[510] The Backlash of Evil (4)
"There exists a concept that mirrors the Akashic Record you thought was all-encompassing. A concept outside the Law. In short, perfect chaos."
"I see."
The smile on Uorin's lips vanished.
"Because he couldn't comprehend that chaos, Ra reset everything."
Gando stared in puzzlement. Uorin moved to the table and pulled out a file.
A thick dossier was set before Gando.
Anke Ra Erasure.
Probably one of the most highly classified secrets in the world, passed down only to Teraje's rightful successors.
Gando couldn't bring himself to touch it—or even to look at it directly. Uorin motioned toward the papers and said,
"Read it. I'll need your help."
"All right then…"
Gando didn't have the capacity to absorb two hundred pages at once.
"You only need to read the last three pages."
Obediently, Gando's eyes ran over the text. Each line hit him like a shockwave.
He swallowed hard; his hands trembled.
"So this is what—"
"Yes. This is the full account of the incident when Anke Ra tried to reset the world and erase himself."
"But Ra still exists, doesn't he?"
"That's where the variable came in. As long as Satan isn't eradicated, any number of resets will only repeat the same outcome. So the Anke Ra Erasure was supposed to be executed after Satan's annihilation. That's why Ra—though he had won the final war—decided to replay the world once more."
Uorin continued.
"Even ordinary people retain faint traces of a reset. That's déjà vu. As the Mitochondrial Eve, Teraje can reconstruct that déjà vu almost perfectly."
"You mean the underlying incident."
"Yes. Based on that underlying incident, our analysis indicates we now live in the world after a second reset. In other words, all events have been replayed and we're currently at an intermediate point on the way to when the second reset was executed."
Gando pictured a timeline in his head.
Once a reset occurs, the world goes into an 'off' state.
Then something amplifies, the world reopens and returns to the point of reset—completing one cycle.
"We're in the middle of that cycle. We haven't yet reached the moment when Anke Ra performed the second reset."
That moment was likely just before the final war ended.
But Teraje's interference was changing the future.
"When would the final war have happened originally?"
"At the time of the first reset—at the Geffin Erasure Device—the final war would have occurred six months from now. Originally, the archangel Kariel would have destroyed Miro's timeline and Miro would have died. But as you know, the second reset—the Anke Ra Erasure—is different. I introduced a variable."
One of those variables was Gando.
The reason he had been made in Mistra's womb for the Anke Ra Erasure, and the reason he was raised as a spy in Tormia away from his mother from birth, was—
"To send Gaold to Heaven. By sending him to Heaven, you created a future different from that of the Geffin Erasure Device."
"Yes. After Ra attempted the second reset hoping for Satan's extinction, Teraje pondered this for centuries. Then my previous incarnation, Mistra, remembered the incident twenty years ago at the Geffin Erasure Device."
A memory surfaced in Uorin's mind.
Gaold, forcing his way through the Law's barrier so violently his hair had turned white, shouting to stop Miro from being sent—his monstrous scream still rang vividly in her ears.
"That's when she realized it. This is it! This man, who would sacrifice everything for Miro, might be a special variable for us."
Uorin clicked her fingers and smiled.
Of course, she hadn't lived it herself.
* * *
Satan's ever-growing face pierced the sky.
Even Heaven's highest mountain range only reached his shoulders.
"Woooooo!"
If a mountain moved with life and will, what kind of destruction would that world endure?
Satan felt like a living mountain.
Everything beneath him looked utterly trivial.
Kurururung!
With every step he took, the celestials' structures crumbled like sandcastles.
Etella, striking in rapid succession from seven hundred meters above, was no longer even worth noticing.
"Huff! Huhhh!"
Rising on external gravity and thrusting both fists forward at speed, cold tears streamed from her eyes.
Powerlessness.
She poured every ounce of strength into each wave, but as Satan's body swelled, her shockwaves dissipated into futility.
"I won't give up! No—I can't give up!"
Her resolve, hardened after defeat by the Arcane, vowed never to yield to the power of evil again.
Creak, creak!
After thousands of strikes her bones began to crack, yet she did not stop.
More terrifying than her body breaking was her conviction shattering.
"Why, whyyyyyyy!"
Does evil grow without limit?
Is this world truly ruled by evil rather than good?
—If everyone were good…
Her master's voice echoed.
"If the world were without confusion, nothing would disturb the peace. But someone will use that calm to break it. Evil's methods are easy, pleasurable, and efficient."
Etella, kneeling and listening, lifted her head.
She was fourteen—an innocent-faced girl with oversized glasses, but her eyes shone with the sacred will of good.
"But there's another main reason people choose evil."
"What is it, Master?"
"Because it looks strong."
Etella blinked at the unexpected answer.
"Yes, you might not understand now. But that's because you are truly strong. The strong do not waver before evil. The weak seek other paths. So remember this, Etella: if one good can stop a hundred evils, then good is stronger than evil."
