Crown King: Return of The Labyrinth | ✓

Chapter 16: Hiding

- your pov -

It was familiar.

The same scent, feeling and sight sent chills down my spine. I knew this feeling. I looked around and tried to move as I float, seeing the endless cosmos that held various orbs and colors. The noise was familiar too— relaxing, something that can make someone calm.

Comfort. I felt safe in here. I couldn't even imagine after a long journey I've went through, and all these wounds on my skin have mysteriously healed. The white noise kept on calling out to me. I turned, spinning and looking about to where it was coming from.

The sound got louder as I roamed across space. A little farther from my location floated a lifeless body. I then realized the noise was coming from him, but not exactly him. The white light surrounded his body as if to make me waken him.

As I neared, my heart pounded.

He couldn't be dead.

"Hey," I slightly shook his shoulder. His eyes were still closed. I gulped, finally making a decision to listen to his heartbeat so I leaned my ear down on his chest. Relief soon washed over me.

It's beating—

"What are you doing?"

"Ah!" I swiftly retracted myself and found myself a few swims away from him. He groaned, holding onto his head as he mustered all of what just happened before. I could still remember the two of us fighting a monster and killing it off, then we were brought here by a tornado vanishing us from that realm. Now we're here, and I thanked we were in a neutral place.

"W-What just happened?!" He looks around frantically.

I sighed. "You gotta thank we're currently in a neutral realm. Never thought the tornado would lull you to sleep."

"I felt dizzy, you know, so I shut my eyes close. I didn't expect I'd actually fall asleep," he slightly glared at me. Seeing his reaction made me smile a bit, much to my amusement. He still has the coldness in him. "So what are we gonna do now?"

"I really don't know," I exhaled, looking around the mysterious swirls of stars hovering around the two of us. "Roam around, I guess?" A lump formed in my throat all of a sudden. ". . . Unless you want to end up meeting the black hole, which is a bad idea."

Considering it, this wasn't a neutral place all along.

"I've heard of it," he said. "It literally just sucks anything that passes through near it, right?"

"Yeah, but, it has an endless arm-like path, and it literally sucks anything that gets into its way into it," I slightly tensed at the thought of it. "No one knows where it is, and the scary part is that you don't know if it's near to you already, and if you did, it'll already be too late."

Cloud was humming, then he stopped. "I think it wouldn't be scary if I'd get dragged into the past. I mean, I could've done something that would prevent me from having amnesia. I could've remembered what happened to me back then."

Soon after he said that, I felt like an icicle. What would his reaction be if he found out that he had sacrificed himself just to save me from getting killed? Fear clouded my thoughts as I broke eye contact with him. But even so, I tried not to show my unnerved reaction. "Well . . . what if you were dragged into the future?"

Through my peripheral vision, he was looking down, somehow I could feel him being confused, and afraid of what might actually happen in the future. "No one knows," he whispered. "Yet somehow, you can the predict the future if you knew what happened in the past . . . but I don't even know my past, which is why I'm trying to bring all the pieces together."