Paradise of Ashes (2)
“So... Yamamoto-san?”
“Yes—er, I mean, yes.”
“Then I believe you owe me an explanation for why you are here.”
Her voice had cooled a touch.
Stealing a gate whose owner had already been decided was outright illegal. Worse, barging in at the last second before the entrance sealed—after the rightful party had already entered—was pure thuggery. It was more than enough to earn the condemnation of everyone in the hunter world.
“Let me start with this: I have zero interest in any of the rewards this gate produces. I don't want my name listed among the contributors when the gate is cleared, either.”
“Uh... pardon?”
Then why did you even come in here?
That unspoken question jabbed hard at my brow.
“Ayase-san. There's something wrong with the gate we're currently in.”
I explained it as logically and cleanly as I could. The gate had suddenly mutated and taken on entirely different properties. And if we failed to clear this place within the next ten hours, the monsters inside would spill out into the world.
“You're asking me to believe that?”
“You're free not to. Only a handful of people know about this, so it's only natural to find it hard to believe.”
“......”
“But the truth is still the truth. And I came here to stop it.”
Astonishingly, there was not a single lie in what I'd said. Aside from the part where I claimed to be Yamamoto, a hunter belonging to an organization whose name I couldn't disclose.
“Is that truly the only reason you came here?”
“It is.”
“No rewards, no prestige, nothing at all?”
“If anything, I'd prefer my name not spread around.”
Her eyes curved into crescents.
“Fine, I'll trust you. In exchange, everything that comes out of this gate belongs to me. Understood?”
“Yes, yes.”
Thank you for believing me. I was so grateful I felt like bowing to a temple altar, honestly.
“So what do we do? Taking down an A-rank gate boss in ten hours won't be easy.”
“There's a way.”
I explained the most efficient route to clearing this place. Kill the four Apostles, then bring their relics to the central altar to meet. I would take the north and east; she would handle the south and west.
“How on earth do you have information on a gate that hasn't even been cleared yet—?!”
Now she was looking at me with outright reverence.
“Sitting on something that incredible instead of putting it on air is a total waste! You're losing money on it!”
“I'm simply not interested in such things.”
“Would you consider appearing on a program with me, then? A gate prophet, or a secret hunter society—we'd make a gorgeous visual pairing.”
“Enough. I respectfully decline.”
Sorry, but this Yamamoto-san is a humble everyman who finds life's happiness in a cup of instant ramen. If I got that much attention in a crowded place, I'd die of a heart attack.
Anyway. That's Yamamoto-san for you.
“First, I have a favor to ask.”
“Ah... yes, understood.”
And so we parted ways.
Each to hunt down their own Apostle.
The Paradise of Ashes.
That was what the hunter who first catalogued this gate had called it. He said it was like gazing upon a heaven that had burned to the ground.
Angels weeping tears of blood, monsters forever hungering for the living. Perhaps a fallen paradise is a far more terrible thing than hell itself.
“Graaaaagh...”
Corpse angels in grotesque, twisted forms came lunging at me. Beings out of an A-rank gate—and so, A-rank monsters in their own right. They didn't look the least bit threatening on the surface.
But those hands and arms.
Take one hit from them, and you'd understand immediately why they'd earned such a vicious rating. The instant those withered, branch-like fingers touched you, they drained the very life from your body. A corpse angel that absorbed enough life would gradually shed its decay and return to its original angelic form—and in the process, it could wield the authorities it had long since lost.
The more hits you take, the harder this opponent gets.
Dealing with monsters like this was simple. You simply refused to get hit from the very beginning.
“Rir! Devour—no, wait, bite!”
Or, alternatively, you gave them no life force to absorb in the first place.
“Woof woof! Grrrrr!”
Rir tore into the angels with wind blades and raw brawling all at once. No matter how wildly they flailed their arms, there was no way those things could siphon life from a spirit body.
THWACK!
I drove my spear into an angel's face and twisted.
FWOOSH!
Then I pumped Karma Flame into the wound, detonating its body completely.
“Hoo...”
I'd been running without rest for quite a while now. This was one of the annoying things about a limited gate: from the inside, there was no way to know how many hours remained until the outside deadline. Unless you'd brought a watch, the time left on the clock was a black box. Which made pace management a genuine grind.
“Ayase... I wonder if that woman's holding up.”
She had a tendency to cough up blood at the drop of a hat, and I had my doubts she was fighting in any real condition.
No—not my problem. My own neck's barely above water.
I would hunt down every Apostle first and worry after that.
Pushing forward, trampling angels into the ash, I ran for a long while—
GRRRRRUNCH!
—and at last, I came face to face with the first 'Apostle.'
The Guardian of the East. Michael.
An Apostle-class entity looked different from the very start. Where burnt wings should have been, it bore wings charred black as soot, and a halo that had not yet fully faded clung to the light by the barest thread.
Flap.
Michael spread those wings.
Up close, the thing was unmistakably a human corpse already deep in rot. To think the name of an archangel hung over something like this.
Utterly grotesque.
But we killed it, or we died here.
VMMMM!
Light gathered around the creature, condensing into a flurry of radiant bolts.
“Flame Soul Moon Blade.”
I coiled Karma Flame around my spear. First, let's swat every last one of those out of the sky.
“Fire Lance: Chain Barrage.”
KWAGAGAGAGA!
