How to Keep a Fallen Lady (7)
"...I'm sorry, what?"
At my words, Iris stared at me with undisguised shock written across her face.
But I was dead serious. Dead serious about going after that Constellation squatting on the back mountain — some senile old fox or whatever it was.
Kill a Constellation.
Out of context, it sounded like complete nonsense.
Killing a god, of all things.
It was the equivalent of declaring you'd shovel a mountain out of the way.
But then again, humanity was the species that had actually managed the shovel-and-mountain stunt before.
"Your Constellation needs to get wrecked. That's my decision."
Using someone and throwing them away.
It was the thing I personally despised most in this world.
So they've milked all the value out of you, and now that you've gone stale, they're just going to toss you aside?
That was the kind of scheme only thepettiest scum alive could come up with.
Worse, Iris had merely failed a single command. On the shaman side, she was a genius with talent straight out of legend — a once-in-a-millennium prodigy.
And they were prepared to throw all of that away over one sparring match.
It was dumber than simple betrayal. It was idiotic.
"Haha... what a funny joke."
"I'm not joking."
There was a way. It would just require me borrowing the power of a god as well.
There was a method to kill a god with nothing but human strength, but it took ages and racked up an obscene body count of innocents, so I was passing on that one.
"Listen carefully. From this moment on, you're going to be the bait."
Deep beneath an ocean whose location no one could pinpoint, a lone silhouette slipped in among the unknowable cyclopean structures.
In that very instant, Nyarlathotep shuddered as she felt the flow of time lurch into overdrive.
One day outside equals ten years in here.
Just this morning, the ratio had been a single day per year outside.
In the brief span of time it had taken to travel here, the acceleration had jumped tenfold.
At this rate, a day stretching across a hundred years — or even a thousand — wasn't out of the question.
And there was exactly one being capable of such a thing.
Cthulhu.
Only she — the one the ancient powers had sealed away in terror of her might — could pull this off.
The authority to warp the current of time at will, an ability that evoked Yog-Sothoth himself.
Nyarlathotep flinched at the sensation, then turned her gaze to the side.
Countless eyeballs clung to a writhing octopus tentacle.
Those were the all-seeing eyes that beheld mortals from a plane of omniscience — eyes potent enough to drive an ordinary human shrieking into madness.
"Get lost."
To an Outer God like Nyarlathotep, however, they were nothing more than an irritating cluster of circles.
She gave the slightest snap of her fingers, and the tentacle detonated in a fashion no sane mind could parse — revealing the form of the being hidden behind it.
"Cthulhu."
As she strode toward that figure, Nyarlathotep felt the flow of time snap back to normal.
She's keeping time normal wherever she herself exists, and aiming the acceleration at R'lyeh alone.
So while she herself lounged in a perfectly ordinary stream of seconds playing games, only R'lyeh was taking the full brunt of eons.
"H-huh? Ahh, N-Nyarlathotep?"
Cthulhu, hunched over her game in paint-splattered squalor, turned around at the presence behind her. Seeing Nyarlathotep standing there with murder on her face, she broke into a sheepish grin.
"What's up?"
"You. Why did you speed up R'lyeh's flow of time?"
Why Cthulhu — who had obediently endured her seal for thousands of years — would suddenly do something like this was a mystery even Nyarlathotep couldn't crack.
Of course she couldn't crack it. Cthulhu was, after all, a being superior to herself.
Even so, Nyarlathotep pressed the attack. What was the meaning of this, out of nowhere?
"U-um, well, you see... it's the same as with you all. I, I got drawn in too, I guess?"
"What?"
It was a baffling answer. But Nyarlathotep grasped the meaning behind it in a heartbeat.
Kim Hyunseong.
Countless Great Old Ones and Outer Gods had been drawn in by the existence of a single human named Kim Hyunseong.
And Cthulhu, asleep in R'lyeh all this time, was no exception.
"Y-you see, honestly, I never really, um, thought anything of being sealed all this t-time?"
That much was a surprise, even to Nyarlathotep.
She'd assumed Cthulhu would resent the ones who'd sealed her.
"I-if anything, it was kind of nice. I didn't have to do anything, I could just, um, enjoy human culture and stuff... b-but lately, I got greedy."
Cthulhu's face flushed red — like a schoolgirl thinking about her crush.
"W-while I was playing games, I met this one human... a-and, um, I fell for him. A mere human, can you believe it."
"..."
It was the same story across the board.
Nyarlathotep, Cthugha, and every other god besides had all fallen for one human named Kim Hyunseong.
"S-so I'm getting out. I'm, um, going to leave and live with Hyunseong..."
"...Do you understand what happens when you break your seal, or are you saying this in ignorance?"
Dagon. Great Old One.
The one goddess who spurned human culture — who never fell for Kim Hyunseong — would be the first to react.
Celebrating the resurrection of the god of the sea, she would manifest her true form directly into reality.
