Fremd Torturchen - Volume 6 - Chapter 4

4

A Tale from Long, Long Ago

This is a fairy tale.

Those who wish to refer to it as such are welcome to do so. But it is a horrible tale as well.

One way or the other, it’s a tale from long, long ago.

Not only were all records of the old world annihilated, but they were also purged from the flow of time itself. No methods remained that one could use to learn what happened there. She was the only person who could testify to the events of the old world.

She was the beginning and the end, the slaughterer and the mother.

“Back then, my world was engulfed in war.”

The Saint began giving her account. Kaito frowned lightly.

As she told it, the old world wasn’t ruled by nations, but by a number of independent organizations and powers all vying for hegemony. Bound by their own interests and motives, they twisted the bloody annals of history for the sake of justice, hatred, and greed. At the end of the day, though, the sources that led to this tangled situation were surprisingly simple, and it was possible to classify them into two broad categories.

Racial conflicts were escalating, and people’s capacity for magic was advancing too quickly.

The former had strewn the seeds of conflict throughout the world, lending each side a different sense of justice and pretext to rally behind. The latter made it so that organizations with powerful individuals and skilled mentors could attain military strength surpassing that of nations. In other words, the old world was what the current world would be like if the balance of power got thrown out of whack after the current world spent another few centuries developing. However, while the existence of higher entities—God and Diablo—had been proven in the old world, nobody had been able to come into contact with them directly.

“Perhaps that world, too, was rebuilt from the ashes of destruction, or perhaps it was the first world God had ever created. I do not know. However, the old world had no religion that held the Creator in reverence. While the general indifference toward God helped spur on the wars, the fact that the Creator offered no guidance was what led to the assumption that it was impossible to interact with the higher entities. Because of that, the world managed to avoid both being attacked by demons and having God descend. Or it did, but…”

“But then you were born.”

“Indeed. I was.”

Upon hearing Kaito’s murmur, the Saint nodded.

Sometimes, the birth of a truly unprecedented prodigy could bring about massive change in a world.

When the small farming village she called home was set ablaze and her family was massacred, her latent talents came into bloom. After being taken in by the state, she became the youngest-ever graduate from the magic academy she was tossed into, then began wandering from war front to war front, working as a weapon of mass destruction. One day, when she gazed upon the scorched earth that she herself had caused, she found herself struck by a certain question.

From her perspective, humans, demi-humans, and beastfolk were nothing more than fragile ants.

Why, then, did such feeble beings feel the need to kill one another?

While she quickly realized the abnormality of that thought and hid it thereafter, her magical aptitude was far beyond what the logic of her world accounted for. Because her country had obtained a powerful mage by sheer chance, it was able to put together a plan to reclaim some territory it had been sorely missing for many years, but she herself quickly lost interest in such petty affairs.

In the beginning, the reason her family had been torn to pieces and burned alive had been because the enemy nation had given weapons to the beastfolk who lived near her village. However, she didn’t hate them, nor did she hold a grudge. Unraveling the truth behind the tragedy further revealed the honorable beastfolk would never have committed such atrocities if not for the fact that her very motherland had betrayed them. Upon delving further, it became clear that the original reason behind the conflict involved suspicions that another nation altogether was meddling in their affairs.

When one obtained transcendental power, the whole world started to look flat.

The conclusion she arrived at was that the entire cycle of hatred was meaningless.

“I just— I found it peculiar.”

With unclouded eyes, she’d taken in the situation as a whole. War had driven the country to poverty, and its people’s hearts could bear no more. The whole continent was being stripped bare, and if things continued on along the same path, all sides were headed for mutual destruction. However, she quickly came to understand something.

Everyone was already well aware of that fact. Yet they had no means by which to stop.

Every party was terrified of falling behind, so the magical arms race was spiraling out of control. Nobody even knew the state of their own research, and nobody felt they could afford to stop. Economies and supply lines were converted to support the war efforts as well. Some people felt armistice would prove disadvantageous to them, so they devoted their wholehearted efforts to throwing fuel on the fire. Their education systems were designed not to teach children about the consequences of their actions, but to brainwash them and instill hatred deep in their hearts. With each successive generation, people stopped questioning the war more and more, even as its original purpose was lost to obscurity.

