Chapter 2 — If You Had Said Something Pathetic, I Would Have Just Put You Out of Your Misery
In a vague sort of way, Ein understood the world to be a fair place. Some people enjoyed extreme wealth while others languished in poverty, some suffered under the oppression of Demon Lords, and some lived in a state of constant starvation, but in the end, all of these were foreign ideas to him. As long as they didn’t happen to him, he didn’t care much about them.
His own family had been driven out of their town and, unable to find proper work, forced into bare subsistence by hunting for their own food, but even that was a rather peaceful way of living, at least for a while.
Going out to hunt something was easy enough, but actually bringing back something to eat could be a challenge. Normally, if he failed to find food, he’d have to go into town and buy something to eat. He was out hunting in the first place because that wasn’t really an option, but neither could he bear to let his little sister starve.
As the sun set, he walked through the forest, dejected. He knew full well how dangerous the forest was at night, so he should have gone into town as quickly as possible, but still he dragged his feet.
The edge of the forest ahead of him seemed strangely bright. The sun was setting behind him, so there was no way it was just the light of sunset, but he didn’t think anything about it was strange either. Maybe his peaceful life had dulled his senses, as the thought that his way of life might be threatened by this odd event didn’t even occur to him.
As he broke out of the trees, the source of the light became obvious. The city was burning. He could already hear the screams and shouts coming from the settlement a short distance ahead of him.
“What the...?” It was clearly a huge disaster. A fire of this size had likely already claimed a number of lives.
Ein hesitated. His relationship with the people of this city wasn’t good. Was there a point to going and trying to help? What help could he even offer? Wouldn’t it be smarter to just hurry home, where there was no danger at all? But even in his hesitation, he ran towards the city. There may not have been much he could do, but there was always the chance he could save someone. He may have been on bad terms with the people in the city, but he hadn’t fallen so low as to let someone die for a personal grudge.
The city was a sea of flames. No one would have stayed in this situation. Anyone who did would have long since burned to death. Yet the city was filled with figures wrapped in flames, writhing in the streets. Bodies burned to a crisp still lay twisting in agony. There seemed little hope any of them would be alive, little hope they could be alive, yet they all still moved. Some of them had been reduced to nothing but bones, making the city look like a den of monsters.
There was no saving anyone here. Ein ran out of the city, back to his home. For the first time, he was grateful that he lived outside the city. Any damage done there wouldn’t reach him. But soon, a sense of dread began to well up in him.
The small, dilapidated trail leading to his home showed clear signs of chaos. Blood soaked the ground. Bits of flesh lay scattered about. The tracks of something moving in enormous numbers, maybe carriages or wagons, led straight towards his house, trampling a number of people in their path.
When he finally made it home, he was greeted by an unbelievable sight.
“Dad!”
His father had been crushed by a lump of metal. Later he would come to know it was an armored truck, but at that time he had no clue what it was. The vehicle had stopped in front of their house, his father only one of the bodies crushed underneath it. In a panic, Ein rushed over to the vehicle and attempted to push it off his father, but it didn’t so much as budge.
“What the hell is happening?! Dammit!”
His father was most likely dead, but that didn’t mean Ein could stand idly by and do nothing. In his confusion, the thoughts of what this thing was doing here or where the rest of his family was hadn’t even occurred to him. When the door of his house swung open and his sister Ariel was dragged outside, his mind finally turned to the rest of his family.
“Huh? Where’d you come from?” said the man who was dragging Ein’s sister behind him. Wearing a black coat over a bare chest, he had a firm grip on Ariel’s hair.
“Who the hell are you?! Let her go!”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. We were ordered to take her alive, you know?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Ein drew his bow from his back and loosed an arrow, planting it firmly in the man’s right eye. But the man’s grin didn’t so much as twitch.
“Nice, very nice. But that’s not gonna kill me.” He casually tore the arrow from his eye and tossed it aside, ignoring the eyeball still stuck to the arrowhead. Or rather, despite the eyeball on the arrowhead, his right eye was still there, as if nothing had happened to it in the first place.
Ein froze in shock moments before a pair of arms grabbed him from behind. As he was pushed to the ground, a number of people leaped on top of him, pinning him down in seconds.
