Chapter 428: The Savior Ω II |
The Savior Ω II
[Dok-seo's Glare attack!]
[It was super effective!]
Spooked by Dok-seo's ominous stare, I hastily threw together whatever excuses I could find and fled without looking back.
A sigh escaped me naturally.
"Life sure isn't easy."
"Ahaha. You're breaking out in a cold sweat. Don't you think the guild leader overreacted a bit?"
Yuri said.
By the way, to mention it again, Yuri was currently equipped with a 24-hour stealth function. In the truest sense, she had become 'one' with me, so she was visible only to me in this world.
The face smiling demurely before my eyes right now, the voice humming with interest, all of it was merely hundreds of millions of Yuris who had seeped into my 'memory' combining to form a single personality. In a way, it wouldn't be entirely wrong to say I was currently suffering from the ultimate dissociative identity disorder, what you might call multiple personalities. It just happened to have the rather trivial feature that the different personalities could communicate freely in real-time.
"So what? If Dok-seo was acting the same as always, where did that ominous feeling I had earlier come from? Was my intuition just acting up?"
"Oh come on, it's obvious."
Yuri laughed softly.
"Ms. Dok-seo hasn't changed. Then the inevitable conclusion is that what changed was Guild Leader."
"What?"
"Guild Leader, toward Ms. Dok-seo."
Yuri deliberately enunciated each syllable as if to leave no room for doubt.
"If you keep staying together like this, you might develop feelings quite different from before, so you sensed that somehow and ran away before that could happen."
"..."
But no matter how well you enunciate nonsense as 'non/sense,' it doesn't suddenly evolve into an apodictic proposition.
"Are you saying right now that I almost fell for that brat Dok-seo??"
"Yes."
"You've finally lost it, Go Yuri!"
"But think about it from their perspective. The people who fell for Guild Leader all started with the same trigger, when they had no hope at all and Guild Leader helped them."
The smiley emoticon on Yuri's face showed no signs of fading.
"Then wouldn't it be the same for Guild Leader? You were all set to wrap things up here. Dok-seo-ssi, whom you didn't expect at all, personally threw herself into helping Guild Leader for hundreds of cycles."
"..."
"When you save someone, they save you too. Ahh. It really is a proverb that's been passed down in the Void for ages."
"I've never heard of such a proverb!!"
Absolutely not, no matter what, I could never, ever admit it!
'Me getting butterflies over Dok-seo? Ha! This self-proclaimed little sister has really lost it. Oh Dok-seo? O-o-oh Dok-seo?! I'd rather date Inunaki Tunnel or Meteor Shower!'
"Guild Leader. I'm parasitizing your brain, so I can hear everything even when you say it in your inner thoughts."
"Respect my privacy a little!"
"Hmm. Well. From the moment you decided to seal your entire life story in a novel and reveal it to the world, hadn't your private life already gone missing?"
"..."
"And Inunaki Tunnel's essence is a young girl, and Meteor Shower's essence is a married woman comforting children. My goodness. I had no idea Guild Leader's tastes were so broad."
"That's just, it's just a figure of speech! I meant I'd rather join hands with anomalies than get butterflies over Oh Dok-seo!"
"You'd only hold hands? My goodness."
"I really can't say a single word to you!"
Yuri chuckled.
"Sorry. But I can't help it. It's a sibling's fate to catch each other's weak points and tease until death."
"Eh, Undertaker-san?"
Someone called from behind.
Someone Japanese.
I turned around to see a person with black hair wearing an apron, arms full of boxes.
"Ah. Kurosawa."
"Yes, yes. Good evening."
Bow.
Kurosawa Touka, a girl more familiar to me by the slightly shorter nickname Kuro than her full name, hurriedly lowered her head. The work apron she wore had four characters printed on it.
[Dang Flower Garden].
This girl who looked a bit scatterbrained on the surface had, surprisingly, recently stormed into Seo-rin's flower shop alone and made a PR pitch about '108 Reasons Why Your Company Should Hire a Talent Like Me.' Dang Family Flower Garden, which had insisted on K-style nepotistic management, was moved by this new generation's passion. As a result, Kurosawa succeeded in claiming the title of the first foreign worker at Dang Family Flower Garden.
"Are you working this late?"
I smiled.
"It's quite late. Must be hard work for a part-timer."
"It's, it's not just a simple part-time job. I really, truly want to learn this and that from this flower shop. Um. Etto."
"Hm?"
