beings in residing in it. And gates were the things that enabled people to use magic.

But was the gate located in the physical body in the first place or not?

Julian's thoughts were jumbled in this state, jumping to a question to another without stops after founding an answer.

Free from the material worlds distraction, his whole attention and prodigious problem solving abilities were working overdrive.

The problem was they weren't focused on anything in particular. Only when something in his field of 'view' moved was he wrenched out of this dangerous state.

This 'thing' was a white, translucent humanoid body approaching it with saccaded movements, sometime fast, sometime slow.

It inspected him, or rather his dead body. A colorless black and white husk he could only see the shape of from his fixed position.

Memories unwillingly came back to his mind, as if shoved focefully by something.

Satella, the witch of envy, his death...

No. He was in a strange state, but he wasn't dead yet. And he should probably do something to prevent it.

But what?

The white 'ghost' inspecting his body had the definitive features of Emilia, so Julian knew for sure that it was probably Satella... Confirming her kill? Seeing how the curse reacted to his death and do something about it?

He doubted she would be able to erase him from the RBD, but only the thought of it uneased him greatly.

If he died, would Kass bring him back? Or would his life be judged again normally because of some bullshit rule of existence?

Julina forcefully stopped himself right there before he lost his control over his thoughts again.

Was not the time to think about that, he should focus on what he could do.

So, he put all his attention toward the only thing of interest around him. The representation of the witch spirit?

No, he was pretty sure it was her soul. Or her od. And as his own cold body didn't seem to contain the same 'spirit' as her. He could deduce that what he was seeing was not something the dead had.

So a soul.

Where was his soul? He had no freaking idea. Gone to hell or whatever.

There were too many questions that he was wary to dwelve upon much on in this state.

At least, there was a thing he could see deeper inside the assumed soul of the witch.

For Julian, it as well could be only an illusion of his own making. But the more he concentrated on it, the more it became graspable in his sight.

An infinitely small two dimensional circle he could somehow see, magnified an equaly infinite amount of times almost like his eyes were a specialized microscope built to observe its specific size.

This enlargement ended only when the circle somehow took on all his field of view.

And it wasn't something pretty, in the middle was a small circle filled with a dense and sickly green purple color. It was split in two discernable sides. The right one filled with a lighter purple but dotted with countless dark green spots like it was plagued with an incurable disease. The left half was perplexing, however. As besides a few shades of soft and healthy green, it was painted a really light magenta, almost white.

The whole thing was fixed around a seed in the very center of it all. A black seed, radiating power and palpable envy.

As he was still admiring this art worthy of Picasso, It suddenly shuddered and disappeared.

Taken a little by surprise, Julian inspected his surrounding to see where his test subject had gone to. But to his astonishement, she was gone. The witch of envy wasn't here anymore.

Without the shadows supporting his corpse, it slumped to the ground. And without her domain of darkness, time went back to normal.

But it didn't matter in his current form, as he found his control over the weird flow of time around him increasing for each instants in this unnatural state of being.

Slowing it down, Julian pondered on the existence of the little circle.

Had he one too?

Focusing within himself, he indeed found one. And if he thought Satella's one was messed up. Then his own made no fucking sense.

There was so much colors that if he could, he would surely have an epileptic crisis.

But, since he began to observe that thing in the witch soul. He was feeling more and more tired.

It seemed that he couldn't stay like this for eternity, as in the end he was relying on his magic for it.

Having no time to waste, he found a green and purple anomaly in it and not really what to do. Simply wished to control it, he didn't even know if it was possible. But he didn't care. Julian was feeling himself fading away and he didn't like not knowing where he was going.

Despite himself, he felt a tang of fear at that instant. By all the new emotions he felt recently, helplessness was the worst by far.

He didn't fear death, but it seemed he still feared the unknown.

Just as Julian resigned to his fate, and he truly died for the first time in this world. The tiny yellow dot at the core of Julian 'circle' pulsed one time, in sync with the purple-green anomaly.

—————

"Well, it's perfectly natural as we, in fact, come..."

Julian stopped abruptly in his speech as extreme vertigo and nausea assaulted him.

Cold sweat trailed down his back as he couldn't help but fall on his ass and sitting against the wall he was leaning on.

"Julian!?" X2

Subaru rushed to his side as he worriedly called his new friend name. While the kind girl approached instinctively at seeing someone in distress.

Puck, as for him flew of Julian shoulder and looked at him, a light flashing trough his eyes as he asked. "Woah! You're okay there? What happened?"

Julian took a few seconds to respond, dazed eyes refocusing and sharpening as he shook his head to chase the nasty feelings away. "It's... It's nothing. Just a bout of dizziness. It's been a while since I had water."

The maiden bit her lips and dip her head a bit. Crouching before Julian, she took out a pouch from her belt and presented it to him. "I'm sorry, It's my fault. I made both of you run around with me on this sunny day while you had nothing to drink. Here, you can drink some, it's water"

Grimacing slightly at knowing his lie was probably seen through, Julian shook his head again. "It's not your fault, I was the one who proposed the deal after all."

Shrugging in his mind, Julian smiled ligthly at the girl and nonetheless took the offered pouch. "Thank you."

"You're saying that, but still..."

Puck rolled his eyes and reprimanded who he saw as his daughter as he landed on her head and patted it. "Stop it, Lia. He said it, didn't he? He was the one who asked for it, and he could have just said it if he was thirsty."

As he was drinking, Julian quite clearly saw the mocking gaze the cat like spirit sent his way. But he frankly didn't care. Like, he just died, was he supposed to tell the truth about it?

As he wiped his mouth and finished drinking what was relatively small amount of water, Julian saw the bitter face Subaru was making to him and smirked.

Holding out the pouch toward him, Julian asked. "Aren't you thirsty too Subaru? Do you want some? If it's okay with the owner of course." He added as it would be weird to just give him a gourd that was not his own.

"Of course, Subaru can drink from it too if he is thirsty."

Subaru's eye twitched as he wabed his hand, saying in an off-handed manner. "It take more than the petty sun to make the great me thirsty."

Rubbing his nose sheepishly, he added. "But... Maybe later."

Julian met eyes with the obviously thirsty Subaru and keeping eyes contact with him, stood up and gave back the pouch to their guide. All the while the later face strangely twitching more and more.

Puck watched the two boys and pawed his face dramatically. "You know, the more I'm getting to know you two. The more I'm thinking letting my daughter hang around was a bad idea."

Subaru shook his head and shielding his eyes from it, took a peek at the sun and its position. "If we want to have a chance to find our thief, I think it's time we should resume our search."

Gazing at both Julian and the girl. Subaru continued. "Don't you agree Julian and err..."

"Emilia, you both can call me Emilia..." The girl, or Emilia hesitated before shaking her head and saying.

Grabbing the hem of her skirt and unknowingly following the trend of saying their name and something about them, she added. "And I'm an half-elf."

As she was waiting for the innevitable curses or fearful reactions, the onky thing she received was an uncomprehensible answer to her declaration.

"Oh, so I was half-right? Eheh..."

The wind howled across the group as silence set upon them and a single response came.

...

"Shut up Subaru..."