Chapter 380 - 380: Against the World

That wasn't really necessary, though.

Mainly because, as the one who designed the "trial," Odin felt that doing so would just be a "repeat" of the airship crash from before.

If he really caused the mountain to collapse—

then what exactly would the boy need to do?

Save everyone else trapped inside the mountain at that moment? Stop the mountain from collapsing? Or simply punch straight through the rock so that he and everyone else trapped inside could get out?

All of those were far too "simple."

Because a Lv. 7 adventurer alone was more than capable of cleaving through a mountain peak in a single strike.

There was no need at all for a trial resembling a test of "destructive power"—and besides, that would mean nothing to the people watching.

What people wanted to witness was a Hero.

Someone who accomplished impossible miracles. Even now, though Zeus Familia and Hera Familia had vanished more than a decade ago, many people still believed in their existence, still remembered the legends about them.

That was exactly why.

A Hero had to accomplish something even more outrageous, even more inconceivable—a miracle that the entire world could not comprehend!

And so...

Night fell.

Isagi and Asfi came to the interior of the mountain, to tour the factory where the alchemic dolls were made.

Honestly, there was no way to tell day from night in here, just like in the Dungeon—the only way to know was by checking the clock in one's hand.

It was the same here as well.

Every household, and even the streetlamps lining the roads outside, had clocks ticking away on them.

Aside from that, there were the lava flows and frost that served purely as decoration—though those couldn't be seen in the towns built into the cliff walls along one side of the crater.

That warm, dim amber light lasted all day, they said, only growing slightly dimmer in the small hours before dawn.

The plaza where the alchemic dolls were manufactured was also located within a fairly spacious cavern.

Unlike the towns, though, here pitch-black steel pipes were bolted together with squarish "boxes," looking like some giant gestating within the cavern.

It had no shape to speak of at all.

Everything here had been assembled purely on the basis of "function," and it looked crude and unsettling as a result.

Since it was an abandoned factory, it was actually far quieter than the towns had been—though from deeper within the cavern, faint rumbling sounds could still be heard, over and over.

That was the "core" of the Magic Kingdom.

The true factory district lay deep within the mountain—alchemic dolls, all manner of magitech, and, further in still, various unverified "top-secret weapons" that existed only as theoretical prototypes or were still under construction.

Isagi was actually a bit curious about it, though there was no need to actually go run in and take a look—that might well cause a "diplomatic incident."

He'd definitely get lectured by the goddess once he got back.

Still.

With his ability to turn invisible, couldn't he just... sneak in...

His thoughts wandered off for a moment.

At this point Isagi was walking alongside Asfi and a crowd of other tourists, lined up in a queue, following a dwarf woman who looked like someone's aunt as their tour guide, into the interior of the factory.

This place, of course, had already been converted into a tourist attraction.

More precisely, it was something like an "exhibition hall," telling the story of how the alchemic doll technology was born, how it evolved over time, up through the present day.

There were also a great many alchemic doll models on display, along with related mini-games and the like.

Isagi honestly felt it wasn't much different from the "history museums" and "culture museums" he'd seen before, so once inside he found himself somewhat uninterested—Asfi, on the other hand, was watching everything with great enthusiasm.

She could make alchemic dolls too; Isagi had seen it before.

That thing was roughly on par with a Lv. 4 monster—a huge "clay figure," pudgy and round, looking rather like a giant snowman sculpted out of stone. It was more than enough to deal with monsters, and especially good as a meat shield.

Come to think of it, Isagi had once been curious about what exactly an "alchemic doll" actually was.

Asfi's explanation had been fairly complicated, but in essence, it boiled down to magic-driven "stone" or "steel."

At first he hadn't really understood it, but after getting the Soul Teardrop, he'd more or less grasped the principle behind it.

Just as Magic could be turned into flame, frost, or howling wind, driven by mental strength—

the so-called "alchemic doll" worked on a similar principle.

