Chapter 137: Aggregate (1)
Chapter 137: Aggregate (1)
Consciousness returned, but sensation did not.
I was adrift in a numbness so profound I questioned my own existence.
Slowly.
Very slowly.
I extended the branches of my consciousness into the surroundings.
My final memories.
There were two.
The death of my consciousness, brought about by being chewed and swallowed by that Corpse Monster.
And meeting that Magical Girl again.
In a place where every desire was fulfilled, I remembered I had a task to complete, and so I left.
So. Where am I now?
I tried to stir my non-existent brain for a moment, but no clear answer came.
I couldn't feel a thing.
Even when I tried to reach out, there was no sensation of movement; even when I tried to draw up mana, there was none of the usual exhilaration.
I felt like I’d experienced this before….
Was it during the fight with the Red Hydra?
I couldn't feel anything then, either.
However, something felt fundamentally different this time.
Back then, I had an intuitive sense that my senses were merely paralyzed.
What I felt now was total emptiness.
It was as if the very concept of sensation did not exist.
Let’s think….
Lost in deep thought, I couldn't even feel the passage of time.
Where am I right now?
Why am I in this void?
What state is my body in?
Through a series of connected thoughts and deductions, I arrived at one conclusion.
Do I even have a body right now?
I might have been chewed into tiny bits, or perhaps I’d been digested.
Though I doubted that thing even had a digestive system.
Either way, I’d never had my body rendered this incomplete before, so it was all guesswork.
Still, I had to try.
If my body was gone, I just had to reconstruct it.
Just like when I stroked Oxymoron’s head.
Drawing on that experience, I began to build my body back up.
Clearing all other thoughts, I visualized the image of the Magical Girl that dwelt within my heart.
Silver hair.
Red eyes.
A small girl.
Asymmetrical two-side up hair.
Dainty ribbons.
A long-skirted dress that showed no skin.
Even though thirty years had passed, it was an image I could still recall vividly.
Gradually, I began to feel something.
The first thing I sensed was a faint vibration.
No sight.
No sound.
No taste.
No smell.
In a world devoid of all other senses, touch was the first to reach me.
I was submerged in something viscous, swaying up and down.
The moment I recognized that sensation, my perception expanded explosively, as if a dam had burst.
How much time had passed.
What state I was in.
What was missing for my restoration.
Not much time had gone by.
I had barely counted to ten after regaining my sense of touch.
Thump.
Finally, my hearing was restored.
Perhaps because I was encased in something slimy, the thumping sounds reverberated heavily through my entire being.
Emboldened, I tried to push forward, but…
…I’m low on mana.
I lacked the absolute amount of mana required to build a body from scratch.
Perhaps because my form was incomplete, the mana flowing through me was pathetically thin, and the restoration stalled.
What should I do?
Clinging to my now-functioning thought process, I wiggled my arms slightly to feel the substance surrounding me.
Black, clinging to my skin.
A viscous slime.
If I was inside the corpse’s belly, this slime was likely the Black Wastewater that flowed throughout Nanjido.
Then the solution was simple.
The corpses moved based on this black sludge.
I didn't know the true identity of this Corpse Monster, but this Black Slime was undoubtedly the source of its power.
I’ll devour it.
the moment that thought crossed my mind—
【%#$^#&$#!@#!】
A massive surge of power and pain flooded into me.
My body began to mend.
My sense of taste returned.
The flavor of rotted meat.
My sense of smell returned.
My paralyzed olfactory nerves revived, and the nauseating stench of decaying corpses stimulated my brain once more.
My vision was restored.
Unfortunately, whether I was truly inside the corpse’s stomach or not, all I saw when I opened my eyes was a viscous darkness.
The restoration of my five senses was welcome news, but I couldn't focus on that at all.
What was it Un-ho had said?
That Otherworldly Power is transformed by will.
If so, how much had this Otherworldly Power been distorted?
‘This is Nanjido, you idiot.’
Crunch.
A skull was crushed.
‘Hahahaha!’
A brain driven mad by drugs.
A syringe was plunged into an arm again.
