You're the One Who Made Me This Way!
You're the one who made me this way!
The Wind Spirit King, Naphras.
The spiritual pillar of every wind spirit in existence, and the greatest of them all. Back in the age when Spirit Kings still walked the world, Naphras's wind blew everywhere the eye could see, and the wind spirits lived beneath her blessing and protection.
That said, if you asked whether Naphras was the master of wind itself, the answer would be no. Her absolute influence over the wind extended only as far as spirits and certain other races. The wind wielded by angels and demons, naturally, was beyond her reach.
In any case, as I wandered the world back then, I felt a peculiar wind coil itself around me — as if every breeze I'd felt until now was being drawn, sucked toward a single point. Following that trail of wind deep into the forest, I noticed the wind spirits growing denser with every step.
-Is that... an angel?
-It's an angel...
-Sooo pretty...
-Lady Naphras is prettier!
-Back off! Angels are dangerous!
-I-I have to alert Lady Naphras...
Lesser wind spirits clustered at the entrance, but the deeper I went, the greater the spirits became — mid-tier, then high-tier ones emerging one after another. And before long, I came face to face with a wind that wrapped entirely around my body.
Translucent green hair, green eyes. The Spirit King, beautiful beyond words, glared at me with eyes brimming with hostility.
-Begone! Come one step closer and I will not stand idle.
Was this entire space within her domain of wind? A will-laden voice reverberated through the air with a deep hum. I knew her identity at once.
"The Spirit King?"
-...Indeed. I am Naphras, the Wind Spirit King. What business does an angel have coming to this place?
She carried hostility, but it wasn't hostility alone. It was fear. Despite holding the lofty station of Spirit King and wielding tremendous power, Naphras's ethereal body was trembling — like prey cornered by a predator.
"I am not an angel. I'm a human."
-Nonsense! I can feel that vile divinity radiating from your very flesh!
Fwoooosh!
A gale swept over me. And, as surely as night follows day, it dealt me no harm whatsoever. The only damage I suffered was my hair getting tousled into a slight mess.
"Hmm..."
Sliip...
Even that was smoothed back to its original state by my divine magic.
"I did want to meet the Spirit King, but I never imagined it would be like this."
-W-withdraw at once, or else...
Thud.
With every step I took, Naphras's body shuddered harder. Beside her, the spirits fretted and fussed, wailing what do we do, what do we do without cease. When I finally stood right before her, I let out a sigh.
"I'll say it again. I'm not an angel — I'm a human. And I have no intention of harming you."
-You are an angel.
"I'm telling you I'm not."
-Then how do you explain carrying that abominable divinity in your body and remaining unharmed? If you were truly human, the moment you took in divinity of that magnitude, your entire being should have crumbled to nothing!
She was right. A hundred times over, she was right. The only beings who could contain divinity of that scale were angels of Revelation, the mutant heaven-scented, the Saintesses who received divinity from Revelatio — and me. Every other existence had either been wracked with agony, unable to endure the divinity, or had already been annihilated.
And yet I shook my head.
"I am human."
-...To the very end.
Even as I spoke the truth over and over, the Spirit King refused to believe me. In a way, it was only natural. Having long since grown used to this song and dance through countless similar situations, I finally ended the standoff by pulling out a hammer.
"If you won't believe me..."
Would you care to experience it for yourself?
■
"...I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what?"
Back in the present. Having made my way to the forest of the Spirit Deity Duke, Arne Parthia, I found Naphras hanging her head before me. While the two women beside her watched with wide, rounded eyes, Naphras rolled her green eyes this way and that before answering.
"Well, it's just... I meant to tell you, but..."
"Meant to tell me what, exactly?"
"Um..."
Naphras turned her head and draped a green barrier across the entire area — a barrier that sealed away both sound and sight. And that sealing included Arne and Leo as well.
"Na-Naphras?"
"I will speak with her myself. Your will, I too shall respect."
Arne, utterly unprepared for the possibility that even she would be shut out, flustered — but Naphras calmly delivered her message and then shut the barrier completely.
Now, within a barrier holding only the two of us, Naphras's crumpled, hunched form slowly began to sink.
"Don't kneel."
"...Y-yes, ma'am."
She straightened herself back up.
"First things first — you know why I vanished, right? Those demon bastards..."
"Your language has gotten rather filthy, Naphras. That wasn't how you used to talk."
