Chaos - 1
Rene had a dream.
It had been so vivid that even after she woke, the trembling would not stop.
It could hardly have been otherwise. The scene that had unfolded within the dream was so horrific it defied belief.
Bern lay propped against a cave wall. His beloved sword had been flung to the floor, and his legs had been severed. Whether he had lost consciousness or not, he sat with his head bowed, not so much as a twitch of movement.
A black shadow was slowly approaching him, though she could not recall its exact form. All she remembered was a monster so ravenous it drooled in thick, dripping strands, frantic to devour whatever it could reach.
The monster sprang forward and landed before Bern in a single bound. It opened its maw wide, licked its chops, and slid its prey's head down its throat. By the time roughly half of Bern's body had disappeared into its mouth—
Crunch!
The monster's razor teeth sheared Bern clean in two and began to chew, wet and grinding. Scarlet blood burst forth and ran from the corners of its jaws, pooling on the ground.
Rene, forced to watch it all, screamed. No sound came out. In the dream she was nothing more than a bystander. She could neither squeeze her eyes shut nor turn her head; her gaze was locked in place, as if she were compelled to see it through to the end.
Only after she had witnessed Bern's final moments did she at last wake from the dream.
She bolted upright the instant her eyes opened, her back already soaked through with cold sweat. What kind of dream had that been? How had it felt so real?
Rene hugged her trembling body and sobbed. The gruesome death of the one she loved—even knowing it had only been a dream, it was an experience almost impossible to bear.
"Hic…!"
Her eyes, wet with tears, would not dry. The tears kept sliding down her cheeks for a long while.
Something like that must never happen…
Time passed. When the tears finally stopped, Rene's eyes had gone sharp and vicious. A dragon's vertical pupils, honed to a killing edge. She had not forgotten that dragon's blood ran through her veins.
The dragonkin possessed a power not unlike prophetic dreaming—a phenomenon that appeared when one drew near a crossroads of fate. She had heard as much from her own mother, the Radiant Dragon, herself.
I have to twist it. I must…!
Rene ground her teeth. Always the one protected, always the one standing behind Bern—she remade her resolve. This time she would be the one who protected him. She would change that cruel future no matter what. Her eyes, thick with venomous determination, flew wide open.
"What in the hell is that grotesque…!"
A dwarf whose head had been swallowed by black liquid. And the source of that black liquid, they said, was a pickaxe.
That much I could accept. The problem was why the pickaxe in question was hanging off the dwarf's crotch.
No matter how I looked at it, the sight was impossible to process.
"If we cut the pickaxe off, will he go back to normal?"
"I couldn't say for certain. He might never recover at all."
Nothing to lose by trying. We decided to sever the pickaxe—but the moment I actually moved to cut it, I hesitated. It was attached to the single most important location on a man's body. Of course I wavered.
"We don't know what state they're in, so for now we should prioritize neutralizing them by—"
Crack!
Before I could even finish saying we should subdue them while leaving the pickaxe alone, Rene shot forward like a bolt and snapped the pickaxe's shaft clean in two.
Watching it happen, I reflexively bent at the waist and clutched my own groin. That particular agony every man experiences at least once in his life—the kind that forges instant solidarity among all of us—transmitted itself straight into me.
"Gyaaaaaagh!"
The dwarf's pain was my pain; his scream was my scream. The one silver lining was that the black mass enveloping the dwarf's head began to peel away. Just as Lin had said, the pickaxe really had been the culprit.
"Are you all right?"
"I—I'm fine."
I hadn't actually been hurt, after all. My empathy had simply kicked in hard enough to leave my lower abdomen feeling strangely cold. If I'd been that dwarf, I might have begged someone to just cut my head off instead.
"All done!"
"Good work…"
The dwarf lay foaming at the mouth on the floor. The pickaxe separated from his body had turned into a mass of black substance. Thankfully, it had not turned out that the pickaxe had originally been a certain male organ.
Frach, any idea what this black stuff is?
[This body does not know either. Mana is not something visible to the naked eye to begin with—yet I can scarcely believe that mana this vivid, this viscous, even exists.]
