Chapter 494

Elias still could hardly believe what had just happened, even though he had been the one to do it. The boat rocked beneath him, the blue spear of mana he had released from his hand held firmly in place as the sky itself seemed to turn into foam and melt away. The divine power had just moved according to Elias’s will. He couldn’t understand why his mana had pierced through the elder’s fortress-like divine power and surged upward, nor why that hostile force had been drawn toward him. He couldn’t believe he had managed to attack the elder when he didn’t even know where he was.

‘How?’

At that moment, Elias realized that, although he still understood nothing, the Concentration spell the elder had placed on him had been broken.

Where was the elder? What about his friend?

Elias quickly turned his head. The elder was standing in the direction of his right arm, guarding himself. A massive shield made of divine power was shattering and scattering in front of him. The elder had not fallen, as though to prove that he was indeed the head of a clerical family that had held sway over Rome. Elias had to admire his reflexes.

As Elias’s gaze sharpened, the elder, who had been looking almost sorrowful, spoke.

“What a truly foolish person you are.”

Foolish? Elias? Just because he refused to betray his friend?

Keeping his staff angled across his front, Elias remained on guard while twisting the corner of his mouth into a crooked smile. He could feel the flow of spatial mana. One fortunate thing was that the spatial magic had weakened. It was too early to say that it had broken, but the tremendous impact had created a gap between it and the original coordinate system. The unfortunate part was that the elder had surely noticed it too. Elias didn’t care. He answered the elder.

“I know.”

Narke. If it was Narke, would he know what was happening by now? Could he sense it even without looking at Elias? Elias tapped beside his ear to relay the situation to Narke. The elder pointed at him.

“By now, you must have realized how dangerous that person is.”

“Did Terminus Eukairia tell you that?”

“You must have realized that you know nothing about him.”

“That’s right. I’ll admit it readily. I still don’t know.”

Elias answered, feeling his heart turn cold. And he thought. There was no doubt about it. He had just learned for the first time that his friend had buried the existence of someone deep within his heart, and it had shocked him.

They had never promised to tell each other everything. Elias himself hadn’t told his friend everything about his own life. And yet he had thought that the only thing he didn’t know about him was whatever plans he was keeping to himself. Even after his friend had told him there were things he couldn’t tell Elias just yet, Elias had arrogantly believed that he knew him completely.

That was how much fullness and comfort Elias had felt when it came to his friend, and how much of an advantage he had felt over the friend’s other relationships. Something like: I know him better than the school friends who rejected him. I know him better than the people at the Command Headquarters. There’s something between us that runs deep… Like with his childhood friends. Maybe even the little parts of him they could never fill in.

But Elias knew now that was all there was to it. He didn’t know his friend. There were mountains of things he didn’t know, and all that remained in one corner of his mind was the faint suspicion that his friend had lived a life completely unrelated to his own. Of course, he didn’t know enough to reason it out, so it was nothing more than a feeling.

And yet, even if Elias told himself that to make himself feel better, the fact remained that he knew nothing about his friend’s innermost memories. Perhaps that was why his heart felt so cold. So then, what of it? What had changed?

“You must be thinking this right now,” Elias looked at the elder with a smile. The elder continued with burning eyes. “‘Even so, I cannot betray my friend.’”

“Indeed.”

The words had barely left his mouth when the elder thundered back.

“What a childish way of thinking! To let personal affection sway you, shielding someone who will bring an unavoidable disaster upon this world simply because you have been close all this time! You have something terribly wrong in your thinking. From where you stand now, I may seem no more than the villain who turns you into the tragic hero of some sad tale. But one day, as you lie dying, you will remember my words. ‘I was wrong once.’”

Elias stared at the elder with cold eyes. All this time, he had admired the elder’s abilities. He couldn’t help but marvel at the magical knowledge the elder had accumulated over more than a century, his own unique spells, and the extraordinary abilities that seemed to be his Special Ability.

