Epiphany Festival
“…Pfft.”
“…?”
The sudden appearance of a figure in the empty prayer chamber, and the language of Arkish.
That combination left me dazed, and then a light laugh brushed my ear.
“Aha! I’m kidding, kidding. You really think a god—however you slice it—would be bound by a language made by humans?”
“…Edel?”
“Yep. Edel, at your service!”
The woman—Edel—flashed a breezy V sign beside her eye.
Judging from the divine power spilling off her, and that strange presence that set her apart from ordinary people, it did seem like it was really Edel.
…So this was a god?
This?
“Isn’t that a little rude to the thing itself?”
“Huh?”
I had been thinking it, yes, but I hadn’t said it out loud.
…Come to think of it, a moment ago Edel had said something like, “You really think a god—however you slice it—would be bound by a language made by humans?”
Was she reading my mind?
“Bingo~! Well, not all of it. Your poor little sparrow-brain is annoyingly high-spec, so it’s not exactly easy to read.”
“So it really is Edel.”
“Didn’t I just tell you that?”
She had, yes.
I only found it hard to believe because I’d never dreamed a god would speak so casually.
At this rate, she sounded less like a deity and more like some unemployed layabout you’d find in any village.
“...Hey, you didn’t forget that I can read your thoughts, did you?”
I knew. It was convenient.
“You’re a strange one.”
People usually kept their distance when someone said they could read minds. But far from recoiling, I’d called it convenient.
With those words, Edel looked down at me with luminous silver eyes.
“Still, if possible, could you just say things out loud? Like I said before, your thoughts are pretty hard to read.”
“Got it.”
“Good, good. So, my little sparrow—what brought you all the way out here from so far away?”
She could read my mind, so she already knew why I’d come, but Edel asked anyway, all innocence and mischief.
What had I come here to ask?
I’d traveled all the way to the Holy Kingdom determined to ask Edel the questions I had, but I had never imagined she would descend in person. Even if I’d expected an answer, I’d only thought I’d get a revelation at best—
“I don’t think even a revelation would be something you could brush off as ‘at best.’”
…Anyway, so stunned was I that I’d forgotten everything I’d been preparing to say, and I needed a moment to gather my thoughts.
It hadn’t been something I’d thought about for long, so it didn’t take much time to remember what I’d nearly forgotten.
Before long, I opened my mouth.
“-Are you the administrator?”
“….”
At my question, Edel’s smiling face froze as if I’d struck her dumb.
Just as I had a moment ago, she seemed to sort through her thoughts, and at last she answered.
“I know your habits already, but could you at least call me Edel? I’m a god, you know. It makes me sound terribly unseemly.”
Beginning with words that had little to do with my question, Edel stepped lightly across the chamber.
She crossed to the statue fashioned in her likeness and leaned herself against it.
I hadn’t realized it before seeing her, but there was a rather glaring gap between Edel’s statue and her actual appearance.
Honestly, if someone told me to find Edel by looking at that statue, I might never have recognized her.
Still, how many people had ever seen Edel in the flesh?
The ones who had were probably already lying in coffins.
Thinking that made it sink in all over again just how absurd this situation was—standing face-to-face with Edel herself, of all things.
“For someone who talks like that, you don’t seem very moved. Still—there’s no point in denying it here, is there? I honestly didn’t think you’d come right out and ask so bluntly.”
With a faintly put-out look, Edel let out a small sigh.
“When did you start suspecting?”
“Who knows.”
If I had to say when, it was probably when I ate that stir-fried rice so spicy it made my head feel like it was about to explode.
That kind of searing heat, sharp enough to wake forgotten memories, wasn’t easy to find in this world of Silia.
But if that had been all, I wouldn’t have suspected anything.
“It was strange. So many people crossed over from a continent across the sea I hadn’t even known existed, and you granted them your blessing.”
“The demons came over that way too.”
“But the demons weren’t accepted so easily.”
After all, that was why the two racial wars had happened in the first place.
The native Silians hadn’t been able to accept the demons who wanted to settle on the Ardeena Continent.
Of course, I understood perfectly well why the Silians had resisted their settlement to the bitter end, so I wasn’t trying to blame them.
I was simply saying it was so.
“Even taking your blessing into account, Edel, it’s still strange that such a massive number of Apostles could settle here without any serious backlash.”
And that wasn’t the only strange thing.
“The power of resurrection, which is hard to find even if you dig through the continent’s history books; their manner of speech and conduct, so unlike the Silians despite coming from another continent; their growth, far too fast to be normal.”
Those were only the most obvious points. If you asked me to keep going, I could have listed plenty more.
