Aika Wants to Hide Her Power (1)
Aika Wants to Hide Her Power (1)
After the Gate swallowed us,
I witnessed overwhelming violence.
Not the violence of the monsters inside it, but...
that of my master, Aika Ninomiya.
The violence of my beloved wife.
—Whoosh.
'What just happened...?'
My stats had reached a respectable B-rank level by then.
Even my dynamic vision was entering the realm of the superhuman, yet...
I couldn't tell what Master had done.
I saw only the result.
Countless streaks of violet mana hung carved into the air.
Space warped beneath the tremendous force, while monsters burst apart as though struck by artillery shells.
The delayed shock wave came next, followed by a roar that threatened to deafen me.
And finally...
—Tilt.
"......Was that too much?"
Beneath a mountain of monster corpses and a sea of blood,
Master stood serenely alone, tilting her head.
Without a word, I turned toward Công.
He was already looking at me.
—Blink, blink.
[Hey. What the hell was that? Scared the shit out of me.]
[I don't know either. What is that? I'm scared.]
I had thought an S-rank Awakener like Công might understand, but he was just as bewildered.
That was how abnormal Master's feat had been.
Fifty monsters from an S-rank Gate, annihilated in a single second.
Neither Master nor I could have done that in the First Round.
What the hell was that?
Perhaps that was why...
[The Saint will soon witness a miracle within the Gate....]
'...Those old people had been telling the truth?!'
A memory suddenly returned to me.
It was from just after we arrived in the United States.
* * *
Rewinding a little.
We had just landed after a flight of more than ten hours.
We decided to move out immediately without resting.
The time difference had left us tired, but...
people might have been trapped inside the Gate.
We needed to rescue them as quickly as possible.
"The American Awakener Association has prepared vehicles. We'll take those and...."
—Rush.
"Seo Yujin! Please give us an interview!!!"
"Mr. Võ Chí Công, what are your thoughts...."
"Do you intend to become a naturalized American citizen....?"
"......."
...We had been about to leave immediately, but they stopped us.
I was too dumbfounded to speak.
Reporters might have been obsessed with views, but did they have no awareness of the situation?
An S-rank Gate had appeared in the nation's capital.
Civilians within a five-kilometer radius should have been swept inside.
Dozens or even hundreds of casualties wouldn't have been surprising.
Yet they were holding us back and wasting time.
What in the world were they doing?
'Of course, I knew there were still zero casualties.'
Fortunately, their delay would not get anyone killed.
There had been no casualties in the First Round either.
At this point, no one should have died yet.
But no one else could possibly know that.
They were pulling this nonsense when every second seemed critical?
I was speechless.
Công reacted much the same way.
"Sigh... This is an emergency. Interviews will have to wait until we confirm the safety of the civilians caught inside...."
"Ah, that's fine. As of now, zero people have been transported into the Gate."
"...Excuse me?"
"Hey, Công. Why are you freezing up? Ignore them and let's—"
"Yujin. They're saying no one was caught inside the Gate...?"
"......?"
We reacted almost identically to the unbelievable claim.
No one had been caught?
A Gate five kilometers across had suddenly appeared,
not in some desert, but in Washington, the capital of the United States?
How could that possibly make sense?
'Unless a miracle happened....'
—Lunge.
"This is a miracle!!! A miracle bestowed by the Lord!!!!"
While I stood blinking, an old man suddenly thrust himself forward.
Fluent Korean coming from a Black man felt slightly unexpected, but...
his affiliation was obvious.
Only one organization on Earth constantly spoke of the Lord.
"The Church of the Lord?"
"Ah, Seo Yujin!!! Võ Chí Công!!! Aika Ninomiya!!! It's an honor to meet you!!!"
"Who are you?"
"I am!!! High Priest Ray Ellington, the first in the Church of the Lord granted the honor of receiving the Saint and his companions!!!"
—Pause.
'A High Priest? He was an enormous figure.'
His position surprised me.
Because the Church of the Lord worshiped Awakeners as divine apostles, its clergy rarely gave themselves grand titles.
Yet he called himself a High Priest?
In Catholic terms, he was probably close to a cardinal.
Công and I immediately changed our attitudes.
The Church of the Lord held incomparably more influence in the United States than in Korea. We needed to handle him carefully.
"I see. But how was no one caught in the Gate?"
"We evacuated them in advance!!! Starting several days earlier, we moved people out of the area where the Gate was to appear!!!"
"...You knew a Gate would appear? How?"
"The Saintess came to our archbishops in their dreams and warned them!!!"
The High Priest continued speaking at length.
Several days earlier, the Saintess had appeared in their dreams.
She had warned them of the coming disaster.
Knowing in advance, the Church helped its faithful and the other civilians evacuate.
Not a single civilian had been caught in the Gate. This was truly a miracle of the Lord, he proclaimed.
"Perhaps because I received the prophecy directly, I was bedridden for three days and nights!!! But that is a laughably light penance beside the miracle bestowed by the Lord!!! It is proof that the Lord has shown mercy to me and to all humanity!!!!!"