And yet Elias could only condemn the elder’s mind, angry at it with something close to pity. The elder had spent more than a century believing himself to be in the right. He had commanded the Rome of the noble houses with a mere gesture, and the customs, principles, and laws that governed the universe, accumulated over more than a century, had been arranged perfectly within the shelves of his mind.

He possessed the righteousness to ensure that not even the slightest harm came to an innocent person. At the same time, he was convinced that he had the right to regard those he deemed guilty as less than human and destroy them. There was not the slightest trace of flexibility in his judgment.

“The only reason you can shield your friend out of loyalty is because you are ignorant. You have no way of fully grasping this person’s world. How could you possibly understand a world that left the limits of human cognition and perception long ago? You have not even come close to the truth. You have merely grasped its rough shape! You have done nothing but helplessly stand beneath the snow in a raging blizzard. You have simply left your corneas to do what they naturally do, without ever knowing how much the randomness in the edges of those hundreds of millions of snowflakes resembles the work of God. With such fleeting knowledge and shallow understanding, you cannot comprehend a world of chaos that could become the foundation of all ages. The stubbornness you believe to be righteousness is nothing more than a product of ignorance. In the end, humanity is destined to regret the hasty judgments born of ignorance and emotion.”

At that, Elias could only smile in resignation. A quiet laugh escaped him as he tightened his grip on his staff.

“I agree. I still don’t know. Then why did you show me this?”

“Because a sensible human being would not stand out in a snowstorm and let it hit them with nothing but their bare body.”

The elder shook his staff threateningly. It was nothing more than a hand gesture born from his inability to suppress his own emotions, so no magic came from it.

“Because a sensible human being would see the dark clouds bringing a snowstorm and seek shelter!”

Elias quietly stared at the elder for a moment before changing his tone.

“You know that very well, Elder.”

The moment the elder’s brow stopped moving, Elias opened the hand that had been gripping his staff and swept it through the air as he spoke.

“I will remain where I am even when the storm comes, and I will stay there until the eye of the storm pierces straight through me. By then, the wings of the spiral may have already reduced much of the world to ruins, but I will still say that I intend to remain until the very end.”

He was saying this knowing exactly what he was choosing. Elias remembered the baptism of knowledge that had pierced through his body. He remembered a repository of knowledge as vast as the universe. And then he remembered his friend’s mana.

For an instant, he caught a glimpse of his friend’s world—the world that took each word it was given as a heading and indexed an entire sea of information in an instant. The fire of the Old Testament. The fire of the New Testament. The fire of Prometheus. The fire of Homer. The fire of Shakespeare… And the fires of countless scholars and writers whose names he did not know.

The information Elias had read from him really was scattering, unable to be retained in his mind. But when it came to the subject itself, Elias had opinions of his own that he could defend without feeling lacking. So he argued. Or perhaps he simply stated his case.

“I don’t know any human who runs away from fire.”

Elias did not know how much of the wordplay the elder would understand. But the fact that the elder might not know all the meanings ‘fire’ carried at once was no reason for Elias to stop.

“Even if humanity’s stubborn habit of holding on to fire is what drives the world toward despair, isn’t it also what drives it toward hope?”

Humans were the ones who seized fire, built towers toward the heavens from the corpses of all things, and charged upward toward the sky. Humans, children of fire, were also the ones who gathered up the corpses of those towers, burned incense, and offered prayers.

The animal that ran endlessly toward its ideals until it finally decided to become a god was human. And the animal that, despite all that, continued to keep humanity human was also human. If the fire of the body was humanity’s burden, then the lamp was humanity’s invention.

The ashes of that fire remained in Elias’s body, in the organs that had been torn away and the brain capacity that had been expanded further. They remained in the lives of his fellow New Human citizens who, had they not been discarded for failing to meet the required standards, would have been alive by now and formed a society of their own. They remained as a scarlet letter imposed upon those among humanity who had failed to seize wealth and power.

