Prayer (4)
"I'm sorry."
"You bitch—"
I was flatly rejected. That damn woman. She tells me to make a wish, then what the hell am I supposed to do if she won't grant it?
"Calm down! Please calm down before you get angry!! Whoa, you're so scary I can barely speak."
She let out a sigh and continued.
"It's not that I can't grant everything. Of course I'll give you as much as I can to match your efforts. I have no intention of keeping my mouth shut and pretending nothing happened after you sacrificed yourself in my place. …However, the curse is something deeply attached to that body. Once used, its lifespan can't be restored."
"So in the end, you're saying you can't grant it. You useless bitch."
"Please hear me out to the end. I can't save the hero's body. But I can save the soul."
I crossed my arms and tilted my chin. A gesture telling her to keep talking.
"The hero… or rather, the gamer, is currently possessing the body of Hero Luke, correct?"
"That's right."
"In that case, wouldn't it be possible to abandon the hero's body later and possess a different one instead?"
My eyes widened. It was a method I had never even considered.
"…That's possible?"
"You succeeded once, so why not twice? It's what you'd call reincarnation."
She added with a "however."
"Possessing a body comes with quite a high cost… If you reincarnate again, you won't have a body as strong as the hero's. Your appearance will change quite a bit too."
"…I see."
I nodded silently. It wasn't the answer I wanted, but at least it meant I could escape the curse. She seemed to know this wasn't enough, so she added more.
"Ah! But don't worry. I won't just reincarnate you and leave you alone. Sacrifices! Beauty! Reasonable power! I can grant all of that after you defeat the Demon King. In other words, you'll enjoy wealth and glory! If even that doesn't appeal to you…"
She continued.
"I could even send you back to the home you originally lived in."
"……"
Home, huh.
'…Not really.'
That wasn't an appealing option. The damp semi-basement, the creaking body, the feeling of slowly being forgotten at the bottom… Dark thoughts began to rise, so I quickly changed the subject.
"Let's move on from the reward talk. I've more or less accepted that much."
I couldn't completely escape the curse, but at least I could change bodies to get away from it. With that thought, I held out the holy sword I'd been about to cut her with earlier.
"More importantly, in the game, the holy sword gets upgraded at the end of each chapter. Is that possible here too?"
"Of course it is!"
She snatched the holy sword from me right away. Then she began shaping divine power and tinkering with it. She went on about how this originally required a cost, how she'd cover the shortfall through the Four Heavenly Kings, how most of the cost had been absorbed by the Insect Magic authority so she couldn't give a massive upgrade, and so on. There was a lot of talk, but in the end, I still received an upgrade.
"The upgrades you'll receive are increased cutting power, improved durability, and a minor physical ability buff. That's all."
"Even that's more than I expected."
Honestly, I'd thought I might not get any upgrade at all. It was less than in the game, but if I considered that she'd skimmed it with Insect Magic, it wasn't an unacceptable result.
After I received the holy sword back, she spoke with a relieved expression.
"Whew! Still, I've given most of the explanations I wanted to give! Is there anything else you're curious about?"
"Hmm…"
I thought it over. Let's see. I'd heard why the difficulty had become so ridiculous, that there was a reward waiting for me, and why my curse had appeared. At this point, it felt like I'd heard most of it…
'Ah.'
Then a sudden question came to mind. That object I'd found in the Insect King's residence. The blue stone whose item name was completely garbled and unreadable. It suddenly came back to me. It had definitely been a bugged item in the game… so why did it exist here too?
"Come to think of it…"
I opened my mouth to ask her about it.
"Yes?"
Then I stopped. My instincts were warning me. A corner of my mind had gone ice-cold in an instant. It wasn't the intuition of Hero Luke… but that of Kang In-woo, the gamer from Earth.
—This is the kind of question that shouldn't be asked.
In the game, every character who used that item had been deleted. Without a trace. Of course, since she'd invested so much in me, she wouldn't delete me right away… but something bad would definitely happen at the very least.
"No, it's nothing."
So I had no choice but to brush it off. She didn't press me further, perhaps because I hadn't given away the awkwardness. An awkward silence enveloped us for a moment. She watched me with a faint smile for a while before finally speaking.
"Hero. You must know this, right? How many heroes there have been before you."
"…The twenty-first, I suppose."
This was background information given before the game started. The twenty-first hero chosen had appeared to defeat the Demon King. It was only a few sentences of explanation, so not many people knew it, but as a hardcore game addict, I remembered.
"Yes. Over the past two thousand years, there have been more than twenty heroes. Many of the Four Heavenly Kings have died and been replaced, and countless heroes have bloomed and withered. Through all those years, only one thing has remained unchanged…"
She raised her index finger.
