Chapter 307

The Ahriman that had copied everything about Han Su-yeong—her face, her voice, all of it—stood there in silence, watching her as if waiting for an answer.

It didn't breathe. It didn't blink. There wasn't a single tic or twitch—it just stood there like a doll. Wasn't that what they called the uncanny valley? The revulsion and disgust of staring at a wax figure of yourself clung to the back of her neck and wouldn't shake loose.

'...No.'

This wasn't that kind of disgust and revulsion.

That thing held something inside it that was different from every Seven Calamity she'd ever crossed paths with.

The disgust, the revulsion—it came from that "something."

Han Su-yeong didn't know what it was.

The one thing she did know was that whatever it was, it had more than enough to drag her to ruin.

And in fact, plenty of things on her right now were warning her about exactly that.

The ring and the shield she'd received from Yu Ji-hyeok—the very proof that she stood with him.

The dagger her teacher and the closest thing she had to a parent, Nam Hyun-hwa, had pressed into her hands.

The dull ache and strange resonance running through the crystal lens at her forehead—where another version of herself who'd lived through the worst possible future had laid her blessing.

Even the book Ahriman had mentioned, the one whose nature she still didn't understand.

Every single one of them was warning her.

She didn't need to ask anyone what they were warning her about. She already knew.

And as if it had known all of this from the start, Ahriman spoke up in an offhand tone.

[In case you misunderstand, I'll mention one thing—because I am a Seven Calamity, no matter what is offered to me, the possessions and protections and blessings of every existence outside of another Seven Calamity reject us. Humans, spirits, dragons, undead, all of it.]

[I advise you not to let another being's input determine your decision.]

[The choice is yours. The price you pay for that choice, and the consequences that come back to you—all of that is yours alone.]

[Don't forget that.]

There was a strange power woven through its words.

In all honesty, if not for the headache stabbing into her skull and the faint trembling of her dagger, she might genuinely have started weighing what it was saying.

[I'll ask one last time. Will you accept my proposal?]

[All I ask is that you give me a single act of assistance. Obviously, I won't ask you to kill the people around you, or to betray them. What I'm asking is limited entirely to me, and me alone.]

"...What is it, then? I can't even start to think about it if I don't know what it is."

[I will explain the details if you accept.]

Ahriman regarded her with a flat, inorganic gaze.

For a second, looking at that gaze—that gaze on a face identical to her own—she felt a sudden jolt of fear at the thought that maybe her own eyes looked like that too.

[In exchange, I will tell you, without holding anything back, every truth of this world that I know. And on top of that, I will free you from the prophecy that says you will kill Yu Ji-hyeok.]

Will you accept?

Han Su-yeong fell silent at that.

There were only two choices.

Which meant, from the very beginning, there had only ever been one answer she could give.

"No."

In the back of her mind, warnings from another version of herself—one who had lived through a future she would do anything to avoid—came rising back up.

'Avoid talking to Ahriman as much as you possibly can.'

That other Han Su-yeong had said it while she was dying, coughing up blood from a Seven Calamity's venom eating her from the inside out.

'Its face, its voice... everything that makes it what it is breaks down and collapses the minds of anyone who comes into contact with it. Anyone with a weak will or weak vital energy will have their brain melt and die just from looking at it. Talking to it, looking it in the eye—that's way worse.'

She'd been right.

What it actually meant to have your mind melt away—Han Su-yeong was experiencing it for herself today, for the first time.

'Especially if it offers you something, you have to refuse no matter what. Its words have force beyond a binding oath—they work like a prohibition. If you agree without thinking, you'll regret it. Don't say yes, not even as a joke, not even casually. Not under any circumstances.'

'Best to avoid it altogether, but you're going to end up in a situation where you can't. When that happens, refuse firmly and clearly. That's all you need to do.'

'...Yeah, but it's going to be hard. It knows what the other person wants and what they're thinking. It knows what you long for, and it pokes at exactly that. And on top of that, it has the power to manipulate people's memories too.'

'But—you and me, we're... yeah. Its power doesn't work on us.'

'...Why do you think that is?'

"I don't need it."

Han Su-yeong refused Ahriman's proposal and stared it dead in the eye.

Ahriman just gave a small shrug, like none of this mattered to it in the slightest.

It looked almost like the gesture was deliberately put on for show.

[A shame.]

[I never make the same offer twice.]

