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“Hey, Yuto. How was it actually?”
“Hmm? What, River?”
The Tower-Class Adventurer and his friends, having finished one piece of work, walked along the roads of the adventure city.
Their figures naturally walked down the middle of the road, and in those unconscious movements, the pride of the strong peeked through.
“Don’t play dumb. Your skill. You looked at Tooyama Naruhito with your skill, right? Was what he said true?”
River, Yuto’s longtime friend and a large second-rank adventurer, scratched his head with a rough gesture as he spoke to Yuto beside him.
“…Taha. Yeah, he wasn’t lying. That’s the conclusion of my Catch in the Lie.”
Yuto Wetral. An adventurer who had reached a sort of endpoint known as Tower-Class Adventurer. Among the many eccentric Tower-Class Adventurers, he was an unusual existence.
His talent was by no means suited for combat.
The skill “Catch in the Lie.”
Its effect was simple. He could tell other people’s lies. That was all. It was similar to that “Justice,” yet would never be able to reach it. That was the limit of Yuto’s talent.
That function had indeed shown that Tooyama Naruhito had not lied about anything.
In every single word.
He had been an interesting guy. Yuto had not expected to find a fellow professional who would genuinely say that Tower-Class Adventurers were not even in his sight.
Yuto’s mouth loosened slightly.
“Ahh, if you, a natural lie detector, say so, then it really is that, huh. The Elder. What a pain. Scary.”
The slender man, Small, with slightly wavy blond hair and a sharp face that women seemed to like, sighed.
“If it isn’t Tooyama Naruhito’s doing, then it’s an Elder. That’s the bad option.”
Their work had been settled.
If the forest abnormality was not the dragon slayer’s doing, then the remaining possibility was an Elder, an abnormal existence among monsters.
River and Small lamented that their job’s target had become a troublesome one.
“No, River, Small. It’s the opposite.”
““Huh?””
Yuto grinned brightly at the two who were lamenting.
He tossed the chewing tobacco hidden in his pocket into his mouth and chewed it.
“We’re lucky. It’s a good thing the target of this job was the Elder. Really.”
“Yuto, what do you mean?”
“Taha, it’s obvious. To me, that man looked more terrifying than an Elder.”
He stuck out his tongue and played with the chewing tobacco. It was a vulgar gesture, but when a good-looking man did it, it strangely made a picture.
“…Well, the story that he killed a dragon is one thing, but Yuto, honestly, that blue-haired girl looked far more like a monster to me.”
“Small is right. And that Lizardonian, the one who took your back, Yuto. He vanished and appeared without letting a single one of us notice. Was that a sacrament or something?”
“Taha, you guys don’t get it either.”
Yuto took the chewing tobacco he had thoroughly tasted out of his mouth and crushed it in his palm.
“Small, River. Want to make a bet?”
The bits crushed in Yuto’s fist scattered like seasoning.
“A bet? On what?”
At Yuto’s words, his two sensible friends tilted their heads.
“Those adventurers who picked a fight with the dragon slayer earlier. How about whether they’ll be alive until tomorrow morning?”
The Tower-Class Adventurer laughed in amusement. His face was that of a man certain of the bet’s result.
Tooyama Naruhito thought.
‘Now then, what exactly was different between them and us?’
Tooyama Naruhito thought.
From this point onward, he would kill humans. He thought about that act, which had easily entered his range of choices since coming to this world.
Tooyama Naruhito listened carefully.
Wrapped in the power of his friend loved by shadows, while hiding in the attic of their base, he quietly listened to the voices of the humans he was about to kill.
“Ahh, damn it. It hurts. It hurrrts.”
A deep voice groaned.
“Damn it, Flatt, how are your fingers?”
“Bu, hihi, it hurrrts. It hurrrts… Hey, medicine. Give me medicine.”
“Zabas, we’re using bone-setting medicine on Fred. That’s fine, right?”
He pressed his ear to the attic and listened carefully.
There were the sounds of life there. According to Lazaar’s investigation, this was a rented house lent out to adventurers.
Surely, they had a story of their own before they rented this place.
In the attic, Tooyama lay on the thin building material and continued listening closely to the voices from the living room below, where the adventurers had gathered.
