WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 359: The King Who Kills Others, the God Who Kills Himself - 17

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I explained the whole situation to the regressor and Tyr. I had tried to persuade the Lord of Gold, but his anger had turned elsewhere. Perru had stepped in to stop him from killing every last jackal.

I waited, bracing myself to be grabbed by the collar again, but to my surprise, the regressor nodded in understanding.

"Well, that can happen."

"What? It can happen?"

"Not everything goes according to plan. Especially when you're dealing with an unknown like the Lord of Gold."

'I messed things up completely while poking at things too. I tried to stop the military state, borrowed the Sanctum's power, branded them the axis of evil, and even lit the spark of a world war.'

Something felt off. When Perru or Hilde criticized me, I didn't feel much, but the regressor empathizing with me made it clear something had gone terribly wrong. Was I on the regressor's level? No way. I was much more normal than her! I had to be!

The regressor, now relieved, generously defended me.

"Either way, good work. You stopped the war for now."

"The Lesser States are about to be destroyed because of me, though?"

"It's not like you're the one destroying them. The Lord of Gold is. There's no reason to blame you."

'It would be stranger if Hughes could control the Lord of Gold however he wanted. Only the King of Sin could do something like that. Still, it's certain now that Hughes can communicate with mysteries... He said he was from the military state. Could one of his parents have been an imperial prince cast aside by the Empire? Not that his background matters much.'

Why was she being like this? It made me uncomfortable. It made me feel like trash.

Having roughly grasped the situation, the regressor got to her feet at once.

"All right. Let's go."

"Where?"

"To stop the Lord of Gold. We can't let the Lesser States be destroyed, can we?"

She said it as though it were obvious. It wasn't obvious at all. Hilde asked again, as if unable to believe what she had heard.

"Setting aside why the Lesser States can't be allowed to fall, how are we supposed to stop the Lord of Gold?"

"We'll have to find out when we get there. We can't stop him on our own, but we might manage if the Verdigris Lord is there."

"Perru didn't even help us. Why should we risk our lives to stop the Lord of Gold for someone so ungrateful?"

"That doesn't mean we can just leave him alone."

"Yes, it does! Why are we getting involved with that thing?!"

Ignoring Hilde as she bounced in place, the regressor stretched as though she truly meant to go.

After taking a moment to recover and deciding on a rough course of action, she gathered Skywarbler and Jizan again, then looked around.

"Let's go. As for a guide..."

The regressor scanned the area, spotted a highway beginning in the middle of the cornfield, and muttered.

"We won't need one."

The Lord of Gold's trail wasn't hard to find. A road ran straight through the cornfield toward him, or rather, a road he had made as he went.

Hilde borrowed a jackal's wagon nearby, or so she claimed. It had no horse and was just a cargo cart with a body mounted on wheels, but that was enough. We raised a sail and used Skywarbler to create wind. The force turned directly into speed and pushed the cart forward.

The road made by the Lord of Gold had no curves, and Skywarbler's power overcame air resistance. Once we shot out of the cornfield, we spotted the Lord of Gold entering the city far ahead.

Then we all fell silent.

"R-run!"

"Oh, God...!"

What could I even call that?

The Lord of Gold was... yes, like a rag. Not in the sense that he was filthy, but in the sense that he wiped away filth and revealed what had been hidden beneath it.

Jackals had been living in the city beside the cornfield. Since they would leave someday, they hadn't treated the city with care. They tore off window latches and door hinges to sell, threw trash wherever they pleased, and knocked down walls or pillars whenever they needed space for themselves. The city was lively, but filthy.

The Lord of Gold passed through it, wiping away that filth like a rag.

Whenever he marched, the ingrained grime called the Lesser States peeled away. The radiant Golden Kingdom hidden beneath a single layer regained its color. Scattered ruins rose again and became bustling streets.

Everything within a five-hundred-meter radius was covered by the Golden Kingdom at once. The Lord of Gold was a gigantic cleaning tool for restoring a nation, with a five-hundred-meter radius.

"Ugh, aaah...!"

...And it removed humans as well.

I saw people being crushed. Parts of the jackals' bodies had been replaced with crops made by the Lord of Gold. They were high-quality alchemical materials, and the moment they entered the Lord of Gold's domain, they could be broken down and used as ingredients.

Until now, the Lord of Gold hadn't actively harvested them. The Suppression Lord had kept them from approaching him, but the Lord of Gold hadn't cared enough about them to take an interest.

Now, things were different. The Lord of Gold was attacking the jackals indiscriminately.

The city moved. Jackals fleeing through its streets hesitated as their paths were blocked. While they lost time, the Lord of Gold's homunculi attacked them without discrimination.

There was no escaping a Lord's homunculi. The jackals were crushed along with the city under overwhelming force. Even then, the city returned cleaner than before. The Lord of Gold had restored it more beautifully by excluding humanity.

"Everyone! This way! Get on a vehicle as fast as you can!"