So just because Elias had been born with this body beneath a fire that had been used wrongly, there was no reason for him to approve of the misuse of fire or serve the world that had created him.

The elder’s anger had not come from reading the end of the world. It was a matter of fundamental values.

Just as it was only natural that humans who dreamed of ascending, willing to abandon human morality if given enough power, would refuse to accept humanity’s descent as human, it was equally natural that they would refuse to accept the ‘ideal of New Humans’ as human.

But no matter what happened, Elias would never agree that something had to be dismissed as inhuman simply because it fell outside the boundaries of what was considered human. Fire tempered him. That was what Elias thought. Even after the confusion had lifted another layer, he thought the same.

“Therefore, even if I die because I remain true to my convictions, I have no intention of stepping aside.”

“Not only you, but the world will per—”

“Even if the world is destroyed, I have no intention of stepping aside.”

Elias cut the elder off without hesitation.

“In my eyes, the end of the world is created by people like you. You define the limits of human ability, then hastily decide that anyone above or below those limits is not human. That is why, when faced with someone who has done nothing wrong, one person calls him ‘someone capable of building the Tower of Babel,’ while another calls him the Messiah.”

“The Messiah? Ah, how arrogant! There is no way this person could have said such a thing himself, yet the fact that you know it means you have already obtained the information overflowing from within him.”

The elder spoke excitedly, as though the fact that some group intended to use him as a kind of Messiah were itself sufficient justification for killing him. From his tone, however, it did not seem as though the elder had known about that before now.

Elias looked at him with an expression that suggested he had not heard a word, his eyes cold as he continued.

“The limits of humanity are what make people want to kill this person. It’s unfortunate. But unfortunately for you, I’m someone who doesn’t believe in the limits of humanity.”

“Ah, why must such an innocent soul keep his eyes so firmly shut? It is truly lamentable! You saw it yourself, did you not? That flood of knowledge! Is that not the true Library of Babel?”

“Of course I saw it myself.”

Elias pictured what he wanted to happen before his eyes. He wanted blue light to surge from the staff of mana in his hand. He wanted to avoid being brought down by the elder’s magic again. He wanted to keep the elder from laying a hand on his fallen friend behind him. He wanted to hold out until reinforcements arrived.

Boom—

With a deafening blast that pushed the air away, flames resembling his friend’s covered Elias’s hand and staff before surging into the sky. Behind it, Elias shouted, his irises reflecting the same hue.

“I saw with my own eyes that this person is no different from me. He is human.”

At the center of that storm, Elias could find no proof that the person was anything other than human. Mana like a spear was aimed at the elder’s throat.

“That is all there is to it. This is where my respect for you ends.”

Elias didn’t care how the elder was connected to Terminus Eukairia. He wasn’t curious about where he had hidden his letters with the Secretariat of State, either. What frightened Elias was the fact that he didn’t know whether he could protect his friend against a person this cunning and experienced. Suppressing the cold rising all the way to his chin, Elias spoke.

“If you don’t intend to let him go, then fight me!”

The elder looked at Elias with an anguished expression, as though he were suffering a wound that threatened to tear him apart. Elias thought he looked like someone aboard the Ark watching a newborn child being swept away by the flood¹. The elder lowered his head and stamped his foot hard. Immediately afterward, Elias could hardly believe his eyes.

The elder had vanished from the spot. No matter where Elias looked, he couldn’t see him. He couldn’t sense even the slightest movement of a living thing. There was no way he had simply retreated. That couldn’t be it. As the master of the family, the elder would know the warp coordinates of each spatial magic formation. He had either warped outside this space or resorted to some other cheap trick.

Damn it. That cursed elder had avoided a direct confrontation.

Even if he really had retreated, Elias couldn’t trust him after a lifetime’s worth of suspicion and distrust. However.

