Chapter 399: Not Again... (2)

Perseus POV

Alright, so I am teleported, and I should make a note of never sleeping with the gauntlet on...but if I am teleported, wouldn't Ruka and Leilah be here? Heck, if I'm gone, wouldn't Buddy try to teleport to me? Heck, I can't teleport to them either.

So is this a dream? I'm so confused...

"No..." the girl shook her head in denial, "Tell me your name, you impostor."

Huh, her voice...it's not as strong, but it's there...I resisted it, but I could feel her trying to draw out the compulsion to follow her orders.

"Umm, my name is Justin."

"Justin what?" she demanded

"Justin Case."

"Your fake name is Justin Case? Leave here while I'm in the mood to spare you."

"So you can't detect lies?"

"How'd you...you are dad...but you're dead..."

"Oh, I'm dead, clearly I wasn't the main character of this universe. Did I not try to show the enemy with my female persona? Women are spared in war."

"You are Dad!" she ran up to me and hugged me tightly

"Ummm...I don't want to ruin your tears of joy, and this is, like, cool and all. But I don't think that I'm the same Perseus you know. I don't even know your name."

"Shut up."

"Ok."

*****

Her name is apparently Rosalina Silver...yes, Rosalina...I would never give my child such a name, but she revealed to me that Leilah and I were deliberating between wanting to name her either Rose or Rosa, but my parents got in the way and added the -lina, which Leilah liked.

What happened in this world was the world underestimating the powers of the fake rose and the powers of the human cyborgs where there are people who replaced half their body parts with magical weaponry.

The humans won in the end, but that resulted in internal conflict, which resulted in their own downfall as each hero had their factions, and while this internal conflict was happening, the village was executed one by one.

As for the gods, they eliminated each other with only Maple remaining as the sole survivor during the war between the gods, who also later died.

Isfrid had a tool or crystal of sorts that could be used to instill his hatred of demons in someone. He used it on Maple, who killed Lilith, a person who couldn't bring herself to hurt her...

Maple later killed every demon in the world, and later, herself for the memories of one falling for a half-demon and mating with one.

"I'm the only one left with a demon bloodline." Rosa concluded, "I've searched and searched, but including me, there are less than 1000 people left, but...I'm here alone because they don't want a demon living with them..."

"Poor girl..."

Again, weird hugging a person who's my child and yet, physically older than me. It must have been decades since then, and she was isolated inside this bunker alone.

The prints left at the village were very old, barely recognizable...some were new though...I don't think I'm wrong to assume that she's being hunted.

A timeline where we're careless...and it resulted in this...everything that could have gone wrong somehow went wrong.

"You don't to answer this, but...when did I have you?"

"Right before the war..." she answered, "You lasted until I was 13, before Maple found you and...along with mom..."

"I see..."

I don't know how long I'm here for before I get pulled back...but, assuming that I have to manually use the machine to get back and assuming that this isn't my physical body, despite my being able to touch everything, I should still be able to use the gauntlet somehow, or at least the one of this universe.

I should get the other Perseus to adopt this person somehow...he has one adopted daughter from an alternate universe there anyway, so having her guide a similar soul shouldn't be a problem.

The Perseus of this world had Rosa before the war, and I didn't, that's enough of a difference already, but...the events that she described sounded familiar enough, and shouldn't be any different from mine, so I'll have to plan for those scenarios, we might want to confront Isfrid early and take him out of the equation...

"I saw that our home was basically cleaned and properly repaired, I didn't realize anything was wrong until I got out...you did it, didn't you?"

She nodded.

"So why did you leave Grandpa Laker behind?"

His corpse wasn't surrounded by flies and it was basically a skeleton...it was also deliberately left there.

"His corpse is the vessel of the enchantment that is hiding our home." She answered, "It's how no one raided it while I'm gone, applying directly would have made them notice it since the enchantment and head inside..."

"What's the enchantment? And why his corpse specifically?"

"It's to basically make them ignore the house and move on from it, it's sort of like ignoring things that you see in your peripheral vision...as for great grandpa, they dragged his corpse out of the grave and placed him there, and I needed a place to hide...so I used his corpse as a vessel, they won't touch his corpse as humans believe touching a demon's corpse is cursed after the one that did it died to a sickness."

She then can't move it far away since the vessel is needed to keep the enchantment going...and moving it might tell the others that she's close by...

"No need to be shy nor ashamed...Grandpa Laker would be happy to know that he helped you in some way..."

This world is doomed...Rosa will have to move somewhere else...the humans are going to repopulate, and if she has any descendants...they're going to be persecuted for having demon blood, this world ended a long time ago...I might as well help her leave it.

"May I ask you where is the time gauntlet?"

"In the human settlement..." she replied with tears in her eyes, "I couldn't get it back after Maple handed it to them...I'm weak."

"No need to cry, I'm a strong guy, I'll go get it back and save the both of us."