Wizard of the Abyss - Chapter 263

Chapter 263: False God (7)

TL/ED – Miso

I didn’t catch exactly what Nightchase’s warning meant.

In any case, it was dangerous. That much was what she was trying to tell me.

And if all it amounted to was “dangerous,” then my decision hadn’t changed.

“I’m going in.”

“What an idiot.”

As if she’d expected as much, Nightchase hid herself away inside the cup. Wondering just how the heck she pulled off such a marvelous trick, I peered into the cup, and found it filled with water rippling gently inside.

So this was something I’d be able to do myself one day, was it? Frowning, I tucked the cup carelessly into my pocket and set off toward what had once been the Capital.

And then I discovered the first problem.

“…Do I have to ask them to open it?”

The Capital’s massive gates were shut tight.

With nothing to lose, I tried knocking on them.

“Elysia. It’s me. Let’s talk.”

Sadly, no answer came back.

Well, it had been worth a shot. As I shrugged, Linmel immediately drew her sword.

“Jern, step back for a moment.”

“I can punch a small hole through it myself, you know-”

“Then they wouldn’t notice over there, would they?”

Linmel said something I couldn’t make sense of and leveled her blade.

That was all I managed to see.

“Hngh.”

Along with a cute little cry that didn’t sound like she’d put much into it at all, a bolt of lightning came down.

To be precise, the sound came a touch late.

KRAKABOOOOOM!!!

“…?”

She brought the raised sword slashing down.

With nothing more than that, the gate and the wall were split clean in two.

Rumble, rumble, rumble… the stone wall that should have held it up and the gate that had been smashed to pieces began to collapse slowly. What had once been the western gate of the Capital became a pile of rubble close to ruins in less than ten seconds.

Watching the wooden door get mercilessly crushed beneath the fallen gate stones, scattering sawdust into the air, I swallowed hard.

And even after all this, I was a Demi-god, and Linmel was a Human?

“That should have gotten the message across.”

Linmel stared at the shattered gate and muttered to herself with a hostility I could feel.

It seemed, somehow, that she didn’t care for Elysia. It was natural enough not to like one of the Fallen, of course. Had they fought or something?

“R-right. Then shall we head in for now?”

Inside the gate was just as it had looked from outside. It had been restored so cleanly that it wouldn’t have seemed strange for people to be walking around right then (except for the gate Linmel had wrecked), yet it was a silent city with no one in it.

When I started walking to reach the library, which I hadn’t been able to make out-

“Aren’t these cucumbers way too expensive?”

“You think we run our business at a loss? Don’t buy them if you don’t want to.”

“What are you brats doing playing in the carriage road, get lost right now!”

“Now, now, you’d best be careful. With the recent ordinance, anyone caught beating children won’t escape a heavy sentence.”

“Tch, what’s the world coming to…”

People sprang into being.

“Hm.”

“Uh, uh…?”

The least fitting thing imaginable for the word “silence,” the laughter of children and the haggling over prices, carriages rolling and beggars begging and dogs roaming about, the Capital I’d known was recreated exactly as it had been.

It seemed Linmel could see it too. Unable to immediately grasp the sight before her eyes, she looked around, then turned to glance behind her and her eyes went wide.

“Jern, look behind you!”

The gate Linmel had just smashed to pieces had somehow regenerated.

That was how it appeared to my eyes. My Current Sense told me something different, so I grabbed Linmel’s hand and stepped backward just as I was.

“Jern?”

“It’s fake.”

A few more steps.

The moment I drew back, a silence loud enough to hurt my ears returned once more.

The Capital seen from outside the gate was still a ghost town empty of people, so the gate too remained shattered.

I frowned and pulled out Nightchase, whom I’d brought along for exactly a situation like this.

“What is this thing?”

“How should I know? You think I’m some kind of encyclopedia?”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course not. That place is just a space without a world. Part of a world that, for some reason, no Outer God owns. Normally something like that can’t exist this way. Even back in my time it was only ever part of an empty space that, very rarely, would form and then vanish right away. Do you really think there’s a world that exists without a god?”

Nightchase went on from inside the cup as if she truly didn’t know.

“From here it’s just a guess, but the one who made this world, that fellow they call the Outer God of the Deep Sea?”

“The First Wizard. What about him?”

“To me, this world looks like a tool that guy used.”

“…?”

A tool?

The phrasing didn’t sit well with me, and as I frowned, Nightchase continued.

“The Outer God of the Deep Sea harbored that delusion, didn’t he, that a world without us, without Outer Gods, was the most perfect world? But the thing is, he himself was an Outer God too. So to make it run even without him, he went ahead and bestowed Authority to turn that into a god.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“I’m saying he forcibly Deified a world that no god owned. Your friend, to put it one way…”

Nightchase, who had been choosing her words, soon snickered.

“…would be something like an eraser. If gods overlaying each other’s Domains is like fighting by painting their own colors over one another on a drawing pad, then the Outer God of the Deep Sea folded nothingness into the world, killing the Outer Gods and erasing their worlds along with them, making it as if there had been nothing there from the start. Nasty hobby.”

An eraser, huh.

As I chewed over the word, she went on as if singing.

“The problem is, the moment he created a world like this, that eraser is no longer needed. So it isn’t supposed to exist. The Outer God of the Deep Sea probably thought the same and swallowed it down himself, I’d guess, but he never imagined in his wildest dreams that it would bloom again from the bloodline of his own descendants.”

