WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 370

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God and Human

Deka, adjutant to the Suppression Lord Hecto, had not followed the Golden Ark. The subordinates of the Suppression Lord who had scattered during the chase were strung out in a long dry line, and Deka, forever the one left to clean up, had to round them all up.

That didn't stop him from complaining while he did it.

"Damn it, damn it...! Everything we've done for the Lesser States, all this time!"

A company shares its fate with its lord.

In the Lesser States, where the Golden Mirror's long shadow fell over everything, a company needed more than skill to hold a competitive edge over other alchemists. No matter how talented a craftsman was, there were limits to how much one person alone could shape the world.

That was what a lord was for. You needed a chosen alchemist who could conjure value from nothing, and only then could a company grow into a power that spanned the Lesser States.

"That rotten Hecto-ssi, is dying really all there is for you? Just leaving behind everyone who believed in your ideals?"

Those who processed the stockpiled grain. Those who transported what was processed. When Deka tallied up all the company members scattered across the cornfields and the city, the number came to no fewer than five hundred. It didn't sound like much on the surface, but in the Lesser States, where individual bonds were thin at best, a group of more than five hundred was no common thing. And every last one of them had a vehicle the size of a house. A properly organized company like that was as good as a city on the move.

There had been a time when the sight of it filled his chest with pride. But knowing it was about to dissolve, Deka couldn't manage even a smile.

He glared ahead and bit down on his finger. Blood seeped up through the crushed skin.

"No. We can't just fall apart like this. If Hecto-ssi's assets get divided up, the company loses the one thing still holding it together! Damn it all, but which lord do we even go to..."

Muttered words that no one would hear, falling alongside drops of blood. Without a miracle, Deka's lament would end as nothing more than a lament.

", I have heard your resolve."

And then, like a miracle.

Someone appeared before Deka.

A woman with her hood pulled low. Nothing showed but the line of a slender jaw. What little else was visible, a bandaged fist peeking from her sleeve, looked like something you'd see on a martial artist who practiced energy arts.

He had no idea when she had come to stand beside him. Deka's irritation nearly flared, but at the worst moment of his life, the feeling of fate arriving unannounced quieted it. He pressed his lips together and focused on her.

"Order is always necessary. A value that everyone believes in must be upheld for the sake of that belief alone. The Drum Company of the Suppression Lord is the dinner table of the Lesser States, and it must survive so that its people do not go hungry."

Every word of it was right. Deka felt it down to his bones. Why was it that some people only ever started things without preparing for what came after? If the Drum Company disappeared tomorrow, half the jackals of the Lesser States might starve.

"You are a part of the system that makes the Lesser States what it is. Even for a country thrown into ruin once by a Demon God, who could deny the merit of those who built order within that chaos? You have contributed."

Something loosened in his chest. Like scratching a deep itch and flicking all that dark residue far away. Words failed him. Deka just nodded, hard.

Deka had contributed. The Lesser States had filled its belly on the contributions of the Drum Company and those like him.

Deka had worked. Pulling an all-nighter was routine. There were days he had put his life on the line.

Deka had been faithful. He had always worked with his whole heart, caught Hecto's eye for it, and eventually risen to the position of adjutant.

Surely, then, he deserved something in return. That was how the world was supposed to work.

"...You, you're..."

"One who knows you. One who recognizes you. One who will repay you."

Peruel removed her hood and showed her face. The halo gleaming above her grey hair quietly announced who she was.

"At last...!"

...Of course, what Deka truly wanted had never been order or discipline. Grand things like the Lesser States' peace or prosperity were results of working under Hecto, not goals he had ever set for himself.

He was a common small man. The ordinary kind of coward who leans on a greater authority, savors the feeling of belonging to it, and swings that borrowed weight around for the thrill of it. Under anyone other than Hecto, he would have caused his fair share of harm.

But now, called upon by the Holy Maiden, Deka was a genuine patriot who had labored for the Lesser States.

