Hello?
"Are you prepared?"
Before he drove the sword in, he looked around at the Three Noble Gods and asked.
"Once this is attempted, it cannot be undone. All that will remain is the difference between success and failure."
"We are resolved."
Amaterasu answered with a hand laid over her heart.
"Too many lives have slipped away beneath the excuse that we must not interfere overmuch in the mortal world. That is an original sin we are bound to bear for the rest of our lives. We do not wish to heap any more of it upon ourselves."
Tsukuyomi snapped his fan open. The lower half of his face vanished behind it; only his eyes showed above the edge.
"We believed in our children. Believed far too much. We forgot that even a god can err. We are not perfect, as Father and Mother were."
Grief, regret, anger, pride, doubt, sorrow, arrogance. The pride he had raised across long ages as a god lay open to be read, and he had sunk himself beneath a tide of tangled feeling. It was an anguish that belonged to Tsukuyomi himself, the epithet of moon god set aside.
"Before the mortal age arrived, when gods were masters of the world, I was young. All of us were. Highest rank or lowest, it made no difference. Each of us thought himself the center of the world."
Perhaps even their parents, the primordial gods, had been no different.
"Absurd, isn't it. An ending always exists. And yet we thought ourselves perfect, simply because we had slipped past the years and learned to handle a few workings of nature."
Susanoo touched his beloved sword. His palm closed around the hilt and let it go again, as if to confirm whether the blade was false or true. His brow twitched. Blood seeped from his thick lips.
"Our age had ended. Because of a single being who came from the infinite universe we had never even deigned to look upon."
I lost to him. I lost my beloved sword to him. My divinity broke because of him.
"……And to him, I lost the family I loved."
Glory that had seemed eternal passed like the turning of the seasons. The Amenohabakiri in his grip was a fake pressed so close to the true blade it nearly deceived the hand—an extension of his arm, forged by giving the concept of legend the shape of fantasy and by waking the memory stored in his body. The Sacred Realm held swords beyond counting, and still Susanoo had tempered this false beloved sword for a single reason: so he would never forget that day.
"After losing, and losing again, we siblings wandered without a place to go, and at last we raised the Shrine. We meant to recover our strength through human worship, and to lay plans for the days to come."
Self-mockery drew itself along the line of Tsukuyomi's eyes.
"In truth, we had fled, praying that he would never appear again. Absolute helplessness is a swamp there is no climbing out of. For us, who were gods, its depth was the abyss."
"But we overcame it. We crawled free of that swamp. By our strength alone? No."
Thanks to the children who had cultivated a paradise in the place they fled to. Thanks to the children they had regarded as nothing more than animals under their protection.
"The Shrine did not come this far because we were here."
It had been able to exist into the present only because so many had devoted themselves to it.
"We have done much that was wrong, and much has displeased us. More times than I can number, I have wanted to surrender my body to rage and cast down heavenly punishment."
Nor was it the Shrine alone. There were the irreversible atrocities committed by the descendants of the sun goddess, the people who had gone along with them, a pain that in the end never vanished, a hatred the years would never dilute.
"But we were no different."
God or not, they had been unable to do well from the beginning. There had always been children seeking a god, and as time passed their numbers only grew. They could not grant every wish. They were neither all-knowing nor all-powerful. They did not possess infinite energy, nor did they overflow with strength of mind. Down the years they were eternal; within a relationship, they were finite. They were no different from any other mortal. They erred. They misjudged. They wearied. They did things halfway. They ignored. They excused themselves.
The history of the Shrine always recorded that the gods had made only righteous judgments. Even when the unavoidable came, it was defined as a trial from the gods, and those who failed to overcome it were left to blame their own incompetence. That was a shell—a shell fitted over them by the people of each age, so the dignity of the gods would not be harmed.
Amaterasu remembered, clearly. She had stored every last fault in her heart and refused to forget them. But storing them was all she had done. The woman she had been when two suns descended upon the earth, and the woman she had been when the Shrine was first raised—there may have been a difference of maturity between them, and nothing beyond it. It's all right. It's all right. So she had comforted herself, and in the end she had driven herself to a place she could no longer avoid.
"Even a god is no different from a human. We have always committed mistakes. So many that we could scarcely bear to look upon tomorrow's sun."
"We could not set those mistakes right. We could not repay them. Ours was a seat of responsibility, and we took none. Even as the mouths heaped upon our shoulders grew fewer, we never truly felt it."
"Today, we sever that chain."
A deep resolve settled in Amaterasu's eyes.
"You can't—!"
