Slayers: Chaos

Chaos 73

Slayers: Chaos

Episode 073: Lunatic! We're All Mad Here

Milgazia was stuck thinking about how to handle the unlikely, but apparent, situation of Dolphin having a nervous breakdown that drove her to seek a creative way to protect herself. Darkstar had drilled the fear of death into her head during her captivity, something that Milgazia did not doubt that he could do, thus it was only natural that she clung to the life giving power of fusion magic, even subconsciously, as a form of protection. After all, even when monsters wanted destruction, they had their, ifs, ands and buts about it, as if they didn't want to just get it over with. Exterminating others, they would do it, especially when it empowered them, thus making them safer at the same time, in the case of the higher ranks, or preventing them from being labeled as incompetent and exterminated by their superiors in the case of the lower ranks. Yet at the last moment, like any sentient creature that existed, they wanted to continue existing. They were chaotic, not nothingness, after all.

This also worried Milgazia for another reason. Zelas had been studious in overcoming the monsters' known weaknesses and even managed to provide several of her minions with added defenses through various processes. Fang was a monster and fox chimera, part monster and part living beast. Xellos had experienced humanity and retained the lessons learned well enough so that he was stronger as a monster towards their usual weak points. However, Zelas had not made any changes to herself, yet she was able to adapt to wielding courage, albeit it still pained her. Granted, Canal was able to wield wrath, but upon remembering the situations he had been told about in stories shared while traveling through space in the over-world, Milgazia mused that they were worse off than he thought. Just as Canal had been outmatched at that time, so were they. The balance of darkness and light was so off that one side wielded the power of the other in an effort to restore that balance and that led to evolution, the mixture of light and dark. To take some of the opposing forces and wield them to even out the field, said field would have to have been severely tilted in the first place.

It all also reminded Milgazia of when he started to wield black magic, even mastering several spells that borrowed power from Zelas. He wasn't raised to do so, being a golden dragon and all. He should think he would want nothing to do with such forces after the events of the War of the Monster's fall. Yet he took that power and used it as if it was his own, his instinct guiding him in an ironic twist that felt too necessary to be a mere coincidence. To win is to lose and to lose is to win. Those who push the world out of balance will have their power taken for the purpose of trying to restore that balance. Over a year ago the battle had been motion versus stillness, ever changing life versus eternal death, chaos versus nothingness. This time it was an odd mix of a being that wielded both darkness and nothingness in unpredictable ways. Yet one thing had to be the same as last year, Milgazia didn't know how, but he knew it. "She knows..." He muttered under his breath. 'Zelas once again knows more than she lets on,' Milgazia mused. She must have reached the same conclusion as him as us didn't further push the worlds out of balance even if she had the chance to kill Luna, maybe even ruin or seal her very soul to prevent the knight of Ceifeed from reincarnating. Yet she let her go so easily, she must have expected to require using Luna's power for herself in the future somehow. Maybe it was just an inexplicable instinct, but a beast's instinct was usually right.

"Who knows what?" Dolphin snapped, not liking the long silence. She wasn't used to being in such a weakened state and the feeling of Darkstar's power trying to overtake her was far too fresh in her mind for her uneasiness to leave her any time soon. Receiving nothing but silence in exchange for her question, Dolphin continued with a thoughtful expression replacing her slightly psychotic one from before. "A monster who is worried about dying, the world is a backwards place if I am haunted by what I feed on."