I had barely interacted with the Apostles at all, yet even I felt the incongruity. The people who had spent far more time with them didn’t seem to notice anything out of place.
They just waved it off with, “Well, they’re Lady Edel’s Apostles, so I guess that makes sense.”
That, more than anything, only deepened my suspicion.
And then—
“What really confirmed it was Journey.”
What finally drove the nail into my suspicion’s coffin was Journey’s behavior.
However much she liked talking to herself, she did it way too much.
It was almost like she was conversing with someone.
Even without that, her words and actions were enough to stir a homesickness for some long-buried homeland in the back of my memory.
That was one reason I’d decided to travel with her.
“You were already suspicious. Why didn’t you tell her?”
“If this really was the world inside a game, like I thought, then telling her would only make things worse for me.”
A game character realizing she was one of the people inside the game and speaking to a player? If it hadn’t been deliberately built that way, it wouldn’t have been strange for her to be deleted on the spot.
Come to think of it, the fact that I remembered something like this while everything else had gone fuzzy meant my past self must have really loved games.
“Heeey… but if that’s true, isn’t it still dangerous now?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Maybe even the thought I was having now had been manipulated by someone else.
Maybe I was just a character built on the concept of “a man who lived on Earth in his previous life and was reincarnated in another world.”
“I’d rather die than live as a puppet. I just didn’t want to die before I knew the answer.”
“…Relax. You’re not a puppet or anything like that. If I had to call you anything… yes, I suppose you’d be a sword.”
“A sword?”
A sword, carefully sharpened and tucked safely against one’s chest for when danger came.
Edel, having said something I couldn’t quite parse, went on.
“To sum it up, you were half right and half wrong. Like you thought, this world is a game, but…”
Edel spun around once.
Was it just my imagination? Her body seemed a little more blurred than before.
“At the same time, it’s also a real world.”
“…What do you mean?”
It was either real or it wasn’t. What was this, half-fried, half-seasoned chicken?
Without meaning to, I asked with a sour edge in my voice, and she gave me a wry smile.
“Don’t think about it too hard. It’s a real world, and people from another world crossed over into it. Just think of it that way, wouldn’t that be enough?”
Unlike you, they crossed over through the game.
I understood her explanation, but I still couldn’t accept it.
“That’s possible?”
If that were true, it would mean Earth’s technology had advanced enough to turn an entire other world into a game.
How much time had passed since I died for something like that to become possible?
“Of course not. However advanced technology gets, do you really think it can surpass the power of a god?”
Edel agreed at once.
“If this world had been normal, and my power still intact, then yes. You know it already, don’t you? The beings I did not shape, the beings that did not belong to this world. The beings that invade by crossing dimensions.”
At those words, something flashed through my mind.
Since I had fought one of them not long ago, it wasn’t hard to recall.
“I fought them for a very long time. By human reckoning… for more than a few hundred years. But in the end, I lost. What came of that was—”
“Dimensional Beasts.”
“That’s right.”
It was a breezy answer, almost startlingly so.
The Dimensional Beasts had first appeared on the continent when I was four years old, so it had only been about thirteen years ago.
Which meant Edel had fallen back then, too.
“Because of them, my world was gnawed away, ruined, and broken. And when a world breaks, the power of its god naturally weakens as well.”
“Earth’s people took advantage of that opening and turned this world into a game?”
“Huh? No, no! No matter how much my power has faded, do you really think mere humans could humiliate me like that?”
“Then why did it become like this?”
“Heh, are you getting annoyed? How cute.”
Edel caught my irritation instantly and laughed under her breath.
No, not like a ghost—like a real god.
I looked at her sourly.
“Turning this world into a game was my choice. I thought it was the best possible move.”
“…Turning it into a game was the best possible move?”
“I made a contract with Earth’s god… though I suppose, in your terms, I should call him the administrator.”
With an expression that somehow looked melancholy, she continued.
“I agreed to turn Silia, the world I love beyond all reason, into a game and bind it to his world—in exchange for preserving this world’s existence.”
If it had remained as it was, the only future waiting for this world was destruction.
As she said it, all manner of emotion clung to her voice.
“That’s why I said you were half right and half wrong. I’m both the god and the administrator of the world that became a game… Silia Online.”
So? How does it feel to have guessed right?
Happy? Disappointed? Relieved?
To Edel’s question, I answered honestly.
“If I’m being honest—”
“Mm-hm, mm-hm.”
“It sucks.”
“Aha! Right? I think so too!”
Edel burst out laughing and clutched her stomach.
…What exactly was so funny?
I couldn’t make sense of it at all.