Chapter 20 — Aren’t You, Like, a Perfect Example of an Enemy of the World?
“Now then, where should I start? Well, my ultimate objective was to bring Lord Albagarma home after he went missing.”
The moment he heard that name, a shiver ran down Lynel’s back. It must have been the name of the Dark God, a name so taboo it had passed out of human memory.
“My darling just up and disappeared one day! That was a habit of his, though, so I figured it was nothing special. But no matter how long I waited, this time, he never came back.”
“Um, does that mean you two are married?” He really didn’t care one way or another, but asked as if it were of deep interest to him. If he was going to buy some time, he needed to extend the conversation for as long as possible. Luckily, the Dark God’s spawn were quietly waiting while they talked.
“Ah, sorry, did I make us sound too close?”
“No. While your positions may be different, there is still a relationship between you two. Please don’t concern yourself with the semantics,” Orgain answered reverently, still kneeling.
“Hmm, maybe something like ‘concubine’ would be more accurate? Well, unlike humans, it’s not something that is legally monitored, so as long as both parties have consented, it’s fine. Maybe it was a bit more than that, though. My darling was always so quick to grow embarrassed.”
“I see,” Lynel said, desperate to fill the space with empty words.
“I thought something must have gone wrong, so I went looking for him. I heard that he had traveled to another world, so I sent messengers to many worlds and eventually discovered that he was likely here. I started focusing my efforts on this world, but I couldn’t directly intervene, so it was rather difficult. The best I could do was gather small pieces of information from the humans that I reincarnated here. Putting it all together was quite challenging.” Vahanato spoke as if she had been wanting to complain about the pain of that struggle to someone for a long time.
“Uhh, aren’t you intervening directly right now though?”
“No, this is a fairly roundabout method. I had to add the star crystal expansion to the world’s system myself. Then I had to set you up as a person from this world so that you could avoid conflicting with the local system. That allowed me to operate as a manager of the bonus content that’s available to you, so I could send you all of those messages. And now, using the front of being someone that you’ve summoned, I can finally take direct action. Now that I know for sure that my darling is here, I can ensure that the seal is lifted. I can’t get involved this way over and over, so I had to wait for the perfect moment!
“Anyway! After analyzing my stores of information, I found that he was locked away somewhere in this very world, and that he was being held here by the Swordmaster, so I decided to get rid of the old coot. But then I hit another snag. No matter who I sent, no one could beat him!”
Vahanato paused to glare at the Swordmaster. Lynel didn’t know how long she had been sending messengers to this world, but she had likely been working at it for millennia. It wasn’t hard to believe that she was starting to lose her patience.
“Since this silly human had taken humanity’s entire fate on his shoulders, his Fate level was absurdly high! No matter how much stronger the people I sent against him were, they simply never won.”
“Umm, can I ask a question?”
“What is it?”
“Did those people you sent not use Random Walk? I would expect them to eventually win if they could just keep trying over and over.”
“Ah, that wouldn’t work. Powerful warriors with especially high Fate levels can’t keep coming back to life to try again. That would be pretty lame, don’t you think? So that’s an ability that only garbage-tier mooks can use.”
“Garbage-tier...” Lynel felt his heart drop.
“Oh, but it’s not like I’m making fun of you. In the end, it was thanks to you and your awful luck that things worked out so well. No one I sent could stand against the Swordmaster. Trying to fight him made them an enemy of humanity, and Swordmasters totally outclass such enemies. So I changed my whole strategy. What if I sent someone to be an ally of humanity instead? Someone who was so unlucky that they’d die immediately if left alone?”
“Wait, you mean...”
“That’s right! If someone with luck as awful as yours was on humanity’s side, then humanity would be wiped out! In short, such ill fortune would give rise to a rebirth of the Dark God.”
“But wait, I die so often! There’s no way I’d survive long enough for a plan like that —”
Lynel stopped short as the realization hit him. That was why he had been given Random Walk and all of those star crystals.
“Well, obviously I needed some way to keep you alive even with your terrible luck. I knew that Fate would definitely try to have you killed. If it failed to accomplish that over and over, it would start to try harder and harder to make it happen. In the end, the cycle would build up to a calamity on a level that would threaten the world itself. And so here we are!