“So you’re saying the situation isn’t great.”

“Not great? Ahaha!”

Nightchase sneered openly and stuck her head out of the cup to look at the Capital.

“That thing can’t be killed, can’t be won over, can’t be swallowed; it’s like a cancer. It’s a common enemy to humanity, to Void, and to you as well. Leave it be and it’ll spread out and cover the world humanity has to live in, and while Void could probably quarantine it somehow, he’d rather not poke at it for no reason. But the worst off is you. You have to go in there, don’t you?”

“…”

“What if your Authority dwindles? What if the Domain you’ve expanded all this time gets buried and erased in that world? You think you can stand against Void in a body that isn’t even a god’s anymore?”

“Well, it’s not like it’s impossible.”

“Bleh.”

I poked Nightchase’s head back down to shut her in, stopping her merry chattering, and started walking into the Capital again.

What stopped me was Linmel.

“Hm? Linmel, what is it?”

“Jern. I’ll go.”

“…What?”

Linmel, who had taken hold of my hand, answered with a confident look on her face.

“From what I’ve heard, it sounds like if you go in there, Jern, some kind of problem could come up. Right?”

“Probably. It can’t be certain, though.”

There was no way Elysia would actually do me any harm.

The sort of thing Nightchase was imagining likely wouldn’t happen. As I was thinking that, Linmel boldly thumped her chest.

“Then just trust me. There won’t be any problem if I go in, right? Isn’t that so?”

“…Uh…”

Was that how it worked?

For a moment I was tempted, but then I shook my head.

“No, that won’t do. That’s too dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

Linmel tilted her head. Behind her I could see the gate she’d smashed to pieces.

It was something made by this small, white hand that was holding my wrist right now.

“Well, Elysia could be dangerous, and-”

“Don’t worry. I absolutely won’t kill her.”

“She can’t be left crippled either. Her arms and legs all have to be intact.”

“Of course! If she resists too much, she might end up with a little scratch on her face, but that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It’s not that it doesn’t matter…”

“Trust me, Jern.”

She met my eyes in earnest.

“While you’ve been suffering in that place called the Deep Sea for our sake, I’ve worked hard too, not as much as that, but still. So that someday I could be a strength to you when you came back.”

“Yeah. It seems like you’ve gotten stronger than me.”

“That’s not true, Jern. I know what I know.”

Linmel looked at me.

In those eyes, something different was reflected.

“You’ve changed, Jern. Too much. Far, far too much.”

“…”

At those words-

I slowly felt a chill crawl up my spine.

“Linmel. How do I look to you?”

“Jern is Jern. No matter how you change, that doesn’t change.”

“…Oh no,”

From the moment I’d returned, Linmel had probably known, and seen, without missing a single instant, that I’d become something other than human.

It seemed I’d been disregarding her intuition far too much.

What would go through her mind, learning that someone she’d spent half her life with had become something other than human? As I opened my mouth to explain, she shook her head as if there were no need.

“I’m fine. Still, in a situation like this, you should rely on me. Because if not for things like this, it seems like I won’t be able to be of any use to you. I’ll come back safe, no matter what.”

There was truly so much I needed to say, but-

only one thing came out.

“…I’m counting on you.”

“Mm!”

As if that one word was enough, Linmel stepped back and went in through the gate.

Linmel’s figure no longer appeared in my Current Sense. Feeling lousy, I perched myself down where I was, and a startled-sounding voice came from inside the cup.

“So there was a reason you’d take a liking to that one.”

“Shut up or I’ll kill you.”

“What’s the matter? Beings who can see Domains not permitted to Mortals aren’t exactly rare. Later on, ones like that get recognized as our Apostles. For a mere human to have the qualities of an Apostle is an enormous thing. At least the humans I know are a vermin-like species, so I’d believed it would’ve been impossible for anything short of an elf…”

I tied the cup’s lid shut so Nightchase couldn’t get out and double-bagged it inside my pack.

Even if Elysia was one of the Fallen who’d come to possess some kind of Domain, she wouldn’t be able to overcome Linmel as she was now.

‘That thing would even kill Decay.’

In strength, and in the ability to see through to the essence of things.

She seemed superior to me, a mere Demi-god at best.

Thinking such thoughts, I sat on a hill near the Capital and waited for Linmel for a while.

A few hours later.

Around when the sun began to set and dusk settled over the Capital.

“…”

Something caught on my Current Sense.

Clang.

From inside the gate, a bent lump of metal came flying out, as if spat forth.

“Haah, it’s all gone wrong.”

Nightchase, having squeezed her way out of the bag, frowned.

Looking at the lump of metal that had once been a sword.

It was the sword Linmel had been holding until a few hours ago.

As I walked over, picked up the sword and examined it, Nightchase, having grown anxious on her own, spoke up.

“Still, how about waiting a little longer? She might’ve just tossed it because it got in the way.”

“No.”

“Don’t you dare act like a human. Seriously.”

“I’ve held back long enough.”

If they want to watch, then let them.

I undid every Binding Seal that had been holding me back and took a single step forward.

Seeing water slowly seep out from the footprint I’d left, Nightchase hung her head low.

“…Finish it as fast as you can. Considering you weren’t caught even when you came here and made a lake, just in case.”

Linmel, Elysia.

It was time to drag them both back out.