It was simply a matter of normalizing the Magic that existed within its body, and giving it a certain "behavior pattern"—this didn't mean the thing possessed intelligence, but rather it was like how a fireball released by a spell could hover in place, fly straight forward, or curve and loop around.

It was some kind of preset "configuration" set up in advance.

Originally.

This had been essentially impossible for magic-users, because the earliest alchemic dolls were all creations of people who possessed the Mystery (Development Ability).

But later, a certain genius magic-user in the Magic Kingdom overcame that problem.

That reminded Isagi of the Soul Teardrop again.

Magic-users from a thousand years ago also seemed to have had similar abilities, like summoning various "elemental creatures" and the like.

"Building on that, the strength of an alchemic doll is actually directly proportional to the amount of Magic inside it—which is also why your Soul Teardrop's strength matches your own."

Whenever the topic turned to her own specialty,

Asfi tended to get a bit chatty. But in short, an alchemic doll's strength was "proportional" to the Magic within its body.

As for herself,

at her level of Lv. 4, she could only ever create a Lv. 4 alchemic doll at most.

But,

the "craftsmen" here in the Magic Kingdom were different.

They used a technology called the [Magic Core], which could seal off a portion of Magic—somewhat similar to the [battery] Isagi had once asked Asfi to make—and then place it inside the body of an alchemic doll to power it.

On that basis, even a Lv. 1 craftsman could create a high-level alchemic doll.

For the Magic Kingdom,

the real limit on an alchemic doll's strength was actually the "total quantity of Magic" available.

A single [Magic Core] could only hold so much, and since a doll consumed Magic continuously as long as it was active, it needed to be constantly replenished—completely unlike how Asfi and Fels normally kept their alchemic dolls as small toys, only "activating" them when needed.

And in order to keep the alchemic dolls throughout the country running day to day, the entire Magic Kingdom maintained a technology called the [Magic Network], centered on the capital, Altena, extending outward to constantly replenish the dolls' Magic at all times.

Some people had once dreamed about this.

If all that Magic could be gathered together, what kind of terrifyingly powerful alchemic doll could be created?

But reality, of course, wasn't that simple.

A single [Magic Core] had a limit to how much Magic it could hold; gathering Magic together wasn't simple either; and beyond that, Magic needed to be manually converted by magic-users—no matter how many individual magic-users' mental strength you pooled together, it was hard to produce a qualitative change.

It was just like how, no matter how many low-level adventurers you gathered together, sheer numbers could never make them a match for a high-level adventurer.

Even when it came to the same "Magic,"

there was a world of difference between a low-level magic-user and a high-level one.

That was an unbridgeable gulf—even after all their research, the nobles and craftsmen of the Magic Kingdom had to admit there was no solution.

But.

Just as every national secret came in two forms—"disclosable" and "undisclosable"—

in fact,

the Magic Kingdom had actually made some breakthroughs on this front. It was just that, first, it was still in the experimental stage, and second, it came with fairly significant restrictions—it could basically only be achieved under extremely strict conditions, in what was called a "theoretical experimental environment."

After a long while,

Isagi and Asfi arrived at the final stop of this "alchemic doll exhibition hall."

As the coarse, booming voice of the dwarf-auntie tour guide rang out,

the two of them, along with the rest of the tourists, arrived at an absolutely enormous steel plaza deep within the factory.

Right before everyone's eyes,

a steel structure nearly a hundred meters tall stood embedded into the rock wall.

That was the very first "alchemic doll prototype," created by the ordinary craftsmen of the Magic Kingdom, those without the Mystery (Development Ability)—the so-called "first-generation unit."

It had no name, only a code designation.

Being merely a first-generation unit, it couldn't even move; it had only served to verify some of the earliest technical hypotheses.

Normally,

tourists who reached this point would listen to the guide's brief explanation, then head back—perhaps picking up some little doll figurines as souvenirs along the way to wrap up the day's tour.

But today was different.

Because Isagi was here.