"Yaaaaaah!"
The speed of her Thousand-Hand Kannon Thunderclap increased.
Just as her fists were about to be shattered beyond use, a thunderous, malice-laced blow struck Satan.
"Great Thunder Barrage!"
Szzzzang!
Satan's skin rippled like water, waves fanning outward.
But those waves rolled back as if time had reversed, and with a booming impact they hurled Etella aside.
"Why…!"
Etella plummeted from hundreds of meters.
"Whyyyyyyyy!"
Confronted with an unbearable reality, she trembled with crushing helplessness.
'I'm sorry, Master. I'm not strong.'
As her belief crumbled, her body accelerated toward the ground.
Iron Wheel Eye — Equilibrium.
The air's resistance surged, sharply slowing her descent.
She struck the earth with a thud and sparks flashed in her vision, but the blow had not torn her limbs apart.
"How—?"
As she tried to comprehend what had happened, Se-in ran up and peered down at her.
"You all right?"
"Se-in."
"Sorry I'm late. I had business in Ingris."
Pushing herself up with her elbows, Etella stood.
Pain throbbed through her fists belatedly, but there was no time to nurse it.
"Wasn't Armin supposed to go to Ingris…?"
"She did. But that's not why we went."
"We?"
Etella finally looked past Se-in's back.
Arius, his eyes bandaged, was crawling like a dog with his tongue out, and a woman led him by a leash attached to a collar.
"Miro."
"Is that Satan? He's really ugly."
Miro shaded her eyes with her palm and regarded Satan as if she were watching an animal in a zoo.
* * *
"After all, the labels 'good' and 'evil' are just human-defined boundaries."
Uorin turned away from the window.
"They existed before humans even called them evil. Some kind of force—or the concept of chaos."
"So Satan is the embodiment of that chaos."
"Exactly. A being born from the Akashic Record defines what lies outside the Akashic Record. That's why Anke Ra couldn't defeat Satan, but humans might. However—"
Uorin sat again.
"Only if the power that defines good is stronger than the power that defines evil. What will humanity designate as righteous—good or evil?"
"If evil wins, there will be no reset and no future for us. Was Gaold the variable the Empress planned to use to destroy Satan?"
Uorin shook his head.
"Heaven wasn't that easy. They made alliance mistakes and, even with the Crusade's full might, they were defeated. Gaold is an excellent mage, but not irreplaceable. He's merely an occasion that could create a variable. The true variable that could shake Heaven is someone else."
A single face rose in Gando's mind.
"So then…"
"Adrias Miro. She died pointlessly at the Geffin Erasure Device, but I thought Gaold might be able to save her. I intended to change the future through her."
"Can she succeed?"
"I don't know. We can only believe. But if she can't, no one can. In any case, Miro is—"
Uorin smiled, bathed in sunlight.
"The strongest Prajna humanity has produced."
* * *
"What did you go to Ingris for?"
Se-in answered Etella's question briefly.
"To learn Ra's will."
That morning, after assigning the party their tasks, Se-in had met again with Miro, who had defused the mental bomb in his head.
Before coming to Heaven—when he had entered Miro's timeline at Istas of the Alpheas School of Magic—Se-in had felt an odd sense of dissonance and wanted to identify its source.
He expected to find reunion there, but Miro was absent, and Se-in sensed a strange distortion.
No choice felt real. At the time no one could explain that feeling, but he thought Miro might be different.
As expected, Miro sensed something the moment she heard Se-in and went to examine Ingris's Akashic Records.
Thus they finally grasped the true meaning of this war and the current flow they were caught in.
"It's the second reset. After the Geffin Erasure there was another reset, and we're on that timeline now. That's what I felt at Istas."
Miro added,
"Se-in fine-tunes physical and emotional factors with the Iron Wheel Eye. That's why he can detect the world's subtle errors more clearly than others."
Se-in continued.
"The problem is that the world of the first reset and the current world could be completely different. Why Istas? Because in the world before the first reset, our visit to Istas never happened. In other words, an event that didn't exist in the previous world is happening now. What that implies is—"
Miro took over.
"Someone deliberately provoked the event that would send Gaold to Heaven. They triggered it to free me. I have a rough idea who could do that. There aren't many with the means, power, and intellect to calculate this far ahead."
"Teraje," Etella said. She had heard Teraje's secret from Gaold's group before coming to Heaven.
"Right. Probably planning everything since the Day of the Twenty Judges. The purpose is one."
Miro looked up at the monster devouring the world.
"To topple that thing. Through Anke Ra's reset humanity was given a chance, and Teraje created the possibility. That's why I feel so angry."
Her lips trembled as she walked.
—Miro, stop this… come back.
For a brief instant a man's face flashed through her mind and Miro's eyes sharpened.
"Are these bastards playing with me?"