Chapter 2 — Damn, I Screwed Up. I Accidentally Protected You. Looks Like I’m Losing My Edge
Yogiri’s group returned to the forest near the port town. They had set up a rendezvous point with Ryouko and Carol there. In the dim forest, Yogiri Takatou, Tomochika Dannoura, the Enju robot (being controlled by Mokomoko), Luu (the girl born from the Philosopher’s Stones), and her self-proclaimed daughter, Hiruko, were sitting down, resting against the numerous trees. Their objective was to head to the east, where they had heard there was another Sage. After Shigeto had summoned the Philosopher’s Stones, there was a possibility that any Sage they encountered might not have one of their own anymore, but without any solid information, their best bet was to go take a look.
There were two methods they could use to reach the continent in the east. One was to take a ship, but since Yogiri and Tomochika were now wanted, most of the people in town were hostile towards them. That made booking passage on a ship rather difficult. Their next idea was to get a smaller boat and use Luu’s telekinesis to propel them. Ryouko, Carol, and Risley had gone to the city to secure such a vessel and supplies for the journey.
Their second option was to use the teleportation devices set up by Lain. These devices were set up around the world, so it would allow them to reach the eastern continent instantly. But in order to use them, they needed Euphemia’s knowledge. Finding her was up to Yogiri’s group. They had been searching for her since she had gone missing.
“How are we supposed to know when Carol and Ryouko are coming back?!” Tomochika blurted out, suddenly realizing that they had decided to meet here but had never come up with a time.
“What, you guys never set up a way to reach each other?” Hiruko sighed.
“We didn’t expect to get back here so quickly,” Yogiri replied. “I had hoped they’d have found the stuff and been waiting for us already.”
“Why don’t we send Hanakawa to look for them?”
“Why me?!”
“If we go into the town, we’ll be attacked again, and Luu and Hiruko don’t know them that well.”
“No way! If I end up alone in this situation, some absurd event will whisk me away again! I have no intention of leaving Sir Takatou’s side!”
“Not that being beside me will keep you safe.”
“What?! Are we not friends?! You say that, but in the end, you’ll end up saying something tsundere like, ‘Damn, I screwed up. I accidentally protected you. Looks like I’m losing my edge,’ and I will be safe the whole time, yes?”
“I guess I probably wouldn’t leave you to die.”
“Probably?”
“But you’re pretty low on my priority list.”
“For what reason?! Am I not the weakest member of our group?! Does that not deserve some level of protection?!”
“You really don’t look like someone I want to protect, though.”
“Doesn’t your healing magic give you an edge?” Tomochika asked. “I’m pretty sure I’m the weakest one here.” Though she was capable of fighting with her martial arts, she was the only one in the group that was an ordinary human with no special abilities.
“But still, Sir Takatou’s ability to unconsciously react to killing intent can protect others as well, correct? Is it limited to only a single additional person?”
“Not necessarily.”
“So why not add me to those who it would protect?!”
“It’s not something that I do consciously. I think it’s something like, if someone dying would inflict psychological damage on me, then attacking that person counts as an attack on me as well.” However, he couldn’t be sure that it would always keep Tomochika safe, so whenever it seemed like someone would attack her, he consciously acted in her defense.
“In short, seeing her die in front of you would inflict some sort of trauma on you?”
“That’s right. If Dannoura died in front of me, it would be a pretty big shock. So she gets protected automatically while she’s near me. Attacks against her count as attacks against me. Do you understand now?”
“Really, I wish to say that I understand less.”
“Sorry, but I don’t feel like I’d be moved all that much if you died in front of me. So you won’t be protected automatically.”
“Could you not turn your heart more towards that of a hero?! That’s it! You need to embrace a spirit of brotherhood! I think you also lack the necessary compassion to save someone in peril right in front of you!”
“It’s not anything unique to you. The same thing goes for Carol and the others. We’re just not that close.” Though he felt bad about it himself, Yogiri didn’t expect he’d feel much if Carol or Ryouko died in front of him. So if someone attacked them, he probably wouldn’t notice the killing intent and wouldn’t react automatically.