"This servant will personally see to it that you receive the treatment you deserve."

"Ah... oh..."

There is no heaven in this world, and no hell. Only lonely graves remain to mark the dead.

But gods deceive the dying.

They say that humans are not beasts and live for higher purposes. That the present is merely the soil from which lofty ideals will one day grow. That to die in service of those ideals is cause for joy in heaven.

Whether that was truly what Deka wanted was beside the point. Human faith was always this thin.

The Steel Maiden, Peruel, issued her solemn command to her new follower.

"Guide this servant to Claudia. That is your mission."

"...Yes! I will carry it out!"

He was still the same small man, still looking for a greater authority to lean against.

Deka knelt before Peruel and resolved to devote himself to her, filled with a soaring elation he couldn't name.

***

When the regressor said she would kill a god, the Thunder Lord went quiet for a moment.

'You'll kill the Sky God? A wandering stranger no one has ever heard of is going to fulfill Claudia's oldest wish?'

If it were that easy, Claudia wouldn't have spent every cumulonimbus storm huddled indoors, trembling. What the regressor was promising was too absurd to believe, yet too sweet to dismiss as nonsense. That was the problem.

'More than anything, this young one carries... a strange certainty. That kind of confidence means there's something behind it, some means I'm not seeing. There's no harm in accepting.'

Still, being so quick to trust felt a little careless for the ruler of a city. But then, if she was a regressor, maybe that made sense.

The Thunder Lord let the silence stretch, then spoke.

"...Whether those words are truth or bluster, nothing will be clear until we reach Claudia."

With that murmur, she spun on her heel and stepped out of the cabin. Every step she'd taken earlier had sounded like distant thunder, but with her intensity pulled back, her footfall was now perfectly quiet.

So we were past the need to posture. With the Thunder Lord, emotion seemed to express itself directly through the body. Using mind reading on her felt almost unnecessary.

"For now, I will escort you all to Claudia. As honored guests."

She extended the invitation with noticeably more courtesy than before.

As with any large city, Claudia had accumulated layers of people clinging to its edges the way fat builds up. Before reaching Claudia itself, the Golden Ark passed through dozens of shanty towns. Those who weren't even jackals, who couldn't survive without a city to lean on, had set up sparse camps around the mountain and were scraping by.

But that was not Claudia.

Claudia's boundary was more definitive than any national border. Specifically, it took the form of an electrified wire fence two meters tall.

What sat outside the fence was outside Claudia. The real Claudia began on the inside.

Standing before the fence, the Thunder Lord reached out her hand. An invisible force extended from her and tugged at the steel gate. With a groaning crack, the two-meter steel gate swung wide open.

She walked ahead without hesitation. "Welcome. This is Cloudville, Claudia."

The first impression of Claudia was hazy, not for any particular reason, just a great deal of fog. But pressing through it, after a while, a sight appeared that made our eyes go wide.

Tall iron buildings greeted us first. They rose easily thirty stories or more, looming down at us from above. Each building narrowed as it climbed, and at the top, iron branches reached out in every direction. They looked like enormous trees made of steel.

Below those outstretched steel branches, buildings shorter but still impressively tall stood packed in tight together, sheltering under them the way smaller trees shelter under a forest canopy.

The Thunder Lord glanced up and explained.

"Lightning rod towers. Steel structures built to escape the Sky God's wrath. If the sky turns dark and lightning suddenly strikes, don't panic, just get into the shadow of a lightning rod tower... Ah."

She covered her mouth and continued.

"With people like you, getting struck by lightning probably isn't much of a problem. That was unnecessary of me."

"No, please do tell us everything. We'll need it."

"Woof! Woof!"

Two Beast Kings yelped desperately. The regressor looked puzzled at the sight of Azzy and me failing to hide how unsettled we were.

"You two act like nothing scares you normally. What's going on?"

"What do you mean, what's going on? Being scared of lightning is instinct. A direct hit can kill you."