“But I’m pretty hurt, to be honest. Who the hell am I? Don’t you know the name Masayuki? I thought the head of the Immortal Corps was pretty famous by now.”
The Immortal Corps. As ignorant of the world as he was, Ein still knew that infamous name. Serving under Sage Lain, it was an immortal battalion of undead, golems, and other lifeless creatures. No atrocity was beyond consideration when it came to fulfilling their objectives, and it was rumored they preferred killing as many people as possible to add to their numbers. The smell of the people pinning him to the ground was enough to confirm they were undead as well.
“What do you want with Ariel?!”
“Don’t know, don’t care. I was just told to bring her in.”
“Dammit! Let me go!” At this rate, he’d be killed. He desperately struggled against the ones restraining him but accomplished nothing.
“Huh. Looks like you got the wrong idea. Do you think I’m a murderer or somethin’?”
“Of course you are! You killed my father, didn’t you?!”
“Oh, that guy! Yeah, that was an accident. We just drove on up and he happened to be in the way. We never meant to kill him. If it had been on purpose, we wouldn’t have crushed him like this. What a waste.”
“You bastard!”
“Ah! But you’re still in good shape, aren’t ya? Welcome to the crew. We’re always looking for fresh blood.”
“Like hell I’d join you!”
“Okay, crush him a bit more. Give him enough weight to suffocate him.”
Suddenly the pressure on his back increased. Ein could feel his ribs cracking as the air was pushed from his lungs. With no room to expand his chest, he couldn’t draw in breath.
“Don’t overdo it. If you crush him completely, he’ll lose a lot of firepower—”
Masayuki was interrupted by his head dropping to the ground. The pressure immediately vanished from his back, prompting a bloody coughing fit. The undead holding him down were gone. He was free to move. Still coughing, Ein looked around but couldn’t find the undead anywhere. When he looked up, his eyes went wide. Corpses hung in the air, as if frozen in space.
“You call that a waste, yet set the whole city ablaze? That sounds much more wasteful to me.”
Turning around, Ein saw a woman in a maid uniform. Instinctively, he understood she was a maid in appearance alone. She gave no impression of being subservient to anyone.
“The hell was that for?!” Masayuki roared, his head sitting in his right hand. He had managed to grab it out of the air as it fell. It seemed the leader of the Immortal Corps could handle losing his head without issue.
“I am Teresa, a Knight of the Divine King.”
“What? Why is a Knight butting in?!” Masayuki returned his head to his neck, which reconnected smoothly.
“Butting in? Surely you don’t think I can ignore an entire city being razed.”
“That was just an accident. Bad luck. We just wanted to do some recruiting. It’s their fault everything was made of wood!”
“In any case, the past is the past. I still cannot ignore what you are doing now.”
“So what? You wanna start a war?”
“Well, I suppose the Axis Church and the Sages have a nonintervention pact...but there’s a reason I’m known as a mad dog.”
As Teresa chuckled, dismembered corpses rained down around them. Already confused about how they were floating in the air in the first place, seeing them sliced apart and falling to the ground left Ein at a total loss.
Masayuki clicked his tongue. “Jeez, what a pain. I’m too smart for this. Guess I’m pulling out.”
“My, what a shame. Here I thought you and I were quite alike.” Despite having the option, Teresa seemed to be refraining from attacking him directly.
“Wait...wait...why are you taking her?” Ein choked out. For a moment it seemed like everything had been resolved, but from Ein’s perspective, the main problem was yet to be faced.
Masayuki tossed Ariel into the armored vehicle. “Huh? I told you, this is my job.”
Ein couldn’t move, couldn’t even crawl closer to try and take his sister back. “You! Miss Teresa! Please, do something! You’re from the church, right? You’re a Knight, aren’t you?!” Turning, he begged the woman standing behind him. He had neither the spirit nor the strength to do anything himself, so she was his only hope.
But her response was cold and heartless. “I don’t believe I have any obligation to go that far.”
“Just so you know,” Masayuki interrupted, “this is a job from the Great Sage himself. Even if you stop me, someone else will come after her.”
“See? There’s no point in me doing anything.”
As if to cut off any further conversation, Masayuki hopped into the armored vehicle and immediately drove off.
