Chapter 43 - The One Who Was a Watcher V

7

CRASH

The sound of shattering glass rang out on every side. It was proof that the Saintess had just activated her aura, though my eyes had failed to catch it.

The bullets charging toward me like a school of sharks shattered all at once. The hatchets tumbled across the ground. Thousands of bullets pulverized into dust and drifting amid the snow made for a truly spectacular sight.

"..."

The woman responsible for that miraculous spectacle—the Saintess, or the Fallen whom my future self would name the Executor—was staring blankly at me.

"What are you trying to do?"

At first, her tone sounded perfectly ordinary. But I had spent countless years with her, and would spend countless more. It was difficult to hide her emotions completely from someone destined to share thousands of years with her.

The Saintess was flustered.

'Just as I thought.'

I nodded.

This had never been a fight to begin with.

The Saintess truly had no intention of killing me. Her only goal was to subdue me.

I couldn't know exactly what she had in mind at the moment. Unfortunately, I had acquired Mind Reading in my 554th run, and this was only my 107th.

Still, I had clues to work with.

"Saintess."

"Yes?"

"Please stop using Time Stop. Send back the awakened you summoned, too. Otherwise, I will kill myself immediately, without giving you any time to intervene."

"..."

The Saintess gazed into my eyes. For an instant. Perhaps for eternity. Or perhaps she was looking at herself through my eyes. Eyes reflected within eyes.

THUD

The hatchet she released from her hand sank into a snowbank. Fine pellets of snow were still falling from the sky. They settled over the thousands upon tens of thousands of footprints stamped into the snow.

Time flowed.

"I've stopped."

That was how the Saintess described it: she had "stopped."

Suddenly, I felt an emotion almost too much to bear. She and I were kindred spirits in that we both lived within a distorted flow of time.

People who had lived in familiar places were called fellow natives, while those who lived in unfamiliar places were called outsiders. What, then, of time? In ordinary people's eyes, weren't we both irredeemable strangers?

Snow fell. I thought of this place as a land of exile isolated from every world, a place of banishment the world had abandoned.

As it happened, the Korean word for banishment had originally come from the word for returning home. At some point, returning to one's hometown had become a punishment.

Then this gap in the world must be our home.

"... Good. You don't want me dead, Saintess, and I don't want you dead either. So we should be able to talk."

"I agree."

We stood a little over six meters apart.

"Then let's establish what each of us wants first. I want you not to restrict my freedom."

"... I want the same. I don't want you to stop me from carrying out punishment, Mr. Undertaker."

The Saintess began to speak.

"If you regress again now and the 108th world begins, you will undoubtedly try to keep me from becoming 'this.'"

"..."

"You won't want me to become a murderer. You'll want to keep me in a position where I'm always justified, always beyond reproach. But this—my decision to inflict pain on those who have committed evil, even if I must do it with my own hands—is a conclusion I reached for myself."

"Is that why you tried to subdue me?"

"Yes. I intended to imprison you until I found a way to erase only specific memories. The world is vast, and there are many awakened, so an ability to control memories must exist somewhere. In the worst case, I could turn to Ms. Go Yori."

Go Yori was out of the question.

"Come to think of it, you said earlier that you had summoned Go Yori. Don't tell me she's on her way here?"

"That was a lie."

The Saintess said it nonchalantly, her expression blank.

"It was also a lie that I summoned other awakened in the name of a constellation. It was a tactic to make you impatient and induce you to make a mistake. No one is coming here. There is only the two of us."

"... I see."

Good God. It had all been a bluff. I really couldn't let my guard down around this woman.

I steadied my breathing. Then I sheathed my sword and spoke.

"Saintess. In the next run, and the run after that, no matter how many times I regress, I will never hide from you the fact that you reached the conclusion that you should punish evildoers yourself."

"..."

"I promise. So please set your fears at ease."

"..."

"Even if you burn the world to the ground, I am on your side."

Silence passed between us.

Whenever snow landed on the Saintess's shoulders, a tiny crack sounded, like a window splitting. Only the sound of falling snow and crumbling glass echoed softly through the world.

"It's so bitterly unfair."

The Saintess's voice seeped like a shadow between those white, transparent sounds.

"That in the next run, I won't remember any of this—these memories, this conversation. That all my memories of sixteen years with you will melt away like snow."

"... I will remember."

"Yes."

The Saintess gently lowered her eyes.

"That makes it all the more painful."

"..."

"All I can do is apologize. You must feel more sorrow than I do. But I simply couldn't bear it. The thought that everything that happened, every memory, the meaning of someone's death, might disappear. ... And the very fact that we must leave all of it on one person's shoulders."

