Chapter 133
Victoria's hair had turned purple, and the wounds on her body were gone—the scales and the gills along with them.
The problem was the water pouring in, thick with shattered stone. Even if a person could breathe underwater, staying alive in there was impossible. The rubble of the building the machine had just brought down, and the ornaments swept in with it, would grind anything caught in that water the way a blender does. A tsunami barely a meter high is enough to mill a city on the coast to nothing. Water is dangerous. That was why Dagon had arranged for a device like this.
There was a reason the architecture resembled lumpy coral. It was not simply meant to evoke the sea. When the place flooded, the water formed a vortex, so that anything living sucked in with the debris would die. It had been built to kill traitors rather than enemies, and so they had been even more thorough. Of course, when the design was handed out, they called it a failsafe—something to drive enemies inside and bring the place down on top of them.
In short, being able to breathe in water was nowhere near enough to live.
"The scales are gone..."
Victoria half-peeled her clothes away and ran her hand, over and over, across the place where her ribs had been, then spread her fingers and studied them. The water had climbed to her knees. What had come flooding in turned all in one direction, and a vast whirlpool opened inside the dome. The blender was on.
It was growing dangerous. Caught by that current and slammed flat to the floor, she would come back out dead. I was thinking as much, watching in silence, when Victoria checked her arms and legs a few times, then stretched her arms forward with a puzzled look on her face.
The water in front of her went soft and yielding, like jelly. Not only the water in front of her—every bit of water around her turned soft and wobbly. More kept pouring in without pause from outside the dome where we stood, but all of it became jelly and piled up beyond us.
Come to think of it, the second world had not held a single person with a superpower. Then again, far too few people had been made with the Harvester to begin with. I could not multiply them without limit, but here I meant to be a little more aggressive about it.
In the meantime the water had come streaming down over my body as well. I had expected it to be sticky. Inside, surprisingly, it was simply water—smooth to the touch—and yet the moment anything tried to move, it shoved back hard, like water dusted with starch.
Rrrumble.
The device that had been patiently, meticulously collapsing everything from the outside in had reached its last stage: bringing down this place where all the water gathered. Stone dropped from the ceiling. The pillars around us began to give way completely. Victoria was stronger. Not one fragment managed to pierce the barrier of water she had made.
Time passed until every structure around us had fallen.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
Victoria had survived. She breathed as if she had sprinted the length of a training ground at a dead run, bent so far at the waist that at last she sank into the mud the ground had become and stayed there a long while. She seemed utterly spent.
Well, plenty of the empowered from the first world had struggled the same way after using what was theirs. That power belonged to them. They were not drawing it out of me, the way the Heavenly Demon Divine Art does, so exhaustion was only natural. If anything, it was strange that she had called up a force no human ought to produce and was only this tired.
"You..."
Having recovered enough to stand, Victoria looked at me.
"Survived. Congratulations."
"Kyaaaah!"
Victoria startled and screamed. She had reason. From where she stood, more than half my body had been reduced to minced meat. The only part relatively intact was a portion of the upper body that had been inside the barrier. Beyond that, not even a picked-clean fishbone remained.
"You're... alive?"
"It's someone else's body anyway, so the pain is fine."
There was pain. But the cold was far more dreadful than anything I could suffer from nerve signals as slight as these.
"Earlier, you said that body wasn't originally yours."
"Yes. That's right. For the record, I'm not the one who was meant to descend into it, either."
Victoria looked at me, puzzled and pitying at once. Of course she did. To her eyes, I was dying.
"You're not their master? I heard the name Dagon."
"No. I'm not Dagon."
Dagon, Daegon, Deygon. The names were many. All of them pointed to one.
She looked herself over several times, then nodded.
"Right. If it had been that one, I'd have turned into a complete Deep One. Yeah. But are you okay? Something like blood is pouring out of you."
The lower half had been ground away entirely, and a broad sheared face ran from my back all the way around to the ribs in front. Even so, this body was sturdy. The blood and the other fluids had already stopped leaking, and the systems within had dropped into an emergency regeneration protocol meant to keep it alive. Feed it properly, and it would grow back.
