Wizard of the Abyss - Chapter 261

Chapter 261: False God (5)

TL/ED – Miso

The next morning. I carefully took a single step forward and pressed my foot to the ground.

Nightchase studied the footprint I left behind, then nodded.

“Right. This should do.”

“Well, that’s a small mercy…”

I let out a sigh and looked down at the footprint.

No more water was welling up. If I’d gone off to this so-called new Capital while carrying an ability that created a lake with every step, I’d have been a walking, living disaster.

That said, there was an enormous difference between hiding an ability while human and hiding one while a god.

“This is so stifling.”

The air felt heavy. The ground was hot. The sunlight was unpleasant.

In my current state, I could easily have listed thousands of reasons why this world displeased me. Just standing or walking was enough to grate on my nerves.

“Of course it is. Right now you’re deliberately putting a Burden on yourself.”

“A Burden?”

“Yes. Normally, it’s only natural for a little ocean to appear every time you take a step.”

Nightchase answered as if I’d said something absurd.

“That’s what happens when you force your way into a place that isn’t your Domain. When gods visit another world, they’re supposed to tint it with their own Domain first.”

“That’s a god? Sounds more like a stray dog marking its turf with piss.”

Natural or not, I couldn’t move around in that state.

Bearing a slight- no, a fairly large amount of discomfort, I walked toward Linmel, who wore a look of fascination.

“I’m ready. Let’s go.”

“Okay, but it’s a bit of a walk. Will you be all right?”

“How far?”

“Hmm? About two hours, maybe?”

“…On horseback?”

“No, that’s about how long it takes when I run.”

Which meant it took even longer on horseback.

As I sighed and prepared to accept my fate, Linmel laughed brightly and crouched down in front of me.

“What are you doing?”

“Get on!”

“…No, I have to bring this one along too…”

I glanced at Nightchase, ready to refuse.

Nightchase tossed a wooden cup, from who knows where, onto the ground, then stuck a foot into it.

“Whoa, what is that?”

“This is how I’ll travel.”

Nightchase melted down and poured into the tiny cup, one that could barely hold a single glass of water.

Dumbfounded, I picked up the cup, gave it a shake, and asked.

“Are you sure you actually became human? How is something like this even possible?”

“If I were still a god, I wouldn’t need to travel at all, would I? I’d just sprinkle some water wherever I needed to be and appear there.”

That made sense.

Holding the cup of water, I went through a brief inner struggle.

Walking for nearly a whole day inside this unpleasantness, or throwing away my pride and riding on Linmel’s back.

The decision came quickly. No one was watching, after all.

“My… for someone who’s supposedly the only god who can stand against Void, you’re a sorry sight.”

It wasn’t that there was no one at all. Cheon-hwa leaned her back against a tree, watching this with indifference, looking as though she had no intention whatsoever of coming.

“You’re not coming? You could meet your original, you know.”

“…”

Cheon-hwa didn’t answer right away. She paused for a moment, then shook her head.

“It isn’t the right time yet.”

“Is that so?”

If she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to. I had no intention of forcing her.

I didn’t have time to spare on anything else right now.

“And, um, set me down before we get there, okay?”

“Got it!”

In exchange for surrendering my pride, Linmel played the role of taxi to perfection.

We arrived at the great Capital in an instant, at a speed close to the speed of sound.

The moment we arrived, I cautiously felt out my surroundings with Current Sense.

“This is more…”

“In one piece than you expected?”

It was.

The scale had shrunk a little, of course, but it was a city built so well that no one would believe it was a place people had fled to.

And the people, rather than looking anxious, were living and smiling well enough. So much so that it was hard to believe this world was teetering on the edge of ruin.

“Look, look, I helped dig this moat! You could say the west gate section was made entirely by me. How is it? How is it?”

“Y-yeah. Good job.”

Praising a moat deep enough that an ordinary person would die instantly if they fell in, the moment I passed through the open gate- a knight, a woman who had been standing nearby at a loss, came rushing over.

The woman knight, her face gone utterly pale, looked Linmel over from every angle to check for injuries, then heaved a deep sigh.

“Knight Commander Linmel! You abandoned your duties and went off where exactly?! Do you have any idea how worried I was? You know that if even you go down, we’re truly finished…!”

“Ah, that’s right… I never reported in. Sorry. I forgot.”

So Linmel was a Knight Commander.

Well, with this skill, that was only natural. As I was caught up in such thoughts, the woman knight’s gaze turned toward me.

“And this man is…?”

“It’s Jern! Oh, Jern. This is my Adjutant.”

