The Horn Must Break to Leave the Sanctuary
The unicorn Alice answered.
To leave the sanctuary, a unicorn must break its own horn.
Bicorns might be different, but for us, stepping out of the sanctuary is a life-or-death decision. It means cutting all ties with the clan and never returning. Ever.
With that, Alice closed her mouth. The story was over.
I’d expected as much, but the answer was so disappointingly shallow that I unconsciously scowled.
“That’s it? You just snap your horn off like it’s some kind of exit visa and stroll out?”
“Yes! If I had to put it bluntly, that’s exactly right!”
Fuck.
I hadn’t really expected this brain-dead unicorn and that insane black mage to have any meaningful connection. Still, I’d hoped for something—anything—that might give us a lead on the black mage organization Immortalis.
I swallowed a sigh and asked another question.
“……When exactly did Abidus leave the sanctuary? Do you happen to know which country he went to first?”
“Huh? No? That guy never once stepped outside until the sanctuary collapsed.”
“……Collapsed? The sanctuary?”
Veronica stepped forward in shock. It looked like her feet had moved on their own. Even I, the one who’d asked, was slightly taken aback.
I’d only asked because I wondered if Abidus’s first destination had been within Immortalis’s sphere of influence. Why the hell was this girl casually dropping a bombshell like that? Had living as a refugee for so long turned her brain into mashed carrots?
“How on earth did something like that happen? The prophet’s barrier shouldn’t have been so easily destroyed……”
“Who’s this prophet person?”
Veronica and I both froze at Alice’s empty-headed question. This horse-brained idiot had the purest, most pristine brain I’d ever seen. If you cracked her skull open, you’d probably find walnut cookies instead of gray matter.
Don’t tell me she got kicked out of the sanctuary for being a complete airhead?
The thought actually crossed my mind. If even a human like me was thinking that, I could only imagine how Veronica—a bicorn—felt. The prophet’s descendant, the seer Veronica, looked exactly like someone who’d just heard a thirty-year-old unemployed rock band member ask who the Beatles were. Her mouth opened and closed without making a sound.
Come on, maid. You got this.
“Y-you don’t know? You’re saying you don’t know the prophet? Astoria Magidora! You truly don’t know her?”
“Uh…… Ar, Artoria? Yes! I’ve heard of her!”
“Who the hell is Artoria, you thick-skulled horse-faced moron?”
There was some famous British professor with a name like that, I thought vaguely.
Alice immediately squealed in protest.
“I do know! It’s, it’s that person! The one who left behind the prophecy of the savior! The one who said salvation would come to the descendants of the divine demons, right?!”
This time, both Veronica and I were rendered speechless.
Right. Fuck. We should’ve explained that part first.
Completely missing the fact that we’d gone silent, Alice kept chattering away.
“I’ve never heard the title ‘prophet,’ but Astol… Acetone… Sepia-ton? Anyway, I know that name at least! There was even a stone stele with her words back in my homeland!”
They carved the prophet’s words onto stone steles?
I’m certain the prophet specifically instructed that her words be passed down only orally.
Had the unicorns failed to properly inherit the prophet’s will? A strange itch crawled up the back of my neck. I ignored Alice’s babbling and frowned.
Fuck?
The information and my guesses were connecting. The baseless delusions and reasoning I’d been juggling suddenly lined up like pearls on a string.
“I may hate studying, but everyone back home always said I had a good head on my shoulders, you know?! Whether they’re still alive or not, I don’t—”
“Hey.”
I cut off her pointless protest. Alice, who had looked ready to complain, took one look at my face and immediately shut up. I must have been making one hell of an expression.
“……There wasn’t just one unicorn sanctuary, was there?”
“Huh? Well, yeah. There were at least ten, I think. I only know about my own homeland, though.”
“And all of them were completely destroyed? Every single sanctuary left behind records of their knowledge?”
“Uh, probably? I was too busy traveling with Jeanne—I mean, with Heiromain—to know what happened to the others. But I did hear that every sanctuary had stone steles installed.”
“……Do you happen to know what destroyed them?”
I braced myself for disappointment no matter what answer came. This horse-brained girl had a habit of giving completely irrelevant replies to the questions I actually wanted answered.
“Um…… what was it called? Were-beast? Li, Lifeslow?”
As expected, nonsense was pouring out of her mouth.
“Oh! That’s it! Werewolves!”
But the last word that tumbled from her seemingly idiotic babble was exactly what I’d been hoping for.
“Our sanctuary was destroyed by monsters called werewolves!”
In this world, werewolves are an endangered species. They might already be extinct. The concept still exists, but there haven’t been any sighting reports in a ridiculously long time. If you caught one alive, you could probably make a fortune at auction.
Incidentally, I had the dubious honor of having beaten one of those legendary rare monsters.
Well, maybe “honor” isn’t the right word. Bad luck, perhaps? Either way, the fact that I killed one werewolf while fighting alongside Tirsi is undeniable.