And simultaneously, the Night of the Fish would begin.
The Deep Ones — the spawn under Dagon's command — would descend upon humanity all at once.
By human reckoning, each one rated A-rank.
Tens of thousands of monsters far beyond humanity's strength, swarming across the entire Earth.
And at the same moment, Dagon herself would appear in reality.
Every being who glimpsed her true form would go irrevocably mad, accelerating humanity's collapse.
And at the very end, Cthulhu would shatter R'lyeh, achieve her full resurrection — and mankind would meet its extinction.
"O-of course I know that. But..."
Cthulhu wiggled her fingers and tilted her head.
"...why would I care?"
Cthulhu covered her mouth and laughed, as if entertaining the world's most foolish worry.
"H-Hyunseong will be fine, because you guys will protect him, right? S-so what happens to the rest of the humans is, um... not my problem, is it?"
"..."
She had no comeback.
Because Nyarlathotep, too, considered every human other than Kim Hyunseong to be irrelevant — alive or dead, it simply didn't register on her ledger of concerns.
To the Outer Gods, 'Earth' was nothing but a playground teeming with a species that was easy to toy with.
Everything else? A decent rest stop if you happened to want to settle in for a while.
But that was a thought she kept buried where no one could see it.
As long as Kim Hyunseong lived here, she had no intention of touching the Earth — not while he needed it to stay comfortable.
The problem was that Cthulhu felt no such reservation whatsoever.
To her, as long as Kim Hyunseong came out of it unscathed, everything else was perfectly fine.
This won't do.
Realizing that words would reach no one, Nyarlathotep released her disguise.
A shapeless mass of amorphous liquid flooded across R'lyeh.
In a situation where a single photograph, spread across the world, would have driven all eight billion humans irretrievably insane, Cthulhu simply rested her chin on her hand, utterly composed.
"Have you ever beaten me? Even once?"
The stuttering, awkward girl of a moment ago was gone, and in her place remained only the sovereign of the deep sea.
Above the amorphous mass devouring R'lyeh, dozens of slime-coated tentacles descended from on high.
"Hah... hah..."
One arm severed, Nyarlathotep gasped for breath as she clawed her way out of R'lyeh.
She's stronger than she was back then.
Even granting that Cthulhu had been overwhelmingly powerful, Nyarlathotep had assumed that was ancient history.
She'd been certain the seal would have weakened her after all this time — so she'd thrown everything she had into the assault.
A force that, unleashed anywhere outside R'lyeh, could have blown the Earth to pieces without it even registering as strange.
No — a force so immense it could have shattered the planet a hundred million times over.
Because R'lyeh existed outside Earth's civilization, there was no 'System constraint' to restrain the full release of power.
In other words, that had been Nyarlathotep at full strength.
And Cthulhu had crushed her effortlessly — from inside a seal, no less.
Even after thousands of years sealed away.
This is dangerous.
For the first time in ages, Nyarlathotep broke into a cold sweat at a situation refusing to go her way.
I have to prepare for the resurrection.
But as always, the moment she hit a wall, Nyarlathotep began dismantling the problem.
Within an instant so brief that the flow of time itself splintered into fragments of one ten-thousandth of a second, she reached her conclusion.
The resurrection cannot be stopped.
Now that Cthulhu had set her mind on returning, nothing could hold it back.
Which meant the focus had to shift to neutralizing the fallout.
Dagon.
A goddess holding a seat among the Great Old Ones.
Had she already fallen for Kim Hyunseong, matters would be simple — but regrettably, she didn't even know he existed.
Forget falling in love; anyone who laid eyes on her would count themselves lucky to escape with their life.
Fortunately, she too was bound by the System's constraints, so rather than acting directly, she relied on her Deep Ones.
Those things were pathetically weak — not even fit to stand before a Lesser Outer God — yet they carried enough force to reduce a puny civilization dating back to 4000 BC to dust within twenty-four hours.
Still, not enough to make humanity utterly incapable of resistance.
Which meant the conclusion was obvious.
Make him stronger.
All she had to do was forge Kim Hyunseong into someone capable of slaughtering tens of thousands of Deep Ones.
That was a feat impossible even for those mortals called S-rank.
But she had it. The means to make Kim Hyunseong the strongest.
Kill a Constellation.
Kill the Constellation, and strip its power for himself.
If human strength wouldn't cut it, then he simply needed a god's strength.
Besides, it was a step he'd have to take sooner or later anyway.
A human body bought him a hundred years at most.
To walk alongside the Outer Gods, he would need an immortal form.
And as it happened, there was one god perfectly suited for the purpose.
The Old Fox of the Back Mountain.
With the divine power behind shamans in his grasp, it would prove useful in a dozen different ways.
And so, each for their own reasons, Kim Hyunseong and Nyarlathotep's goals aligned perfectly.