Chapter 2 — It Sounds like You Are Just Giving Us the Highlights!
“Yes, I imagine this situation was brought about by my grandfather. In that case, there is a high chance he and Takatou might become enemies. Should that happen, I believe taking Takatou’s side would be advantageous.”
“Your grandfather? You mean the Great Sage?” Tomochika asked. “We never met him, though.” The Sages were organized in a pseudofamily headed by the Great Sage, making Sion his granddaughter.
“Yes, I imagine at this point grandfather has yet to notice Takatou’s existence. But if you continue as you were, it is only a matter of time before he recognizes you as a hindrance.”
“As we were, huh?” Thinking back on their adventure, which had supposedly been a dream, Yogiri hadn’t intended to do much of anything but had been accosted by all kinds of people. It was hard to say the Great Sage wouldn’t end up interfering in the same way.
“S-So, in short, you are saying you wish to be our ally, Miss Sion?” Hanakawa asked.
“In a general sense, yes. More specifically, I only intend to cooperate with Takatou, but if bringing harm upon his classmates would bother him, then in the end, it means the same thing.”
“So if I said I didn’t care about Hanakawa...” Yogiri started.
“That is too far for a joke, Sir Takatou! Do you have any idea what kind of wicked soul Sion is?!”
“I won’t say it; don’t worry.” He turned back to Sion. “Anyway, what did you want to talk about?”
“First, I would like to get a grasp on the current situation. For starters, speaking as if everything was a dream may lead to some confusion, so let us call what occurred back then as ‘part one’ instead. The new situation starting from now will be ‘part two.’ We can then call this time reversal ‘the restart.’ How does that sound?”
“Doesn’t sound much easier to understand to me,” Tomochika said, unconvinced.
“There’s a possibility the same situation will occur in the future. If that occurs, having to discuss things by saying ‘the previous time’ or ‘the time before that’ would end up getting quite complex. Numbering them makes it easier to keep things straight,” Haruto said.
Yogiri agreed. If there was a chance of this happening again, Sion’s way of describing things would make it quite a bit easier to understand.
“First of all, I would like to hear about your actions in part one, Takatou. More specifically, could you tell us what exactly you killed?”
“Weren’t you watching us the whole time?”
“I cannot say I was observing everything you did, and I also dropped out halfway through part one, so I do not know anything that happened after that.”
“You don’t have memories of anything past when you died?”
“Correct. I only recall events up until that mysterious goddess emerged from the Underworld. The moment I thought I had died, I reappeared on the grassland, having just finished the summoning ritual.”
“I also died partway through,” Shigeto said bitterly. “After Takatou arrived and stopped the Omega Blade, that Sage girl tortured me to death.”
Yogiri had met Shigeto on his search for the Philosopher’s Stones, but he had only killed the Omega Blade, the source of his classmate’s nigh-omnipotent power. He had departed immediately after taking the stones, but Shigeto had been left with a number of women who held grudges against him. With his powers gone, he had been totally at their mercy.
“There’s nothing I could have done about that,” Yogiri said, recalling their chance meeting. At that point, Shigeto had been riding a power trip after obtaining the powers of the Omega Blade, following his each and every whim. “And I can only tell you about the things I killed intentionally. I don’t remember the others.”
He looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember. The first thing he had killed was the dragon that had attacked the bus. Next was Ryousuke Higashida and Yoshiaki Fukuhara, the two who had flown in with Hanakawa. He had killed them when they had tried to harm him first. He had spared Hanakawa, in part to get information out of him, and in part because Hanakawa had been much less of a threat.
“Were this Higashida and Fukuhara on the bus with you this time?”
“I don’t think so,” Tomochika said. No one else had seen them either.
“I see. So it appears that those Takatou killed in part one do not exist in part two after all. That is another thing I wished to confirm.”
“In that case, what about your arms and legs?”
Yogiri recalled his fight with Sion. He had killed various parts of her to threaten her, and when she had fled, he had attacked the man she was with as well. In order to save his life, she had become obedient after that.
“My right ankle, left ankle, right little finger, ring finger, left little finger, right shin, and left earlobe have no feeling anymore, and I cannot move them. It only looks like I can move them because I am using telekinesis to do so with external force. Of course, I cannot stand either, so I float to create the illusion.”
“Although I am aware it is late for this observation, your power truly is terrifying, Sir Takatou,” Hanakawa said. Yogiri remembered that Hanakawa had been with them when they had confronted Sion.
“Of course I do not intend to complain about that now,” the Sage continued. “I was quite lucky to survive with as little damage as I did, and I can only be thankful that you stopped attacking Youichi when you did. With some supplementary magic, we can both live our daily lives unimpeded.”
While it was hard to believe she wasn’t upset about the situation, she wasn’t showing it in the least.
“Continuing on, then,” said Yogiri.