And just like how treasure goblins drop rare items, that werewolf I crushed gave me an incredibly huge raid reward.
The only thing that turned me into a burning character in this balance-breaking, status-window-less magical shitland.
Mana Succession.
If ten percent of my growth comes from hard work and seventy percent comes from Beast Regression, then the remaining twenty percent has to be the Mana Succession I get from beating the shit out of rune users.
How else could a pathetic weakling like Nord—who nearly died running from bugs—grow strong enough to fight three Ulster warriors at once after only half a year?
In this world, mana is basically the combination of MP and INT stats from a game. Even a trash mage who only knows low-level spells can somehow function as a proper wizard if they have enough mana. It’s the same reason a man with a teaspoon-sized load but a massive dick can still keep his wife satisfied.
The reason I can run around as a Magic Kid Masuri with fewer than ten learned spells is entirely thanks to my absurdly rapid growth in mana capacity.
That’s why I still remember that werewolf’s name. Me, the guy who can barely remember people’s names.
The werewolf bastard who first properly shoved a fragment of Germania mythology into my life.
His name was—
Tabula.
“……Now it all makes sense.”
Even though a massive question had been answered, Veronica didn’t sound particularly happy.
“As expected of my master. This is the true face of the successor to the God of Wisdom. Just as Master deduced, the prophet feared the Compilation Battalion, but her kin failed to understand her true intentions and made a fatal mistake.”
I could practically hear the sound of a unicorn’s eyes rolling back in her head.
When we suddenly fell silent with grim expressions, Alice wisely lay flat on the ground. Veronica sent a telepathic message only to me so Alice wouldn’t hear, but it looked like she had a lot she wanted to say to the unicorn and was barely holding back.
Can’t be helped. Oral transmission always gets distorted.
Just like how rumors in the military get exaggerated and twisted, the unicorns had forgotten the part where the prophet said, “Do not leave any written records,” while passing down her words orally.
It was hard to call it entirely their fault. The prophet herself bore some responsibility for not making it crystal clear.
Anyway, because of that, the unicorns left behind stone steles in their sanctuaries and leaked records…… which got them discovered by the Compilation Battalion.
What came next?
A horse holocaust.
A massacre took place in the unicorn sanctuaries. And not just any massacre—they went house to house, conducting a thorough search and destroy operation.
“Werewolves. Werewolves, huh. Ha. So that’s what happened.”
Veronica let out a sigh that sounded like she had run out of words.
The side effect of Beast Regression, which caused physical mutation. Tabula, who had become a werewolf through mutation magic. The president of the Trustas Company, whose body had grown scales. The ancient gods’ mana they all possessed.
All of it had been a hint pointing to the same answer.
“The Compilation Battalion released werewolves mutated into beasts—just like Tabula—to destroy the unicorn sanctuaries. That way, even if the barriers disappeared and traces were left in the world, the crime wouldn’t point back to them.”
It was the same as when we uncovered the truth behind the dye incident. Remember those bastards who turned innocent wild mother bears into addicts to ruin the dye’s natural habitat? Just like them, and just like the recent Nuckelavee incident, the Compilation Battalion released mutated experimental subjects transformed into beasts for their large-scale erasure operations.
They wanted to create crime scenes that didn’t look like something humans had done.
According to Alice, not all of them were werewolves, but that doesn’t really matter.
The Trustas president had scales, not wolf fur. It seemed the final animal form varied from person to person. In my case, the mutation principle was different, so I just ended up with a bigger dick. But those poor bastards who tried to get stronger and became victims of this world’s version of Beauty and the Beast (minus the beauty) must feel pretty screwed over.
Got a problem with that? Then go live on Earth, you tiny-dicked losers.
“So they were massacred by their fellow intelligent races. No wonder the surviving Abidus became a human-hating lunatic.”
“Indeed. He was already a proponent of exterminating other races. If he learned of the Compilation Battalion’s existence, it’s only natural he would conclude that the human race must be wiped out first.”
Abidus, who had fled from a destroyed sanctuary, had discovered the truth. And perhaps that was what corrupted him into a unicorn black mage. As for his broken horn—well, it probably just melted slowly during his black magic training.
“When I met that bastard, he was already in his true form. If he somehow figured out how to return to his original appearance and mistook the one who taught him or performed the ritual as the ‘Guide of Prophecy’……”
It made perfect sense for him to swear loyalty to Immortalis. Wasn’t that a black mage organization that treated humans as nothing but experimental materials? Getting acknowledged and saved by a group that perfectly matched his tastes must have felt like striking gold. He was basically a neo-Nazi who’d been rescued by the KKK.
Honestly, the fact that Alice was so carefree was harder to understand. Why the hell was she so optimistic? Was it because she didn’t know the full story?
Even that professor lady who had gone through something similar—wait a second?
A thought casually passed through my mind and my eyes snapped wide open.
“Hold on. What about elves? Elves have long lifespans too, right? Don’t they leave behind records or anything?”
