42. Homeward

I could feel just how much I’d grown, and remarkably so. Two whole years of it, and I was grateful that none of that time had been frittered away for nothing.

“Phew.”

Now for the last objective.

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

All that remained was to put an end to that bastard, still hunched over and hammering away at his keyboard.

Had he been so sure I’d lost? Even with me right under his nose, he hadn’t caught the faintest hint of my presence.

Should I kill him?

Killing him with his guard down would be the easiest thing in the world. One swing of my sword and his head would go tumbling free.

But I didn’t. End it here and I’d be left with nothing.

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

Where was this place? What the hell was this guy? Why was he wearing Eve’s face? I had a mountain of questions to ask.

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

He typed at a speed that rivaled me at my prime.

Brings me back.

It called to mind my old self, the one who’d taken games more seriously than anyone.

“Huh?”

So I reached over and pressed the power button on his rig, firmly.

“N-no… no way!”

He shot up from his seat and shook the monitor. But the screen, packed dense with unreadable code only a moment ago, had already gone dark.

“Aaaaaargh!”

He tore at his hair with a shriek, then slowly turned his head. He’d finally noticed 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 to keep an eye on you didn’t come down for nothing.”

I zeroed in on his choice of words.

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

So I asked.

“…”
“Hey, if you’re going to say something, say all of it. You want to 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.”

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 spoke.

“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 up 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, just to prove this wasn’t an empty threat.

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

I knew at once what the Great Cataclysm meant: the fall of the Empire, brought on by the Emperor’s corruption. But I decided not to bother letting 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 — that’s terrifying. Since you’ve already brought it up, tell me what it is, too.”
“It’s no use telling you anyway. It’s not a story a resident of another world like you could understand.”

He still took me for Arden. A resident of this otherworld, in other words.

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

For the first time, the guy who’d been answering so readily fell silent. After a long wait, he replied.

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

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 that, and when the Great Cataclysm comes, I’ll spare House Arne. You don’t even have that deep a relationship with Lillian, do you?”
“Not deep, you say! Big Sis and I are—”
“I’ve watched Lillian for a long time. A lie like that won’t fly.”
“Tch. Why are you so interested in my Big Sis?”
“Same as before — that’s something I can’t answer for you. I’ll tell you one other thing instead.”

I quietly waited for his answer.

“Watch your back.”

The instant the words landed, I sensed someone behind me and twisted away on pure instinct.

“…Ngh!”

It wasn’t enough. A dull impact, and a jolt of sharp pain shot up my left shoulder. Wrenching my head aside at the last second had spared me the disaster of a torn-open throat, but I couldn’t absorb the shock entirely.

“Quick reflexes.”

The thing attacking me was the teddy bear whose neck I’d cut clean through, lurching now in a clumsily patched-together state.

I tightened my grip to counterattack at once, but what came next was beyond anything I’d expected. Just like 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.”

His voice lingered like an echo, and I couldn’t stop him from vanishing completely.

“…Haah, haah.”

The moment he disappeared, the rest of the dolls that had surrounded me lost their function all at once and toppled over. I caught my ragged breath and looked around the ruined interior.

Only one worry came to mind right then.

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 kept sending troops like these to the house while keeping his real body hidden somewhere hard to find, it was bound to be a tricky business to deal with. True, the house had the knight order under Valerian’s command.

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

I turned it all over and decided I needed to get out of here for now. Blood from the wound on my shoulder was pooling on the floor.

Does anything change just from thinking about it?

Then as now, dwelling at length on a worry that wouldn’t be solved right away just wasn’t in my nature. Brood too deep and the brooding turns to worry; worry eventually links arms with anxiety and grabs you by the ankle. Prepare for the worst move, but only carry what actually needs considering right now. That was my motto.

Maybe it was the wound in my shoulder, or maybe 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 cottage ceiling filled my view. The first thing to catch my eye was a girl absorbed in reading something.

It wasn’t a paper book, though. It was an e-book woven from blue particles, scanned copies of the volumes in Arden’s room and the books from Rose’s archive. The girl always passed the time like that.

Come to think of it, I knew almost nothing about her, so for a moment I wasn’t sure: was the girl in front of me the real Eve, or had that puppeteer from earlier shown up again?

On instinct, my hand went to my waist. But the familiar weight of my sword wasn’t there.

Noticing belatedly that I’d been staring right at her, the girl closed the book of blue particles she’d been reading. At that, it dissolved into glittering stardust and scattered on the air.

“…So it really is Eve.”

Thinking about it again, I figured that if even I couldn’t recognize her, nobody could.

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

“Eve? Who’s that?”

When I turned my head, I found Lillian beside me, sipping her tea, her eyes lighting up as if intrigued. Eve wasn’t visible to her, so from where she sat it must have 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 little runt 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 to it.

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

As far as the eye could see, Lillian’s condition looked perfectly fine.

Eve was the one who had me worried.

Eve shook her head as if dumbfounded.

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

Overclock’s cooldown wasn’t ticking, which meant the skill had never been cast at all, exactly as she’d said.

We needed to talk this through a little more, so I explained everything that had happened.

The traumas she’d lived through, the ones I’d relived as I took on Lillian’s poison. The two years I’d spent rushing around, trying to turn every last one of them into a happy ending. All the way to the puppeteer wearing Eve’s likeness, the one I’d met at the very end.

Eve’s expression ran through every shade as she listened. As she heard about the traumas, tears welled and brimmed in her eyes, and at the part where I’d turned them into happy endings one by one, they burst out all at once. When she heard I’d met a puppeteer who looked just like her, she startled, and as I described the conversation I’d had with him, she sank into grave thought.

Having heard the whole story, Eve spoke.

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

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, with a warm nature that longed for human affection.

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

DV feeds on negativity to grow. That Lillian, tormented by nightmares from such a young age, 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 fussing aside, I formed a single hypothesis.

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

I grew certain she’d be the key to solving the demonification of NPCs at its root. 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 worked 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, her energy was even higher than before.

“A friend my Big Sis introduces me to? I’ll just have to take it on faith and go 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, Lillian looked back over her shoulder.

“Homeward, of course!”