In The End

Aiden walked the streets at daybreak.

He had come to a wharf at the very edge of the imperial capital, where a huge ship could be seen cutting its way in through the bluish dawn. Most of the weapons smuggled into the capital flowed in aboard ships plying the canals, and this very spot was where today’s incident would break out.

Wow.

Seeing them all written out and shoved in his face, every incident set to blow up at once today, made it hard to breathe. The line spelled out so bluntly in the Main Quest, ‘fail and you die’, only made it worse. Unlike the Sub Quest he had been handed once before, this one seemed to go out of its way to stress that he had to succeed.

Just like what I used to see inside the game.

Looking afresh at that murderous line threatening him point-blank, ‘do this or I kill you’, brought home to him that the ground under his feet belonged to a game world. Unlike in a game, though, where dying let you try again, one death would be the end of him. If anything about it was fortunate, perhaps it was that today was the last day he would have to pour his attention into things like this.

Definitely…

Aiden ran back over the ‘progression’ of the incident in his head.

However secretly it was brought in, a haul large enough to be tied to a coup was bound to leave a trail for someone to pick up. The capital’s city police catching the scent and rushing out to crack down was exactly where the ‘scenario’ that would sweep up the whole world began.

And that’s where they are.

Mixed in among the police coming out for the crackdown was Aiden’s target: the honorable savior, who would awaken their own talent in the ‘crisis’ they would go through today.

The protagonist of this world.

At this point, surely, they were nothing more than a rookie in the city police. Aiden had no idea what they looked like or what sort of person they were, but they would certainly appear here today.

No. They had to appear, for the sake of the world’s future if nothing else.

So come and take some of what’s landed on me while you’re at it.

His true feelings, admittedly, lay closer to that.

In any case, to take that first step he would have to start by bringing in the person he had arranged to meet. She had definitely said she would wait somewhere around here.

As he looked about, a face swung down out of nowhere from above. Katya was hanging upside down like a bat, her legs hooked over a nearby street lamp.

…His heart nearly dropped out of him.

“Hel-lo.”

Watching her wave at him upside down in midair, beaming, he felt his chest tighten at once. To look at she was just a girl, yet a pressure like facing some huge beast of prey clamped down on his whole body. Noelle gave him a similar feeling, but with her there was at least no certainty she would do him harm. This one was a time bomb.

“It’s strange, you know.”

That was what the human-shaped beast of prey, if you please, said the moment she saw his face.

“What is?”
“That you didn’t notice a thing until I’d got this close.”

“…”

“Someone grand enough to use the very same divinity as me — why can’t you manage even something that simple?”

“…”

“You’re carrying power every which way, but you don’t seem to know the first thing about using it. Honestly, it makes me want to haul you off to the Holy Kingdom right now and crack you open for a look.”

The way she drove straight to the heart of things out of nowhere no doubt did a large share of the work in making him feel that pressure. She could not have been more right, either. Every supernatural power Aiden held was formidable in the extreme, but he had no idea how to put them to use in a way ‘suited’ to combat. To Katya, raised as a genuine combatant, his level was probably pathetic.

“Well, it’s fine.”

Katya dropped down beneath the street lamp and went on.

“So long as you keep your promise, little things like that don’t matter either way. So, what do we do first?”
“There’s someone I want to introduce you to. Let’s start by meeting them.”

The honorable protagonist would have no trouble at all making Katya feel something on the spot. In the original, after all, the whole process of folding Katya in as a ‘companion’ began with her feeling something from the protagonist at their first meeting. Not long after they met, the protagonist punched clean through her congenital insensibility by one method or another and let her feel ‘sensation’ of some kind, and that was how the individual quest tied to Katya began. He remembered perfectly well the scenes that followed, with Katya trailing along after the protagonist.

Katya answered with a snort of laughter.

“Now that I’m looking forward to.”

…The words came out cheerfully enough, but.

They also sounded rather like a warning that if he could not keep the promise, he was on his own.

The crackdown site was boiling over with heat, and not as a figure of speech: bombs were going off and bullets were flying, so the temperature really was high. It was deafeningly loud too, between the police side’s ceaseless calls to surrender over a loudhailer, the criminal outfit’s curses, and the ear-splitting reports of gunfire and blasts. Loud enough to leave anyone wondering what was so colossal about a weapons-smuggling crackdown.

Still, I suppose it’s lucky there aren’t any casualties.

The capital’s city police were not the regular army, but among the organizations that kept public order they were elites without question, hardly the sort to struggle with wiping out a criminal outfit like this one. The clear condition about ‘casualties occurring’ did not look likely to be much of an obstacle.

Meanwhile, on the fringe of that fierce battle.

“Do we really have to stay this quiet?”

While merely being there sent Aiden’s stress level shooting up, Katya, hidden in the shade with him and watching the whole show, sulked out loud. Whatever they were here to do, she seemed hugely dissatisfied at just standing around ‘boringly’ without stepping in.

Honestly, she really…

With nothing that counted as sensation reaching her body directly, Katya delighted in every kind of eccentricity that might let her feel something, at least in her mind.

“Just bear with it a little. There’s nothing to gain by butting in over there anyway.”
“You’ve made me this bored, so if it ends in some anticlimax I really am going to get angry, you know?”

“…”

He did wonder what kind of lunatic called it boring in so light a tone, with rounds and explosives flying before her eyes, but when Katya said she was going to get angry, that was the omen of a catastrophe with a death toll in the double digits at least and the triple digits at worst. Not something to take lightly.