“Elves? Of course they do. Haven’t you heard of the artifacts from the fallen elf kingdoms? Even I, who only knows what archaeology professors say, know about them. You’re the husband of an archaeology professor—how do you not know?”
I do know, you fucking— I have a master’s degree too, you bitch.
I almost lost my temper when Alice gave me attitude through the group telepathic chat I’d sent without thinking. But she just blinked innocently, as if she hadn’t meant any harm. Hearing that the person who’d just dissed you had no ill intent still felt like shit, but I held back.
It wasn’t like I’d asked out of ignorance. In this world full of constant twists, I’d simply lost confidence that my common sense was still correct.
“Anyway, fuck. Elves leave records too, right?”
“Yes. I think I understand what you’re getting at. ……That woman also said she lost her parents to a beast attack and was driven out of the forest, didn’t she?”
“Exactly. That’s it.”
This was it. There was nothing else.
Yerna, who claimed to be of high elf bloodline, had been attacked by some kind of beast when she was a child. She’d lost her mother in a blazing forest and was picked up by Hoenir.
The high elf mother who gave birth to baby Hitler Yernavich. When Hoenir saw the ‘beast’ that had killed her and screwed over Yerna, he had erupted with rage toward the human race for some reason.
Why?
“──The ‘beast’ that attacked the elf forest and the beast that destroyed the unicorn sanctuary. They must be the same kind.”
It was almost certainly true. If this turned out to be yet another criminal organization, then this world really was destined to be destroyed. Just how many shadowy criminal groups were there? Every time we turned around we ran into a different organization! If every country just had its own Triad, Yakuza, or Mafia, that would be enough—did we really need a K-Villain Designated Group called the Strawberry Seaweed Faction on top of that?
The four of them going to the sauna together, eating meals, going “Eui?”—that wasn’t important. What mattered was what came next.
If I thought about it just a little further, another deduction emerged.
“Yeah. When you think about it, Enlir was way too much of an idiot.”
That guy’s worldview and intelligence weren’t any better than a child’s. Saying he was young and therefore inexperienced was a laughable excuse. Why? Because even Larilura, who was younger than Enlir, was smarter, kinder, and more cautious than that moron.
“When he met me, Tabula was gathering sacrifices.”
Those sacrifices had been a one-armed young man and three children. The one-armed young man had been kidnapped from the circus troupe for their disabled circus performance. What Tabula had really been after were the children. The kidnappers hadn’t known that and had kept everyone alive.
—A werewolf taking children away, calling them sacrifices.
—The high elf bastard who had suspected me of being a Humanum Dei but decided I wasn’t because I was “too old.”
When you combined those two facts, the answer became obvious.
“The Compilation Battalion must have been gathering young children to find ‘test subjects’ with the aptitude to become Humanum Dei.”
Was that why Yerna had said something about being an “experimental vessel”?
To summarize:
1. Gather children who will become ‘sacrifices.’
2. Verify and select those with the right aptitude.
3. Educate and brainwash them to their liking.
4. Raise them as candidates to inherit the Divine Throne.
──And what is created through this process is a Humanum Dei.
Enlir had been one of them.
“Now it all fits. Yeah, fuck, it was weird that they gave that much power to such a stupid bastard.”
Any guy would want to play with a drone or RC car. But giving a missile launcher to a psycho who could kill people as casually as feeding stray cats? Only an idiot would think he wouldn’t cause an accident.
Yet they had no choice but to give it to him.
“It was the opposite. The one who had the aptitude to inherit Thor’s Divine Throne just happened to be that kind of brain-dead idiot.”
That was the reason.
The moron who had run wild with a cheap Chinese Mjolnir, fallen for my provocation, given me time to activate my ultimate skill, and then died. Even a guy like that had been one of the lowest-ranked Humanum Dei.
“……My lord. At this point, can you not imagine why Hoenir seeks to exterminate humanity?”
“Yeah. It probably is that.”
Hoenir was a god who had survived after Ragnarok. I didn’t know how he’d survived, but he had clearly been watching what humans did without dying. The version of him I saw in my dream had been deeply disappointed in humanity.
Disappointment. It’s disappointment. To be disappointed, you first have to have expectations.
You only get disappointed because you had expectations. If you never expect anything, there’s nothing to be disappointed about.
What had Hoenir expected?
What had he expected from the humans of this world that led to such disappointment? What made him begin the Human Complement Project, essentially hitting the reset button on humanity like someone playing The Sims or Civilization?
I had already heard the answer.
I had heard it through the knowledge left behind by people of that era.
“……The Child of Chaos.”
The power unique to the human race—the ability to defy fate. Odin had believed in it and died. He believed that after Ragnarok, a world free from the rule of fate would arrive, and he left behind arrangements before kicking the bucket.
But Hoenir, who had been left behind after sending off his friends, had seen it.
He had seen humans killing bicorns, unicorns, elves, and dwarves. He had seen them dominate the world or fight among themselves until they destroyed everything—all because of their selfish desires.