A/N
Hello folks, I'm back, and no, I'm not dead yet. Sorry for the long absence over the past few days, though; it was practically out of my hands this time.
A new heatwave reached my region, and everyone started abusing their ACs until a power outage hit the entire region.
So, I've been living for the past two weeks or so with only two hours of electricity per day. And if that wasn't enough, drinking water started becoming scarce, and people are now basically fighting each other in supermarkets over one extra bottle.
With all that still happening, a small forest caught fire, and it almost reached my neighborhood.
In short, it's a mini apocalypse right now where I live…
Anyway, I just wanted to apologize for the absence, but here I am whining instead. Sorry about that, haha. It's just that living has suddenly gotten so much harder, and it's hot- so hot I'm melting here- so I wanted to vent, just a little, to my dear readers, since I can't really do it back home where everyone is living through the same hell.
That would make me a real asshole, ha.
Either way, now that things have calmed down a bit, I'm back. I thought I was going to take a break after finishing this volume, but I guess that was it…
***
***
The manifestations moved like the living, looked like the living, and even breathed as the living did. He could see Shun Morikawa standing at his side, blade drawn, wearing that same perpetually exhausted expression.
'Are they just puppets wearing a face I remember? Or is there someone actually home in there?'
The feedback from his newly evolved path skill told him it was the latter, but Ashen couldn't quite believe it yet. He veered his eyes from Morikawa and looked toward Rowan for the space of a breath, searching for the tell that would confirm that his skill was fooling him.
He found none. If anything, the longer he looked, the more certain he became that whatever stood before him thought, and doubted, and felt.
Rowan's eyes carried an emotion too complicated to fake: nostalgia, layered with grief, layered with a strange gladness that would have made no sense to him if they were indeed puppets.
"Long time no see, Ash Harth." Rowan's voice was steady despite it all. "Or should I call you, Ashen Hart now? What an unbelievable circumstance we find ourselves in."
"Are you really him…?"
"Not exactly." Rowan's mouth curved wryly. "The real Rowan Vance is long dead as you know well. I'm just a figment of your imagination, given life with your concepts and mana."
He tilted his head slightly. "But even so, I have his memories until his last breath, as well as the capacity of free thought. From your perspective, I'm real enough to count."
Ashen opened his mouth, but nothing came out. There wasn't a single response he could come up with for this absurdity.
"Focus." Morikawa's voice cut through it, snapping him out of it. "They are coming."
Ashen turned, and what he saw made his blood run cold.
***
They hadn't made it far.
Love, False Mercy, Self-Consumption, Mandate and Reshaping; all five surged forward as one, mana trailing behind them like comet tails, aimed at where a mortal man was daring to ascend beyond his station.
They didn't get far before a three-meter-tall figure descended into their path.
He was massive, draped in a violet robe that attached to him like a second skin; threaded with lines that ran from his body into the ground.
"Sovereignty?" Reshaping tilted his head with surprise. "What are you doing here? Where's Malice? Did you leave that thing alone?"
"I left him." Sovereignty's voice carried no urgency, though the words themselves demanded it. "The Custodian Order has arrived here."
The silence that followed lasted less than a second before it shattered.
"WHAT?!" Reshaping's body shook violently as panic bled through every edge.
"Those insufferable—" Self-Consumption stopped chewing mid-bite, arm forgotten in his grip. "Why now? Why HERE?"
"Ohoho…" Love's smile thinned until her jagged teeth peeked. "How rude of them. Barging in uninvited."
"This is unacceptable." Mandate's voice rose as the stones beneath his feet rearranged faster and faster, and he failed to maintain his calm. "They cannot be allowed to interfere… not now… Not when we're so close to alignment!"
Sovereignty's threads pulsed once, sharp and red, silencing them.
"This is your fault," he said, and though his tone never rose, the accusation was clear enough. "If you had killed that pest a year and a half ago instead of playing with him, the Custodian Order would never have taken interest."
Nobody argued.
"You have been absent for eighteen months." Sovereignty's gaze swept the group. "Of course they will interfere. Rats always come running when something starts smelling."
