The Savior Ω III
"Strictly speaking."
An old memory.
The first cycle that I had already lost within myself once.
Memories I had barely managed to reclaim by living through the Reincarnator's life exactly as it had been repeated.
"You can't really be called a regressor, Mr. Undertaker."
Yuri and I.
The two of us were the only rebels in the world, rebels plotting a revolution against a fate that had been sealed to end in destruction at the hands of anomalies.
"The only true, 100% pure regressor is Mr. Schopenhauer."
The places where we had our conversations were always back rooms isolated from time, stations where the train had stopped running.
Our language was always cautious, like spies who had infiltrated enemy territory.
"And yet, Mr. Undertaker, you're 'effectively' standing in the same position as a regressor. Isn't that fascinating?"
"Complete Memory."
"Yes, exactly. While this world repeats itself over and over, you simply don't lose your memories."
Go Yuri smiled.
"But to deceive the enemy, you must first deceive your allies. From now on, you'll masquerade as a regressor, believe yourself to be one, and fool both friend and foe alike."
"..."
"In the end, no one will be able to grasp your true identity. Even if some Outer Gods realize that the world is repeating, as long as they can't discern your true name."
True name in both senses.
My original name, Go Yuir.
My original fate, the one who remembers.
"You won't be conquered by the anomalies, doc. Never. Not unless you give up on yourself first."
"..."
"So then, Mr. Undertaker."
Yuri clasped my hand.
"We're the only people in this world who've allowed each other to be conquered."
"...Yuri."
"Yes, Mr. Yuir."
Clink.
The silver bell on her wrist cast a small shadow as it trembled.
"I've entrusted my name to you. And you've entrusted yours to me."
"And you know my identity, just as I will one day live through every moment of your life."
"We are one."
That promise.
"Let's save this world, together."
The silver bell swayed.
In the fate we had conspired against, the world was one that could only exist if both you and I were absent, or if both you and I were present together.
Our martyrdom together was thwarted.
The possessor who inherited our will declared that it was too early for our funeral.
I was merely an ordinary person born with the fate to remember and record the past, but now I thought I might try believing in the future.
True name, Go Yuir.
Alias, Undertaker.
Other aliases.
'Infinite Regressor', 'False Reincarnator', 'Undateikeo', 'The One Who Remembers', 'The Sealer of Time', 'The Strategist'.
Schopenhauer's workout partner. Ah-ryeon's guild leader. Seo-rin's gourmet tour companion. Yo-hwa's teacher. Seo Gyu's elder brother. Ji-won's chauffeur. Ha-yul's godfather. Bi-cheong's doormat. The benefactor of the Magical Girl Association. Dok-seo's co-author. Do-hwa's nemesis.
Called by many other names as well.
Someone's family member.
The false regressor was now entering his final cycle.
I opened my eyes.
'June 17th, 1:59 PM.'
Time limit.
'60 seconds remaining.'
The final strategy battle that would determine whether we could save the world completely or not.
I couldn't waste even a single second.
That's why it took not even a moment for me to assess the situation here at the starting point, the Busan Station waiting room.
"Mister!"
The waiting room was dim and gloomy.
The station had suffered a blackout, with all artificial lights extinguished.
It was a symbol proving that this place was no longer the regressor's exclusive domain, but had become a crossroads shared with the Possessor.
"Right away!"
No lengthy explanations were necessary.
Our operational schedule had already been mapped out to the second.
The fact that instead of 399 people randomly summoned to the Busan Station waiting room, our carefully selected strategy team members had taken their places made this abundantly clear.
And…
"..."
"..."
"..."
All the strategy team members were lying down in the middle of the waiting room with their eyes closed, having fallen 'asleep'.
It wasn't just Seo-rin, Ji-won, Yo-hwa, Ah-ryeon, Ha-yul, Gyu, and Do-hwa who had dozed off, the core leadership who had played crucial roles in the Regression Alliance up until now.
Sword Marquess, the Great Priestess, Manyo Neko, Nenet, and others, a considerable number of outsiders were also laid out in rows as if they'd been laid to rest in a communal cemetery.
"Hoeeek."
Around these sprawled people, hundreds of Tutorial Fairies had surrounded them, holding hands and dancing in a circle.
"Is that person the Secretary General that Secretary Oh Dok-seo mentioned, or is it?"
"That's right! No more talking, put him to sleep quickly!"
"Hihiek. There is no paradise in the place you flee to. I thought we'd barely been liberated from the oppressor's rule, but all that waited for us was just another form of violence...!"
Time limit.
50 seconds.
"Hush-a-bye, our baby."
"Mother is in the island's shade."
"Twinkle, twinkle, little star."
Song infused the fairies' dance.
An incantation, the most primitive emptiness for humans, a spell meant to bewitch and lure humans into the dream realm ruled by Baku.
An abrupt drowsiness tugged at my eyelids.
"Catch! Mister!"
Dok-seo threw something.
I snatched it from the air with a swift motion.
It was a silver bell.
"No-sho will join soon too! I'll wait here until that old man arrives and go in together with him! Don't worry! You go first, old man."
I didn't hear what came after that.
My consciousness had fallen into the emptiness disguised as a dream, thanks to the incantation woven together by hundreds of Baku all at once.
But I wasn't worried.
'I know, Dok-seo.'
Just as she trusted me, I trusted her as well.
Time limit.
40 seconds.
'I'm counting on you to handle that perpetually late old man.'
Dive.
And to the next stage.
'I'm leaving it to you.'
The scenery changed abruptly.
"You've arrived, Mr. Matiz."
It was some shabby alleyway.
Just like the '0th station' from moments ago, people were sprawled out in rows in this '1st station' alleyway as well, sleeping soundly.
However, Ji-won wasn't lying on the street but inside a car, sitting in the passenger seat herself, looking at me as I opened my eyes in the driver's seat.
"I've been waiting."
"Why didn't you go ahead?"
"How could I abandon the mission of waiting for Mr. Matiz on my own?"
Ji-won wore a faint smile.
"Everyone's already gone ahead and is waiting."
"I see."
"Yes. Since the flow of time hasn't slowed down enough at this location yet, I, who doesn't need to say much, took charge of this place."
She extended her hand to me.
"Your Excellency."
"..."
"I wish you a pleasant journey."
I took her hand.
It was cold.
Ever since that night when it seemed the rain would sweep away everything on the ground, the body temperature that the girl called Ji-won held had always been cool.
It was because she had hastened to prepare herself to accept another person's warmth.
"It shines so beautifully."
From beyond the car window, above the villas and multi-story houses lining the alleyway, the fairies were singing lullabies in chorus.
"Please go ahead."
Listening to the song instead of the sound of rain, I closed my eyes.
The hands we held curved slightly into a gentle arc.
The smallest circle permitted on this earth.
"Guiding the latecomers is my role too. Mr. Matiz, will you wait for me this time, instead of the other way around?"
Time limit.
30 seconds.
'Of course, Ji-won.'
Dive.
And to the next stage.
"..."
2nd station.
"...Teacher."
It was a classroom in some school, willingly soaked in the evening glow.
We had already rapidly approached a dream within a dream.
Time had long since become distorted, the second hand probably moving at a much slower pace than in reality.
Space had become just as strange, the classroom that existed not in reality but in a dream was warped in some indescribable way, making its size difficult to gauge.
Hundreds of people were slumped over classroom desks, sleeping.
Only one student with orange hair draped down was looking at me with an expression that seemed about to cry.
"I'm sorry, for forgetting."
"It's not your fault, Yo-hwa."
"But both unni and teacher..."
"We all just acted on our own and disappeared from your memory on our own. People who believe themselves to be clever tend to make a lot of mistakes."
Cheon Yo-hwa was regaining her memories.
Was it an achievement Dok-seo had accomplished while conquering the cult?
Or perhaps, as we drew closer to the great emptiness of the dream within a dream, the sediment accumulated there had 'flowed backward' and engulfed Yo-hwa.
'Probably both.'
Oh Dok-seo had persuaded Yo-hwa before June 17th arrived.