Of course, there was still merit to sticking with Yogiri, as those who attacked him died automatically. Even if his protection didn’t extend to everyone, sticking with him still increased their odds of survival.
“Honestly, the more I consider your power, the more unfair it seems!” Hanakawa continued to complain. “Being that invincible must leave life feeling rather tepid!”
“It’s always been like this for me, so I don’t know any different.” Yogiri had never felt like life was that simple. There were plenty of things he worried about specifically because he had his power.
“However, after this discussion, I am even more convinced that I cannot leave your side! Please don’t send me to look for them on my own!”
“Hmm. I could use electromagnetic waves to connect to their cell phones...but I would not know which phone to contact,” Mokomoko said.
“Then you’re no help either!”
“Hey, I dunno for sure, but you’re talking about meeting up with the girls we saw earlier, yeah? If they join us, there’ll be nine of us. Our group’s getting kind of big, isn’t it?” Hiruko suddenly jumped into the conversation.
“Similar to how party size is limited to six in some RPGs, if the group gets much larger, it will be difficult to manage,” Hanakawa agreed.
“Are you saying you can’t carry nine people at once? If it’s too many, we can leave Hanakawa behind.”
“Please refrain from speaking of abandoning me so flippantly!”
“Good joke. Adding a few more people makes no difference to me.”
“On that note, couldn’t you use your powers as a god to make us invisible or something? We could at least go look around town then.”
“Yeah, that would be a piece of cake.”
“So gods eat cake too, huh?”
“That’s what you’re worried about?! We eat as much as we want!”
Yogiri didn’t really know what it meant to be a god, but Hiruko at least seemed to have a physical body and so could eat.
“If you can do it, then please do.”
“Done.”
Yogiri looked around, but nothing seemed to have changed.
“You won’t notice a difference. But I’ve thinned our presence enough that most people won’t notice us.”
“You mean similar to Doraemon’s pebble hat?” Hanakawa asked. “So we could, for example, sneak into a young lady’s residence and be unnoticed no matter what we did—”
“Hiruko, if Hanakawa does anything weird, feel free to toss him out.”
“Leave it to me.”
“Heh heh...though I always speak of such erotic things, I always chicken out when such chances arise! That is the kind of pure boy I am! Rest assured, I will fail to accomplish anything when the time comes!”
Believing Hiruko’s claim that they were invisible, Yogiri’s group headed off to the city. Leaving the forest, they walked to the nearby port town. The town was surrounded by walls, so to enter, they’d have to pass through the gate. The last time they had tried, they had been accosted by the guards and had fled.
Yogiri felt uneasy as they approached the town. It felt totally different from the day before. It was terribly quiet. While there had been bustling crowds passing through the gate yesterday, there were no signs of anyone now. Even as they approached the gate, there were no guards.
“Something seems wrong,” Tomochika said, tilting her head.
“Waaaaaaaah! What happened?!” Hanakawa was the first to notice.
The inspection station beside the gate was covered in blood. Guards, merchants, and ordinary citizens lay sprawled around. It was clear at a glance that they were dead. Their heads were missing. The states of their necks made it clear they hadn’t been cleanly beheaded with a blade either. The heads had been bitten off or crushed somehow, and there was no sign of them anywhere.
“What happened?” Yogiri stepped past the bloody scene and into the city. Things were no different within. Headless bodies were strewn about the street, turning it into a sea of blood.
“I don’t think there’s much point in checking further...” He changed his mind and went back. The silent city offered nothing but the smell of blood, so even without checking, he could be sure there was no one left alive.
“As far as I can see, none of them have their heads.”
“Why?! What happened to Carol and the others?!”
“If they were here...” There wasn’t much hope, but he couldn’t say it out loud.
“Uhh, testing, testing! Were you calling us?”
“Carol?!” Tomochika looked around as Carol’s voice suddenly greeted them, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“This is a special ninja technique, the Echo Jutsu!”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a little annoying for her to just leave it at ‘it’s ninjutsu,’ isn’t it?”
