Chapter 3 — A Guy like Those Enemies in RPGs Where You Have to Defeat All of Them at the Same Time
“After a brief inspection, it seems the population of the world in part two is roughly six percent smaller than in part one,” Sion explained. “I imagine that is a result of Takatou using his power.”
“Ummm...I am not sure I truly wish to hear the answer, but...what exactly is the population of this world?” Hanakawa asked.
“Approximately one billion.”
“So, six percent of that is...sixty million people?!” Hanakawa’s face went pale as he spoke. “That is absurd! You have gone way too far, Sir Takatou! Even if circumstances required you to eliminate an entire army, surely that would be no more than a million!”
“What kind of standard is that?” Yogiri answered.
Looking around the table, almost everyone had the same reaction as Hanakawa. The only exception seemed to be Sion, who, for some reason, looked proud.
“That’s easy for you to say,” Yogiri continued, “but there was a guy like those enemies in RPGs where you have to defeat them all at the same time or they come back to life. He had sworn to chase us forever, so I didn’t really have any options but to kill him.”
“Do you think everything is a game?!” Hanakawa protested.
Yogiri explained about Hornet, the boy they had met on the cruise ship on their way to find Yoshifumi on the eastern island of Ent. They had been attacked by pirates partway there, and then the people on the cruise ship had attacked him. That had all seemed to be Hornet’s doing, with him using his power to control others. He had used some sort of parasite to infiltrate their bodies and take control of them.
Not really understanding what was going on, Yogiri and Tomochika had come across him while wandering the ship. He had said he planned to use the two of them as test subjects for his research. Of course, Yogiri wouldn’t accept that, so they had ended up fighting. Killing him was easy enough, but Hornet had explained he had clones of himself spread across the entire world. He’d claimed that even if he was defeated there, the clones would pursue Yogiri from around the world.
“However, is the fact he was able to kill a sleeping threat spread across the world before it was able to harm anyone not a cause for celebration?” Sion asked.
Yogiri could have just killed the enemies in front of him, but that wouldn’t have really solved the problem. If someone was controlling people from afar, he could kill that particular person, but it seemed that each of Hornet’s clones was equal in power to the original, and all of them equally intended Yogiri harm, so he’d had no choice but to kill them simultaneously. It wasn’t really something for him to hesitate over.
“Did the Sages know there was a guy like that out there?”
“We do not share everything with each other, but at the very least, I was unaware of it.”
If Hornet’s grasp had really stretched to the ends of the world as he’d claimed, it wouldn’t be strange if at least one of the Sages had known about him.
“I... I ended up becoming a follower of the UEG and killed plenty of innocent people. If that was all a dream, I can feel quite relieved that none of what I did was real. However, even if it was a dream, what you did hasn’t disappeared. There’s no bringing back the people you killed. How do you feel about that, Takatou?” Haruto asked.
“Nothing in particular?”
“Not even taking the time to think?! Surely you should be agonizing over a situation such as this!” Hanakawa exclaimed.
“Why are you the one complaining when Ootori asked the question?”
“How do you feel nothing at all upon hearing you are responsible for sixty million deaths?!”
“All I’ve been doing is whatever I could to protect myself. As I’ve said before, I’m not going to kill myself. So if anyone tries to kill me from here on out, I won’t hesitate to use my power on them either.” There were certainly those who considered Yogiri’s existence to be a problem. But no matter what the cost was, he had no intention of lying down and dying for them. “If you don’t want me using my power, please solve the problems before I have to.”
“That is hardly the attitude of a hero! Not that I could ever recognize you as one!”
“Ha ha ha, sorry,” Haruto apologized. “I didn’t mean to sound like such a jerk.”
“I don’t mind, but is that what you were doing?”
“Of course.”
Yogiri looked at Haruto’s face, but the other boy’s expression was unreadable.
“While I am aware it is my fault for leading the conversation astray, if we do not move on, we will never reach the end of this,” Hanakawa complained.
Yogiri had long since grown bored of the discussion, but he understood that if he didn’t explain things thoroughly, they wouldn’t be able to plan what to do next. He continued to wrack his brain, trying to remember every detail.
“Uhh...after the cruise ship, we went to an island...”
They had ended up landing on the western side of the island of Ent. Ent was split into an eastern and western side, which were divided by a large chasm. Travel between the two sides of the island was strictly limited. The easiest way they had found to cross to the other side where the capital was situated was to pass through the Elven Forest, so that’s what they had decided to do.
Although a lot had happened on the way, the most relevant thing was the relentless attacks by the apostles of Malnarilna. For some reason or other, the second-largest religion in the world had set their sights on Yogiri.
“In the end, before we could make it through the forest to the east, we found Yoshifumi in some ruins there...”
“I believe my great deeds have been overlooked in your description of events!” Hanakawa interjected.
“What did you do?”
“I was an apostle of Malnarilna myself, and I used my powers to summon Malnarilna to your side, making me instrumental in their defeat!”