And thus obtained even the Baku, crafting a battle plan composed of just 60 seconds.
In the process of rehearsing to realize this operation that bordered on pure gambling, the Yo-hwa before my eyes must have grown accustomed to dreams within dreams countless times.
"I... it's okay if I fail."
"..."
"I'd rather hope the next cycle doesn't come. I've only just gotten my memories back this way, but if the wheel turns again, I'll become the me who doesn't remember you, teacher."
I don't want that.
Yo-hwa covered her face with her hands.
"Really?"
I patted my student's shoulder.
"I want to see you receive your graduation certificate and experience university life, Yo-hwa."
"..."
"It might not be particularly exciting. You've experienced too much already. But the experience of being able to call boring things boring isn't actually that bad."
I said playfully.
"And it would be troublesome if your trademark remains a sailor uniform forever. Don't you want to try some different fashion?"
"Uht..."
"This will be my last cycle."
The classroom bathed in sunset.
Even excluding the seats reserved for latecomers, there was still one empty chair there.
"I'm sorry for continuing to inflict wounds you couldn't remember."
"..."
"Your teacher was clumsy too. Immature. I wanted to do well, but there were many things I failed at. Will you forgive me?"
The birch forest spread out beyond the window swayed, a thousand white shadows melting into the redness.
"Yes..."
The song of that forest was the Baku's lullaby.
"Unni, please take good care of her."
Time limit.
25 seconds.
"Of course."
Dive.
And to the next stage.
"..."
3rd station.
It was not the red of evening but a more primitive red, a mansion drenched in blood.
Ha-yul.
A small-framed girl sitting in a wheelchair had her back turned, looking at the mansion.
[Why are you so late?]
A murder that hadn't occurred in this cycle.
But Ha-yul, already infected by the emptiness poison that had flowed back from the dream within a dream, seemed to find this entire scene familiar.
"The time here is slowed down quite a bit, you see."
[That's your entire excuse?]
"Sorry."
This mansion, which would have originally been located in Fukuoka in reality, had many parts distorted, just like the previous station.
The mansion was a chaotic mess of corridors, doorways, and staircases scattered about like the backrooms.
The people mobilized for the operation were dangling from the ceiling by puppet strings, sleeping in rows like meat in a butcher shop.
The blood flowing beneath them all came from a single person, Jung Sang-guk, Ha-yul's biological father.
[I was thinking about murder.]
As I approached her side, Ha-yul muttered while still keeping her gaze fixed on the slaughterhouse before her.
[If the world is repeating, then in the end, a single murder is no different from thousands, tens of thousands, eons of murders.]
[I hated Jung Sang-guk.]
[But was I hateful enough to kill him for eons, does a sin worthy of that much hatred even exist, I was thinking about that.]
Ha-yul looked up at me obliquely.
[And love too.]
"..."
[Oppa cherished me for hundreds and thousands of times. How can a person do that?]
"Didn't you love me just the same way?"
[I only did it because I couldn't remember. There's nothing difficult about that at all.]
"Even though you couldn't remember or know, once you loved someone that one time, you love them forever, repeating that love through eternity, isn't that wonderful?"
I knelt down in front of the wheelchair.
And matched my gaze to be slightly lower than Ha-yul's.
"I'm always cheering you on, Ha-yul."
[...Oppa.]
"Even when you're hurt, you're the kind of child who asks herself whether this wound should suffer eternally and answers 'no'."
[...]
"When you receive love, you're the kind of child who marvels at how that love reached eternity and rejoices at that miracle. Ha-yul, you have courage stronger than anyone and wonderful love."
Ha-yul was…
[...]
Crying.
She had a body where both crying and laughter were processed as silence.
Because the world couldn't hear those sounds, she had never cried with exaggerated tears meant for others, and never laughed with expressions meant to show off to others.
She had kept a tower built of crying and laughter purely for herself within her heart, and yet still permitted the footsteps of others to climb that tower.
The most beautiful tower in the world had always been built within the heart.
"When this is all over, become independent."
[...]
"Let's go on a trip together."
[Far away?]
"Very far away."
Ha-yul haltingly leaned forward, supporting herself on the wheelchair's armrests.
[Go ahead and wait for me.]
Thump.
The time one person had crossed was contained in a gentle weight that embraced my head.
From the tower of her heart, a soundless song.
A melody longing for that summer day was echoing.
[I love you, Dad.]
Time limit.
22 seconds.
"I love you too."
Dive.
And.
To the next stage.
-x-X-x-
The Savior Ω IV
The 4th station.
"Ah."
It was a gallery.
"G-Guild Leader... Ehehe."
Once, in the plaza of the Tower of Babel, a makeshift museum of humanity's last art had been cobbled together from whatever materials were available, scraps gathered here and there.
But there was a difference.
Unlike the exhibition that had taken place in the distant past of reality, the exhibition spread before my eyes now was far more vast in its collection.
"Have you been waiting long?"
"Huh? Oh, no."
Sim Ah-ryeon, her entire body smeared with paint, grinned widely.
"By my reckoning, it's only been about sixteen days. Everyone else has already gone to the lower floors... I was bored, so I've just been painting!"
"I see."
"Hehe."
Ah-ryeon approached and wrapped her arms tightly around my waist.
Her paint-covered face rubbed against my coat.
A child who had been born into a colorless world seemed intent on transferring the only equation of color she allowed herself onto me.
"Since there's no one else around, this is really nice."
"..."
"Dok-seo told me. That I'm actually the same in essence as the Udumbara. Mm. While it's an objective fact that I'm as beautiful as a flower, being essentially the same as a plant is pretty weird to hear..."
I smiled.
Whenever Ah-ryeon clung to me like this, trying to infect me with her colors, I would usually brush her hair, but unfortunately, I didn't have my anti-Sim-Ah-ryeon tactical equipment on hand right now.
So I wiped the paint from Ah-ryeon's face with my coat. She flailed her arms, going ah, hwah, fluttering like a startled bird.
"But after coming here and remembering all sorts of things from the past... I understood a little."
"What did you understand?"
"To a flower, the world is just a few drops of water and a few points of sunlight. I think that's about all I want from the world too. In terms of humility, I'm similar to a plant..."
"That's a lie."
"Eh?"
"You don't just want water and light, you crave incredibly sweet nectar and the most pleasant sunlight. You little thing. The most greedy flower in the world, that's what you are."
"Ah, ah, aah."
Ah-ryeon was helpless against my cheek-squishing offensive.
"Mmm..."
A silly sound escaped from her mouth, something like hwihii.
"This is nice after all..."
It was the sound of her burrowing deeper into me, pushing a syringe all the way into my lungs.
"What is?"
"Why the old me, why 'they' would go so far as to kneel before Guild Leader, act like a saintess, and commit something tantamount to suicide. I understand now."
"..."
"I wanted to know."
Squirm.
The tens of thousands of works hanging in the exhibition hall, all the paintings that the artist Sim Ah-ryeon had created across past and present lives, began to drip colors like poorly applied paint, falling drop by drop.
"When I die. Even knowing I'm dying, struggling until the very end, I wanted to know what emotions Guild Leader would feel then."
"..."
"I wanted to know, I wanted to feel it. What color that emotion would be, I was so curious. Honestly, it was hard to resist."
"I'm always amazed by how consistently you treat me like an all-you-can-eat buffet, Ah-ryeon."
"I can't help it! Guild Leader is my water droplet and my sunlight."
"..."
Squirm, glurk. Squirm.
Viscous colors gathered around us, flowing through the gallery corridor.
"Most people probably won't understand. To a flower, water droplets and sunlight are prey. They're something to hunt... But they're also everything in the world. They're god."
Does a flower love sunlight?
"People will probably condemn a believer who devours the flesh of their god as blasphemous... But actually, isn't everyone like that? Everyone devours the juices of the world. Every single day."
Can one understand a flower's love?
"And yet... they live without even knowing what they like, or how they like it. Hwe. Strange people..."
"Your thorns are too poisonous."
"Ehehe..."
Ah-ryeon bit my nape with her teeth. It was neither an act of predation nor a gesture of intimacy.