“Yeah, use it. That’s what we stocked it for! Damn it, my leg is finally reconnecting… We’re deep in the red. Damn it, damn it, damn it!”
“Hey, Zabas, what do we do? No way we’re just going to stay quiet against those guys, right?”
“Yeah, obviously! That blue-haired woman, that Lizardonian, and that black-haired man too!! Like hell we’ll let them walk around this city after looking down on us!”
“Right! But what do we do? Those guys were stronger than expected. We can’t take them head-on.”
“…Should we contact that woman from the other day?”
“The Crows, huh.”
“Th-That’s a bit much…”
“No, we’ll do it now. Besides, we’re adventurers. We use anything we can use. Anything useful, we use it. I won’t forgive those guys.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. The targets are those brats. We’ll kidnap them and use them as hostages. That’s good. Right, Flatt?”
“Buhi, hihi, my fingers. My fingers still won’t move. But those guys, hihi, I’ll make that freckled girl’s fingers the same and break them in front of that blue-haired brat girl…”
The voices he heard were voices of resentment.
Do something, and it is done back to you. Human activity and the chain of retaliation were probably things that could never be separated.
Tooyama Naruhito thought.
They were dangerous. Too frightening to leave alone.
For the current Tooyama, that alone was reason enough to kill people.
Slowly, he placed a hand on his own neck.
It was Tooyama Naruhito’s strongest weapon.
It was the power Tooyama Naruhito had chosen to continue possessing.
The paper-charm giant in his dream. A Relic deeply connected to that unknown existence.
Fulfill, Relic Blade.
The broken blade was pulled from Tooyama’s neck. He knelt and slowly readied the blade that had grown from his own neck.
Its function, which turned killing intent itself into a weapon, continued obeying Tooyama’s will even after crossing worlds.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Into the gap in the building material, he slowly, slowly inserted the broken blade. The blade ate its way through the wood fibers.
Scrape.
“That’s the spirit. Good, good. For now, we’ll rest slowly today and… What? What is this?”
“H-Hey, is someone burning something? Smoke?”
He closed his eyes.
He remembered his fluffy black-haired friend he had lost.
Back then, he had been weak, foolish, and unable to do anything. He had no power, no resolve, and no will.
That was why it had been taken. That was why it had disappeared.
Tooyama Naruhito knew that precious things could one day suddenly be taken away with almost laughable ease.
“I don’t want anything like that ever again.”
Ping, ping, ping.
Within the shadows, Tooyama opened his eyes wide.
There was no light reflected in his brown eyes.
The room filled with mist—
“H-Hey, outside! Let’s get outside!! S-Something, something’s wrong with this smoke?!”
“No, it’s not smoke. This is mist—”
It was already too late, for everything.
For them, and for Tooyama.
“Kill, Relic Blade.”
The trigger was far too light.
“Ah?”
Drip. The first adventurer man began bleeding from his nose. The moment he brought his hand to his nose to stop the bleeding, the skin on his hand tore open and blood burst out.
“Ah???”
His eyes rolled as blood streamed from them, and the instant he let out a strained voice, he vomited an amount of blood recognizable at a glance as fatal and collapsed.
With a slight delay, his body twitched and trembled. The mist that had entered inside him carved apart the adventurer’s life.
“Zabas?! Wh, why, eeeeeeeeeaaaaaa!”
The man who noticed his companion’s abnormality stood up, then clutched his head and collapsed. Slash, slash, slash. His skin split, the nails on his fingers tore apart, blood streamed from all over his body, and then he stopped moving.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Blood danced within the mist.
Red mixed into pure white.
Screams echoed within the silence.
Tooyama Naruhito did not forgive existences that would harm him and his own.
Tooyama Naruhito did not forget that the world was always trying to take something from him.
Tooyama Naruhito had decided.
Never again would he let the world take the beings around him, the beings he did not want to lose.
Ping.
“—”
It began suddenly. The agony and screams heard from the attic grew even louder, and the screams took shape and emerged.
It hurts, it’s painful, help me, mother—
“Wh-What is this?”
Tooyama instinctively held his head with one hand. Powerlessly, he collapsed face down.