“Oh, yeah! That did happen!”
Though Yogiri wasn’t really sure how it had occurred, after getting separated from Hanakawa long before reaching Ent, their classmate had popped up again in the Elven Forest. For some reason, he had become an apostle of Malnarilna and had been given powers by them. His new power was to summon anyone or anything.
That said, it required the consent of the person he was summoning, so more precisely, it was only technically the ability to summon anything. Using that power to summon Malnarilna themselves, he had forced them to fight Yogiri head-on.
“You didn’t defeat them, though,” Yogiri said.
“So you killed Malnarilna, then?” Sion asked.
“No. One of them ran away, so I let her go. I don’t know which was which.”
Malnarilna was, in fact, a pair of childlike twin goddesses named Malna and Rilna. Claiming they could also use instant death powers, they had targeted Tomochika for a demonstration, so Yogiri had responded by killing one of them. The other had then run away. He’d considered killing her as well, since she had been responsible for sending the apostles after him, but had hesitated to kill someone who was running in fear and showing no intent to harm him.
“We tried to get out of the forest after that when some robot showed up and demanded we give it the fragments of the goddess... Oh yeah! The Philosopher’s Stones fused together into a baby. What was that about?”
After meeting Sion in the capital, their objective had become to collect the Philosopher’s Stones. Returning to their world would require a tremendous amount of energy, so he had figured the stones held by the Sages would be able to provide that. They had been keeping the stones in their backpack, but at some point, those stones had fused together into a weird lump of flesh. It continued to change, eventually taking the form of a human child.
“Yes, I have heard that the Philosopher’s Stones were originally the scattered pieces of some god. Calling them fragments of a goddess seems accurate. With that god’s divinity being sealed away, those fragments were nothing more than energy sources...but that must mean the other half of Malnarilna was also killed.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Even if only one survived, the seal should have remained intact.”
“I don’t know much about that, but is there some connection between the Sages and that god? What are gods, anyway?”
“That’s an interesting question coming from someone who’s killed plenty of them...” Tomochika sighed. Of course, Yogiri had no qualms about using his powers against anyone, be they a god or any influential person.
“To answer what a god is, that would be a transcendent being capable of interfacing directly with the underlying building blocks of the world, I suppose. Though Sages are quite powerful, in general, we cannot compare to them. After all, they are beings that can change the rules of the world. That said, the only one who can change the rules of a given world is the god who rules it, so a god from another world would be incapable of wielding their full power if they forced their way in.”
“Malnarilna was the god of this world, right? Kouryu said they took the position from him. But if the god ruling a world is so strong, is it possible for another god to take that position from them?”
“If the gap in strength between them is sufficient, then yes. On top of that, my grandfather also played a role in such a changeover.”
“Ah, Kouryu did say he had a grudge against the Sages. That explains it.” Tomochika seemed to have accepted the explanation. When they’d first met, Kouryu had said something about Sages dying brightening his day.
“Malnarilna became the chief god of this world, and a contract forbidding the Sages and their fellow gods from interfering with each other was signed. As such, we no longer had anything to do with each other. At the same time, a number of other gods were sealed away. One of them was split up into the Philosopher’s Stones, which were distributed among the Sages.”
“And when Malnarilna dies, the seal breaks. That’s how it works, huh?”
“Even I wasn’t aware of what exactly was sealed away within the Philosopher’s Stones. I certainly did not expect they would return to normal on their own.”
Yogiri gave a rough explanation of Luu, the girl born from the fused Philosopher’s Stones. “The UEG also showed up out of nowhere. Is she another of those sealed gods?”
“Probably,” Carol added. “Ryouko, Haruto, and I ended up becoming her underlings. We were told that was what happened to her.”
To get revenge against the gods who had sealed her away, the UEG had sworn to destroy all life in the world that they ruled.
“Talk about throwing a fit! As those summoned to this world from elsewhere, we had nothing to do with that!” Hanakawa said.
“If Malnarilna died, does that mean Kouryu took back control?”
“That is most likely the case,” Sion said. “There are no other candidates for the position, after all.”
“So now that we’re in part two, Malna or Rilna should be alive again, so are they in control now?”
“If you only killed one of them, that should be the case.”
“So Luu is probably back to being trapped in the Philosopher’s Stones then. Actually, now that there are fewer Sages, what happens to the number of Philosopher’s Stones?”
“I cannot say for sure, but I imagine the number is unchanged. Van has taken charge of the extras, so fewer Sages likely means he is holding more of them.”
“We got so many of them too. Now we have to start collecting them from the start again?” Tomochika muttered. They had only started collecting them partway through their journey but had gone through quite a bit of trouble to get them. It wasn’t hard to imagine she’d feel depressed seeing all that work amount to nothing.
“In that case, I think your situation has likely improved somewhat.” Sion pulled three round, transparent stones out from somewhere and placed them on the table.
