Wizard of the Abyss - Chapter 275

Chapter 275: Calamity (1)

TL/ED – Miso

Perhaps it was thanks to my kind nature.

The moment the dwarves began their construction, the very first thing I did was release Brimdal from prison.

Brimdal, who unlike me seemed wicked by nature, showed not a trace of gratitude and just grumbled out one complaint after another.

“Did you get a good price for selling me off, then?”

“More than enough. There’s not a single dwarf left guarding you, Brimdal-nim. That’s because they all went off to work.”

“…You actually persuaded those stubborn, pig-headed mules… Now I’m starting to believe you really are some kind of divine being.”

I showed the still-grumbling Brimdal the Brass Dagger I’d been given.

“Do you know what this is?”

“No.”

“Then, can’t you feel something deeply unpleasant coming off of it?”

“Not at all. Is it supposed to be something special? It just feels like a crudely made dagger to me.”

“If you can’t tell, then never mind.”

I slipped the dagger, unpleasant just to hold, into my pocket and sank into thought for a moment.

It had killed The First Wizard. Not that I actually believed those words.

Even Kaldrak had said it was nothing more than a legend that happened to be passed down with this dagger.

What I was curious about was something else.

‘How exactly did he die?’

The First Wizard had made preparations for his own death. And those arrangements had in fact been quite meticulous, so rather than merely bracing for some unforeseen contingency, he must have truly known he was going to die.

But now, I knew. The First Wizard had never been human to begin with; he was an Outer God of the Deep Sea. And not a fake like me, but the original.

A being like that, dead because his lifespan had simply run out?

“What the hell is this thing, anyway?”

As I sank into those thoughts, Brimdal tilted his head, snatched the Brass Dagger away, studied the blade closely, and frowned.

“It’s a decorative dagger, and it’s been stored terribly.”

“It’s made of brass, after all… Stored strangely, you say? It looked pretty well kept to me.”

“I’m a dwarf too, when it comes down to it. There’s a mark where the surface was ground down once. Which means it had rusted, and since the whole thing was ground down rather than just one part, somebody must have left it shoved in seawater or something.”

I took the dagger back from Brimdal and fell into thought again, and he stretched with a grimace.

“Let’s get out of here, fast. I don’t want to spend even one more second in this dreadful place. What happened to the carriage?”

“Let’s leave it here. I’ve gotten the hang of this by now.”

When I raised my hand, water welled up from the floor, now without my even needing to flick a droplet.

I stepped in foot first, and when I came out the other side, I was in the Capital.

It was a travel distance I couldn’t have even imagined just a few days earlier. By now it was as good as having no limits on movement at all.

Brimdal, walking out of the pool after me, looked at me with his whole face scrunched up.

“I feel cheated. I should’ve gone and learned Magic too.”

“It’s not even Magic, I keep telling…”

…you. A chill prickled down my spine just as I was about to finish the words.

Without realizing it, I looked up at the sky.

The scar that split the sky had risen up darker than before. Up to this point, sure, it was something I’d more or less expected.

But up until then, the sky had still been just the sky.

Something to be called a place, not a living thing. Something to be seen as a part of nature, not a singular, independent entity.

“What the hell…”

Now that was no longer true.

To my senses as an Outer God, the sky no longer looked like a lifeless place.

If there was anything to take hope in, it was that only its outline was visible so far. Like a silhouette glimpsed faintly through fog, all I could do was dare to guess at what might happen if that thing truly awakened and began to act.

Busy operating underground, I hadn’t noticed the change in the sky. As I gazed up at that gloomy expanse, I saw that rain clouds had gathered.

This was bad.

“If I asked where you’ve been all this time… Jern?”

“Something just came up that I need to check on.”

I raised my hand, made a pool, and threw myself into it.

The place I traveled to this time was the exact same place. The only difference was the position.

My field of vision opened up in an instant. The sky, thousands of meters up in the air.

Falling straight down, brushing through the clouds, I noticed a wet, sticky sensation near my ears and reached up to touch the spot.

Blood.

Blood was flowing from my ears.

“Be wrong, would you. Just this once.”

Letting out a sigh, I kept right on plummeting.

It wasn’t just my ears. All over my body, which had passed through the clouds, every kind of wound had been torn open, and blood was pouring out wildly.

What those clouds produced was probably not rain.

A certain Fallen who had been in the Crimson Circle came to mind. That one’s World had been the kind that controlled rain, and he must surely have been devoured by Void and stripped of that World.

Even if Void still couldn’t perfectly handle the colossal World that was the sky.

It meant he had gained complete control over the more localized, smaller Worlds.

I slammed into the ground at about the thirty-second mark from when I’d started falling.

-Splat!

“Gwaah!”

Brimdal, who had been standing there blankly, made a dumbfounded face as he watched me suddenly plummet out of the sky covered in blood and splatter flat as a pancake.

“A-are you dead?”

“Perfectly fine.”

When I brushed myself off and stood up, not a trace of the bloodstains remained.

Instead, I was merely damp with a bit of water. Brimdal, now looking at me as though I were an outright monster, tried to back away from me.

“I’m starting to feel a little sorry for the Crimson Circle, having to go up against a guy like you…”

“Brimdal, get all the Knights to evacu- no. Just go hole up in the warehouse.”

The rain would pour down soon.

I’d been about to order an emergency evacuation, but then, through my Current Sense, I caught sight of Knights with baffled expressions hurriedly trying to get people to take shelter indoors, and I grasped the situation.

So they’d already been through this once. I immediately made a pool on the ground and formed a door leading to Sharmia’s office.

“Yes, please relay the same order to every surviving city right now. Tell them to get inside their homes and absolutely not come out.”

“Ah, understood.”

