Chapter 24 — I’m Not So Twisted as to Watch the Whole Thing
“Now then, with all that’s happened, I think I’m going to have to kill you.” After finishing his exchange with the samurai-like man, the Great Sage turned to Yogiri.
“You should have done that from the start,” Yogiri said. “I don’t know why you dragged it out so much.” They had already met at the top of the pyramid in Cavern Quest. If he was going to kill Yogiri anyway, he should have just done it then. That would have saved Yogiri a lot of trouble fighting and killing people. He felt like he had gone through a lot of needless effort.
“I thought it would be more interesting this way. A lot of unexpected things happened thanks to all this, so I’ve been enjoying it. But it’s about time I finished things. The future looks pretty boring from here.”
“‘Interesting’ this, ‘boring’ that. Are you that starved for entertainment?” Yogiri was starting to feel fed up. He couldn’t help his frustration that all of this was being done just for the sake of killing time.
“Yeah, I’m usually pretty bored. So could you go ahead and use your power for me? You like the same thing, right? You enjoy seeing the faces of people who are overly confident in themselves when they realize they’re actually powerless, right?”
“Not especially. And even if my power didn’t work on you, I wouldn’t make some funny face for you.” If his power didn’t affect the Great Sage, that would be all there was to it. Yogiri’s ability hadn’t made him arrogant. As far as he knew, it worked on everything he had encountered so far, but he wouldn’t be surprised if there were exceptions. In a sense, he took his power for granted, but he didn’t understand how it worked in the least. He didn’t know enough about it to think it strange that it might fail. “Let me ask first, just in case, but can you get us back to our home world?”
“I probably could, but then the people you killed would never come back to life,” the Great Sage replied.
“If this is all your dream, why can’t you manage it?” Yogiri didn’t consider himself to be a part of the Great Sage’s dream, but when he had been told that this was, in fact, a dreamworld, there hadn’t been much he could say to argue. As long as he still had his own free will, there wasn’t a lot to complain about either.
“When you came, a rule was placed on this world that anyone you kill can’t be brought back to life. I need to get rid of that rule, which is why you have to die.”
“Fine. But if you try to kill me, I’ll resist.”
“But how am I going to do it? Just plain old instant death is no fun.” The Great Sage lifted his right hand, where a small light began to glow.
That looks incredibly dangerous! Mokomoko exclaimed.
“It does, doesn’t it?” As someone with no experience with magic, there was no way Yogiri could gauge the power of a spell just by looking at it. But the intense, frenzied pressure of the light he was seeing was clear to everyone.
“Let’s call it an erasure bolt,” the Great Sage said. “If it hits you, it deletes your entire past, present, and future. I guess in really simple terms, it’ll make it so that I totally forget you ever existed.”
“So because it’s your dream, if you forget someone exists, they disappear?”
“Exactly. I don’t really need to use something this extreme, but I thought I’d make it a bit of a show. It only moves as fast as I can throw it, so if you try hard enough, you should be able to dodge it. Okay, let’s start.”
“Please wait!” As the Great Sage made to throw the ball of light, Alexia stopped him.
“What’s wrong?”
“I investigated the boy, just to be safe,” Alexia explained, “and he is no more than an ordinary teenager. Any mundane method of taking his life should be sufficient. But that in and of itself is strange. He has killed all kinds of people. He has even created a situation where someone as powerful as you cannot bring the dead back to life! So I decided he merited a deeper investigation!” Alexia was clearly in a panic. Yogiri didn’t care about her much, but her desperation was enough to draw his attention.
“But I couldn’t find out anything. It’s too strange! This cannot be the case! As I attempt to investigate further, my will to investigate disappears! I am forced to turn my eyes away! There must be something at work on me, some kind of protection for him! I have given everything I have to you, Lord Mitsuki. I gave you all of my power, all of my being, leaving me only a hollow shell of what I once was. But even so, there is still something left in me! Something fundamental to my being, something I cannot separate from myself!”
“I see,” Mitsuki replied. “So what do you think I should do?”
“Let us return this boy to his home world! Leave the dead as they are and restart the world without them! There is no need for us to expose ourselves to this kind of danger!”
