67. I Like It

Now and then, leafing through a comic or grinding away at a game, you run across that one line about the miracle of the Red Sea parting. Could the sea really split clean in two and open up a road down the middle? Was that even scientifically possible? I’d once caught myself thinking that if it really were possible, I’d want to see it at least once before I died.

It came out of nowhere, sure, but the reason it was on my mind was simple.

“Fight! Fight, you idiots! Fight, damn you!”

Gamma was screaming at his minions at the top of his lungs, veins bulging. The soldiers on the field, though, acted as if his orders couldn’t reach them at all, flattening themselves against the far wall and lining up in two neat rows down either side. They left a road open right down the middle of the battlefield, a road meant for me and Gamma and no one else.

The trigger for all of it had been simple.

I’d come charging in like a lunatic, and the spearmen and cavalry scattered. To my surprise, though, the archers and mages didn’t give up even after the front line collapsed. If anything, with the danger of hitting their own allies gone, they rained down arrows and magic bolts to their hearts’ content.

It suddenly reminded me of the shoot-’em-ups you used to find in every arcade, a real classic of the genre. You piloted a fighter jet, blasting the swarms of enemy planes bearing down on you out of the sky until you finally took out their core base. The one thing that mattered above all else was weaving nimbly through the hail of enemy fire. Nerve-racking work, trying not to take a single hit.

At first, anyway.

It varied from game to game, but once you got the hang of it, dodging bullets wasn’t all that hard.

Of course, that was always with the sky for a stage.

— Thunk.

The sound of an arrow punching through the air and burying itself in the ground was kind of cute, in its way.

— Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Dozens of arrows flew, every last one of them aimed at me alone. One seemed to be going for my eye. Another came savagely for my calf.

And it wasn’t just arrows.

— Fwoosh!

A flickering fireball rushed in to roast my thigh, then slunk off disappointed.

— Bzzzt!

A lightning bomb dropped at my feet and spat out an ugly current, putting on a grimy little show of trying to coax me into a shock.

Wasn’t the hero jet in a shoot-‘em-up basically a natural disaster from the enemy commander’s point of view?

Not once had I spared a thought for how the enemy commander felt, but watching myself now, I could dimly understand the despair and rage he must have carried.

But what could I do? It wasn’t as if I could take a hit on purpose.

The long and short of it: once every last scrap of firepower the archers and mages could muster had been spent in a full-scale assault on my shadow, they quietly fell back to the far wall.

In any case, back to the present. I stood facing Gamma.

“How about the two of us have a little chat?”

“Hey. Sweet potato.”

At the taunting little nickname, the hem of Gamma’s robe rippled violently.

“…It’s Gamma! You damn bastard!”
“Whatever your name is, I don’t care. Anyway, you seem a whole lot worse at commanding your underlings than that puppeteer I ran into last time, no?”

At my jab, Gamma’s shoulders trembled and shook.

“Don’t compare me to that infuriating prick! That guy who thinks he’s so hot and I are nothing alike!”
“Did you swallow a foghorn? You’re hurting my ears.”

I leveled the tip of my sword at Gamma’s throat.

“From the looks of it, you’re just going to ramble on and on about yourself again. So how about I just lop your head off? Saves us both some time, doesn’t it?”
“W-wait! Hold on! What do you want to know?!”

The instant I put real strength into dragging the blade across his neck, the desperate groveling that bled into Gamma’s voice was a far cry from the arrogance of a moment before.

“I’ll answer all your questions… so just spare me. Just this once.”
“Now we’re talking.”

I obediently drew the sword back, but kept my gaze fixed on his throat as I whispered to the unseen Eve.

Preparations done, I threw out my first question right away.

“Why did you descend straight into reality this time? Unlike before, when you were hiding inside Big Sis Lillian’s trauma.”
“We each have different assignments. That guy was tasked with handling the mental worlds of dangerous elements. My role is to find talents who can ruin the world.”
“To put it simply — Big Sis Lillian was a dangerous element, and you came to this Abyss to scout for someone useful?”
“That’s right. He was assigned to slowly break Lillian down, but thanks to you barging in, he failed, nice and spectacularly! Serves him right!”

This Gamma and the puppeteer I’d run into before clearly didn’t get along. Two enemies at each other’s throats was very good news for me.

“But thanks to you, the scenario changed. And… That One grew very angry.”

Right on cue, this being they called ‘That One’ turned up again.

Probably the final mastermind trying to drag this world to ruin.

I waited for Gamma’s next words.

“That One ordered us to deal with you by any means necessary. So because of you, lately we’ve been working ourselves ragged, can’t even sleep!”

I kept my eyes fixed on him as I pressed on.

“First and foremost, your objective would be to kill me and Big Sis Lillian, right?”
“Correct.”
“Then my Sister, who left to meet the master, should be fine. No, wait — you saw your chance and attacked us precisely because she’s gone, didn’t you? With only your targets, me and Big Sis Lillian, left here.”
“…!”

Bewilderment showed plain from behind his robe.

I pushed the tip of my sword up under his chin.

“Why make a face like that over something so obvious?”
“N-no! It’s just that your reaction… it felt like you’d already predicted everything, so it caught me off guard. For an otherworld resident, this should be a baffling story, and yet you’re so unbothered.”

Gamma fumbled out his excuse, breaking into a cold sweat.

For my part, I was doing some thinking of my own.

I should be careful not to react too calmly.

He’d called me an otherworld resident, which meant he didn’t suspect, not by a hair, that I, a being from another dimension entirely, had taken over Arden’s body. So I needed to be a touch more careful. The moment I let even the smallest slip show, I’d be handing him a foothold.

