WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 346

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The King Who Kills Others, the God Who Kills Himself - 6

Something felt off the moment I spotted a low, gently rounded hill in the distance. A ridge visible behind the treeline, as ordinary a sight as you could ask for.

Except that hill had not existed anywhere before we reached the Golden Palace.

A scene invisible from outside. Was it real, or just an illusion? Without any ability of my own to tell the difference, mind reading was all I had.

And right now, I had no way to use it.

Because not a single living person could be found among those belonging to this Golden Palace.

The only human in the Golden Palace, by the thinnest of margins, was Hecto, and he pointed at me and spoke.

"Golden Lord. This is the one."

Elik looked me over with a steady gaze. I returned it calmly, reading the expression of what I supposed I should call her, or it.

Residual consciousness is not alive. Even so, it once belonged to a human, so there was quite a bit I could pick up on, just not with the same completeness as reading a living person. In other words, my mind reading was sealed for all practical purposes.

Tyr was gone, and here I was alone in the heart of enemy territory. And on top of that, mind reading was not working. This was getting a little dangerous.

While I was debating whether to run, Elik produced a small notebook, read something from it, and spoke.

"You said you came as a peace envoy to negotiate a truce."

"That's right. It seems they have no desire for conflict on the Abyss plains."

"...The land of opportunity, now that the Abyss has vanished."

She flipped through the notebook again, absorbing something. Even when I stared hard at the back of the pages, I could not make out a single word.

If my mind reading had been working properly, I could have pulled out the contents of Elik's notebook, what she was thinking right now, what she planned to do, everything from her likes and dislikes down to what had happened to her long ago. But right now, nothing came from Elik.

Only the distant memory of what had brought the Gold State to ruin, and the regret she carried, drifted through the air around her.

What on earth had happened? I wanted to know more, but mind reading was no use.

While I was thinking, Elik finished whatever passed for deliberation and opened her mouth.

"Suppression Lord. Your assessment."

She spoke down to the elderly man without the slightest awkwardness. Even as a corpse, a king's corpse wore dignity like a second skin.

Accustomed to that manner, Hecto addressed the far-younger-looking woman with equal deference.

"I would say not bad. The Lesser States have spent far too long without properly working the land. Even if you put seeds in the hands of those jackals now, I suspect they would eat them before the day was out. Might it not be more reasonable to let the military state cultivate the land and take a share of what they produce...."

"Wrong."

Elik cut it off without leaving room for argument. Hecto went quiet. While he read the room and tried to work out the meaning behind the Golden Lord's words, Elik turned back to me and opened one hand.

"The Abyss plains are the Gold State's land by birthright. They were from the very beginning, and they will remain so."

The Gold State? Why bring up a kingdom that collapsed ages ago?

"If you have not forgotten your history, you will know that the Elik royal line used the Abyss as a burial ground for failed works. That is so, is it not, envoy?"

Elik spoke with the composure of someone who still considered herself a reigning monarch. For a king who had been devoured by the Golden Mirror, it was an excessive degree of self-assurance.

Unless, if my guess was right... but was it?

I took a slow breath.

Accept it. Mind reading, the steadfast companion of my entire life, was not working right now.

But mind reading was not my only strength.

Even mind reading could only reach a human mind. Not the thoughts of animals, not tomorrow's weather, not what the seeds I had scattered would grow into. I was not a prophet.

Human ability, though, was never just mind reading. A human's true power was the capacity to use every available means in pursuit of a goal.

Investigate the world, break it apart, predict it, exploit it. Even when things went wrong, you used the failure as a foothold and pressed on. Impossible was a verdict reserved for after every last possibility had been exhausted and carefully weighed, and even then, possibilities that had never existed could appear with the passage of time.

Declaring something impossible before reaching that point was something only prophets did. The rest of us could leave that conclusion for after we had actually failed.

So let's try. Start with my hypothesis.

"That much is true. The Gold State was a nation of craftsmen, and they had a tradition of dumping spent forge ash and useless scrap metal into the Abyss. Between the kingdom and the Gold State, the side that paid closer attention to the Abyss and held real control over it was the Gold State."

"You know your history."

"But that was always a matter between the Gold State and the kingdom."

The Golden Mirror was known as the mystery of the Lesser States, but then there would be no reason to use the name Golden Mirror.

The modifier in front: golden, which simply meant gold. The title appended after: mirror, the word for a monarch's subject.

In other words, the name Golden Mirror already contained the Gold State within it.

Why use a name like that? Perhaps the Golden Mirror had never been able to leave the Gold State behind. Or perhaps....

"The relationship between the Lesser States and the military state is exactly the reverse. Once they became the alchemical nation, the permanent loss of alchemic costs terrified them so badly that they would not even approach the Abyss. The land was abandoned, the military state invested in it and got results, so wouldn't the military state's claim be the larger one now?"