—Clap, clap, clap.
Applause erupted the moment his explanation ended.
Even people outside the Church clapped in a daze, so it didn't appear to be a lie, but...
[Công. Is that true?]
[It is. I confirmed it with Future Sight.]
[...So civilians really knew days in advance that a Gate would appear?]
[I can't observe the past, but the present and future make it look that way.]
If he wasn't lying, the situation was even more disturbing.
Gates appeared at random times and locations.
Even the technology of the First Round could not predict them.
The Chairwoman herself sensed one only moments before it opened.
Yet someone had known ahead of time?
And that person was not even an Awakener?
There were three possibilities.
The Saintess and the Lord truly existed.
The old man's senile ravings had happened to be correct against miraculous odds...
'Or was he a regressor too?'
Someone like me, who knew the future, might exist.
That possibility made a broad smile bloom across my face.
"Is that really true? Th-That's incredible!!"
"Ho ho!!! It's nothing...."
"An S-rank Gate broke and not a single civilian was caught in it. When I first heard it, I truly thought it was a lie, you know?"
—Ding!
[The skill "Complete Hypnosis" puts on sunglasses and strikes a pose.]
"How could I speak falsely before the Saint!!! I haven't uttered a single lie to you!!!"
"Oh, I'm not accusing you of lying~ Why would I doubt someone from the Church of the Lord...."
[Yujin. What do you think?]
[I probed him with hypnosis. He wasn't lying. Everything about the Saintess is true.]
[This is driving me insane.]
I had slipped hypnosis into my smiling conversation.
The result confirmed that every word about the Saintess was true.
How did we react to that shocking truth?
[Could he simply be a delusional fanatic?]
[Entirely possible. If he believes it firmly enough, he won't recognize his own claims as lies.]
[What do you think, Yujin?]
[There's no god in this world. If one meant to appear, it should have done so forty years ago when the first Gates opened.]
[Agreed. I won't trust it yet.]
Right. We didn't believe it.
This was the first time anything like this had happened.
One measly miracle was nowhere near enough.
And if it truly was real?
Then the Saintess would keep warning people when and where Gates would appear.
We could believe after that.
"I see. However, the American public must be anxious, so we'll go subjugate the Gate now."
"Please, at least allow us to serve you a meal...."
"We'll take you up on that next time. Guys, let's move!"
Only then did we resume moving.
We'd extracted all the information we could. There was no reason to linger with the Church any longer.
[My disciple, I remained quiet because the discussion was difficult, but is there anything I need to know...?]
[It's nothing important. I'll explain later. Could you clear the people blocking our path?]
[All right. Understood.]
—Fwoosh!!
"......Hk."
We casually deployed the Strategic Nuke.
The crowd before us, including the High Priest, split cleanly in half.
Master's overwhelming pressure had driven them aside.
Only the people from the American Awakener Association remained, hovering awkwardly after being pushed around by the Church.
We joined them and started toward the Gate...
"......W-Wait!! Saint!! One last message from the Saintess!!!"
—Stop.
We stopped joining the Association team.
My footsteps froze.
All because he said the Saintess had left me a message.
A smile spread across the High Priest's face.
"The Saintess asked me to tell you this: the Saint will soon witness a miracle within the Gate."
"A miracle? What kind?"
"I don't know the details. She said I wouldn't be able to endure it if she told me."
"What does that even...."
"But it will surely be a miracle you need, Saint. The Saintess cares for you very deeply."
Confusion replaced the smile on my face.
A miracle? What was he suddenly talking about?
And the Saintess supposedly cared about me?
We'd never met. We had not even been in the same room.
"Ah, yes. I'll look forward to it."
—Turn.
Too baffled to argue, I answered vaguely and turned away.
The Church was probably laying the groundwork to fawn over me as its Saint again.
* * *
That was what I'd thought.
—Ding!
[The Gate's estimated danger level evolves from S-rank to S+++-rank....]
[The dungeon's master has been slain!]
[The Transcendent ????? intrudes!!]
The notifications erupted the instant I approached the Gate.
Heralding unprecedented danger, the Gate swallowed all of us at once.
And then...
"......."
'Was Master always that strong? She had not been anywhere near that powerful in the First Round?!'
Master swept everything away as though performing a miracle.
—Mutter.
"That gorilla, she was hiding her strength this whole...."
Công assumed Master had finally revealed her full power, but...
that couldn't be true.
I knew better as both a regressor and Master's husband.
The power she had displayed far exceeded her own.
What had happened could only be described as a miracle.
The moment I realized that...
—Rush.
"Master!!"
"......!!!!? M-My disciple! This is... no. It wasn't me. I didn't...."
"A-Are you hurt anywhere!? Does anything ache? Do you have a fever? You aren't dizzy, are you!!?"
For the first time across both the First and Second Rounds,
I had no idea what to do with myself because I was so worried about Master.
"......? What are you...."
"Our delicate Master... F-First, climb onto my back!! I'll carry you!!"
"......Is he... worried about me?"