“I am not particularly well educated on the matter, but there was a ninjutsu technique by that name which involved acting as if one had turned traitor,” Mokomoko explained. “However, this is likely referring to the auditory phenomenon, and is just a skill for leaving messages. I imagine the similar name is merely a coincidence.”
“I set it up near the gate. And this is just a message, so I can’t answer you back. By the time you guys get this message, I’ll probably already be dead.”
“No way...”
“Man, I’ve always wanted to say that!”
“Hey!” Tomochika shouted back.
“To be honest, I have no idea if I’ll still be alive when you hear this. I’m not planning to die or anything.”
She didn’t sound like she was in that much trouble, but with the aloof way Carol always acted, it was hard to tell.
“Just in case, I’ll tell you about our job. We looked around town, but it was in a terrible state. It looks like getting a boat will be impossible.”
The town was in a state of total chaos. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from the capital had swamped it. Though the port made the town prosperous enough, they were far over capacity. The streets had been packed, and those who couldn’t make it inside were left to loiter outside.
“We didn’t see anyone outside the city, did we?” Yogiri asked.
“Considering what happened to the people inside, I imagine the survivors fled immediately,” Hanakawa guessed.
“Since it was totally impossible, we figured we’d just go back to the meeting spot and wait. But then Euphemia appeared.”
“What?! Did we miss her?” Tomochika cried.
Yogiri was also a little surprised, but it wasn’t impossible. If Euphemia had escaped from whatever was happening back in that cave, it wasn’t hard to believe she’d try to rejoin Risley. Vampires had supernatural senses, so it wouldn’t have been too hard for her to find the girl.
“But she hadn’t come looking for us. She appeared all over the city at the same time.”
“At the same time? What does that mean?”
“She probably inherited that ability from Lain. Lain could make clones of herself.” Yogiri recalled Lain’s strategy of making clones and throwing them at a city to attack.
“She said she was an envoy of the Ultimate Extermination God.”
“Uhh...” Tomochika didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Sounds rather...edgy? We never encountered a person like that.”
“But that’s the being who created the vampires, right? If they came up with the name ‘Origin Blood,’ that sounds like it fits...” Tomochika tried to find some way to come to terms with it.
“She said that everyone who lives in this world has some sort of original sin against this UEG.”
“Oh, the edgelord levels are rising.”
“And then she started smashing people’s heads.”
“Okay, perhaps it comes across as less edgy once they begin actually putting it into practice!” said Hanakawa.
“So Euphemia did all this?” Yogiri asked. With her power, smashing people’s heads would be no problem. But if all she was interested in was killing people, there should have been an easier way.
“I want to run away, but she’s so much stronger than we are that I’m not confident we can make it out. Risley wants to talk with her, but we’re not sure we want to die with her, so we might split up. So see you later. If we survive, I’m sure we’ll meet sooner or later.”
Carol’s message came to an end, and silence returned.
“So, uhh...where did this UEG person come from?”
“Judging from the context, maybe it was that huge monster that attacked the capital?”
Carol’s group had met a man named Zakuro in the underground ruins, who had told them the enormous monster was a god. From the information they had at the moment, it was the only thing that seemed a likely candidate for this UEG. Of course, it was a name that had just appeared out of nowhere, so there was no real way for them to pin down who it was.
“If that’s true, you normally wouldn’t call yourself something like the ‘Ultimate Extermination God,’ right?”
“Well...” Hanakawa said, “I am sure gods have all sorts of tastes. It is not so hard to believe their naming senses might be very different from ours...”
“Malnarilna seemed pretty out there too, didn’t they?”
Yogiri remembered Kouryu. Gods in general seemed to be pretty ridiculous, so accepting such a weird name didn’t seem all that bizarre.
“So, what now?”
“There’s nothing left for us to do here. I guess we should move on.”
It was hard to believe there was anything to be gained from investigating the city. It wasn’t like they weren’t curious about what had happened, but it was already over and had nothing to do with them.
They decided to head to the eastern continent as a group of six.
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