Chapter 22 — I Might End Up Falling for You Anyway
She had to escape. She had to. She had to.
That was the only thought running through her mind. But no matter how much she wanted to, her body wouldn’t move. Now that she had witnessed it for herself, her mind couldn’t focus on anything else, fear of that one thing dominating her thoughts.
It was a dead end. The inevitable destination of all fates, beyond which there was nothing. The end of all things in human form. An embodiment of nonexistence that would overcome all others, something that no one could ever hope to surpass. Before this thing, the machinations of Fate were nothing more than a crude joke.
The idea of fighting such a thing was absurd. When she had first heard that it could kill with only a thought, she had figured that was ridiculous, an obvious exaggeration. She had assumed that the difference in skill level had simply been so steep that it had merely looked that way to bystanders. There had to be some sort of trick behind it, and by analyzing that ability, she knew she could come up with a way of countering it. As long as she had access to her own powers, she would be able to find a solution.
How naive she had been. Far, far too naive. She understood now just by looking at it. With a simple wish, this thing could kill anyone. No manner of object or phenomenon could survive its final choice. There were no countermeasures that could be taken. That was the kind of creature it was.
At that moment, Aoi realized the goddess’s attacks hadn’t come close to touching Yogiri. Even in her madness, she had instinctively understood that she should be afraid of it...that if she’d attacked that being, she would have died.
Sion...what the hell did you do?!
It was impossible to believe that such a creature could exist. It was hard to put it into words, this phenomenon like a great calamity or a curse. It was impossible for such a thing to hold a personality, to act like an ordinary person. And even if its existence were possible, there was no way someone like Sion would be able to summon it.
This was the worst situation imaginable. Sion — no, the Sages in general — had been far too simpleminded and arrogant. Why had they believed that only beings far weaker than themselves would be summoned? Why had they assumed that just because it had worked out that way so far, that’s how it would always be?
Aoi stared down at the ground, which was now covered with her own vomit. She didn’t feel like she could ever raise her head again. Even if Yogiri let her live, she felt that she would go insane. And really, that would be fine. What she was truly afraid of was what she would do once she had lost her sanity. If by some freak chance she attacked him, she would die in the truest sense of the word. This was the first time she had ever dreaded her own certainty in the existence of the soul.
She had to do something. First, she had to calm down. If she did nothing but cower here in fear, she obviously wouldn’t be able to escape, nor could she kill herself before he got to her.
“Gahaha! As I said, I normally have no interest in tomboys, but seeing your usually calm and collected persona break down as you vomit and wet yourself so freely, I feel like I might end up falling for you anyway!”
As Aoi desperately tried to collect herself, Hanakawa’s voice broke through the haze in her mind. He had been talking for a while, but now that she heard how absolutely stupid he was being, that ridiculousness somehow managed to help her calm down a little. And as she did, she realized there was no reason to despair. She wasn’t Yogiri’s enemy yet. From his perspective, she was just some girl who’d shown up and started puking all over herself. She could still find a way out of this.
Taking hold of that faint hope, she lifted her face.
“Hey, isn’t that Hanakawa?”
“Oh, it is,” Yogiri replied disinterestedly.
The moment that Tomochika and Yogiri noticed him, Hanakawa dropped onto his hands and knees. “I promise, I am not here because I wished to follow you! Miss Aoi forced me to come here against my will! Isn’t that — wait, Miss Aoi?!”
Just as Tomochika was about to ask them what they were doing there, the girl with Hanakawa doubled over, falling to her knees as she became violently ill.
“Uhh, are you okay?” asked Tomochika. The girl seemed human enough, and the fact she was throwing up likely meant that she was not one of the Dark God’s spawn.
“Fear not, I am in perfectly good health!” Hanakawa answered.
“Sorry, I couldn’t care less about you,” Tomochika retorted.
“I thought you could never disobey our instructions with that slave collar on. Aren’t you supposed to be in the middle of a forest somewhere?” Yogiri asked. It occurred to him that Hanakawa wasn’t even wearing the collar anymore.
The collar in question forced one to be entirely subservient to the first person they laid eyes on, so Hanakawa had placed it on himself while looking at Tomochika. Disgusted by the whole thing, she’d passed on control of their former classmate to Yogiri, who had told the sleazeball to go wait in the Forest of Beasts. If he was truly following those instructions, there was no way he could have left.
“Ah, well, that is...”
“So you were lying after all.”
“No, I wasn’t! At that point, I was very much under your control! But I never said how long the effect would last. Please, you have to remember that much!”
“Well, I figured it would be something like that.” Yogiri had doubted from the beginning that the collar would work forever. “So, what’s going on here? Who is that?”
