Wizard of the Abyss - Chapter 264

Chapter 264: False God (8)

TL/ED – Miso

It was only after I let out my breath that I realized it.

The fact that I’d been holding it all this time.

-Splash. The foot I stepped down with sent an unpleasant sensation up through me.

At some point the ground had turned into sticky, squelching mud. Blinking, I looked around and slowly furrowed my brow.

The whole world was submerged underwater.

…An illusion?

“Gurgle…”

I only realized it wasn’t an illusion after I looked over and saw Nightchase beside me, slowly spitting out bubbles and clutching at her throat.

I hurriedly reached for her, and only after I’d drawn the surrounding water away to make a space where she could survive did I realize I’d done it naturally.

It didn’t feel like manipulating Water Pressure or Current.

It just, it just felt like this world was bending itself to my will.

More than that, it felt like there was no difference between me and this world at all.

“Haah, haah…”

“What is this.”

I looked up at the sky.

A pale, hazy light was filtering down through the water. The sun, probably.

After a long stretch of coughing and spitting out water, Nightchase glared at me as if she wanted to kill me.

“You- this is the world as seen from your perspective.”

“From my perspective…?”

“That’s right, you idiot. You’re the Outer God of the Deep Sea. Wherever you are is the Deep Sea itself.”

I blinked a couple of times, but I understood her meaning soon enough.

The way water poured out and formed a lake every time I took a step in reality, the way I had to throw everything I had into holding it back, it was all the same thing at heart.

In the end, wherever I am has to be the Deep Sea.

I had become that kind of being.

“I never had the slightest wish to understand any of you.”

I muttered to myself as I looked around.

The reason gods are forever trying to make every world their own.

Whether I wanted to know it or not, I felt like I was starting to understand.

“What an awful feeling.”

The Deep Sea was no longer a place of terror and suffering to me.

The sight of the castle completely submerged in seawater was truly grotesque, and yet to me it looked utterly natural.

So much so that the mere thought of it rising back up onto dry land instantly soured my mood.

The insane notion that all things ought to be submerged in the Deep Sea was not a pleasant sensation in the slightest. I shook my head and walked toward the castle gate, and Nightchase scrambled after me, sneering.

“Awful? Do you really think someone who’s tasted the omnipotence of a god could ever go back to a human life?”

“What are you on about.”

“You’ll never put this world back the way it was of your own will. You’ll keep trying to bury every world under the Deep Sea, get caught by Void, and watch your whole plan fall apart. And then I’ll be drowned in the Deep Sea all over again.”

“…?”

What the hell was she talking about.

As I tilted my head, she let out a sigh with a gloomy look on her face.

“Your brain melted away ages ago. The sensation of ruling a part of this world isn’t a pleasure a single mortal brain can dare to withstand. No god can overcome it, which is why no god can give it up willingly. That’s why releasing your Divine Authority should have been the very, very last resort…”

“Have you lost your mind?”

It was such an absurd, baffling thing to say that I had nothing to give her in return but that.

But Nightchase frowned as if she had a fair degree of conviction in her own words.

“Hmph. If you think I’m wrong, then Seal your Divine Authority again. If you can say, even for a single moment, that this world isn’t the Deep Sea-”

“This world is not the Deep Sea.”

Going back was far easier than Liberation had been.

I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again, and at once a fierce, unfiltered sunlight that no longer passed through water tickled my skin.

“…Huh?”

The world was no longer submerged.

There wasn’t even a trace left to show it ever had been. The only thing left to prove that this world had been inside the Deep Sea moments ago was Nightchase, water dripping from her whole body like a drowned rat, a dazed look on her face.

She stood there blankly, as if she couldn’t believe I had denied the Deep Sea.

“Satisfied?”

I didn’t have much time to play along with this kind of game, so I waved my hand again and submerged the world. This time taking care not to let Nightchase drown.

Nightchase hurriedly followed behind me and threw out a question.

“W-wait, how, how did you resist the impulse?”

“On the contrary, if the rest of you got called Outer Gods because you couldn’t hold back even an impulse this trivial, then it goes beyond pitiful, it makes me feel something close to contempt.”

“No! This isn’t a shock a mere human brain can endure! What on earth… how…!”

I tuned her out and stepped through the castle gate, and at once a scene far more grotesque than before unfolded.

“Glub glub glub glub glub…”

“Glub glub..?”

“Glub glub glub glub glub…..”

The city’s citizens were still there.

Talking much the same, moving much the same. As if nothing were strange at all.

But every time they opened their mouths, bubbles seeped out, and the sound that came from those mouths was something like the dying gasp of a human suffocating to death.

And yet the way they carried on conversing with one another so naturally was proof that this was not a properly made world after all.

After all, even my own Deep Sea Creatures would react if the bizarre phenomenon of all this world’s Sea Water vanishing ever occurred. This was a world of a far lower and more lacking class than the Deep Sea.

“O-over there-”

Nightchase came up beside me and pointed somewhere.

There, on the city’s inner wall, an enormous gash had been left behind.

It wasn’t something my Deep Sea had created. It was the scar of a fierce battle, as if a giant had raked it with its fingernails.

One, two, three… countless such marks had been carved into it.

Several houses had collapsed in ruins, and there were even flames burning up from within the water.

‘Linmel.’

It was reasonable to see these as wounds left by Linmel’s sword rather than Elysia’s.

I moved along those scars. Current Sense soon told me where they were most concentrated, and-

As if it were only natural, that place was right in front of the library.

“Think hard.”

Nightchase warned me one more time.

