The Perfect Version of Me
As Do-yun drew closer to the place where he sensed Elysee’s presence, he soon found himself doubting his own eyes.
Two elves with exactly the same face stood facing each other.
“Huh? There’s two of the same person?”
“You see it too.”
Only after confirming Ciel’s reaction did Do-yun know he was not imagining things.
Strange.
When he had first entered, Elysee might well have been mixed in among the Nightmares. But the odds that a Nightmare already scattered in every direction would still be maintaining a challenger’s form were low. Which meant the doppelganger standing there had been created by Elysee herself.
“I can’t even tell which one is the original.”
Expression, posture, features—everything was identical. Even the rhythm of their blinking and the timing of their breaths matched perfectly. A flawless copy, with no way to distinguish real from fake. Assassination was out of the question; he could not even risk laying a hand on either of them. If the one he decided was fake turned out to be the real Elysee, the result would be an unmitigated catastrophe.
A peculiar thrum spread through the air, and invisible sparks leapt between the two Elysees as they glared at each other without moving. The sparks born from the collision of their mana showed not the slightest retreat.
“Their movements are too identical.”
Hoping to find some clue as to which was real, Do-yun folded his arms and watched carefully—only to feel a chill crawl up his spine at the sight of the two figures moving in perfect mirror symmetry.
Ordinarily, a Nightmare’s power was tuned so that a challenger who had reached the tenth floor could just barely overcome it. But when the opponent was oneself, the word “barely” lost all meaning. Strength, technical mastery, even the smallest unconscious habits of the body—everything was completely the same.
“So that’s why Elysee asked for help.”
If there had been even a slight imbalance in power, that gap could have been exploited. But the doppelganger before them had learned her own way of thinking in its entirety. No matter how original or brilliant a strategy Elysee devised, it was meaningless. The moment the Nightmare read her memories, the same cards were already in the opponent’s hand.
Do-yun finally gave up on telling them apart with the naked eye. At this rate they could stare all day without a decision, so he decided to intervene himself.
“Hey.”
The single word left his mouth, and both elves’ heads snapped toward him at once. Yet one pair of eyes held gladness, while the other held only emptiness. The instant he met those two gazes, Do-yun knew which was the fake.
His sword flashed free and cleaved one body in half before Ciel’s sharp scream could catch up.
“Doyun-nim! What if you made a mistake?!”
Ciel shot forward and stared down at the Elysee who was already a corpse, her face crumpling. The one she was looking at was the Elysee who had smiled at Do-yun with open relief.
“It wasn’t a mistake.”
Do-yun calmly recovered his blade and denied her words. As if to prove his choice correct, the corpse he had cut soon softened and melted away.
“Someone facing what they fear most wouldn’t look perfectly fine.”
He glanced at Ciel, whose mouth hung open, then explained the reasoning behind his judgment. After that he strode forward and stopped in front of Elysee. The empty eyes of the surviving elf held no emotion at all.
Her condition is way too bad.
Do-yun waved a hand in front of her face a few times and frowned. It seemed Elysee had not simply been fighting a doppelganger; she had been seeing something far worse layered over it. He was still weighing whether to slap her awake when the flame spirit nestled against the back of his hand flared with light.
A faint, almost negligible presence—yet even that was enough to restore a measure of clarity to Elysee’s eyes.
“Where…?”
“The tenth floor. And I just saved you.”
“Ah—thank you.”
Her complexion was still terrible, but once her mind returned, Elysee quickly grasped the situation she was in. She shook her head to steady herself and bowed.
“Thank you again. If you hadn’t been here, things would have gone very badly.”
“May I ask what happened?”
He knew it was a considerable breach of manners to ask about someone else’s trauma, yet he could not contain his curiosity. Her greatest fear was a doppelganger? What kind of event produced a trauma like that?
“It was me. A slightly more perfect version of myself.”
Elysee squeezed her eyes shut, and the full story slowly left her lips.
“As the highest branch of the World Tree, I was in a position where I had to make decisions about the future of our people.”
Among the elves, the better one could wield the World Tree’s power, the greater one’s voice became. And Elysee, closer to the World Tree than anyone, had been something like a proxy for every elf.
“I believed I had thought it through carefully. I was certain the choice I made then was the best one.”
Fragments of evil called Mana Stones had begun to contaminate the forest. Elysee decided to clear the Mana Stones starting from the areas the World Tree’s power could reach. As a result, the elves’ patrol range shrank, and the outer regions were left untended.
“The price of that wrong choice was catastrophe.”
Because no one patrolled them, Mana Stones multiplied without end in the outer zones; those places were swallowed by dark energy and transformed into a demonic realm crawling with grotesque beasts where no one could live.
“Even so, there was still a chance left at that point.”
At some moment a strange notice began flickering before her eyes, summoning her to the Tower of Trials. It was the last lifeline the gods had thrown so that the forest in crisis might be saved.
