Chapter 176 - Those Who Realized (2)

The apostle of Greed looked at the man with incomprehension in her eyes. With the blue moon at his back and a friendly smile on his face, he stared steadily at Emil, his blue eyes as bright as the moon itself.

Blood gushed from Emil’s mouth, ran down her neck, and gathered on the blade piercing her body. Soon, the crimson blood began pattering to the ground.

“Who... are, you?”

Sensing death approaching, Emil asked the question with a pale face from which her smile had vanished.

Yet unlike Emil’s grave expression, the man’s smile was utterly easygoing.

“Does that matter right now?”

“Of course it, does, doesn’t it?”

Her voice remained relaxed despite her rigid face, as though she did not want him to notice she had lost her composure.

The man tossed out an indifferent question.

“Why?”

“Shouldn’t I at least know the name of the person who killed me?”

“Killed you? Of course not—”

“Then are you going to spare me at this point?”

“No, there’s really no need for that, is there? After all—”

SHUNK!

“You’ll come back to life, won’t you?”

Emil’s expression stiffened further. She had suspected as much from the moment the man came here and drove a sword into her back, but his words had confirmed it: he knew about her reincarnation art, a secret known only to the apostles.

Her mind began racing furiously. Which apostle had revealed the secret of the reincarnation art? How accurately, and in how much detail, did the man before her understand it?

But her thoughts could not continue for long.

“Ugh—hah!”

As though punishing her silence, the man drove his sword deeper still. She spat out another gush of clotted blood.

PATTER!

Crimson blood splashed onto the man’s trousers like haphazard raindrops. Yet, yet his face remained calm.

“You don’t have to worry so much.”

“...”

“I don’t know where your next reincarnation will take place either.”

Emil clenched her teeth. She did not believe him. If he truly did not know the location of her reincarnation, he would not foolishly go out of his way to tell her so.

Anxiety and agitation had crept over her face. She struggled to look up at him. The man was still smiling. Even with blood splattered everywhere, he stood with the blue moon at his back, wearing the same friendly smile.

Then he reached out, as though offering a saving hand to someone who was ill.

“I came here to give you a warning.”

“... A warn, ing?”

He gently stroked her cheek.

“That’s right.”

“About, what?”

For an instant, his eyes flashed coldly.

“Don’t touch Marquis Pallatio.”

“... What?”

“I told you.”

SHUNK!

“Bleurgh!”

“Don’t touch Marquis Pallatio. Of course, I know he isn’t someone who would fall easily just because you lot went after him. But people are funny, aren’t they?”

He pressed the blade in harder.

“I can’t help worrying.”

“Ahaha, am I being too fussy?” Elivan scratched his head with an awkward laugh utterly at odds with the situation.

As she slowly approached death’s door, Emil felt a deeply strange sense of incongruity. As though she had seen the man before her somewhere before. An intensely uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

“Anyway, that’s why I went out of my way to come tell you. Honestly—this might make me sound a little cold, but I don’t care what you lot do. Do this, do that, whatever you like.”

Emil kept retracing her thoughts, trying to discover where that strange feeling came from. Over and over. As though she were consumed by the thought.

“But Marquis Pallatio is off-limits. He is someone who absolutely must not perish now.”

Even with death looming before her, she continued pondering the question echoing endlessly through her mind.

“Ah.”

“Then remember what I said, apostle of Greed—no, Emil.”

She understood. She understood the source of that inexplicable déjà vu.

“Unless you want to bring your greed to an end and rest forever, you’d better remember what I said.”

She understood where she had seen the eyes of this man who held her weaknesses and shameful secrets in his hands.

“Never touch him.”

Those were unmistakably what she had seen beneath the roots, in a place deeper than where they themselves dwelled—

The Nebula.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

Emil’s thoughts could go no further. The world went dark. By the moment she understood the source of that strange feeling, her head had already been twisted around twice, breaking her neck and ending her life.

And Elivan wiped his smile away so completely that it seemed he had never smiled at all. Without a word, he turned and walked away.

####

A few days after leaving Lartania.

[“Hmm, how tiring.”]

“Why? Tired from being so pathetically cute?”

[“Human, if you say one more word, I really might butcher you.”]

“How are you going to do that?”

[“Grrrr—if only I could undergo incarnation, the likes of you would—!”]

“But you can’t. What can you do when you can’t?”

[“Aaaaargh!”]

As though he had found the perfect opening, Evan had spent days doing little besides teasing Basiliora. Deus’s remark about being “pathetically cute” had had tremendous repercussions.

Watching the two bicker, Alon silently sighed to himself. In Lartania, one incident had followed another, leaving him little chance to think properly. Now that he had time to spare, there was far too much to consider.

The first thing that came to mind was the inner world he had seen when he met Kailas. A ruined world, utterly destroyed, with nothing left in it.

[“What nonsense are you talking, whelp? This inner world is yours.”]