A sunflower was tilting its head toward its sun.
"I won't die anymore."
Ripples spread from my shadow.
"Because now I know."
All the paint that had dripped from the gallery gathered into my shadow, forming black.
Not the black that was darkness because nothing existed, but the black that was darkness because everything overlapped.
Ah-ryeon's voice sent ripples toward my heart.
"For watering me every single day, without skipping even one day... For dropping sunlight into my shade every day, mm..."
Ah-ryeon looked up at me.
A smile, the smallest and most radiant ripple a person can spread into this void.
Without laughter in that place, the sky blue wouldn't have been so boundless.
"I was happy! G-Guild Leader."
Time limit.
21 seconds.
'I was happy because of you too.'
Leaving my heart with someone who didn't need an answer, once again.
Dive.
And on to the next stage.
"..."
It was the Underwater Shrine.
What should have been a dilapidated house located in Dongbinggo-dong, Yongsan, Seoul, but the place before my eyes was a mixture of that house and the undersea cafe of the Inunaki Tunnel.
"Welcome, Mr. Undertaker."
The Saintess sat neatly as always, no different from any other cycle, dressed in comfortable clothes suitable for activity.
"The floor I'm in charge of is the fifth layer of the mind realm. Since you've arrived here safely, you should be quite free from the time constraints outside now."
She immediately brought up the operation upon meeting.
I almost laughed.
Like the other companions, the Saintess must have had memories of past cycles flowing back, but this was so very like her.
"The children are each guarding a layer. Is this Dok-seo's thoughtful arrangement?"
"Yes. But it's also to prepare sentinels in advance in case anomalies appear blocking the passage midway."
Kyarururu.
No sooner had the Saintess finished speaking than a little girl ran through the eerily spacious Underwater Shrine.
Woof! Woof!
A large dog that had no form, only a shadow remaining, chased after and ran ahead of the little girl in play.
It was the primal spirit of the Inunaki Tunnel.
"...As you can see."
The Saintess cleared her throat.
"The closer we get to the divine realm of the dream within a dream, the more distorted the shape of the place becomes. Time is warping too."
"That's only natural. Go Yuri has relived the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Unlike ordinary people, time for her is endlessly layered."
"...Just like it is for Mr. Undertaker."
"That's right."
"..."
"..."
The Saintess rowed through silence.
Each person was a ferryman of a boat facing a tumultuous sea. The tongue was the first oar cutting through those waves.
When the wordless wind couldn't push everything forward, everyone had no choice but to row their oar through their own waterway.
"Um, the Silver Bells..."
But the route chosen by this skilled boatwoman was in a direction even I found difficult to predict.
"Shouldn't I return them?"
"Pardon?"
Slowly.
The Saintess averted her gaze.
"They're proof of the promise originally made with Ms. Go Yuri, right?"
"..."
"I don't think it's right for me to have such a precious treasure."
And as the Saintess pulled down her sleeve, wouldn't you know it, there were the Silver Bells, jingling and sparkling.
'Good heavens.'
In other words, even though the Saintess had recalled the memories of the 267th cycle where she sacrificed herself to seal the outer god Nut...
Her first reaction wasn't an expression of gratitude or apology, but rather the question, 'These Silver Bells seem to have a rightful owner, don't they?'
It was truly extraordinary.
Even if the universe were endlessly vast, it would be hard to find a capital T this large.
"Please take them, Mr. Undertaker."
"..."
Leading with emotional appeals here would be the mark of an amateur.
As someone who had graduated with an A+ even through the advanced course of Saintessology 101, I needed to properly drive the opponent into logical confusion.
"I understand."
I nodded.
"But have you consulted with the Saintess of the 267th cycle before making this decision?"
"...Pardon?"
"No matter how memories reverse-flowed from the dream within a dream, they're ultimately nothing more than incomplete afterimages. Those Silver Bells are something I gifted to the Saintess of the 267th cycle, and the right to decide how to handle them belongs entirely to the Saintess of the 267th cycle."
"..."
"Can we truly say that the current Saintess perfectly represents the Saintess of the 267th cycle? Hmm. I'm only concerned whether you, Saintess, can freely dispose of a gift that doesn't even belong to you."
The Saintess made a blank expression.
"But I think it's disrespectful to Ms. Go Yuri."
"Go Yuri employed all sorts of means to awaken you as a powerful awakener."
The Saintess hesitated.
Beyond the Underwater Shrine, outside the undersea tunnel that surrounded it, the shadows of sleeping people were falling like fish shadows.
"When she became your younger sister and died before your eyes, she deliberately staged her death in an isolated warehouse, ensuring you couldn't contact anyone, making a show of it."
"..."
"When she became your childhood friend, your only close friend, the sole passage to the outside world, she carefully removed each of your fingers clinging to the cliff edge of the world. Meticulously."
I paused for a moment.
After letting the fish shadows cross our faces a few times.
"Is there really a need to be courteous?"
"..."
"If you feel you owe each other nothing, then in the end, you can only ask yourself what you want to do."
I smiled.
"What would you like to do?"
The Saintess closed her lips.
It was as if the fish shadows were opening and closing their mouths in her stead.
"...I received this without knowing."
"I gave it to you without knowing either."
"I think it was wrong."
"Even though it was a mistake made without knowing, it's difficult for you to forgive, is it? Yourself, Saintess."
"Yes."
"Your younger sister, childhood friend, best friend, they all committed wrongs while knowing."
"..."
"Will you be unable to forgive them?"
A brief silence.
"...No."
The Saintess shook her head.
"I... can forgive them."
"Why is that?"
"Because in the end, it was done for people. Not just in words but in actions. Not just with one life but by dedicating all their lives. Because they walked the path they thought was best."
"I see."
I nodded.
"Then please forgive yourself a little for the mistakes you made in the past without knowing."
"..."
"If Go Yuri can be forgiven, there's no reason you can't be forgiven."
I placed the Silver Bells the Saintess had removed back on her wrist.
"Ah."
"I hope that Ms. Saintess will be just a bit more generous toward your own ignorance, just as much as you are toward others."
"...Toward myself."
"Yes. There will be people who won't forgive. There will surely be moments where even you find it hard to forgive yourself. But even then, I will forgive you before anyone else."
"..."
"Just as you did for me."
Jingle.
I looked at her while covering the Silver Bells hanging on her wrist with my right hand.
"Will you accept it?"
"..."
Hesitation.
And then, firmly.
"Yes."
The Saintess smiled like a blooming flower.
"Remembering various cycles... I realized something."
"What is it?"
"That what I lack is courage."
The soundless clamor of the sea. Around the path laid on the uncrossable seabed, waves endlessly crashed.
If you only knew the way across, the waves were no longer drifting currents but merely waterways that stayed in place.
"Just waiting for something is meaningless. You have to approach first. Mr. Undertaker gave me that courage."
"Ah, then I'm gla—"
The current quietly resonated.
The fish shadows no longer passed long between the Saintess and me. The gap between us had become too narrow for that.
Just now, she had pulled on my wrist and kissed me.
"..."
I was so surprised my eyes widened.
Those widened pupils were clearly reflected in the pupils right before me.
Without withdrawing her lips, the Saintess...
[Just as Mr. Undertaker advised.]
...spoke only through the passage she had pierced with her own wound.
I felt the shadows of the waterways descending into the Underwater Shrine wrap around my consciousness.
[Yes, I did what I wanted to do.]
Time limit.
20 seconds.
[From now on, I'll be waiting for Mr. Go Yuir's answer.]
Dive.
[This time, I won't wait too long like before.]
[See you soon.]
And.
On to the next stage.
-x-X-x-
The Savior Ω V
"Oh, you're here?"
"Oh, you're here?"
The 6th station.
That place was a flower garden.
A place where only the rustling of falling petals could be heard. The Garden of Fallen Flowers, where even in death the fragrance remained.
And the Dang Flower Garden, where Dang Seo-rin had spent time with her family.
Two landscapes overlapped.
"..."
Of course, the appearance was quite removed from reality.
The sixth layer of the heart. Now there was only one layer left until the dream within a dream's deepest layer.
