“It… can’t be!” Lakshman said, looking utterly shocked. “The Workshop Clan is destroyed! I made sure of it! I even sunk their entire land that they called home to make sure they never go back to their old ways again! How could they be behind your presence?!”

“Yes. You did,” agreed the Ancient Evil with a smile, “but aren’t you forgetting the survivors? What would their feelings be towards the man that destroyed their people and home? Take a guess.”

Lakshman looked at him with great anger while he heard Asura say inside his mind, “Calm down, Lucky. You’re letting your anger cloud your judgement.”

This made his current-self click his tongue and ask his enemy, “Really? What makes you think I will believe that?”

“Ha!” His enemy snorted with a gleeful smile. “I have no reason to lie at this point in time. Isn’t that right?”

He suddenly posed the question down below, and Lakshman looked down as well towards where Dominic, Lagron, Nara and Valerian were situated at. There, he saw them looking towards Athurus and someone else who was wearing a cloak that covered his entire appearance. However, when the question was posed, the man suddenly threw back the hood hiding his face and revealed himself to be someone Lakshman instantly recognised.

“That’s right,” the man replied with a wicked smile. “We helped each other to get this far.”

“Father?” Athurus asked the man, who turned out to be his father, and looked confused. “What are you talking about? What kind of help did we provide that man? I don’t remember ever meeting such a person before.”

Athurus’s father turned to look at him and the look he gave him was full of disdain that caused Mardana Kingdom’s King to flinch with fright.

“You are such a fool, Athurus. I didn’t let you meet him because never shared the hatred or drive to vanquish the Phoenix Titan. The best that you could’ve become was a distraction for us to buy time for our master plan,” said his father in a cold ruthless voice that caused his son to look very shocked and hurt.

“I… I don’t understand,” Athurus pleaded with him and moved forward. “Father, you told me that the Phoenix Titan is the enemy of the world! His very existence brings trouble and destruction, but he’s right now saving our kingdom from that monster girl and now, this person is also wreaking havoc on our kingdom!”

“And? Why should I care about the kingdom?” His father asked, stunning his son in the process. “Even now, you don’t realise the bigger picture and only live in your deluded state of mind.”

He swept his arm in an arc and declared, “Listen, son! We are part of the once mighty clan known as the Workshop Clan. We were powerful, and we lived a prosperous life… until the Phoenix Titan and his Phoenix Clan attacked and destroyed our clan… our home… our families…! That’s why we lived in hiding, waiting for our time to get back at the man that destroyed our future!

Do you get it?! This is an unsettling rage that was carried over for thousands of years since the ancient times! We had great hopes that you would carry on our legacy and bring his ruin, but you turned out to be an idiot believing the nonsense stories told to you in children stories and bedtime stories and grew up without malic!”

“W-What?” Athurus asked, looking aghast as he took a step back in shock.

“We realised there was no future for you to carry out our plan to exact our vengeance on the Phoenix Titan! So, we changed your perspective of the Phoenix Titan, manipulated you into believing the Phoenix Titan is an evil entity that constantly puts the world in danger! He’s a threat that needs to be taken out by any means necessary, and it became all that much easier as the threats he faced were a threat to the world, but we didn’t care! What matters was the goal!”

Athurus looked at his father, his mouth slightly open with an expression of utter disbelief mixed with shock on his face. It seemed like he was mind blown and was taking far longer to react due to the heavy impact it felt by the heavy hitting of his father’s own words. They hurt him a lot, and it made him start to realise how easily he was manipulated.

“So,” began Dominic from beside him as he walked up to stand next to him, “you manipulated your son into treating the Phoenix Titan as a villain to give your people time to do whatever it was you had planned for a very long time because you had firm belief that the Phoenix Titan would survive all of his encounters.”

Athurus’s father turned to him and smiled as he replied, “You are quite perceptive, Sword Titan.” As Dominic grimaced, he looked up at the Ancient Evil and said, “All of our efforts have culminated in the existence of that being, who will finally exact our vengeance and vanquish the Phoenix Titan once and for all!”

“Father…!” Athurus said slowly with sadness as he looked at his father with tears flowing out of his eyes because of the feeling of facing the biggest betrayal of his life.

“Do you see now?” The Ancient Evil asked Lakshman, who was looking down at the older man with great anger. “These are the kinds of people that are included among those you were fighting hard to save. How does it feel?”

Just then, he heard Athurus’s father shout, “O’ ancient one! We have done everything as you told us, now carry out your end of the deal!”