Recalling Kailas’s words, Alon tilted his head in puzzlement. Both his own understanding and Kailas’s explanation agreed that an inner world essentially depicted the world within a person.

According to Kailas, an inner world ultimately took one of two forms. Either it was firmly established through receiving Mourning of the Heart and a spell formula, as with a Magus, or, for those who had not done so, it represented an exceptionally vivid memory.

... Naturally, while Alon could indeed use sentences, he had neither received Mourning of the Heart nor possessed a spell formula. That left only one conclusion.

‘... A vivid memory, then.’

That ruined world had originated from a vivid memory of Alon’s. And this was the point he could not understand.

He had been living here for over ten years now. He had all but become a person of this world, but strictly speaking, he was still someone from another world. There was no way he could have a vivid memory of witnessing a ruined world.

Then was it a memory belonging to the original Alon Pallatio? That, too, was naturally all but impossible.

When he first became Alon, he had not yet reached twenty. And that ruined landscape was not something a man under twenty—much less a noble—would ever have seen. In other words, the memory of that ruined world could not belong to the “real Alon” either.

‘Then the only possibility left is... that I don’t remember it.’

A forgotten memory. Reaching that thought, Alon absently stroked his chin. It would be one thing if he had visited somewhere he could see such a landscape, but however hard he thought, nothing came to mind.

If he had to name somewhere remotely similar, perhaps the north? But it could not be the north either. A land where life could not survive and a land where life had been annihilated felt fundamentally different.

After pondering for a while longer, he silently fingered The Foot That Runs Through the Past tucked inside his coat.

‘By the time we reach Coloni at this leisurely pace, I should be able to go back in. I’ll ask whatever else I want to know then.’

Having settled his thoughts, Alon stroked Blackie, who had slipped out from against his chest and was now purring on his hand, rubbing its cheek against him.

... It was midsummer.

####

About a month later, Teira entered the royal castle at Karmakses III’s command and soon learned from the king the name of the person suspected of being an incarnate god.

“Marquis Pallatio, Your Majesty?”

“Yes. You need only check when he arrives.”

“Understood.”

Although that was his answer, inwardly he was full of questions. To be honest, he could not begin to guess why Karmakses III suspected Marquis Pallatio of being an incarnate god.

‘... Well, his achievements alone are certainly impressive.’

Of course, even an archaeologist like Teira had heard stories about Marquis Pallatio. He had dealt with Outer Gods and monsters, piling up achievements that were extraordinary for a noble. As a result, his renown had spread throughout the continent.

Yet even taking all of that into account, Teira believed Karmakses III’s suspicions were misplaced. Naturally, the king must have reasons Teira did not know. Even so, he was certain. Had he not already seen an incarnate god himself?

An incarnate god was bound to stand out in the first place. And that was not all. If Marquis Pallatio truly were an incarnate god, he would have no reason to hide his identity.

‘No, he could have some reason to conceal his identity—but—’

Even then, there was absolutely no reason to hide it by posing as a noble. ... Truthfully, whatever the reason, he could not understand why an incarnate god would disguise himself at all.

Just then, the doors to the audience chamber opened, and a man walked in. He wore an ink-black coat, and not even standing before the king brought a change to his expression.

‘So that is Marquis Pallatio.’

Teira found himself marveling. He had seen him once from a distance, but up close, Marquis Pallatio exuded an extraordinarily peculiar aura. A very strange aura that defied explanation.

For a moment, he stared at him in a daze.

“Have you been—well, Marquis Pallatio?”

“Yes.”

Karmakses III hurriedly cleared his throat and asked after the marquis, his voice bringing Teira back to his senses.

He had to carry out his orders discreetly, without missing this opportunity. While the two exchanged pleasantries, Teira carefully drew up his mana and began feeding it into the artifact hidden inside his coat, without their noticing.

It was an artifact bearing a blue-orb motif, which he had obtained ten years ago at one of the jungle ruins and brought here concealed against his chest. Its effect was simple: it manifested the other person’s power before his eyes.

In the past, he had used this artifact on the incarnate god in the lizardmen’s land and learned what a god’s power looked like.

‘If Marquis Pallatio truly is a god, a sphere bound in chains will appear. If not, there will simply be a round sphere.’

He did not know why it manifested in that form. But the incarnate god’s power had unmistakably appeared as a chained sphere.

As he recalled that sight, Teira felt the artifact activate. Then his eyes, which had been watching the marquis without any particular expectations, slowly began to widen. The reason was—

‘That’s... impossible...’

Just as when he had seen the incarnate god before, a sphere had appeared in front of the marquis’s chest. A sphere tightly wrapped in chains.

Teira’s reaction did not stop at widened eyes. Despite Karmakses III’s explicit instructions to handle the matter quietly, his mouth fell open without his realizing it.

And no wonder, for in front of Marquis Pallatio—

‘Four... of them?’

There were no fewer than four floating spheres, when even the incarnate god had possessed only one.