If this place, which had no choice but to be thoroughly steeped in the Void Poison, resembled reality, that would have been more cause for concern.
"...Dang Seo-rin?"
But the scenery before my eyes seemed to transcend the simple dimension of "the space is bizarre."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
Seo-rin, no.
Two Seo-rins answered simultaneously.
The situation was as follows. Different versions of Seo-rin were reflected on my right and left retinas respectively, cunningly overlapping at the center.
"A bit bewildering, right? I feel the same."
The Seo-rin on the right was tending to violets drooping their heads in the Garden of Fallen Flowers.
The navy blue shadow cast by the sunlight from the glass window caressed the withered and twisted petals, and that had now become the violet's new color.
"A bit bewildering, right? I feel the same."
The Seo-rin on the left was caressing a corpse pierced through by tree branches in the Dang Flower Garden.
The collapsed ceiling of the building. Starlight poured down endlessly. Seo-rin seemed to be holding a funeral service with the Milky Way of the night sky.
"..."
Overlapping yet not overlapping.
I could immediately understand what these two layers of scenery existing simultaneously meant.
"Seo-rin as a human. And... Seo-rin as Hecate coexisting."
"Right."
"Right."
The violet cast a shadow, and the corpse dripped blood.
""Originally, eliminating Hecate and leaving only human Seo-rin would be the route Oh Dok-seo has chosen until now.""
""But that brat, when it came down to the very end, I guess she changed her mind this time.""
""She's saying you should be the one to have the choice, isn't she?""
A hollow laugh escaped me.
"That's really... such a Dok-seo thing to do."
Seo-rin also giggled.
""Really, isn't she way too fourth-dimensional? Sometimes when I talk with her, I end up tilting my head like 'Huh?' 'Did I mishear something?'""
"Ahaha."
I laughed along with Seo-rin, but how could I not grasp Dok-seo's true feelings?
Placing one of my connections at each staircase descending into the dream within a dream.
This held meaning beyond simply handing over the choice to me.
'It must be a gift for me.'
That's right.
This current situation was truly like a dream for me as a regressor.
No matter how carefully I had crafted armor to protect my mental state, how could I not be affected at all while experiencing my memories with companions resetting with each regression?
I thought it foolish to develop the habit of digging into unavoidable sadness.
So I had simply applied ointment repeatedly to prevent flesh from forming over the wounded spots.
"I roughly get yours and Dok-seo's idea. In short, it's a golden axe silver axe operation."
""Hm?""
"Now I decide whether the Seo-rin I truly loved was the personality inherited by the Outer God Hecate, or the human Seo-rin. Then I just need to take one of their hands after making that decision, right?"
""Ahahaha. You got it!""
Day and night mingled in midair.
""Actually, Dok-seo was the first to come up with the idea, but I thought, what would be the point? No matter how much I thought about it, I could only see the ending where you'd choose both of us.""
"A cliché from folktales."
""I'm confident, you know. Whether I'm an anomaly or not, I'm confident you'll see me as Seo-rin exactly as I am.""
It was well-founded confidence.
Because the path we had walked, the countless cycles, the log of conversations we had shared, all provided the basis for her confidence.
"Then you'll understand this too."
I smiled.
"Seo-rin. Actually, the choice doesn't lie with me, it lies with you."
""Huh?""
Seo-rin tilted her head.
""What do you mean?""
"Seo-rin."
I looked at the Seo-rin on the right.
Still completely human, contaminated by the memories of an Outer God but not yet united with the Outer God.
I looked at the Seo-rin who was still alive on June 17th.
"Those memories you feel you've regained now are actually the past of some Outer God that replaced your soul."
"..."
"You don't need to unconditionally consider that as your life. No. It wouldn't be strange if you found it unpleasant instead."
"..."
"The massacre of your entire family was planned by a being called Go Yuri. You were forced to make a wish. And by the anomaly that responded to that wish, your life was completely mortgaged."
I spoke calmly to her eyes, taking care not to mix in any exaggeration.
"You have the right to reject this future, this past, all of it as belonging to someone else and not yourself."
"..."
Then I turned my head.
The Seo-rin on the left.
Still completely an Outer God, who had foreseen the end of being demoted to a human, but precisely because of that, could refuse that conclusion.
I looked at Hecate, who had not lost her name even on June 17th.
"Seo-rin."
"...Yeah."
"Guild Leader."
"...Yeah."
Hecate hesitantly opened her mouth.
"...Vice Guild Leader."
"Well. I don't know what it feels like for an Outer God to transform into a human. For someone who only responds to wishes to become the wish itself is a bit too abstract for a Homo sapiens like me."
"Ahaha. What are you saying? You're more anomaly-like than any anomaly."
"Wow. Then Samcheon World was ultimately an anomaly organization after all. The Guild Leader, the Vice Guild Leader. No, thinking about it, isn't Ji-won also the priestess of Leviathan?"
"Whoa. That guild dominated the Korean peninsula? And even our rival Baekhwa is the same? Korea's done for, seriously."
We laughed side by side.
"You can still refuse."
"..."
"From your perspective as a former Outer God, humans might be nothing but utterly insignificant creatures. Even if you refuse, I have no right to stop that choice."
"Why?"
"In the end, I'm Go Yuri's accomplice. I'm one of the culprits who dragged you as an Outer God down to earth."
"..."
She closed her mouth.
I waited until the silence melted into day and night. Only then did I ask the sun and moon.
"Will you accept being an anomaly?"
First to the sun placed on the left.
"Will you accept being human?"
Then to the moon placed on the right.
"...I, uhm, I."
Seo-rin, dyed in the sun's shadow, opened her lips.
"I don't think it's a particularly important question. After all, why. People's cells all get replaced, right? Anomaly or whatever, if it's my personality then it's me."
Treating an anomaly like mere cells?
No, well, cancer cells are still cells. It wasn't wrong, so a laugh escaped me unintentionally.
Seo-rin looked straight at me.
"If I deny these memories, I'll lose all the traces I walked with you, the traces I would have walked. I don't want that."
That was the human's answer.
I nodded and looked at the other side.
"..."
Hecate, soaked in the starlight of the night sky, opened her lips.
"What you said about humans being insignificant creatures compared to an Outer God's authority. You're wrong."
A smile hung on her lips, hehe.
"An Outer God has nothing but themselves. Most humans are like that too, but... at least the life I've lived and ended up living was different."
Hecate reached out her hand.
Squeeze. My left hand was grasped.
"Undertaker! I'm truly glad I got to know you as a human being!"
"..."
"I'm sorry for dying first. Thank you for keeping my promise every time. Every day, for trying to be by my side... Thank you. You are..."
Squeeze. My right hand was grasped.
"Go Yuir."
"Undertaker."
The left and right Seo-rins, which had been separated with a slight gap, simultaneously pulled me toward them.
""You have always been like magic to me!""
The sun and moon overlapped.
The rotten and crumbling fallen flowers accepted the crimson and bloomed fully, and the tree branches that had only corpses hanging on them were embroidered with petals and blossomed in full.
"When the latecomers come down, I'll follow along."
With a smile. Holding the earliest blooming flower that a human could produce, Seo-rin whispered right before my eyes.
It was a song that always flowed in my heart.
"By the way, I think Ha-yul is really pretty! Oh, but Oh Dok-seo is a bit… Sim Ah-ryeon too."
Time limit.
20 seconds.
"When today is all over, let's talk!"
Dive.
And.
To the next stage.
"..."
It was quiet.
The 7th station.
The terminal station.
Although time and space should have been mixed up more arbitrarily here than anywhere else, what spread around me was just the Tower of Babel plaza wrapped in silence.
"Hmm?"
Clang.
Noh Do-hwa, who had been working on something with tools, turned around.
Black eyes that weren't hidden even by deep dark circles scanned my face.
"You're here? You're ridiculously late..."
"Director Noh Do-hwa."
"Well, you'd call me that. Though it's a bit awkward since I in this current cycle haven't actually founded the National Road Management Corps or anything..."
"Where did the other raid members go? How about the Sword Marquess old man? Seo Gyu?"