"Woof!"

Azzy barked in agreement.

Lightning, sudden noise and blinding light that brings fear, and occasionally delivers death as well. For beasts, it is the most common and familiar natural disaster. These days I had enough experience to usually avoid it, but fear written into the species is not something you can argue away.

A human could read the signs and dodge, or win over the right people and stay safe. But lightning was as fickle as it was powerful. A direct strike killed you, and even surviving one meant waiting for the awful pain on the other side.

Small wonder it was the first thing humans ever worshipped.

The Thunder Lord answered in a tone that said she understood.

"That's just how it is. Beastkin in particular tend to dislike Claudia more than most. Because..."

The regressor answered like an eager student.

"Their fur gets soaked in the fog, or if not that, the lightning makes it stand on end?"

"That's right. How did you know? That's not something an outsider would easily pick up."

The Thunder Lord was impressed.

"Well, it seemed likely."

'It's something I heard in a previous loop.'

Showing off prior-loop knowledge again. I understood the urge to seem like you already knew everything, but was that really wise? Every little thing like that peeled back another layer and revealed you were a regressor.

Oh well. It wasn't like I could say, "Hey, aren't you worried people will get suspicious if you keep mentioning past-loop knowledge?" Not my place. Leave it alone.

The humans living under just one of those lightning rod towers would easily number over a thousand. And there was more than one or two of them. Against the backdrop of the cloud waterfall visible in the distance, more than ten towers rose into the sky.

The grandeur befitting the largest city in the Lesser States was staggering. The Thunder Lord kept talking.

"The outer districts where the fog doesn't reach as much are mostly residential. The inner areas close to the waterfall are the production zones. Seven out of ten jackals roaming the Lesser States were born and raised in Claudia. There was a stir just now because word got out that the Golden Mirror was coming, but thankfully, thanks to all of you stopping it, the city was saved. Rustscale, no, Golden Lord."

Perru, addressed suddenly by that name, answered a beat too late.

"...Yes."

"Take a good look at this place. It runs independently, but it is still part of the Lesser States. The fate of this city rests on the choice you make."

The color in Perru's face, never good to begin with, dropped further. Burdened and worn, she answered faintly.

"...That is exactly what I wanted to ask you about, Thunder Lord."

"No. You are the one who must do it."

"...I lack the experience for such a heavy responsibility. Someone as capable as the Thunder Lord would be far better suited..."

"The Golden Mirror was also someone who lacked the experience for such a heavy responsibility as ruling a nation. But he was the king of the Lesser States, practically a god over it. That was because of his power."

Whether she meant to burden Perru or encourage her was hard to say. The Thunder Lord said it sharply either way.

"I am clearly a remarkable person. Compared to me, you fall short."

"...So then..."

"Even so, you are the one the Golden Mirror recognized. You are the Rustscale Lord, who holds unmatched destructive power in the Lesser States, and you now hold that bell in your hands. You can create or destroy the Lesser States as you see fit. No matter how remarkable I am, I am still only human. Holding a single city together and serving a god, that is the full extent of what I can do."

Whether she was boasting or being humble was hard to tell. What was clear was that the Thunder Lord was drawing a deliberate line.

Elkid, the Thunder Lord, wielded the force of lightning and commanded what amounted to near-limitless power within the bounds of Claudia. But it was still a human's power. However deeply she despised the Golden Mirror, she kept that feeling separate from her recognition of him as the one who had built the vast system that was the Lesser States.

...From where I stood, the Thunder Lord and Perru both looked like they were swinging godlike power around, so the distinction felt a bit blurry to me. But regardless.

"The Golden Mirror was a terrible god. I will help you, so become a god worth serving."

That, then, was the most encouragement the Thunder Lord could offer in her own way.

'...A god. I don't have that kind of ability.'

The person in question felt like she was being crushed under the weight of it.

And so we made our way toward the deepest lightning rod tower.

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