You Again?
Crash-haaaa...
The shattered ship cleaved through the current and pressed onward. The water had long since been pouring in through her broken hull, and still she refused to sink, pushing forward all the same.
Ku-gung... ku-gung...
At some point the sky over the frozen space had darkened, black clouds gathering overhead. It was the same kind of phenomenon that preceded the Kraken's emergence.
"Hmm..."
I had been gazing out over the sea for a moment when I summoned the White Savior without hesitation. The snow-white hammer settled into my hand, and the instant I poured divinity into it, a violent burst of light tore open the darkness of the space with a thunderous crack. Beside me, the duplicated White Savior readied itself for a strike as well.
And then the hammer came down, to smash the ship to splinters—
"You'd best stop."
"?"
Someone stopped me before I could swing. A man stood at the very prow of the ship. He wore a purple robe, and long violet hair curtained his eyes as he glanced back at me.
An existence that had appeared out of nowhere, radiating a power I could feel plainly. A sorcerer. The most important figure in this dungeon had arrived.
"So you're the Sorcerer."
"This ship is bound for a world destroyed by calamity. If you don't want to be swept away with it, let it drift as it will."
"Destroyed? You mean what the Kraken did?"
"......"
The presumed sorcerer said nothing, silently gazing out over the sea. The ship that had no right to still be moving carved on through the waves, and a quiet standoff stretched between us.
"Excuse me?"
"You did well to subdue the Calamity of the Sea. But that alone will not be enough."
The sorcerer's violet eyes stared at something far away.
Grrr-oooooh...
Those grotesque limbs and eyes, drawing ever closer.
"The calamity you subdued is merely the tip of an iceberg. No—it's less than a tip, a worthless little vermin. The true calamity is like a colossal star."
"And who exactly are you?"
"This is a world where the calamity accomplished its purpose. Had you not done what you did, it would have turned out the same."
"......"
"Pay no mind to appearances and devote yourself to your task. You are a lowly thing—be grateful you survived one of the star's existences. And so—?!"
KWAAAAAANG!!
I brought the hammer down on the sorcerer. He lost his balance and pitched over where he stood.
"What is the meaning of this! You ignorant—"
"And one more."
KWAAAAAANG!!
The duplicated White Savior slammed into him a second time. This time he went down entirely, rolling somewhere across the deck.
Whoong! I recalled the hammer, slung the White Savior across my shoulder, and walked toward the sorcerer, who lay sprawled pathetically on the deck. For the record, I'd struck him with my 4th form active, so he wasn't actually hurt. He'd simply been knocked over by the impact.
"Sorry about that. My hand slipped."
"...Are you insane?"
"About halfway?"
I wouldn't call myself sane, no.
"...Truly mad."
"How about it? Do I still look like vermin to you?"
"......"
The 'Lily' the sorcerer knew was the child Lily—a young girl who had inherited my weakened power, still too young to even know her own heart. The me standing here now was stronger, inside and out, than the girl beside whom he'd spent all those days. Not remotely comparable.
The sorcerer snapped his violet eyes wide open, then flinched and glared at me as the realization struck.
"...You're not that girl."
"No, I'm not."
Last time, he'd caught on just from the letter being read and made me fail. This time was different. I hadn't torn my way in here by force—I had unraveled the trap and arrived on my own, and so the sorcerer had taken me for the child Lily. A clever girl with a fair measure of power. But inside that girl dwelled the returning Dreamland Fairy, looping her way back again and again.
Of course, now that the child Lily knew the sorcerer's identity, this could still end in failure, but...
"...Very well. Since you've come this far into my home anyway, I suppose it makes no difference."
As expected—having been let into his own inner sanctum, he had no way to cast me out now.
The sorcerer groaned and pushed himself up off the deck, hand pressed to his head.
"You shouldn't even be hurting. All that groaning for show."
"...An outsider, beyond doubt. What are you?"
"I asked first. Answer me, and I'll answer you."
"......"
The sorcerer walked back to the prow of the ship.
"...Do you know about the calamity?"
"Of course."