"Yes. This body doesn't die of something like this."
Victoria nodded at that, then went abruptly still. She stood without moving for quite a long time before she let out a long sigh.
"I made a contract with you earlier. So what happens now? If you're something like a god too, there's something you want from me."
Ah. So she finally had the room to think about the contract. She didn't need to worry about that.
"I'm not a god. And people ought to live freely. When your ending comes, all I have to take is the warmth."
In the meantime I would also take the warmth of every living thing this person killed. I did not say so. Suppose I told her that a death brought in someone else's warmth, and then she simply never killed anyone. What then?
"Freely?"
She looked at me as if I were telling a lie too absurd to bother with. I nodded my large, fishlike head anyway. Having no pupils made the gesture feel oddly wrong, but there was no problem just now, so it was fine.
"Yes."
I had no thought of forcing anyone. Leave people alone, and they would send me warmth of their own accord. What reason was there to compel them?
Victoria turned my words over. When she seemed to have reached a conclusion of her own, she looked at me and spoke.
"What are you going to do from here?"
She was asking what I meant to do. I looked through the memories of the Victoria standing in front of me. The past was complicated, but the important part came down to this: Victoria really had been a student.
Not, of course, the kind of school that lives in those faded memories, where royalty and nobles make a show of how far down they can look at everyone else. Places like that were not absent from this world. Victoria simply did not attend one. By this world's measure she was a modernized alchemist—a student training for the profession of Clockwork Knight.
This world stood at the forward edge of a civilization in which brass clockwork and magical mechanisms lay tangled together. Easiest to picture it as steampunk on the outside, with magic for an engine. That was why she had handled the crowbar so well. It also explained how naturally she had used a serious weapon.
At any rate, she had been heading home for the break, waiting at a port to catch a ship, when she was taken. She woke in an underground prison deep in a den of Deep Ones. Coming to among people already half-turned into fish-folk, she snatched up the crowbar lying beside her and, with a single blow, killed the Deep One about to drive a syringe into her.
After that she moved through the den, trying to escape, until she caught a high-ranking Deep One who had come to take her back—and her priorities changed. The creature's dying breath had been that their god was descending. From that one she obtained a weapon that could kill any Deep One in a single stroke, and a key capable of bringing this place down. She also learned that the injection had already gone into her.
So she killed every Deep One in her path and reached the place of summoning. After that, I was summoned. And so we had come to now.
The faded memories glittered, as if to say she might as well have been the protagonist of a horror game. I agreed, and considered what ought to come next.
Lead this enormous body away and hide in the water. That was dangerous. All sorts of living weapons, made through biotechnology and driven out into the wild, had died there. Going out in this shape did not seem as though it would help. It would only postpone, a little, the business of being torn to pieces.
They had attacked me, so I could have made monsters of them. But unless I was making a tool, I never meant to take warmth and turn something into a monster again. A sneer of that kind only had to happen once.
"What should I do."
"Don't ask me again."
Silence settled. Victoria, who had been standing in the middle of the ruins with her arms folded, seemed to remember something, and looked at me.
"The kids from the magic academy walk around with creatures they call summons—things that can turn themselves almost human. You can't?"
Transformation. I could not use magic. Then, if it were not transformation but mutation, might it be possible? I was not sure I could change into a human shape. I had regenerated flesh before, though.
"I'll try."
Changing the shape of the vessel was a first. It was not a living creature but a made one, so there was no resistance. Press reality down hard enough, and the world changes in the direction I want.
Krrk. A hairline crack ran through the world.
"Huh? You were a little girl?"
I had become a small girl. I had nothing left to say.
The girl's face was a face I knew. Not exactly the same, and yet before Victoria's eyes stood a small girl whose features were still perfectly clear. I swear I had never meant to take this form. Purple hair. Small hands, small feet. A girl much like the last time I had seen her.
Soo.
In a corner of memory, a technique I had never once understood how to use flickered alight.
Soosim Gong Choseol
Yes.
That memory glimmered, faint. It shone the way Soo used to smile when a prank she had played on me succeeded.