What reached his ears were voices. With pressure like a loudspeaker being slammed directly against his eardrums, screams smeared with suffering reached him.
Ping, ping, ping.
Within the shadows, messages appeared in white letters, deliberately easy to see.
“Harvey, huh…! What is this?”
“For a Familiar of Knowledge, that explanation is really rough… What is this, seriously…?”
With a snap, Harvey’s message cut off.
His vision flickered.
A message.
He saw a scene.
That man was the second son of a farming village.
He worked from morning to night, and the next day would come again. The sweat he shed never made him richer.
He could endure such days because that girl was there. A simple girl with braided hair who laughed often.
Between work, the time when the two of them sat together in a corner of the field for just a little while, looked at the sky, and talked. The man lived only for that time.
But the man had that girl taken from him. By his own elder brother, the one permitted to inherit everything in that farming household.
A night spent hugging his knees.
What he heard was that girl’s cry echoing from the bedroom.
From the same place came his brother’s groans filled with pleasure—
The man had everything taken from him, so he went over to the side that took.
[Behold the scenery you stole.]system-end
That man had a dream. A dream of making life even a little easier for his young siblings and old parents.
That man knew that the world was cruel, and not everyone could become happy.
That the total amount of happiness was decided from the beginning, and the world was made so that people would steal it from each other.
Relic Blade killed people.
Every time Tooyama Naruhito disposed of an enemy, what flowed into him were human thoughts, human memories, human scenes.
It devoured all of them. Thoughts, dreams, wishes, despair, and sadness equally.
“Ugh… Uwoe…”
A tyranny that defied the mechanism of reincarnation.
An existence scarcely confirmed in this world’s history.
Soul devourer.
An existence that killed others, took in all of them, and made them its own sacrifice.
Relic Blade had the same function.
The power of the “mist,” whose restraints were close to coming off. That power, which preserved everything, worked against Tooyama’s will.
He had killed too much and made it drink too much blood.
“Relic Blade… You bastard, what are you doing…?”
They mixed. Voices of resentment and other people’s memories entered him. The pain and fear engraved into the mist seeped into Tooyama as well.
Due to the old seal, Relic Blade had remembered the smell of human blood and the taste of human souls that it should have forgotten.
The “mist” gathering on the plains and spreading through the mountains engraved that karma into the world.
Why? Why? I wanted to live more. I wanted to become happy. I wanted to make them look back at me. I wanted my family to be happy.
“A, aaaa…”
Bad, this was bad.
His body was terribly cold. Voices continued echoing inside his head. It was an uncomfortable feeling, as if he had realized multiple strangers were inside his own house.
Tooyama tried to ask Lazaar for help, but he could not speak. No, to be precise, he could not tell whether he was speaking. He could not hear. Only the screams and laments of others were in his ears.
“Damn it, damn it! Relic Blade, return. Return…”
Rattle, rattle, rattle.
He pulled out the broken blade still stuck in the attic and commanded it as usual, but Relic Blade did not respond.
It merely trembled faintly.
“What, what is happening…? Soul devouring? You bastard, Relic Blade, adding a feature not written in the manual this late—”
—Ah.
He noticed halfway through speaking.
That suspicious being who existed inside that dream.
A muscular giant with a paper charm filled with characters like Sanskrit. That macho giant dressed in an eboshi and robes like a shrine priest.
“…This is your doing, Paper Charm Machooooo…”
He simply recalled his conversation with that suspicious person who called himself Relic Blade.
Relic Blade, offerings, souls, ego, hidden quest, Fog Dream.
“That bastard… Ignoring the contract, huh?”
That unsecured arrangement he had made with that being inside the dream.
Do not bring disadvantage upon me by any means whatsoever.
However, the promise they had made the other day seemed to have meant nothing. In fact, right now, an abnormality was occurring because of Relic Blade.
At this rate, it was bad. His instincts as a living creature told him that if things continued, he would stop being himself. In a sense, that was more terrifying than death.
Ping.
“No, not yet. Think. Think, think, think think think think think think.”
What held Tooyama back from panic was a skill he had acquired through his life so far. Not something special like a skill or magic, but the power to live that humans could gain over the course of their lives.