Kurosawa put down the boxes. Then, even though she'd just greeted me, as if that wasn't enough, she bowed again at a 90-degree angle.
"La-last time, for bringing my mother to this village! I'm truly grateful!"
"Ah."
I smiled bitterly.
"Didn't you already come with your mother to say thanks before?"
"Sti-still. I haven't repaid my debt to Undertaker-san yet. Before I repay it, well. Even after I repay it, I need to keep feeling grateful."
Kurosawa's words weren't fast. She didn't seem like someone skilled at interpersonal relationships to begin with. She'd probably lived a life learning more about fermentation methods than methods of opening up her heart to others. Even so, Kurosawa was carefully stitching together the words she must have practiced in her mind countless times before running into me by chance.
"You see. Not long after we arrived in Busan, I heard about the chaos that broke out in Tokyo, and I was so worried. What if something happened to Mom, I thought I'd go crazy."
"..."
"But then I heard that Undertaker-san went to Tokyo and resolved all those things. I cried a lot then."
"Did Seo-rin tell you?"
"Dok-seo-san told me!"
"I see."
Of course, the reason I went to the Japanese archipelago wasn't to save Kurosawa Touka's mother, but to leave an impression on the key figures who would later form the Magical Girl Association. In other words, it was a favorability grind. Bringing Kuro's mother to Busan was just a 'side' quest I accomplished along the way. But every alleyway is someone's front yard. My side quest was inevitably someone else's main quest.
"Arigato Gozaimasu! Tha-thank you!"
"..."
The first thanks was in Japanese, the second in Korean that was still inevitably awkward.
Kurosawa under the night sky.
Suddenly, next to her...
――――――――――
Please give me good luck. Let me avoid all those 'chance misfortunes' like dying from a randomly falling rock.
――――――――――
A corpse, its entire body covered in monkey fur and turned pitch black, stood silently.
This too was a phantom visible only to my eyes in this world. In the distant past, from the moment I picked up the 'Monkey's Paw' in the 444th cycle, this was the fate of a girl named Kuro discovered at the entrance to Seongsan Ilchulbong Peak in Jeju Island.
――――――――――
I'm sorry for being born.
Mr. Monkey's Paw, please make me disappear.
――――――――――
The girl left those words in her diary as her last will before vanishing.
And now before my eyes, instead of an ominous furry corpse, there was a child bowing her head, covered in dirt and the smell of grass from working hard late into the night.
"I'm glad."
"? Yes?"
"Get off work quickly. I've kept a busy person here too long. Give my regards to your mother."
"Ah. Yes, yes! Have a good night!"
Even as Kurosawa left, she kept turning around from afar, bowing multiple times.
When her retreating figure melted into the darkness beyond the seventh streetlight, Yuri spoke.
"She's a good person."
"Yeah."
"The scenery of the route reached by the possessor and regressor joining forces. I think it's not bad."
The situation was much better than before. Even within an endlessly tight schedule, Dok-seo had delivered Udumbara to as many awakeners as possible before June 17th. This Udumbara itself was a subspecies improved by Sword Marquess. Originally, it would parasitize the user's body to grant immortal life in name only, but this Udumbara-Plum Blossom would transform into plum blossoms on its own after a certain period.
"Most of the Monster Waves have been repelled too."
Yuri, naturally reading my mind, chimed in.
"Though some minor problems remain. Those will naturally resolve once we completely subjugate the Great Voids."
"And the remaining Great Voids are..."
"One is White Night, which descended on Seoul not long ago."
Yuri smiled.
"And the other is Dream within Dream. The unconscious underground where I arbitrarily set up residence, borrowing the dreams of all humanity."
"..."
"It's my final sanctuary."
"As you all know, the old man's regression point is around 13:59 on June 17th."
Tower of Babel.
In the meeting room of the National Road Management Corps, established without fail in this cycle too, the members of the Regression Alliance each wore their own serious expressions. The one leading the meeting was Oh Dok-seo.
"And Seoul's White Night. The starting point of the Void descent that turned south of the Han River into a wasteland in one fell swoop is precisely the same day, June 17th at exactly 14:00."
"..."
"In other words, there's only a difference of one minute."
All the Regression Alliance members were listening to Dok-seo's words with utmost care. It was a scene that felt unbearably awkward to me, but for the other Regression Alliance members, this was actually more familiar.
'It's like.'
Glance.
In a corner of the meeting room that no one but me paid attention to, a reincarnator with pink hair stood silently.
'Just as the regressor called me received the baton from the reincarnator who once shouldered humanity's frontline.'
