Kalmash (2)
The Forgotten Age was the era when Sephirot, the source of light, and Qliphoth, the source of chaos, held each other in balance within the primordial World Tree.
It was the age when the elves, under Sephirot's blessing, ruled the surface world.
Kalmash was the boundary that touched Qliphoth's chaos, a domain claimed by those who had descended from the outer sea—the beings known as the Outer Gods.
The denizens of the outer sea, drunk on blood and madness, urged mortals toward slaughter and left traces of chaos scattered throughout Kalmash. To stop them, the elves forged the Chains of Order, and the path we had just crossed was one of those chains.
...That was the setup, all right.
Anyone who had read the original novel would know that setting inside and out.
Kalmash was one of the major stages even in the source material, and more than that, it was practically the homeland of the Outer Gods—the final bosses, if you wanted to call them that.
Hardly a place you could call anything less than a true devil's country.
Kalmash had one defining trait.
This place, where primordial chaos had condensed, was unstable right down to space itself.
The thick miasma of death made it impossible to tell direction, and no machine would function here.
That was why I needed Adina.
Kalmash was absurdly vast, and in that vastness I had to find the traces of Sephirot and carve out a route forward. Only her Spirit Eye could read them.
Of course, Adina had insisted she wanted nothing to do with such a horrific place, but I broke her resistance with the authority of the landlord in a single stroke.
"...By the edge of the rocks. To the right from there."
Black clouds packed the sky overhead until there wasn't a scrap of open blue left.
Adina pointed into the dimness with her fingertip.
Every time she closed her eyes and opened them again, a violet gleam flashed briefly through the dark, as if it were piercing the gloom itself before vanishing.
Flicker, flicker.
While I was lost in thought, watching the brief bursts of light that split the darkness, a woman's voice drifted up from behind me.
"Your Spirit Eye... So that's the White Hair Tribe's unique trait, the one I've only ever heard about."
Arkan stared at Adina in silence, as if she had discovered something interesting.
"I told you, didn't I? I said she'd be fun."
"Hmm? Well, it's interesting enough, but still a little underwhelming. It's true that the Spirit Eye is a rare trait, but it's not all that special."
Well, that's true enough.
The Spirit Eye was a unique trait of the White Hair Tribe. For ordinary people it was the kind of ability they might go a lifetime without ever seeing, but if you considered how long Arkan had lived before carving out her current reputation, she must have encountered a talent like that many times over already.
And so we walked on under Adina's guidance, and a long time passed.
The deeper we went, the more the surrounding environment and terrain changed.
The sky, buried beneath black clouds, denied us even a sliver of light, and the darkened undergrowth below was so swallowed by shadow that its shapes were hard to make out.
The land was desolate.
Only pitch-black and blood-red rocks were strewn here and there in bizarre, unnatural forms.
The air was foul as well; every breath brought the reek of iron pricking at my nose, and the stench rising from space itself was worse still.
It was exactly the sort of place that came to mind when one thought of the end of the world.
The only fortunate thing was that we were still at Kalmash's entrance, where the terrain and environment were at least close to ordinary.
That was why I, a human, could still walk around here without immediately collapsing.
"It's strange, isn't it? Looking at you like this, you still seem like an ordinary human."
"I'm not like one. I am one."
"Yes, yes. Of course you are."
"......"
I didn't even bother replying after that.
Once the conversation died, I let my eyes sweep over the surroundings and thought back to the original story.
A giant black-iron spire twisted into a spiral, standing at Kalmash's entrance.
That was it. Just one sentence.
It had been the place described through "her" memories in the original novel.
In any case, we had succeeded in getting into Kalmash's entrance. All that remained was to move deeper inside under Adina's guidance.
Adina, naturally having no idea what I was thinking, voiced her doubt.
"What exactly are you hoping to find in a place like this?"
I stared at her face.
She wasn't merely frightened.
There was genuine confusion in her expression.
I answered in a flat voice.
"The Seed of the Apocalypse."
"The Seed of the Apocalypse? What's that?"
"Something that exists. There's no way you'd know about the lingering chaos left behind in the Forgotten Age."
"......"
At my halfhearted reply, Adina grit her teeth.
I didn't really care.
No one here would be able to detect what I truly meant anyway.
Except for one person.
"...Did you just say lingering chaos?"
The Great Lord, Arkan.
Her eyes gleamed with a strange light.
"How does a human like you know something like that?"
Ah, damn it.
How troublesome.
With her Eye of Insight, there was no way I could spit out a lie.
"I've seen it."
"Seen it? You mean the age when the world was first born?"
"Yes."
Well, sort of. I did see it.
In a novel.
"And how exactly?"
"Am I obliged to answer that as well?"
At my sharp retort, she gave a quiet laugh.
"Let's keep moving."
Before the conversation could drag on any further, I rose to my feet first.
I was just about to take the lead again when Adina's voice came from behind me.
"Hey."
"What is it?"
"Don't you see that?"
I looked straight ahead.
But there was nothing to see in the dense darkness.
"Where?"
"There."
Where Adina pointed with her fingertip, there was still nothing at all.
That was when it happened.
Whoooosh—
The thick darkness writhed and coiled like a whirlpool, and from its center a shape emerged.
Without question, it was human.
More specifically, it was a rather beautiful woman.
The woman's identity was...
"...Found you."
Elfride Trivia.
