Aslan
Aslan
The campfire had burned low. It cast a bright glow, painting the rain-soaked forest and bogland around them.
The light flickered and groped outward but never reached far—partly because it was only a campfire, and partly because of the people seated around it.
The shadows their bodies cast stretched long and dark.
Those shadows leaned into each other, resting head against head, an odd sight when you remembered that none of the travelers were actually touching.
"What... was that?"
A girl who had been staring silently into the flames asked the question.
Her name was Angela Tail—orange hair cropped roughly at her shoulders—but the group called her Angie.
She had her nose buried in a blanket, breathing shallowly, waiting for an answer.
"A god."
"A god?"
"Yes."
The answer came from a man. Curling black hair, teal-green eyes, a weary cast to his face. The firelight played across his profile, lending it a melancholic look.
The single-word reply seemed to leave Angie dissatisfied, but the man—Aslan—had no way to elaborate.
He simply didn't know much.
His thoughts drifted back over what had happened inside the sanctuary.
'Found you.'
The moment the corpses spoke in unison, the words had echoed through the corridor.
Layered into that sound were voices that were not human.
The cries of beasts, of monsters, the chittering of insects—every kind of noise.
The countless voices hammered at Aslan's ears like a discordant choir, grating and repulsive, while Angie and Ereta felt a chill crawl over their skin.
Then the corpses had collapsed all at once.
The baleful black energy faded from their eyes, and the sound of bodies hitting the ground spread from deep inside the sanctuary, down the corridor, outward through the whole structure.
Watching it happen, Aslan recalled what the Ancient God had warned him.
'That entity will not endure even the briefest moment of your disappearance from its sight. It is likely already on its way to find you.'
Just as the Ancient God had told him—fearfully, urgently—that entity had indeed come looking for him.
When Aslan finished speaking with the Ancient God and returned to reality, he sensed that he and Angie had been gone for less than a single heartbeat—an impossibly short span.
Yet, for the loss of that sliver of a moment—the brief lapse in its surveillance—just to find one man named Aslan, the entity had gathered every corpse in the region and hauled them here.
Aslan and his companions confirmed the fact on their way out of the sanctuary.
The corridor had been absolutely packed with bodies, far more than they had seen on the way in.
Drowning victims swept away by rivers; travelers who had simply died along the road; the corpse of the giant priest they had already killed and left sprawled; monsters; every insect in the vicinity; migratory birds that had been crossing the sky; forest animals.
A vast variety of death, reeking of rot and the smell of blood, crowding the passageway so thickly they could barely move.
Corpses scraped together by some entity. The image hardened Aslan's expression.
Had it really needed to commandeer that many bodies just to find him and announce it?
The obsession was beyond comprehension. Aslan still had no idea what that entity even was, and the frustration made him jab the poker into the fire and roughly rearrange the wood.
Crk.
A spent log collapsed, its ashen remains crumbling gray against the ground. Aslan stared at it in silence for a moment, then exhaled.
A god with the power to puppeteer corpses—as far as Aslan knew, no such being existed.
There was not even a school of magic for controlling the dead. Necromancy simply did not exist in Geladrion.
That narrowed the possibilities to two.
Either it was the power of a divinity hidden from Aslan's knowledge, or it was not divinity at all.
He considered the latter far more likely.
Someone—or something—had taken Aslan, born on Earth, and shoved him into this game world, crammed him into a body that resembled his own but was subtly, strangely different. Pulling off a trick like this seemed well within its capabilities.
And then there was what the Ancient God had said.
Even the Ancient Gods and the current gods feared that entity and avoided it.
If it was a being that even transcendents from other universes and dimensions were afraid of, puppeteering a few corpses was nothing.
Still prodding the campfire, Aslan felt eyes on him and raised his head. Ereta and Angie were both watching him in silence.
Their gazes were complicated. Angie's main emotion was suspicion; Ereta's face was unreadable.
But even Ereta, whose expressions he could seldom decipher, seemed to have realized that what had just happened was deeply wrong.
She simply wasn't asking, because it was obvious Aslan had no way to explain it.
He sank back into thought during the strange silence, organizing his conclusions as he watched the fire dance.
First, the clues.
A god whose symbol was an animal.
Specifically, an animal that did not exist in this world—in Geladrion.
Aslan ran through the complete list of gods in his mind.
The God of War.
Cosmic Inevitability.
The Predator.
The Unfalling One.
The Abyss.
The Veil of Compassion.
The Self-Birthing Mother.
The Formless One.
The Twilight Flock.
Before Aslan had been thrown into Geladrion, the gods he had seen in the game numbered seven—omitting the Formless One and the Twilight Flock. Now, counting those two, there were nine.
Turning a piece of firewood with the poker, he considered.
'Of these, five take animals as their symbols.'
Two of the Three Evils under Cosmic Inevitability: the Poison-spitting Dragon and the Fire-weaving Spider.
The Unfalling One, who took the shape of a whale.
The Self-Birthing Mother, whose form was that of a centipede.
And the Twilight Flock, whose very name proclaimed the sheep.