Thump.
I approached her while looking around.
"And why is Director Noh Do-hwa standing guard on the most dangerous seventh layer?"
"It's difficult to answer when you throw multiple questions at once. You bastard."
"..."
It is Do-hwa alright.
"First, the other members are over there, peacefully knocked out inside the Tower of Babel, so rest assured..."
Clang.
Do-hwa hammered at her work.
"As for your next question. I don't understand it myself either, but it seems I have a trait that doesn't get contaminated by the Void Poison even if you drop me here in the dream within a dream..."
"What?"
"You didn't know? Well. Since this is the latest information we obtained while going in and out of here, it makes sense you'd be slow on the update..."
The corner of Do-hwa's mouth twisted.
"Oh Dok-seo said something. Ah. Apparently the very fact that I've never been corrupted throughout all cycles is considered like a trait in itself, so I don't seem to be affected by the dream within a dream..."
"Whoa."
An exclamation flowed from my mouth. I was genuinely surprised, for what it's worth.
Do-hwa continued hammering while speaking.
"Thanks to that, whether it's the sixth or seventh layer. I'm perfectly fine no matter how long I stay in the dream within a dream. So Team Leader Yu Ji-won, who has similar immunity like me, is in charge of the entrance to the passage, and I'm in charge of the exit..."
Thinking about it…
In the regression alliance that was almost entirely bustling with Outer Gods or priestesses of Outer Gods, Do-hwa had always performed the role of anchor.
And Do-hwa had never once betrayed her own humanity.
'...If there's something that doesn't change even while thousands of worlds repeat, then that's already no different from a law. She became a law that doesn't crumble even when entering the deepest void.'
It was truly a remarkable achievement.
But if I expressed my respect, only non-combustible trash would be discharged from Do-hwa's facial muscles, so I changed the subject.
"What have you been making since earlier?"
"Ah, this... Heu."
Do-hwa grabbed the work and showed it to me.
There were two things that looked like arms, two things that looked like legs, and one thing that looked like a head attached to it.
In short, it was a doll.
"It's you..."
?
"What?"
"You. You. Your alias is Undertaker and your real name is... what was it again? Anyway, both your alias and real name are fucked up."
"Is that a personal insult??"
"I've had my entire life insulted, so isn't this level of statement permissible? You bastard."
"No, anyway. Me? This doll?"
I had no choice but to look at her with a face containing 100% pure bewilderment.
"There's even not just one doll but two, three, four, five, six, seven... No. Really, how many are there? Why are there so many dolls?"
"It's a commission from Ms. Oh Dok-seo..."
Dok-seo?
"When this quest ends successfully, your body will be split into at least five or six pieces, so before that happens, she told me to use doll clone jutsu in advance to make Undertakers..."
"..."
"So I made them. Collaborating with your daughter Puppeteer. Well, there's still the ontological contemplation of whether this is really the Undertaker or not. Don't worry though. If I cut off the limbs prettily and attach them, it'll work..."
"What??"
"My ability is prosthetic production, isn't it? Originally it's an ability to replace lost limbs, but apparently the opposite is also possible. If I attach arms, legs, limbs, necks, and heads one by one to connect them, I can make them become the real 'that person'..."
I couldn't recover from the shock.
"Ah, no. Wait. There's too much to point out here. First of all, my legs? My legs are two. I'm not a centipede."
"I know that..."
"To replace all the legs of the dolls placed here with my real legs, I'd have to evolve into a human centipede, so by what means are you going to fill up all the materials!"
"Sim Ah-ryeon..."
Flinch.
"If you cut it off, get healed and it grows back, then cut it off again, get healed and it grows back, isn't that enough..."
Silence.
"No. Limbs aside. What about the brain?"
My earnest rebuttal.
"The head? No matter how amazing Ah-ryeon's healing ability is, regenerating even after the head is blown off is really not easy."
"Goodness. Who's extracting the head all at once? I'm not an idiot."
"Whaaat?"
"You just cut off the brain a little bit, heal it, cut it off a little bit again, heal it, and slowly do defragmentation..."
Silence.
"...Did Dok-seo devise this operation?"
"Ah, yes. She was spouting it with such a confident face like 'I saw it! The only happy ending I found!'..."
"Dok-seo!"
I cried out.
I could feel the gratitude and respect for Oh Dok-seo that had built up in my heart melting away like ice cream in Daegu during summer.
"So..."
Do-hwa smiled.
"Where shall we start cutting..."
"..."
"Arms? Legs? Or if your habit is to eat the bad stuff first when eating curry, should I start with the head..."
"..."
"Well, but rest assured. At least there's no doll for me."
Do-hwa whispered as if murmuring.
Cold sweat wouldn't stop running down the back of my neck.
"There's still some time left before the kids come down from upstairs anyway. I'll cut as prettily as possible, so you decide which part to cut first..."
"..."
Alias, Undertaker.
Real name, Go Yuir.
Perhaps Go/Yu/ir.
It was the greatest crisis of my life.
It was the moment I realized that for someone with many lifetimes, the greatest crisis of a lifetime also becomes many, a fact I didn't particularly want to realize.
-x-X-x-
The Savior Ω VI
"Huu..."
The sight of my face dripping with cold sweat must have been quite the spectacle.
Do-hwa smirked, like someone who'd just returned from a pyramid tour with friends only to comment, "Hmm, is that all?" with a dismissive wave of her hand.
"The choice is yours in the end. This is merely the methodology that person Dok-seo proposed. You're under no obligation to follow it..."
"Then I refuse with every fiber of my being!"
"Well, do as you please. Though I'd personally like to see what kind of circus act you'll put on..."
Do-hwa set down her tools.
I swallowed hard. For her, it was simply a gesture signaling the end of her work, but from my perspective, where that doll looked like something akin to 'Artificial Human Undertaker Model 2,' I couldn't help but feel as though I'd just narrowly escaped being dunked into concrete, experiencing the thrill of a dramatic last-second escape.
"..."
"..."
With the sound of hammering gone, the depths of this Dream Within a Dream fell silent as a tomb.
4 a.m. Like stepping out to a convenience store and finding yourself at a concrete intersection devoid of pedestrians or vehicles, when the night sky holds its breath for just a moment.
Standing idly at a crosswalk alternating between green and red, the white silence between us hung in the air just as it did then.
"What are you thinking about so deeply?"
"Why don't you take a guess..."
"Well then."
I fumbled through the blank manuscript of white silence for ink-dark letters.
"I'd wager you're savoring a certain kind of joy."
"Joy? Hoh. Me, you say...?"
"Yes. The Director Do-hwa has always distinguished herself from her counterparts in other cycles. Always."
"..."
A sideways glance, Do-hwa looked this way.
Whether she did or not, I was organizing the manuscript of silence.
"But now, at this final of finals, all those past memories, all those future predestinations have been given to you. You've finally crossed the rapids of time that could never be crossed."
"..."
"Now you can denigrate all the versions of yourself from every other cycle to your heart's content. Only the self standing in this moment has achieved the ultimate victory, shall we say. So, yes. You are, in your own way, savoring joy."
"Heh."
A nasal sound slipped from Do-hwa's lips.
"Unpleasant bastard..."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"Yes. That's right. Despite how I look, I'm in quite a good mood right now..."
I could tell the moment I saw her.
Even the great Do-hwa, no matter how much this was Dok-seo's request, couldn't possibly have participated in something as frivolous as the Undertaker Project without any reason whatsoever.
Just the fact that she teased me without any particular mockery, which for Do-hwa was genuinely normal communication, showed that Supreme Leader Do-hwa's satisfaction level had clearly hit at least 70%.
"I offer my condolences to my past selves. For tens of thousands of years, all I have are memories of work, work, work. Buried in paperwork..."
"Haha."
"Right now I'm in this strange place, so the memories are vivid at least. Once everything ends, they'll all become hazy..."
"Did Dok-seo say that?"
"Yes. That we should share our reflections [before the strategy], not [after the strategy]. Once Dream Within a Dream is conquered, even the memories piled up here like dregs will fade..."