“I don’t know how you resisted the Divine Authority, but you have a means of escape, so why bother staying here-”

“Shut up. My head’s a little tangled right now.”

Strange sensations kept jabbing at my mind.

I could clearly do something more. But I couldn’t tell what it was. It was like countless arms and legs had sprouted all over my body and I couldn’t move a single one of them.

In a situation where a battle seemed about to break out at any moment, walking in without even knowing what I could do struck me as a poor move, so I tried stimulating one of those countless sensations.

The sensation closest to Water Pressure.

In that instant, the world slowly warped.

“…Holy shit-”

Nightchase swore when she saw it.

“Do that more. Keep doing it.”

It was obviously something bad, so I stopped.

Only then did I see what the rippling was. The library’s wall was gouged in places, as if a spoon had scooped a great heap out of melting ice cream.

Had I melted the wall with heat? As I tilted my head, I confirmed that the sea I ruled had widened, ever so slightly.

“…The difference in class is just too vast. This means it was over the moment it was submerged into the world called the Deep Sea…”

“Don’t tell me this is-”

Just in case, I asked Nightchase, who had sunk into despair, and she nodded.

“Assimilation. You just ate that library.”

“…….”

In other words.

Just as the stomach dissolves food with gastric acid.

It meant I had nearly turned that library slowly into Sea Water.

If it worked on a building, then naturally it would work on a human or any living thing. What kind of absurd power was this? My mouth fell open in disbelief, and I frowned.

‘So this is literally Divine Authority.’

Within this world called the Deep Sea, all things bent to my will. I could manipulate anything. That was why it was the Deep Sea, and that was why I was the god of the Deep Sea.

“What in the world has the so-called Outer God of the Deep Sea been doing all this time? If he’d just eaten other worlds and Assimilated them, half the worlds would be Void’s and the other half his own. Why did he sit still? Why…?”

While Nightchase fell into her own thoughts, chewing on her fingernails, I committed that sensation to memory.

And slowly I began to melt and swallow the tightly shut library doors.

“…Elysia.”

My head was still full of worries.

What if Elysia had killed Linmel?

How was I supposed to treat her?

Should I see to it that she received a punishment fitting of murder? She’d fallen into such corruption because of me. Should I avenge Linmel? Was Linmel… still alive?

With my tangled thoughts sorted out, what came into view behind the melted door was.

“S-stop it… stop!!”

“Stop what, stop what! You deserve more, more- ngh.”

“?”

It was Linmel, mounted on top of a crying little girl, pounding her fists into the child’s face.

***

There were three days Elysia could never forget.

The day her mother died.

The day she saw Jern in the crumbling Spire.

-And the day she heard that Jern had vanished.

“It’s all right.”

“E-Elysia…”

Elysia answered with composure to the father who had brought her such news.

“Jern’s surely gone off somewhere to find a way out. So, it’s all right. I’ll study magic even harder so I can be of help the next time he comes.”

“…When did my little girl grow up to be so admirable…”

Her father embraced Elysia with a look of deep emotion.

And she put some distance between herself and the father who insisted on hugging her tight.

-So that he wouldn’t catch the wild, frantic pounding of her heart.

‘It’s all right.’

Back in her room, she repeated it to herself.

“This has happened plenty of times before.”

Jern always took the dangerous path and acted recklessly.

But in the end he always came back. He stayed by her side when she truly needed him.

So this time would be the same. If anything, doing nothing at a time like this was something she must not do.

‘This is something only I can do.’

She cautiously waved her hand.

The lamp on the desk slowly went dark. And when she touched the candle wax, she couldn’t feel the faintest trace of warmth. As if it had never been lit to begin with.

It was a deeply unsettling power, but Elysia did her best to smile.

Because she knew this power was something that could help one single boy.

‘I just have to stay like this.’

Having made up her mind, she left her room. She intended to test her ability further on the other Fallen.

Lately, the more she repeated this ability, the more she felt as though something was growing stronger.

And so a day passed.

A week passed.

-And half a year passed.

‘It’s all right.’

She repeated it to herself.

‘It’s going well.’

Jern hadn’t come back, but-

Her ability was growing more powerful with each passing day.

“M-my Young Lady.”

“Yes? What is it?”

“Well, the Fallen you laid your hand on, they seem terrified of something… they’re not in their right minds. Some of them are even showing symptoms like memory loss and regression.”

“Hmm.”

Elysia, who had somehow shed her girlish air, answered indifferently, the dark circles under her eyes a shade deeper.

“It’s all right. I think they were just a little shaken. In the end it’s a good thing for them and for me both. Is there some problem?”

“Ah! No, not at all. Trash like the Fallen deserve to die in the first place. Of course they do. It’s only that Her Highness the Princess expressed a bit of concern, so I’ll be sure to pass it along properly.”

“Thank you. I’ll try to be a little gentler with them from now on.”

She had no intention of doing any such thing.

Elysia wrote down today’s record in the journal that had already grown to a third volume.

[Area of effect : Head]

[Memory loss, delirium, primal fear. Incomprehensible screaming.]

[-Definite reduction of the world.]

“Not bad.”

-Tap tap.

She tapped her quill pen against the notebook and smiled softly.

The Fallen had been hurt ‘a little’, but it had clearly made the world shrink.

From here, all she had to do was refine it into a slightly safer method.

She had plenty of time.

Since he still hadn’t come back.

‘It’s all right.’

She brought to mind once again the word she had recalled hundreds of times.

‘Would this be enough to earn his praise when he returns?’

In an unusually good mood, she slipped the journal back onto the shelf.

It was the day before the world turned upside down.