False Mercy's grandfatherly features hardened, just slightly. "Then we should move quickly, before they arrive to disturb us. That man is on the verge of evolving his concepts. There isn't much time left regardless."
"I'm aware." Sovereignty turned toward the fracture in the distance, where white light still bled from Ashen's ascension. "I'll handle this myself."
The threads running from his robe, through the ground, through every Outer God present, turned visible all at once, glowing a deep, throbbing red.
"W-wait, what are you—" Reshaping's protest died as the threads tightened.
Sovereignty drew on all of it, every ounce of mana his fellow Outers carried, funneling it into a single point: Love.
"Ah~" Love's voice came out breathless, delighted even as her body began to change, flesh compressing, elongating, sharpening into a spear of meat and bone. "How intimate."
"Forgive me," Sovereignty said, without a trace of apology in his tone, and took hold of her new form, then…
He threw her in a fiery white arc.
She crossed the distance at a speed that tore the air apart behind her. The pillar of flesh screamed toward the zone where Ashen stood.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!
It struck true. A hundred kilometers of earth simply ceased to exist, replaced by fire and a fracture so deep that lava wept from its cracks.
Sovereignty watched, and for the first time in longer than any of them could remember, his expression colored in satisfaction.
"Looks dea—"
It didn't last.
Zzzzzttt—
He saw the earth knit itself back together, followed by every consequence it had brought about.
Then, the pillar receded, flesh unspooling in reverse, flying back the way it came until it came back to his hand.
The illogical phenomenon did not stop there; he looked intrigued as the fleshly spike wiggled around until Love stood there once more, blinking and disoriented, but fully restored to her original shape as if none of it had happened.
Even the mana he had concentrated on her had been redistributed. Only then was he able to move beyond his thoughts.
In the now unmade crater's center… a man, looking whole and alive, unlike a few moments earlier, was staring back at them.
Sovereignty tilted his head, genuinely curious now.
"Messing with time…? How surprising." A slow exhale. "Then, let's see how much you can keep doing it."
The threads throbbed again, and this time thousands lost their invisibility, then hundreds of thousands, then millions.
At the far ends of those threads, monsters answered. Catastrophes, dragging Great Demons behind them on threads of their own. Great Demons pulling Demons. Demons pulling Great Beasts and Gorefiends and every lesser Wild Beast beneath them in an unbroken chain of subjugation stretching back to a single source.
They converged, marching in a disciplined order, like an army with no rival on this continent, funneling toward their sovereign.
Sovereignty regarded the black tide gathering behind him with indifference and uttered.
"Kill him."
GWOOOOOO— GHAAAAAA— GRRRRRRR—
They didn't need telling twice.
When the wave finally reached Ashen, they found that he wasn't alone.
Two million soldiers stood behind him, glowing a pure, stubborn white against the black horizon, akin to a single firefly refusing to acknowledge the storm bearing down on it.
Not one of them flinched.
Because they had already done this once, and died doing it, and here they stood regardless.
*
…thud… thud… THUD… THUD… THUD—THUD—THUD—
Ashen saw the vast wall of Narkals blocking his escape, felt six godlike presences behind it, and gulped.
"...Commander. I will be honest with you." Sweat ran down his temple, but he still spoke in a steady voice. "I do not have any idea how I brought you here, nor do I understand much of the process."
Rowan nodded. "What are you getting at?" Despite asking, the man was pretty sure he knew what Ashen was about to say.
'Since I can't control you, I'm trying to ask nicely here. This is what I'm getting at!'
Ashen smiled tightly and pointed toward the anchoring army.
"Can you lend me a hand?"
"Hah."
Morikawa smirked the moment the request was uttered.
Rowan simply smiled for a few moments before saying, "If it were anyone else you were asking, I'm sure they would have declined. But as luck would have it, I think we are about the only people, dead or alive, who would stand by your side against that."
"After all… we are the shield of humanity, and…"
He slowly drew the sword from its sheath.
"As far as I can tell, you are the only human around here, and so…"
"We will be your shield."
Rowan pointed at the sky with the tip of his sword.
"MEN!!"