Drink your justice(3)
Damien’s gaze dropped to the floor. …It was a posture devoid of confidence. Nothing like the hero from the original story I knew. In the source material, he had been obsessed with the holy sword, toying with the women around him while mocking the player.
“…All I could do was run from the future that had already been decided.”
Now he was laying his honest feelings bare before me. “No matter how many times I warned the people around me about the future I saw and told them to evacuate, it never made any difference.”
His shoulders trembled faintly. Fear was written all over him. …How much solitude had he been forced to swallow alone? It was an emotion I could never fully grasp.
“But everything changed after I met you, Shade. The moment you appeared in the future, the world itself began to shift.”
“If that’s true, then your obsession with me isn’t all that strange. Everyone reacts the same way.”
I couldn’t bring myself to empathize, yet I understood. A fixed future. An inescapable ruin. I knew exactly how fragile people became when confronted with such things.
“My friend was the same.”
…And I also knew how strong they could become. Because Yuho had been that way.
Even while living on borrowed time, she had chosen to stay with me and gambled everything on a single operation. A fifty-percent success rate. Later, her father told me she had bet her entire future on heart surgery that offered only a coin-flip chance of survival. If it had succeeded, I could have kept living my life even after the college entrance exams.
“…A friend?”
“Yeah. Her name was An Yuho. Beautiful black hair, like ebony.”
I nodded at Damien’s question. She was probably still alive somewhere in this world. Just thinking of her brought a smile to my lips. I shouldn’t be smiling like this.
“…I’ve never heard that name before.”
“You wouldn’t have. She’s someone only I know.”
After arriving in this world, I had no choice but to abandon my old name. A Korean name was too difficult to pronounce in this fantasy realm… and far too alien.
“But if that friend of mine had known this world was being devoured by a false god…”
“If she had known, then what?”
“…She would have prepared a countermeasure, wouldn’t she?”
I clenched my right hand. The white phone Yuho had given me inside that nightmare. Whenever I thought of that symbol, I could roughly guess what she was planning. She was aiming for a variable that even Cthulhu wouldn’t anticipate.
“As if to prove it, I now possess a means to resist the Outer God.”
“What is it?”
“…Abraxas. It’s connected to your name, but you don’t know it?”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard it, too. You really do keep a lot of secrets.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“…I have no rebuttal.”
I informed Damien of the existence of the status window. I had originally thought it was meant to block any approach toward gacha characters.
“Anyway, Abraxas’s ability is probably ‘forgetting.’”
That was my conclusion based on everything I had felt so far. It filtered out anything related to Cthulhu, as if protecting everyone from him.
“Why do you think that?”
Damien tilted his head, clearly skeptical, then nodded. “Your companions don’t remember meeting you as children or having any connection to you.”
“…That does seem to be the case.”
He nodded again. Perhaps that was why Lavi’s attitude had changed so abruptly—she had recalled a fragment of her memories involving me.
“Maybe it’s to keep Cthulhu from learning about me… or perhaps it’s protecting me until I grow strong enough.”
I wiggled my fingers slightly. Damien still hadn’t let go of my hand. …It was starting to get sweaty and uncomfortable, so I wanted him to release it. But Damien merely shook his head lightly, as if it were nothing. Was he deliberately teasing me while knowing the future?
“Well, I don’t actually think there’s no way to kill Cthulhu.”
I offered the hero a hopeful remark. From the moment Yuho had asked me to end the infinite loop, several possibilities had come to mind.
“What is it?”
“We break it the same way—with a story. We create a new myth.”
After all, the beings that gained power were creations written by humans. Pulp fiction. The Cthulhu Mythos itself was nothing more than a deity invented by H.P. Lovecraft for entertainment. It was the complete opposite of why humans originally wrote myths. Unlike the gods born from mortals’ fear of lightning and earthquakes, their terror of death, and their desire for justice, this one was different.
If they were truly Outer Gods from beyond the stars—beings from the unknown, the touchstone of humanity’s extinction as the cardinal had said—then—
“We have the holy sword. We have Lavi… and above all, we have a hero who knows the future.”