Suppression Lord Hecto announced it through a broad iron plate that amplified their voice. The jackals fled at top speed, making full use of their mobility. There had been casualties, but many were still alive.

Perhaps that displeased the Lord of Gold. He made his next move.

The city heaved as though it were alive.

One jackal, running away on two legs, felt something strange. They were confident in their speed, yet their legs kept growing heavy and their heart pounded as though it might burst. At first, they thought it was fear and forced themselves to run faster.

The moment they fell, they realized their exhaustion was not just in their head.

Their body scraped across the ground and slid downward, as though they had slipped on a steep slope. They clawed at the stone pavement with broken nails and muttered.

"The, the city's... tilting..."

With those words, they "fell" toward the Lord of Gold.

This city was the Lord of Gold's creation. To deal with the bugs living within it, he used a very simple method.

He "folded" the city.

It was like a giant clam closing its shell. The jackals who had failed to escape rolled down streets that had become slopes and slides. Many braced themselves by planting their feet against the walls, but those less fortunate struck something and died before they could. Others rolled all the way to the Lord of Gold and were "resonated."

Quite a few were still alive, but it was only a matter of time. Once the city closed its mouth, they would have to choose between two deaths.

Falling to their deaths, or resonance.

The terrified jackals shouted.

"Help me! I'll give you all the money I have!"

"Please save me! I don't care who it is, just get me out of here!"

No matter how they screamed, there was no way to save them. Even if someone could rescue one person, which jackal would risk their own life to save the rest?

The jackals who had barely escaped the city, or had been lucky enough to be outside, put even more distance between themselves and it in case they were caught in the aftermath.

Then.

The city stopped.

At the same time, someone ran into the city against the flow. It was Perru, riding Aurea. As she approached, the folding city jerked as though it had caught on something.

Her ability did not work well against living creatures. That was especially true for a beast with vitality as strong as a horse's. Perru pictured the city's structure in her mind as she rode Aurea, who raced forward with snorting breaths.

'...The city's foundation has turned to steel. The power source? Twisted iron?'

Iron had restorative force. If you grabbed both ends of a steel bar and twisted it like a rope, it exerted immense force as it tried to return to its original shape.

The Lord of Gold had alchemized twisted iron from the beginning and used it as the power source to move the city.

Verdigris Lord Perru had also reached the heights of alchemy. She couldn't create it herself, but she could roughly understand the Lord of Gold's design just by looking at it.

'...Then the power source.'

She would destroy it.

Iron's restoring force disappeared if its structure collapsed. Perru's power could not create something that didn't exist, but it could erase what already did.

That was why she had held back from using it, but now was the time. Perru reached out toward the mental image.

Objects made of metal could be melted down and reused. Once those recycled objects wore out, they could be polished and melted again, becoming something new. Alchemy was no different. As long as one could pay the cost, things could be repaired and reused again and again.

Perru had been born to poor jackals, and reusing a single object dozens of times was ordinary. Her treasured tin doll had once been a wheel spoke, then an iron crowbar, and had gone through dozens of transformations after that.

So then.

How much more could it change?

A child's curiosity guided her. Perru used the alchemy she had learned on her precious doll.

She transformed it. She returned it to its original state. She changed its material. She made it tin again. She made it move. She posed it.

Perru loved the doll, and she loved alchemy. She had played with that one doll throughout her childhood, growing attached to it. It was precious to her, so she kept it close all the more.

Yet both the doll and alchemy had an end. Just as a human who filled their body with something external would continue to age, the doll, continuously exposed to the magic that altered it, eventually reached its end.

It stopped responding to alchemy, and its body crumbled beneath its own weight. The tin, filled with impurities, became mottled red like rust.

No matter how hard she tried to restore it. No matter how she gathered the fragments to give it shape again.

It only hastened the doll's end.

At some point, the doll ended completely.

The end. Someday, everything came to an end. Alchemy might be perfect, but the humans who handled it were imperfect.

No matter how great or wondrous magic was, alchemy had no choice but to meet its limits as long as the humans using it had limits.

Her innate arcane was the endless repetition of alchemy. It was the end an object alchemized over and over within a closed world could reach. If alchemy was the journey given to an object, her ability was its final station.

Innate Arcane, End of Gold.

.

..

...

Crack.

Rusted iron split apart. The weakened structure could not endure the twisting force. It collapsed under its own power and shattered like glass.

The city's grip weakened. The closing clam loosened as though it had run out of strength. Rumble. The folding city unfolded again. Those who had been about to fall into the Lord of Gold's mouth instead fell away from him. Having survived a better fall, they risked their lives to run outside the city.

The walls blocking their path and the pillars holding them up collapsed like sandcastles the moment Perru's power touched them, opening a way. The jackals poured out like floodwater through a burst dam. The homunculi could not pursue them. If they did, they would be caught in Perru's power.

The harbinger of an end that destroyed everything rode alone toward the Lord of Gold.

Even the Lord of Gold could not ignore that. At the end of the road opened by Verdigris's power, he glared at Perru.

Footnotes:

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