The Seed of the Apocalypse I had been searching for all this time.
"Stay here."
Step, step, step.
I moved forward.
With every step I took, my whole body grew heavier, as though an enormous pressure were pinning me down, but I gritted my teeth and endured it.
How long had I walked like that?
The woman's outline, which had only looked like a black silhouette before, gradually came clearly into view.
......
I stood still and looked down at her where she had collapsed.
She wore a white holy robe, but the pure fabric had been stained black-red in many places.
The skin exposed beneath had begun to rot as though cursed; flesh decayed, then golden holy light would flare up and regenerate it again, over and over without end.
It was as if she were trapped in an eternal cycle of suffering.
...This is bad.
This was the price of sealing the Demon King inside a mortal body.
The shard of chaos sealed within her would gnaw away at her reason over the span of eons.
...Saintess.
She was hanging on by divine power, but even that seemed to have reached its limit.
The forcibly sealed shard of the apocalypse would soon take root and bear fruit.
And then she would be reborn as something new.
She would lose every conviction and every part of herself, and become nothing more than chaos's puppet.
That won't do.
Even if she had already been swallowed by chaos for the moment, her essence was not that of a villain.
The true Saintess, secretly switched out and taken away from where she belonged. That was Elfride's true identity.
She had been suffering here because of a scheme by the Holy Order, but that was never supposed to be her fate.
If I could remove only the shard of chaos lodged in her flesh, that should be enough to put out the immediate fire.
What a murderous aura.
I stared at her as she exhaled a sinister energy.
She looked exactly as she had been described in the original novel.
Slowly, I reached out toward her.
The moment my hand touched her forehead, an overwhelming presence stabbed into my soul.
Fwoosh!
Black energy burst out of her as if it had gone berserk.
Normally, I would have been swallowed by that dreadful miasma and lost consciousness. But I was different.
That's insane.
Every strand of power she spewed forth was being absorbed by the ring on my index finger.
The ancient relic that devoured shards of chaos: the Ring of Ephrasia.
The surging fragments of chaos were purified into infinite Mental Image, filling my soul.
The tattoo beneath my right eye began to shine with blue light.
At the same time, radiance bearing the highest order swallowed the darkness whole.
The primal Mental Image buried deep in my heart trembled violently.
The five stars of the rune engraved on my soul finally came to bloom.
It was proof and sign that I had crossed one of the countless branching points.
And then, at that moment.
Something came toward us.
RUMBLE... RUMBLE... RUMBLE...
It was a serpent.
By sheer size alone, it could have been mistaken for an ancient dragon without anyone batting an eye.
The instant I saw it, I knew exactly what it was.
Jormungand.
The serpent that devours the world.
The monster born between destruction and creation.
Jormungand.
A destruction-class monster.
The Great Lord Arkan.
She stared blankly straight ahead.
Monster.
A monster. And not just any monster, but at the very least a destruction-class one—a primordial beast that belonged only in myth.
Even she, who had lived for centuries, was seeing a destruction-class monster in person for the first time.
No, she had never even imagined it in the first place.
Who would have thought she would run into something like this beyond the boundary?
"Tch. What a mess."
That was not the kind of monster you were meant to fight.
Of course, if she had to fight it, she could manage, but even she would have to pay a certain price in sacrifice.
There was no need to oppose it at all.
That was simply what a destruction-class monster was.
She turned her head.
The two girls who had followed Luke were so crushed by the monster's overwhelming pressure that they could barely move at all.
Ah, how annoying.
Human flesh containing a Demon King had certainly been intriguing, but if she had known they would run into a monster like that, she would never have opened the passage in the first place. She was just about to regret it fiercely when—
Step.
The sound of footsteps rang out, breaking the eerie silence.
Her eyes widened.
Luke Richter—the man who had told her he would show her something interesting—was slowly walking toward the monster.
It was worth praising him for keeping his sanity under such pressure, but that did not mean she could simply stand by and watch.
That was no different from walking straight to one's death.
And yet the expression on his face was bizarrely calm.
The faint smile that rose at the corners of his mouth...
It was the smile of a man whose whole body had started to itch.
The brilliant blue light flowing from his right eye fixed itself on the enemy before him.
And then—
"Acceleration."
From his entire body, an intensely compressed blue haze burst into full bloom.
Those threads stretched outward by the dozens, collided at a single point, and coalesced, giving birth to a vast ripple.
A wave born of countless points of friction.
It was a tide of Mental Image, and also a domain.
"Time Gate."
At the center of that ripple, a single beam of light compressed to the extreme shot up into the sky.
That brilliance, which lit the darkness as it tore through the air, took shape as a gate.
"Open."
SCREEEEEEK—!
With a shriek that stabbed at the eardrums, the gate opened.
Massive heat surged up from beyond it.
A cold, clammy, malevolent current seized control of the space.
And then—
"Reverse."
The world froze.
As if time itself had stopped, even the speck of dust drifting through the air came to a dead halt.
The pressure of time glued the space itself in place.
Immediately afterward—
WHOOOOOOSH!
The wide-open Time Gate began to devour everything that had been pinned by time's pressure.
Space was ripped away whole.
The undergrowth, the pebbles, the rocks—everything was torn free.
The enormous serpent before him was no exception.
The Time Gate finished feeding and quietly concealed that existence away.
And then...
The world from which everything had been torn away...
Void.
It exploded.
Emptiness swallowed the world.