"It's all right. I can bear it. And I have you, too."

Snow fell.

With a cracking sound, the Saintess's lips parted.

"When an awakened's abilities reach their limit, they become no different from an anomaly."

For the first time in all my regressions—and the first time in human history—the phenomenon of the "fall" was being explained through a human being's lips.

"What?"

"At some point, I became able to move freely even in a frozen world. And I changed so that I could replay not just my own voice through Telepathy, but every sound I remembered."

The Saintess was utterly serious. She assembled her words at a measured pace, slowly enough for my understanding to keep up.

"At first, I simply thought my abilities had blossomed. It was a natural inference. But as time passed, another hypothesis, another possibility, kept circling in my head."

"What possibility?"

"The hypothesis that I wasn't growing at all. That, on the contrary, I might be losing myself."

The Saintess narrowed her eyes.

"Originally, Telepathy transmitted only 'my' voice. But what would happen if I transcended my own body? If I strayed further and further from being human? In that case, couldn't I reproduce countless sounds, rather than only my physical human voice?"

"Uh... It's logically possible. But couldn't the phenomenon you describe also be interpreted as an expansion of your scope—or rather, the breadth of your self?"

"Yes. But the two aren't very different."

The Saintess gave a small shake of her head.

"... It's very difficult to explain this feeling to someone else. But there are symptoms too distinct to dismiss as mere psychological anxiety."

"What symptoms?"

"Transparent aura."

Why was it? The instant those words left her lips, I too was seized by a sense of foreboding.

It felt as though an invisible tongue had swept down my spine, licking it from the nape of my neck to my pelvis.

The Saintess was looking straight at me.

"The auras awakened manifest all have their own colors. When you saw that my aura had no color, you interpreted it as 'an aura with a transparent color.'"

"... That's right."

"But what if it wasn't aura?"

She spoke almost in a murmur, voicing a question she had probably pondered countless times herself within stopped time.

"Something that produces the same effect as aura reinforcement, but isn't aura. You must have witnessed countless phenomena like that."

"Anomalies...?"

"Yes. Monsters."

Tenlegs didn't use aura.

It simply had, from birth, a body that seemed reinforced with aura.

My heart pounded. As though matching its beat, endless cracking noises rang from all over the Saintess's body.

"I am being consumed more and more by void poison."

"..."

"And that isn't all."

SNAP

The Saintess snapped her fingers.

At that instant, my vision flipped over.

"...?"

No, to be precise, it hadn't flipped.

As though I were having an out-of-body experience, I found myself looking down at my own body.

My first-person perspective had become a third-person perspective.

"Saintess?"

My lips moved. I could see my lips moving.

It was an utterly strange sensation.

I could look down at my own back. If I did strength training in this state, I could lift weights with perfect precision. But a third-person world offered far more than advantages.

"What on earth is this...?"

A sense of floating.

Ultimately, a person's self clings to their body.

The body is the most immediate objective reality. If it loses that immediacy and is placed alongside other objects—if it becomes merely one object among many—the self, too, loses its anchor, left to drift upon the waves of a boundless sea.

"That is the world I see, Mr. Undertaker."

CRUNCH

The Saintess walked toward me through the snow. I was helpless, like a newborn who had yet to learn how to control its body.

"In the past, I only saw this way when I used Clairvoyance. But I grew more and more accustomed to it... And now I've reached the point where I can't distinguish my own vision from a third-person perspective."

The Saintess took my hand.

I distinctly felt her hand, chilled by the snow. And yet, somehow, that sensation was 'distant.'

Should I say that touch felt like color? Although touch ought to be the closest sensation of all, felt right on my skin, I sensed a distance.

Just as she had said, it was a sensation almost impossible to explain to someone else.

Grotesque.

Strange.

An anomaly.

"I think perhaps about half of my being has already become an anomaly."

"..."

"When you discovered my secret, I thought I was in terrible trouble. But looking back now, it's a relief that you found out, even this late. If just a little more time had passed... I probably would have lost even the part of me that mattered most."

The Saintess whispered right before my face / delivered a monologue far in the distance.

The Saintess gathered the little body heat she had left into both hands and wrapped them around mine / the Executor assumed a posture as though praying to the heavens.

"If I had reached that point, I might have become capable of halting time so that your regression failed to occur. No. It's not a possibility. I'm certain."

"..."

"Losing my color, losing my vision, losing my form, losing even time, until I became something that only looked down upon everything and watched. An anomaly like that."

Vapor flowed from the Saintess's mouth / a wisp of frail human warmth rose in the midst of a snow-covered world.