"A fitting envoy, citing only what favors your own country. But let me point out your foolishness."

I did not particularly care. Whether the Abyss plains belonged to the military state or the Lesser States was beside the point. What I needed right now was information.

The Golden Mirror kept moving, kept creating things. And yet everything being created felt somehow off. The cornfields were one thing, but stone cities and tall ramparts were the kind of architecture that had gone out of fashion. With the advance of alchemy, there was serious debate about whether walls served any purpose left, and here was the very founder of alchemy building them anyway.

Because the Golden Mirror made it, that is why it exists, fair enough. But the question of why the Golden Mirror made it in the first place was still standing.

That question, though, also yielded to a single simple hypothesis.

"You are wrong. This is the Gold State."

Perhaps the Golden Mirror was trying to rebuild the Gold State on this land.

"That makes no sense. The Gold State was destroyed by the Golden Mirror's own hand."

"You are wrong. There is a king here, territory here, and subjects who follow. That king is the Gold State's king, that territory is the Gold State's territory, and those subjects are the Gold State's people. Therefore this nation is the Gold State."

"The Gold State's king Elik is dead. Killed by the Golden Mirror. You are not King Elik."

"We still exist. We possess the king's memories, the king's appearance, the king's power. What do you intend to call us?"

The single most necessary element of the Gold State was the king. If the Golden Mirror wanted to rebuild it, constructing a version of King Elik would have been the first requirement.

Good. The outline was coming into shape. Golden Lord Elik was a homunculus, the Golden Mirror's creation. If that was the case, the Golden Mirror had to be somewhere in this space as well.

"I came to negotiate with the Golden Mirror, ruler of the Lesser States. Not with King Elik of the Gold State. Call the Golden Mirror. I'll negotiate with them."

Let's get the Golden Mirror out here. If I could see the Golden Mirror in person, every remaining mystery would solve itself.

Elik, however, had no interest in following my lead.

"Not even a grain of courtesy. Very well. Then I will make things rather more plain."

Elik extended a hand.

The earth was alchemized, and from beneath it a massive spear rose up like a growing tree. Ordinary dirt alchemized would never produce high-cost alchemic steel, but this was the Golden Mirror's domain. A quaint concept like equivalent exchange had no footing here.

Elik lifted a spear twice her own height in one hand. Forged from a metal that was anything but ordinary, it caught a cold light and leveled its point at my throat.

"There is no declaration of war more unambiguous than severing an envoy's head. I will show you in action rather than words."

Oh no. Did I push too hard? I asked for the Golden Mirror and suddenly she wants to kill me. So that was the nerve I hit.

"W-wait, just a moment. Do you know who's standing behind me?"

"It makes no difference. I will carry out the execution personally."

"Your Majesty! I'm serious!"

This was going to get me killed. With mind reading not working, I had no way to handle this homunculus. If I'd had mind reading, I could have found some way to escape. Actually, I never would have asked for the Golden Mirror to be called out in the first place! Give it back!

That was when it happened. Suppression Lord Hecto, who had been listening quietly, scrambled up and moved to restrain Elik with urgent alarm.

"Please wait, Golden Lord. Their fighting strength is not something to dismiss."

'Rustscale said the Progenitor Tyrkanzyaka was among their companions. Vampires who exert blood dominion are troublesome to deal with. Better to send them away peaceably to the principality if it comes to it....'

But Elik ignored even Hecto's counsel and readjusted her grip on the iron spear.

"It matters not who comes. The Gold State will endure in steel forever."

"Ngh...."

Was I going to have to fight? No diamond here. How long could I hold out with card magic.

I had my card in hand and was steeling myself for one last desperate stand when it happened.

Ding. A clear, bright bell tone rang out.

The sound itself was not loud. But from the fullness of it alone, you could tell it was a bell made with real care. If the material had been iron instead of gold, the harmonic would have moved something in whoever heard it.

Elik's gaze swung around. At the end of it stood the door of the town hall, creaking slowly open. Through the gap came a bright, unguarded voice.

"Your Majesty! It's finished!"

At the same instant, a sensation like the entire world stepping back caught me and pulled.

Not only sensation. A thin, invisible membrane separated me from everyone else in the room. As though the air had gone rigid as glass, my hand would not move any further forward.

Sound probably would not reach either. My presence might not even be visible. It was as if I had been excluded from the far side of the world.

It was not my imagination. Elik's and Hecto's expressions changed at the mere fact of this person's arrival. Elik's face broke into a bright smile unlike anything I had seen from her before, and she welcomed the owner of that voice.

"Demo."

Calling the Golden Mirror's name.

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