Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 534: Finale

(3rd Person POV)

The Demiurge's slanted eyes narrowed at that. "This... Are you trying to make a second Pleroma out of the Kenoma?"

"No." Arthur shook his head. "I'm telling you I want the Kenoma steadier than it is now. It keeps throwing up broken characters, contradictions, things that don't hold together from one moment to the next. We give it consistent laws. We make it regular. But it stays what it is — the opposite of the Pleroma. The Kenoma will be the place where everything the Pleroma forbids gets to be real. In the Pleroma there are worlds with magic and worlds without, but the Monad keeps all of it regulated; a reality can't just sprout a brand-new system of power out of nothing there. Here, anything can. That is the whole strength of the place. And that is exactly why it's unstable. So we don't kill the instability. We put a leash on it."

He went on, laying the shape of it out plainly. "We stop the Archons' game — the forced collapses, a thousand endings choked out of a world before it's had one. We let a reality run its own full cycle instead of being harvested early. We set laws underneath the chaos so the chaos has a floor to fall on. The wild things still get born. They just stop tearing the whole reality down on their way out. Bounded, not erased."

The Demiurge weighed it, and found, to his own faint surprise, that the plan would work. With his power gone he was scarcely more now than one of his own Archons had been, and the Archons were gone besides. He was alone, and there was nothing left for him to do but follow.

"I will do as you ask," he said.

"Good." Arthur nodded. "You've got trillions of years behind you. I expect a great deal out of that. And don't waste a thought on hiding — wherever you go, I'm already there. I can reach you anywhere."

The Demiurge let out a dry, tired chuckle. "Understood, Lord Arthur."

And then he was gone, off to the work he'd been left alive to do.

Arthur turned to the empty throne room. He willed himself larger, to the scale the seat had been built for, and sat down upon it.

"So. Absolute Ruler of the Kenoma." He let his head tip back against the throne. "And already bored out of my mind." A thought surfaced, and with it the ghost of a grin. "System or no system, there's nothing stopping me now from dropping in on my favorite worlds. Dragon Ball, for a start."

He thought of it, and went.

---

He arrived precisely where he meant to: the small planet of the God of Destruction, out in Universe 7.

Arthur stood with his hands folded behind his back, letting off no ki at all, not the faintest thread of god ki, and watched.

Whis was running Goku and Vegeta through their training, easy and loose, barely seeming to move. "Goku, your stance is nothing but openings. Vegeta — far too restless, as always."

The two of them traded blows across the grass. Then Goku stopped dead in the middle of a strike, and Vegeta's fist cracked clean across his jaw as Whis slipped aside from the exchange.

"Kakarot!" Vegeta snarled. "What in the world is wrong with you? Can't you see we're in the middle of something?"

"Hohoho," Whis chuckled.

But Goku wasn't listening to either of them. He was staring, wide-eyed, mouth open. "L-look. Vegeta, Whis — there's somebody over there. Somebody's watching us."

"What? Impossible." Vegeta scoffed. "Do you have any idea whose planet this is? This is Lord Beerus's—" He turned to follow Goku's stare, and the words died in his throat.

Whis had felt nothing either. But when he turned, his eyes went wide, and a bead of sweat stood out on his brow — a fear in him he had not felt before the Grand Priest, or before Zeno himself. "That's... How did someone come this far in without my sensing a thing?"

Arthur started toward them.

In a blink Whis was between the newcomer and his students. "Goku. Vegeta. Get back. Whatever begins here is beyond your level — I can't promise I'll be able to protect you."

The two of them swallowed hard. If Whis of all beings was saying that, something was very wrong indeed.

Arthur stopped before them. "Greetings. I'm Arthur — the Absolute Ruler of the Kenoma, which happens to be the reality this world of yours sits inside. What's up?" He offered his name and his title as lightly as a man passing the time of day.

Whis' composure trembled. "Absolute Ruler of the... Kenoma? I've never heard the name. Just who are you?"

"Whis," Arthur said, "your stance is nothing but openings."

He was in front of Whis before the words had landed.

"What—!"

Arthur struck him once, at the base of the skull. In that single blow the strength went out of Whis almost entirely, and his Ultra Instinct — that flawless, automatic guard — did nothing at all. His flight failed. He dropped to the grass and took a few unsteady steps back. "Such power..."

Nearby, Goku and Vegeta stared. They had never once managed to land a hand on Whis. This stranger had done it between one breath and the next.

"There's no need to be afraid," Arthur told them. "I've no intention of harming a reality that sits under my own territory."

Whis straightened, gathered himself, and asked with careful respect, "May I know who you truly are? Are you the Dragon God — Zalama?"

Arthur waved it off. "What? No. As I told you. I'm the Absolute Ruler of the Kenoma."

