WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 357

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The King Who Kills Others, the God Who Kills Himself - 15

Jingle. A bell rang in my hand.

Bell sounds had been used since ancient times to rouse people from sleep. The Golden Mirror's relic was no different. That clear, bright tone yanked me up from where I'd been submerged beneath his inner world and pulled me back to reality. Consciousness that had sunk deep rose to the surface. When my senses returned, I found myself back at the moment I had rung the golden bell.

Time in a mindscape, no matter how long it stretches inside, amounts to no more than an instant in the real world. I had spent a good while talking with the Golden Mirror in there, but to anyone watching, I probably looked like I'd been playing some kind of speed-ringing game.

Whatever my mind had been up to, my body had come to a brief halt while it processed everything that had happened in that short span. Maybe I'd read too deeply. I needed to pull myself together quickly.

"Demo!"

That was when it happened. Elik came charging in at full speed and shoved me aside. I hadn't read her mind, so I hadn't seen it coming, and I went sprawling hard. A dull, heavy pain spread through my back and lower spine.

Pain. Proof of life, as ever. Hurting like this was actually helping me come around. Not exactly what I would have wished for, but there it was.

"You, what did you do to Demo...!"

Elik had been glaring at me with furious eyes when she stopped dead. She turned her trembling head toward the Golden Mirror, eyes wide, her face a mix of shock, fear, and some nameless dread. She called out the Golden Mirror's name.

"De... mo?"

No answer came to the king's call. Instead, the Golden Mirror moved with a far more deliberate will. When that small boy took a single step forward, a sound like a giant leveling the earth came rolling in.

He did not walk toward where a path already lay. A path came into being wherever he walked. Rather than follow the world as it was, he cut it and reworked it and shaped it into the world he wanted. He was a Demon God in every sense of the word.

With a sweeping, grinding roar, the world reshaped itself before him. He lifted one foot, and the soil broke into fine, even pieces and settled flat. Rock was sheared into neat blocks and spread across the surface like paving stones. Each instant of creation felt like time running in reverse. The Golden Mirror walked the road he had made, unhurried and assured. Behind him, the homunculus soldiers and his weapons of war fell into step. And behind them, Elik, who had governed the Golden Palace as its Golden Lord.

The golden bell, relic of the Demon God Demo. A final work, created just before the Demon God who had longed for the Gold State's restoration drew his last breath.

In hindsight, the strange part was that the relic had been content to stay inside the Golden Palace, playing at dolls in comfortable seclusion. This was never unthinkable. The Golden Mirror's wish had always been the same.

The Golden Mirror had been weighed down by guilt, though, and that guilt had made it hesitate before creation that required destruction. So it had wandered the Lesser States, repeating hollow acts of creation and nothing more.

But now, having recognized what lay within itself and broken free of those chains, nothing remained to hold it back.

Things broke and crumbled. What became raw material soon took new form and rejoined the world. As part of the Gold State.

The Golden Mirror moved forward, driving certain destruction ahead of it in pursuit of true creation.

The legion surrounding us pulled back. Or rather, perhaps the Golden Palace itself was moving, giving the strange sensation that the world was marching forward.

Hilde watched until it had gone far enough, then let out a breath of relief and turned back. She made her way to my side with her usual cheerful air.

"See, I knew Father would come through! 'I' believed in you the whole time!"

'Oh my? This actually worked? I thought all he'd manage was to stir up a lot of anger!'

Her words and her thoughts were worlds apart. Lying to my face like that? I pushed myself up and shot back.

"Believed in me? Really?"

"Of course! If 'I' don't believe in Father, who will? And no one knows Father better than 'me'!"

"What do you even know about me. Wet your lips before you tell a lie that big."

"Lick. Done!"

"The fact that you wetted your lips means it is a lie."

"Ah! You caught me!"

Hilde had not believed in me a hundred percent. Less a matter of doubting my abilities and more a matter of hoping this plan would fall apart, but the fact that she'd come along and cooperated throughout said she wasn't entirely sane regardless. Whether she had the heart of a gambler or had simply gotten too deep into her own performance, I couldn't say.

Either way, as Hilde put it, the mission had succeeded. The war would not happen.

The problem was the side effects it was going to bring, and working out how to explain that would take some thought.

More than anyone else...

"...What happened? Where is the Golden Mirror going?"

How to explain this to Perru. That was something I needed to think through carefully. For the sake of my own neck, if nothing else.

For now, run through it fast. Maybe give it to them as a list, nice and clear.