Certainly.
This very magic that allowed everyone to recall previous cycles was itself a byproduct of Dream Within a Dream. In extreme terms, it was no different from the Void.
If the main body, the Void, were to be conquered, the byproduct would naturally disappear as well.
Woof!
A large dog came running from the entrance of the Tower of Babel.
Do-hwa knelt with practiced ease and stroked the large Maltese this way and that.
Huff, huff, huff.
Its tail wagged vigorously.
More pets followed the Maltese, wriggling closer.
Among them, one puppy trembled with its front and hind legs severely misaligned in height. There was also a cat with three tails sprouting from its rear, cracking like whips.
"Good, good..."
Hundreds of pets.
All children of a broken world with limbs somehow askew or damaged.
The pets I'd gifted in previous cycles, that Do-hwa had raised, and that the two of us had held funerals for together.
Once those children received even a single pat from Do-hwa, they immediately dissolved into ash.
"..."
Before long, only pure white ash fluttered through the plaza of the Tower of Babel.
Do-hwa brushed the ash from her doctor's coat and stood up.
"Awakener Undertaker."
"Yes. Speak, Director."
"Every time I killed you, you never once resisted but accepted death willingly. I'd like to ask why."
"Because I am the very one who dragged your life into this place."
The same answer as always.
Though the strata forming that answer had changed.
"Go Yuri arranged nearly everything for the sake of my fate. Nearly everything. However, even Yuri couldn't have foreseen that your existence would become this critical to my plan."
"..."
"Yes. You're also a case where you awakened due to a gap in your heart caused by Go Yuri. However, your ability isn't particularly impressive. [Protective Gear Creation]. In no scenario would you become the protagonist, or even a main character, with that ability."
In other words…
"You didn't join this story because of Go Yuri. Only I, the false regressor, caused you to bear all that suffering."
"..."
"Therefore, I bear responsibility. Unlike others, you at least have the right to kill me as much as you desire."
The corners of Do-hwa's mouth lifted.
"Even now?"
"..."
"If I say I don't like this ending, that the path you and Dok-seo created doesn't suit my temperament and I refuse it, what then?"
Do-hwa stepped closer.
"Still...?"
Her dry fingers grasped my neck.
Squeeze. Through the black leather gloves, a frail grip transmitted its pressure.
"Will you still die for me?"
I smiled.
"I'd accept it. But you won't be able to kill me anyway."
"Oh?"
The eye behind the monocle gleamed with interest.
"And why is that? Don't tell me you think my favorability toward you has maxed out enough to prevent murder? If so, I must tell you that would be a grave miscalculation..."
"It's not that."
As I answered, I thought.
Why did Dok-seo place Do-hwa at the final station?
Do-hwa herself responded with 'because of her Void affinity,' but Dok-seo had been the one persistently pushing ridiculous bait about an old-married couple or whatever nonsense.
As always, Dok-seo had given her a choice.
"Even if you kill me now, we'll meet again anyway. Here. Again. In the next cycle."
"..."
"And killing me then wouldn't be a 'new choice' from your perspective. You'd simply be retracing the choice your past self, your previous self made. And you..."
"I what?"
"Hate becoming a copy of yourself more than anything."
"..."
"How many times will you keep killing me? A thousand? Ten thousand? But eventually, an end will come, and the you at that end will make the choice to let me live. The person who remains in this world will be the one who made that final choice. Not you standing before me now."
"..."
"Only by sparing me here do you remain as the uniquely victorious one who survived to the end, a human freed from the shackles of regression. Noh Do-hwa. Therefore, you absolutely cannot kill me."
"..."
Slowly.
The leather glove formed of five distinct contours pulled away.
"To think you'd actually pull it off."
The sound that slipped through the withdrawn lips was closer to admiration, yet closer still to a curse.
"To publicly declare you'd save the world and then actually make it happen. Truly, astonishing."
"It wouldn't have been possible through my strength alone. It was possible because Yuri came before me, and Dok-seo followed after."
"...Those who've gambled and lost must accept the appropriate consequences."
Do-hwa removed her monocle.
"I won't bring this up ever again, so listen carefully..."
Thud. The folded monocle fell to the ground and rolled among the ashes.
A small rustling sound. It was the scream the monocle made as Do-hwa's shoe crushed it underfoot.
Do-hwa pulled off her gloves and tossed them aside.
"This is your victory. Undertaker."
"..."
"And this is my defeat."
Then she grasped my hand.
The back of my hand grew cool. It was because my lifted hand was brought close to Do-hwa's pale forehead.
"You were right and I was wrong. You were prudent and I was rash. My contempt was too premature to harvest the final autumn."
Squeeze.
With her head bowed, Do-hwa's face wasn't visible.
But she was expressing her emotions not through her face but through the pressure held in my hand.
"I pay my respects to everything you've accomplished. Even if my memories fade, the fact that a human like you exists will never be erased from my heart."
Emotion transmitted through bare hands scarred from countless hammer strikes and tool work.
"Claim your victory, Undertaker."
Humiliation.
"Seize your victory."
Disgrace.
"Having walked this far, you are more than deserving of victory."
Yet despite that, accepting defeat as defeat and treating victory as victory, offering mockery as the defeated.
With the same weight as that humiliation, merely changing direction, offering glory to the victor.
"May fortune be with you."
If this place were somewhere else, at the terminus of some remote route where victor and vanquished were reversed.
As if she believed without doubt that she would have carried out these same words.
"I apologize for killing you so many times."
If only human voices could be colored.
"In return, one wish."
Right now, Do-hwa's breath would surely be dripping with blood so cold it stung.
"Any wish at all. Even if it means tearing my soul apart, I'll grant you one wish."
A brief silence.
"Alright. I have a wish."
"...What is it?"
"After this is over, run for president."
"You fucking bastard. Do you really want to die?"
The rebuke carried genuine feeling.
I scratched my head.
"Hmm. With tens of thousands of years' experience governing a peninsula-scale organization, isn't letting such talent go to waste itself a national loss?"
"Really? Is that seriously your wish?"
"I'm joking. Even retirement denial has its limits. Ms. Do-hwa, it's time for you to step down from public duties."
I bent down and picked up the gloves.
After firmly fitting the gloves back onto Do-hwa's hands, I smiled faintly.
"Let's not live too far apart."
"..."
"Even if we don't need to be too close, we don't need to be too far either. When walking through streets bathed in evening glow. When taking a slight detour on the way home... Where you don't need to dress up specially but can meet just by calling..."
Where rain falls when it rains there too.
Where waves crash when they crash there too.
Where if the sun shines beautifully, its shadow falls upon you as well.
"I'd like you to be in such a place."
For someone, if the sunset is beautiful, it's because the roads beneath that crimson lead to neighbors' homes.
My western sunset needed your house facing the same direction.
"Will you do that, Ms. Do-hwa?"
"..."
Noh Do-hwa sealed her lips.
It was a long silence.
So that words flowing from her lungs wouldn't rise immediately through her throat but would circle her heart several times, steeping properly.
"Yes."
She nodded.
"I shall do so, Undertaker."
Immediately after.
"Mister!"
Screech.
A door materialized from empty air and Dok-seo burst through, shoving it open. Her face was flushed from running.
"Huff, everyone! Without exception! I brought them all!"
Beyond the door, I glimpsed flashes of Old Man Scho and the connections I'd passed on every floor up to now.
"I tried to hurry in my own way but, you know, the flow of time is so different that I'm not sure if the timing worked out— Huh."
Dok-seo, who'd been gasping for breath, froze.
Her gaze landed precisely on the scene where I was just fitting gloves back onto Do-hwa's hands.
"Haaaack."
Dok-seo covered her mouth with both hands.
"O-old married couple...?!"
"..."
"S-sorry! Mister! I was so tactless! Wow. I really should just die. Stupid Dok-seo! Idiot Dok-seo! Three minutes, no. Thirty minutes. No no, I'll come back in three hours!"
"..."
"Gasp. But wait, wouldn't that fill up the entire time limit right before the deadline? No, well. Whatever. The world's been destroyed countless times anyway, one more time won't hurt. Have a good time!"