‘I’m sorry it had to come to this. You should’ve paid your protection money when we asked nicely.’
A puncture wound.
Blood flows.
My blood drains into the sewer.
‘Guh… cough, cough.’
Strangled.
Consciousness fades.
‘I’m hungry.’
Those were the last words.
‘I’m… sorry.’
She hanged herself.
‘How boring.’
He opened the door.
‘You think it’s unfair? Mutants don't have human rights. Don't you know that?’
A heavy blade swung down.
‘I wish everyone would just die.’
The wish of someone abandoned in an alleyway.
‘I wish it would all just rot.’
The final words of a corpse pushed to the side of the road because it was "filthy."
‘What’s the point?’
The words of an Awakened who died isolated during the Nanjido subjugation.
‘I don't want to die.’
The final words of one who stood by a well and offered up their own neck.
Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands.
Perhaps hundreds of thousands.
The Nanjido trash heap.
The final moments of the humans who had drifted beneath it.
They overwhelmed my consciousness.
And they whispered.
【Join us.】
Within my mind, a faceless entity reached out to me.
With a face where every feature overlapped into nothingness, leaving only a moving mouth, it tempted me.
【Let us go up there together.】
【To the place where the light shines. Together.】
The non-existent face distorted as if smiling.
A serene, peaceful smile.
The entity, wearing a smile of total enlightenment, seemed to be waiting for my reaction.
However, I currently lacked a head and couldn't open my mouth.
As if only then realizing its mistake, it reached out toward me again.
【You have that desire too, don't you?】
Yes.
Just like those gathered here.
A fiery will to destroy this trash-heap of a world.
Agreeing with that sentiment, I reached out my hand.
The entity before me reached back, seemingly delighted.
A translucent, rounded hand that hadn't fully formed yet.
Our hands met.
What do they call this?
Right. A handshake. An expression of amity.
Grip.
Perhaps because we were holding hands, a massive amount of Otherworldly Power surged into me, and my head finally formed, allowing me to speak.
Now then, shall I say a few words?
“The thing is,” I began.
【Hmm?】
“Everyone has feelings like that.”
Whoosh.
I swung the Pry Bar held in my left hand.
Pop!
With a bursting sound like a water balloon, the entity before me exploded.
Black Wastewater scattered into the air, and the black dress covering my body began to absorb it.
My dress absorbed everything greedily, showing no regard for the pain or Mental Contamination it caused me.
Slowly, my body began to take its proper shape.
My hands regained the color of skin.
My body, which had been rounded and indistinct, gradually became more detailed.
Once all my senses had returned, I looked around.
Inside the pitch-Black Wastewater.
A place where countless black corpses with rotted eyes looked down at me.
They lunged.
With limbs that weren't their own, they sought to kill me for rejecting their goodwill.
I swung my Pry Bar.
Perhaps because I had absorbed so much of their power, they were significantly weaker.
In their weakened state, they were shattered by a single blow from my Pry Bar—which had yet to regain its full power—scattering flesh and slime everywhere.
The fragments of corpses drifted through the air before sinking into the black sludge beneath my feet.
The Black Slime floating in the air was absorbed by my gluttonous dress.
Even so, clothes are just clothes; they couldn't stop the small droplets from splashing onto my face.
Black Slime smeared near my mouth.
I stuck out my tongue and licked it.
It was bitter and nutty.
* * *
Thump.
I opened my eyes to the sound of a heartbeat.
The first thing to greet me was the endless stench of death.
My nose, which had been paralyzed by the rot, was now actively relaying the scent to my brain, thanks to my restored body.
Disgusting.
The smell was so unbearably foul that I opened my eyes, only to see an even worse situation.
I was surrounded by a pile of corpses that had been compressed until their skin burst, spilling their internal contents.
Fortunately, the compression seemed to have stopped after swallowing me, so I wasn't being crushed further.
“….”
Decaying, squelching flesh clung to my skin.
Rotten corpses lose the consistency of meat and take on a strange, dough-like texture.
Like leather that has dissolved in chemicals after a failed tanning process, it looks smooth at first glance, but the moment you touch it, it possesses an unimaginably horrific texture, spreading its trapped stench and transferring death to others.