“My name is Jern Aspandal.”

At those words.

The Adjutant’s expression froze stiff as stone.

“J-Jern…? That Jern?”

“That…?”

“The one the Commander is always talking about-”

“…Aaaah!! Yes, yes! That’s the one! Now, Jern, I have something I need to report, so I’ll go on ahead! Um, wait for me in front of the Imperial Palace!”

Linmel, whose face had taken on the look of someone who’d suddenly realized something, clamped a hand over the Adjutant’s mouth like lightning, then shoved her by the back toward some barracks.

“You absolutely have to wait for me! Absolutely!”

“Sure…?”

What was that about.

Tilting my head, I made my way toward the Imperial Palace.

The Imperial Palace boasted such a majestic appearance that it seemed the Empire’s decline was still a long way off. As I was thinking about what a chore it must have been to build it on this mountain, I suddenly noticed that its gate stood wide open.

“?”

Naturally, the gate of the Imperial Palace was supposed to be closed. No matter the circumstances.

Had something happened while Linmel was away? Feeling a slight unease, I turned my Current Sense to look.

“…Oh no.”

The gate was thrown wide open.

It wasn’t that something had happened. An Attendant, the moment he saw me, immediately bowed his head and approached.

“Are you Sir Jern?”

“Ah, yes.”

“Please follow me.”

“…”

Having roughly guessed how things were going, I sighed and walked after the Attendant.

It didn’t take long before the Attendant arrived at a small room and knocked on the door.

[Come in.]

A familiar voice answered.

The Attendant stepped back, as if turning the door handle was not part of his duties. With no other choice, I opened the door myself, and-

“It’s been a while.”

“I trust you’ve been well all this time.”

Seated at a desk, Sharmia greeted me with a gentle smile.

She looked far more tired than the last time I’d seen her, but I couldn’t hold back and spoke up.

“So you saw it.”

“Yes. I knew you’d be coming today.”

“Does that mean you’re going to be assassinated?”

Sharmia could regress.

Each time she met death, she returned to the past, carrying her memories with her.

If she’d learned I was coming through that ability, it meant something fatal was about to happen to her, and yet,

Sharmia saw the slight bewilderment on my face and quickly shook her head.

“No, it’s fine. I just died a moment ago.”

“…What?”

What was that supposed to mean.

Sharmia, as if it were nothing, ran her fingers over a silver dagger lying on the desk.

“I don’t usually push my ability this hard, but as you probably already know- things aren’t exactly good these days, are they?”

“That only sounds to me like an assassin came…”

“In a sense, I suppose you could say so. That assassin will be knocking on that door in ten seconds.”

An assassin?

As I tilted my head, sure enough, the sound of knocking came.

[Your Highness! Urgent news! In the west, the ground has split open, and all of the provisions have plunged into the earth!]

“Shall I kill him?”

“No. He really is a court official.”

-Thud. With a tired face, Sharmia pressed her seal onto a document, then flicked her hand as if to say the door should be opened.

The court official who entered through the opened door, panting for breath, pressed his head to the floor as if it were a genuine crisis.

“The food to sustain the army at the western rampart has now dwindled to three days’ worth. At this rate, when the Fallen attack, we won’t be able to hold a proper front line…”

“I’ve already loaded all the food from the western storehouse onto wagons. According to this letter, once you give the order to the drivers, enough provisions to last a month will set out at once.”

“What? Ah, did you say a month…? Where in the world would such food…”

“I’ve been gathering a little at a time for a while now. For times like this.”

“Oh, oh…”

The court official looked up at Sharmia with an expression as though he were beholding some kind of god, gave a deep bow, and left.

Only then did I realize what Sharmia had been doing, and I frowned.

“…You’re putting it to very active use. Is that all right?”

Every time something came up, Sharmia would immediately end her own life to return to the past, and she’d been preparing from that point on.

She’d used letters to tease me before too, but judging by how practiced her handling was, it seemed she’d been doing this for nearly five years straight. It didn’t look like something a sane person would do.

“It’s not all right, is it? Still, right now there’s no other way but this.”

Even after I’d arrived, Sharmia had kept dying and dying, returning to the past.

Stretching her shoulders out as if the work was finally done, she perched tiredly on her chair and shot me a sullen look.

“Do you remember, before? That you, Jern, saw a future where you made the Capital sink underwater.”

“…Yes. You did say something like that.”

“In the end, that prophecy was right. It was only a matter of timing.”

Submersion. It was part of my plan. Had she already heard it from the future me.

I explained calmly.

