Peturabo returned to his home alone.

Once just the palace of the tyrant Damex, it is a collection of details that are tiresome to the eyes of the Iron Lord. Everything is so boring, there is nothing worth mentioning about the design and praise.

Now it's different.

Now, here is a pearl. The palace of Lokos has been regarded by every Olympian as a kind of pilgrimage beacon in the past years, and tourists have flocked from various city-states just to see the palace in its glory.

It was completely rebuilt decades ago by his hands, and every thing that belonged to Damex's architects was overturned. Peturabo did everything he could and the results were amazing.

He was complacent about it for a while, alas. Now, it seems, here still does not satisfy him.

It was night, and it was quiet, and there was no sound. The Iron Warriors don't speak when they're on a mission, let alone the Midnight Blade. All the guards had been dispersed, and they were in the square of the side hall to be guarded by the Iron Warriors.

Some of them know the truth, so they are trembling. Others were confused and dismissed it as another classic case of Perturabo — a flare of anger and a vent.

Yes, Peturabo knew what they thought of him, but he didn't care.

He clenched his fists and pushed open the main entrance to the palace. Pale golden light escaped from it, dispelling the darkness. The redesigned chandelier emits a light that is not harsh, but even mild.

Sixteen marble columns inlaid with relief panels stand quietly in the hall, and a coffin is parked in the middle of them. Perturabo didn't look at it, the first thing he looked at was the throne of the Lord of Lokos, which sat at the back of the main hall.

Damex used to sit here, and he used to sit here, and after he left, and Damex also died, the person who sat here became Carliphon.

During his years away from Olympia, his sister sat on this icy throne staring at the empty hall.

The years had turned her into a symbol of old age and sickness, very different from the smart and beautiful person he remembered. Peturabo thought he would despise her for this fragile imperfection, but he didn't.

There was another emotion churning in his heart.

Perturabo lowered his head and walked to the coffin. The hard crystals that make up its body still have dirt on it, and on the orders of Perturabo, the Iron Warriors dug up Damex's grave and brought the sole governor of Olympia here.

Perturabo stopped a few steps in front of the coffin and did not come any closer.

He could see clearly what he wanted to see as he stood here, and Damyx lay in it, and the old tyrant's face was a miserable gray that only the dead possess, but he was also thin, and besides, it was not the effect of death, he was very thin when he was alive.

The man who raised him gradually changed from a sturdy old man to this in the last decade or so of his life. The glory is gone, only the rotten and thin shell remains.

He was stubborn, and even though Perturabo had tried to persuade him several times to undergo mechanical modification or surgical implantation of his organs, Damex was reluctant to do so.

He died of old age, but even in terms of the normal life span of an Olympian, he lived a long time.

One hundred and seventy-two years.

Perturabo thought of the number—he didn't even need to think for even half a second to know it instantly, like an arm, otherworldly. Far beyond any mortal, his transcendence is so obvious.

The father who raised him is dead, his sister is old, and everything in the era he knew is gone, but he is the same.

He will always be the same.

A sudden fear rose from within him, and it was complicated. Perturabo was reluctant to admit it, but he admitted it anyway.

"Father." He opened his mouth to the coffin, using a name that Damex had never heard when he was alive. "Olympia is against me."

His voice was soft.

"It's not that they're against me, it's Olympia that's against me." Perturabo repeated. "There's a difference, you know? The planet doesn't welcome me, it doesn't like what I do to it. ”

"Luther, the Caliban who arrived here from a world you don't know, can confirm what I said. Actually, that's what he told me. He told me everything in his hideout, and the seeds of this civil strife and those currents of thought were planted many years ago."

He paused, and pulled out a rough metal cube from his waist, its unpolished appearance was hard to believe that it was Perturabo holding it at the moment.

Perturabo carefully pressed a few hidden buttons, and it spun around and opened on its own. From a cube, it became a triangle.

A small fragment of finely polished broken metal was exposed, it was iron-gray with a name engraved on it.

Eltros.

