42. Homeward

I could feel how much I’d grown. It was remarkable, and I was grateful those two whole years hadn’t been frittered away for nothing.

“Phew.”

Now for the last objective.

“Argh, this place is crawling with bugs too!”

Which was putting an end to that bastard, still hunched over and hammering away at his keyboard. Had he been that sure I’d lost? I was right under his nose, yet he hadn’t caught the slightest hint of me.

Should I kill him?

With his guard down, it would be the easiest thing in the world. One swing of my sword and his head would go tumbling away.

But I didn’t do it. If I ended it like this, I’d be left with nothing.

This is actually a chance to dig some info out of him.

Where this place was, what the hell this guy even was, why he was wearing Eve’s face. I had a mountain of questions to ask.

“Busy, busy. Modern society’s a grind.”

He was typing at a speed to rival me in my prime, and—

Brings me back.

—it called up my old self, the guy who’d been more serious about games than anyone.

“Huh?”

That would be me. I’d gone and pressed the power button on his rig, nice and firmly.

“N-no… no way!”

He shot up from his seat and shook the monitor, but the screen that had been packed with unreadable code had already gone dark.

“Aaaaaargh!”

Shrieking and tearing at his hair, he slowly turned his head, and at last he spotted me, the one with a finger on his power button.

“Yo, yo.”

I gave him a bright little wave of greeting. At that he sprang up from his seat and scanned the wrecked interior of the office.

“So? You feel like talking now?”
“…Guess that warning about keeping an eye on you didn’t come down for nothing.”

That choice of words didn’t get past me.

“Oh yeah? Tell me who tipped you off, too, while you’re at it.”

So I asked, and here’s what I got.

“…”
“Hey, if you’re gonna say something, say all of it. You wanna play some cutesy little push-and-pull with me?”

“…I’m.”
“You’re?”
“I’m a man. I don’t play push-and-pull with men.”

And here I’d wondered what he was going to say. Had losing the file he’d been working on knocked a screw loose? I studied his condition as I went on.

“All right, from here on you’d better answer my questions nice and proper. That is, if you don’t want to play push-and-pull with a friend of mine who’s a little sharp and a little nasty.”

I brought the sword in my hand to his throat.

“What were you doing here?”
“If I tell you, will you let me live?”
“If I like the answer.”

I didn’t want to leave a wound on Eve’s face, but I drew an extremely thin line across it to prove this wasn’t an empty threat.

“The world will soon face the Great Cataclysm.”
“…The Great Cataclysm?”

I knew at once that it meant the fall of the Empire, brought on by the Emperor’s corruption, but I saw no need to let on that I knew.

“We’ve finished preparing to bring the world down. Within a year, that plan will begin.”
“A way to bring the world down? Ooh, terrifying. Since you brought it up anyway, tell me what it is.”
“There’s no point telling you anyway. A resident of another world like you wouldn’t understand it.”

So he still took me for Arden. For a resident of this otherworld, in other words.

“Are you a god?”
“No, more like a flunky who does what the god tells him to.”
“And why was the god’s flunky in my Big Sis’s nightmares?”

He’d been answering readily enough so far, but now, for the first time, his mouth stopped. It was a long wait before he replied.

“Since it’s come to this, I’ll make you one offer.”
“An offer?”
“Give up on Lillian.”
“What?”
“I’ve sized up the situation. Looks like you used her power to take on a good chunk of the… poison we planted.”

I kept the conversation going, fully aware that the poison he’d just hesitated over meant DV.

“Let me put it another way. Don’t try to save her. Do as I say, and when the Great Cataclysm comes, I’ll spare House Arne. You and Lillian aren’t all that close anyway, are you?”
“What do you mean, not close? Big Sis and I are—”
“I’ve watched Lillian for a long time, so a lie like that won’t fly.”
“Tch. Why are you so interested in my Big Sis?”
“Same as before, I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you one other thing instead.”

I waited quietly for his answer.

“Watch your back.”

The instant those words dropped, I sensed someone behind me and twisted my body at once, but—

“…Ngh!”

There was a dull impact, and a jolt of sharp pain shot up my left shoulder. Wrenching my head aside at the last moment had spared me the disaster of a torn-open nape, but I couldn’t kill the shock entirely.

“Quick reflexes.”

It was the teddy bear, the one whose neck I’d definitely cut, attacking me now in a clumsily patched-together state.

I gripped my sword tight to counterattack right away, but what happened next was beyond anything I’d expected. It was the same as with the Blood Lord. His form began to break apart into tiny blue pixels.

“Thing is, I’m a busy man.”

Teddy bears with grotesquely repaired heads blocked the way ahead like a wall, shielding him.

“Move!”

Dripping blood, I desperately cut down the dolls barring my path.

“See you around, Arden.”

That voice was left lingering like an echo, and I couldn’t stop him from vanishing completely.

“…Haah, haah.”

The moment he disappeared, the other dolls surrounding me all lost their function at once and toppled over. I caught my ragged breath and looked around the ruined interior, and only one worry came to mind.

