Chapter 209 - The Antipode VI

11

A wild God of Alienation appeared!

The world is doomed (again)! Run for your lives!

... Nobody reacted that way.

If anything, everyone was calm.

In most people's minds, the anomaly ranking system had always been neatly sorted into five categories: Ocean-class, Continent-class, city-class, village-class, and below-village-class trash.

If I suddenly made a fuss now, saying, “Have you heard of God of Alienation-class anomalies? They're incredibly powerful! They go around beating the shit out of Ocean-class anomalies, too!” people would probably respond coldly, “What the fuck is that, you nerd?”

Things weren't much different among the members of the Regression Alliance.

“A-are Gods of Alienation really that powerful?”

Sim Aryeon asked. She had rushed over after being summoned and had just finished healing Fairy No. 264, so she was sweating profusely.

“Why are Gods of Alienation the only ones called, um, Gods of Alienation, anyway? All the other anomalies have intuitive names, like village or city... A little Outer God? Giving just this one a different name doesn't fit thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or whatever. It bugs me.”

“Don't be so harsh, Miss Sim Aryeon...”

Surprisingly, Noh Doha casually replied as though coming to my defense.

“You mustn't dare criticize the naming sense of His Excellency the Duke of the Hall of Black Books, the Library Society's Supreme Dignity and ultimate mastermind. Understand? You could disappear without a trace...”

“G-gasp! I'm sorry, Guild Leader! I think your names are always perfect! Y-your taste is the best!”

“...”

Entirely unsurprisingly, Noh Doha was taking the piss out of me.

Incidentally, in dating-sim terms, Noh Doha was a side character whose affection remained locked at Lv.0 no matter who tried to romance him. Yet—and this was truly astonishing—he permitted exactly one person to reach affection Lv.1.

Sim Aryeon.

Why? Simple. Even if his arms or legs broke, she could just heal them with her healing power.

They got along swimmingly for no ordinary reason like compatible personalities or matching MBTI types. It was literally all about her healing power.

That's right. To win Noh Doha over, you didn't need anything else. You just had to become Heo Jun.

For reference, in the game of real life, human affection caps out at Lv.100.

Please figure out how to unlock the remaining ninety-nine levels yourselves, then upload the guide to SG Net.

“A God of Alienation isn't a ‘little Outer God.’ It's a god that alienates this world from humanity.”

“H-huh...?”

“It means a god outside us. Alienation was originally a term Karl Marx used frequently. In English, it's ‘alienation,’ which resonates with the meaning of ‘alien’—an extraterrestrial. When I came up with the name, I incorporated those connotations as well—”

“Wh-what the fuck is that, you nerd?”

“...”

“Ahh! That's my Guild Leader. S-so delicious. I think getting a rise out of you is the most delicious thing in the world...”

Keep it together, me.

My demon-slaying blade was not meant to cut down humans. However uncertain I might be that Sim Aryeon was genuinely human, her DNA sequence was 99.97% similar to mine.

Now I understood why the world had ended. With such unscientific stuff serving as the foundation of life, of course anomalies were teabagging us.

“Aryeon. There are many reasons Gods of Alienation are terrifying, but one is that their ‘patterns’ evolve in an instant.”

“Evolve...?”

“Yes. For instance, failing your first attempt to defeat Meteor Strike isn't a catastrophe. Its pattern of ‘falling from the sky’ is unchanging, after all. You just regroup and try again. But a God of Alienation immediately shores up its weaknesses.”

Though it was still far in the future from run 267, this was why I had contorted myself every which way and fought tooth and nail when subjugating the Operator of All Things at Play.

No matter how many one-two combinations or light jabs you threw, you couldn't build up damage against a God of Alienation.

One blow.

Only a single thrust of a meticulously sharpened bamboo spear could pierce a God of Alienation's fat fucking belly.

That was the trickiest part.

It ran completely counter to my strategy of accumulating combat data bit by bit through as many regressions as possible—a regressor's signature approach.

“Let me show you an example firsthand. Hey, Comrade No. 264. Feeling a little more yourself?”

“Hwehh... I nearly departed for the underworld, but barely survived...”

Fairy No. 264 answered feebly. Perhaps because its body had been blown in half earlier, its already small frame had grown even tinier.

“Call the other fairies, and let's enter the ‘Reverse World’ the same way again. This time, we'll take Sim Aryeon here and the others along.”

“Hweh. Understooood...”

The Saintess, Noh Doha, Sim Aryeon, and I entered the dream together.

And we did indeed succeed in reaching Seoul Station plaza—the entrance to the [Reverse World].

“H-huh? Guild Leader.”

Except this time, transparent ‘glass’ stood between us and Seoul Station plaza, preventing us from entering.

“I can see it, but I can't get in...!”

KNOCK KNOCK

Sim Aryeon tapped the glass with her little fist.

It wasn't just her. The Saintess even unleashed her transparent aura at maximum output and tried hacking at it with a hatchet.

But the ‘glass’ didn't receive so much as a scratch.

The pedestrians in Seoul Station plaza walked over the glass without a care.

They were close enough to touch with the slightest reach, yet the glass divided our worlds so that neither side could affect the other at all.

Just as the afterlife and the real world could not interfere with one another.

“See? The God of Alienation has blocked the passage.”

“Whaaat?”

“Nut probably didn't expect me to be able to enter her domain through a dream.”