“Good. Next question. How did you puppeteer my brothers around like that?”
“The instant you lose in the arena, your soul becomes a slave bound to the victor. Just like those minions sprawled over there. Your brothers were beaten by the master of this place too, so they’re simply being forced to obey.”

Gamma said it pointing at the waiting room, buried layer upon layer in Lillian’s vines.

“It’s the same reason I didn’t stop you when you were told you could do as you pleased with Cerberus. Unless you beat the master of this arena, no living creature can leave this place anyway.”
“So in the end, the only way to settle this is to beat the master of this place.”

I glanced at Eve.

If Gamma was telling the truth, it more or less added up. And yet.

Something’s bugging me.

I had the feeling I was missing something hugely important. And as a rule, a nagging hunch like this had never once steered me wrong.

I furrowed my brow and gnawed at my thumbnail, turning the nameless itch over and over. Chewing slowly through Gamma’s words, I spoke.

“I get that you want us dead. But trying to kill us with a force this paltry makes no sense.”
“…”
“So here’s the conclusion I’ve reached: you’re the ones controlling the master of this place.”

Gamma didn’t answer for a long while. But he didn’t need to.

Because Eve gave me the answer in his place.

At last Gamma raised his head and forced his mouth open with effort.

“Just what are you? Why do you keep ruining our scenarios, Arden Arne? The analysis on you should have been completely finished… Is there something we don’t know about, latent inside you? Surely every last one of your patterns was already analy—”

— Sseogeok—!

Gamma’s words never made it to the end. Before his guesswork about me could finish, I drew my blade across his throat in one straight line.

Gamma’s head parted from his body and dropped to the floor.

I felt for the robed man whose body had been hijacked, but he’d revive a month from now, good as new, anyway.

I gave the bloodstained blade a couple of habitual flicks to shake it clean.

Huh. I really have become a swordsman.

Just as that pointless thought washed over me, Eve spoke up.

I fixed my gaze on the center of the arena, where my Sister Seraphina had vanished, and added.

For now, everything I could do was done.

I let the tension drain out of me and started toward the waiting room where Lillian, Elli, and Valerian were. While I’d been fighting, Lillian had kept the entrance sealed tight with her vines.

“Big Sis, it’s me. Open the door now.”

I’d expected the vines to loosen at my call, but all that came back was silence.

“…”

I could clearly hear someone moving around inside, and still no answer came from Lillian. For an instant, gooseflesh prickled up my spine.

Don’t tell me… a detached squad slipped inside while I was out here fighting?

I was certain I hadn’t caught the faintest sign of it, though.

Anxiety surged over me like a wave. I slammed my fist against the vine wall and shouted.

“Big Sis Lillian! Is something wrong in there? Answer me!”

After a long stretch of silence, Lillian’s voice finally came through from beyond the vines. Somehow, though, it carried a hint of suspicion.

“…Prove that you’re really the real Arden. You could be getting controlled, just like the brothers.”

What kind of fresh nonsense was this now?

“The Arden I know was a cute little brother who couldn’t even fall asleep at night unless he said, ‘Big Sis Lillian, I love you most in all the world,’ before bed—”
“Open it right now!”

The instant the words left my mouth, the tightly shut vines parted left and right with a soft rustle.

“Oh my. Judging by that rotten temper, you really are our little runt.”

The moment the door opened, Lillian stuck out her tongue and gave a maddeningly smug grin. And on top of that, a fairly hard-to-believe scene was unfolding in front of me.

“There, there. Aren’t you a good boy.”

Lillian was kneeling, gently stroking Cerberus’s head. The snarling Doberman was nowhere to be found; the beast was swishing its tail and surrendering itself to her touch.

Was that thing this docile to begin with?

As I took a baffled step closer, Cerberus, which a moment ago had been soaking up every kind of affection from Lillian, flipped the instant it laid eyes on me.

“Grrrrrrr…”

It bared its gums and growled.

“Unbelievable, seriously.”

A hollow laugh slipped out of me. Cerberus sank low to the ground, radiating the air of something ready to rip out the nape of my neck at any second.

“Tsk. No! You’ll get scolded! Devil!”

Lillian gave its head a light smack with her palm. At that, the beast instantly shrank into a sulking heap and looked away from me.

Hold on. What was it she’d just said?

“Devil? What the heck is Devil?”
“It’s this little one’s name. Well? Cute, isn’t it!”
“Cute’s not the problem — you went and named this mutt?”
“Mm-hm. I talked it over with this little one, and apparently it used to be a guardian serving a demon. So I asked how it felt about the name Devil! Devil says it likes the name an awful lot.”

Lillian rattled on, spilling the whole long-winded tale of how she’d come to name it. But my interest wasn’t in Lillian’s trivial knack for names.

“…Hold on, you can talk with this mutt?”
“Mm-hm. Spending ten years in the forest studying plants and animals, I just naturally picked it up.”

The instant Lillian finished answering, Cerberus barked sharply at my feet.

“Woof! Woof woof! Grrrr!”
“Devil, you mustn’t say things like that.”

Watching the beast duck its head and go meek again under Lillian’s scolding, I really couldn’t get used to this.

“What’d that mutt just say?”
“…It says if you call it a mutt one more time, it’ll bite you right between the legs.”

A brief silence wrapped itself around me. Clearly this thing’s lesson on who its master was hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

I jabbed my index finger right up to its nose and spat out exactly one word.

“Mutt.”

The instant the word landed, Cerberus lunged straight at me. I caught the charging beast’s head in the crook of my arm and locked it in a headlock, and it shredded the hem of my clothes to ribbons.

“You little mutt!”
“Woof—!”