There was no country large enough to serve as a mediator, nor was there one powerful enough to secure a decisive victory.

Eventually, she arrived at a conclusion of her own. A certain entity would be necessary to free them all from the quagmire.

“Such as a powerful deterrent—the likes of which didn’t exist.”

For example, something like God or Diablo.

From her perspective, humanity, beastfolk, and demi-humans were all equal. Every living creature was ignorant, and every living creature was like a stupid animal.

That was why she had to save them.

After steadying her resolve to bring about salvation, she got to work.

As long as she could summon them, God and Diablo would be the most powerful forces in the world. She presented her thesis to her government, and just as she’d expected, she received a massive budget to carry out her research.

In the current world, summoning a powerful demon had the contradictory requirement that one must first consume a demon’s flesh. However, the old world’s magical techniques were centuries more advanced, and she herself was a vessel of such rare quality that her very birth was an astronomically unlikely event.

Thus, in a tiny time frame, she was able to come up with a method to summon higher entities, a feat that Vlad had once estimated would take the current world another two thousand years to develop. On that fateful day, though, she was unsuccessful in summoning God. As long as some sort of condition was unmet, God remained immovable.

After reaching that conclusion, she tried summoning Diablo instead. It manifested successfully—

“—And the world broke.”

With a pop.

More easily than a soap bubble.

God creates the world, and Diablo destroys it.

Even the old world knew about these properties of theirs. However, because nobody had ever actually interacted with them, her estimations were overly optimistic. She’d summoned lower-ranked demons over the course of her experiments, but God and Diablo’s reason for being was fundamentally different. The two of them existed solely as a system to rebuild and destroy. They didn’t even have the framework necessary to carry out negotiations. And as supreme a vessel as she was, her lack of experience in dealing with higher entities left her with no ability to resist Diablo.

And so, through her body, it automatically carried out its task.

She didn’t really remember what happened afterward, only that it felt much longer than it had actually been.

All she knew were the vague, nightmarish scraps of memory that remained.

Horrific figures blotting out the sky. Seas transformed into plains of black and crimson. Azure blades cleaving through the earth. Black titans. Parts of the sky transmuted into glass. Bubbles forming in the land. Her own stitched-together body. A cluster of roses in full bloom. Resentful voices, their resistance as short-lived as that of insects. Frail entreaties that, in the end, transformed into bloodthirsty jeers.

“Loathsome  , repulsive  , cruel, hideous  !”

“A curse upon you, a curse upon you, a curse, a curse, an eternal curse upon you,  !”

And then when she came to…

…she was in a place with nothing in it.

If one was to describe that place, the most apropos comparison would be to a blank white canvas. Or perhaps a pitch-black canvas. Nothing meaningful was painted atop it. All the beautiful, warped art that had once been there had been scarred, then lost.

Forever.

Because of that, she had to carry out her atonement.

It wouldn’t do for her to simply leave the world blank and empty. To that end, she tried summoning God again. This time, the world had been destroyed, fulfilling the condition for rebuilding, and thus, God descended.

On God’s orders, Diablo fell asleep. Having wrested back control, she removed Diablo from her body. However, her wish to annul her contract with it and return it to a higher realm went unfulfilled.

In order to annul her contract, she needed to give the order to Diablo directly. And as long as God was keeping Diablo in check, God’s orders superseded and nullified those of His contractor. And annulling her contract with God first would mean having to give up on the rebuilding.

As she agonized over that dilemma, she tried to find a different solution.

Could she just renounce both of her contracts after completing the rebuilding? No, that, too, was impossible.

Once the new world was complete, God would be freed from the condition on which He had descended and would automatically fall asleep. And because she was sheltering God within her body, so too would she. God operated under a rule where He had to rebuild, then sleep, and she lacked the power necessary to obstruct this for long enough to take any other actions. She couldn’t even kill herself by forcibly releasing her contracts.

If she had been powerful enough to control God completely, perhaps another option would have presented itself to her.

However, that was beyond her.