Whis plainly still didn't follow, so Arthur laid it out. "Think of it this way. There are infinite realities — but only two that matter above the rest. There is the Pleroma, which is stable, and which would never permit a reality like yours to exist in the first place. And there is the Kenoma, which allows exactly this. Figures with the strength to shatter planets. Universes. Whole multiverses."

He let that settle. "That Zeno of yours, ruling over the multiverse — he's simply one being among countless like him, scattered through the realities of the Kenoma. And I, as the Absolute Ruler of that Kenoma, can erase realities outright. I could wipe the whole of Dragon Ball from my own world, and yes, it might well surface again somewhere in the Kenoma — and I could erase it again, and again, as often as I liked."

Whis, Goku, and Vegeta went pale. And then, as one, all three of them bowed.

"I-I never dreamed I would meet a figure such as yourself!" Whis said. "Please — allow me to pay my respects!"

Even Goku, who understood perhaps a third of what had just been said, bowed his head, and Vegeta grudgingly with him.

Arthur nodded, satisfied.

He had his fun after that. He needled the Grand Priest. He toyed with Zeno while the Zeno Guards stood by, wholly helpless and unable to lift a finger against him. At one point Zeno, in a fit of pique, tried to erase Arthur where he stood — and the erasure simply turned back on its source, so that Zeno unmade himself instead. There was a brief, universe-wide panic that the ruler of all was suddenly gone. Arthur solved it in a moment by reaching into a neighboring reality and lifting out another Zeno to take the empty seat.

---

After that, Arthur went wandering in earnest, and this time he brought company — Firfel, Apollonia, and the rest of his friends along with them.

They spent themselves across world after world. The Fairy Tail world. Hunter × Hunter. Yu Yu Hakusho. Harry Potter. Doraemon. Every last fiction Arthur had ever carried in his head, and he spared none of them.

And at the end of all of it, Arthur took Firfel — only Firfel, this time — to the Pleroma, where the Absolute Ruler of that reality, the Supreme Being Monad, made his home.

The Pleroma was divided from everything else by nothing but a stretch of empty white, and yet the two realities could never touch, never bleed into one another.

Arthur and Firfel stepped across into that quiet.

An old man waited for them there, robed in white, and by his face he had been expecting them for some time.

"My son," the Monad said. "You've come at last."

Arthur and Firfel exchanged a look, both of them thrown.

My son?

"You were born of this place, Arthur. The Pleroma." The Monad's voice was gentle. "Which is why you could serve as the Divine Spark the system needed. A soul native to the Kenoma would have come apart in all that churning instability long before it ever neared the Throne — but yours was a spark of Pure Order, carried down into the deficiency and never dissolved by it. That same spark is what let you bear the Pleroma's order into the Kenoma without being unmade in the carrying. Your soul has always counted this reality its first home." He inclined his head. "Welcome back to it."

Arthur only smiled. "Monad. I owe you my thanks — for all of it. For designing the system. For smoothing the road under my feet. None of it happens without you."

"I laid out paths," the Monad said. "Which of them you walked was always yours to choose. Understand this: every other reality's Arthur failed. Countless of them reached for the same ultimate height, and every one fell short of it. You alone remained." His gaze moved to Firfel. "And I can see the reason plainly enough. This woman. Firfel Evergreen. She helped you tread the path — guiding you without ever knowing she did it, and holding to a love between you that was true all the way through. Without her, none of it holds. Every other Arthur failed. You succeeded because of her."

"You've got that exactly right," Arthur said.

Firfel's cheeks colored — to be praised so, by the Supreme Being himself. "I only did what I did," she said softly. "I love Arthur. I truly do. And that won't change for all of eternity." She looked up at him as she said it.

Arthur drew her closer against his side.

"Such pure love," the Monad murmured.

Then his tone shifted. "I know why you've come, Arthur. You want to look upon your first world again. The one you lived in, before you were ever reborn as Arthur Morningstar. Is that not so?"

Arthur nodded. "It is. I wanted my wife to see where I really came from."

"Very well." The Monad lifted a hand. "Then let me bring you there, Absolute Ruler of the Kenoma."

Arthur opened his mouth to say something more — and found the words unnecessary, because they were already standing on Earth.

---

They came to rest in a small room. A computer sat on the desk. Posters covered the walls. And there were photographs — a chubby boy, grinning, surrounded by family.

"Where is this?" Firfel asked. She turned to Arthur for the answer, and found none. He had gone utterly quiet.

He was crying.

"Hey..." Firfel had almost never seen it — this man, with all the power he'd gathered to himself, undone so simply.

Arthur let a sob break, and rested his forehead against her shoulder. However vast he had grown, his feelings still ran through him like a river in flood.

"Firfel," he managed. "This room. It's mine. It was my room."

"Really?"

