What She Wished For (5)
“What am I supposed to do if you let go?”
At that mont, her vision cleared. The voice vanished. “Hah.” Yuel let out the breath that had been stuck in her chest and looked to her side. The man holding her up was there.
“...Najin?”
“Yes, it’s .”
Najin was breathing hard. His body was sared with paint, and blood ran down him. Even with holes torn all over his body and blood pouring out, his expression was the sa as always.
“Your body...”
“Is this really the ti to worry about ? This will heal soon anyway. I’m pretty tough.”
Najin gripped Yuel’s hand tightly.
“Whatever you choose, that is your choice.”
“...”
“Do what you want.”
Yuel’s lips parted. How do you know what I was agonizing over? But the mont she t Najin’s eyes, she smiled.
They were the sa eyes as always.
The sa eyes that always looked at her.
Even after she had executed 170,000 people with her own hands, even when she got irritated, got angry, grumbled, or threw herself at him, those eyes had always looked at her the sa way. Only in front of that gaze could Yuel be herself.
“Seriously.”
Looking at Najin, the one who anchored her, Yuel bit her lip hard. A wave ca crashing in from sowhere, and Najin split it apart with a swing of his sword.
Held in Najin’s arms, Yuel lowered her head.
She pressed her fist into his chest.
“Then don’t die. I still have a lot to say to you, yeah? Got it? If you die, I’ll really kill you myself.”
Yuel let go of Najin’s hand.
Najin gave her back a light push.
“Go. I’ll open the way.”
“Will you watch?”
“I will. I promised.”
Yeah, that was enough.
If you were watching, I could stay myself. Leaving Najin behind as he ran in the opposite direction, Yuel looked ahead.
Not much had changed.
But for her, everything had changed.
Under the light of the Baleful Star that gnawed at her sanity, Yuel held herself together. Now she had sothing stronger than that light.
“You bastard,” Yuel muttered.
“You’re totally trying to seduce .”
Then I’ll end this quickly, and I’ll make sure I tell you.
Yuel felt a weight lift off her chest.
So people climb mountains thousands of ters high for one brief second of breathing the air at the summit. She was the sa.
For that one mont, she would endure this pain.
Yuel raised her head and looked ahead. A woman was walking toward her. Yuel suddenly knew her na.
Hermann.
The Star of Omniscience, Hermann.
3.
Constellation of Omniscience, Hermann.
She had a human form, but she looked more like a finely crafted machine than a person. Gears were embedded in her body. Hour and second hands ticked. Intricate interlocking gears beat in place of her heart.
Clack, clack, clack.
Ten stars floated behind her.
The mystique and beauty stars should have held were absent there. Dozens of gears and hundreds, thousands of screws had been fastened into those stars.
To dismantle, analyze, understand, and recreate the mystery called stars, she had repeatedly disassembled and reassembled her own stars. As a result, her stars lost their mystique. In exchange for losing mystery, she gained knowledge.
Constellation of Omniscience, Hermann.
She clapped at Yuel. Clap clap clap. With that cheerful sound, she spread both arms wide.
“How beautiful. A masterpiece. A one-of-a-kind masterpiece.”
Hermann was smiling.
She was in ecstasy.
“That dark crimson light, not the platinum of ordinary stars, not the black of inverse stars either, but a dark crimson star. I think I finally understand why the Witch of the Abyss could be that strong.”
She approached the newborn Baleful Star that had just revealed itself before her. Looking at it, her eyes sparkled with fascination.
“Still, I made it more easily than expected.”
Yuel’s eyes narrowed.
She did not want to trade even one word with this woman, but she had no choice but to ask.
“Just now.”
Yuel’s eyes widened.
“Did you say easily?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
“Just now, I killed how many...”
“203,527, right? I treated the first 30,000 or so as exceptions since they died before you properly stabilized.”
“...”
“Looks like you’re misunderstanding sothing.”
Hermann tilted her head.
“I made a Baleful Star with only 200,000 people. Ah, if I include the experints before you, it would be around four million, and if I include the human cloning trials, probably a little over ten million...”
She spoke calmly.
“But that is still only ten million, isn’t it?”
She said only.
“Child, I made a Baleful Star with just ten million. The star you have is, in essence, the sa as the star held by the strongest transcendent at the end of the world.”
A star like the Witch of the Abyss, who had ground down tens of millions, even hundreds of millions. Smiling, Hermann said she made a star of that level with only ten million.
“I thought I would need to pour in at least another 300 years just to find a lead, but thanks to you, this beca easy. Thank you. Truly.”
She was different. Her way of thinking was different. The way she saw things was different. She was, literally, a being from another dinsion. For Yuel, a human, it was hard to sympathize with that mindset.
“Aren’t you a scholar like ? I thought you would understand. Well, it doesn’t matter either way.”
Tap. Hermann stepped forward.
“Co here.”
The fruit that had ripened at the end of the experint. Hermann moved to harvest that fruit. With every step she took, Yuel felt dizzy. It felt like the world was warping.
No matter that she had a Baleful Star.
Yuel had only just reached Transcendence, and she was only a newborn star. Her opponent, in contrast, was a transcendent who had lived close to a thousand years and held ten stars, a Grand Constellation.
Tap.