After arriving in Quenza, they had met the beastkin girl, Mireiyu. After guiding them around town, she had taken them into a back alley where they were accosted by a group of mostly beastkin. Yogiri had killed them in self-defense, but he had used the opportunity to practice killing only parts of people, so there were likely survivors. Thinking it was a bad idea to kill Mireiyu in front of Tomochika when she had been friendly with them before, he had killed her on a delay. They had then left Quenza on a train heading for Hanabusa, but partway there, they had been attacked by a Sage, so Yogiri had killed him too.
“That would have been the Sage Santarou,” Sion said. “He was fighting a robot Aggressor at that time, so I am quite sure of it.”
“Are the dead Sages also not in part two?” Tomochika asked.
“Correct; they do not exist anymore.”
“You know that already?” The Sages all possessed incredible powers. They likely had any number of ways to disappear and hide themselves, so he found her confidence hard to believe.
“Yes. Before calling this meeting, I did a brief survey of the state of the world in part two. Though I cannot tell you precisely where they are or what they are doing, I could get a quick overview of which areas were under each Sage’s jurisdiction. The area under Santarou’s control in part one is now under mine, and there are no areas under Santarou’s control anymore. As such, the Sage Santarou effectively does not exist in part two.”
After the train was destroyed, Yogiri and Tomochika had continued on to Hanabusa. There, they had met their classmate Yuuki Tachibana and his five slave women. Yogiri had killed some of them when they had attacked him before killing Yuuki himself for ordering bugs to kill them from a distance. Yogiri had then killed a number of zombies, residents of Hanabusa, the leader of the Immortal Corps, Masayuki, and the Sage Lain.
“Tachibana wasn’t on the bus either, right?”
“Right. It seems pretty clear that everyone who’s missing was killed by Takatou,” Carol said offhandedly. Though having lost classmates should have been a big deal, it seemed she wasn’t overly concerned about it.
“You make me sound like the bad guy,” Yogiri protested. “I was just protecting myself.”
“While I agree she could have worded it better, it’s not like she’s wrong,” Tomochika said.
Even if he had known things would turn out this way, he had no way to defend himself other than to kill, and he felt no regret. “So, there’s no Lain in part two either, then?” he asked just to be sure.
“Judging by the areas under their control, the current Sages are myself, Aoi, Shirou, Alice, Raiza, Yoshifumi, Gorouzaburou, Akemi, and Van. Nine in all. The only ones missing are Lain and Santarou.”
“Huh? There are a lot more left than I thought,” Tomochika said, surprised. She remembered fighting more Sages than that.
“We took Raiza’s and Yoshifumi’s Philosopher’s Stones, but we didn’t kill them,” Yogiri said. “I’ve never heard of Gorouzaburou or Akemi, but Van was in charge of the floating continent, right?” Though they had taken his stone, Yogiri had only killed the individual parts of Raiza’s body, never actually taking his life. Yoshifumi had been killed by the shadow sent by the fox from their own world, so Yogiri hadn’t done anything to him either.
“I met Gorouzaburou and Akemi, but I don’t think I killed them,” Shigeto said. He had also been collecting Philosopher’s Stones and had taken theirs with the power of the Omega Blade.
“The only ones whose location I am aware of are Raiza and Aoi. Yoshifumi is likely somewhere in the capital of his empire. Do you know where Gorouzaburou and Akemi are?” Sion asked.
“No. I used the Omega Blade to teleport to them, so I never really knew where they went. What would you do if you knew?”
“There is a chance they could end up being our enemies, so I want to keep track of their movements.” At this point, Sion couldn’t trust the other Sages either.
“Can I continue?” Yogiri said. “After killing Lain, we went to the Garula Canyon, where we got wrapped up in that Divine King’s Trial or whatever. It would take forever to name everyone I killed there.” Yogiri had used his power quite a bit in the tower. There was no way he would remember everyone he’d used it on.
“Very well. How about you just tell us about the people you believe to be important to the world?”
“I’m not really sure who that would be, though.” From Yogiri’s perspective, anyone who appeared in front of him as an enemy ended up dying without much fanfare, so he didn’t have particularly strong feelings about any of them. However, there were a number of weird ones who stuck out in his memory, so he thought maybe describing some of them would give them some hints. “First of all, there was that golden mage guy, right? The one who said he built the tower.”
“He said his name was Eglacia,” Tomochika added. “You didn’t really listen to what he had to say at all.”
“Eglacia is dead? In that case, it appears the things left behind by those who disappeared in part one have survived to part two.”
“Did you know him?”
“I never met him personally, but there would be no end to the list of things he left behind. For example, the walls of the capital of Manii were his creation.”
“And what’s the situation with those walls now?”
“They appear to be in the same condition as in part one,” Sion answered, looking off into the distance. “I would need to investigate further to tell if they have retained the same defensive properties, though.” It seemed she could view things remotely somehow.
“So, what about the tower in the canyon? Eglacia said he made that.”
“There appears to be a barrier in the same place as there was in part one. I cannot tell if the tower exists inside it from here.”