“I’m not sure of the exact chain of events that led to the barrier being so close to failing, but your luck is so awful that terrible things have just been piling up on top of each other until the situation ended up like this!”
“You’ve got to be joking...” Lynel had fallen to his knees. He had always known that his luck was abysmal, but he had never thought it so bad that it would bring about the destruction of humankind. “S-So, if I kill myself here...”
“Feel free, but at this point, you’ll just die. This is the specific future that I’ve been looking for. Now that we’re here, I made sure to take away your power, just in case. But if you’re going to die regardless, why not wait until you see my darling first?”
“I don’t understand! From my perspective, I go back when I die and try again, but to everyone else, I just die, don’t I? Why bother taking away my power if it can’t actually change anything?”
“Well, this is just something that gods do. We can keep rolling the dice until we get the results we’re looking for, and once we have those results, we can make that particular future inevitable. To be fair, I have a feeling that trying to explain this sensation to a human is a wasted effort.”
Lynel had intended to keep her talking for as long as possible, but at this point, he had lost the will to continue. Although in reality he could hardly be held responsible, he certainly felt like it was all his fault — that his very existence would bring about the end of the world. And even if he died now, nothing would change that.
As Lynel dropped his head, he heard the sound of something landing nearby. Slowly, he lifted his head back up and was greeted by a scene that seemed to be taken straight out of hell. An army of terrifying monsters was now filling the area around them. They had suddenly begun to arrive at the remains of the tower in droves.
“The outer parts of the barrier have collapsed. I thought we were almost done here, but I suppose I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy,” Lute remarked.
“After coming all this way, I can hardly sit around and do nothing, can I? I’ll go take a look,” Vahanato offered, pressing a hand to her forehead in thought. It was an all too human quirk.
After staying like that for some time, she suddenly burst out laughing. It looked like she was trying to hold it in, but she couldn’t help laughing so hard that tears flowed from her eyes as she looked over at Lynel.
“Wow, your luck is so hilariously bad, I can’t help but laugh! The man who first created the barrier was here. He could have repaired all of this in an instant.”
Lynel was confused. He had no idea what was so funny about that.
“Fate must have brought him here, knowing that something like this would happen. But he’s dead! I don’t even know what happened to him! There was also a godslayer here. An awfully vile person, in my opinion. If I wasn’t careful, he could definitely have killed me, but he’s dead too! You really are amazing. I never dreamed that things would go this well. Aren’t you, like, a perfect example of an enemy of the world at this point?”
Lynel could only stare at her, utterly speechless.
“So, what about the barrier?” Lute asked, clearly growing tired of waiting.
“Right, right. It’s in a terrible state, and the core is plainly visible.”
The goddess tossed aside the sword in her hand, and it floated back to join the collection of weapons hovering behind her. She then extended her right hand forward, and it disappeared as the air around it rippled like water. She fiddled around inside the distortion as if searching for something for a few moments, then pulled her hand back out. She was now holding a pulsing purple-red mass. A number of tubes were sprouting from it, each oozing a filthy black liquid. Based on the conversation, Lynel assumed that it was the core of the barrier.
“Why did you bring it here? Just destroy it.”
“But then the barrier would simply disappear. Don’t you feel bad for the people who’ve been protecting it for so long? I want them to be around to see the moment my darling returns to power.”
Lynel looked towards Rick and the Swordmaster at his side. Despair was clear on both of their faces. The Swordmaster had said that if he was able to absorb the power from the tower, he could do something to stop their enemies. But would he be able to say the same thing now that the Dark God’s entire army was standing before him? And no matter how much power he had built up, the core of the barrier was already in their opponent’s hands. In short, the moment the goddess had appeared, they had already lost the fight.
“By the way, what do we do about the Divine King? She managed to fight our lord in some capacity. Don’t you think she’ll be pretty strong?” Lute asked.
“She used a tremendous number of sacrifices to match him for only a single instant. Once the barrier is gone, she’ll have nothing left,” Orgain answered, unconcerned.
“But that woman was facing down my darling for over a thousand years. Doesn’t it look like they’re hugging? That annoys me a bit, so I’ll have to make her pay. Make sure to capture her alive. Ah, you lot are in the way, so please move. These humans won’t be able to see the grand finale with you blocking their view.”