The era flowed forward like a river. Greedily, drinking up the reincarnator's soul and inhaling the regressor's blood. Licking up everyone's wounds without leaving a trace, without any blood, leaving only faint traces of the smell of blood scattered everywhere. Because of that, while time was a river, it wasn't water but a river made of blood at any moment.
"So my role, having prophesied the truth of this world before the mister, is simple. Pave the way before the old man regresses."
Still, this aged old woman had one final mission left before exiting from the era.
"One minute. We have to prevent White Night from erupting in Seoul within just one minute."
Seal all Voids at their source. Only then can the earth return to its original form with no one dying from anomalies.
"It's not just Seoul. We have to subjugate Dream within Dream simultaneously too. That way, within one minute, we subjugate the last Outer God, Go Yuri, who has secluded herself in everyone's dreams."
□.
"Only then will our world be truly liberated from anomalies."
"..."
"The reincarnator's hundreds of millions of years. The regressor's tens of thousands of years. My decades. All those years of toil rest on this one minute of subjugation."
"I have a question."
Ji-won raised her hand.
"I'm aware that a large-scale Void occurred in Seoul. And that it's called White Night. But what kind of Void is it specifically that we need to subjugate it in conjunction with Go Yuri's Dream within Dream?"
"It was an incineration."
The person in question, Yuri, answered. However, Yuri's words didn't reach the meeting. Therefore, Yuri could only participate in the meeting through my mouth. It wasn't strange. That was originally my role as a shaman (ZERO_SUGAR), connecting the divine Realm and human realm.
"Guild Leader is a regressor."
The traces of Go Yuri, the first human to reach the divine realm, spoke.
"The world always repeats resets based on the regressor's standard. But it's not a perfectly flawless initialization. Time always leaves residue. Even if they can't perceive the fact that the world is repeating due to regression itself, faint, sometimes truly faint reverberations remain."
"I see."
Ji-won nodded.
"In terms of anomalies, things like the Infinite Metagame or the Mastermind. In terms of humans, things like prophets or possessors. As regressions repeat, residues that detect that fact accumulate."
"That’s right."
Go Yuri smiled gently as she looked around at her 'unnies.'
"Even for a regressor who's only lived tens of thousands of years, such residues accumulated. What about me, who's repeated reincarnation for over tens of billions of years?"
"..."
"Anomalies and awakeners who detected my reincarnation emerged, like Mr. Sword Marquess's case. Very occasionally. But over tens of billions of years, these occasional instances piled up until they became delusions."
It was troublesome for Go Yuri. The secret of reincarnation being discovered by anomalies was the first problem. And awakeners inferring the identity of the '□' pierced through their hearts, causing the abilities they'd painstakingly awakened to weaken, was the second problem.
"So I decided to gather all this temporal garbage and incinerate it all at once."
"Incineration."
"Erase the traces of the reincarnator itself. So that neither anomalies nor humans can notice. Thus, achieving my victory over anomalies and leaving humanity with an empty wound. That was the purpose of the incineration."
The location of that incinerator.
"South of the Han River."
The very name of that funeral.
"White Night."
Yuri smiled.
"The white night I spread out first to bring the world I dreamed of again and again down to earth."
Dreams and night.
Therefore.
"If White Night misfires, my entire plan collapses. I'll be demoted from just a reverberation remaining in dreams to an actual human who once lived in this reality."
"..."
A quiet air circulated through the meeting room. They fell silent for a moment at the reincarnator's scheme, who hadn't hesitated at any karmic killing to make her plan succeed.
"Right."
Oh Dok-seo nodded in an unchanged tone.
"So we need to prevent White Night from happening, and simultaneously subjugate the Great Void of Dream within Dream. Both are devices sealing the person called Go Yuri."
"In the next cycle?"
"Yeah. In the next cycle."
Dok-seo looked at me.
"And this will be the old man's final regression."
"..."
"No more regressions. No more reincarnations. No more humans toyed with by anomalies, no more earth stained by Voids."
However, Dok-seo said.
"I'm hoping for an ending where Yuri and Yuir still remain as humans in that place where all Void poison has disappeared."
"..."
"You can do it, right, old man?"
"Subjugate the double-sided Great Voids left by the first and final Outer God within one minute."
"Yeah."
"Simple enough."
I smiled.
"I'll show you a senior's skill, Dok-seo."
Current point in time.
The 3,558th cycle.
The regressor embarked on the final regression.
Footnotes:
Comments 2