God's Choice (4)
"What the—?"
As Habitz looked around, Uolin fell backward and slid away on his butt.
"Ugh."
When the vanishing released, pain rushed through him.
My leg—
Blood flowed from where the calf muscle had split.
"Hmm."
By contrast, Habitz felt nothing strange when he looked at the wound in his own side.
Only a sense of kinship.
Having the same vanishing let him grasp how serious this was.
'It's similar to mine.'
Habitz leveled his sword at Uolin.
"Come out. I'll kill you."
Another vanishing released, and finally Kido's presence at Uolin's side was noticed.
"Heh?"
Habitz—always the attacker—found the feeling of being the victim oddly interesting.
'So this is what the ones I killed felt.'
He lowered his sword and asked, "How did you do it?"
Kido said nothing, but Uolin replayed the recent moments and realized.
The taste of memory.
By eating the ankle of the earthbound spirit that had been ripped off Habitz, he'd absorbed Habitz's memories.
"Guh—?"
Kido's eyes went half-lidded.
'Crazy bastard.'
He'd consumed countless human memories, but never seen anyone this unhinged.
'I feel like I'm going to puke.' Every time he rifled through Habitz's memories his head became a knotted mess.
'How can anyone live like this?'
At least beasts were straightforward.
'An extremely rational mind pursuing primal instinct. A desire for amusement utterly divorced from survival.'
In short, a pervert.
Kido glanced at Uolin's wound.
'He's been badly cut. He won't be able to run on his own.'
When Habitz's movements froze from the pain, Kido made a once-in-a-lifetime choice.
'Even if I protect Uolin from one attack, he'll still die from vanishing.'
So he left Uolin and ate the ankle of Habitz lying on the ground.
'At least the vanishing was absorbed.'
Not the product of effort like Natasha's, but this talent was extreme.
'If madness counts as talent, this is genius-level.'
The problem was that anyone with vanishing activated couldn't make logical decisions.
Kido said, "If you kill the queen, I'll protect her. If we both activate vanishing at the same time, I can't say who'll win. It'd just be a roll of the dice."
That was true.
Facing a crisis unlike anything he'd known, Habitz considered his options—if "consider" was the right word.
"Kukukuku."
Only the craving for pleasure remained.
"This'll be fun."
At the entrance to Delta, lines of people had collapsed, each strangling their own throat.
"T-this can't be."
While Eintara stared in horror, Shirone understood.
God.
If it can't be used, that means kill.
Is that you?
No murderer in the world could kill billions at once.
Do they really think that's acceptable?
God said this:
It is "emptiness."
Viewed from the outside, this world is nothing but a bubble that exists for an instant and then pops.
But we—
We are beings who live eternally within that instant.
"Mika."
Decreasing to 10.43 million.
-World population is dropping rapidly. 2.27 million. 4.89 million. 44.29 million.
All of them are committing suicide.
"Ughhh."
The numbers made his jaw tremble.
Not all of humanity had died yet; more than half still lived.
But they were giving up.
Why on earth?
Is God a murderer?
"Be gone! Be gone!"
In Delta's corridor, blazing with waves of humanity, Kitra finished two computations.
His algorithm had two steps:
1) Repeat the calculation until it reaches 100 percent under the current system.
2) Change the system through learning.
The conclusion for the first step was to delegate authority to the Illuminati.
-62.7% of users request logout. Activating system shutdown authority.
Now the universe could be closed.
"Beep…"
But at that moment Kitra—the god—evaluated the 62.7 percent figure.
'Is that enough?'
Although it surpassed the Illuminati's threshold, 37.3% of users remained refusing.
Even a god needed sound logic to block a user's master code.
-Causality rate is dropping. Probability 100.000000 percent. Probability 100.0000 percent.
Though both read 100 percent, a pattern showed perfection degrading over time.
-Probability 100.00 percent.
Approve.
By the cold, mechanical logic that sought benefit for more users—
-System shutdown.
The god entered a shutdown code into one of the countless worlds of the multiverse.
In space.
At the moment the Shirone Sphere's workload exceeded 98 percent, a solar wind surged.
"Ugh!"
Even Shirone, far away, felt it hard to bear.
'The Law is changing.'
The rapidly swelling sun would swallow the entire system and then shrink into a tiny point.
How long until that point consumed the universe?
Ten thousand years? A hundred thousand? A hundred million?
No.
From the outside it was an instant.
Like popping a soap bubble, like switching off a running machine—existing and then not existing.
Please…
-Workload 98.356 percent.
Receiving Mika's cold data, Shirone did the math and fell into despair.
'I can't make the time.'
The Shirone on the surface was switching the cause to tachyons, but the god was doing the same.
