Chapter 24
I’m translating the chapter directly into HTML-formatted English and preserving the novel’s paragraphing and embedded in-universe text styling where it applies.CHAPTER_TITLE: Chapter 24. The World of the World Tree and Bad Ending No. 144(3)
“Aaaagh──!”
In the blacked-out world, a wet scream brushed past Raul’s ear.
What came after it was the sound of a child crying.
He could also hear something being trampled underfoot, and something massive crumbling as it collapsed in on itself.
When Raul finally saw the scene before him, it was the ruined citadel of the Western Kingdom.
A flock of flying gargoyles and hollow, clattering undead in the shape of empty armor were advancing. A swarm of Living Armor.
Among them, one undead stood out in particular, its armor etched with grotesque patterns that glowed a hellish red.
That’s...
A high-level boss monster he had only barely encountered a few times after crossing into the Demon Realm.
Flame Devil Armor.
As it raised its sword high, skeletons and ragged golems surging like a tide all around it let out a unified shriek.
Kuaaaaaaak─!
The clatter of iron rang out, mingling with the jagged cackling of skeleton jaws.
Terrified by the scene, the child pinned beneath the building could not hold back its tears.
Soon, a cold iron specter would take that child’s throat with a scythe.
More people screaming at the massacre rushed toward it.
Then blackish-red fireballs fell onto their heads.
Everything turned to pitch-black ash.
It’s hell.
The stage was clearly the western reaches of Exeria, yet what lay before him was nothing short of the Demon Realm itself.
Bad Ending 144.
It was true that every bad ending was terrible in its own way, but Bad Ending 144 was on an entirely different level of ruin.
Raul turned his head.
Then a white wave stretching across the Northern Plains entered his vision.
The pale carpet rippling toward him like wind-tossed surf.
They were undead.
All of it, all the way to the horizon.
If the Western Kingdom was destroyed and there’s still that much of an army left...
It was safe to say the end of Exeria itself was close at hand.
Even the elite of the three churches would be helpless against numbers like that.
Yeah. Once it gets this bad...
Even Raul could not immediately see a solution.
The only possible way out would be for the three churches of Ella, Motala, and Mimir to join hands with Raul and throw their full strength into the fight together.
But even in wartime, they would almost certainly try to purge Raul first.
Whatever the root cause, they believed Raul’s existence was what would bring about Exeria’s end.
Raul waited calmly.
A being like the World Tree would not show a Saint Brand holder a future only to end with, So this is how you all die.
And his prediction proved correct.
With the Western Kingdom’s banner toppling, the world before him blacked out again.
When it brightened once more, the scene had changed to the frigid northern wasteland, and the World Tree of Defiance that had driven its roots into that land.
The World Tree pulsed like a beating heart, flashing with violet demonic mana.
Through the fissures split open in its trunk, high-level undead were pouring out in a flood, as if a dam had burst.
...So that absurd army was using a corrupted World Tree.
But how had a World Tree, with its own independent dimension known as the World of the World Tree, fallen into the hands of demons in the first place?
The moment that question rose in Raul’s mind, another message appeared before him.
“The World Tree rewinds time from the ‘ending’ to the ‘starting point.’”
It arrived with a timing that made it seem as if the World Tree had read Raul’s thoughts.
He felt faintly unsettled, but he kept his attention fixed ahead all the same.
The world blacked out and brightened yet again.
Where is this...?
And yet the scene before him was strangely familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
It sounded like a contradiction, but it was not.
Because the place before his eyes was none other than the interior of the Sererial estate.
The geometric ornamentation and the pure white marble-like pillars set at intervals throughout the place made that certain.
And more than anything else...
Cough─!
The elf sprawled on the floor, his neck twisted far beyond its range and blood spilling from his mouth in thick gushes, was a member of the Sererial household who had guided Raul to his room just moments earlier.
There was no room for doubt.
Soon the door in front of Raul was flung open.
Then Alicia Sererial burst into the room and ran straight through Raul, her face drained of all color.
She stared at the fallen servant in shock, then immediately summoned a multitude of spirits.
Frowning deeply, Alicia stared in one direction together with the spirits.
And then he saw a woman with hair red as fresh blood standing before the wide-open doorway.
“I thought you were just some pretty noble girl, but you’ve got something in you, huh?”
The woman licked the blood on her cheek with the tip of her tongue and let out a sly smile.
Alicia screamed in fury.
“Y-you murderer!”
The summoned spirits all launched themselves at once.
But the red-haired woman showed no trace of panic. With her half-lidded eyes still unchanged, she slipped a hand into her sleeve and pulled it back out.
That alone unleashed dozens of throwing blades.
The gust of those fan-shaped blades carried such immense force that even the spirits were wiped out without resistance.
She’s no ordinary assassin.
Watching the atrocity that would unfold in the future, Raul calmly observed the red-haired woman.
