Ancestral Lineage - Chapter 456
Chapter 456: You are Dead to Me!
Ethan’s arm was still wrapped around Barki’s trembling shoulders when he turned his head toward Pisces. The air shifted, just a subtle warping, like the world itself leaned closer to hear the verdict. Pisces straightened, shoulders rising with a calm that was too calm, the kind that only exists when rage has fermented into something sharper than steel.
“Pisces,” Ethan murmured, voice quiet but full, “what do you wish to do with him?”
Leon’s fingers twitched. His breath rattled. And for the first time, the arrogant guy who saw people like toys looked small, hollowed out from the inside by the truth he could no longer deny.
Pisces didn’t even glance at Ethan. Her eyes, bright and cold as deep-sea glass, locked onto Leon.
“Kill him,” she said.
Just like that. No hesitation. No tremor. No softness.
Leon’s eyes widened, and something pitiful escaped his lips.
“Li–Lisa… please…”
Pisces snapped.
Her aura burst, an invisible wave like the recoil of a cosmic bowstring. Sound cracked. Dust leapt from the ground. Leon flinched as though struck.
“I threw that cursed name away long ago.”
The bitterness behind her words felt ancient. Heavy. Poisoned.
“My husband gave me a new one. Pisces. And I love it.”
Leon shook his head frantically, body weak but desperation frantic.
Pisces stepped forward, each word a blade pressed straight into the past she had buried.
“I curse the day you became my brother.”
Leon’s breath hitched.
“I curse the day I attacked Ethan because of your stupid arrogance.”
Her voice cracked, but only for a heartbeat, before reforming sharper.
“I curse everything. Every moment. Every memory.”
Leon whimpered, “Please… I didn’t…”
“What good have you ever done?” she spat. “For me? For Mother? For anyone?”
The world held its breath, the battlefield silent as her past finally bled free.
“You and that wretched piece of filth you called a father tortured me. Day and night. Because in your family, women were nothing but tools.”
Leon squeezed his eyes shut, shame dripping down his face with tears and dirt and blood.
“If Ethan hadn’t appeared… mother would be dead. Her body rotting next to that man you called father, her death caused by him, because she dared to breathe.”
Her voice lowered, trembling not with weakness but with fury sharp enough to cut mountains.
“I was nothing but a tool. Something to sacrifice for your precious future.”
Leon, barely conscious, reached toward her with a shaking hand.
“Lisa… please… I’m your brother…”
“Don’t you dare beg me.”
Her aura surged, tidal, crushing, ancient.
“You stopped being my brother the day you slaughtered innocent people because of your worthless pride.”
Leon melted into sobs.
“And your hate?” Pisces blinked slowly. “For Ethan? For someone who never harmed you?” She leaned closer, voice cold enough to freeze the sun.
“His only sin to you… was existing.”
She stepped back, chest rising and falling, as though she had finally torn the last thread binding her to that life.
“You are dead to me.”
Nothing moved. Not the wind. Not the dust. Not the sky.
Leon’s soul fractured in that silence, the truth finally crushing what remained of him.
And Ethan… Ethan sat still as a mountain, letting Pisces’ fury echo across every realm willing to listen.
The next turn in this storm is picking up momentum, things like judgment, consequence, and the raw aftermath of severed family ties all waiting just outside the frame, pressing for their moment.
Ethan lowered his hand.
The battlefield, cracked open and trembling beneath the weight of his awakening, held its breath. Leon, still pinned by the remnants of Ethan’s invisible command, twitched uselessly on the ground, helpless rage burning in his eyes.
But Ethan no longer looked at him with anger.
Only with decision.
His golden and silver eyes swept over Leon in a slow, almost pitying gaze. “Killing you would be a kindness,” Ethan murmured, voice soft as warm wind, yet sharp enough to cut fate itself. “And you have never deserved kindness.”
Leon flinched, not at the words, but at the tone. The tone of someone who had outgrown even the need for hatred.
Ethan stepped closer. The throne dissolved behind him as he walked, replaced by a calm, terrifying stillness. The golden beings that had bowed to him before now stood in reverent silence at his back, forming a corridor of judgment.
Leon swallowed, breath quivering. “W–Wait… please… I…”
His voice cracked when Ethan raised two fingers.
The air shuddered.
The twin halos, gold and silver, brightened behind Ethan’s shoulders. From the silver one, a single thread of luminous light unraveled. Thin, delicate, almost beautiful.
Almost.
The thread drifted downward and hovered over Leon’s forehead.
Leon’s eyes widened in instinctive terror. “Lisa…” he choked, reaching desperately for the only thing familiar to him.
Pisces’ lips tightened.
Ethan didn’t even spare Leon a glance. “You don’t get to call her that,” he said quietly.
The silvery thread touched Leon’s skin.
His scream tore open the air.
Not pain, something worse. Something deeper. As the thread sank in, memories burst like fragile glass behind his eyes. Leon’s mind convulsed as the pieces of his life, his pride, his ambitions, his training, his childhood, his mother’s frightened smiles, the twisted lessons of his father, the hierarchy that shaped him, shattered into dust.
Ethan watched as if observing a tide washing away a sandcastle.
Leon’s scream broke into ragged gasps as the last pieces of his identity dissolved. He reached for memories that were no longer there. He clawed at the air like a drowning man searching for a surface.
Then Ethan raised his other hand.
The golden halo pulsed.
A second thread emerged, this one darker, shifting between violet and midnight blue, thick with a heaviness that made even the golden entities behind Ethan bow their heads.
This thread did not remove.
It implanted.
Leon’s body convulsed as the guilt-thread sank into his skull. His eyes rolled, then snapped wide open, filled with horror that had no origin.
Images flooded him, flashes of screams, blood, broken villages, terrified faces. The suffering he had caused. The innocents he had slaughtered under chaos’s influence. The women and children who died begging for mercy he never gave. His father forcing Pisces to her knees while he watched and did nothing.
He didn’t understand the images.He didn’t know why they hurt.
He only felt it.
He felt every sin as if it had been carved into his soul.
When it finished, Leon collapsed to his knees. He stared at his hands with a slow, trembling fear, as though expecting blood to drip from them.
“W–what… what did I do…?” he whispered, voice cracking like old porcelain. “Why does it hurt? Why… why does it hurt so much…?”
He didn’t know his name.
He didn’t know his past.
He only knew the weight.
Ethan turned his back on him.
“You live with that question,” he said, walking back toward the gathered wives, toward Pisces, whose tear-filled eyes burned with vindication and sorrow. “Let it be your chain. Let it be your life.”
Behind him, Leon curled into himself, shaking, hollow, yet crushed beneath a guilt he couldn’t remember earning.
A punishment worse than death.A fate no blade could match.A sentence no prison could rival.
And Ethan didn’t look back even once.
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