“Oh, pipe down, will you?” The Ancient Evil retorted irritably, rubbing his ears as if the shout hurt him to mock him. “I’m already on the job, so stay put.” Then he looked towards his enemy and asked, “How does it feel that the mercy you showed them back then had come back to bite you like this? You never expected it, did you?! Hahahaha!”

He let a roar of cold mirthless laughter devoid of humour as Lakshman continued to look down at the man, who was making a fiendish smile on his face. Lakshman clicked his tongue in frustration and turned back to his enemy, who was roaring with laughter.

“Just how many people did you have to kill to get this far?” He asked him finally while clenching his fists firmly.

“Ha? How many I killed?” The Ancient Evil asked dubiously and looked as if he could not remember. It was proven when he replied, “To be honest, I’ve lost count. But! I’m sure you know what was the requirement to make the sacrifice to attain immortality, right?”

Lakshman did not reply, but simply glared at him with a cold death stare that made his enemy chuckle.

“I like the look on your face! It’s satisfying to see you feeling frustrated, angry and helpless because you couldn’t save any of those 6666 lives! Get it? It’s not 6, or 66, or 666, but a total of 6666 lives sacrificed to grant me immortality!” He said and laughed once more.

As Lakshman was boiling with rising anger, his enemy went on and said, “You couldn’t even save that one person that accidentally discovered our activity, and so we had to kill them to not alert the Phoenix Clan in case you had reincarnated.”

Upon hearing those words, Lakshman suddenly relaxed his fists and looked momentarily stunned before recovering and asking, “What? Which person discovered your schemes?”

The Ancient Evil smirked and said, “Since you’re going to die by my hands anyway, I might as well say it. You see, we were abducting people from all around that possessed the greatest magic affinity for the sacrifice, and during one of our activities, we were discovered by sheer coincidence by a woman part of the Phoenix Clan. So, we promptly silenced her and moved our activities away from there since the Phoenix Clan would’ve been altered at the death of one of them. Your clan tends to react far more viciously to one of your own people’s deaths than to the deaths of strangers after all.”

“Hmm? What’s wrong with your face? You look totally shocked. It’s funny!” He remarked and roared with laughter.

Lakshman was looked at him with a devastated expression on his face because he recognised whom the person that the Ancient Evil mentioned to have killed. It was none other than Spectra, a Phintex Raja that was part of the Phoenix Clan at that time. He suddenly remembered his encounter with her deceased spirit and came to learn of how she died during an operation on people going missing within the Floria Kingdom.

As it turned out, the people responsible for her death was none other than the Workshop Clan and the Ancient Evil. These two were the ones that Lakshman, or Asura for that matter, had not dealt a final blow. He did not want to destroy an entire clan of people right after destroying their home, so he left them go while sacrificing his life in an attempt to destroy the Ancient Evil back then failed. In a sense, it his fault for letting them go that came back to hurt countless people, including a single person that was young, bright and had a long future ahead, cut short because of them.

“You… bastards…!” Lakshman slowly said, and tears began to flow down his face.

“Hmm?” The Ancient Evil stopped laughing and looked at him curiously.

At that moment, Lakshman glared fiercely at his enemy and bellowed, “I’ll never forgive you for this!”

With that, he began to surge with wild power as he radiated golden-red aura that surrounded him. He began to let out a scream as he went through a transformation to reach his final form. There was a violent flash of light that caused everyone to cover their eyes and get buffeted by the strong wind and shock waves that wet sent in all directions. A moment later, the light dimmed and disappeared to reveal the Phoenix Titan hovering in mid-air in his golden-red transformation.

He was mad as tears streamed down his face from the grief that he felt for all those that had died because of his carelessness, including the one spirit he befriended in the past. Lakshman did not know it yet, but his mental state was permanently changed by the realisation of the countless deaths that had occurred because of his show of mercy.

“Oh! You transformed without even doing any warm up,” commented the Ancient Evil with a laugh.

Lakshman glared fiercely at him and shouted, “There is no warm up for the likes of you!”

In the next moment, he vanished from the spot and reappeared in front of his enemy. While he was momentarily surprised, the Phoenix Titan pulled his fist back and delivered a violent blow to the side of his enemy’s face while shouting the remainder of his sentence.

“Only death awaits you!”

With a powerful force and his rage fuelling his attack, the Ancient Evil’s head tore off from his body and was sent flying away.