Pele caught the Shrine Priest by the shoulder.
"It's a god's promise. There's no dodging it anymore."
"The Three Noble Gods have already sacrificed themselves for humans who amount to nothing. How could anyone ask them to sacrifice still more?"
"A god's time and a human's time aren't the same. To human eyes, it must feel like the gods have devoted themselves to you for thousands of years. They haven't. A year is a day, and a hundred years is a year. A mistake from centuries ago still comes at them like yesterday."
"Even so……"
"Hard to understand, I know. It'll feel completely out of nowhere. It's exactly like somebody you only knew by name suddenly showing up and reciting some grim, solemn vow."
"The Three Noble Gods are not people I merely know by name! They are the masters of the Shrine! The parents of Japan!"
"They're not strangers to you because you're their proxy. To most children they're just a phantom in a myth, a celebrity on TV. At that distance, they're strangers."
Favor lies far off. Pain sits close. By the time that favor arrives, a person is already brined in pain. The Three Noble Gods had watched it across thousands of years.
"All we have to do is watch, and cheer them on. That promise isn't for us. It's for themselves."
Pele offered her praise to the Three Noble Gods for choosing the harder road. She did not know them. She was seeing them for the first time today, and honestly she had no interest in what lives they had lived or what wrongs they had committed. But their voices were steeped in desperate will and resolve, and that was enough to move a heart. It was only a little more interest than cheering for a favorite team on television—yet if they failed, Pele thought it would hurt.
"Goddess of the volcano, I thank you for your consideration."
"Why are you thanking me?"
Pele waved a hand as if shooing a gnat.
"I'm not the one who's going to judge you. It's that kid over there, frozen stiff with a sword in his hand."
"……May I speak now?"
He lifted Amenomurakumo no Tsurugi a fraction and glanced around at the company. Eyes poured down on him hard enough to bend his back of its own accord. Amaterasu's gaze, above all, was dreadful.
"Somehow this turned into a scene of the Three Noble Gods favoring us with a fine speech. It's over, so let's hurry up and save the child."
"Honored guest. As the goddess of the volcano has said, would you be willing to test us?"
Amaterasu's eyes had gone moist.
"No."
I turned the mask into an X. Amaterasu clutched at her chest.
"……May I ask the reason?"
"Because anyone can do it with words alone."
Even if the words were true, so long as they never appeared as an actual result, they were only a wait with no promised end.
"You picked the wrong moment. A promise like that is something you make after you've shown us anything at all."
For instance.
"If you'd said it after saving this girl, it would have been a promise well worth looking forward to."
But.
"Every second counts, and you're suddenly putting on a show?"
So much time on your hands you're earning interest on the surplus, is that it?
"Save the chatter and get over here. Don't waste time on something useless."
An inch of iron—enough to kill.
Sliced to ribbons by nothing but words, Amaterasu forced her bitter anger down.
"You are entirely right……!"
She looked to Susanoo and Tsukuyomi and gave the order.
"Triangle formation. Be ready to answer the instant our guest drives the sword in."
At their sister's chilly voice, Tsukuyomi and Susanoo shuddered and snapped into motion.
"Looks like the preparations are done. We've dragged this out as far as it will drag, so I'll spare you the long speech and begin."
Thuk.
The sword ran through the girl's heart with ease. Blood welled and surged from her chest.
"Hmmmm…… No reaction?"
Strange. The sword is the real one.
"I'll drive it in deeper."
"W-wait……!"
Before Amaterasu could stop him, he shoved the blade until it burst out beneath the bed. The girl only bucked at the waist. Blood spilled from the corner of her mouth, and she died.
"Tch. Why is this happening?"
How is this any different from Dan Miryong? Didn't it go about the same with him?
"Feels like something got fucked. But let's wait. There can't be no reaction."
In the original, she'd lived through worse than this. The way of saving her is different from back then, though. And this is after the successor was altered a little further by the Great Shrine Maiden.
The air had gone cold.
"Come on, kid. Try getting up."
Pat. Pat.
He tapped the child's cheeks, lightly. Her head dropped. Between the strands of her hair, a horn had pushed through—faint, but growing.
"Oh."
I called out to the others, as if to tell them there was nothing to fear.
"It's all right! There's a reaction! The horn is growing—"
Crunch.
"Huh?"
My neck hurt. Something had bitten me. When I looked, the girl had rolled her eyes back and was gnawing steadily at my neck with teeth like a shark's. I changed the mask to a little picture of someone saying hello.
"Hello?"
————!!!
I was slammed down through the bed as it shattered.
Oh. She's shy.