The moment the boy stepped in front of the enormous first-generation unit, the dwarf-auntie tour guide used her communication device to alert the "technicians" who were watching everything unfold, and the message was passed further up the chain until it finally reached the great god Odin himself.

The one-eyed old god, up at the mountain's peak, unfurled his Divine Mirror.

The massive screen floating in midair displayed the boy's figure standing before the "first-generation unit."

But the audience watching now

wasn't just the gods—it was a great many nobles as well, from the Magic Kingdom, the Empire, and other small nations either allied to or on friendly terms with the two great powers.

In this age, most nations on the continent were ruled by gods.

But that "rule" didn't mean the gods had replaced the original kings or emperors—rather, the gods had become the "supreme will" guiding the nation's overall direction.

This included the other gods and their Familia members who served under the ruling god of each nation.

Even so,

the actual day-to-day operation of a nation still had to be carried out by the mortals below.

Economy, military, diplomacy, domestic affairs, public order...

Even Orario was no different—Ouranos was the founder of the Guild, but he barely interfered with its actual operations, which were mainly maintained by Guildmaster Royman and his many staff.

Naturally, this gave these nobles considerable real power.

If yesterday's airship incident had been meant to show the common people of the entire world the inconceivable power and "miracle" of a Hero,

then today's trial was meant to show the powerful rulers of the entire world an impossible, unimaginable "miracle" from that same Hero.

Just as had been said before—

every nation surely had secrets the common people didn't know about.

And so, no matter how outrageous what happened next would be, only the nobles present would truly be able to understand it.

In fact,

before the Divine Mirror right now—whether in the [Valhalla] where Odin sat, or in other nations where nobles were watching the scene unfold through their own Divine Mirrors from within their own mansions or castles—many of them were whispering among themselves.

Doubting, confused.

"Are they really going to use that thing?"

"That's impossible, isn't it?"

"Even for a 'Hero,' can he really pull off something on that scale? Is that even possible?"

"Has the great god Odin lost his mind?"

"Does that thing even really exist... no, can it even actually be operated? What if something goes wrong?"

And amid all this doubt,

the trial—

began, without a word of explanation.

First, Isagi and Asfi, both present at the scene, felt an indescribably immense surge of Magic.

It was as if, from every direction, from sky and earth alike, countless streams of Magic were converging toward where they stood—the sheer scale and speed of it wasn't like a rushing river anymore, but an endless, surging ocean tide.

And their destination was the "first-generation unit" right in front of them, this original alchemic doll of the Magic Kingdom.

Earlier,

Alfia had once discovered the existence of something capable of converting matter into Magic—but in truth, the Magic Kingdom's research into this had begun far earlier than she could have imagined.

Behemoth, the Overlord of the Land;

Leviathan, the Overlord of the Sea;

as powerful Monsters that had existed outside the cities since ancient times, they weren't just seen by adventurers as one of the Three Great Quests—for these nations, they were disasters that absolutely had to be dealt with.

Under these circumstances, the Magic Kingdom had, together with the Empire and several other nations, made a number of exploratory attempts to hunt down Behemoth, achieving a certain degree of success along the way.

"War is the best place to test weapons."

Or rather,

without battle, weapons and equipment had no meaning to begin with.

And the magic-users had long harbored a hypothesis of their own: if Magic could be converted into flame, howling wind, stone, or flowing water—then couldn't the same things be converted back into Magic?

And so, through repeated encounters with Behemoth,

the Magic Kingdom came to recognize and gradually master the existence of this power, and through years of research and experimentation, finally arrived—just now—at a "creation" that could genuinely function.

The [World Tree].

That was what the great god Odin called this device.

In theory, it could convert anything in the world into Magic, with no upper limit.

And so,

even Odin and the many nobles present who knew this secret had no idea where the limits of this creation actually lay. The only thing they knew for certain, the only thing confirmed, was this:

Humanity—or rather, the mortals of the lower world—could never possibly hope to stand against it with their own strength.

Because doing so would mean making an enemy of the entire "world" itself.

____

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