“There’s no other way besides that.”

“I agree. I agree, but- I still don’t understand how you can possibly pull it off.”

The Princess tilted her head as if curious.

“I heard you’ve become something close to a god. Perhaps you could make the world sink. But once you do that and come face to face with Void, can you actually strike him down?”

“-Of course it’s impossible.”

The one who answered wasn’t me.

The cup fastened at my waist- Nightchase, who had been inside it, crawled out and, once again in the form of young Linmel, replied as she looked at Sharmia.

“You humans really know nothing about this being called Void. Do you even know how a god’s rank is determined?”

“I wouldn’t, no. As you said, I’m only human.”

“It’s determined by the Domain you rule. That’s precisely why we go around invading others’ Domains and trying to take them for ourselves.”

Having said that, Nightchase looked up at the ceiling as if disgusted.

“That fellow was given the sky from the moment he was born. Half the world is sky, so even if the remaining half pooled all their strength together, it would barely make a fifty-fifty Domain. And right now, Void doesn’t just possess the sky. He’s devoured the Domain of Magic too, and he’s swallowing other Outer Gods to his heart’s content as well, isn’t he?”

“…”

“Every remaining Outer God could come at him at once and still be no match. And yet wanting to throw yourselves at him trusting in this one rookie Outer God can be nothing other than an act of suicide…”

“I see. Thank you, that was helpful, Nightchase.”

“…You know my name? This is really unsettling. What are you?”

“She’s the Princess of the Empire, so mind your manners.”

“What’s a mere king of humans to me.”

Grumbling, Nightchase glared at Sharmia and went on.

“Still, if I had to pick the highest-probability option, this one’s words are right. If you fight him with no countermeasures at all, then even on the off chance you win, he can flee whenever he likes. So first you have to make it so he can’t run.”

“To circle back to the topic, if you do make it so he can’t flee, can Jern actually defeat him?”

Nightchase snorted and replied.

“First he’d have to try a method similar to that bastard’s. If he devours as many of those things called the Fallen as he can- it’d still be impossible all the same, but at least he might be able to throw one more punch, no?”

“…Understood.”

Closing her eyes and nodding, Sharmia gave her assent.

“If it were simply something impossible, Jern has accomplished it any number of times. For a human to become such a… nearly omnipotent being, that too, when you think about it, was impossible, wasn’t it?”

“That’s… true.”

“I, too, have no choice but to live this way, killing myself over and over, so if I can place a bet- I’d like to place it on someone who’s already turned the impossible into the possible once before.”

Sharmia smiled at me with effort.

“My greeting is overdue. Welcome back, Jern.”

“Thank you.”

Bowing my head to offer this minimal courtesy to the hero who was single-handedly holding up humanity, I then moved on to the most important matter.

“But before catching the other Fallen, there’s something I have to do first.”

“And what’s that?”

“Elysia.”

“…”

At those words, Sharmia’s expression darkened slightly.

“I want to save her first. What on earth happened?”

“How much have you heard?”

“That after I vanished, Elysia fell into the Abyss and has been inflicting enormous damage on the Empire…”

“It would be fortunate if it ended at mere damage.”

Sharmia sighed and let her head droop.

“She- not long after you disappeared, she threw away her noble status and rank entirely and joined the Crimson Circle.”

“…What??? No, why would she do that??”

“I don’t know. Whether she wanted to find information about you, or there was some other reason… but in the end, she was expelled from within the Crimson Circle. Not in a normal state, but in a Fallen one.”

“The Crimson Circle expelled a Fallen?”

Wasn’t that backwards.

She wasn’t expelled for being found out as not Fallen. She was expelled because she’d fallen into the Abyss.

As the absurd information that Elysia had joined the Crimson Circle brought on a headache and I clutched my head, Sharmia spoke words that made it worse.

“Elysia is now neither the Crimson Circle nor humanity, but a third faction unto herself. You’d have to say she’s become a being that hates them both.”

“What the- where is she right now?”

From the situation alone, it was hard to grasp what had happened or what had become of Elysia. As only the thought that I’d have to meet her in person grew stronger, Sharmia, who had been hesitating, opened her mouth.

“The Witch of Nothingness is in the Capital’s library.”

“…?”

At that, I tilted my head. Where would the Capital be if not here.

But the moment I heard the rest-

“The former Capital, that library where you used to be.”

…the moment I heard that.

I realized why she was there, and gritted my teeth.

Surely not, surely not, I’d kept telling myself.

“…She’s looking for me.”

It was the same as Linmel.

Elysia was out there searching for me.