Ant Tensei Redux Prologue Terra Arc in segmented format for easier reading and viewer enjoyability.

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[Terra Arc, Final Act - An Unforgivable Regret

*ZERRRANGERRUMBLEGRANNNGRUMBLEZOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUN*

The capital ship evaporated into a grand pillar of light, a massive hole was left in its place. The earth beneath my feet began to shake violently and the bright blue sky above ran black as night.

It was then that the alien leader grabbed my arm, and a single thought burst into my mind,

“You will die with us! It is you who has lost!”

In my reply,

“Yet you have won nothing, you have cheated yourselves.”

In reality, it was all I could muster…

As if his last reason for living had been accomplished, the beast threw himself upon the blade in my hand, dying there without a sound.

Afterwards, the earth began to rupture and split, the air ran thin, and life began to burn out slowly around the world.

Until now… here I am… a single hour later… the last one left…

My comrades in arms screaming in suffering and their cries for help, all have gone silent. Our world… has gone dark..

Women… children… mothers… husbands… life… everyone… and everything now is as silent as the universe around us… in the void of our dead world…

I had killed them all.

If I had just destroyed that ship earlier….

Focused everything into its destruction….

Then…

Perhaps…

It would not have… then we would not be…

A scenario where…

There is no longer a we...

No one to judge me, I now stand alone, the final memory of my race.

All I had done, the lives I saved, built from the depths and touched, all ended by the very same hands.

I watched as almost two hundred thousand men and women die right before my very eyes. Crying, sobbing, laughing or yelling, each one of them had cast their gazes upon me for guidance. For surely, I would figure out some way for them to survive, I had never failed before, there was no way that this was the end.

But… there was nothing I could do… No matter how hard I thought… A mind capable of planning years into the future… could not find a single path within our very reality that would allow for our survival…

Within just twenty minutes after the initial explosion… or whatever the hell it was… the air had already grown thin and there were short periods where gravity itself seemed to lessen or stop. Earthquakes rumbled almost constantly as the ground under heel buckled with every shake.

There wasn’t enough time to build a bunker, and even if we could, it would only prolong the inevitable as we wouldn’t have any way to secure air, food or water in suitable amounts. Even if I took only a few, there would be no real survival that way.

There wasn’t enough time to build a spaceship, and the reports from the studies on the small alien crafts showed they weren’t space capable, so we couldn’t even try to secure some of them.

There was no way to prevent the end with the short amount of time we had left…

Even with a whole world with the sole project of making an ‘arc’ to save the human race, even a limited number, would take almost two weeks to put together. One that was self-sustaining to maintain just two lives.

To build one capable of keeping any number more alive would take so much longer to do, there was just no way we could do it with the world slowly dying as it was.

In reality, there just was no way to do anything in just a single hour, normal life began to die rapidly just after thirty minutes, the atmosphere got hostile after forty minutes, and all life was gone after fifty. Even I, don’t think i’ll survive much longer…

As time went, those eyes of hope turned into despair and regret.

Then, one by one, each one of them began to collapse from the lack of air. either dying, or killing each other off rather than waiting for the end. Each one of them met their fates.

It was when only I, and a single little girl on an air tank, a survivor we had rescued from some ruins, were left. She was perhaps fourteen, maybe fifteen years old…

With her last breaths, she spoke words that I will never… no… can never… forget….

“It’s your fault, my family… everyone… You killed them all…. But… I can’t help but keep forgiving you… Mother and father would have both left me already without you… First mom, then father got sick… then your medicine and programs helped them… I wasn’t alone anymore… They could only praise you, and look up to you with such happy expressions… you were the one who kept our family together… they would always say how pure and kind you were… no matter what… they would always look up to you… so…. no matter how hard I try… I just………. I just can’t hate you….. it’s not fair…. you helped us so much… So… … I… … just want… … … to … … say…

Thank you…

Thank you for giving my life happiness…………………………”

With that, the young girl, no more than fifteen years old, died in my arms… For the first time in my entire life… I looked up to the sky… and tears continued to flow from my eyes, the pain in my chest can never be described… It was all my fault…. I’m so sorry….

She was crying the whole time, but in the end, she died with such a bright smile…

A little girl, who I took everything from, thanked me for the difference in her life…

for the rest of the time until now, I could but ponder my life’s worth after I buried her. Our world would serve as her headstone…

Even now, I don’t know if my life’s sum is worth more than the cost it demanded. What would have been the fate of humankind without me. Beneath the heels of the aliens perhaps, or even a similar fate of extinction. Were the aliens even truly bad, could we have negotiated if I hadn’t led humanity to defend ourselves. So many questions… When pondering a life, many questions you will ask yourself… Most begin with a ‘what if’...

I don’t know what might have been, just what had been. My life was spent in service to life, only to end in death.

Perhaps… a final irony to the annals of my life.

Was I right, was I to blame for everything, I shall never know.

I will leave my final judgement to the universe and oblivion.

My name, was, is, and always will be,

Aristocles Von Rasok,

A man who cherished life more than any other.

I go now to join my brothers and sisters in that next step of life, with no more regrets.

Hah….

Life… it really is so short isn’t it…

“...”

-

Looking up at the stars above his world, Aristocles Von Rasok, once heralded as the savior of mankind, passes away in the shadows of a dead world.

[Final Part: An Unforgivable Regret - END]