Where had all that dignity and poise gone — the bearing and speech from our first meeting? All that remained now was a spirit with a gutter mouth. At my words, Naphras's lips pressed shut.
You're the one who made me this way!
She swallowed the words — all the way down to the last syllable. Well, technically spirits, being ethereal bodies, had vocal structures of an entirely different sort, but the point stood. Having choked down her outburst, Naphras opened her mouth again.
"After the demons massacred the spirits, I hid myself away. Believe me, I wanted to tear the demons limb from limb for using my children as test subjects — but there was nothing I could do."
Higher demons. Excluding the highest demons and the Demon King, they counted among the strongest of their kind. Especially those bearing Epithets — their power and presence were disturbingly, grotesquely strong, and to a Spirit King who could barely settle a contest with a mere lesser demon, they were simply out of reach.
I nodded.
"Good call. Dying a dog's death is worse than surviving."
"...That's rich, coming from you."
"Shut it."
"Yes, ma'am."
Naphras fell silent.
"That demon was Metavasis, the Demon of Transference — the one injecting demonic energy into spirits."
The demon who had scattered demonic energy across the world to a poisonous degree. The moment I named the object of my hatred, Naphras's face turned frost-cold. She had survived to this day only by hiding, unable to face him — but her fury had never entirely burned out.
Neither has mine.
Tuk.
I took hold of her trembling wrist.
"Don't worry. That demon is dead."
"...How can you be so certain? You barely survived that calamity yourself, if I recall."
"I killed him."
"......"
Slap.
Naphras knocked my hand away and stared at me with eyes that refused to believe. Killing a higher demon. An absolutely impossible thing. And done by me — a being they'd called nothing more than a heaven-scented human, at that.
"Liar."
"...It does sound like one. In truth, it should have been impossible."
Calling up the memory of that day, I frowned. My body and soul had screamed, my mind wearing away by the second. I'd crossed the line between life and death countless times — over and over and over — until at the very last, I'd even resorted to the Sacred Fire.
But the real agony hadn't been any of that. What truly hurt was the thing I'd always used...
Never use it.
"......"
Then why did you hand it down to me?
I don't understand you.
"...What is it?"
"Nothing. It was nothing."
I changed the subject.
"It happened at my peak, you see. Roughly twenty-nine years ago."
"Ah. Of course. You were in another world and... hm?"
"That's right. The world of the otherworlders. That's where I came from."
Though I suppose I might be wrong about that.
Naphras studied me in silence for a moment. And then she burst out laughing — a deep, wheezing chuckle that bent her right over.
"What's so funny?"
"Aha-hah... Doesn't it seem the tables have turned, in a way?"
Hmm.
"I split my body apart to survive. Spirits are self-aware lifeforms born when the essence of nature first gathered into one. Unless slain by demonic energy or divinity, a spirit simply disperses and returns to the natural world."
She had chosen to use that very fact.
"So I let myself scatter back into nature. Completely — to the point of losing my very self. And I wove a small spell into what remained, in case I should ever wake again someday."
"......"
It was a situation much like Sgaredo's. The difference being that Sgaredo had failed, and Naphras had succeeded. Not that I hadn't been the one to turn Sgaredo's failure into a success.
"When I awoke, the world had changed. Thousands of years had passed, if you can believe it. The vile angels and demons were gone without a trace, and instead these powerful humans were rampaging everywhere."
"It really is a different world, isn't it."
"But here's what astonished me most: this world is being carried along by some immense power. And yet I sensed no malice whatsoever in it. If anything, it seemed to make concessions for our sake now and then."
The thing shaping this world was the System. Two of them, almost certainly — though what either of them was truly after, I had no way of knowing.
"And then, in an instant, I became an otherworlder of this place. I met a human with extraordinary spirit affinity and formed a contract — one granting me power far, far beyond anything I'd known back—"
"So why are you trying to start a war?"
Naphras's laughter stopped cold.
"As you well know, Naphras, I despise war. Especially political squabbles of this sort..."
"This is not a political squabble."
She met my eyes with utter seriousness.
"The reason I aid Arne — it is neither because some 'power' decreed it so, nor mere loyalty to my contractor. And I assure you, I take no joy in Arne's independence either."
Naphras's face went frost-cold once more.
The Magick Duke —
"is conducting experiments. On spirits."
She had touched Naphras's reverse scale.