“This person brought me with her! Her name is Miss Aoi, but I suppose you should ask her yourself why she is here...” Still on his hands and knees, Hanakawa glanced over at the suffering girl beside him. “Gahaha! As I said, I normally have no interest in tomboys, but seeing your usually calm and collected persona break down as you vomit and wet yourself so freely, I feel like I might end up falling for you anyway! How does it feel to be looked down upon by someone as weak and pathetic as myself? Perhaps I’ll make up a humiliating nickname for you as well!”
“Wow...this guy is still so gross...” Tomochika muttered, taking an unconscious step backwards.
“I don’t care about Hanakawa, but something seems wrong with her,” said Yogiri, stepping closer to the girl with a look of concern. As Tomochika made to follow him, the stranger suddenly raised her head.
“I-I’m okay!” she cried, stretching out a hand to stop them.
“Really? I can rub your back for you if you like.”
“Please, there is no need for you to dirty yourself! I couldn’t ask you to do something like that when I’m covered in filth like this. You don’t have to worry about me!”
Tomochika narrowed her eyes. “She’s awfully subservient, isn’t she?”
“I’m okay, really,” insisted Aoi. “It felt like my insides were being twisted and my brain was being fried for a moment, but now I’m fine! There is nothing for you to concern yourself with!”
“You don’t look that okay to me...!”
“Honestly, I’m better! Please, I’m sorry; just don’t get any closer! I’ll even eat all this back up if you want me to!”
“I mean, if you’re going to go that far, then I’ll step back.” Aoi’s desperation had Tomochika more curious than ever, but she decided to honor the girl’s wishes. The newcomer’s face looked sickeningly pale, enough that it was worrying to look at her, but she truly didn’t want them to come any closer.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. I just need to rest for a bit.”
“All right, we get it. You can calm down now.”
“Yes, I am calm. I came here to deliver this pig to you. Since you are classmates!”
“Hm? That is the first I’ve heard of this, Aoi.”
“Heh, don’t make me kill you, pig. You followed me because you were stuck wandering the forest, separated from your classmates, right? You came with me hoping I would help you reunite with them.”
“Uh, yes, I seem to remember that being the case. Somewhat.” At the girl’s vicious expression, Hanakawa immediately crumpled. It appeared he was now on a mission to reunite with his classmates.
“Perfect. As such, I am here to deliver him to you now.”
“No, thanks, we’re not interested,” Yogiri immediately replied.
“Ah, understood. Then I will dispose of him immediately!”
“Could you not speak of me like I’m nothing more than a worthless book in a second-hand store?!”
“Now that I have delivered him to you, please excuse me!”
Crawling along the ground, the girl made her exit. While they were certainly worried about her, if she was going to reject their help so vehemently, there wasn’t much they could do. After crawling a distance away, she seemed to recover enough to stand up and immediately sprinted towards the forest.
“Ah, uhh, what should I do now?” Hanakawa asked, puzzled by Aoi’s sudden departure and the fact that she had run off without disposing of him first.
“You can go wait in the forest again,” Yogiri answered bluntly.
“Not again! Please, have mercy on me!”
As Hanakawa began to wail, Rick and the others finally rejoined them.
Rick, Lynel, Frederica, and the Divine King. Aside from Yogiri’s group, those four seemed to be the only survivors. All of the other Knights had been killed by the goddess’s free-for-all attack.
“There are a number of things I would like to ask, but first, you...” Rick turned to Teodisia with a stiff expression. From his perspective, she had just murdered the previous Swordmaster in cold blood. It was natural for him to be on his guard.
“I took my revenge on the old man for wrongs that he committed against my people. It is none of your concern.”
“So you say, but I am now a Swordmaster. It is hard to argue that I have no connection to the situation.”
“Since you only just became the Swordmaster, there is no connection. Or do you intend to continue the wicked acts of your predecessor?”
The atmosphere around them was taking on a dangerous tone. Sensing that things were about to escalate fast, Yogiri stepped in.
“I think it’s best if you take a look underground yourself, Rick. If you still plan on avenging the old Swordmaster after that...well, frankly I’m on Teodisia’s side, so you’ll be facing me too.”
Now that Rick had become the Swordmaster, Teodisia wouldn’t stand a chance against him. But Yogiri wasn’t interested in sitting back and watching her die.
“Sir Takatou, I apologize for my rudeness, but I am now a Swordmaster. Even though you bear the title of Knight, for someone powerless like yourself —”
“Cease this impoliteness,” the Divine King interrupted.
“But surely we cannot allow the person who murdered the former Swordmaster to escape!”
“Don’t let your new title go to your head. You don’t stand a chance against this boy. After all, he was strong enough to slay the Dark God itself.” Rick gasped in shock. “The same is true for the death of its spawn. Both were your work, were they not?” the Divine King asked, turning her gaze to Yogiri.