[I hope, for your sake, that you don't come to regret this.]

That was all it muttered.

Han Su-yeong kept her guard up as she stared back at Ahriman, then deliberately threw out a hostile question.

"What, you upset I turned you down? You gonna kill me over it?"

[As I said at the start, I cannot inflict any harm on you. Not by my will, not by anyone else's.]

With that, Ahriman swept its hand through the empty air.

Something began gathering there in response, drawn together by the motion.

At the same time, shattered shards of glass came together on their own and reassembled themselves back into their original form.

Inside was the Milited that had been killed moments ago.

[...My earlier action took away your means of returning to your original time and left you with no choice but to drift here. And now I am using my power, of my own volition, to make sure you can go back.]

[Does that earn me a little trust?]

"......"

Han Su-yeong barely managed to swallow the words rising in her throat.

There was absolutely no reason to volunteer anything to this thing.

She wasn't going to ruin everything for the sake of a moment's satisfaction.

[Once I'm gone, the distortion in this space will fade soon after. All you have to do is stay where you are and wait.]

[After that, you can use the revived Milited to get back.]

[That one in the bottle—it's only alive in the most basic sense, and every connection it has to the main body has been severed. Its memories from this time won't be shared back either, so ask that man to consume its existence. If you do, Milited won't even know what you've done.]

Ahriman spoke and dragged a hand down its own face.

And just like ice cream left out at room temperature, the face that mirrored Han Su-yeong's began to melt and slide downward.

[One more thing, while I'm at it.]

It spoke in a voice that sounded just as horrifyingly liquid as its face looked.

[When you come to understand the truth of this world, or when the prophecy forces a choice on you.]

[If you feel like reality is going to swallow you whole, and there's nothing you can do to push back—call my name.]

[I never extend the same offer more than once.]

[But every rule has an exception.]

[When that moment comes, I'll be hoping, sincerely, that your answer is different.]

With those words, Ahriman vanished as if it had never been there to begin with.

Han Su-yeong, who had been staring at the spot it had occupied, finally let out a ragged breath and collapsed where she stood.

"Hah... hah..."

She felt like everything inside her was about to come up, and Han Su-yeong clamped a hand hard over her mouth.

All she'd done was face it and exchange a few words, and she still couldn't keep her own head straight.

The thought that if she'd let her guard down for even a second, she might have spilled everything inside her without realizing—it made her shake all over again.

'How did the other me ever... fight something like that?'

She held onto her trembling body and kept forcing herself through deep breaths, trying to calm her breathing somehow. Inside her own head, she kept telling herself, over and over, that she'd held up just fine.

"That son of a—!"

Once she'd settled enough to speak, Han Su-yeong let a quiet curse loose at Ahriman.

What it had said at the end was practically a curse itself.

It had no doubt at all that she would crumble once she learned the truth of this world, that she'd break in the face of being fated to kill Yu Ji-hyeok.

Which was exactly why Han Su-yeong could whisper to herself, again, that she'd handled it well.

The truth of this world?

It wasn't even worth laughing at.

"What kind of person do you think I am...!"

The truth of this world, the way it had put it.

That the world she'd been living in was nothing more than a game world.

She'd known that for a long time.

And she'd known what kind of role she'd been given, too.

"Damn it..."

She wiped roughly at the nosebleed trickling down and just clenched her teeth in silence.

All of a sudden, the thought of being alone right now was unbearable.

She just wanted to see Yu Ji-hyeok's face.

That was all.

[...So what are you going to do from here?]

I gave my hand a small shake at Sbeungali's question.

"Beats me. For now, I think we need to sort the situation out a little."

[Hmm... yeah. A whole lot just went by in not a lot of time.]

But the first thing I had to do—that was already decided.

I looked at Ji-na, asleep inside the crystal as if she'd simply slipped into a deep sleep.

The crystal encasing her was, just as the letter had said, the work of Juno, one of the Seven Calamities.

When I actually placed my hand on it, I could feel the unmistakable, faint hum of a Seven Calamity's power.

"...Minerva, we can't just smash this open, can we?"

[If you'd gotten to it right after she was sealed, maybe. But too much time has passed now. And if you force it open, the body inside might be damaged.]

"Yeah, figured."

I hadn't really been holding out hope, so I nodded and pulled out the World Tree to smash the area around the crystal apart.

