WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

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Chapter 385: Lightning Did Not Fall from the Sky - 8

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Maybe I had been wrong from the very beginning.

Claudia was a city of clouds. Clouds poured down the slopes like waterfalls, and lightning struck like rain. Rather than milk and honey, foul, gloomy currents flowed through this harsh land. Unless you were a vampire born to hate sunlight, there was no reason to seek it out.

Long ago, when Tyr led the vampires over the mountain, it had not been a city, but merely a mountain village with unusual natural scenery. Naturally, not many people lived there. Beasts feared lightning.

Still, the lightning kept tigers away, allowing the village to exist at all. Perhaps that was fortunate. If tiger attacks had come to this already miserable land, no one could have survived here.

In any case, the regressor said that fear had turned lightning into the Thunder God, and everyone else seemed to believe the same thing.

It was probably not true.

Rather, the Thunder God warned people of approaching lightning, making the sudden bolts that fell from the sky and took lives and property less dangerous. People had come to see the Thunder God as something familiar.

"...A weather alarm?"

"Yes. I think we may have misunderstood the Thunder God. It wasn't a being that summoned lightning... It came on days when lightning would strike and warned people."

A giant that roared with thunder and hurled lightning down at the ground. It seemed fitting to call such an immensely powerful and sacred being a god, but if you stripped away everything else and looked only at what it did...

It was just lightning, wasn't it? Lightning naturally came with loud thunder and scattered bolts across the ground.

"Seeing it broken like this, it must have been an artificial creation. Other gods were made by humans too, but the Thunder God was created in a more literal sense."

"...A god?"

"And it was more helpful to humans than any other god. Perru, did the Thunder God always appear on days when lightning struck?"

"...Now that I think about it, the Thunder God was always there on days when lightning struck."

"Has lightning ever struck without the Thunder God appearing?"

Perru searched through her memories at my question, then shook her head.

"...No. I think lightning hardly ever struck before the warning sounded... Unless it was thunder from far away."

"Lightning is a purely natural phenomenon, right? If the Thunder God were truly a capricious god, lightning should have struck even on days when it didn't appear. Since that never happened, the Thunder God really was an alarm. A very effective one, at that."

The Thunder God was said to come to punish humans who stole lightning, but it had actually been a tool humans created to detect approaching lightning in advance.

Perru muttered as she learned this unexpected truth.

"...Who made something like this?"

"It's written here. Frang, the Lightning Thief. Quite a grand name. The signature suggests Frang didn't mean to conceal their identity."

"...I've never heard of them."

"That's why their identity isn't the important part."

Knowledge had spread to all humans anyway. Knowledge itself wasn't a secret. What could truly be called a secret was...

"Who hid their identity. At this point, that's more important. Whoever hid it must know a great deal about the thing they concealed."

"...Do you know?"

"I don't know any more than you do, Perru. But I do know something else. When something clearly artificial happens, it's easy if you think about who benefited the most."

I already knew the answer, but I continued the conversation as though I didn't, for Perru's sake.

"You know the story of the Lightning Thief, right?"

"...Yeah."

As someone from the Lesser States, Perru couldn't help but know the legend of the Lightning Thief and the Thunder God.

There were many fairy tales about stealing gold and treasure from a giant living in a magnificent palace. Yet only the tale of the Lightning Thief had a giant made of lightning descend from the clouds in reality to seek revenge. Fiction couldn't defeat reality. Only the story of the Lightning Thief, which began in Claudia, had survived and been passed down through the world.

"But the Thunder God was actually a lightning warning device, and the Lightning Thief was its creator. That truth was cleverly distorted by attaching itself to an existing fairy tale. There was only one being who benefited from the process."

"...Who?"

"The Celestial God."

I had expected as much. Why else would the Celestial God expose such a valuable piece as the Thunder Lord just to attack me? There had to be a reason.

"When the Lightning Thief stole lightning, the Thunder God received the Celestial God's permission and punished the humans on the ground for having its possessions stolen. The Lightning Thief gave it trouble several times, but was eventually caught, repented, and returned the lightning. There are many versions after that. Some say the Thunder God forgave humanity, while others say the Thunder God burned with rage but returned beyond the sky when the Celestial God ordered it to come back."

After thinking it over, Perru asked, "...How is that beneficial?"