Right in front of me stood Damien and his companions. Humans chosen by the gods. A character from a novel published around the same time as The Call of Cthulhu, wielding a holy sword tied to Norse mythology that humanity had built. Even chess, the game of intellect… Goethe once said—
“Isn’t that far too generous? I had placed all my hopes on you, Shade.”
Damien smiled softly, having caught on that I was talking about him. He really did have the kind of face that made people call him a beautiful boy. …Even I, another man, found myself slightly drawn to it.
“In my opinion, it won’t be a hero who writes the new myth. It will be an ordinary human.”
“So that’s why you handed me the holy sword?”
“Yes, of course. The story of a human abandoned by the gods… becoming the brightest light that shines from the darkest depths. A true hero.”
Damien interlaced his fingers with mine. “…No matter how you look at it, this version is far more interesting, don’t you think? That’s what I believe.”
He squeezed tightly. The hero was applying silent pressure, making sure I couldn’t escape.
“Something imperfect shattering and driving away something perfect… That’s the kind of story that feels like a true myth, Shade.”
“If it’s Cthulhu, it’s not impossible. That guy’s already lost a lot of his power.”
I smiled at Damien as if to tell him not to worry. If the being devouring this world had been a higher god like Azathoth, it would have been far more difficult. But since the opponent was Cthulhu, the situation was different. He had become too famous, passed through too many hands, and grown weaker… His power had been diluted to the point where he was practically a third-rate creation.
…Besides, in his first appearance in the original The Call of Cthulhu, a steamship had rammed his head and canceled his resurrection ritual. Defeating him wasn’t entirely impossible. Of course, the protagonist suffered nightmares about the end every night, and there were theories that what had been dealt with was only a shadow, so I couldn’t let my guard down completely.
“If he’s truly a divine being from beyond the stars merely borrowing a name and form, then we can’t defeat him perfectly. But…”
The fact that the original game had been an eight-week seasonal format lingered in my mind. ∞. Turned on its side, it meant infinity.
…She had probably been aiming for that. Eternity repeated as infinity, and thereby gained completeness. However—
“My friend isn’t the type to fight a battle she knows she’ll lose.”
If it wasn’t a perfect infinity but a finite loop with a predetermined end, and if even the slightest possibility of defeating the Outer God existed—not zero percent, but 0.00…1 percent—then An Yuho would never have given up on this fight.
“Besides, beating someone stronger than herself is one of her specialties.”
After all, there were people who had beaten AI. There was no reason she couldn’t do it.
* * *
—[Heh, you really haven’t changed at all. Same as always.]
Damien felt a twinge of irritation as he watched Sinclair laughing beside him. What was that? She clearly wasn’t talking about herself… A strange jealousy welled up inside her, twisting her lips.
Emil Sinclair—another possible version of herself—Shade wouldn’t know about her unless he possessed future sight. No, even if he did, it would be difficult to know. Among countless possibilities, the vision that had begun appearing around the age of seven belonged to a rather peculiar person. Perhaps she had married Shade and her personality had changed.
…Just thinking about it annoyed her more.
“Do you perhaps have a plan going forward, Shade?”
She deliberately asked him a question even though she could see the future. Sinclair’s earlier words and actions had been bothering her. Shade’s choices, which could change fate, would be far more reliable than an incomplete future prediction.
…Probably.
“We need to go to Luna’s homeland. The World Tree should give us more clues.”
At that, Shade once again brought up another woman. This time it was Luna Moonwalker. Just coming to Lavi’s homeland, the Holy Kingdom of Elysium, had already caused this much trouble. Now there might be another rival.
“…Do we really have to?”
Damien felt a slight sting to her pride. Once they dealt with the Outer God, she could show him that the prettiest and cutest girl was right in front of him. A pure-hearted heroine who had loved only one man for thirteen years. …Even having lived as a man for so long, she was straightforward and unpretentious, so she could act without distance from other women without issue. Why didn’t he understand? One of her should be enough.
“The elves’ World Tree holds souls, doesn’t it? And all living things can communicate through that tree.”
Shade continued speaking his thoughts, seemingly unaware of Damien’s slightly sharpened gaze.
“…Who are you planning to talk to?”
“The first hero. If that doesn’t work, then even a previous hero. I want to meet them and have a conversation.”
No matter how erased their names were, no matter how little trace remained—
…Through the World Tree, he believed he could confirm that they had once existed.