Even so, there remained a method by which she could more or less escape. God desired a contractor so He could maintain His peaceful rest, but He wasn’t picky about who that was. As long as there was someone there who wouldn’t fall apart the moment the contract was formed, it would be possible to push the burden onto them. Of course, no such person existed in this clean, blank world.

At that moment, the only way she could die a human’s death would be by abandoning everything.

Yet in order to carry out the rebuilding, she chose instead to live forever.

At that point, Kaito interjected.

“Wait, hold up. You were using God’s power to keep Diablo in check? So Diablo was sealed away in the underground tomb, and the only one left in your body while you slept was God?”

“Indeed.”

“Normally, Diablo can only manifest once God has decided the world should be destroyed. And once God rebuilds it, He stops Diablo from immediately destroying it again. Not to mention that unless the conditions are fulfilled, you can’t summon Him at all… Even though God’s supposed to exist to oppose Diablo, it sounds like He’s clearly the superior of the two.”

“Given my experience, I would have to agree. That’s why I was able to remove Diablo from my body with our contract intact but was forced to carry God with me that whole time.”

And whether or not God was inside her body, the fact remained that she was a peerless sinner. She bore the yoke of grave crimes upon her shoulders. That was why she’d had to build the skies, build the earth, and birth the seas. She had to make vegetation flourish across the land. She had to craft the moon and the stars. She had had to release fish and birds and beasts and livestock out into the world.

Then after making humans, beastfolk, and demi-humans, she rested.

That was the fate she had imposed upon herself. Fleeing her atonement would have been unforgivable.

As she silently rebuilt the world, she had a thought:

In the world to come, all would revere her. Unlike the resentful voices of those on the verge of annihilation she’d once heard, she would doubtless be hailed as a “Saint” and be offered countless commendations. She would be the mother of all who existed, after all. She would probably even be prayed to, hailed as the “Suffering Saint” who sacrificed herself for her children. Yet despite the praises she knew she’d receive, she felt neither pride nor gratification.

For the rest of eternity, nobody would ever consider what she had truly felt.

Without trying to learn what she’d been like before she’d become the Saint and her tale became embellished, they would have no way of even doing so.

But she had no intention of condemning them for that fact. That was simply the way the masses were. The same had been true in the world prior.

They would hear only what they wanted to hear, see only what they wanted to see.

Flocks of sheep were, fundamentally, stupid. And that was the way things ought to be.

But at the end of that day, was that truly not a sin?

The ignorant had no right to cast blame, did they not?

She thought once more in that blank, white world.

Why had she tried to save them all?

Given how things had turned out, it couldn’t have been described as anything other than a flight of fancy driven by a serious case of arrogance and conceit. A fatal mistake, one brought about from the sense of omnipotence that accompanied the possession of great power. Yet in her heart of hearts, she couldn’t bring herself to consider what she had tried to do as worthy of scorn or rebuke.

It had been clear as day that if she hadn’t done anything, the world would have fallen into ruin.

And it was just as evident that, even knowing that fact, nobody else had tried to act.

“Yet even so… I’ve been alone for so long.”

She had fought on her own for so long.

She had fought to save them all.

She remained unforgiven, yet forgiveness was precisely what they would receive.

Therein lay an inescapable contradiction.

If that was the case, then didn’t that make every person’s entire way of life fundamentally wrong?

She became obsessed with that notion. After troubling over that fact for quite some time, she created a hideous, adorable attendant—one who would serve only her. She instructed him to build infrastructure for trade so the new world would prosper. She also told him to teach the people basic information about her, God, and Diablo so that no one would ever repeat her mistakes. Then she decided to entrust Diablo’s detached form to the people of the new world.

Moreover, she also gave him a lump of demon flesh.

“However, if the people of this new world choose to learn nothing…”

And thus, she sowed the seed of evil, ready to flower if anyone driven by zealotry and greed or anyone who would gladly act as an agent of destruction were to appear.

“In the end, I took too long to notice.”

She had been assailed by profound regrets. After all, what had she been left with after salvation had been carried out?