Even if he distrusted the elder, this was no time to let that distrust show in his actions. Elias quickly withdrew his mana and slapped his friend across the cheek. His hands and feet were still trembling faintly, but there was no sign of him getting up. If only Elias could use divine power. If only he could…

Feeling the blood in his entire body grow cold, Elias sent mana flowing through his friend’s veins. No matter how forcefully he pushed it in, nothing changed. Even after shaking his core several times, his friend’s mind remained firmly trapped in a state of intense concentration.

He couldn’t stay like this. Elias hoisted his friend onto his back and rose to his feet, then ran through the open door. He had to reach the main archive, the one hidden behind that pitch-black barrier. He was sick of this enormous, round room. The moment Elias’s mana touched the door—

KRAAASH―!

An explosion shook the room. Elias winced as he felt his heart jolt. At the same time, he saw an orange glow spilling in from beside him. A faint heat clung to his calves. Even without ‘Concentration,’ his five senses were amplified.

Damn it.

Elias turned his head to the pounding of his heartbeat, beating against his eardrums like a drum. Flames were shooting toward the ceiling. The archive was on fire. The door was impossibly far away, just as things often were in dreams.

His guess had been right. That cowardly elder had decided to leave without even fighting, convinced to the very end that he was right and everyone else was wrong. No matter how much Elias ran, he realized that the hallucination caused by the divine power kept pushing him away from the door. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get any closer. Perhaps it was the old mage’s spatial magic.

Panic was poison. Elias knew better than anyone how to react when someone was trying to kill him. He considered himself an expert at it. He would get out of here alive. He had to think that way, at least. He wasn’t alone, after all. The weight of another life was on his shoulders.

Elias soaked a handkerchief with a potion and adjusted the way he held his friend. Instead of carrying him on his back, he needed to cover his nose and mouth.

All right. Let’s think this through. The interior of this archive annex was made of wood, but judging by the domed roof resting on its circular walls, stone walls surrounded the building from the outside. The building probably wouldn’t collapse completely—but carbon monoxide would kill them. Could they last about two minutes? If so, he had about five attempts.

The smoke from the blazing red flames blurred his vision. Sweat began to run down his body from the heat. With the hand holding his friend, Elias flicked his fingers. Once again, a long mass of mana formed in his grasp.

The fact that he couldn’t approach the door here meant there were two possibilities: either the elder had laid magic over this place beforehand, or he was still casting magic from somewhere nearby.

In other words, just like before, Elias was standing in the elder’s palm—in the very center of the mana he had created. He had to trust that unknown power, that unknown will, one more time. Even as his senses were beginning to fade, he had to. Through his vision reddened by smoke and flames, Elias poured strength into his arm.

Another deafening roar rang out.

A vibration followed, as though heaven and earth themselves were shaking. This was no time to let the confusion of his senses make him miss the counterattack. Elias fought the urge to rub his eyes and, with his vision effectively useless because of the smoke, suspended a blue spear in the air. Tears streamed from the smoke filling his nose. His lungs burned.

— After a long time, in the third year, the word of the LORD came to Elijah.

At the familiar voice that should have been impossible to hear, Elias immediately realized that he had lost consciousness. A light reminiscent of a sunset poured down from the sky. Strangely, he felt the air gradually clearing.

— Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the land.

Divine power spread across the space. Elias squinted. When he opened his eyes again, a terrible pain scraping across the insides of his eyelids, his mouth fell open. Half of the domed ceiling was gone.

An unfamiliar hand reached down toward him. Elias followed the edge of the pristine white glove with his eyes and looked upward. Pure-white hair, as white as a dove’s, fluttered in the wind. Narke stood before him, his blue eyes set against the sunset behind him. He spoke, “You changed today.”

Translator Note

1. A reference to Noah’s Ark, in which Noah and his family survive the Great Flood aboard the Ark while the rest of humanity is destroyed. ↩︎