“Hmm. Coming from you, of all people, that is pretty persuasive. But that doesn’t change that this is my world. There’s no way a character in my dream can kill me. Even if he could, that would just mean the world was destroyed, right?”
The Great Sage’s words made Yogiri realize something. If this world was actually a dream the Great Sage was having, what would happen to it if Yogiri used his power to kill him? Normally, one would expect the whole thing to disappear, which meant Yogiri would be killed too. That would be entirely pointless.
“Please!”
“Stop getting in the way,” the Great Sage replied, making Alexia go stiff. Whatever Alexia had been trying to do, the Great Sage had stopped her. It was like time had frozen for her alone. “Sorry. Things have started looking pretty sloppy, haven’t they?”
“It’s fine,” Yogiri replied. “This’ll be over pretty fast anyway.”
What would happen if he killed the Great Sage? How much of an impact would that have on the world? Yogiri believed he was telling the truth, and killing the Great Sage would lead to the world being destroyed. So he released the seal on his powers. He opened the second gate, and beyond it the third gate, unleashing the full extent of his own abilities. There was now nothing limiting him, returning him to his natural state.
Killing the Great Sage would destroy the world. If Mitsuki and this world were so closely linked, even Yogiri’s second level wouldn’t be enough to deal with him.
“This time I’m attacking for real, okay?” The Great Sage threw the ball of light like he was playing a game of catch.
Yogiri activated his power.
◇ ◇ ◇
Mitsuki was in the dark.
Though he was utterly confused, he was far from worried. For someone omnipotent, as he was, there was no such thing as fear. He could enjoy anything that happened to him.
“Did he do something to me?”
He tried to recall the previous events. He had thrown the erasure bolt, but Yogiri had made no attempt to avoid it. If he had, the attack would have followed him anyway, but Mitsuki hadn’t bothered explaining that. He didn’t remember seeing the attack land, so something must have happened before it made contact.
“He must have done something. But I really have no idea what.”
“Let me tell you.”
Mitsuki turned around at the sound of a person’s voice. Standing within the darkness was a young man. He seemed a little familiar. He was one of the gods that had ruled over this world before Mitsuki had arrived and turned it into his own dream.
“You were one of the gods here before Malnarilna, right?”
“That’s right. And I’m the current god too. After all that’s happened, I’ve taken up the name Kouryu, so please call me that.”
“Kouryu, is it? Why are you here?”
“Because things have finally gone the way I was hoping. I wanted to see you off, just to put the icing on the cake.”
Mitsuki figured Kouryu was talking about taking back the Heavenly Throne after Malnarilna’s death. Once Mitsuki reset the world, all that would be undone again, but Kouryu should have known that. If he wanted to bask in the glory he had achieved while he still had the chance, Mitsuki was happy to let him do so. Nothing Kouryu was saying bothered him in the least.
“So, what exactly happened?” Mitsuki asked.
“You should be able to figure that much out on your own, shouldn’t you?”
“I like to hear things from other people, though.” If he decided he wanted to know something, he could learn anything in the world instantly, but there was no fun in that. He preferred to learn things by conversing with others, no matter how trivial those things were. It was much more fun that way.
“Then I guess I’ll talk with you for a bit. The answer is actually quite simple. You lost to Yogiri Takatou. Your attack never reached him.”
“Really? That’s interesting! I guess it was worth meeting him face-to-face after all! I never expected something like this!”
“You seem pretty laid-back for having lost,” Kouryu remarked.
“I mean, it’s all a dream anyway. I can reset the game whenever I want. There’s no point getting upset because my character in the game died, is there?”
After a short silence, Kouryu burst out laughing, barely able to stay standing through the fit of hysterics. “A game! It’s all a game, is it?! I guess it kind of looks that way! Yeah, I get it.”
“Did I say something strange? You realize I’m not dead, right?” That was obvious. The fact that he could still think meant he couldn’t be dead.
“Yeah, you’re right. You aren’t dead. Yogiri Takatou didn’t kill you. That’s why he had to use his full power.”
“So what?” Mitsuki was getting a little bit irritated with the way Kouryu was dodging around what he was really trying to say, dropping hints but never telling the truth outright.