In the end, what of hers, what of anyone’s had she been able to save?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Just like when she was young, she hadn’t been able to save anything.

And because of that, it was only natural that nothing of value was born in the new world. After the destruction and restoration, the three races ended up making the same mistakes as before. People who sought power had arisen, swept away all others, and begun walking the path to annihilation.

Once again, her conviction was reaffirmed. All living creatures were nothing more than ignorant, stupid animals.

“There was nothing in this world worth protecting.”

And when the solitary prodigy, the Saint, finally realized that fact—

—she chose to set down her burden.

That was all.

That was all there was to the tragic— No, to the farcical tale.

“And they all lived happily ever after.”

For the third time, a heavy silence descended on the two. However, it was quickly broken by the dry sound of clapping.

Kaito had lifted his arms and was clapping his hands together. It wasn’t intended in the slightest as an act of blasphemy against the Saint. He was just mutely praising her recounting of the tale. However, his action wasn’t meant to demonstrate sympathy or pity, nor was it designed to express criticism. He himself knew an anecdote that the Saint’s story reminded him of.

Once upon a time, there was a girl.

She tried to stop a man whom nobody else could stop. To do so, she became a sinner without peer.

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

As he obtained immense power in a crumbling world, he decided to save the ignorant, stupid animals. Just as the Saint had said, it was a decision steeped in arrogance. A terrible act of conceit. However, there was one clear difference in the way the Saint and the Mad King thought.

Kaito saw the stupid sheep as precious.

Humanity, beastfolk, and demi-humans are all equal. Every living creature is ignorant, every living creature is like a stupid animal, and every living creature is precious.

Also, the Mad King had a wish he was determined to see granted. He had boasted he’d save everyone, but at the end of the day, that was little more than an afterthought. He would never say it in front of the people who were entrusting their lives to him, but Kaito knew he’d discard the prospect of salvation without a second thought if it got in the way of his true objective.

He was well aware of how callous he was being to all but a few, how his unreliability verged on madness.

In other words, the salvation I’m trying to bring about isn’t for anyone else’s sake. It’s for my own, and I’m just selfishly doing everything I can to that end.

He thought back on what the Torture Princess had said at the World’s End.

“Bear no conceits—saving the world and destroying it are but mere matters of personal selfishness.”

Even if nothing remains, as long as I did everything I could, I won’t have any regrets.

No matter what fate awaited him.

Having the dedication to shoulder everything on one’s own for the sake of the weak and the downtrodden was noble, no doubt. But Kaito knew. The world wasn’t beautiful enough to accommodate such selfless love.

It wasn’t worth sacrificing yourself if you would ultimately regret having done so. After all, you wouldn’t exactly be rewarded for your troubles. The world was a cold and unfeeling place. Yet contradictorily, it also contained something radiant within it.

Because of that, Kaito had sought to dig this item up. His blade had gotten stuck in the swamp, so he’d plunged his hands in instead. And after sustaining countless wounds, he’d grabbed hold of the jewel.

There was information he needed to do that, information he couldn’t get anywhere else, and he’d just received it.

Kaito stood up from his chair, then began speaking to the Saint, who was staring at the wall once more.

“Well, sorry for making you tell me that long story. And thanks. I won’t ask you for anything else. Various humans, beastfolk, and demi-humans will probably come by with some questions later, though. It sounds like the old world’s magic was pretty advanced, so I’d appreciate it if you avoided letting any harmful information slip. It’d probably turn out better for you that way, too. If word got out about how important and dangerous the stuff you know is, your safety might be at risk. Odds are, there are people who’d be willing to use way nastier methods than what I just did to keep that information to themselves.”

“You say…such foolish things… The bugle has been blown, the roses have bloomed, and the wings have spread. The end-time…is not nigh. It is already here, and yet…”

“Yeah, true. I mean, I’m sure that’s what you believe, at any rate. So I figure you should go live as you please. You were planning on dying the moment you set down your burden, but you were able to buy yourself a grace period before the end. The way I see it, nobody has any right to interfere with that.”

Kaito’s voice was kind. He was implying it would even be fine for her to use old-world magic to make her escape.