It should be about time for it…

Happily, before Katya could grumble any further, the incident Aiden remembered was already unfolding in front of them.

“Everybody back off!”

That’s right.

Aiden nodded inwardly as one of the cornered gang members hauled out a box that looked dangerous at a glance.

“…A hellfire bomb?”

Even Katya, who had watched the whole thing with indifference until then, went so far as to let out a whistle.

“Weren’t those too expensive to see much use even in the Coalition War? What’s something like that doing rolling around a back alley?”

As she muttered, the city police officers’ faces came into view one by one, drained of blood. They must have sensed that if that thing went off, the whole area could easily be blown away.

“—Wait, calm down—”
“Drop your weapons! Put every one of them on the ground or I set this off where I stand!”

Ah, it even brought on a wave of nostalgia. Wasn’t this the very first cutscene that played once the tutorial ended? And right here, the ever-so-grand honorable protagonist would appear and subdue in one stroke the petty crook threatening to blow the whole area away. That was where the grand story began.

Yes. Any moment now.

One.

Two.

Three.

“…Chief, what do we do?”
“Don’t provoke him for now. You see the way that bastard’s eyes have rolled back?”
“Hey, what are you whispering about! Put the weapons on the ground, I said!”
“Wait, calm down. Hm? I’m telling you. We’ll put them down. We’re going to put them down.”

“…”

They had to come out.

No.

They should have come out by now…?

A chill ran down Aiden’s spine as he took in the situation before him, in which ‘nothing had changed at all’. His fingers and toes went cold.

Naturally.

The one who should naturally have been there was nowhere in sight.

Not here?

At this point they absolutely had to be there. With the situation descending into chaos like this, there absolutely had to be one person, just one, who stepped forward first and showed ‘courage’.

But.

There was no one.

Everyone only watched for a cue, afraid they might lose their lives. Here there were only ordinary people.

The sort of person who shone and glittered, fit to shoulder the fate of the world. The ‘protagonist’ onto whom Aiden had meant to fling the burden laid on him.

That person was nowhere here now.

“…”

Aiden squeezed his eyes shut.

In the end.

The ‘worst case’ he had wanted so very badly to avoid was taking concrete shape before his eyes.

“Hey.”

Before he could put any of it in order, a cold voice reached him from his side.

“So, the person you were going to introduce me to?”

“…”

“Don’t tell me they’re among those pathetic specimens over there?”

This was no moment to admit honestly that there was nobody. If he did, his head could easily come off on the spot; knowing Katya’s usual disposition, that would be the normal outcome.

“—”

Once again, with a click, a switch flipped inside his head: his own survival instinct, the one that kicked in whenever a situation reached the extreme.

“Aiden, your answer?”

Katya repeated the question, even the smile she wore like a mask beginning to fade. It was an ultimatum in all but name, as though she were asking whether he had really wasted her time on rubbish like this. Meanwhile, Aiden’s head was drawing up an estimate at terrifying speed.

What’s urgent right now is…

What he had to solve on the spot was making the monster of a princess beside him ‘hurt’, by whatever means. If he could not punch through every bit of Katya’s ‘divinity’ and shove ‘sensation’ of some kind into her, he would die right there.

—That’s the premise.

And he had worked out the method for that once before. He only had to drive in a ‘single blow’ powerful enough to punch through all the divinity she held.

All he had on him now was one revolver kept for ‘self-defense’ and, as Katya had pointed out, several half-baked supernatural powers he did not know how to use and was merely ‘holding’. A shabby weapon, and abilities no better than a pearl necklace on a pig’s neck. With these, he had to land a ‘single blow’ that exceeded the output of a monster on a par with Noelle.

“—”

In that case, then.

Could he do it? Was there a way?

The calculation was quick, and the conclusion quicker still.

“Have you gone deaf? I’m asking you right—”

“Shut it for a second, would you.”

There was.

Exactly one.

He had reached the same conclusion once before, too. It was a method he absolutely did not want to use.

A method he really, truly did not want to use.

“I’ll do it.”

First, though, there was one person he had to call. With that, Aiden slipped a hand inside his coat and pressed something down firmly.

“I told you to wait.”

One second. Two seconds. Three. He counted up to ten, and once that short silence had passed, the anomaly arrived all at once.

“—What is that?”

Among those at the wharf, it was someone quick on the uptake who let that out, probably because they had sensed something in the surroundings change. It could not be seen with the eyes, but anyone with a good sense for such things would have realized some fierce ‘current’ was forming around them.

It began as a faint movement, then grew into a wind, then a gale, then a typhoon that seemed ready to send even fairly heavy things flying.

And at last, from the sky, a ‘human’ wrapped head to foot in pure-white haze plunged down like a meteorite.

— WHAM!!

— KRRRRA-BOOOOOOM!!!!

The blast bore no comparison to the ear-splitting din of the fight a moment earlier, and almost everyone nearby screamed. All but Katya, whose eyes took on a glitter, and Aiden, who had ‘called’ the one responsible here.

“Hoo—”

Noelle straightened the hat her violent landing had knocked slightly askew, then lifted her head a little and looked around.

“Ah.”

Spotting Aiden, she smiled faintly.

“—You called for me?”

It was as composed a greeting as could be, wholly unbefitting so terrifying an entrance.

“…”

Aiden fiddled with the switch tucked inside his coat and stared at Noelle in a daze. It was the signal beacon she had given him before, telling him to press it if he ever got into danger.

…That she’d come running at once if I was in danger.

So it hadn’t been a lie.