Bang.
The door slammed shut.
"Ah!"
It opened again.
"J-just, don't mind me! Of course, I'll eventually see whatever happened here in the laptop manuscript! But really don't mind me! I know how to respect privacy, you know! You trust me, right? Then I'm off."
Bang.
The door shut again.
"..."
"..."
If the door hadn't opened from this side, it would have taken over three hours to clear up the misunderstanding, and the conquest operation would have been postponed to the next cycle.
What tremendous luck.
-x-X-x-
The Savior Ω VII
I somehow managed to drag Dok-seo out despite her falling into a completely absurd misunderstanding.
It wasn't easy.
That shameless brat kept making suggestive expressions while desperately clinging to the doorknob in resistance.
"Hiiing... Mister, that's too much..."
Only after I finally gave her a good knock on the head did the 'Reader Oh Dok-seo' program in her mind get replaced with the 'Possessor Oh Dok-seo' program.
Grumbling all the while, Dok-seo woke up the awakeners who'd collectively entered sleep mode inside the Tower of Babel.
Shortly after.
"Hyung!"
The awakeners came pouring out in a rush.
Leading the pack was none other than our SG Man, Seo Gyu.
"Fuck! Hyung, thank you! Seriously, thank you!"
"Uh... why so suddenly?"
"I remembered! I got hit with flashbacks of being beheaded the moment the tutorial started, over dozens of times all at once!"
"Ah."
The veins bulging in Seo Gyu's muscles trembled.
"Those fucking fairy bastards! If I'd been a combat-type ability user, I would've dedicated my soul to beating the crap out of fairies for the rest of my life! Fuck!"
At those words, Yo-hwa, who'd followed Dok-seo to join them at Dream Within a Dream's deepest layer, reacted.
"Oh. Those fairies are all under my command now. Want to go one-on-one with me?"
"...No, no, Guild Leader."
Seo Gyu deflated instantly like a muscle after pumping.
It would be hard to criticize him for acting unmanly despite that fine physique when the trauma from the zombie kingdom founded by Elder Yo-hwa the Necromancer was probably quite intense.
"Meow! Undertaker!"
Patter patter patter, a blonde magical girl with cat ears poking out came running and dove for my neck.
"Well, well. Who do we have here?"
"Myahaha!"
From the Magical Girl Association, the guardian collective of the Japanese archipelago. A sunflower bloomed across Manyo Neko's face.
"Really, really thank you, nya! I just thought you were some strange person I met at the Inunaki Tunnel entrance! To think you saved my friend... that you saved Yō-meow. I only just realized, meow!"
"Uh, yeah."
I was slightly flustered.
It was common knowledge that Manyo Neko was the representative pro-Undertaker faction within the Magical Girl Association.
But across all cycles, Manyo Neko had never been this uninhibited with physical contact.
Our relationship always maintained a gap somewhere between friends and comrades, creating a pleasant draft whenever the two of us talked.
"Oya."
Laughter sounded.
The Magical Girl Association's leader, the Great Priestess, approached while covering her mouth with a fan.
That laugh had just flowed down along the fan's folded creases like water through a valley.
"Isn't it natural? To discover that what you'd dismissed as chance encounters were actually all part of an operation to save your irreplaceable childhood friend."
"...Um."
Obsidian Qin had also arrived.
Originally scheduled to be sacrificed during the Inunaki Tunnel exploration, but from cycle 146 onward her fate was altered.
Afterward, she came to shoulder one pillar of the Association alongside her friend.
Like Seo Gyu who'd survived from the 50th cycle onward, Obsidian Qin was also a survivor who'd belatedly escaped the schedule of extinction.
"Thank... you."
Bow.
Still wearing her trademark mask with the 'X' mark drawn on it, she let her black hair hang down as she gave me a respectful bow.
"Why the Inunaki Tunnel, judged to be a special-grade specter, disappeared before we could even begin proper exploration... I never imagined something like that had happened."
[Truly a peculiar fate, is it not!]
The armless swordsman.
Phantom Blade laughed heartily through telepathic magic rather than spoken words.
[Remembering when we sailed out to sea with lord Undateikeo and were attacked by aliens still chills my liver!]
"Their weakness was water. They melted like whipped cream when touched by water."
[Ah, I heard from lord Dok-seo. Heh. Truly. Meeting their end in the middle of the ocean to children whose weakness was water, there could be no greater foolishness than that.]
Tap.
Phantom Blade moved her scabbard with telekinesis to tap my forearm. It tickled.
[There were many comrades I wished to march alongside, but this is the Great Void. The expedition was composed only of combat ability users who could at minimum pull their own weight, I hear. Please understand.]
"What do I have to understand? I'm grateful you came at all."
[Lord Undateikeo is truly a samurai who has grasped righteousness!]
I continued exchanging warm greetings with various comrades one after another.
All were welcome faces, though occasionally there were some who stirred particularly deep emotions.
"U-Undertaker-san."
"Oh. Uehara."
"Was I... only useful in the early stages as a B-rank ability user and then discarded from the midpoint onward?"
"Pfft."
Sim Ah-ryeon, who'd been fidgeting nearby, openly burst out laughing.
Uehara Shino's expression darkened.
"Besides, our speech patterns are similar too. I stutter when I talk, and that one over there also..."
"No. You're just awkward when speaking Korean. Ah-ryeon over there is like that because humanity itself is awkward to her, so it's a different dimension."
"The reality that hierarchies exist even among awakening abilities is deplorable..."
For reference, Uehara Shino was a Japanese Communist Party supporter. She'd probably get along splendidly with a certain German-born old man.
Everyone was crowding around me, sharing retrospective memories that might be their last, when.
"..."
In the distance, I saw Lee Baek leaning against a wall.
Lee Baek. Lion's Roar ability user.
In the timeline where he lived alongside Go Yuri, he was an upstanding leader who'd filmed something like a National Road Management Director prequel.
But on my regression line, he was always the man stuck playing the 'early tutorial cancer character.'
"..."
Nod. Noticing my gaze, Baek gave a small bow of his head.
He couldn't bring himself to approach me directly to shake hands or voice an apology. Nevertheless, he wanted to participate in the final conquest battle to see it through.
That will could be felt in his eyes.
'Good expression.'
I smiled.
'Can a person change so much just from recalling memories of other cycles?'
How much time had passed?
The hubbub of chatter and the clamor of laughter had both grown relaxed enough to accept silence.
"Ah. Ahem, mic test."
Having rolled around like a balloon in a child's hands for hours, the air had grown full of vulnerabilities that Dok-seo slipped through as she grabbed a megaphone.
"Yes. Has everyone sufficiently caught up? Ah. I'm not some pervert like that Undertaker old man over there, so I can't perform absurd tricks like simultaneous foreign language interpretation. Please translate reasonably from the sides."
Laughter swept through the assembly.
"Hmm."
But then Dok-seo suddenly made a strange expression.
"Looking at everyone gathered like this, I'm newly reminded that I'm really quite a good person."
"?"
Question marks floated above the expedition members' heads.
"Even though I was born chosen as the protagonist, thinking about how I rolled through hundreds of cycles taking care of all these extras one by one, I wonder if anyone quite like me even exists..."
"?"
"This world owes a debt to the goodwill of the human being called me. That fact. The truth that this gathering was made possible by my treating all of you without any favoritism, I hope you won't forget even when the day comes that the Great Void is conquered and memories grow hazy."
"..."
Silence.
"What the hell is that serial abandoner babbling about?"
Finally someone couldn't hold back.
"Hey! LiteraryGirl! The sight of you calling in readers to beat them up after you went corrupt is still vivid in my mind, what kind of fucking goodwill! Goodwill!"
"You bastard! You're the one who wrote fanfic about Director Do-hwa under that ridiculous pen name Non-LiteraryBoy, right? You're the one who changed pen names!"
"Grrrr!"
"You said you couldn't do foreign languages but why did you run AOIM GPT to churn out translations and spread them around?! So we'd suffer too?!"