"The Demon King."
The Lord of All Demons. Eternal and immortal. The absolute being. The continent's calamity who had held the throne for over two thousand years. The fact that twenty-one heroes had appeared meant that the previous twenty had all failed to defeat the Demon King.
"It's a difficult path. A path no one has ever succeeded on. Even I can't measure how many thorns lie along that road."
"And yet you still make me do it."
"Because you were the only one."
She continued.
"…In the first place, even I created that game without knowing whether it could be cleared or not. But you cleared it dozens, hundreds of times. I believe in you."
"……"
No wonder the difficulty was so damn hard. I wasn't sure whether to be glad or sad that being called a game addict was the reason. If I'd played a little less, I wouldn't have been dragged here in the first place.
Tap. Tap tap.
As I was thinking that, white clusters of light burst around us. She seemed to be wrapping up the conversation. She smiled innocently and spoke again.
"Well then, it's about time we parted. Ah, by the way, you'd better close your eyes from now on!"
"Why?"
"You might develop mental problems!"
The moment I tilted my head, not understanding what she meant—
'Something' appeared behind her. Something whose form I couldn't even properly grasp, only its overwhelming presence.
"Come to think of it, I forgot to pass this on. The next Heavenly King is the Puppeteer. Puppeteer Net. The Demon King's army will have grown a bit stronger as the seals loosen slightly. You should already know the Puppeteer well, so please be careful."
She'd dropped something important, but it didn't register at all. A far more shocking sight had filled my vision.
After staring at 'something' for a long while, I finally realized its identity.
It was her true form.
A chill ran down my spine.
…In The Demon King and the Hero's Party, levels were notoriously difficult to raise. The maximum level was only 100 to begin with. Across nearly a thousand playthroughs, I'd never once reached level 100. Even if I released the Demon King's seal to its limit, even if I pushed the hero's growth to the absolute extreme, I'd only reach the high nineties. It was impossible to hit max level.
So I'd thought it was blocked by the system. That level 100 only existed as a formality. That actually reaching it was impossible.
[Lv 100]
"Ah, before you go, there's one thing I should warn you about."
It wasn't. I'd simply given up on my own because the wall was too high. It existed right in front of me. Within her true form—so vast it was hard to fit in my vision—a single status window flickered clearly.
[Lv 100]
So distinct it gave me goosebumps. As if declaring this was the truth.
Eventually, the avatar I'd always thought of as Enen spoke quietly.
"From now on, show a little more courtesy. I happen to value manners."
With those words, I plummeted beneath the clouds.
*
"Kuhk…! Kuh-heok…! Uuuk!!"
"Hero? Hero?! Are you alright?!"
When I opened my eyes, I was back in the church's prayer room. I covered my mouth and retched. The saintess looked at me with a worried expression from beside me.
My head felt like it was splitting. My stomach churned as if my insides were twisted. It was the feeling of my brain rejecting something it shouldn't have seen.
I cursed inwardly. Damn it, this wasn't some Cthulhu mythos. Just looking for a second and I end up like this? It was absurd.
Even Enen, who possessed such unfathomable power. Even me, who had frozen helplessly before her.
I remembered the first time I'd swung the holy sword at the goddess. At first, I'd thought she'd barely dodged, but that wasn't it. Since it was just an avatar, it probably wouldn't have taken any damage even if I'd hit.
'From beginning to end… she was just humoring me.'
Whether I should call this being deceived or not… I felt pretty lousy about it.
Looking at the saintess fussing beside me, I said,
"I'm fine… I just got a bit dizzy. Sorry for making a scene."
"Are you really okay? You're not hurt anywhere?"
"Yes. I'm really fine. More importantly, how long was I praying?"
"Huh? Not long. Maybe about five minutes…"
"Only five minutes?"
I'd thought we'd talked for quite a long time, but only five minutes had passed? I couldn't help but be flustered.
'A god is a god, after all.'
Seeing her casually do something so incomprehensible…
My head was in chaos from receiving too much information at once. Maybe it was also because I'd faced her true form.
"I'm sorry. I need to rest for a bit."
"Of course. Would you like me to help you?"
So I decided to take a short rest. I needed time to sort through my thoughts, even if only for a moment. The saintess supported me with a worried look as I sat on a nearby chair and caught my breath.
Perhaps because of the bright sunlight streaming through the window, the seat itself was comfortable. But the rest didn't last long.
Crash!
"Something terrible has happened, Saintess! Hero!"
Because someone had kicked the door open and burst in. It was a messenger from somewhere. His hair was disheveled, probably from running in such a hurry. With an urgent expression, he spoke.
"Th-the Demon King's army has attacked!"
At those words, we both shot to our feet.