The Omniscient Eye That Scorns All Things
About a week had passed since I'd first heard about the Spirit Queen Elesion.
That morning, Kyra's hair had been flipping through every color of a traffic light while she busted out poppin' dance moves. In the end she announced, "Four of us… no, five of us need to hold a meeting!" and vanished into her room to meditate.
Was she having a personality war in there? And before that—why five? Did she count her main body as a separate personality too?
Thanks to that, I was left alone managing the igloo, leafing through the ancient tomes of the Rahelon Continent she'd dumped on me for whenever I got bored.
Book of Origins: Record of the Day the First Star Fell
I stroked the worn leather cover and let out an admiring whistle.
"Damn… even Leon, the original protagonist, never got to read this one."
The reason was simple. In the original story the book only showed up during the Chaos Library episode, and at the time Leon had been getting his ribs caved in by the guardian golem. He was out cold. The heroines had to haul him out of there, so the book got buried under the collapsing library rubble.
This time around, of course, I'd stopped the Chaos Library from falling and secured the book as well. Then those damned old geezers had snatched it away, so I'd only recently gotten to hold the real thing in my hands.
Idiot. You should've leveled up earlier. Thanks to that, this precious setting book is getting its first reading from Extra-nim himself.
A strange mix of triumph and bitterness rose in my throat as I turned the page.
Today's section was…
The First Descent of an Outer God and the Birth of Rahelon
Rustle, rustle.
As the pages whispered under my fingers, sentences that hit like a hammer landed in my eyes.
…In the beginning, Rahelon was nothing.
Neither mana, nor divine power, nor demonic energy—not even life itself—existed in that gray desert. It was a canvas abandoned by the gods, a blank page upon which no story had yet been written.
"…Look at that wording. Gorgeous."
I swallowed hard without meaning to. No matter how many times I reread it, my heart hammered. This was content that had never appeared in the original novel or any of the setting books.
Yet one day the sky tore open, and the first guest plummeted down. It was both calamity and blessing, come from beyond the world.
That colossal Outer God struck the earth of Rahelon and met its death—and that death at last painted color upon this world.
Its blood flowed and became mana. Its flesh became fertile soil. The last breath it exhaled became the spirits. And those who absorbed the purest fragments of its power appeared…
They were the origin of the Transcendents.
"……Holy shit."
My mouth fell open on its own. So the very foundation of this world—mana itself, and the power of the Transcendents—had come from the corpse of a dead Outer God? The Outer Gods we'd been fighting so hard to stop were basically this world's mothers?
And the shocks didn't end there. The final paragraph held a name even harder to believe.
The first Transcendent, the all-knowing designer who sorted the chaos-filled fragments of power and bestowed rules upon this world.
We call him Master Retleca.
"Master… Retleca?"
I'd never heard the name before. Yet for some reason it left a strange sense of dissonance. Retleca, Retleca… alien, and yet somehow familiar. I kept murmuring the name, trying to remember where I'd heard it, until an image flashed through my mind.
…That's the author's pen name.
I clutched my head as confusion crashed over me. This world held secrets far deeper and darker than anything I'd known.
Still, digging any further felt like my brain was about to overheat, so I decided to finish the rest later.
"Haa… that's enough for now."
I closed the book and stretched. Outside the window, deep darkness had already settled over the snowfield. I'd been so focused that a lot of time had slipped by.
"Night already? I'm starving. Guess I should start on dinner."
I stood and started for the kitchen. Then, in that exact moment—
"…Huh?"
Only then did I realize something was wrong. The world beyond the window had gone dark. What kind of nonsense was that? Night gets dark; that much was obvious. The problem wasn't that it was dark.
On the snowfield, nights were supposed to glow bluish from moonlight reflecting off the snow. Right now the view outside looked as if someone had dumped a whole bottle of ink over everything—perfect, absolute black.
"……."
A chill raced down my spine. I walked slowly to the window, pressed my nose to the glass, and looked up at the sky.
Nothing.
"The sun… is gone."
No moon. No stars. Even Nemesia's black moon, which was always supposed to hang in the western sky, was nowhere to be seen. It was as if the canvas of the sky itself had been ripped away, leaving only void.
"No way."
An ominous premonition stabbed through my mind. Without looking back I slammed the igloo door open and bolted outside.
"Headmaster!! Kyra!!"
Bang!
The second I stepped out, I froze as if nailed to the ground.
"Ah…."
White breath spilled from my lips, but no scream followed. Because of the sight before my eyes.
Where the sky should have been, a single enormous eye was slowly opening in the pitch-black darkness—an eye so vast its edges could not be seen. A vertically slit pupil, redder than blood. That colossal iris was looking straight down at me and the igloo standing in the middle of the snowfield, as if examining microbes under a microscope.
F o u n d y o u.