The battle did not last long.
Even so, the assassin subdued Alicia, a ranger and spiritist, far too easily.
Her hands were impossible to track.
The spirits were recalled one after another in an instant, and before Raul could fully take in the scene, the small assassin was already leaping into Alicia’s embrace.
Of course, she did so while driving a razor-sharp blade into Alicia’s left chest.
“Ghk!”
Spitting blood, Alicia fell backward.
And for some reason, the red-haired assassin looked at her with something like pity.
Before delivering the final blow, she suddenly murmured something deeply symbolic.
“We are what remains of a grievance that could not burn away. A revenge we could not bring ourselves to spit out.”
Slash!
At last, a crimson line rose along Alicia’s throat.
She died there, and with the Sererial estate engulfed in flames, the World Tree’s vision of the future faded away.
***
Back in the present, Raul sat up from the soft grass.
When did I black out?
He could not remember clearly.
Raul brought a hand to his forehead and forced his divinity to flare, trying to clear the haze from his mind.
“Haa.”
Only then did the world before him sharpen, and the fog that had seemed to cling inside his skull finally lifted.
“So the saints who saw future visions kept fainting because of this?”
Future vision was a miracle with a crushing mental burden.
Raul slowly replayed the scene in his head.
The Sererial mansion in flames.
The elf massacre and the red-haired assassin crushing Alicia with utter ease.
From first to last, the whole thing had been a chain of incomprehensible events, yet Raul’s vast store of knowledge still managed to sift out the information he needed.
A grievance that could not burn away, huh...?
That had been the assassin’s hint.
Raul knew of a group that performed that sort of strange ritual every time they finished an assignment.
The Empire’s dagger... One of the most notorious assassin groups in Exeria. Cinder.
Raul steadied his mind and reviewed the intention behind the World Tree’s future vision.
Cinder would invade this World of the World Tree?
No. It might already have infiltrated some part of this world.
The World Tree said that massacre was the starting point, right?
Raul did not know the details in between, but apparently that Sererial tragedy would become the catalyst for the elves to open the dimensional gate to Exeria wide.
A pretext for revenge? Or did they only realize the danger too late?
Whatever the case,
Could the fools in the city of the inner chamber, who ruled the elven world, really expect an act of vengeance like that to succeed?
Elves had a strong tendency to look down on other races, but the reverse was true as well: other races would stake their lives on fighting elves.
The result is obvious.
The elves would be crushed.
And it seemed that, in the end, even the World Tree would fall into the demons’ hands because of it.
Raul lifted his head and calmly stared at the World Tree.
For some reason, he had the odd impression that the enormous tree spanning the sky was looking back at him too.
Raul spoke toward it.
“You want me to stop it?”
Of course, there was no reply from the World Tree.
Even so, Raul remained there for a long while, standing still like a tree with roots sunk deep into the earth, looking up at it in silence.
***
“Mesiah Scenario Chapter 2: ‘Revelation’ is scheduled to upload in 182 hours, 48 minutes, and 22 seconds.”
Raul had returned to the Sererial estate before it was too late, and now he lay on the large bed in his guest room, staring at the message that had appeared before his eyes.
What it signified was the cooldown between epic quests.
So that was just one of those game systems meant to stop cheese strats...
A scenario cooldown, a function intended to keep people from slipping through the main quest by taking cheap shortcuts.
Raul had thought it existed only within the game.
Yet somehow, it had been carried over exactly as it was into the reality that Exeria had become.
Why?
Wasn’t this world supposed to be another reality?
Come to think of it, if it did not apply to other people, it still applied to Raul without fail.
Skill acquisition, leveling up, item stat corrections, and so on.
By the time he counted them all, there were countless forms of adjustment wrapped around him.
“Did I really just come into a ‘game world’?”
After a year and three months, the stale question he had worked hard to forget floated back into his head after a long absence.
“Then...”
What, exactly, would death in this world lead to?
ExD had save and load, but there was no such thing as dead characters coming back to life.
And since waking in this world, Raul had not once seen the word save.
Would a death without save mean Raul’s erasure?
And if so, what was the difference between that and real death?
His brow furrowed hard as a mess of complex questions filled his head for the first time in a while.
“Haaah.”
After exhaling a long breath, Raul rubbed his face and tried to clear his mind.
He decided to focus on the questions within reach first, rather than the endless ones that stretched beyond his grasp.
Cinder.
How had those bastards entered this World of the World Tree?
At first, he had simply assumed that a group like Cinder had found a way to cross dimensions on their own.
But on reflection, that was a low-probability assumption.
It’s not that Cinder couldn’t do it...
What mattered was that they had no reason to stir up trouble with the elves, especially not one branch of the elders’ council.
Cinder was not some brainless bunch moved around by other people’s orders.
They were often misunderstood because of their nickname, the Empire’s dagger, but Cinder was not the Empire’s underling.
