Living (4)
The otherworld.
Shirone and Rian, running to obtain the true tone, turned at the blast of hot wind from behind them.
"Impressive."
Above the horizon where the Pyrotechnics Corps' Systems Control branch stood, a vast mirage shimmered.
"Now that Son Yujeong has attained enlightenment, Le Te won't be easy. We need to put as much distance between us as we can."
Rian agreed, but looking at the swarming demons ahead made that seem unlikely.
'They're getting stronger. Is this really going to be okay?'
Even if they retrieved the true tone, once the psychic barrier opened the hellish demons would spill into reality.
"Do what we can."
Shirone said, reading Rian's thought.
"Someone always hugging everything and sacrificing themselves—I'm sick of it." Rian fell into thought.
'Shirone, I'm not very bright. I can't explain it precisely, but there's a contradiction in what you say.'
Because Shirone himself intended to embrace even the true tone and sacrifice himself.
'If you think you'll end it with just you…'
Rian charged.
'I won't let you!'
He clenched his teeth and swung the greatsword. A sound like his heart stopping shattered the air as demon flesh shredded and whirled away.
"Stop them! Don't let them advance!"
The demons thrust their bodies forward as living shields.
Puzzled, Shirone looked at the black clouds blotting out the sky and felt it in his gut.
'Heuksung. They're not going to let this go easily.'
Just the size of the domain let them gauge the first play; counting reserves felt meaningless.
"Rian!"
As he warned, the Miracle Stream activated.
-Bind the sinner.
The instant light erupted from Shirone's body, the black clouds fell oddly and blanketed the ground.
"Mom. Mom."
When Etella came to, a landscape she had never seen spread before her.
A tunnel like intestines stretched on endlessly, and rotten-smelling liquid pooled in the corners.
Her ears burned.
"Mom. Mom."
A fetus, its face half-melted, was gnawing at her ear.
Etella dropped her head and saw countless fetuses clinging to her body.
"Why did you abandon me?"
The voice echoing through the tunnel couldn't be pinned to any single person, but that didn't matter.
"Sorry."
All the life in this tunnel were her children, and she had steeled herself already.
"Come. Follow me."
This was probably the system process for dealing with karma, and at its end waited eternal oblivion.
'It's okay.'
Purifying every limbo was the right thing to do, but the one thing that weighed on her heart was…
'Shagal.'
The Taeguk chain had not disappeared.
'I believed you could have become a good person.'
But far too many lives had already died by his hands for that to be undone.
'This is a step for you too. I don't know how long this journey will be…'
May he find rest as well.
As Etella walked the tunnel, countless limbos clung to her.
When the dreadful pain transmitted through the Taeguk chain hit—
"Uaaaaa!"
Shagal grabbed at himself and rolled on the floor.
'It hurts.'
It was the pain Etella felt.
"Goddammit!"
Shagal hauled his convulsing body up and sprinted down the corridor again.
'Wait! Just let me see you!'
He opened the engine room door and found a floating meat-brain suspended between massive cliffs.
"Hah! Hah!" Seeing the chain pulled from his chest sunk into the meat-brain's center, he unleashed a barrage of projectile blades and charged the cliff.
"Come out!"
When he drove his dagger in, the swollen-eyed fetus—unable even to open its eyes—gaped its mouth.
"Come out, I said!"
As if tossing away trash, Shagal flung the fetus impaled on his blade down the cliff and ripped at the meat-brain.
As the flesh-brain was torn to pieces, his heart thudded with restless haste.
'Where are you? Where are you?!'
The dagger embedded in the inner wall slipped through without resistance and came out the other side.
Half-crazed, Shagal turned back the way he'd come.
'Gone.'
The meat-brain before him was only hardware; Etella had already vanished into the otherworld's system as a whole.
"Where is she!"
Shagal, who'd been madly hacking at the flesh-brain, flinched and sank to his knees, collapsing.
"Uaaaaa!"
Etella's emotion—plunged into terrible despair through the Taeguk chain—struck him.
-Remaining purification time: 87해 2,875경 3,241조 1,203억 1만 9시간. The message he didn't want to hear sounded without being requested.
'Why, why would you do something so foolish? You could've just spoken! You could've threatened them—said you'd do this! Why had to…!' In truth, he already knew.
He knew how much Etella had sacrificed over the time that had passed.
"Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!"
Consumed by self-hatred, Shagal drove the dagger into his thigh.
'I want to erase the being that is me.' No—he wanted to grind himself down into the machine.
"Die! Die!"
Cursed with a fate that forbade death until the karma was purified, Shagal plunged blades into himself.
"Die, I said!"
Even as blood gushed like a fountain from the wounds of the projectile blades, his self only sharpened.
A sudden thought came.
Maybe it wasn't that he couldn't die, but that he didn't want to.