The crystal itself was a no-go, but the walls and floor around it were a different matter.

I was about to send the huge crystal straight into the shadow when—

[A Seven Calamity's aura is rejecting Henir's Shadow!]

"Ngh—!"

A notification window popped up, and at the same instant some kind of formless force shoved me back—hard.

More precisely, it slammed Henir's Shadow away like it was repelling it.

The push was so strong that even after I drove a branch of the World Tree into the floor to anchor myself, the force didn't ease up at all.

"Hk!"

Then, in a blink, Minerva burst out of the shadow and caught me from behind.

Her wings and her tail wrapped around us both without a gap, and the next instant we slammed into the floor together.

"...Yu Ji-hyeok. Are you all right?"

"Yeah, thanks to you."

A breath far hotter than any human's brushed against the back of my neck.

At my answer, Minerva, who'd been holding me tightly to her, loosened her arms and let me go.

"Thanks for the save. I just... was a bit caught off guard."

I slipped out of her hold and got to my feet right away.

As I did, I made sure to hide my fingers, which had been half-charred, where she wouldn't see them.

Mercifully, aside from that, neither of us seemed to have taken any serious damage.

"...It's a barrier of Juno's."

Minerva, getting up after me, muttered as she folded her wings and tail away.

"It was the most skilled of us at barrier arts. Even so, to think it would lay down something this powerful in addition to the crystal..."

She dusted herself off and looked at Ji-na, sealed inside the crystal, with something almost like fresh-eyed surprise.

"It seems Juno considered sister-in-law... ahem, your, ah, your sister—an extremely dangerous opponent."

She mumbled the middle of it under her breath so I wouldn't hear, then nodded.

I quietly asked her back:

"To break this, we have to kill Juno, right?"

"I can't say for certain, but I'd think so."

[No—it's certain.]

Sbeungali cut in.

[I distinctly heard that when Juno was sealed, every barrier it had set up here and there vanished along with it. The reason your sister's didn't disappear is only because the one wrapped around her was put up by a remnant—a fragment—of Juno, not Juno itself. But all of Juno's fragments are bound to it. If Juno dies, every last one of them goes too.]

I nodded quietly at his words.

"Then I just got one more reason to kill it."

[...So what now? Leave her here for the time being? A hundred and fifty years isn't enough for anything to happen to her, I should think.]

Logically, he was right.

Even if this place collapsed, that crystal wouldn't crack or be damaged.

But for some reason—

Something inside me was screaming, fiercely, that I absolutely could not do that.

Something warning me that if I did, I would never see her again.

Sbeungali seemed to pick up on what I was thinking, because he grumbled.

[A barrier that reacts to the intentions of whoever touches it? With that kind of force behind it, you can't exactly handle it carelessly. Then again, you can't just stash something like that somewhere or leave it sitting in a corner for a hundred and fifty years either...]

"Hold on."

His words pulled something I'd nearly forgotten right back to the surface.

The black coffin.

The piece the Smith of Yado had crafted, made for me and me alone.

The same coffin holding the doppelgänger Milited had summoned.

I pulled it out of the shadow and, without hesitation, opened the lid.

What unfolded in front of me left me almost speechless.

"...You were right, Belluna."

She'd told me I would regret it if I turned down the Smith of Yado's offer, and she'd been telling the truth.

I thought it numbly, watching the crystal get drawn inside the coffin.

It took a while, but once the coffin had absorbed every last bit of the crystal, the lid closed on its own, the lock clicking firmly shut.

"Hm?"

While I was looking it over, I noticed that the color that had filled in when I'd put the doppelgänger in last time was now nearly halfway up. That was when it clicked—it was a gauge showing how much capacity remained inside.

Two and a half.

Which meant I could probably only fit two more things in there.

"......"

What came to mind right then was something from a recent conversation with Milited—about the three primes that alchemy spoke of.

It had said that with its own power, it couldn't bring back a doppelgänger to true life. If you wanted to revive someone like that, you needed both their intact body and their soul.

If you had those, you could use a person's doppelgänger as a material to fuse their separated body and soul back together. In theory, that would let them come back, fully and completely.

For alchemical knowledge, I had Kath Ryle and Alice Blesbuck—the two who could be said to have inherited everything Milited knew.

And I had the body, and the doppelgänger.

The only thing left was the soul.

"...Ahriman."

The only name that came to mind was that one.