The surging flames collided with the light and burst into explosions. Seizing the gap, I closed the distance in a flash and drew my spear art.
On the ravaged, cratered ground, Ayase pulled something from the bisected body of an angel.
“It really is here...!”
Just as that man had said. In the heart of each Apostle lay the legacy they had left behind.
Relic of the Guardian of the South
Carry this to the central altar, and the boss could be summoned.
“Hold on. Doesn't that mean we could clear an A-rank gate in under ten hours...?”
This was headline material.
Not long ago, the eldest son of one of Korea's great conglomerates had set a new record in a C-rank gate, and look how the whole world had fawned over him for it.
With this gate, I might be able to make my name known on the world stage too!
It was the best news she could have asked for. With her time running short, a chance to make a name for herself in one swift stroke did not come around every day.
“By the way... I wonder if Yamamoto-san would come on my program after all...”
Her instinct as a star was telling her: he was the scoop of a lifetime. Information on a gate no one else knew, a compelling persona, and raw strength besides—everything about him beckoned down the road to superstardom.
And he has that face—an exact copy of Lee Tae-hyun's.
Even that could serve as a selling point. If he were the real Tae-hyun, it would be a mega-hit.
But there's no way, right?
She could chalk up his fluent Japanese to a translation item, sure. But Lee Tae-hyun was barely an F-rank hunter. Even if he'd shown skill beyond his grade and people had taken to calling him an 'Irregular'—
The gap between how strong he was when I last saw him and now is just too big.
The last time she'd watched Tae-hyun was during his B-rank gate solo-clear broadcast. Keeping up with every trend was part of her job, so she'd tuned in half out of obligation.
Whoa...!
By the end, though, she'd been cheering for him in earnest. Watching his body get shredded into rags while he stood toe to toe with an opponent stronger than himself, she'd caught her fists clenching without realizing it. That image of him—standing unbowed against an enemy he could never possibly beat—
It looked so much like herself, waging a silent war against her mana tumor.
Anyway, less than a year has passed since that B-rank broadcast.
For that man to suddenly sweep through an A-rank gate in a handful of strikes—if it were on air, it would be a huge story, the kind that would dominate the media for days.
“Yeah. No way it's him.”
Lee Tae-hyun was Lee Tae-hyun, and Yamamoto was Yamamoto.
The moment she settled that judgment and launched herself toward the next Apostle—
“Ngh...!”
—pain came surging up from inside her again. Thankfully, she didn't vomit blood this time.
But... this can't go on...
A weakening body meant falling combat power. It meant her spot in the Japanese hunter rankings could be snatched away at any moment. And if word ever got out that she suffered from a mana tumor, the damage to her ranking was a certainty.
Endure. Endure it!
She bit down hard. Crimson blood welled where her teeth split her lip and dripped, drop by drop.
“Not yet... not yet...”
Having forced the pain back down, she rose to her feet.
“I... can't die yet...”
Not until her name was written among the World Rankers. This life was not hers to throw away carelessly.
I will not die. Not ever.
And with that grim resolve, she steeled herself.
By my own reckoning, about eight hours had passed since we entered the gate. But I couldn't be certain. It might be six. It might be nine. Either way, this was no situation for taking it easy.
“You're late.”
“I got a little turned around on the way.”
Turned around, my foot. She'd clearly frozen mid-step with that pain of hers, over and over again on the way here. I didn't bother pointing it out.
“Did you collect all the relics?”
“Of course.”
We laid out the relics we'd each brought.
◈ Raphael's Trumpet
◈ Michael's Scales
◈ Gabriel's Lantern
◈ Uriel's Scroll
All four relics gathered, without a hitch.
“Now we simply place these on the altar.”
“That's really all it takes?”
“No additional ritual is needed. Slaying the Apostles and cutting out their hearts was the ritual, in a sense.”
“...Something about that is horribly cruel and strangely poetic at the same time.”
Ayase framed a square with both hands and raised it to her eye. Peering at me across her finger-frame, she smacked her lips softly.
“Mm~ No matter how I look at it, you're star material.”
“Not happening.”
I'd sooner bite off my own tongue and die than go on national television as Yamamoto. Genuinely.
“Do you happen to know what boss spawns here, too?”
“I do.”
The boss of this place was called the Praying Demon. What made it unusual was that it never attacked us directly. It didn't move, didn't resist—it simply offered its prayers quietly to the sky above.
The true attacker was the sky of this gate itself.
Its authority would come for us in its stead.
“Have you ever played a game? An RPG, say.”
“Huh? Ah... I've never played one myself, but I've watched plenty.”
“Then you also know how, when an enemy attacks, the area the attack will land in gets marked in advance.”
“Yes... but why are you bringing that up all of a—”
Why? Because—
“From this moment on, that's exactly what we have to do.”
“I'm sorry?”
I placed the four relics atop the stone altar. The relics melted into liquid and seeped down into the stone.
GRRRRRRUNCH!
With a monstrous tremor, the heavens began to split open.
“Brace yourself. The boss fight starts now.”
Something descended from that rift, as if alighting from on high. A body wrinkled like a man in his nineties, hide of bristling black skin, bat-like wings, and a pair of horns jutting from its brow.
A being that could only be called a demon pressed its palms together in prayer.
WHUUUM!
A sacred barrier bloomed into being around it. And at the same moment—
Shaaaaa!
—light came flooding up across the ground we stood on.
“Dodge!”