WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 385

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Lightning Did Not Fall from the Sky - 8

Maybe I had been wrong about it from the very start.

Claudia, city of clouds. A place where clouds pour down the mountainside like a waterfall and lightning strikes like rain. You could call it a harsh land running on foul, heavy air instead of milk and honey. Unless you were a vampire with a born aversion to sunlight, there was no particular reason to seek it out.

Far in the past, when Tyr had led her vampires across the mountains, it was nothing more than a mountain hamlet with unusual scenery, not a proper city. Naturally, not many people lived there. Animals fear lightning.

You might say it was fortunate that the lightning at least kept tigers away, giving people room to build a community. If tigers had come on top of everything else in that already brutal land, survival would have been impossible.

Anyway, it was that fear that turned lightning into the Sky God, or so the regressor said, and others believed it too. But that probably wasn't the truth.

More likely, the Sky God had begun announcing when lightning was coming, and that made the sudden strikes that had once claimed lives and property a little less dangerous. People had even started to feel a certain warmth toward the Sky God.

"...A weather alarm?"

"Yes. It seems we had the wrong idea about the Sky God all along. The Sky God wasn't something that called lightning down, it was something that came when lightning was on its way and warned people."

A giant that howled with thunder and hurled bolts at the earth. Enormously powerful, sacred in bearing, the title of god seemed to fit it well. But strip away all the drama and look only at what it actually did, and...

It was just lightning. Lightning is loud by nature. Lightning scatters bolts across the ground.

"And now that I see how it broke apart, it must have been something someone made. Other gods were made by human hands as well, but the Sky God was constructed in a more straightforward sense."

"...A god?"

"And one far more useful to people than the others. Perru, was the Sky God always visible on days when lightning struck?"

"...Come to think of it, whenever lightning came, the Sky God was always there."

"Was there ever a time lightning struck without the Sky God appearing?"

Perru thought back through the past and shook her head at my question.

"...No. A case where lightning hit before the alarm sounded... I can't think of one. Not unless it was distant thunder."

"Lightning is a purely natural phenomenon, isn't it? If the Sky God were truly capricious, there should have been days it didn't show up and lightning still struck. The fact that there weren't any confirms it: the Sky God was an alarm. A very good one, at that."

The Sky God, long believed to come and punish anyone who stole lightning, had actually been a tool humans built to detect when lightning was approaching.

Perru murmured at the unexpected revelation.

"...Who made something like this?"

"It's written right here. Frang, the Lightning Thief. Quite a name. The fact that he signed it suggests he had no intention of hiding himself."

"...Never heard of him."

"Right, which means his identity isn't really the point."

The knowledge had passed to all of humanity regardless. The knowledge itself wasn't the secret. What could be called a secret was something else entirely.

"Who hid his identity, that's what matters now. Whoever did the hiding would naturally know the thing they hid very well."

"...You know?"

"I'm just as in the dark as you are, Perru. But I know something else. When something is obviously deliberate, it gets easier if you ask who stood to gain the most."

I already knew the answer, but I kept the conversation going for Perru's sake, playing ignorant.

"You know the story of the lightning thief, don't you?"

"...Yes."

People of the Lesser States, as the ones most directly involved, would know it better than anyone. The legend of the lightning thief and the Sky God.

There are countless fairy tales in the world about someone stealing gold and treasure from a giant in a grand palace. But a giant made of lightning actually riding down on clouds to take real revenge in the world, that only happened in the lightning thief story. Fiction cannot beat reality. Only the tale that started in Claudia had survived and been passed down through the world.

"The thing is, the Sky God was actually a lightning alert, and the lightning thief was the Sky God's creator. That truth got quietly twisted by grafting it onto an existing fairy tale. Only one party benefited from that process."

"...Who?"

"The Celestial God."

I had more or less guessed. Did they really go to the trouble of exposing the Thunder Lord just to come at me? There had to be a reason worth that.

"When the lightning thief stole lightning, the Sky God, robbed of what was its own, received the Celestial God's permission and came down to punish the humans below. The thief gave the Sky God a bit of trouble a few times, but in the end the lightning thief was caught, had a change of heart, and returned the lightning. After that, the stories diverge: some say the humans were forgiven, others say the Sky God burned with fury but the Celestial God called it back, and it retreated beyond the sky for the time being."

Perru turned the idea over in silence before asking again.

