LDQ Vol. 7 pt. 3 (Patreon)

Just like when we watched Valkyria’s memories, everybody gathered together in front of the movie theater screen with various snacks and drinks in preparation for the “show.”

And this time, me and Vala were sitting next to each other. We were the stars, after all, so I got us one of those comfy, leather, movie theater chairs that could seat two people. It had a leg rest and everything built into it, and it was even capable of reclining for some extra comfort.

While Vala held a bowl of popcorn on her lap and picked from it, I sat there with my arm wrapped around her. Everybody else just sat in singular chairs, not that any of them minded.

We’d have to get a proper movie theater setup sometime where everybody could have their own luxury chair. Then again… maybe not too proper. It was nice getting to sit outside and watch movies in broad daylight without having to worry about natural lighting being an issue or anything. Then again, the superior solution would be to have a proper, indoors theater as well as this outdoors one. Both were nice at times, so why not get both?

But that aside, once everybody was sitting down and ready, the memories me and Vala had from our time in the forest appeared on the screen.

Vala was on the ground, panting, with white clouds covering up her chest and crotch to prevent anybody from seeing her nude figure. Most of us had already seen her naked before, but not everybody in attendance was in our relationship, plus there were children, AKA Luca. So, a child, but still.

Vala being able to see herself that tuckered out on the ground was enough to make her current self’s cheeks redden a bit. More importantly, there was something that neither of us noticed at the time. Her abdomen had a sort of golden glow to it. She must have been too tired, and pleasured, to notice it back then… and I had a pretty good excuse for not noticing it myself since I was barely even able to stand.

Part of me felt bad for leaving Vala on the ground like that, and I probably looked pretty bad since the screen only showed what happened rather than let everybody know how I felt, but I remembered how I felt.

I felt like my soul was torn to shreds.

My head was killing me, I felt like there were dozens of daggers stabbed into me across my body, and I couldn’t even see straight. I seriously felt like my body was being ripped apart from underneath my skin. It was painful enough that I couldn’t even be bothered to make any noises, all I could do was stand there in the absolute most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my entire life. I had no idea it was even possible for somebody to feel that much pain. It made accidentally hitting my balls a one out of ten on the pain scale, and even then, the pain I felt was more like a million out of ten.

It shouldn’t have even been possible for somebody to feel that much pain without passing out from shock or trauma or something, but it was, and I felt it. So while I might have looked like the bad guy by just standing there while leaving Vala naked on the ground by herself, she was the one happy and satisfied while I felt like I was about to die at any second.

Not that I could blame her for that. She had no idea what was going on.

But… it was scary. Terrifying, even. It was genuinely the most terrifying, painful experience of my life, and I wanted nothing more than to call out to her for help, but I couldn’t even do that.

Not that I needed to in the end. Vala eventually sat up straight and looked around for me, and her eyes widened with clear worry once she saw me.

“Dr-Drake? What’s—what’s wrong?” Vala asked, standing up to come over to me.

I dropped to my knees at that point, the only sound escaping my mouth being a pained gasp as I brought a hand up to clutch at my chest over my heart.

“Drake!” she cried out, rushing over to me and dropping to her knees in front of me. She placed her hands on my shoulders and looked me over for a moment before saying, “I—I knew it! We shouldn’t have done that! Your soul can’t—your soul has been… I—I killed you. Because I didn’t stop you… I—”

But no matter how much pain I might have been in, I wasn’t going to tolerate my girlfriend crying in front of me feeling guilt over mistakenly thinking she killed me. That was why I placed my hand on the side of her head and pulled her close enough for me to press my lips against her own for a moment, and then I whispered with what little strength I had, “Don’t… be stupid.”

Was that the most appropriate thing to say? Maybe not, but I don’t want to sell short the fact that my soul was literally being torn apart. Or rather, it was already torn into countless fragments that were all just barely floating around next to each other. The mechanics behind how souls work can get pretty confusing, but it was something like that. My soul was already torn to shreds and fading away. Each time a piece of my torn soul drifted far enough away from the other pieces, it was permanently gone—erased from reality.

Vala, being able to see my soul using her draconic powers, could watch in real time as my soul faded away in front of her. I might not have had a single wound anywhere on nor in my body, but my soul was irreparably damaged.

Honestly, I thought I was going to die. I thought that my cocky arrogance finally caught up to me. I told her that I’d be fine and that everything would work out, and she trusted me… but neither of us believed in that afterward.

“Drake—please, please don’t—please don’t leave me,” Vala said, barely even able to speak as the tears freely ran down her cheeks. “Please don’t—”

The memory on the screen paused.

Window, with her own reddened eyes and tears on her cheeks, stood up and turned to look at me and Vala before shouting, “What the heck is this?! Why—why did something this emotional happen off-screen and none of us even knew about it until now?! I wasn’t ready for something this emotional! You can’t just suddenly throw in a tearjerker like this and expect people to accept it in the middle of all the cozy slice of life stuff! What kind of hack writer would—”

“But it’s how it happened,” Vala said, cutting Window off. “Sometimes stuff doesn’t happen like it should and you just have to deal with it.”

“But—but the mood! And you! You were crying and you look so sad in it that I want to try jumping back in time just to hug you! And now you’re watching it while eating popcorn without even reliving any of those emotions or anything!”

“Well, I know it has a happy ending, and going through that once was emotionally exhausting enough, and this popcorn is good.”

Window huffed and turned her attention to me specifically. “And what about you?! Why are the rest of us crying and sitting on the edges of our seats while you’re just sitting there with a blank expression on your face?!”

“Because this is the boring part,” I answered. “The interesting stuff happens next.”

“You were dying!”

“And I lived.”

“But you were dying!”

I shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

“How?!”