At Vahanato’s command, the gathered spawn immediately dispersed. The goddess then waved the wheel she was gripping in her left hand. With that one motion, the remainder of the first floor of the tower was obliterated, revealing the canyon beyond and the barrier surrounding it. The goddess and the two humanoid spawn walked to the edge of what had once been the tower, where they could better see the Dark God’s prison.
“Look, look!” Vahanato urged Lynel and his companions. “You can’t see anything from there, can you? Come a little closer.”
It was an inappropriate invitation, yet hardly one they could refuse, so Lynel, Rick, and the Swordmaster did as they were told. They all looked equally demoralized in the face of such a hopeless situation.
Peering over the edge of the tower, they could clearly see the canyon. At the center of the large spherical space that had been carved into it, two figures were floating in the air.
The Dark God, dressed in black.
The Divine King, dressed in white.
Facing each other as if in the middle of an embrace, they were perfectly still.
When Tomochika and the others finally made it back up the stairs, there was no longer a room there. A wide open space greeted them instead.
“I’m thinking that things got a lot worse while we were gone,” Tomochika murmured.
It was like a scene out of hell itself. Monsters that could be described as nothing less than demons were crowded around them. To make things even stranger, the creatures were all shaking with laughter, their voices painful on the ears. The evil aura that they gave off was strong enough to be palpable, making the area look strangely darker to Tomochika’s eyes.
Looking around, she soon found the central figure of the chaos. A beautiful woman who stood out from the crowd was standing at the edge of the cliff. Though she looked like neither a monster nor one of the Dark God’s spawn, it was easy enough to guess that she was the driving force behind the current situation.
The humanoid monsters around the woman were kneeling reverently before her. One of them was the winged spawn that Tomochika had pegged as the final boss. They must have been the highest ranking members of the demonic horde.
Facing the army of monsters were the Swordmaster, Rick, and Lynel. They were the last three standing. All of the other Knights had been killed, heavily wounded, or were kneeling there motionless. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t help but feel like they had lost.
However, the situation seemed to have come to a pause for the moment. Everyone was staring intently at the center of the barrier, waiting for the beast within to make his move.
“Well, this has totally spiraled out of control,” Tomochika muttered idly. She had no idea what the best way of handling the situation might be.
“It certainly does look like the beginning of the apocalypse,” Teodisia remarked frankly. “I can’t imagine being able to defeat even a single one of these creatures, let alone all of them.”
“Speaking of which, what happened to that other monster you saw, Dannoura?” Yogiri asked.
“Oh, right. That was a while ago, so it should have made it up here by now...” She scanned the crowd but couldn’t see it anywhere.
“Now! An age has passed and the seal shall be undone! This is the time of my darling’s revival!” the woman declared, her voice somewhat lacking in regalness but otherwise clearly filling the area. Lifting some sort of gross-looking mass high above her head, she crushed it between her fingers in a dramatic display.
A sound like a heartbeat pulsed out from it.
The space around the Dark God throbbed and distorted. The air wavered and appeared to crack. Thin, delicate fissures spidered across the spherical gouge in the canyon, like it was encased in a globe of glass. The cracks spread with terrifying speed, and before long, the space burst outwards with a brilliant flash.
The barrier had been destroyed. Time, frozen so long within it, had started to move again.
“Hahahaha! Ah, my darling! I’ve missed you so much! Please wait, I’ll be down there in a moment!” the woman shouted with a trance-like ecstasy.
At the same time, the lady dressed in white, who had been at the center of the barrier for ages untold, flew towards them, landing beside the Swordmaster. Based on Rick’s story, she must have been the Divine King.
The Dark God, however, teetered for a moment and then pitched forward.
“What...?”
Tomochika couldn’t tell whose voice was yelling, but almost anyone present could have been shouting the same thing. The Dark God was falling, brought straight down to the ground by nothing more than gravity. As it fell out of sight, Tomochika heard the splash of something hitting water, and assumed the body had fallen into the river that ran through the canyon.
Everyone had gone dead silent.
“Sorry, I guess,” Yogiri apologized.
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