“But the me of that time didn’t know that.”
Desperate only to resolve the disaster right in front of her, Elysee asked every elf not to answer the Tower of Trials’ call. Coming from the one with the greatest authority, the request was as good as a command. In the end, all but a handful of defiant elves remained in the forest.
“I think you can guess what happened after that.”
Do-yun could only nod quietly. If the forest had miraculously endured its destruction and recovered its true form, Elysee would not be standing here now.
“Why did you treat Robin so coldly?”
Having listened in silence, Do-yun tossed the question out. At the crown of the World Tree he had once asked about Robin’s past. At the time Elysee had dismissed him lightly as a half-wit or a boy in his rebellious phase—yet Do-yun had sensed a strange regret and bitterness beneath her tone.
“Actually… I’m the one who inflicted Heavenly Punishment on Robin as well.”
Whether facing the Nightmare and recalling the past had softened her heart, Elysee confessed her own sin in a voice that sounded as if she had let everything go.
“I deliberately didn’t stop the child who said he would accept Heavenly Punishment just so he wouldn’t take his spirit partner into the Tower of Trials.”
The power of the Mana Stones had been devouring the forest, and the spirits’ strength had been steadily waning. In that period when the vacancies left by the elves she had belatedly sent into the Tower of Trials struck as a fatal blow, Elysee—driven to the extreme—had even entertained a thought she never should have.
If I stoke this child’s sense of loss, I might push him to climb to the highest floors of the tower.
Knowing full well what happened to an elf forcibly separated from their spirit, she had still placed upon Robin the Heavenly Punishment said to be reserved only for those who committed great sins. In the end, Robin’s rage toward the World Tree was something Elysee herself had ignited.
“Even so, I could never show those feelings. The other elves were relying on me.”
When there were no more elves who had not yet set foot in the Tower of Trials, Elysee entered last. Every elf except those who had not yet returned from the tower came to see her off, and Elysee—who had inherited the World Tree’s power most strongly—climbed without hesitation. Perhaps because her sense of duty toward the other elves had burrowed so deep into her unconscious, the first Nightmare she faced had taken the form of an ordinary monster.
“But the higher I climbed, the more doubts rose.”
The more difficult the floors became, the more naturally she looked back on the past. Had her choices truly been right? Had there been a better way?
“All those questions and regrets tangled together and became that doppelganger.”
A hero who never shirked responsibility, who made the right decision without the slightest hesitation, and who could protect everyone. That was both the ideal Elysee dreamed of and the shadow she feared most. That perfect figure was also a mirror that cruelly proved how lacking her present self had been.
“I’m sorry. I ended up using you without meaning to.”
The composed demeanor from their first meeting was gone; Elysee’s face was nothing but gloom. Do-yun looked down at her slumped shoulders and let a single remark drop.
“You’re digging a hole over something that doesn’t even matter.”
“Doyun-nim?”
Ciel, listening beside them, called his name in alarm. The words he had just spoken were far too cold and heartless to offer someone already wounded. Yet Do-yun paid it no mind and continued evenly.
“Once you run out of breathing room, you won’t have the luxury of those full-bellied worries.”
It was neither sarcasm nor clumsy comfort—only thoroughly practical advice. What mattered to Do-yun was not the past. When survival a few days or even a few hours from now was already uncertain, time spent regretting the past was a luxury. His nature was plain enough from the forms the Nightmares he faced had taken.
What I fought weren’t ghosts of the past, but other challengers.
Not the monsters he had once met on Earth, but the rivals he would clash with later in the Tower of Ascension. Clear proof that Do-yun valued the coming future and survival more than the past.
“Get up and go kill some other Nightmares.”
He had cut down the Nightmare in front of Elysee for her. But the trial of the tenth floor required one to overcome one’s own fear with one’s own hands; because Elysee had not slain a Nightmare herself, she still had not met the clear condition.
“Doyun-nim! You should at least comfort her! How can you be so cold-hearted?!”
Ciel was pounding his back with both hands as if to scold him—then caught her breath when Elysee let out a hollow laugh.
“Full-bellied worries, is it.”
Do-yun’s single remark dismissing the agonies she had chewed over until they were in tatters as nothing special instead lightened Elysee’s heavy guilt.
“You’re right. Without even the smallest achievement, I would have no face left to show the other elves.”
A far lighter expression settled on Elysee’s face; life had returned to her eyes. Confirming the change, Do-yun was about to extend a hand to help her up when—
A slender breeze brushed the back of his neck.
He had thought nothing of it at first, but his expression soon hardened. The breeze had not been natural. It was an unnatural current born when the surrounding air was violently sucked toward a single point—an out-of-spec natural phenomenon strong enough to affect the entire tenth floor. There was only one means that could make such a thing possible.
“……The Rune of Glory.”
The moment Do-yun murmured the words, Kaya—standing at the heart of the storm—flashed her amber eyes.