If he digs in and hides on purpose to wage a war of attrition like this, things are going to get pretty nasty.

If he sent troops like these to the house while hiding his main body somewhere hard to find, dealing with it was bound to be a tricky business. Of course, the house had the knight order led by Valerian, but—

Non-combat NPCs like Elli and Leo would get caught up in the fighting and die without a fight.

I kept turning it over, then made up my mind that I needed to get out of here for now. The blood from the wound on my shoulder was forming a puddle on the floor.

Does anything change just from thinking about it?

Then and now, dwelling at length on a worry that couldn’t be solved right away just didn’t suit my temperament. Brood too deep and the brooding becomes worry, and in the end that worry links up with anxiety and grabs you by the ankle. Prepare for the worst move, but only carry along what needs considering right now. That was my motto.

Maybe it was the wound on my shoulder, or maybe it was the ‘face of Eve’ he’d been wearing. I couldn’t tell which, but I felt strange.

“…Let’s go.”

When I opened the door to head back, that light soon swallowed up my consciousness.

When I came to and opened my eyes, the ceiling of the cottage filled my view, and the first thing to catch my eye was a girl absorbed in reading something. It wasn’t a paper book, though, but an e-book made of blue particles, scanned copies of the volumes in Arden’s room and the books in Rose’s archive. She always passed the time like that.

Come to think of it, I knew almost nothing about her. So for a moment I got confused. Was the girl in front of me the real Eve, or had that puppeteer I’d seen earlier shown up again?

Instinctively, I brought a hand to my waist, but the familiar feel of my sword wasn’t there.

Belatedly realizing I’d been staring straight at her, the girl closed the book of blue particles she’d been reading, and it turned into glittering stardust and scattered into the air.

“…So it really is Eve.”

Thinking it over again, if I couldn’t recognize her, who could?

Says the guy who didn’t recognize her, though.

“Eve? Who’s that?”

When I turned my head, there was Lillian beside me, drinking tea, her eyes sparkling as if intrigued. She couldn’t see Eve, so from her side it looked like I’d shouted a woman’s name into thin air.

“Don’t tell me — a girlfriend?”
“…No. It’s nothing like that.”
“Calling out for a woman even in your dreams. Our youngest is sneakier than I thought.”

I denied it, but Lillian had already made up her mind, her nostrils flaring wide. She rattled on about this and that, but it was all useless noise, so I shut my ears.

Looks like Lillian’s DV transferred over to me safely.

As far as the eye could see, she looked perfectly fine.

This one, on the other hand, was the problem.

Eve shook her head as if dumbfounded.

Had something gone wrong with Eve’s memory? Or had someone tampered with mine?

If Overclock’s cooldown wasn’t running, then just as she said, it had never been cast to begin with.

We needed to talk a little more, so I explained everything that had happened. How, as I took on Lillian’s poison, I’d experienced the traumas she’d lived through. The two years I’d spent rushing about, trying to turn every one of those traumas into a happy ending. All of it, up to the puppeteer wearing Eve’s likeness, whom I’d met at the very end.

Eve’s expression went through all sorts of changes as she listened to my story. When she heard about the traumas, tears welled and brimmed in her eyes, and at the part where I’d turned them one by one into happy endings, the tears burst out all at once. At the part where I’d met a puppeteer who looked just like her she was startled, and when she heard about the conversation I’d had with him, she sank into grave thought.

Having heard the whole story, Eve spoke.

In the real world, she said, only two days had passed.

Just as she said. From everything I’d observed all this while, Lillian’s personality wasn’t all that different from Eve’s, either. Pure, scatterbrained, the owner of a warm nature that longed for human affection.

I recalled the countless traumas of hers I’d witnessed.

DV feeds on negativity and grows. Lillian had been tormented by nightmares at such a young age, and that she hadn’t gone mad was nothing short of a miracle.

Eve nodded in agreement, then showed me something.

“Whoa.”

A sound of admiration escaped me on its own.

A DV stat of 89% had plummeted all the way down to 15%.

Leaving her to fuss, I formed a single hypothesis.

What if Lillian can apply this power to other people too?

I became certain she would be the key to fundamentally solving the demonification of NPCs. It also made sense now why that guy had made the preposterous demand that I give up on her.

“Hmm-hmm-hmm~”

Because this girl humming a little tune to herself was the very core of this world.

I got up from my seat and moved my body this way and that. There didn’t seem to be any particular side effects.

“All done thinking about your girlfriend?”
“I told you I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Hmmm~ Really? Then should I introduce you to someone?”

Lillian sidled up playfully and poked me in the ribs. Now that the DV had been cleared away, she had even more energy than before.

“If it’s a friend you’re introducing, Big Sis, then I’ve gotta take it on faith and meet her.”

At my words, Lillian blinked, then broke into a great big laugh.

“Hah! Looks like I’d better hurry up and make some friends, then.”

What was so funny? She really was an impossible person to figure out.

Anyway, after snickering to herself for a while, Lillian suddenly stepped out of the cottage.

“Where are you going?”

At my call, she looked back over her shoulder, and—

“Homeward, of course!”