"He's also an Olympian." Perturabo said, glancing at the coffin again. His eyes were so complicated that he couldn't believe it was him.

"I don't know if you can understand what I'm saying, father, but I should be able to assume with confidence that you're listening. Wasn't that how many years ago? I describe scientific theories or contempt for those works of art, you don't understand, but you listen patiently"

"Eltros is also an Olympian, and he is one of my children. He was selected to be part of my legion, and then he was killed by me at the hands of his brothers. ”

The Iron Lord was silent for a moment again, and he pressed the button to turn the triangle back into a square and put it back. For a few seconds, his masseter muscles kept repeating the process of tensing and contracting.

There was an irrepressible anger swelling in the eyes of this man, if he could simply be called human, and this anger did not belong to mortals, not even to men.

It's too complicated, too twisted and extreme, and even the devil in hell won't like it. Anger is supposed to be the most violent emotional catharsis of a person, but Peturabo's anger is different.

He restrained it, twisted it, made it lose its angry nature, and became a whip held in his hand to whip himself.

"I don't even know who I'm going to be angry at when I get this far."

He muttered to himself as he looked at the coffin.

"It used to be like this, I always found someone to vent my anger, and I always found one. But Olympia has come this far, who am I going to blame? To myself? I should do it, my reason tells me I should do it, but I can't"

Perturabo curled up his numb fingers and slid them across the glass surface of the coffin.

Damex lay inside with his eyes closed, unable to respond to any of his words. This ordinary man, who had tried so hard to be his father, had become a corpse, which could be a banner in the mouth of some or a symbol of the resurrection of others.

But it will never be able to be his father again.

Forever.

Peturabo looked away, and suddenly felt a burst of amusement - what was he doing?

When Damex was alive, he didn't confide in him the slightest bit of sincerity. Now, he has been dead for more than 30 years, but he can't wait to lie on the coffin of the old tyrant and cry loudly.

It's ironic.

Perturabo let out a sneer, and he looked up at the ceiling of the main hall.

He designed a glass dome there, and the approximate star map of the Milky Way was shown by the refraction of the light through the bulges and depressions of the glass, and the night of Olympia was superimposed by them, and it was incomparably beautiful.

However, in the eyes of the genoplasm, there is much more to the night sky than that.

He stared at it, and it stared back with a cold gaze.

A huge whirlpool, something that stands among the stars. It scrutinized him, judged him, made him anxious, restless, manic for the umpteenth time

What exactly is it?

"What the hell are you?" Perturabo asked it, and a sincere question was born on his face.

This question once belonged to many people, including ancient scholars who wore robes and could only observe the stars through hand-ground glass lenses. There are also believers of gods who preach to the devotees while observing the stars under the night sky.

And now, this doubt belongs to one of the sons of the emperor, to the most illustrious group of men.

For the first time in his life, he looked at it with unquenchable courage.

"Are you going to destroy me?" The Lord of Steel asked softly. "Or change me? Turn me into something that I spit on myself? ”

The vortex in the stars did not answer, and it certainly did not. There was only one case in which it would answer him, but that was not what was happening now.

"There was only one moment in my life when I got rid of you, and that was when I stood with him. He was wearing armor and had a glitter on his body. He and I were standing side by side on a nine-thousand-meter high mountain peak looking down below, and that's when you disappeared. Why? Are you afraid of him? ”

The Iron Lord smiled coldly.

"Look." He said to it. "Whatever you want, you can look at it however you want, and you can evaluate it as much as you like."

The whirlpool remained silent, and only Perturabo's voice echoed in the hall. The voice of the original body is resolute, and the connection between words and sentences is so powerful that it is like a hammer colliding with an anvil.

"I've accepted my flaws, and you're no exception, you're just an illusion, an illusion. An unsearchable lesion from my nerves, and one day I might be killed by you, but at least for now I'm Peturabo. ”

He glared at it as if he had won.

"And Olympia is my world." Said the Lord of Steel. "The problem between it and me will be solved by me and it."

Also, yards.

(End of chapter)