What Is Your Name?

Another One.

The final boss of Forever. Dan Chuyeon's last opponent, and the being who had twisted the Earth however he pleased. In Part Three of Forever, where the balance of power had gone completely to shit, he was the marvel that took the summit as if it had always been his.

Can I win?

For the first time. Truly—for the first time, I was afraid. I had read the original. Another One was a monster whose very existence might as well have been the author's self-insert, doted on like a daughter, and even the backstory was a shock in its own right.

Another One was a living thing that had come from space to Earth. He was an alien. In the full flourish of the Age of Myth he arrived utterly alone, a certain substance in his hand, and he looked upon the thousands of gods arrayed to meet him. Before the countless divinities spread across the Earth's domain—celestial gods, any one of whom might have ruled the world and none would have called it strange—Another One let fall a single sentence.

"This should be amusing."

After that, the Age of Myth ended in the alien's hands. The feat was his alone. He finished mythology the way a man settles an empty stomach at lunch, handed lordship of the world to humankind, and split the substance he had carried out of the cosmos into five.

The Stone of Resurrection. The Book of Death. The Door of Space. The Crown of Mind. The Tablet of Records. These five materials, each bearing an absolute concept, scattered to the ends of the Earth, and Another One hid himself away with nothing but the dregs left once they were cut apart.

An unreckonable span of time passed. Now, at last, he had shown himself in the present age, wearing the title of the phantom thief's fan, and he stood before me.

"Not going to move?"

"……"

Another One rolled his ankle, slow and easy. The motion looked like a man checking that his foot was still properly attached. At that trifling gesture, my body answered on its own.

"Silver Thread?"

A thin line took shape in empty air. A silver blade wound about him and bound him fast.

"Acceptable, for a first move."

Another One tipped his head. The tilt said, go on, then, if you think you can. There was confidence in it, and leisure to spare.

"You will not regret it."

I drew the Silver Thread—not with my hand, but with my will. The thread had no physical body. From first to last it was born of me, a phantom thief's power. Poised between matter and what was not matter, it bared its teeth at the prey.

A phantom sound reached me, something being wrung tight. There is no sound in this world. Even our conversation was an exchange of will, not of language. And yet the hallucination reassured me: your attack was not in vain. A hallucination, though, is only a hallucination. It was not the truth.

"Dull."

"……!"

The thread burst apart as helplessly as a spiderweb striking a man. A single step. That was all.

"Is this the end……"

"It isn't."

An explosion erupted underfoot, and black flame swallowed Another One whole.

"Nothing but the physical? No attack for the mind?"

"This isn't your show, is it?"

The smoke thinned of its own accord, and Another One stepped clear.

"Weren't you the one who finds the cracks in an enemy's mind and slowly brings him down from the inside, with fear and with confusion?"

"Or else—"

"Have you decided, this late, that you want to show me something new?"

"I'd rather see a new attempt like that some other time."

"I don't want to see it now."

"I want to see it when my ears decide they're interested."

"Do it the way you always have."

"Phantom."

From Another One's hand, countless trump cards spilled. My cards.

The mask cracked. Not like the cracks that had been carved into it before. These warped it from the inside out.

"Something's different."

Another One's voice dropped, just a little.

"Something's lacking."

A footstep. Then a second.

A slender spear punched out through my chest. Strange, scholarly characters ran from the point of the blade all the way down the shaft—a phonetic script used by the ancient Germanic peoples. Runes. The runes cut into the blade announced what the spear was. The divine weapon of the god who had offered one eye to the Well of Wisdom. The trembling one. Gungnir.

"Ghk."

A mouthful of blood came up. Drop by drop it fell from beneath the mask, one and then another. While I thrashed against the spear, lightning cracked down through the shaft.

"——!!!"

It was a lightning of another order entirely from any I had known. Lightning that mocked nature from dozens of dimensions above. Few bolts in existence could shock me like this. A single name drove itself into my skull: the great lightning forged by the first giants, the weapon of a god who had made sport of everything under heaven. Astrape.

The weapons of two chief gods were killing me.

Something crunched. Nerves burned. Bone went to powder. Hundreds of lights flickered and died in my eyes.

"……You don't die after all."

Another One sounded honestly impressed.

"Even for a being of ‍‍‌‌⁠⁠‌‍‍‌⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠‌‌‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the Origin, isn't this too much? These are the weapons of the two most famous gods in the world. You take both of them and you don't die! How can anything be this unreasonable?"

Then what does that make you, handling the pair of them like toys?

I wanted to throw it back at him. Open my mouth, though, and only lightning would have come out.

"Is the body simply that sturdy, or is the recovery that absurd…… Then what about this?"

