when one looks back to their childhood, one remembers the vivid springs of laughter, climbing trees and reaching out for the stars, and making flower crowns in fields of flowers. but when [name] looked back at her youth, it was void of those colorfu...
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chapter 68. [name]'s dream
[ author's note: this chapter has such a special place in my heart i hope you guys love it too <3 ]
[ ...i want... ]
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the mountain of rubble hissed and groaned like a beast breathing its last, every settling stone coughing up plumes of dust that drifted across the blackened sky.
around lay buried bodies of ghouls, each one burning from the black flames, some underneath the rubble, some slowly burning away...not one standing back up to live.
for a long moment, the ruins stood in silence, as though even the world itself was holding its breath, but then that silence was split in half by a ragged laugh, broken and manic, rising up from beneath the wreckage.
fang clawed his way out first, bloodied arms trembling as he shoved a boulder aside, his grin wide enough to split his face. his chest heaved with each breath, but his laughter came out louder still, tumbling over itself in fits of madness.
"no fuckin' way..." he wheezed, choking on dust but laughing anyway. "they actuallydestroyed the tower. bahahahaha! can you—can you even believe that?! the one thing we fought tooth and nail over, the one place that was supposed to stand forever, and they flattened it like it was a sandcastle!"
a few meters away, the rubble shifted again, and eurene rose from the broken stone like some blackened phantom, as if her very body were a flame guttering on its last flicker. blood slicked her side from zoro's attack, and every step she took smeared more of it across the stone, but her eyes remained hollow, unblinking, devoid of even the faintest ripple of emotion.
"seeing it crumble, and nowing it is gone..." she said softly, her voice cold enough to cut the smoke. "...i can believe it...because that is what they do."
"hah... hahahah..."
aozaru's gravelly chuckle echoed then, as the massive old man slumped against what remained of a wall, his torso half-frozen from brook's strike, the rest scorched raw by flame. he groaned as though every laugh cracked a rib, but he laughed anyway, deep and booming. "what a show... what a fight... what an experience. my body feels like it's been ground into paste... but damn if it wasn't worth it just to see that tower finally fall."