"Ugh—"
If he dismembered himself and inflicted pain, maybe Etella would stop him like before.
"Why are you doing this to me…?"
Following the Taeguk's workings, Shagal's pain rode the chain and struck Etella's heart directly.
"Mom. Mom."
The fetuses, unable to nurse and tearing at her like jaws, had swollen to fill the tunnel.
"Let's go."
Etella walked on, tears falling.
"I will save you."
Shagal shouted.
"Enough of this!"
He pulled the blades from his body and crawled out through the hole in the flesh-brain.
"So that's how you'll get your revenge? You think I'll take it? No—I'll chase you down! I will… I will find you—!"
He would drag her back to hell.
'I'll make you stay by my side for life!' Shagal drew a deep breath and activated his scent memory of the incident.
'I can't smell anything.'
If Etella had become a process, she had either disappeared from this otherworld or existed everywhere at once.
'I can find you.'
Shagal's sense of smell sharpened to an impossible degree, and at last he sensed a specific location of the process.
At the same time, the Taeguk chain stiffened and stretched out to an unknowable distance.
"Going."
Bleeding heavily, Shagal launched himself and punched through the wall following the chain.
'I'll kill you. The moment I meet you I'll slap you. I'll torment you slowly. Until you scream!'
The most terrible things he could imagine doing to Etella filled his mind, but—
-Remaining purification time...
His pain was still being converted into karma.
The twelve Apostles who had joined the race battle pressed Yuriel from all sides.
When the golden dragon Metira blocked Yuriel's wheel of paradise, the venom dragon Poine spun and slashed into her flank.
A massive archangel was sent flying, breaking a tree with the force of the kick.
Yuriel, breaking rock and regaining her center, met Poine with a grin.
"It seems times have changed. Archangel Apostles are out of fashion now."
Of course it was a lie—just a taunt.
Blitz, the thunder dragon, surveyed the battlefield.
'Even with us here, the elf–fae fight is neck and neck. That shows Yuriel's influence.'
Each of the twelve Apostles had reached the pinnacle of different attributes, but a dragon's true power appears when they return to their true forms.
'Not being able to use breath is the biggest problem.'
If all twelve Apostles fought in their true bodies, even the widest floodplain would be razed.
Blitz recalled the directive from the Messiah.
'More important than winning this war is protecting the nearly extinct elves and fire-kin.'
If they were wiped out, the variables that could change the Apocalypse's future would vanish entirely.
'We've already lost a significant number of elves. No more. We must hold here.'
A grim resolve settled in the eyes of the twelve Apostles.
Meanwhile, three kilometers from Green Ocean, a temporary fairy barracks stood.
"Lord Crown."
A fairy officer dragged two captured elves into his lab.
"Let us go! What are you going to do to us?"
When the pair of elves entered, Crown turned.
"Oh?"
"Just kill us! Torture won't make us bow—!"
The elf's bold yell collapsed into a scream when he saw the room.
Crown put a finger to his lips.
"Shh. Don't frighten the children."
"What… what are you doing?"
Creatures native to Green Ocean hung from the walls, each with its skull split open and brain exposed.
"Huh? Doing what? I was just… observing."
Crown took a seat at the table.
"Don't just stand there. Sit. From now on we need to have a deep conversation about the future of life."
Drawn by the fairies' power, the two elves dropped to their knees under the table.
"Future of life? This is slaughter. This is killing living things!"
Crown was calm.
"Elves were originally fae."
"They were like us—my servants, my minions. Then they mixed with humans and became the race they are now."
"What are you trying to say?"
"It's strange. Reproduction—without some kind of mechanical mechanism, it seems impossible."
"Don't lump us with animals. Elves were born from pure love."
"I know. They call it agape, right? Virgin conception, life created without mechanical means—that was the privilege of the archdeity Kariel. I thought about it. What is it, really? How could I become like that?"
After the silence he went on.
"I don't know."
The elves grew uneasy at Crown's smile.
"I think there's a concept of 'life' that precedes biology. It has some invisible special inertia. Without that, the tragic mechanism of creating descendants and then dissolving oneself can't be explained."
He believed the core of that inertia was agape.
"Let us go."
The elf forced strength into his eyes as he spoke, though in truth he wanted to be put out of his misery.
Crown flew up onto the table.
"I deny that mechanism."
He approached a bear mounted on the wall and plunged his large hand into its exposed brain.
The bear's eyes rolled back as it convulsed.
"If I transplant my brain into this beast, I become a bear. I'll breed into countless bears. When I age, I can switch into another creature—tiger, eagle, human—"
"Or an elf."
"Argh! Aaaah!"
Bound, the two elves wept.
"Enox. If I board the elf leader's body, I won't need agape. But I need a lot of data first." Crown turned back to the elves.
"You will be the first step of my experiment."
It would also be the first step in the fairy biomimetics that would shape the Apocalypse's future.