I didn't think I’d have to experience this again.
The sensation of corpses rolling around in the trenches during a stalemate on the battlefield.
To experience a version of that amplified several times over…
Well. Time to get out.
I swung the Pry Bar in my left hand, carving through the corpses inside.
Or was it entrails?
Since I was inside the Corpse Monster, they might be organs now rather than just corpses.
Not that it mattered.
Using the Pry Bar to pry apart and demolish the fused corpses, I slowly moved my body.
Thump. Thump.
All the while, I felt the vibration of impacts and swaying, but I didn't panic.
I still have time.
Because I had shared a consciousness with them, I understood most of the current situation.
A massive Corpse Monster harboring the desire to climb the walls of the endless abyss and destroy the Nanjido above.
It would likely try to destroy the world after Nanjido, but…
“That’s going to be difficult.”
This monster had received an unimaginable amount of Otherworldly Power from somewhere.
Most likely, it was bestowed by an Entity at The End of the Story.
A being that grants power humans cannot withstand and rules over Mutants.
It fit the description I’d heard perfectly.
However, there was one problem.
The vessel of this monster was already cracked and twisted.
It had exceeded the limits of what even a monster, let alone a human, could endure.
That was why the Otherworldly Power was leaking out as Black Slime, and its body was collapsing.
Normally, it would have had enough life left to destroy Nanjido with a single swing of its fist.
But I had sucked it all dry.
Thanks to that, the monster’s power had plummeted.
Even so, its pure combat strength was still enough to qualify as an O-Rank.
Ah. Here we go.
As I took stock of the situation, I saw light.
Blue and red light.
The colors that symbolized them.
Crunch.
I slammed the Pry Bar into the final corpse and pushed with all my might.
I could see the outside.
The dark abyss.
That darkness.
“I can finally breathe.”
Emerging from all the hardship, suffering, and the stench of rot, I felt an indescribable sense of refreshment.
Due to the nature of the Otherworld, there was no wind, but the mere reduction in the pressure of the gruesome corpses and the smell of decay provided a sufficient sense of liberation.
As I took a breath, I felt a strange sense of dissonance I hadn't noticed until now.
I’d grown used to the stickiness and smell of the rotten flesh covering my body as I fought my way out, but this was something more intense.
Looking down at my thigh where the sensation was strongest, I saw a strange line.
A black cord connecting me to the Corpse Monster.
“What is this now?”
Did this form because I was draining the Otherworldly Power?
My body is fully restored anyway, so I can just rip it off.
Snap.
Ah. Much better.
Now then, I need to find a place to fight.
I can't exactly fight in mid-air….
“Gagagagagak.”
A horrific sound of grinding teeth echoed.
Twitch.
The stationary corpses opened their eyes again and looked at me. They stared with eyes oozing fluid.
“Tsk.”
Thinking they were about to attack, I prepared to jump down, but—
“ABUAAAAAAKH!”
BOOM.
An impact sound came from a completely unexpected direction, making me pause.
The monster had attacked the cliff it was climbing.
Having destroyed The Wall of the hollow, the Corpse Monster crawled into the massive cave it had created.
I stayed quietly perched on the monster as we moved together.
“…The battlefield, then.”
It seems this thing intends to settle things with me as well.
Then I should respond in kind.
Thud.
Kicking aside a corpse, I stepped onto the new ground.
Its face turned toward me.
A hideous face with only a mouth.
Normally, it would have to express its emotions through that mouth alone.
But it was shedding black tears.
From the places where a human would have eyes.
Between the corpses situated there, Black Slime flowed out.
As if it were weeping.
I knew why it was doing that.
Because I, too, had seen their memories.
“I won't negate your experiences.”
“Krrrrrrrk.”
It gnashed its teeth.
“But I’m also in a position where I have to stop you.”
Having said that, I smiled and charged toward my enemy.
Since this is their funeral…
Shouldn't I give them a grand send-off?
A fist made of corpses flew toward me.
I swung my Pry Bar to meet it.
Let the requiem begin.