"...That's a benefit?"

"Of course. They made the Sky God their subordinate without lifting a finger. That's obviously a benefit."

"...What?"

Perru stopped short at the unexpected answer. I grunted and pried up one of the Sky God's ribs, peering inside. I had expected complicated machinery, but I was wrong. The interior was almost empty. There was a small device in there, but only a fraction of what I had imagined. I had been wondering why it fell so slowly, and now I understood. Like a balloon, it was enormous in volume and barely weighed anything.

Is the Sky God really just an alarm? But I can still feel something from it. The true relic carrying the Demon God's trace must be...

This.

"Lightning did not fall from the sky."

If something is only large, there's a reason for that. I moved past the hollow shell of the Sky God's body. If the restored, bare-framed Sky God could be said to have a skin, it was nothing more than a wide piece of cloth attached to its back.

"It was sent up from the ground. From the very beginning, lightning was never something that belonged to the sky."

A kite.

A toy that tries to ride the wind up into the sky, held in place by a string. Hanging from the Sky God's frame was a kite with its string snapped. Torn and ragged, but thanks to the Golden Mirror's power restoring it, both its function and its shape were clear enough to make out.

The Sky God had been launched from the ground and sent up into the sky, entrusted with the vital duty of signaling when lightning was coming.

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

"Not just the Sky God, most likely. The majority of what makes up Claudia is probably all useful tools along the same lines."

"...Why did the Thunder Lord want to destroy the Sky God?"

"Who knows? Maybe the alarm wasn't needed anymore?"

I answered without much thought, but Perru nodded and accepted it.

"...That's true. After the Lightning Rod Towers were built and the Thunder Wheels installed in Claudia, there was no reason to fear the Sky God anymore."

"Then everything lines up. Until now, people feared and revered the Sky God, so leaving it alone was fine. But once people no longer feared the Sky God, the awe toward the Celestial God would fade along with it. That's when they'd want it dealt with."

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

"I couldn't say, but probably not."

The Thunder Lord herself hadn't known. But she was someone whose values and abilities alike had been observed by the Holy Maiden from start to finish, so even when she made what seemed like a reasonable decision, she would end up moving in the direction that benefited the Sanctum.

"In any case, this too is a Demon God's relic, so whether or not the Thunder Lord was involved, someone clearly knew of its existence."

This relic doesn't carry the deep-seated resentment of someone dying with an unfulfilled wish, the way the Golden Mirror or the Great Patriarch had. Whoever it was, they seemed to have gone peacefully. Not every Demon God dies clutching something left undone.

But this was still a relic. The mark the Demon God had carved into the world remained.

"Fiction does reflect reality to some degree. The lightning the lightning thief returned in the story, that would refer to this. Otherwise there would be no reason to say it was returned at all."

"...You want to take it?"

"Depending on the situation, maybe. But just being able to see it is enough for me. I have no attachment to possessions."

"...?"

Don't look at me like that. Who has less attachment to possessions than me? If I'd wanted money, I could have just flattered some noble and lived comfortably.

I only want to catch up to humanity. The steps humanity took while I was losing my strength, steps that carried them so much farther ahead than I ever realized.

Now then. Let's see what the Sanctum went so far as to send back up to the sky to hide. I held that flutter of anticipation in my chest as I reached toward the relic.

For a moment, the world seemed to stop. An animal instinct that moves independently of mind reading sensed something wrong and seized my senses. In a world stretched endlessly thin, a vast and sharp presence swelled up at my back.

[I did warn you.]

Light flashed.

There was no time to react. No ability to react, either. My field of view was hazy with fog, there were few people around me, and Perru, weakened as she was, had duller senses than mine. No one nearby for mind reading to get ahead of.

Even so, this was... too much. Too lethal.

I looked down. A sharp blade. No sign of the hilt anywhere. Only the blade jutting out from my abdomen.

Oh. Mind reading hadn't caught it.

Pain like being cauterized came next. The feeling of having my insides scraped raw with sandpaper and then having the remains poured back in through my mouth. Blood flooded my mouth.

I gripped the blade with my hand, but it didn't move. My palm was only cut open and bleeding. Through the awful pain I turned to look, and there stood the Thunder Lord, watching me with empty eyes.

A ring of electric current floating above her head. Wings of lightning beating at her back. The Thunder Lord, manifested as an angel, drove the blade deeper into me.

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