“Phew! Hey! Did you just hear that thud?”
“Hmm?”
Forcing the goddess away from me, I quickly scan the surroundings. I think I just heard Rin’s voice.
“I don’t know.”
The goddess, making a strangely disappointed face, bothered me, but that wasn’t important.
I heard Rin’s voice.
And it seemed to have a warning laced with a chilling sense of killing intent.
“I heard Rin’s voice. It seemed like… she was warning me?”
“You heard Rin’s voice? And it was a warning?”
The goddess flinched at the name Rin and started scanning the area. But all she saw was the dark sky of the Spirit Realm.
“There’s nothing here.”
“…Am I being too sensitive?”
Her joking attitude, with a chuckle and a shrug, was annoying.
“Do you really think Rin could connect with the Spirit Realm?”
Sure, thinking logically, it was impossible.
“Right? At this point, Rin hasn’t properly awakened as a harbinger of the apocalypse, so she wouldn’t have dealt with the Spirit Realm or its imprint.”
“……”
The Goddess of Death, who had started to smile boldly, suddenly froze. A strange sense of unease washed over me.
“Why are you acting like that? Please, just agree with what I said.”
“Uh, um. So, uh.”
Suddenly hesitating and subtly distancing herself like she didn’t know if Rin was watching made me even more uneasy.
“Just say it already! Hurry! Agree!”
As I grabbed her shoulder and shook her, she immediately averted her gaze and stuttered.
Now I was feeling not just uneasy but scared.
“Stop messing with me.”
“No, um, what I mean is–”
“What is it?”
No matter how I thought about it, there was no way for Rin to have a connection with the Spirit Realm. Even if she was a magic genius, bridging the continent and the Spirit Realm would be akin to creating something out of nothing.
Unless she had experience as a harbinger of doom, that is.
But then the Goddess’s single line crushed my expectations mercilessly.
“When you died, I returned all the memories to the continent.”
“…What?”
What does that even mean?
Suddenly, my head buzzed, and I felt lightheaded enough to see the goddess in front of me blurring.
“So what you’re saying is that all the people on the continent remember the apocalypse and your death.”
“Why!?”
I shouted at her like I was scolding a child, and she took a step back, forcing out an answer.
“It’s, it’s because of her! Don’t be mad at me!”
“No, then why on earth would she do something so stupid?!”
“U-uhm, according to Time, it was a gift for you and a curse for the continent…”
“Are you kidding!?”
I needed something to hit.
But since there was nothing, my fist just shook in the air, swallowing my anger.
“How is that a gift for me?! Are you messing with me!”
“Talk to Time about that! Don’t come at me!”
My head was spinning.
Then that means Rin had the experience of destroying the continent as a harbinger of doom, not once but twice.
Once, she killed me, and another time, she went around killing people of her own volition.
‘I thought I’d never see her again.’
Her sobbing plea echoed in my mind.
[I don’t want to part with you. Daniel, I… I want to go with you. Back to that time when we had another chance. I want to laugh and talk with you again, to hug you, and to chat.]
Rin, who was crying desperately at that time.
Because of the curse laid by the God of Life, there was nothing I could do then.
In the end, knowing that, she had faded away, asking me to forget her.
“So Rin has returned.”
I wanted to see her too.
I wanted to apologize and say I was thankful.
This was starting to make a bit of sense as a gift from the Goddess of Time for me. After all, she had wished so desperately that we could be together again in the same time.
‘If it’s this way, it’s not impossible.’
This way, it wouldn’t be as difficult as creating something out of nothing.
Rin had already created a connection with the Spirit Realm, so if we focused on that, connecting to the Spirit Realm wouldn’t be hard for her.
What kind of image did I show Rin just now?
The image of being embraced by the goddess who had manipulated me into destroying the continent, piling tragedy upon tragedy.
From my perspective, I had been forced into it, which felt unfair, but would that matter to Rin?
“Ah, ahhhh!”
My head was pounding.
I want to see her but don’t want to at the same time.
Those two opposing feelings began to clash inside me. As I was racking my brain on how to explain this mess,
I realized another truth.
I turned my head towards the Goddess of Death, who had just been blinking at me from the back.
“Is it… all memories? They all came back?”
“Yeah. It’s classified as one of the bizarre phenomena known as the continent’s nightmare. Kind of like an urban legend.”
“If that’s the case…”
My voice trembled.
A blasted level of fear began creeping up from my toes.
[If everyone is dead, and only the two of us are left, will you marry me?]
The proposal from the shy elf, though it happened quite a while ago, still resonated clearly in my mind.
She had proposed to me, putting her shame on the line.
[Sure, sounds good.]
I had answered yes.
It was an event that reminded me of love after becoming desensitized while living as a Sherpa traversing the Forest of the Demon Realm.
“Ah.”
So that meant Eris had also regained her memories of me. Since she had previously said she was someone else due to a lack of memories, that was all void now.
The click of thoughts connecting suddenly echoed in my head.
The God of Life had said to the Goddess of Death, “Eris is the one who has a piece of my shard.”
That meant it wasn’t Rin but Eris who was trying to resurrect me.
For some reason, I felt a huge wall standing on both sides, constricting me.
“Are you, are you okay?”
Rin’s obsession and occasional glimpses of insanity.
She also knew everything about our story, so she was definitely aware of the severity of the situation.
Honestly, she was much scarier than the God of Life breaking in.
“Hey.”
“Hmm?”
“I can’t just stay dead, can I?”
Unbeknownst to me, I had noticed the overwhelming pressures creeping towards me. If it were an enemy, I could just cut through them, but this wasn’t something that could end so simply.
At my desperate plea, the Goddess of Death closed her eyes for a moment, resting her chin in thought and then immediately shook her head.
“That would make me dangerous, so it doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
*
“Hu, heh heh.”
Having descended onto the rooftop of a nearby building, Rin couldn’t stop the giggles that bubbled up uncontrollably.
This was the first time she had been swept away by such feelings, and she didn’t know how to release it.
The girl who could crush the entire city of Nirva with just a thought was forcing her twitching fingers to stay still.
Any slight touch, and it felt like she would explode.
Clank!
The rooftop door shattered, and the Paladin Dioner, along with the other holy knights, appeared.
As Rin landed from the sky onto the building, they charged in and surrounded her.
“Charged with the destruction of the continent…”
“Excuse me.”
Before Dioner could yell something, Rin’s voice sliced right through him. Just opening her mouth sent a frigid chill wafting through the air.
The holy knights, though human, felt the power of a being branded as a calamity, even if indirectly.
“Who is sitting in my rightful place?”
“What?”
At that moment, Dioner acted like he had heard something absurd, puffing up his chest, when Ares, who had joined late, appeared.
“Rin! Please calm down and let’s talk…!”
“In my place, someone else is sitting.”
“……”
Instinctively sensing something, Ares took a step back, an overwhelming desire to flee surging within him.
He wanted to see his deer-like wife and rabbit-like daughter.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered the possibility of having to fight Rin.
He had thought that getting close to her, being a Mage, would give them a better shot at winning, but that turned out to be a bigger miscalculation than he thought.
“I said it was my place!!!”
Rin’s hands began to tear through the mana in the air.
It felt like everything around was siding with Rin.
I heard that an Archmage can regulate and control everything in the world, and the holy knights instinctively understood.
This was the dignity of an Archmage.
And the power of a nightmare that had destroyed the world twice.
The fierce wind that made my nose tingle and the sunlight breaking through the darkness, even the air that entered through my nose and exited through my mouth.
Everything was exuding killing intent toward the holy knights.
Rin’s influence was so powerful that it could make them feel as though the entire continent had become their enemy.
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