"Everyone. There's good news and there's bad news."

Hilde picked up my opening in a theatrical tone.

"For some reason that suddenly terrifies me. If even Father thinks it's 'bad' news, does the world end tomorrow or something?"

"No. The world isn't ending."

"...?"

'What does that mean? Surely not that something else is ending? No, surely not!'

She understood perfectly well. Why wasn't she reacting to that part? Afraid that dragging it out any longer would cost me the window I had, I moved quickly.

"Good news first."

"Don't 'I' get a choice? 'I' would have preferred to hear the bad news first."

"Doesn't matter. After a serious conversation with the Golden Mirror, it looks like the war with the military state won't be happening after all!"

Strange, why such a cold response? It was good news, no question, but the reaction was smaller than I'd expected. Hilde greeted my announcement with a distinctly unenthusiastic whine.

"That's not really good news for 'me,' you know? I'd rather just have the war. Clear out the Golden Mirror and the Lesser States is nothing, really."

"...And the bad news?"

Perru cut Hilde off and pushed me to continue.

Right. I'd tried to soften the blow with the good news first, but that had failed. What mattered now was delivery. I cleared my throat, arranged my face into a suitably regretful expression, and stated the bad news plainly.

"The Golden Mirror intends to destroy the Lesser States."

Nothing added, nothing removed. Just the bare fact of it. Maybe too bare. Neither Perru nor Hilde immediately understood, and for a moment they both sat turning the words over in silence.

Hilde came around first. She tilted her head.

"Hm? That's good news for 'me,' though."

One person's good news can be another person's devastating blow. A little life lesson, learned here today.

Perru asked again, looking like she refused to believe it.

"...What?"

'...W-what? What did he do? There's no reason the Golden Mirror would...'

"Let me explain briefly. Perru, the golden bell is a relic of the Golden Mirror. I went in trying to pass a trial to earn the relic's recognition. But instead of giving me a trial, the relic kept going on about restoring the Gold State. So I criticized it, said something like, what kind of country is this that jackals would tear apart and leave nothing of in two days? And then."

Technically it was the Golden Mirror running a trial on me, but close enough. Near enough to the truth, so I'd let it stand. I wet my lips and carried on.

"All I said was that much, and it declared it would kill every last jackal to give the Gold State permanence, even without people left to live in it!"

"...That's a lie. There's no way."

"Believe me, I wish it were. Go and see for yourself. There probably isn't much time left, because the Golden Mirror is moving right now to burn the jackals' nest to the ground."

In the last moment before I'd been flung back to reality, the Golden Mirror had fixed its thoughts on a place. I had read its destination just before returning.

The Lesser States had become half a nomadic nation entirely because the Golden Mirror kept moving. The people of the Lesser States had to dodge the destruction it left in its wake while still scavenging what it left behind. That was why no one could build a proper home, and all of them wandered.

But there was one exception. A single town nestled at the foot of a mountain that the Golden Mirror had never visited, and so it had become the only permanently settled city in all the Lesser States.

A city under the rule of the greatest lord, the Thunder Lord, where children were taught alchemy and whole food was provided to keep them free of the Golden Mirror's curse.

"Claudia. The one settlement in the Lesser States, and the city with the most people in it."

The Golden Mirror, which had until now done nothing but create things for the sake of rebuilding the Gold State, had changed course.

A Gold State with no one left to live in it would become food for the jackals. So kill all the jackals, convert them into homunculi to guard the Gold State, and you had two problems solved at once. That was the conclusion it had reached, and now it was moving to capture the jackals and put them to work as watchdogs.

As a relic, the Golden Mirror would pursue its goals through rational, methodical means and would not overlook the simplest solution available. Morality? That belongs to the living. The Golden Mirror, already horribly dead, had no use for it.

"The Golden Mirror will break that city first, and turn everyone living there into homunculi. Homunculi to guard the Gold State for eternity!"

And the homunculi the Golden Mirror would build this time would be on an entirely different level from what existed now. The Golden Mirror had been deeply disappointed in humanity, and right up until I had broken its chains, it had never truly designed humans with any sincerity. What could a sincere Golden Mirror actually create from human beings? Where would the line between human and not human even fall?

An interesting question as the king of humanity, but before I could dwell on it, Perru reached out and grabbed me by the collar. My back bent under the pull.

"...What did you do...?"

Perru was staring at me with the largest emotion I had seen from her in recent memory, as if she were about to kill me.

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