"Of course it is. The Celestial God gained the Thunder God as a subordinate without lifting a finger. How could that not be beneficial?"

"...What?"

As Perru faltered at the unexpected answer, I strained to lift the Thunder God's rib and looked inside. I had expected a complex mechanism, but I was wrong. Its interior was almost empty. There was a small device inside, but it made up only a tiny part of it. I had wondered why it fell so slowly. Like a balloon, it was all bulk and hardly any weight.

Was the Thunder God really just an alarm? Still, I could feel something...

The true relic containing a clue to the Demon God was...

This.

"Lightning didn't fall from the sky."

If it was this large, there had to be a reason. I went past the Thunder God's hollow body. Once restored, the Thunder God was little more than a frame. If it had anything that could be called skin, it was the broad sheet of cloth attached to its back.

"It was sent from the ground into the sky. Lightning was never something that belonged to the sky in the first place."

It was a kite.

A toy that wanted to rise into the sky on the wind, held in place by a string. A kite with its string cut was attached to the Thunder God's body. It was torn and worn, but thanks to the Lord of Gold's authority restoring it, its function and form were still clear.

The Thunder God had been launched from the ground into the sky, entrusted with the important duty of telling people when lightning was coming.

"...The Thunder God was a tool to protect Claudia..."

"It probably wasn't the only one. Most of what makes up Claudia is likely a useful tool like the Thunder God."

"...Why did the Thunder Lord try to get rid of the Thunder God?"

"Who knows? Maybe because an alarm was no longer needed?"

I answered casually, but Perru nodded in understanding.

"...That's right. After Claudia built lightning rod towers and installed Thunder Mills, there was no longer any need to fear the Thunder God."

"Then everything fits. Until now, people feared and revered the Thunder God, so leaving it alone was fine. But once they no longer feared the Thunder God, their reverence for the Celestial God would fade too. So she must have wanted to get rid of it now."

"...Did the Thunder Lord know all of this?"

"I don't know that much, but she probably didn't."

The Thunder Lord herself didn't know. Still, from her values to her authority, she had been a being observed by the Holy Maiden. Even if she made a rational judgment, she would ultimately move in a direction that benefited the Sanctum.

"Either way, this is also a Demon God's relic, so even if it wasn't the Thunder Lord, someone must have known about it."

This relic didn't carry the kind of lingering resentment that had formed in the Lord of Gold or the Great Master just before they died. Perhaps Frang had died peacefully. Not every Demon God died with unfulfilled wishes.

Still, this was a relic. The traces a Demon God left in the world remained.

"Fiction reflects reality to some degree. The lightning the Lightning Thief supposedly returned must refer to this. Otherwise, there would be no reason to say it was returned."

"...Do you want to take it?"

"Depending on the situation, I might. But I'd be satisfied just looking at it. I don't have any material desires."

"...?"

Don't look at me so suspiciously. Who was less materialistic than me? If I wanted money, I could've buttered up some noble and lived in luxury.

I only wanted to catch up to humanity. To follow the trail humanity had gone far ahead on while I had lost my power.

Now then. What had the Sanctum gone so far as to return to the sky and hide? Just as I reached for the relic with a racing heart...

For a moment, it felt as if the world had stopped.

Separate from my mind reading, the beast instinct within me sensed danger and seized my senses. In the endlessly stretched world, a huge, sharp presence swelled behind me.

『I warned you clearly enough.』

Light flashed.

I had no time to react. I couldn't have reacted even if I had. My view was blurred by mist, there were few people around me, and the weakened Perru was less perceptive than I was. There was no one whose thoughts I could read beforehand.

Still, this was... too lethal.

I lowered my head. I saw a sharp blade. The hilt was nowhere to be seen. Only the blade began in my abdomen and protruded out.

Huh. It hadn't appeared in my mind reading.

Then pain like being seared by fire came over me. It felt as though the inside of me had been scraped raw with sandpaper before the debris was poured into my mouth. The taste of blood filled my mouth.

Even when I gripped the blade with my hand, it wouldn't move. Only my palm was cut, blood running down it. Through the terrible pain, I turned my head.

The Thunder Lord stood there, staring at me with empty eyes.

A ring of electric current floated above her head, while wings of lightning stirred behind her back. Manifested as an angel, the Thunder Lord drove the blade in deeper.

Footnotes:

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