The Saint tilted her head to the side in a gesture one would expect from a young girl. Kaito had a vague sense of why she was acting so innocently. She’d gotten tired of trying to figure out whether he was a friend or a foe. Her unease was plastered across her face. She was no doubt hoping he would turn out to be a friend.

However, as he gazed at the woman who had nowhere in this new world to turn, Kaito lacked such kindness.

Unfortunately, I’m neither.

He had no intention of denouncing the woman for her solitary fight.

On the other hand, though, he held a strong personal grudge against her.

“You’re a normal person now, just like you wanted. Go on—live wherever you want and die however you like. But you’re the one who brought all this down on us. Don’t forget that.”

As he lowered his voice, Kaito snapped his fingers. Azure flower petals flashed around his wrist, and he nonchalantly sliced his own artery. Blood gushed from the gap between his glove and his sleeve.

The blood flew over onto the wall, then began writhing.

The Saint blinked. Before her, the blood had taken on a recognizable form.

A “window” had opened up in the underground chamber.

Scenes from the outside began projecting where the Saint had been staring at.

“…Ah—”

A faint noise slipped out of her open mouth. Kaito gave a short nod. The Saint had finally come to a realization. She’d been staring fixedly at the wall for some time, almost as though she could see something in it.

Yet in truth, she’d seen nothing, in every sense of the phrase.

“The ignorant had no right to cast blame, did they not?”

Kaito was ironically reminded of the quote the Saint herself had murmured mere moments ago.

According to the Saint, her recollections of the end-time were dim.

In other words, she’d never really seen the things outside that window before.

God and Diablo had both descended on the world at once. It was a situation that wasn’t even supposed to be possible. Because of that, there were probably differences between how the destruction was currently progressing and how it had occurred in the old world.

However, the tragedy of the situation was identical.

Outside the window, blood was spraying, desperate screams were echoing out, and hundreds of crying voices could be heard.

Every scene unfolding there was actually happening somewhere in the world.

It could only be described as hell.

A giant, rabbitlike underling was grabbing the elderly alive and gnawing on them like carrots. A soldier carrying a cannonball was snatched into the air by some black thing and let out a shriek, before being returned to the ground as a pile of skin. A woman was frantically trying to get her crying children to stay away from her as a creature made of nothing but digestive organs melted her flesh. An armless demi-human was dancing an ecstatic, meaningless dance atop a mountain of charred corpses.

Because Kaito was linked to Diablo’s pillar, he could sense the particulars of every person in every tragedy that was occurring.

He could sense them, and he had abandoned them all.

I can’t save everyone.

Kaito wasn’t a god. He could boast about saving the world, but it was impossible for him to save everyone from the personal tragedies befalling them. No matter how quickly he reached his hands out, it would never be fast enough.

And at the same time, he knew. The world was hell, and that wasn’t just true at the moment. There were countless people begging to be saved. Each and every one of them was crying out just as desperately as Kaito had in his previous life.

“Help,” they were crying.

“Please save me.”

And Kaito had abandoned them without so much as glancing their way. Because of that, they’d suffered and died.

I have to make sure I remember that fact.

Kaito had decided his objective was more important to him than the world. He had no regrets. Given that, remembering seemed meaningless. It certainly didn’t do the dead any good.

Even so, though, Kaito refused to let himself look away from reality.

Anyone who could forget something like that isn’t worth the air they breathe.

When one possessed preeminent power, the whole world started looking flat. However, the end-time was fundamentally just the accumulation of countless personal tragedies.

Forgetting that fact would mean forgetting how to love the world.

The Saint gazed blankly at the scenes playing out before her.

She had undoubtedly once seen the fragments leading up to the end-time. However, at some point, without even noticing it herself, she’d become blind to the individual tragedies.

As he looked at her skinny back, Kaito suddenly said something wholly unrelated to the various horrors.

“The Butcher was a good guy, you know. Even though he betrayed us, I still liked him.”

The Saint cocked her head. She gazed up at him in wonderment.

Given her expression, she hadn’t understood what he’d just said. Ah, thought Kaito. A momentary despair overtook him.

