Consider It a Little Extra
There was a road that led toward Forever.
"……."
Dan Chuyeon spared no particular interest for the vast cosmic vista opening around him. The only things that held him were the substance waiting somewhere far ahead, and the man.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Behind his back, and beneath his feet, his homeland was meeting its end. He did not look back. He had come this far on the sacrifices of his companions, and the right path was not to let himself be snared by worthless thoughts, but to put an end to this damned mess as quickly as he could.
"If I just have Forever, I can put everything back the way it was."
He set his foot on the bridge of stars. With every step the stars rippled, and Dan Chuyeon kept walking into a universe that had no end.
Far off, a great gate floated in the void, and the pictures adorning it blazed in splendid light. Dan Chuyeon laid both hands against it.
"Another One. You in there?"
Before he opened the gate, he spoke to his old enemy.
"Even after coming all this way, I still can't stop wondering. What the hell you were trying to pull with all this bullshit."
He had separated five materials out of Forever himself. Why gather them again? He could have collected them perfectly well without reducing the world to a wreck, so why do it? And what was this Ideal World he had been chasing?
"It's time you told me."
With a sound that could not be named, the door began to open.
His old enemy was there. Wrapped in darkness, the Absolute who had worked the world in the shape of a man stood in arrogant stillness.
"……Another One."
He had seen that figure more times than he could count, but now that the moment had come to face him properly, Dan Chuyeon's mouth went bone-dry. He hauled his power up as far as it would go, bracing for an attack, and at the same time searched for where Forever was.
There……!
Behind his enemy, above the stairs, something floated in the act of creating a universe. Forever. The substance that would end everything was right there.
Dan Chuyeon walked toward Another One, who guarded the foot of the stairs like a gatekeeper.
"Another One. Let's finish this."
The pressure closed in. Breathing grew difficult.
"………."
Another One said nothing. He simply stood there. Dan Chuyeon bit down on his lip.
Is he ignoring me…….
The man did not hold any real conversation with someone who failed to meet his standard. No—he did not treat them as people at all. He switched his interest off completely, the way one ignores a stone lying in the road.
Dan Chuyeon had grown strong by passing through hardship. Even beings on the level of chief gods had come to seem laughable, and Heaven itself had declared that no one on Earth could defeat him.
Everyone but the one in front of him.
"I don't know what kind of test you've got ready……."
Nature devoured the cosmos. The universe, which had been nothing but darkness and radiance, rewrote itself into the landscape of Earth.
"I'll smash that pathetic arrogance of yours."
Dan Chuyeon moved. Nature surged up in a dragon's roar and passed judgment on the Absolute. A judgment that would not end went on, and on…….
"………."
Another One was untouched. Not even dust clung to his sleeve.
"Hah. Hah."
Dan Chuyeon shook his head against the despair rising in his throat. This could not be. He had grown stronger and stronger, and still the road to his enemy had never felt so far.
"Damn it!"
Swallowing his fury, Dan Chuyeon charged. He meant to land at least one blow before he died.
Thud!
The hit landed solid.
"………."
"………."
Their eyes met. Only then did Dan Chuyeon notice that something was wrong.
"Huh?"
Nature whispered, and blank disbelief washed over his face.
"……He's dead?"
The enemy he had thrown everything at had never been alive to begin with.
"What the hell is this……."
He could not believe it. Which meant that he himself had failed to leave so much as a scratch on a man who was already dead.
"Fuck……."
And so the match that would decide the fate of the universe came to an end.
The moment I spoke a single ending, Another One went rigid.
Clothes that had been stirring in the wind stopped dead in the air. The darkness I had been able to perceive as color returned to nothing. The gaze I had faintly sensed was gone, and there was nothing in front of me at all.
Was he shocked by his own ending?
No. This man was not someone who could be shocked by a thing like that. It was not the judgment of a reader who had seen the original. It was an assessment made person to person.
The years Another One had lived approached eternity itself. He was a monster among monsters, one who had endured a span of time no exact number could express. He might well have been older than the blue star under our feet. There was no chance he would grow sentimental over something as small as death.
Of course, he was still, strictly speaking, a living being. He had wounds. He had feelings. Even if an eternity of living had sickened him of life, death could still frighten him. That belonged to instinct, and it was why the Book of Death could strike an instinctive terror into him.
But I saw it differently. The reason he had frozen solid, like the Han River in the dead of winter, was that he had sunk into thought.
Someone might ask what was so remarkable about thinking. This man had no need for the ordinary turning of a mind—laying plans, working through a worry. Why? Because he had already been through nearly everything. Experience piled upon experience upon experience. Even when there was nothing left to pile and the whole of it collapsed, he piled it again, and again, and he had gone on living until it rotted all the way through.