Ein quickly lost consciousness.
◇ ◇ ◇
When he awoke, Ein was lying in bed. He was home, staring at his own familiar ceiling, but he knew the events weren’t just a dream. The pain wracking his body proudly declared the truth of those events. Without rising, he looked around the room to see Teresa stand to leave.
“Good, you’re awake. I may look like a maid, but that’s as far as the comparison goes. You’ll have to handle the rest on your own,” she said as she turned away.
“Wait...let me ask one thing.” Ein was calm. It seemed his time unconscious had helped him get his thoughts in order.
Though clearly irritated, Teresa stopped. “I suppose I can answer a question or two.”
“You’re strong, right? How can I get that strong?”
“I see. If you had said something pathetic, I would have just put you out of your misery, but...” Returning to Ein’s side, Teresa sat down beside his bed.
“My strength comes from the Gift, a source of supernatural power. It is not particularly uncommon. Does your family not have one?”
“No...not that I know of.”
“I see. The Gift isn’t especially rare, though whether it is useful or not is a different matter. Most of the Sages possess the Gift as well, so without it, you will have no chance of fighting them.”
Ein wanted power. He would defeat the Sages and take back his sister. Teresa understood that immediately.
“If you want the Gift for yourself, go seek out the Swordmaster. If you tell him I sent you...well, that may not do you any good, but he should at least listen to your story.”
There were any number of ways to obtain the Gift, but if he received it from the Sages, he couldn’t use it against them. If he wanted to fight them, he needed the Gift passed down from the Divine King, managed by the Swordmaster.
◇ ◇ ◇
Though he succeeded in inheriting the Gift from the Swordmaster, Ein did not become a Knight of the Divine King. The Knights served to keep the Dark Gods imprisoned and exterminate their spawn, but they couldn’t oppose the Sages. Instead, he joined a resistance group aiming to free the world from the grip of the Sages.
He knew Ariel had been taken to the Great Sage, but he had no idea where that was. If he fought against the Sages and eroded their strength, he would eventually reach the Great Sage. Such was his plan, but despite his endless efforts, he couldn’t even match Sage Lain.
Afterwards, his sister had been discarded by the Great Sage and returned to him, but her mind had been lost. Ein spent a great deal of time trying to find a way to return her to normal, traveling across the world at the barest hint of a clue.
In the midst of that despair, the world was suddenly reset. Ein hadn’t lost his memories. Though the world itself had changed, his hatred of the Sages and his obsession with curing his sister made those changes evident. The situation had changed. The Divine King was no longer imprisoned, and Sage Lain no longer existed. But that didn’t change the fact that Ariel had been abducted. In short order, the Great Sage would tire of her, sending her back home in a pathetic state.
In the end, there was no solution but to kill the Great Sage himself. Ein needed to get rid of him before his sister was lost. He understood that the Gift wasn’t enough to help him. The Gift was something the Great Sage had brought into this world, so no matter what lineage of Gift he obtained, they would all be useless against him.
So what could he do? He needed a power entirely separate from the Great Sage’s. A power that had existed before he had come to this world, or something that was foreign to it. Having traveled across the world in search of information, a vague plan took shape in his head. If he was able to get his hands on the powers of the Dark Gods that the Knights kept sealed away...
Once the first seal was broken and he had defeated the Dark God that lay within, the rest was easy enough. One Dark God agreed to assist him in his plan to kill the Great Sage, and with its power, he was able to defeat others. Negotiations, threats, theft, absorption—no method was off-limits in Ein’s search for power.
The power he obtained was far greater than the human body could handle. Naturally, he paid the price for that. His memories were lost. His emotions were lost. He abandoned his human form, lost all sense of social awareness, and even his objective started to become vague and uncertain. The only thing he just barely held on to was his memory of Ariel.
As he was now, Ein knew what was happening across the entire world. Yet even so, he couldn’t find the Great Sage or his sister. It seemed the Great Sage had managed to hide his dwelling from any sort of ability that might find it. Ein briefly considered wiping out the Sages, the Great Sage’s underlings. If they were entirely exterminated, surely the Great Sage would have to show himself. The plan was simple enough, but he never ended up needing it.
Without warning, without any visible reason, the Great Sage had appeared.
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