“Every time I saw a cat expose its fluffy belly to me, offering me that forbidden treasure… I died inside. My whole life, I would get exposed to forbidden bounties of fluff impossible for me to obtain. Dying on the inside is nothing new to me.”

Window, with the most unamused expression I had ever seen from her before, looked at both me and Vala before sighing and saying, “The mood has been completely ruined. I’m letting it play again.”

With that, the memory on the screen resumed.

Hearing Vala cry and beg me not to leave her—well, there was only one thing I could do in that situation.

It was my duty not to make her cry from anything other than happiness, and dying wasn’t going to make her cry from happiness.

I hoped.

So even though I was afraid I might actually die, I forced myself to believe in myself. I forced myself to believe in my ability to survive having my soul ripped to pieces.

If love was truly powerful enough to reverse entropy like Vala liked to claim, even though she implied she didn’t actually believe that was true, then I was going to believe it myself.

And if love was powerful enough to reverse entropy, it was powerful enough to force a soul back together.

I wrapped my arms around Vala and pressed my lips against hers once again, kissing her with more passion and love than ever before. I wanted to convey every last ounce of my love for her through that action. No matter how boundless my love for her was, I was going to make her so aware of it that she’d get sick and tired of me and think I was too clingy and overwhelming.

I poured all of my love into her.

And not in the sexual way.

More importantly, as I did so, we finally noticing that increasingly bright glow coming from her abdomen—from Vala’s womb shining through her skin with that golden light.

“Wha—what?” Vala asked, looking down at her abdomen. “What’s… going on?” She placed her hands over the glowing area. “I—wait! This—this is—!”

A burst of golden light erupted between us, accompanied by a shockwave that sent both of us flying backward.

It was strange. The shockwave was powerful enough to send both of us flying away, and it felt strong enough to knock down some trees or lift rocks off the ground, but it did none of that. It was as if our surroundings only experienced a gentle breeze from the shockwave. On top of that, while we might have been sent pretty violently through the air, we didn’t hit anything. Instead, we both felt like we got caught by some sort of… soft, fluffy energy. Like landing on top of a bed made out of cotton candy. This energy caught us and gently lowered us to the ground just in time for the brilliant light between us to dissipate and reveal a feminine figure standing at its core.

My first impression was that the girl standing there was Vala. She had draconic wings, horns, and a tail just like Vala, and they were even about the same overall size. Then there was the fact that all she had on from what I could see was a simple, baggy shirt that looked like the one Vala liked to wear.

But when the girl turned to look at me, I saw a similar but different face… and it looked younger, too. Not to mention that while there were some similarities with Vala, there were also some similarities to me, mainly in regard to her having shortish, black hair.

Also, at that point, I was still in such overwhelming pain that I couldn’t resist falling down onto one of my knees.

I thought I was going to, anyway.

Instead, before I could actually fall, that girl I saw appeared directly in front of me and wrapped her arms around me to keep me up. That gave me a good opportunity to look her in her eyes… and I knew who she was as soon as I got that close look into her eyes.

“Heh,” the girl said, a familiarly cocky smile on her face. “Come on, Dad. You’re not going to die on me right after creating me, are you? Wait… woah. Your soul is—okay, sorry, I understand now. Here.”

The girl who called me her dad tightened her arms around me for the tightest hug she could probably manage, and in doing so… she didn’t just hug me. She hugged my soul. By hugging me, she hugged all those fragmented pieces of my soul so tightly together that she forced them to reunite and become whole again.

Her hug glued my soul back together.

“Looks like some pieces are missing… but that’s okay,” she said. “After all, love is the power that can reverse entropy, and love is the power that can make the impossible possible! Even if that means forcing my way through the fabric of existence to bring back the lost!”

A couple moments in silence passed before I felt the remaining pieces of my soul—the ones that had faded away and that should have been lost until the end of time—come back to me. And once they were back with me, the girl hugged me extra tight again to force them back into position with the rest of my soul.

I was whole again.

All of the pain was gone.

“What—what did you do?” I asked her.

“Heh, I did what I said I would do,” the girl answered. “I transcended our reality to bring back the parts of your soul that you lost. I’m not really sure how I did that, but I followed my heart and it all worked out!”

That was when I realized something felt… off. Something felt different.

My soul was back and whole again, but… different?

“I think something happened to my soul,” I said.

The girl titled her head for a second and said, “Let me check.” A couple of seconds later and she had an explanation for me. “Oh! Huh. I guess because your soul already started fading away, the parts that moved on to the next stage of reality already got touched by the laws of reality there. But since I brought them back to you… how to put it… you’re technically a higher reality being now? Before, your soul was only part of this reality, but now your soul has parts from two realities, and the other reality is a higher stage than this one, so… you’ve basically become a god. I think. I don’t know, all I know is that parts of your soul have been touched by the next reality up, so now you’re OP.”

“That made no sense.”

“I’m not only Mom’s daughter, but I’m your daughter. I think I’d be doing a bad job of being your kid if I made any sense.”

I placed my hand on her shoulder and said, “You’re definitely my daughter.”

“Hehe, told you so. Anyways!” She stepped away from me and spun around to face Vala who had apparently been standing there staring at us like a deer in the headlights the entire time. “S-sorry, Mom. I know you wanted an actual baby and stuff, and didn’t want to skip any steps, but I—”

The name “Mom” alone, said while looking at Vala, was enough to make her jump and tear up before charging straight into our daughter to tackle hug her to the ground. Then, before anything else could be said, Vala used her tail to wrap around my ankles, yank me down to the ground, and forced us to all hug together.

Thankfully, our clothes were put back on at some point without me realizing it or knowing how. It would have been awkward to have a group hug with our daughter while we were naked.