A grotesque voice, like razor-sharp nails raking across the inside of my brain. My eardrums felt ready to burst, yet instead of screaming I bit down hard on my lip until blood ran, using the pain to hold my mind together.
Running was impossible. Whatever that giant eye was, the moment it recognized me, the entire space had already fallen into its grasp. Even so, if I wanted any chance of doing something I had to stay calm. I forced strength into my shaking legs and stared straight up at the monstrosity covering the sky.
…Stay calm and analyze. Panic and you die.
My thoughts spun at full speed. From the moment an extra like me had interfered, this world's main story had long since left its fixed rails. Over the past three years, the Lord of the Rotten Swamp—who should have arrived during first-year summer break—had shown up in winter instead. The Screaming Faith that was supposed to appear in second year had failed to descend at all and simply vanished. On the flip side, Outer Gods that were never supposed to exist had once swarmed in and besieged the academy.
Right. The order and timing have been a complete mess for ages. A sudden appearance itself isn't what throws me.
So who the hell was the thing in front of me right now? I rapidly ran through the list of the remaining five Outer Gods.
Apostle of the Oldest Star. Gravekeeper of Twisted Time. Fragment of the Screaming Sigil. Predator That Swallowed the Stars. Silence of the Deepest Abyss.
Beings with different titles and powers, each of whom should have descended within a year, toppled Argentina, and plunged Rahelon into chaos.
But…
None of them.
No matter how hard I dug through my memories, there was no entity described as tearing open the sky and appearing as a giant eye. Not a star, not a gravekeeper, not the void. Then what the hell was this? A completely new variable that had never appeared in the original setting books or even the author's afterwords?
I'm going insane. What the actual hell is…
Cold sweat slid down my spine. For humans, the unknown is always the most terrifying thing. But right now the important part wasn't its identity. It was stopping this thing and surviving.
I spun around on pure reflex and shouted.
"Kyra!! Lady Kyra Bell Arenas!!"
No answer.
"Headmaster! Are you in there?! Get out here now! The situation is critical!"
Still silence. The igloo door stayed shut, and not the faintest presence stirred inside. That was wrong. Kyra was a Transcendent. The strongest mage on the continent couldn't possibly fail to notice the insane surge of mana thrashing right over her head. Sleeping? Hell, even if she'd been knocked out cold, that killing intent should have jolted her upright. So why wasn't she showing her face at all?
Don't tell me… it isolated us?
Had that eye seized this space and twisted the distance between Kyra and me? Or had the constraints and errors of causality she'd talked about kicked in and frozen her in place? Or had something gone wrong in the fight between her personalities? Whatever the reason, it was the worst possible outcome. It meant a third-year cadet like me had to face that monster alone, without the Transcendent backup I'd been counting on.
Hell, if even Leon—who was absurdly strong against Outer Gods—had been here, the situation wouldn't have felt this hopeless…
"Ha, fucking hell… life really is out to get me."
Haa… whatever. I spat a curse and tightened my grip on my staff. If I was going to die without doing a single thing, I might as well go down swinging.
Wooooong—!
The giant eye floating in the sky twitched once more. At the same time its vertically slit pupil widened even further and locked its gaze on me.
O one who seeks to escape the world's story.
The voice rang out again—clearer this time, heavier, crushing my entire body under its pressure.
Go on, then. Prove whether you can kill it.
"……What?"
Kill it? Kill what? Was it talking about itself, or something else entirely? I didn't get a second to think.
KRAK—!!
The instant the words ended, pain exploded through me as if every blood vessel in my body were bursting open.
"Guhhk!"
Crimson blood poured in streams from my eyes, my nose, my mouth. Simply because that eye had looked at me, a human body had begun to collapse.
My vision dyed red. My legs shook so hard I could barely stand, yet the surroundings were even worse.
KRA-KOOM—! KWAANG—!
Violet lightning poured from the sky like rain. The air itself screamed as it tore apart, and a massive vortex formed above the blizzard-swept snowfield.
—Kieeeeeeek!!
—Grrrr… kuhng!
Screams of the monsters that lived on the snowfield reached my ears. Snow wolves with steel-hard hides, massive yetis, even the harpies that had been flying through the sky—hundreds, thousands of them were sucked into the vortex and hurled upward like dust into a vacuum cleaner. Without a single chance to resist, they vanished into the red eye floating in the heavens.
Crunch, crack.
The wet sounds of monsters being crushed and disassembled inside the eye echoed across the entire snowfield. Overwhelming difference in rank.
"…I'm so fucked."
There was no way this counted as a fight. Put simply, this was a higher predator's feeding time—a natural disaster itself. And now the tip of that vortex was turning toward me.
"Khrrrk…."
I jammed my staff into the snow and held on. Spitting bloody saliva, I glared at the thing through blurring eyes.
Prove it, huh?
I still had no idea what it meant, but fine. If there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, then there were only two options left: die here, or burst that eyeball and live.
"Haa… damn it. Let's fucking do this."