As it did, the Saint asked Kaito the very question he’d been expecting.

“…The Butcher?”

“Ah right. Yeah.”

Originally, the Butcher hadn’t had a name.

He was the Apostle, nothing more than a seed of evil planted in the world. The Saint should have been able to perceive his actions. Yet she hadn’t known he called himself the Butcher, nor the fact that he had been loved.

“And finally, thank you so much for your many years of patronage.”

The words Kaito had been told rang in his ears once more. He shut his eyes tight.

The Butcher had abandoned everything he’d enjoyed and canceled out all the memories he’d collected. He’d swallowed up the pain as he cut away both the feelings of those who’d shouted at him not to die, as well as his own arm.

All because he’d been told, “Thank you for being born unto me.”

That was all. Yet the person who’d told him that didn’t even know what it was he’d sacrificed.

She hadn’t even tried to learn.

“They would hear only what they wanted to hear, see only what they wanted to see.”

In the whole time they’d been talking, she hadn’t mentioned him a single time.

Kaito drew in a deep breath, then slowly let it out. He spoke quietly, scratching at his faded-brown hair as he did.

“You said that ‘even so, you were alone for so, so long’… Meaning you endured it all alone, right?”

“I did. And it’s true.”

“Well, not quite.”

Kaito shook his head. After a brief moment of silence, he snapped his fingers and dispelled his simple, wooden chair.

The wound on his wrist had already closed up without a trace. His soles clicked rhythmically against the ground as he walked. Right before he reached the door, he stopped. His black coattails fluttered as he turned around.

The smile he was wearing could almost be described as kind.

“You just chose to be alone, that’s all.”

And now the Saint had no one.

Not even her hideous, adorable attendant.

The Saint looked around the room, baffled. The window was still there. Cruel hells were still displayed on its surface. Tragedies building to the world’s destruction piled up one after another. For the first time, the Saint’s face curled into a faint grimace. She was the one who’d caused those scenes to occur twice over.

They were what had come from her attempts to save everything.

The Saint called out to Kaito in a small, trembling voice.

“You…aren’t going to…kill me?”

“Why would I?”

As he answered her with a question of his own, Kaito’s expression was so calm that it seemed practically sublime.

Her response was immediate. She cried out, imploring and urging him.

“I’m a sinner without peer!”

“So?”

“You… Your grudge against me is so strong that even killing me wouldn’t satisfy you, right?”

“Nah, I’m over it. I don’t care anymore.”

Kaito asserted his claim indifferently. Then with a casualness that befitted his tone, he pushed open the door. However, he stood still for a moment. Without turning around, he closed his eyes again.

The Butcher then appeared behind him, humming a strange song in the throne room. Elisabeth shouted at him, calling him an annoying lout. Their lively exchange blurred in the dim light, then vanished. With that, Kaito opened his eyes back up. He didn’t check the Saint’s expression or bearing. Still facing forward, he continued.

“Lucky you. You got everything you ever wished for.”

And then Kaito Sena closed the door.

For a moment, he felt like he saw a frantically outstretched arm in the periphery of his vision. Something rang in his eardrum.

Perhaps it was an entreaty, or an insult, or maybe some kind of question. However, Kaito didn’t even spare it enough thought to figure out which. He passed by the faithfully waiting doorkeeper boy and headed back. The exit was blocked, but he’d already known that.

That was why he waited until he couldn’t see the boy anymore, then stopped in his tracks.

“Geh, gah, bleh… Blergh—”

He bent over and hacked up a massive amount of blood. There were chunks of flesh mixed in with the red liquid that was gushing from his pale throat. Kaito squeezed his chest tight. After desperately regaining his breath, he looked up.

As horrible pain racked his body, he let out a fierce laugh.

“Fourth wave’s almost here, huh?”

He snapped his fingers. The blood spilled atop the floor wriggled, then started painting a magic circle. Azure flower petals flew through the white hallway. They formed a cylindrical wall with Kaito at its center, then cracked and vanished in a dazzling display of light.

When it was gone, it left nothing and no one in its wake.

And with that, the chance encounter between the Mad King and the Saint came to an end.