“Didn’t you have to take it out of your body last time?” Yogiri remembered that when they had faced Sion previously, she had begged him to spare Youichi in exchange for her Philosopher’s Stone, which she’d had to dig out of her chest to get out.
“Last time it was a last-minute affair, so I had no other choice, but this time I was able to prepare in advance.”
“Why do you have three?”
“They belong to me, Aoi, and Raiza. I thought they might be necessary, so I collected them beforehand,” Sion said as if it had been nothing.
“What was all our suffering for before then?!” Tomochika complained.
“Why suffer if you don’t have to?”
“That’s true, but still!”
“I will do what I can to collect the remaining stones myself. I imagine it should be easy enough to convince the other Sages that have encountered Takatou in the past.”
“Is it really going to be that easy?”
“If she’s going to do the work for us, then we can just leave it to her,” Yogiri said. “So, where was I? I said basically everything that happened in Ent. So, after that, we went to the continent east of there, where we were split across four kingdoms. Dannoura and I stuck together, and even though we thought we had to do something, while we were wandering around, people kept appearing to attack us. The last one we saw was the UEG, I guess. She did some crazy beam move, which Luu protected us from, but the ground around us was totally destroyed. In the end, she tried to kill me so I killed her first. What was she, though?”
While Yogiri and Tomochika had wandered, they’d been accosted by a prince, a princess, a queen, and a variety of gods, but none of them had left a strong impression on him.
“The UEG? I imagine that was another one of the sealed gods the Aggressors were searching for,” Sion explained. “We knew that we were fighting the Aggressors to keep them from finding something hidden in this world, but we weren’t told exactly what that was.”
“Are you Sages a serious group at all?!” Tomochika blurted out.
“Not particularly. We have the right to live however we wish in this world, our only obligation being to fight off the Aggressors.”
“After I used my power to kill the UEG, this whole thing happened. So what do we do now?” Yogiri finished describing their adventure so far in this world. There were plenty of things he had skipped over, but he didn’t imagine that would be a problem.
“First of all, let us start by summarizing the current situation. The current date on the Holy Calendar is the 1852nd year, Season of the Sun, the First Month, Day of the Tortoise—”
“Wait, hold on! That’s what this world’s calendar is like?!” Tomochika blurted out.
“Of course.”
“Oh, what is this? Were you unaware?” Hanakawa interjected. “Very well, very well. Allow me to explain the long and storied history of this world!”
“Uh, no thanks. I’ll look into it later if I care.”
“At any rate, this is the same day you were summoned to this world in part one. After part one progressed to a certain point, the world was switched into part two, I suppose.”
“Why did we end up switching to part two?” Ryouko asked. The explanation that it had all been a dream was fine for now, but Yogiri was also curious what had led to the switch happening.
It was likely due to the UEG’s actions leading the world to a point it was near total destruction, Mokomoko said.
“How did that happen?” Tomochika asked.
The UEG unleashed countless beams of light that rained down on the planet. Luu’s barrier was sufficient to guarantee our safety, but the floating continent was effectively annihilated, and the surface of the world had countless holes punched through it. If those beams of light all passed straight through... It is hard to say without knowing precisely how gravity functions in this world, but it is not too hard to guess that it would lead to the total destruction of the planet, no?
“That’s how it looked,” Tomochika remarked, relaying Mokomoko’s explanation.
“On top of that, we were killing people all over the world,” Haruto explained. “Though we personally didn’t accomplish much, Zakuro wiped out most major cities. In short, the world was basically doomed.”
Using her subordinates, the UEG had made quite a bit of progress in wiping out all life in the world.
“Huh? So does that mean the Great Sage saved the world?!” Tomochika asked.
“If the Great Sage is responsible for this, then yes,” Sion answered. “I am not familiar with my grandfather’s exact powers, but according to the rumors, this world is effectively a dream that he is seeing.”
“Uh...what?” Tomochika said. “What do you mean ‘a dream he is seeing’? I don’t get it at all!”
“I also laughed it off as impossible when I first heard it. No matter how powerful he may be, the fact that I was alive and thinking made it impossible to believe I was a part of someone else’s dream. However, now that I have seen this situation, I cannot help but believe that it could be true; hence, the explanation I gave to all of you earlier.”
“Saying that we dreamed it all is totally different than saying we’re in someone else’s dream though!”
Hmm...there are similar stories harking back to ancient times, such as myths that the world is the shell of a clam or the dream of a dragon.
“What can we even do, then?! We’re all just sitting in the palm of his hands!” Tomochika cried.
“Yes, you are correct. However, Takatou’s power has shown it is capable of influencing this world, be it a dream or not. Normally one would expect that if the Great Sage were to save the world, he would return it to its original state. But he did not accomplish that. In short, it means his power is not limitless.”
“Ah...”
“That is the primary reason I have decided to cooperate with Takatou in this,” Sion announced.
While everyone else thought deeply about the implications, Yogiri was recalling a game he had once played that took place entirely within the dream of a whale.
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