Even if a war broke out tomorrow, even if the Earth ended tomorrow, could an eternity really have lacked events of that scale? He would have lived through them until he was sick of them.
And one thing more. Curiosity about the Origin was nothing special to him either. He talked as if he wondered, as if he wanted to know, but if he had truly wanted to know, he would have used an entirely different method. And I would not have been able to resist it. The inhabitants of the Origin? A phantom thief? Chaos? None of it would have mattered. Time would only have dragged. The result would have been the same.
And yet now he had sunk into thought. He was trying, the way other people did, to draw a conclusion from the problem set before him. That conclusion would lie close to prophecy, as if he had looked straight into the world's answer sheet—close enough to make the prophecies of the Prophet under Terra's protection look like a fraud.
"………Hm."
His thinking seemed finished at last. Time, which had stopped, began to turn again.
"How was it, troubling yourself for the first time in so long?"
"Hm."
Another One looked up at the sky and stroked the darkness.
"……Night, is it. How much time has passed?"
"About ten minutes."
"Ten minutes……. Ten minutes, was it……."
He could not quite gather himself, like a man not fully woken.
"……Hoo."
Only after another ten minutes did Another One let out a sigh.
"It has been so long since I did anything like thinking that it felt strange. Fortunate that so little time went by."
"How long passed inside the thought?"
"Roughly ten thousand years? I cannot be certain. My sense of time was a mess. It may have been a hundred million."
It sounded like a joke. It did not feel like one.
"You must have had a great deal to think about."
"Even I was surprised I could concentrate that hard. It felt like going back to the old days."
Another One rolled his shoulders straight.
"I do not know what to do with this."
"You thought that long, and still reached no conclusion?"
"I built plenty of hypotheses……."
He shook his head.
"A hypothesis is only a hypothesis. It could not become certainty."
"A hypothesis close to the right answer, I imagine."
"It may be."
Another One let the words trail away.
"Why did you kill yourself?"
Another One's suicide. An ending for the ages, one that blew the work apart and earned a name fit for infamy: a dragon-headed suicide, the old slight for a tale that begins like a dragon twisted into a self-inflicted void. Comb through every story ever made, and you would not find a final boss who died so emptily. Even endings laid with the most meticulous foreshadowing were cursed in those days, and he had simply died for no reason at all…….
Not one reader had wondered why Another One took his own life. Their affection had already left for good, and they did not even want to speak of it. But now that I had come into the world of the work, I could ask the man himself why he had died.
"……Who can say."
Another One stroked his chin.
"……It would not have been a sudden choice."
"Then……."
It had been thoroughly planned?
"A supposition. I do not know the circumstances on that side."
But—
"If I did kill myself all at once."
I swallowed.
"There must have been some particular reason I only understood at the very end."
"……And what is that?"
"I do not know. That one and I are the same, and we are not."
He breathed out.
"The reason I killed myself……. I cannot even imagine it."
Another One looked genuinely stifled.
"……May I ask just one thing?"
"So long as it is not important."
"Hss. It is important, though……."
"What is it?"
"After I died. How did the world end?"
"………Hm."
Should I tell him? If I did, would that choked feeling in him clear all at once? I tried to weigh the gain against the loss, and realized it was meaningless. Given time, it was a truth he would reach anyway.
"……Dan Chuyeon used Forever."
"What did he think?"
"…The wish he made was this."
"Tsk. Nothing worth looking at, then."
Another One clicked his tongue. The darkness warped.
"To think he would end, with his own hands, the very world he had wanted so badly to protect."
"It would have been better if he had only turned time back."
"That would not have worked either. The measure of time is different. If you mean to manipulate time, the Door of Space is better."
A meaningless remark, now that Forever was complete. Another One and I looked at the moon. The full moon still shone on the both of us.
"May I ask just one last thing?"
"What is it?"
"In the Origin, you went on and on about your Ideal World. Do you truly pursue that Ideal World?"
"………."
Another One smiled a smile that might have meant he would answer, and might have meant he would not.
"Let us leave that for later. That Ideal World may yet change."
"……I see."
"But I can promise you it is not so difficult a thing."
In the end, it came close to peace.
"I will be going. Thank you for the time. I will buy you a meal one of these days. And this."
Pop.
A USB appeared in front of me.
"Consider it a little extra."
"Well. Take care."
"Have a good trip to Japan."
Another One melted into the darkness and was gone.
Whoooosh.
The wind swept the place where he had stood. I touched the USB and looked up. The full moon was gone.
"I should sleep."
I stretched, and went home.
The next morning, the day to leave for Japan had dawned.