To explain once again, the domain built by Nut, the goddess of night, consisted of ‘the living world and the afterlife.’

This God of Alienation possessed the authority to designate which side was the living world and which was the afterlife.

Thus, she had defined Kim Jucheol's illusion, trapped inside the crystal gravestone, as an afterlife called Valhalla. Beyond that, she had even designated the reality we lived in as hell.

And there were almost no ways for beings living in hell to interfere with the living world—in other words, Nut's domain.

Yes. Almost.

“But there are plenty of stories about people experiencing the afterlife through dreams. Recruiting the tutorial fairies allowed me to pioneer this ‘dream-entry route.’ From the God of Alienation's perspective, a vulnerability had been discovered, so she promptly patched it.”

“Huh... Th-then how do we get back in?”

“Good question.”

TAP

I lightly tapped the glass marking the boundary between the afterlife and the living world.

It wasn't a simple knock. I, too, channeled aura into it to produce a wave. My ink-black aura vibrated, but the glass didn't even budge.

This was another troublesome aspect of God of Alienation-class anomalies. You couldn't overcome them by stubbornly pushing forward with brute force alone.

Though perhaps I simply wasn't strong enough.

“For now, I've named this God of Alienation ‘Nut.’”

“Nut...”

“She's a goddess from Egyptian mythology. She governs the night sky—in other words, the cosmos—and presides over the daily cycle.”

Whenever Nut destroyed the world, the night sky unfurled without fail.

But blood vessels pulsed through that night sky, as though it were alive and moving. The Milky Way might turn into blood vessels throbbing red and green, or sunset light might drip like blood.

“In Egyptian mythology, too, the night sky is the goddess Nut's body. When people in ancient times looked up at the night sky, they didn't think of an endlessly stretching universe.”

“What did they think, then?”

“They imagined a transparent membrane covering the night sky.”

“Huh? H-how...?”

“They thought stars weren't ‘spheres floating in empty space,’ but ‘holes in the transparent membrane.’ They imagined the world breathed just as humans do. The stars were its breathing holes, and starlight poured down whenever the world took a breath.”

“Huh? Oh... Starlight is the world's breath...”

“That's why the Pythagorean school, influenced by Egyptian mythology, claimed that whenever the stars moved, the ‘sound of the world breathing’ rang out like a song. Human hearing simply couldn't pick up that song.”

“Wow...”

That was why the ‘night sky’ was painted on the inside of the coffin lid above a pharaoh's mummy.

They had turned the coffin containing the mummy into a ‘little universe.’

The starlight was carved with particular care, because the pharaoh's soul passed back and forth through those star holes—the ‘breathing holes of the world.’

“G-Guild Leader! You suddenly seem so knowledgeable! You knew lots of things besides uselessly memorizing the names of Romance of the Three Kingdoms characters...”

This little shit...

“Hey, you brat. I've always been knowledgeable about anomalies. I was a support-type awakened like you, too, and I got this far by studying. Studying!”

“Oh, you're back to being a preachy old fart...”

“What was that, punk?”

“Aaaaaagh! N-no violence!”

Tears welled in Sim Aryeon's eyes as I held her in a headlock.

“S-so how do we cross into that domain when the passage is blocked...?”

“Hmm. Since Egyptian mythology is its primary foundation, we should be able to cross over if we become mummies.”

“Mummies?”

“Yes. Incidentally, becoming a mummy requires removing the brain. Egyptians believed the brain wasn't a particularly important organ, and that people thought with their hearts.”

“Eek! That means dying!”

“Shall our dear Aryeon become a mummy on humanity's behalf?”

“N-noooo...! You're the one who should be left on a mountain to die of old age, Guild Leader, not me...!”

Then the Saintess raised her hand.

“Mr. Undertaker.”

“Yes? What is it?”

“If this God of Alienation called Nut has the authority to define the living world and the afterlife, and she has defined our world as the afterlife... Specifically, as ‘hell,’ where souls suffer.”

The Saintess tilted her head.

Her aqua-colored hair swayed slightly.

“Then wouldn't all sorts of phenomena occur beyond people suffering extreme déjà vu from the regression virus? I mean, genuinely hellish things.”

“...”

Oh.

12

We scrambled back to reality.

And outside, hell was unfolding in full swing.

“Aaaaaagh!”

“I-I've been stabbed! Stabbed with a knife!”

For starters, blades had sprouted in place of trees on Busan's Mount Gudeok, slashing people.

Rather than remaining quietly planted, the blades repeatedly lengthened and shortened in real time.

The ‘blade-trees’ seemed to be spreading down the slopes of Mount Gudeok, infecting more and more of the city's other trees.

“Help! Please, get me out of heeere!”

“Ugh, uh. Urrgh, aaaah!”

In the Tower of Babel plaza, where the protesters had gathered, the stone paving had melted into one enormous soup rather than simply caving in.

People floundered in furiously boiling molten metal. Their skin continually melted and burst, but, bizarrely, it regenerated almost immediately, causing them to drown and burn to death over and over without end.

This ‘boiling molten metal,’ too, showed unmistakable signs of gradually spreading from the Tower of Babel plaza to other areas.

“G-Guild Leader...!”

My companions witnessed these sights from the rooftop of the National Road Management Corps headquarters. Unable to hide their bewilderment, they turned toward me.

“Th-this can't be happening! We were only gone for a moment...!”

We had only been gone for a moment.

Yet the world had already become hell.