'I have to concentrate on the Sphere.' Shirone stared at the sun's core.
Please hold on.
Amy squeezed her soul.
"Ughhh."
She maximized the incarnation of flame, but the Law of the sun seemed bent on burning even that away.
"Amy, go back."
Ikael said, "This is the end. We will soon be absorbed by the world's Law. But you are not an angel. I can't let you die here."
Once the sun explodes, not even a god from the outside can reverse it.
A singular, irreversible event.
It was the true Omega end.
"We can't stop the apocalypse, but the universe won't vanish instantly. There'll be some time."
After the sun explodes—ten minutes? For them, maybe ten days?
Knowing Ikael wasn't lying, Amy's heart shattered.
Shirone.
She wanted to see him.
If the apocalypse couldn't be reversed, she at least wanted to face the end with him.
'I'm sorry, Shirone.'
Amy shed tears of fire.
"No. I'll stay here."
"Amy."
"Don't try to persuade me. There's no method, and of course I want to see Shirone, but… how will I die?"
"I'll fight until the end." Amy seemed ready.
"Amy will die."
At Fermi's words, Seriel's eyes widened.
"What!?"
She grabbed him by the collar at once.
"You crazy bastard! How could you say something like that now! Does Shirone know?"
"No."
Seriel was even more stunned.
"You're actually insane? You knew and didn't tell us?"
"Didn't I say you'd understand?" Fermi answered. He had—but this went far beyond what she'd expected.
Her strength to strike gone, she released his collar and staggered.
"What were you thinking… Fermi, this isn't right. Of course one life can't be worth more than all of humanity, but this is unacceptable. You—" Seriel cried, tears in her voice.
"We're friends!"
Fermi moved to the window.
"We are not friends."
"Fermi!"
"But I think it's important. Amy is, after all, a core emotion of Yahweh." "If we'd told Shirone the truth, the future would have been completely different. Even with many people cooperating, this future was ultimately pulled into being by Shirone."
The moment Shirone took a drastically different step, the future's information would be shredded.
"So… you sacrificed Amy?"
"No."
Fermi turned back with a cold expression.
"I'll save Amy." "At this point, what I can tell you is that to save Amy, we first have to die."
Seriel stood dumbfounded.
And—
Fermi smiled bitterly. "Not yet."
The archangel was disappearing.
Is this it?
The feeling of sliding into an irrecoverable, endless void of nothingness was truly horrifying.
'To end like this.' At the trailing edge of the melting mental form, Satiel recalled a very distant memory.
'There were good times too.'
No—looking back, the good times had been few.
Flare! Flare!
Metatron, Paiel, Metiel, Kariel vanished one after another, and then it was Rayel's turn.
"Satiel."
His consciousness reached out.
"Remember me…."
Satiel choked.
When all the angels had left and he had screamed in despair, this was the only angel who'd come to him.
"Ugh!"
Why had he—
'He was so close.'
Why had he done something so foolish?
"Ikael."
Satiel gave a sad smile.
"I'm sorry."
In that moment Ikael felt it: an indescribable feeling swelling infinitely within her mind.
The heart itself is not an error.
But love—
is an error.
"Beeeep!"
Kitra emitted the most extreme mechanical scream; its limbs trembled.
?Probability 99.999999999....
'The calculation is wrong.'
To fix the error, Kitra immediately connected to Satiel's consciousness. The process raced at light speed.
Thud… thud…
In a dark space where a familiar heartbeat thrummed, Satiel slowly opened his eyes.
"Satiel."
There was a vast brown mass with huge eyes—the solar incarnation Anke Ra—there.
"Anke Ra."
Although no time passed during the signal exchange, Anke Ra spoke coolly and directly.
"Your quantum signal is interfering with mine. Take immediate action."
"I apologize. My fault. But, Anke Ra, I cannot."
That is what the heart does.
"I will grant you eternal life."
And Anke Ra knew how to alter quantum signals.
"Right now I can make your signal persist in another universe. I can give you anything you want."
Satiel bowed his head shyly. "Anything?"
"Yes. Whatever you desire will be granted."
"Is Guffin there?"
"Anke Ra, I was always your faithful servant. I denounced Ikael's betrayal, and I even drove the child born between her and Guffin to death."
Slowly moving forward, Satiel sat before Anke Ra and stroked the coarse skin.
"I thought that would be enough. By your will I could obtain something precious. But what happened? They all left forever. Ikael, Guffin, the angels who followed me—even you."
"I never abandoned you."
"…Sure."
Satiel's eyes snapped open.
"You never cared from the start, you bastard."
She dug a curled finger into Anke Ra's eye and shoved it in up to the shoulder.
"Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" A piercing, high-frequency scream tore through the air as the connection between god and Satiel was severed.