That did not let Tooyama’s thoughts stop.
He had no choice but to deal with this situation using only the materials he currently understood. It was laughable, falling into such a crisis because of the weapon he handled.
He smelled a farming village. It was the sour smell of manure. Tooyama’s memories and the memories of the man he had just killed began mixing.
“I, couldn’t beat my brother at anything… So… No, no, no, that’s wrong. I don’t know any of that. I’m not you… Stop. Don’t come in…”
“I hurt. It’s all engraved in the mist. I’m going to die here… No!! I’m the one killing!! They’re the ones dying! …They? I…?”
They mixed together, mingled together.
One who devoured souls was invaded by the souls of others. Just as many people were influenced by others.
The souls of others invaded the individual known as Tooyama Naruhito.
It was a sensation of his own way of being being forcibly warped. A situation that would already have broken the personality of an ordinary person.
However, Tooyama Naruhito did not stop.
“Think… Think, think think…”
His body was still numb, unable to fully accept the souls of others.
His mind began to float and melt under the souls of others.
But only his intellect, only the intellect that made Tooyama Naruhito be Tooyama Naruhito, had not yet given up.
“Think. There are messages. There is knowledge. I can still analyze… Knowledge… Harvey…”
His brain continued moving, slowly, slowly drawing in a thread.
The Familiar of Knowledge, Harvey. The message she had left him. Remember. Just earlier, only moments ago—
Ping.
His body had failed, and his spirit had failed.
But Tooyama Naruhito still had that. What dwelled in the man who had lived a single life and never stopped thinking was a certain intellect.
“The contract…!”
That old man is bound by your contract!!
The high intellect reached the message that the Familiar of Knowledge had left for Tooyama.
“If he’s bound, then this isn’t a disadvantage to me?”
The premise had been wrong.
This situation was not Paper Charm Macho turning against him.
Based on that premise, he spun his mind.
Soul devouring, ego, assimilation, Relic Blade, expanded interpretation, aptitude, mist, stolen scenery.
He organized the information he recognized and slowly regulated his breathing.
“…Souls… This is what’s…”
He had a hypothesis.
It was an occult-like story, but at this point, after otherworld transfer, it was too late for that.
Right now, he was being tormented by the “souls” he had killed. Relic Blade’s functions included a power related to souls. Right now, that was functioning for the first time.
Because of that, he was now in danger. Because it was convenient, usable, and necessary, he had kept using a “Relic” without thinking carefully. The risk had exploded here.
“…Hehe. A bit late now.”
He thought a little and laughed.
In the dream, he should have understood that. He had decided to operate Relic Blade while understanding the risks of it and the existence connected to it.
A decision made by a grown adult. Then the one responsible for it had to be him as well.
“…This is something to reflect on. I’ll use it next time. So right now…”
Think, think, think, think.
Then what should he do? If these “souls” or whatever were doing this to him right now, then what should he—
“Why are we going through this?”
“Why do I have to die?”
“How dare you kill me. I’ll never forgive you.”
Apparently, Relic Blade had finished disposing of all the adventurers before he knew it.
That blade that devoured souls and preserved souls delivered the voices of the dead to Tooyama Naruhito—
“Huh?”
Ping—
The voices of souls reached him within the melting egos.
The voices of the souls of the adventurers Tooyama Naruhito had disposed of.
“Why are you acting like victims?”
Simply put, that pissed him off.
He had thought about many things, but that one line from the souls flipped that switch.
An Explorer’s brain was broken by the intoxication filling the dungeon.
Among them, Tooyama Naruhito’s brain was broken to an exceptional degree. What served as the primer for intoxication were fear, excitement, and—
“Even after killing you, killing still isn’t enough. You seriously piss me off.”
Anger.
Trash cleanup had to be thorough.
Down to their filthy souls.
“Kill death itself. Die.”
Together with those “souls”—
“Kill them all, Relic Blade.”
Rattle, rattle, rattle.
The broken blade stopped trembling.
Ah, from the start, that power had already belonged to Tooyama Naruhito.
“Ah—”
As its master ordered, the mist wrapped those souls in pure white fog so that they would be even easier to digest.
Ping.
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