Given the certainty in her words, there was little point in trying to trick her or deny it. Reluctantly, Yogiri confessed. “I’m really sorry about that. I didn’t mean to kill him, or to ruin all of this.”
He and Tomochika were outsiders who had stepped into the middle of an encounter millenia in the making, and then thrown it all into chaos. It was something he really should have left to the people of this world to settle.
“No, you have my thanks. In truth, there was a limit to how long we could keep the barrier in place. That strain was likely the cause for your companion’s desire for revenge.”
Rick looked around at the scene again. The Dark God, who had driven the ancient world to the edge of destruction, the source of all this calamity, lay dead, surrounded by the corpses of the twisted spawn it had birthed and who had worshiped it in turn. The young Swordmaster’s expression grew even harder.
“Sir Takatou, exactly who are you?”
“I’m a high school student who was summoned here by the Sages.”
“Oh, you’re just a normal high school student now?!” Tomochika said with exaggerated surprise. But Yogiri had always wanted to think of himself that way — an ordinary teenager who just happened to have a strange power.
“Very well then,” Rick relented. “I will set aside the issue of the previous Swordmaster’s death for now. We must consider what comes next.”
“Honestly, we ended up here by accident on our way to the capital, so that’s where we’re heading now,” Yogiri replied.
“Ah, well in that case, I will accompany you. There is nothing more to be done here, so I may as well return home. I’m sure you will be going back as well, Lynel and Frederica?” Rick, it seemed, lived in the capital, and apparently his companions did too.
“I will need to search for more information, so I will likely head to the capital as well,” Teodisia added, likely still wondering how to find her sister.
Tomochika decided to bring up something that had been bugging her for a while. “Teodisia, could you tell us your sister’s name again?”
“Her name is Euphemia. Do you know anything about her?”
“I feel like I’ve heard it before...do you remember anything, Takatou?”
“I feel the same way, but I tend to forget anything that I don’t actively try to remember.”
“Even that much is helpful,” said Teodisia. “Since you did not come here from the capital, please tell me which cities you visited along the way. I will go to those places in search of leads.”
Tomochika quickly outlined their journey from their bus’s arrival in the field to their time at the tower. When she finished, Teodisia decided to head for Hanabusa.
“I will also go to the capital. It has been more than a thousand years, has it not?” the Divine King mused. “Though it may now be abandoned, I should visit the temple first.”
It seemed their decisions had been made, with most of them planning to take the same road.
“All right, can you please tell us the way?” Yogiri asked. “We have a general idea of how to get there, but if you have a map or something, that will help a lot.”
“A map?” Rick frowned in thought. “A short distance away lies the camp of those who came here with me, and they should have a map. But...why don’t you simply travel with us?”
“Y-Yes!” Hanakawa interjected, having added himself to the group at some point. “This is normally the point where one obtains a large number of companions, correct? So now we make our journey to the capital together! That’s what should happen next!”
“No way. Dannoura and I are traveling alone,” Yogiri proclaimed shamelessly.
Tomochika was at a loss for words.
Having flat-out declined the offer to travel alongside the others, Yogiri and Tomochika returned to their truck. Though the goddess’s rampage had destroyed the surrounding area, the vehicle itself was miraculously unharmed.
“Hey, wouldn’t it have been easier to just stick with everyone else?”
“I don’t like big groups of people. It gets to be too much of a pain.”
“Yeah, that’s understandable.” Tomochika hadn’t been especially excited about traveling with the others herself, so if Yogiri preferred that it just be the two of them, that was fine with her. “Speaking of which, what happened to that dragon girl? Her name was Atila, right? Wasn’t she supposed to take us to the capital?”
“We already know how to get there, so we should be fine. And now that the Swordmaster is dead, it would probably be hard to face her.”
“That’s true.”
Additionally, having her guide them meant having to travel along with her. That went against Yogiri’s wish to keep them as a party of two. Then again, while they had been traveling alone together for most of their journey, now that he had put it into words, Tomochika couldn’t help but find it a little embarrassing.
As she hesitated, thinking things over, Yogiri made his way to the passenger seat as usual. With no desire to force him to drive, Tomochika took the wheel without complaint.
“All right, this time we’re heading to the capital for real! So, which way should I go?”
I have more or less determined the correct route.
“Oh, Mokomoko is still here. I hadn’t seen you for a while so I figured you’d finally passed on to the next life or something.”
Come, now! I suppose I didn’t end up being all that useful back there, but still...
“Anyway, we’ll be leaving navigation entirely up to you. So, once again, let’s go!”
“Hurray,” Yogiri said, lifting a hand into the air with absolutely no energy at all. Though it was better than when he simply ignored everything in favor of his video games, he still seemed awfully sleepy.
Tomochika put her foot on the gas, and the truck slowly rocked into motion.
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