“That barrier was made to seal away the Dark God, right?”
“That is how it appears. The Swordmaster and the Divine King work hard there on their own, so we Sages did not interfere with them. Our duty was only to repel invaders from foreign worlds, the Aggressors.”
“Yeah, about that,” Yogiri said. “We were told the Dark God came from another world. There was something about long ago, he almost wiped out humanity. Does that not make him an Aggressor?”
“The designation of beings as Aggressors is something that is left up to my grandfather. Roughly speaking, it only seems to apply to those who are looking for something in this world.”
It seemed threats that existed in this world from the start, and those from other worlds who were simply rampaging without cause, were outside of the Sage’s purview. Though Sion didn’t know it, Yogiri had some clues as to what the Aggressors were after: the fragments of the goddess the robot Aggressor had been searching for. In short, they were looking for the Philosopher’s Stones, the god sealed away in this world.
“Anyway, I killed the Dark God, so what is it trapping now?”
“I am sure the situation has changed to make things consistent somehow. If the barrier still exists, there is likely something other than the Dark God sealed within it. Speaking of which, you also killed the Dark God that was responsible for killing me in Manii, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“In that case, it is likely something related to that place. The Underworld still exists, unchanged from its state in part one.”
“Either way, if it’s sealed away we can ignore it, right?”
“But what about the Divine King?” Tomochika asked. “As I remember, she sacrificed herself to seal away the Dark God before.”
“She can stay there. It’s not like we have an obligation to break her out.”
“Huh? You’re just going to ignore her?!”
“It’s not about ignoring her. We just have no obligation to help. Either way, we won’t know the situation there until we look, and that’s not what we’re doing right now.”
“Well...I guess we haven’t decided what we’re doing next...”
Tomochika wasn’t quite sold, but Yogiri continued all the same.
“After leaving the canyon, we headed to the capital, where I defeated a number of our classmates. What were their names again?”
“You don’t even remember their names, huh?” Tomochika sighed. It wasn’t like Yogiri had no interest in the people he killed. It was just that he never knew the names of his classmates all that well.
“In the Underworld, you killed Yukimasa Aihara, Romiko Jougasaki, and Ayaka Shinozaki.” Sion had been keeping track of the battle royale in the Underworld, so she had known his victims.
Yukimasa had possessed a book that could tell him the future and rewrite that future as well to a degree, but Yogiri had never known about it. Romiko could control the spirits of the dead, which he remembered a little since she had used it to control Mokomoko.
“Huh? Didn’t Shinozaki die on the bus?” Tomochika was surprised by the name. “Wait, but she wasn’t on the bus in part two, so that means Takatou killed her?”
Although he hadn’t known her name, Yogiri did recall a girl who had been killed on the bus.
“The dragon you encountered in the Underworld was her,” Sion explained.
“How did that happen?!”
“I do not know the details either, but it appeared she wasn’t a human from the beginning. After eating the dragon that attacked the bus, she took its powers.”
“Okay, I still don’t understand.”
Hmm...that would explain why she failed to receive the Battlesong system in part one, Mokomoko murmured.
“Wait, then did Kiryuu have some reason he couldn’t get Battlesong too?”
Yuuichirou Kiryuu. He was a rude and conspicuous student but had already been impaled by the dragon by the time Yogiri had woken up. Yogiri, Tomochika, Ayaka, and Yuuichirou had all been left behind because they had failed to receive the Battlesong system and thus were powerless. Three of them had clear reasons for that failure, so it seemed natural he would have had some reason as well.
Who knows? He is alive in part two, so perhaps we should just ask him.
“Anyway, after all that happened in the Underworld, some huge woman appeared. I killed her, and then we left the capital.”
“Ah! That’s when we met Risley, right?” Tomochika said. “I wonder what happened to her? If Lain doesn’t exist...”
“Risley?” Sion asked.
Yogiri gave her a brief explanation. The girl, who had appeared out of nowhere and asked Yogiri to marry her, was actually a clone created by Lain. If Lain didn’t exist, it would make sense that Risley didn’t either.
“I see. However, I cannot say for certain that she doesn’t exist. The things Eglacia created in part one still exist even without him, after all.”
“But if Lain doesn’t exist, she definitely couldn’t be a clone of her...so that means someone else would have created her?”
“If you are curious, I can look into her situation as well.”
“Sure, thanks.”
Yogiri couldn’t write the girl off as a total stranger. They had traveled together for a time, so if she was in trouble now, he was willing to offer her a hand.
“Umm! Might I ask something?!” Hanakawa interrupted.
“What?”
“Though it sounds like you are just giving us the highlights, continuing at this pace will still take a colossal amount of time!”
“Yeah, I’m getting pretty bored of it too,” Yogiri agreed. The journey that had led them to the UEG’s death was a complex, winding string of events. The thought of having to describe all of that in detail was rather demoralizing.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login