He nodded. "That picture. The chubby kid — that's me."

Firfel stared at it, astonished.

"This is my family's house," Arthur said.

"I want to see the rest of it."

He nodded, and they stepped out together. Through the house the family moved about their day, and Arthur bent his power so that not one of them would sense the two visitors passing among them.

They came upon the mother first.

"It's been a year now," she said, quiet. "A year since Arthur passed."

The father drew her in against him. "Darling. If you cry, he'll see it, and it'll only make him sad."

"I want to cry anyway..."

"Me too."

And the two of them wept together.

Further in were the brothers. Four of them. The eldest spoke up. "Today's Arthur's death anniversary. Whatever else, we show him nothing but happiness. That's the rule."

"Right." The second nodded. "You remember how much the little guy loved his video games? We used to sit and play his favorite one with him."

The third laughed, thick around the edges. "I remember he'd be hammering away on the controller like his life depended on it — and it wasn't even plugged into the console."

"Ha — I remember that too," the fourth said.

There were cousins as well, trading their own small pieces of him back and forth.

Firfel turned to look at Arthur.

He was sobbing openly now, past any dignity, nose running. "Mother. Father. Brothers — I'm here. I'm right here." He said it, and still he would not let himself appear to them.

He only sat down among them instead, Firfel settling in beside him, and together the two of them stayed and listened while a family remembered its youngest son.

"Arthur," Firfel said gently, after a long while. "I want to know. How did you die, here?"

He went quiet, and for a moment he didn't want to touch it. Then he let it out. "I died of an illness. A bad one. Kidney failure — stage four."

Firfel's eyes widened. "You died... such an ordinary, mortal death..."

"This world is orderly," Arthur said, sniffing. "It's the Pleroma. There's no miracle waiting to save you here. I got sick, and I died, and that was all there was to it."

Firfel's own eyes filled. "I don't understand. I thought the Pleroma was a perfect world — no troubles at all, not like our Kenoma. But there's sickness here, and no cure for it?"

"Our Kenoma might hold a cure for something that has none here," Arthur said. "But in this place, if the cure hasn't been found yet, then it simply doesn't exist. And even where a cure is found, there's always another illness waiting behind it. This world is orderly. Pure. Stable. It can only stay that way by holding to its own order. If the Monad reached in and made the sickness vanish by decree — then it would be no better than the Kenoma."

And at last Firfel understood.

They sat there a long time. Then Arthur and Firfel rose and left the house — but not before Arthur left something behind at the small altar where his ashes rested. A note, in his own hand, so that his family would know the writing and know who had left it:

"Mom, Dad, brothers, cousins — don't worry about me. I'm doing well in the other world. In fact, you won't believe this, but I've beaten Goku, Vegeta, Whis, the Grand Priest, and even Zeno! I've been to the Dragon Ball world, and Naruto, and One Piece, and Fairy Tail, and Hunter × Hunter, and more — all the worlds you and I could only ever dream about. I've even got a whole collection of Pokémon. I'm doing better than you could imagine, so please — don't worry about me."

And after that, Arthur and Firfel went out into the world wearing ordinary faces, two Earthlings among the rest, and let themselves simply have fun.

[End.]

---

AN:

I finally finished Lord of Entertainment.

As I was writing the final chapter of this novel, I felt overwhelmed by a bit of sadness and became more emotional than I expected. I knew I had to end it eventually because I couldn't keep struggling with motivation to write it forever. There were times when I felt really unmotivated, and sometimes I would also feel anxious or even have panic attacks. Honestly, I still experience that sometimes even now. It made writing feel much harder than it should have been, and there were many moments when I wondered if I could actually finish this novel.

But now that I'm finally parting ways with this novel, I can't help but feel really sad.

And strangely, I think I'm okay with that.

It's a sad feeling, but in a good way. After spending so much time with this story, these characters, and this journey, it feels a little strange knowing that I've finally reached the end. I think a part of me is just emotional because something that I've been working on for so long is finally over.

At the same time, though, I also feel a great sense of relief and accomplishment.

I finally finished a novel. I didn't drop it halfway through. I actually saw it all the way to the end.

Looking back, the novel isn't perfect, and I know there are a lot of things I could have done better. But even so, I learned a lot while writing it. I made mistakes, tried different things, and improved along the way. I'm glad I got to experience all of that through this novel.

Whether you guys liked the ending or not, I truly appreciate everyone who stayed with me throughout this journey, despite everything.

And to those of you who stuck around until the very end, I especially want to say thank you. Your support meant a lot to me, and I genuinely appreciate every one of you.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for supporting this novel. I hope you enjoyed the journey, even with all its ups and downs.

Thank you so much.

I hope you are all doing well and taking care of yourselves.

And with that, Lord of Entertainment is officially signing off.