A Small Gift
"That place? Where exactly have you locked him up?"
When I asked, Chronos broke into a thin smile.
"I knew Lord Karma would take an interest."
I had only meant to ask whether such a prison even existed, but Chronos seemed to have taken it another way.
"Ah, you share a history with him as well, do you not? I heard he slaughtered your subordinates."
Back then, yes.
Though I was the one who arranged it that way.
Who would have thought that little performance would lead all the way here?
"I knew this one's small gift would please you."
And since it saved me the trouble of hunting Laward down myself, if he asked whether I liked it—well, I did lean that way.
Thump—
Chronos set the coffin he had been carrying on his back down onto the ground and looked at me.
"This way."
Clunk!
The lid of the coffin swung open, and a wind blew out from inside, brushing past my hair.
Wind was blowing from within an empty coffin.
No matter how you looked at it, the sight made no sense.
"Enter here and you will arrive."
Go into the coffin.
Ordinarily that would mean death, yet Chronos spoke as if he were simply pointing out a doorway.
As I stared at the coffin, Chronos nodded.
"Even if it does not sit well with you, there is no other choice. This is merely a path that leads elsewhere."
The coffin becomes a road.
Coffin.
Different characters, yet a word that can also mean passage.
In my memory, Chronos's coffin had held Chronos himself.
Yet now it was empty.
And wind passed through it from the inside.
Unless my memory was faulty, either there were several coffins, or the thing could change form.
Besides, I already knew of something like this.
I already owned one.
The Subspace Pouch.
It felt unpleasantly similar to the item the Magic Tower master had made.
Had the Magic Tower master been in collusion with the Death God Cult for a long time?
If so, then Grand Duke Keln would have been the same.
Perhaps those human experiments were an even older project than I had thought.
I hesitated a moment before following Chronos's guidance.
Going with him would let me find Laward, but it would also mean accepting his proposal in the end.
Even after elegantly dodging the Esther Hellfire ending, here I was.
Daywin had escaped it, but Karma had not.
No.
I was walking in of my own free will.
I had meant to draw Chronos in from the start, so I was going on my own two feet.
"...Fine."
"As expected of Lord Karma."
Chronos smiled with open satisfaction.
Beside us, Lucia was watching me with a worried face.
"Are you certain this is all right?"
Perhaps mindful of Chronos, she asked in the same formal tone she had used at our first meeting.
Come to think of it, even this felt nostalgic.
She had been so stiff back then.
When had she changed so much?
"Of course it is. If you come with me."
When I whispered it to her, she smiled more brightly than ever.
"I've been waiting to hear those words. Now it's my turn."
With that, Lucia stepped forward first.
"I'll go with you even if it's hell."
"Aah...! Where the hell is it...?!"
Laward irritably unleashed a shockwave.
Kwaang!
The trees of the black forest toppled one after another, opening a rough path.
"And why is this place so damn big!"
Kwaaaang!
Even after uprooting every innocent tree in sight, his anger was not spent, so he went on to devastate the entire forest.
"Damn it... I have to find it and get out of here quick... How many days left until the new term starts...?"
Quite some time had passed since he came down from the cliff.
There was no clock anywhere, so he could not check the exact hour, but by feel it had already been a good twelve hours.
I'm hungry.
Around the time his body's signals kicked in, a thought suddenly struck him.
Come to think of it, how did the other prisoners stay alive?
The question flashed through his mind.
They were hanging off the cliff. How did anyone feed them? It looked like they'd been hanging there for... quite a while.
He stood blankly in the middle of the desolate forest and thought.
Am I the only one who's hungry?
Everything here was black.
The mountains, the water, the prison itself.
A place of pure black.
The only things with any color were the prisoners.
It doesn't feel like a place that actually exists in the real world.
While thinking—something he rarely did—Laward plucked a mushroom growing on a tree and stuffed it into his mouth.
"Ptew."
Yeah, that was not edible.
Ssssss—
Just then a patch of undergrowth rustled and a figure emerged.
"Most people examine something before putting it in their mouth...? How did you not even hesitate for a single second...?"
Though calling it a figure was a stretch.
Only half of it was human.
A man with a human upper body and the lower body of a horse.
Another prisoner approached with the clop of hooves.
His four legs were free, but his two arms were bound in manacles behind his back.
"...Why are there only demonkin in this place?"
"With you here, that statement has become false, human. And in this place you need not eat anything at all."
"But I'm hungry."
"That is merely an illusion. You may feel hunger, yet you will not die from lack of nutrients. That is the nature of this place. Stay a while and you will grow used to it. So it would be better if you refrained from putting just anything in your mouth."
"I've... seen your kind in the scriptures."
Laward narrowed both eyes, searching for the word.
And encountering a demonkin he had seen in the scriptures also meant he was about to kill it.
"Kenta... Kentasaurus?"
"I apologize that I do not bear so grand a name as some ancient reptile, human. I am a centaur."
"Right. Now that I'm actually looking at one, there's something I've always wanted to ask. Mind if I ask?"
"I would rather you not bring up the trousers. I am thoroughly sick of that question."
"When you put on trousers, which way do you...?"
Laward simply ignored the centaur's words, let his gaze drop to the half-horse lower body, and asked,
"Just put on some trousers..."