"E-even your view counts were always lower than mine. If I'd been the guild leader's ghostwriter, I would've cut the regression within 500 cycles... That's just facts..."
"There's suspicion that the Cheon Yo-hwa sisterly yuri novel that suddenly appeared anonymously on the SG Net novel serialization board in 806th cycle was your work."
"If you had time to shit out stuff like that, write the main story! The main story!"
Truly enthusiastic cheers like wildfire.
Dok-seo adjusted her cap with a huff and a smirk.
Damage taken: zero. She looked completely unfazed.
The thought process currently rolling around inside that skull was plainly visible without needing exploratory surgery.
She was probably absorbed in self-praise like 'Seeing how I drove both fans and haters crazy, I really do have the qualities of a superstar!' I'd bet my entire fortune on it.
"Life is suffering. If the fate of a writer is to be beaten by the ignorant nonsense of the masses, then I shall say to those base heavens that I loved my life as a writer..."
"Stop your bullshit!"
"We were the ones suffering because of a serial abandoner like you, you bastard!"
"But now the time has come to put an ending on the story of first draft Go Yuri, revision Undertaker, and editor Dok-seo. Let's go! My beloved readers!"
People threw rotten tomatoes and eggs, but those projectiles never made contact with the person called Dok-seo to create tomato-egg fried rice. Dok-seo didn't budge an inch and trudged forward.
The reason was simple. The [Absolute Defense] that had already reached the realm of a great immortal spat back all those projectiles.
The current Oh Dok-seo was invincible.
"Goodness..."
Dang Seo-rin, who'd stuck close beside me, let out a hollow laugh in disbelief.
"The final conquest battle. And she's probably the first in human history to ruin a morale-boosting speech like that..."
"She's probably thinking right now that she looks incredibly cool."
"Why on earth did the baton of world salvation get passed to a kid like that?"
"Who knows."
I smiled.
"Maybe because her talent for loving herself and the world surpasses anyone else's."
"..."
"Let's go, Seo-rin. We can't let your final concert be ruined."
"Yeah."
Thud.
I stepped forward.
Thud.
Seo-rin stepped forward. Ah-ryeon stepped forward, Ha-yul stepped forward, Yo-hwa stepped forward.
Thud.
Ye-ji stepped forward. Ji-won stepped forward. Do-hwa stepped forward.
Seo Gyu stepped forward, Baek stepped forward, Manyo Neko stepped forward, the Great Priestess stepped forward, Phantom Blade stepped forward, Obsidian Qin stepped forward.
Thud.
In Seo-rin's footsteps hung the night sky of Utopia.
In Ah-ryeon's footsteps were captured the Udumbara blooming at the ends of the earth.
In Ha-yul's footsteps, the puppet strings connecting humanity's final arks tied their knots.
In Yo-hwa's footsteps were white birch skins. In Ye-ji's footsteps was frozen white time.
In Ji-won's footsteps was seawater. In Do-hwa's footsteps were roads connecting to all the lonely cities of this earth.
Thud.
The extinctions humanity had endured, the deaths it couldn't endure, were carved into each and every one of those footsteps.
The screams that had been torn into thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of branches, each creating discordant cacophony.
With me at the head, through everyone's footsteps taken with a thud, through the shadows of footfalls, they connected.
Route.
A single one.
"Mister."
We decided to call that lonely road 'time.'
"That's the main body of Dream Within a Dream."
The tip of Dok-seo's pointing finger.
There stood a glass monument split into a thousand, ten thousand branches, a gravestone transparent as a mirror, enduring as a massive citadel.
Carved into each of the hundreds of millions of glass facets were images of Go Yuri.
"...The tombstone of Time Seal."
"Yeah. It might even be the superior version of the ability you possess. Except that while you sealed other people, Yuri sealed none other than herself."
"I've explored Dream Within a Dream a few times too. I never saw such an absurdly massive tombstone then."
"Right."
Dok-seo nodded.
"That mirror cemetery. The kaleidoscope containing hundreds of millions of Yuri's disappears at exactly 2 p.m. on June 17th. By the outside world's standards, wait. Yeah. It'll happen 19 seconds from now."
"..."
"The White Night outside and this Dream Within a Dream's tombstone are linked to each other. While burning away every clue that might allow one to guess the Reincarnator Yuri's identity."
"What happens if we break that?"
That's when it happened.
"[The Corrupted Reincarnator] will descend."
It wasn't Dok-seo's voice.
I turned my head.
Dok-seo, not having heard that voice just now, was giving her own answer about something or other, but my attention was completely drawn forward.
"Guild Leader."
Go Yuri was there.
A phantom visible only to me.
"...You hadn't been visible for a while after entering Dream Within a Dream. Were you in a place like this?"
"I'm sorry. It wasn't intentional. It's no different from being forcibly dragged to where I should be."
"..."
"The [red flesh] Guild Leader occasionally witnessed. That's both the result of my existence becoming corrupted and an extremely, truly extremely weakened form."
"Weakened, you say?"
I couldn't help but ask back reflexively.
"That is weakened?"
"Yes. Though I may not look it, I'm an existence that accumulated the karma of an outer god in a human body, you know? Hundreds of millions of lifetimes. If I unleashed all hundreds of millions of abilities at once, well, things like the Outer Gods would have no choice but to collapse entirely."
"..."
"Except for the very minor drawback that the world I sought to protect would collapse along with them."
Yuri caressed the surface of the mirror-smooth tombstone.
"While crossing countless years, I sealed away my own abilities one by one."
"That's..."
It was a very familiar sound.
Yuri smiled brightly.
"Yes. Just like how Guild Leader restrains your own aura ability."
"..."
"In short, every single one of these countless split mirror surfaces holds the same status as 'the aura Guild Leader sealed,' each a vestigial organ from the past."
My mouth closed on its own.
"The traces of me as a human struggling to remain human. The traces of some ability I as a human once pinned my hopes on. If I'd been unable to give up to the very end and kept clinging to them, they would have certainly run rampant and led to corruption."
"..."
"The sum total of routes leading to bad endings."
Go Yuri turned to look at me.
No, not just me.
Dok-seo standing beside me. The members of the Regression Alliance. The hundreds of awakeners forming ranks behind us.
"Certainly, if you succeed in unearthing this tombstone and eliminating the 'corpse' that emerges, I'll truly be able to return to being human this time."
"..."
"But, is it possible?"
She, 'humanity of the past.'
Looked at us, 'humanity of the present,' and lifted the corners of her mouth.
"The traces of me sleeping in this tombstone possess no humanity. Of course. I scraped together every bit of humanity that remained, however faint, and handed it over to the me outside."
"...Truly a monster then."
"Yes. The noise, the dirge of some pitiful existence that eternally laments a world and human fate it could never save by itself, abandoning even its own self."
Yuri placed both hands neatly at her waist.
"So this is the final Rubicon River. Guild Leader. If you want to turn back, now is your only chance."
"..."
"It's a cemetery no one knew existed anyway. Once White Night erupts, it'll disappear forever without leaving even a trace. You can all just return like this and occasionally drop by Dream Within a Dream through the fairies, receive the memories of previous cycles like an IV drip, and live on reminiscing about your connections with each other."
"And you won't be there."
Go Yuri's eyebrows lowered.
"I consider that what remains in Guild Leader's memory was a sufficient lifetime. Still."
"Sorry, but…"
I grasped Dok-seo's shoulder.
"The child who inherited our legacy seems to think differently."
"..."
"Old Man Scho."
Thud.
Emit Schopenhauer stepped forward. A quiet footfall. In his hand was gripped a single nameless sword.
"Aye. You called?"
"Cut that thing down."
After that, words weren't necessary.
One sword stroke.
At a speed difficult to follow with the eyes, Emit Schopenhauer drew his blade, and slightly slower than the arc the sword traced, the crystal tombstone slid apart.
"Ahh."
Go Yuri too was cut along with the tombstone.
A crack traced across that slender smile.
"Truly, such incorrigible greedy ones..."
And then.
Bursting through the shattered mirrors with broken seals, red flesh surged forth.
Humanity's long nightmare had arrived.
-x-X-x-