Hmm…
[Rather than this body, it is you who wears the expression of someone with a hunch.]
I'm not certain, but I've seen something similar before.
It had happened in the Demon Realm Forest episode of Part Three—the arc that had gotten Bern absolutely roasted for its plot convenience. The main story had the Academy deciding to investigate after anomalous phenomena were detected deep in the forest. They successfully stabilized the forest's disturbances and the arc ended there… except the true culprit was never identified, and only a loose thread remained.
Pitch-black clay that did not belong in a forest.
The phrasing from the novel and the black substance I was looking at now were uncannily alike.
The problem is that the mastermind behind the Demon Realm Forest episode never showed their face—not even through the novel's ending…
Hints had been sprinkled here and there, but the culprit never appeared. Looking back, there had been even more reasons to trash the author than I'd thought. Bern's Pong-Pong Guy ending had been so overwhelmingly traumatic that I'd never even considered it.
[So the conclusion is that you do not know either.]
Pretty much. Still, there are a few things I'm sure of.
[Such as?]
That this isn't the work of the demonkin.
Until the Demon King's resurrection, the demonkin had moved with meticulous caution. They either hid their identities completely or cut off loose ends so thoroughly that nothing could be traced back to them. Creatures like that would not go around scattering black mana across a meadow or draping it over dwarves. In the actual Demon Realm Forest episode, there had not been so much as a single hint connecting the incident to the demonkin.
[If it is not the demonkin's doing…]
Then the likely candidates are the Magic Tower—or a magical beast.
[The Magic Tower I cannot speak for, but if it is a magical beast, this body has a few candidates in mind.]
Oh? As expected of Magic Sword Wiki!
[I do not know what that means, but cease addressing this body in such a manner.]
Got it, got it. So who are these candidates?
[Have you ever heard of the Four Evil Beasts?]
Four malevolent monsters from Chinese mythology. Their names were Tao Wu, Tao Tie, Gung-gi, and Chaos, each more grotesque than the last. Monopolizing the Strongest in the Academy had referenced them as well, though none had ever made a direct appearance.
I've only heard the names.
[They are secret weapons—magical beasts the First Demon King created in secret. They were forged to destroy the First Hero. But they were made too powerful for that purpose, and in the end even the Demon King could not control them.]
Don't tell me…
[Indeed. All four escaped the Demon King's castle and were set loose upon the world.]
For something like that, surprisingly little is known about them, isn't there?
[One of them was said to have been slain by the First Hero, and another was captured and disposed of by the First Demon King.]
And the remaining two?
[Unknown. After their two kin perished, they vanished without a trace. Instinct must have told them the danger was too great, and so they went into hiding.]
This world was crawling with far more dangerous elements than I had ever imagined. Why did I have to suffer for setting the author had casually discarded without a second thought? If I ever made it back to my original world, I was going to take a hammer and pay that bastard a house call. The trolling had long since passed the point where words would suffice.
At least tell me who the remaining two are.
[Gung-gi and Chaos. The others were killed.]
So whatever happened here was probably the work of one of those two.
[Most likely. This body has never seen the Four Evil Beasts firsthand, and so cannot say which of them it might be.]
Guess we'll have to find out ourselves.
I let out a long sigh and scooped the black substance into an empty bottle. The moment the stuff touched my skin, my stomach lurched, my head spun, and a wave of dizziness crashed over me.
"Are you all right?!"
"Ugh…! I'm fine."
The instant I finished packing it into the bottle and pulled my hand away, my head cleared again. At least we now knew for certain what had seized control of the dwarves' minds.
"How could you touch something like that so carelessly?! What if something had happened to you, Bern—what then?!"
"S-sorry."
Rene had snapped at me with tears in her voice. She was far more emotional today than usual. Finding that strange, a sudden thought slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.
"Ah! By the way, Rene—are you…!"
"Yes?"
"Is today your egg-laying day?"
"……"
Rene's expression went ice-cold. Frach's scathing judgment followed immediately after.
[Go die.]