And then he looked at him with open contempt.
"I don't care which side you go with... Could you just wear something?"
"I would prefer you not stare so intently. It is unpleasant."
"Goddess above... Even for a demonkin, this level of indecency..."
"I would like to as well, but my hands are like this. Would you free them for a moment? Wait—come to think of it, why are you... not bound?"
"I have another question."
"You have not answered a single one of mine, yet you are shameless. Still, I shall be generous and listen."
"Have you seen my sword?"
"A sword? A sword... I have not seen one."
"Think carefully. It's a long sword without a guard."
"No, nothing of the sort comes to mind."
"Hm, right."
Kwaaang!
A shockwave erupted from his halo and erased the half-man, half-horse from existence.
Next time I should ask about the sword first. Mixing words with him only got me an eyeful of filth.
Laward grumbled as he moved on.
Time stretched on endlessly.
The hunger continued.
By feel it had already been a full day, so he tried to make a rough camp, yet he stayed awake the entire night.
No—since this place had only night to begin with, he could not even be sure whether the hours he spent sleepless counted as night. Either way, he could not sleep.
He felt hunger.
He felt drowsiness and fatigue.
They even accumulated.
Yet he could not eat.
He could not sleep.
Enduring the endless hunger and exhaustion with his entire body, he crossed each day.
Truly.
Hell.
It was similar to the "Chapter of Hell" he had read in the scriptures.
But this was nothing more than a cheap imitation.
If it were truly hell, there would be wardens.
It resembled the scriptures, yet it was different.
A false cult.
This is blasphemy.
Besides recovering his sword and returning before the term began, another goal took root in Laward's mind.
He would capture the Death God Cultists who had so insolently committed blasphemy and bring them to judgment.
How much time passed after that?
He wandered without rest in search of his sword.
Along the way he met many demonkin prisoners.
"Hey, seen my sword? Long blade, no guard."
"A sword? What sword? More importantly, why is a human here..."
Kwaang!
"I'm looking for a long sword without a guard. Seen it?"
"I haven't."
Kwaang!
"Long sword, no guard."
"Huh? A sword?"
Kwaang!
"No..."
"...Eh? No? Who are you..."
Kwaang!
But there was no harvest.
Kraaah! I have to find it soon! How am I supposed to face Master like this...!
Laward climbed back up to the cliff where he had first begun and offered a prayer.
He earnestly begged the Goddess to let him recover his sword and leave this place.
When he finished praying and opened his eyes, a landscape even more desolate than before filled his sight.
By Laward's reckoning: five days.
He had killed every demonkin he laid eyes on while searching for the sword.
In other words,
without even realizing it, Laward was turning that unknown space into a genuine hell.
I followed Chronos through the coffin.
It was a space of pure black.
A place I had never visited in the game or in my previous life.
"Kraaaah! Aaah...ah!"
The moment we entered, screams reached us.
Smoke rose from every direction, and black rocks and trees had all been shattered and snapped.
"A demon... it's a demon...!"
Figures that looked like demonkin were running with manacles and shackles still on them.
But weren't they the demons themselves?
They were demonkin, after all.
Whatever was happening, they looked extremely desperate.
Did the Death God Cult really live in a place like this?
It was a chaotic mess that would drive anyone mad after a single day.
There seemed no chance of spending even a moment in peace—were the Death God Cultists really this pitiful?
"Please! Please, just say you know! Say you've seen it!"
"Somebody find that damn sword already! Long blade, no guard, damn it!"
Hm?
A long sword without a guard?
It felt familiar somehow, but anyway.
If the Death God Cult truly lived in a place like this, then no matter how well I was playing the part of Karma, I was ready to turn around and tell Chronos I quit on the spot.
But—
"What... what is the meaning of this...?"
Even Chronos wore a face of complete panic.
"Why are the prisoners...?"
What.
This is new to you too?
"L-Lord Karma. Please wait a moment. This cannot be... this simply cannot be..."
Wow.
Now he was even stammering.
I kept seeing new sides of Chronos today.
Then it hit me.
I remembered.
A long sword without a guard.
It was the sword I had bought for Laward.
I had prepared it because of the news that Blash was coming, and it had ended up as nothing more than a gift of a single blade.
Even now the wasted money was enough to cost me sleep.
Thanks to the Magic Tower master I had achieved financial freedom, yet that particular expense still stung.
Because of that very sword, Rebecca had even picked a fight with Laward once.
The name Holiday.
I recalled how Laward had given that sword a double-edged name meaning "Sacred Daywin"—an utterly embarrassing, cringeworthy title.
A name I never wanted to utter with my own mouth.
Which meant the current uproar was... Laward's doing.
It had been a long time since anyone called Laward a demon—not since the Houndry operation.
Even though, appearances aside, he was an aspiring Holy Knight.
"Lord Karma... this cannot be..."
Chronos's spindly legs trembled.
For someone who casually hauled around a coffin as large as himself, this must have been quite the shock.
I had expected Laward would not die, but I never imagined he would turn the place into this much of a mess.
It was the same feeling as those news stories about Korean giant hornets slaughtering America's native wasps and filling you with a strange surge of patriotism...
"This was this one's chance to make amends... to recover..."
Then why did you drag in someone you couldn't even handle in the first place?