Those five were the only ones that qualified.
But even within that short list, some could be ruled out.
First, the Poison-spitting Dragon and the Fire-weaving Spider.
Dragons and spiders actually existed in Geladrion. By definition, neither could be the unknown entity the Ancient God had warned him about—a being whose symbol was an animal not of this world.
Furthermore, the Fire-weaving Spider was already as good as cast out. If that were part of some grand scheme it would be surprising, but Aslan didn't think so.
Too many things didn't add up.
When he had killed Ereta before, the divinity of the Fire-weaving Spider had shattered effortlessly before the purity he wielded. It had crumbled, been laid low.
If this were all an act, there was no need to go to such lengths.
By the same logic, the Twilight Flock was also unlikely.
It was a god that hadn't existed in the game, and its low activity and scant presence in continental records made it suspect. But the critical point was this: sheep existed in Geladrion.
Any god whose symbol was an animal that existed in this world could be set aside for now.
That left two.
The Unfalling One—the colossal whale that swam through time and devoured it.
The Self-Birthing Mother—the centipede god that filled other dimensions with itself, distorting and crushing entire universes.
Given the clues, it could only be one of the two.
Of course, he wasn't obliged to trust the Ancient God unconditionally. But Aslan had no other source of information.
After twelve years of wandering, this was the first real lead he had obtained. It was easier to accept it as a working premise.
If he got better clues later, he could reassess.
'...No. It could be the Formless One.'
Mid-thought, he considered one of the gods that hadn't existed in the game—the Formless One.
A god about whom virtually no concrete information had ever been released.
Its shape, its actions, the location of its stronghold—all unknown.
Did it even have priests? Did it have high priests? No one could say.
Where other gods' priests and high priests were publicly known, the Formless One was a void of information.
The only thing anyone knew was that it was so obscure in form that it could be called formless.
'The possibility is significant.'
But with so little information, that was all it was—pointless speculation. Nothing that would change his immediate course of action.
Aslan's course of action was survival. Uncovering the hidden mastermind and resolving the situation had to come after survival.
One fact alone let him seize his will to live again: he had seen the twelve-year-old past flickering before his eyes, heard it, almost touched it.
He could think, with absolute conviction, that he would make it home no matter what.
And the first step toward that was, naturally, gathering the Masters.
"...What are you thinking about?"
He had been absently fidgeting with the poker when Angie's voice pulled him back. Ereta, who might have been dozing with her cheek on her knee, breathed slowly and languidly before her eyes opened late.
"Our next move."
The words meant the next leg of their journey was decided. Even Ereta, rubbing her eyes as if unfamiliar with drowsiness, focused her attention on Aslan. He spoke quietly under the weight of their two gazes.
"We took a detour to check the Sanctuary of Sorrow, but from here we follow the original plan: we go find the Master of the Sword."
The Master of the Sword was an old comrade of Aslan's—not just skilled, but trustworthy.
Angie, who had heard this before, wore a sullen expression and glanced sidelong at Ereta.
It was the look of someone not entirely sure they could trust this insane woman.
And now one more was about to join them. The thought irked her.
It was a possessiveness she didn't even recognize in herself.
But she didn't voice the complaint. She trusted Aslan, and she figured that complaining wouldn't make her look cool anyway.
She had the nature of someone raised poor—someone who could only puff up her pride under the eyes of others.
"...Is there a reason you're pursuing this?"
This time the question came from Ereta. She had not spoken a single word since they left the sanctuary, but now she opened her mouth.
"Did I never tell you?"
"No."
Aslan scratched his jaw with a slightly awkward look. It was an expression they hadn't seen on him before. Angie let out a quiet snicker, and Aslan answered with a self-conscious smile.
Lightly.
"I'm going to kill a god."
"...What?"
"And then fix the world."
"...What?"
"That's my purpose."
Ereta's reaction came back at him. Her pink eyes went wide, her face openly bewildered.
To kill meant to take the life of something that was alive.
God was the word for a supreme being beyond life itself—a being so mighty it had no concern for living or dying.
To kill a god. The phrase sounded like a contradiction. At least, it did to Ereta, who had been a high priest.
Yet the tone in which that contradictory declaration was delivered was so light that Ereta glanced away, wondering if it was a joke.
'Is he serious? Or joking?'
From her perspective, Angie was a kid full of inexplicable bluster, and she hadn't even reacted to the absurd statement—she was just stretching, indifferent.
Judging by that alone, it seemed serious.
"...You mean that?"
She couldn't understand. The story was too bizarre to grasp. As Ereta blinked at him, Aslan let out a soft chuckle.
Instead of answering, he pulled his blanket up and said, "We need to reach Kardi tomorrow, so we'd better sleep early. The rain's stopped, but the road is rough and long."
With that, he closed his eyes.
Angie leaned back and stretched out on the ground as well, and Ereta stared at the two of them, at their ease, utterly disoriented.
'Kill... a god?'
Because of that, Ereta could not fall asleep until very late.
She walked through the next day exhausted, and only collapsed from fatigue after they arrived at Kardi.