There was no way for a young transcendent to stop that step, no way to reject that touch.
“Co on.”
There was none.
But for a re human, there was.
“Bullshit.”
Yuel sneered.
“Would you go if you were ?”
The mont Yuel twisted up the corner of her mouth, Hermann’s eyes narrowed. The step she had been taking toward Yuel stopped in place.
“You.”
Hermann’s eyes opened wide.
“What are you, right now...?”
“What else, you crazy bitch.”
Yuel pointed a finger at her own temple.
“Suicide.”
Her Baleful Star, her body, every elent that made her up began to shake unstably. She wavered on the brink, as if one wrong touch would collapse everything.
How?
Hermann’s eyes filled with shock. It was already astonishing that the human who should have been swallowed by the Baleful Star had kept her sanity, but even more astonishing was that the Baleful Star before her was trying to kill itself.
A transcendent’s death was never simple.
They were basically immortal, and even if they eroded over ti, it was exceedingly hard for a transcendent to et complete death. At minimum, this was not sothing a star that had just been born should have been able to attempt.
...Even the Star of Omniscience had not predicted this.
Knowledge that pierced all things in the world, analysis based on that knowledge, results derived from that analysis, and from that, endlessly precise prediction of the future. That was Hermann.
That was why she was omniscient.
The one who knew everything, the Omniscient One.
Yet even Hermann had things she did not know, could not calculate, could not predict.
“You have no idea how long I endured for this mont.”
That was human madness.
A human who had endured long years, holding herself together with the madness called obsession, curled up the corner of her lips.
Yuel had studied transcendents in Sealed City. Through believers who said they had heard voices from the god in the sky, through theologians from outside, through countless humans, she analyzed what a transcendent was.
A transcendent was a being certain of itself.
Or one that beca certain of itself through others.
In Yuel’s view, a transcendent was a being that built itself as a single story. If so, what would happen if the middle of that story was torn out or erased?
One theologian said it.
That would be the death of those deathless transcendents.
Yuel was certain.
That would be her ending.
“Ah.”
Thrust. Yuel pushed her finger into her temple. Her form began to distort even more violently. Hermann panicked but could not move rashly.
She realized it.
If she moved carelessly, it would not stop at ruining her masterpiece. She could get caught in that collapse too.
“How does it feel?”
Yuel grinned. Even while grinning, her finger was rummaging through her own head. She was not trying to simply break herself.
At this mont, she beca a mathematician again.
She regarded herself as a single formula. A precisely constructed formula. A formula that would break if even one part went wrong. Yuel began dismantling that formula. In other words, she dismantled herself.
She could feel it as she beca a transcendent.
How the being called herself had been constructed.
Which part connected to which, how they fit together to function. Just as Hermann, the Star of Omniscience, disassembled and analyzed herself, Yuel also began disassembling and analyzing herself.
“You.”
Hermann was flustered.
“You are insane?”
Yuel laughed out loud.
Who was saying that to whom?
Yuel stepped toward Hermann, who had taken a step back in panic at Yuel’s madness. A transcendent stepped back, and a human approached the transcendent.
“You know.”
As she dismantled herself, Yuel wished desperately. She wished for herself to be forgotten. For her story to be forgotten. For no one to rember her. To erase from this world the bloodstained City Lord of Sealed City.
The Baleful Star would not allow her death. Yuel disassembled her body, which kept trying to regenerate, even faster.
“Sword Expert, whatever, so fucking archmage, I don’t give a damn about any of that. I don’t want this shitty power even if you give it to .”
If the Constellation of Omniscience made .
If I am fated to beco the apostle of the Star of Omniscience.
“Fuck off.”
Then she would rather beco ignorant.
Even if she beca a complete fool who knew nothing and rembered nothing, she would still screw over the transcendent that had shoved her life into a pit.
Yuel carried out her plan.
She dismantled the stories that made her. Like pages being torn from a novel, like sentences being erased, the elents that made her spilled onto the floor.
...A human ard with madness achieved great feats.
The computational power she gained upon reaching Transcendence, the very first thing she used it for, was dismantling herself.
「......」
And there was a being that grew interested in this sight and listened to her wish to be forgotten.
Standing opposite the Constellation of Omniscience.
Feared by Hermann.
And at the sa ti, fearing Hermann.
A certain star, each one the other’s natural enemy, did not miss this mont. Human madness reached the sky. A certain star that listened to that madness reached out a hand to Yuel. The star had no na.
People only called that star this.
Star of Forgetting.
The star pushed forward the back of the human who tried to achieve a great feat with her own hands and her own will. Feeling sothing push at her back, Yuel burst into laughter.
“I.”
The City Lord of Sealed City.
A woman who only wanted to be Yuel.
A transcendent who beca a City Lord at a young age, was forced to shoulder a whole city, killed everyone in that city, and reached Transcendence that way.
“I am human.”
In her final mont, she chose to be human.
“And I will die as a human.”
The human whose life had been toyed with by transcendents raised her middle finger at the transcendent before her.
It ant eat shit.
The mont the star form that contained vast power broke apart, all that sealed power was released. The release of power took an extrely simple form.
Flash.
With that flash, the Baleful Star caused a colossal explosion.
User Comments
0 comments from readers