He'd dodged my question only to fire off another of his own, but it wasn't one I needed to dodge. Other monsters aside, the Kraken and I went back a long way. We'd clashed countless times, and until the day it died, our win rates against each other hovered near even—our skill had been all but identical. True, after the Kraken's death I grew considerably stronger before losing that power, while the Kraken, in turn, grew stronger than it had ever been.
"You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who knows the Kraken as well as I do. Especially now, of all times."
"Then this should be simple. It is scattering its avatars across the entire world."
"I've seen that much."
Over thirty Sea Dungeons had already been discovered. Their difficulty, mechanics, and playtimes all differed wildly, but every one of them was connected to the Kraken—that much was certain.
The sorcerer nodded.
"Each of its avatars wields a different power. One is so weak a single knight could fell it, while another carries strength enough to drown an entire subcontinent."
"......"
"By that account, setting a few aside, they might not sound all that threatening."
But—
"The village where the weak avatar appeared had no knight-class champion, and it drowned. The strong avatar, strong as it was, had no one who could stand against it, and met precisely the same end."
"......"
"Outsiders of your caliber do come and hold the line from time to time, but there's a limit to that too. The avatars keep multiplying. If this continues, what do you suppose happens?"
What if the Sea Dungeons kept spawning without end, until the number of avatars swelled beyond anything the players could handle?
"...They'd burst out."
The day the sun rose anew—January 1st. The instant the Great Cataclysm struck, dozens, hundreds of avatar Krakens—and the true Kraken itself—would appear across Deoen. All to drown the entire continent beneath the sea.
And this frozen place, this—
"—is a world that perished because it had no knight-class champion. A truly hollow ending, that."
Creeeak... creeeak...
Crash-haaaaa...
A sea steeped in desolation, and a harbor where only the tiniest traces remained. It might well have resembled the child Lily's village. The Kraken that struck here was far weaker than the one that had hit Lily's village—but the one difference was that there, I had been present.
Creeeak... sploosh!
Here, there had been no me. Perhaps a player had come, since this was a dungeon too—but they must have been a true novice, or quit for some reason or another.
Crash-haaaaa...
The ship glided past the broken harbor. Far in the distance, the faint outline of the Kraken's eyes. I lifted the hammer on the off chance an attack might land, but this place was already ruined—and it seemed nothing would connect. Some manner of suppression force stood in my way. Push it even slightly toward menace, and a failure message would surely flash across my vision.
"It's a finished story. Better not to touch it."
"Then who are you? How do you know all this?"
Knowing about the calamity was one thing. But the fact that the Kraken was creating avatars and seeding them through dungeons everywhere was not the kind of story a mere villager would know. It was outsider knowledge—player knowledge. So how did this sorcerer, wandering a dead world, come to possess it?
He closed his eyes quietly and began to speak.
"...The place I came from held a calamity capable of drowning an entire subcontinent."
A monstrous being with two-tenths of the true body's power. Stronger than most of its kin, he had done everything he could alongside the outsider who had come to help him—and still, in the end, failed to stop the destruction. The outsider died after challenge after challenge and escaped the dungeon, and the sorcerer, left utterly alone, was forced to watch the world end with his own two eyes.
By rights, he too should have died and become a soul adrift upon the sea. But he was different.
"The outsider possessed a special art called the Otherworld. Before he departed, he confided the secret of that art to me, and with it I succeeded in creating a space where time flowed at but a fraction of its natural pace."
He endured inside that Otherworld for ages—and when he finally emerged, everything was already over. The continent had become an ocean, and the calamity towering so high above it was sealed behind some suppressive force, beyond even the touch of a finger. No vengeance remained, nothing at all—and the moment he abandoned everything—
—he came upon a golden raccoon, drifting through the air as it surveyed the calamity.
The raccoon, upon spotting him, was so startled it nearly keeled over, gaping in disbelief that he was still alive—
"...The 'Again-coon'?"
"That's right—hmm?"
"No—no, please, go on."
"...The raccoon, wielder of wondrous power, made me an offer. There was another world, he said, full of those who suffered under calamity—would I not go and help them?"
"......."
That just sounds like he was covering his own mistake, if you ask me.
"So that's why everything had to be kept so convoluted."
"Exactly. I was told to conceal my identity, and I was bound by restrictions of my own. Well—at this point, revealing it can't hurt..."