Sharmia was already issuing orders to her retainers with an urgent expression.

When I suddenly appeared right beside her in the middle of all that, their faces went pale as death.

“An assassin! Princess, there’s an assassin…”

“It’s all right. He’s someone I know.”

Sharmia glanced at me and then pressed her retainers.

“Relay it as fast as you possibly can. I’m counting on you.”

“…Yes, your highness!”

Once the retainers, still casting wary glances, had left the office, Sharmia let out a deep sigh and turned her gaze to me.

“Jern, you came at just the right time. As you probably already know, it’s going to rain.”

“What kind of rain?”

I’d felt it with my own body, but Sharmia would surely understand its impact on the Capital far better than I did.

Sharmia continued with a deeply serious expression.

“To start with the good news, it won’t last long. It’ll only fall locally, over this Capital and a few other cities. Hold out for about ten minutes and it’ll be over.”

“And the bad news?”

“Ten minutes looked more than enough to kill every single person, haah…”

“How did I act?”

If I had been there in the future Sharmia had seen, then of course I would have tried to stop it.

Given that she’d come back, it seemed I had failed, but there were still things to be gained from the experience of failure.

“You tried to block the falling rain. But it wasn’t the kind that could be blocked. It’s not just sharp, it’s poison. An utterly vicious nerve toxin. If it disperses into the air, that alone is enough to kill everyone.”

“Tch, what a filthy method to use…”

The picture came together. I had probably succeeded in blocking the rain, but I hadn’t been able to stop people from dying.

As I frowned, Sharmia added a remark.

“You told me to have your past self run a test. I don’t know what that means, but you said you’d understand once you heard it.”

“Yes. I was just thinking about that very thing. When will the rain come down?”

“Probably five minutes. Will that be enough? If it’s not possible, I could push it back a little further.”

“It’s fine. You mustn’t strain yourself.”

I waved off Sharmia, whose gaze had landed on the dagger, and hurried out of the office, adding quickly:

“Tell the people not to be alarmed no matter what happens. That it’s all been prepared in advance. If it comes from you, Princess, they’ll believe it.”

“Ah, yes. Understood.”

I quickly worked my Current Sense and looked over the cities where the rain clouds had gathered.

Fifty-one cities in total. The citizens, following the orders they’d been given, were heading into their homes.

‘It’s still not enough to stand against the sky, but…’

Against mere rain, though.

Feeling the water slowly surging in, I whispered quietly.

“-Submerge.”

At the same time, a few drops of water trickled out from the ground.

The drops became a pool, and the pool became a stream. The stream became a river, and formed a lake.

“What kind of order is this all of a sud… huh?”

“Wh-what is this?”

-Roarrrrr…

The Knights, who had been moving this way and that, were horrified at the sight of a massive river that had suddenly begun flowing down from the hills, and they wheeled their horses around.

“What the hell, did a dam burst?”

“Wh-what dam, there’s no dam anywhere around here…”

“Then where did all this water come from?”

The water flowing out of the ground swelled in an instant to a level that submerged the people in the Capital up to their ankles.

“Yes, Commander! Right now in the Capital, water’s suddenly flooding in out of nowhere…”

“Yes, yes…”

“…What??”

“Ah, understood.”

A Knight who had been watching the dawdling citizens dart into their homes in the blink of an eye and bolt their doors finished his exchange with his commander and relayed the order with a dazed look on his face.

“I-it’s a natural phenomenon. Reassure the citizens, and under no circumstances are they to leave the city.”

“…?”

“No, what are you talking about? Everyone’s on the verge of drowning right now! It’s already up to our waists. This is obviously the work of those Fallen bastards…”

“He said that if you can’t believe it, you should try dunking your face in.”

“This is no time for that, we need to evacuate everyone immediately!”

“…H-hey.”

Just before a rift could break out among the Knights as well, one Knight who had actually plunged his face into the water scratched his head as if he couldn’t believe it himself.

“I really can breathe?”

“?”

Meanwhile, I, the one actually pulling all of this off, felt like I was dying.

“Tch, this is hard.”

I had to grasp every one of the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of people, one by one.

Then, each time one of them dunked their face into the water, I had to create a pocket of air that would let them breathe for more than ten minutes.

At the same time, I had to keep drawing out the Deep Sea, over and over, and cover every single city with it. No matter how much I’d grown, doing all of it at once was very nearly impossible.

‘Stay calm.’

Rather than fully submerging every city, I revised my plan to raise the water only just high enough to cover the houses.

It wasn’t something I’d have to keep up for long anyway. I only needed to endure for about ten minutes.

And so, even if it meant pushing myself a little, all while submerging the cities-

-Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat….

A torrential downpour began to fall.

The black-tinged rain hammered violently at the surface of the water, trying to break through it and get inside.

“…Not a chance.”

Blocking those attempts wasn’t all that hard.

The hard part was the work of keeping the water surface flowing continuously so that the rain couldn’t seep inside.

Even so, it was easier than submerging all fifty-one cities within this short span of time had been. Gritting my teeth and holding out for ten minutes, I felt the rain begin to weaken.

-Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…

The rain clouds parted, the sun began to show, and at last it died down.

Only then did I catch my breath, and I shifted my gaze toward the people.

“What is this, are we dead?”

“No, it seems like the Princess did something…”

Mercifully, the death toll was zero.

There were a few hundred people who’d been so startled at being submerged in the water that they fainted, but even they were in no danger of losing their lives.

“Phew…”

Barely, but I’d managed to hold it off. Relieved, I looked up at the sky.

The clouds still hadn’t completely vanished.

Instead, they no longer dropped any rain but were drifting together this way and that, forming words.

[So, that’s where you were.]

“…”

I glared for a long while at the message, whose author I could identify without a doubt.

*****

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