"Please remember, Mr. Undertaker. This fight, this challenge to save the world, is not a game that gives you infinite time. Only the number of attempts is infinite. Once you enter a stage, you have a 'time limit.'"

"A time limit..."

"That time limit is probably fifteen to twenty years. Once awakened go beyond becoming accustomed to their abilities, to the point where their abilities devour them, they will become close to anomalies, like me. Do you understand? An awakened's abilities are not an unalloyed blessing. They are a double-edged sword."

CRAAACK

Somewhere, before my eyes, perhaps very far away, the sound of glass cracking rang out.

Only now did it occur to me that it might not be glass, but a membrane. A transparent membrane surrounding the Saintess—the human being called the Saintess.

"This time, you focused on my growth, so I ended up becoming like this the fastest... But I don't know what will happen in other runs. My intuition tells me that the more powerful an awakened's abilities, the greater the danger. For example... Ms. Dang Seorin of Three Thousand Worlds would be no exception."

"..."

"Twenty years. Preferably before fifteen years approach, you must restore the world to its original form. Please remember, Mr. Undertaker. The time limit..."

The sound of shattering glass grew increasingly distinct.

I realized what the Saintess intended. And so I pulled her hand toward me and wrapped my arms around her back. Controlling my body from a third-person perspective was quite difficult, so I might have used a little too much force.

The Saintess's eyes widened.

"... Ah."

"You intend to kill me. So that I regress before you change completely. But wanting to shoulder that burden alone is selfish."

I heard a faint breath / laugh.

"You really do know me well, Mr. Undertaker."

"Let's go together."

"..."

"I never mentioned it, but I'm actually an expert at managing my mental health. Once, I spent three runs doing nothing but traveling around the country. I've even worked as a convenience-store owner."

"A convenience-store owner?"

"Yes. You need to learn how to let go a little, too."

I drew up aura throughout my body.

The glass membrane, already splitting with cracking sounds, began to shatter in earnest. Shattering crashes followed one another. As my aura enveloped us both, countless sounds of rupture rang out.

Snow fell. Glass shattered. Though the snow fell and fell, it could not bury the two shadows etched upon the white snowfield.

"... So warm."

The Saintess closed her eyes.

"Why do people... do that to people... when they're people."

CRASH

The world quietly stopped the snow.

Those were the Saintess's last words.

8

There is an epilogue.

This epilogue is not a scene confined to any particular run.

Run 109, run 110, run 111... It was a scene that repeated without fail whenever I forged a blood alliance with the Saintess.

"That's what happened."

"..."

After hearing my entire story, the Saintess quietly rested her hand against her chin. Seemingly deep in thought, she occasionally tilted her head one way, then the other.

"It's a story about me, but it doesn't feel like my story."

"Really?"

"Yes."

She looked at my face with an exceedingly serious expression.

"Going out and about so diligently. That isn't like me."

"..."

So that was what she meant.

The Saintess stood and fed the fish in her aquarium.

The fish she had carefully collected since before the world became like this quickly gathered at their owner's gesture. Red. White. Yellow. Blue. Beings of every color swam through the water.

"However emotionally cornered I was, I find it hard to understand punishing evildoers anonymously, too. Placing oneself in a godlike position to make people tremble in fear is an effective strategy, but it's the idea of someone who doesn't trust others. If I could be diligent enough to go out and about, shouldn't I instead have announced my existence and abilities to the world and formed a government myself?"

"Hmm. Perhaps you weren't quite that diligent?"

"Indeed. It's half-hearted. I choose to live in seclusion precisely because I don't want to do things by halves."

The Saintess's fingertips gently brushed the surface of the water.

The water's surface, which formed the boundary of the fishes' world, the membrane enclosing it, rippled slightly. She seemed to enjoy the sensation.

"Above all, the me of the 107th run described the fall as though it happened automatically once an awakened's abilities blossomed. But that's a flawed analysis. There is an obvious counterexample."

"A counterexample...?"

"You, Mr. Undertaker."

The Saintess spoke.

"You've already regressed through countless years and continuously developed your abilities. If my theory were correct, you should have experienced the fall before anyone else. But since nothing like that has happened to you, the fall is very likely nothing more than a psychological problem."

Nothing more than a psychological problem.

The Saintess was as hard on herself as ever.

"But I do understand what those last words meant."

"What did they mean?"

"That people kill people. That they kill them even though they're people. That is always a bitterly painful truth. And..."

"And?"

"..."

The Saintess glanced back.

I blinked. Like a crab in an aquarium blinking its stalked eyes while clicking its claws.

Then something truly rare happened.

The Saintess smiled faintly.

"It's a secret."

- The One Who Was a Watcher. End.