Just as Gungnir was nearly drawn free, another spear settled lightly at my shoulder and pressed into the flesh. Yellow light shone from it with an arrogant gleam. A weapon with the power to seal healing—the arm of a warrior who died by his lord's three mistakes. Gae Buidhe.

"A mere hero's weapon has no effect."

Before a god's armament, it was a lesser thing. In the modern age, though, this too was a divine relic, and he had thrown that relic as a test, as if something of this grade could be discarded without a thought. He drew Gungnir out the rest of the way and tossed Gae Buidhe onto the floor. Astrape seared my whole body over and over, but I turned myself hazy and slipped free.

"Have you anything more?"

"Hardly. This is not the end of my collection."

There were too many to boast of them all.

To the right. He tipped his chin, and something raked past my neck and was gone, spinning like a boomerang. He who came from the primordial waters—the weapon of the god charged with preservation, among creation, destruction, and preservation. A chakram that had, thrown once, annihilated an army and struck an aerial fortress from the sky. Sudarshana.

I drove my face into its path as it came back around. Stopped by the mask, Sudarshana spun without end; the wind of that rotation alone could have raised a typhoon. I tilted my neck at a razor's angle and slammed Sudarshana into the ground. A hammer followed at once. Short in the handle, pregnant with lightning—a divine weapon. The smasher. Mjolnir.

It took me, and my body flew backward at the speed of an airplane lashed across my back.

"Think you can endure it?"

Keeping pace with that speed, clouds formed in the sky and slowly descended. Little by little. Little by little. And then ‍‍‌‌⁠⁠‌‍‍‌⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠‌‌‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I understood. Of course. They were not clouds. They were weapons, countless, beyond any counting, merely packed so densely they could be mistaken for cloud—from arms that anyone who knew myth had heard of, to arms never recorded and long since forgotten. There were so many. Enough that I could not trust myself to escape.

"This."

I might die.

A rain of myth broke over me.

◇◇◇◆◇◇◇

Another One flicked the shaft of the spear planted before him. It was the spear that had gone out first against the phantom thief, and he treated it like dust drifting across a room.

"It mustn't end at this."

If the living died to the leavings of the dead, would that not be far too dull? Another One fixed his gaze on the field of weapons. The one he was waiting for had to come out. This was nothing but the opening ceremony.

"……Yes!"

Delighted, Another One slapped his own knee, a gesture that did not suit him in the least. He swallowed the urge to run, then and there, to the silhouette rising out of that field.

"You can do more than this, can't you?"

The silhouette came toward him with a riot of myths in bloom across his back. Another One waited, fretful as a child waiting on ice cream. Patience he had stacked star for star across the universe began, from this instant, to burn away at speed.

"Bring out everything inside you."

You still ‍‍‌‌⁠⁠‌‍‍‌⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠‌‌‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠haven't shown me that. Another One pressed on, fervent.

"Show me the true essence of the Origin!"

"Give me the unknown!"

"Human of the Origin! Chaos of the Origin!"

"That which does not exist here—give it to me!"

The silhouette dropped.

"……Hm?"

"Is this a joke?"

Another One called to the fallen figure, almost pleading.

"Or groundwork for the next attack?"

"Say something, won't you."

"Hello?"

He spoke into empty air where no one stood. Nothing answered. He sucked a breath through his teeth and smacked his lips, steeped in regret. The disappointment was as large as the hope had been.

"If you don't want to play with me, you need only say so."

Is it really going to peter out like this?

"Fine. Come back later."

"And don't do this next time."

"Where are you going?"

"……!"

A feeling that had slept through an eternity surfaced. It smashed the walls stacked tier upon tier, ran from the spinal cord up into the brain, and forced the memory upon him in a single stroke. It was a fundamental terror.

"Yes. This is how it ought to be."

"This is what I saw. This is what I felt!"

"You can do it……!"

"Can't you……!"

He never finished the last of it. The mask had fallen, and the man was looking at him with his face laid entirely bare.

The pressure is different. He isn't the same man as a moment ago……!

"Who are you?"

Another One doubted he would ever, in all his life, ask a better question.

"Phantom?"

"The Chaos of the Origin?"

The man drew the fallen mask across his palm in one slow pass.

"I am myself."

Not Phantom. Not Chaos, either.

"Just someone who sent the author a letter to mark the ending."

"Only a reader."

"I see. ‍‍‌‌⁠⁠‌‍‍‌⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠‌‌‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠So you're human."

"A person."

The Chaos that had been toying with him thinned. The impurity blocking the road ahead fell away, and this man grew a little more whole. The existence he had never been able to bring to a conclusion, he fixed at last as one.