On the contrary, Cinder’s history went back deeper than the Empire’s thousand years.
Of course, the residents of Exeria, who had never had the chance to read any so-called setting compendium, would have no way of knowing that truth...
Still.
Those bastards will appear in this world. This mansion will go up in flames, and every elf of the Sererial house, Alicia included, will lose their lives.
Future vision was, like Raul’s own messages, a power that came closest to truth.
There was no room for doubt.
If there’s no other motive...
There was only one thing that could drive Cinder into motion.
The object they fixated on like fanatics, the Ancient Relic.
Most likely, they had been contracted and paid with that as the reward.
Ancient Relic.
The words that had suddenly come to mind made Raul’s eyes widen.
The Ancient Relic, and this World of the World Tree, which had already broken away from Exeria sixteen hundred years ago.
Here...
It was entirely possible that an Ancient Relic still remained here.
But would Cinder move merely on that possibility?
A group that had shown no interest for over a thousand years?
Raul rubbed beneath his chin and fell into thought.
No.
It takes a trigger to change behavior, not for an individual, and certainly not for a group.
In other words...
What if Cinder wasn’t tearing through dimensions and rushing in on their own, but someone went to them and offered an Ancient Relic as payment?
If they were shown the real thing in person, their attitude could easily change one hundred and eighty degrees.
Raul felt a chill crawl up the back of his neck at the gruesome hypothesis that had just taken shape in his head.
Which means...
There was a traitor somewhere in this World of the World Tree.
And not just any traitor, but someone with enough influence to possess several Ancient Relics.
Is the traitor inside the elders’ council?
Whatever the case, there was too little information to be certain yet.
Raul had not actually met Cinder in person.
***
That night, Raul left his room once more.
The apocalypse looming before him was coming at him baring its fangs so clearly now that standing still like one of those idiots was not in Raul’s nature.
Ah, and by idiots, he meant those lofty elves, who apparently considered themselves too good to share even the same sense of time as ordinary humans.
Raul was in a rare mood of irritation.
The sudden vision of the future had left him privately anxious, and that was one reason for his frustration, but the real anger came from somewhere else.
How could they possibly be that rude?
Today, the door to the room where Raul was being held had opened exactly three times.
Exactly three times, from the moment Raul, who had stayed awake through the night, watched the sun rise until it bowed its head once again.
And none of those visits were to report any progress.
They had simply come to deliver a meal of carrot soup and vegetable porridge.
Finally unable to hold it in, Raul asked the elf servant clearing away his dinner tray,
“When will I be able to leave?”
But that servant only replied in a cold voice and a very dry tone.
“So you really are human. Your patience is lacking.”
It was not even an answer to the question, just a response soaked in naked disgust.
Ha.
Should he just let them all die as their fate intended?
For a brief moment, Raul felt as though his patience had been pushed to its limit.
Still, thanks to Edwin’s courtesy and Alicia’s genuine goodwill, he spent the late night wandering outside.
“Hoo.”
Still pisses me off when I think about it.
Raul pulled the elf robe down low over his head as he had the night before and roamed the streets while letting out a few more sighs.
White divinity shimmered within his eyes.
The halo’s sacred light, which saw through the essence of a target, would surely make it easy enough to distinguish a human mixed in among elven society.
But even as the night deepened, he gained nothing.
Then a pleasant smell drifting from a tavern teased Raul’s nose.
Good liquor?
All at once, one of the peculiar habits of Cinder came to mind.
They loved alcohol just as much as Motala’s drunkards did.
Especially expensive, rare liquor. They were hopeless when it came to that sort of thing.
Raul pushed the tavern door open a crack and looked inside.
Soon the owner, an elf with long ears, approached and spoke to him.
“Looking for something?”
Raul rubbed beneath his chin for a moment, drawing things out, then confirmed that there were no humans in the tavern and asked the elf owner,
“Do you happen to have forty-year Beast Blood?”
“My, that sort of thing isn’t available here. We do have a twenty-year. Want a glass?”
Beast Blood was a liquor Cinder’s assassins particularly favored.
Raul politely declined the owner’s offer and stepped back out into the street.
He repeated the same question at tavern after tavern.
All the while, he made sure to scan the interiors as well.
Then it happened.
“Got any forty-eight-year Beast Blood?”
A voice asking for Beast Blood came from a customer who had entered the tavern before Raul.
And yet at that clear, ringing voice, Raul stopped in his tracks.
Even with the same green robe pulled low over her head, the small figure felt oddly familiar.
There was no need to check with divinity.
The hair spilling out from under that hood was a deep, unmistakable red.
We are what remains of a grievance that could not burn away. A revenge we could not bring ourselves to spit out.
Blood-red hair, a clear voice.
It was exactly what he had seen and heard in the World Tree’s future vision.
Cinder.