“If you died, the world would end. If you hadn’t told him that, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out this way. Well, actually, I’m not sure about that either. Yogiri Takatou is one of the regulating forces in the Ensemble World, so it would be a much bigger problem if he died.”
“Can you just come out with it?”
“You said you prefer hearing things from other people, right? If you’re tired of listening to me, just figure it out for yourself. This is your world. You’re omnipotent. Everything goes the way you want it to, right?”
He was right. Mitsuki didn’t know why Kouryu was here, but he had no need to rely on some minor god to figure anything out.
“Alexia!” the Great Sage called out, his voice swallowed by the all encompassing darkness. Alexia did not appear. There was no response. She was a woman whose greatest joy in life was answering the Great Sage’s every desire, who always appeared in the blink of an eye to hear his every word, but she didn’t even respond.
“Come on, don’t you remember? You froze her in time. There’s no way she can reply to you!”
“Alexia, you have my permission to move again!” Accepting that he had made a foolish mistake, he called out to her again, but there was still no answer.
“Hmm. You didn’t really treat her very nicely back there,” Kouryu suggested. “Maybe she’s off sulking somewhere?”
“That’s impossible! Alexia loves me! She would do anything for me, any time!” Mitsuki’s irritation was starting to blossom into anger.
“Why don’t you try doing something for yourself for once?” Kouryu suggested. “You’re always leaving things to other people because you just can’t be bothered, aren’t you?”
Alexia wasn’t replying. That was a fact. So Mitsuki relented, investigating the situation for himself.
“What’s wrong?” Kouryu asked. “Just look it up yourself. You’re basically omniscient, right?” Kouryu was making a poor attempt at hiding his mockery, inflaming Mitsuki’s frustration.
But he wasn’t really sure where to start investigating. Even if he called himself omniscient, he couldn’t know every fact at every time. Maybe if he tried, he actually could, but the effort would be exhausting. The trick was to learn only the information you were immediately curious about, to focus on the fact you wanted to learn alone. Normally, doing so would cause the information he was looking for to float up in the back of his mind, but now nothing was happening.
“What’s going on?!” Mitsuki exclaimed.
“Oh, is something the matter? You can’t figure it out?”
“Shut up!” he reflexively attempted to erase Kouryu, a rather direct use of his power, one that he hadn’t used in quite a while.
But Kouryu didn’t disappear. That smirk was still directed straight at him. “As an order from the Great Sage himself, I’d really like to obey it, but for some reason, I can’t. I wonder why that is?”
Mitsuki had no desire to spend another moment with some lowly god from the previous era. He decided to go back home. Everything was just his imagination. Whatever he thought became reality. The moment he thought to return home, he should have appeared there. And yet, he was still standing in this empty void.
“Why?!” he shouted. He tried to make some light, to return to the Meld Plains he had just come from, to call his friends. None of it worked. The world around him remained as it was, steady and unrelenting darkness.
“Please...just tell me. What is going on?” Mitsuki began to beg. He had finally understood that there was nothing he could do.
“Since you’re asking so nicely, I guess I have to tell you,” Kouryu replied. “Yogiri Takatou killed the relationship between you and the world.”
“What?” Mitsuki didn’t understand what that meant. He could understand the idea of killing a living thing. Even the idea of killing a phenomenon like gravity made sense, in a vague sort of way. But what did it mean to kill a relationship?
“If the world is a dream someone is seeing, how do you avoid that person’s influence?” Kouryu asked. “By cutting them off from the dream. Make it so that they can’t influence the dreamworld. At least, that must have been Yogiri’s conclusion.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said this was like a game before, right? If we stick to that example, it’s like Yogiri broke your controller. Basically, you can’t do anything anymore.”
Understanding was slowly dawning on him. Mitsuki was starting to realize what had happened. And as that understanding set in, fear was not far behind.
“Okay then, I think I’ve explained enough to you, so I’m going to be on my way. I’m sure you’re about to break down into all kinds of terror and confusion, but I’m not so twisted as to watch the whole thing.” Kouryu disappeared, leaving Mitsuki alone in the darkness.
The Great Sage tried to die, but he couldn’t. Right now, he didn’t even have a physical form. He was nothing more than a disembodied consciousness, separated from reality. He had become only the dreamer, merely a tool that was necessary to sustain the world.
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