WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 528

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A Newborn Pup Fears No Tiger

Nothing is more pointless than meeting absurdity with common sense. The reason it's absurdity in the first place is that common sense doesn't work on it. No choice you make is the right one, and by the same token, doing nothing isn't wrong either.

The regressor had done nothing, watching people die around her, and in the end she had been right. She was still alive.

For now.

'Fight? Don't fight? Ugh. What do I do?'

Even fleeing while the Mountain Lord tore through the Black Tiger Corps was not so simple. In the middle of the chaos, the regressor kept her head and read the situation with cold precision.

'Running alone just gets me hunted down and killed. If there's any chance of surviving, everyone needs to scatter in different directions. Or I just flatten myself on the ground and pray the tiger shows mercy... damn it! Even that means throwing my life at the tiger's whims!'

I was in the same position. With no way to read the Mountain Lord's thoughts, I couldn't say for certain that turning tail and running from a predator was the better call.

'I can survive. But...!'

The regressor was herself something close to absurdity. Armed with every method imaginable, she had a trick for getting through even this. But that trick only worked for her.

'What about Hughes? What about Ende? And Azzy, who lost her crown? Do I just let them die to the Mountain Lord and run?'

The regressor could escape. She had the ability to slip away from the absurdity for a moment, watch how things played out, then come back in her next regression and change the outcome.

But she chose not to run. She could die here and use the experience as fuel to start again, and she wanted to see what came next.

'No! After everything I've done to get this far...! If I run now, this regression is over! I need to know what happens to Azzy without her crown, what's different about the King of Wolves when the crown is whole, what changed because Hughes got involved! I have to know! If I run, I find out nothing!'

Seven-colored light flickered in the regressor's eyes. The lights of the Seven-Colored Eyes merged into one, drinking in what lay beyond them. The cursed eye known as the All-Wheel Heaven Eye, the Eye of Fate, flared to life and illuminated a past that should never have existed.

The height she had once reached. There had been a time when, unable to grasp the elusive principle she was after, she turned to magic instead, trying to develop an innate arcane. She had failed in the end, but it gave her a much clearer understanding of how relics worked.

What the Eye of Fate showed her was Shei, in her time as a mage.

Magical energy poured in from a future that did not exist. The present diverged from the fate she had observed. To close the gap between them, she drew magical energy from everything around her. The regressor's subspace and Rene's pouch opened on their own. The magical energy stored in the countless treasures and arcane tools she had gathered flowed out to sustain her.

'I don't need to win! Just drive it back! Just make it change its mind! It's impossible to plan for, but... the Mountain Lord was never something you could plan for!'

For actual fighting, energy would have served her better. The regressor was only half-trained in innate arcane. But this wasn't a fight, it was making herself bigger, louder, threatening enough to give the Mountain Lord pause. What she needed wasn't a blade. It was a gong.

She funneled the surging magical energy into Skywarbler. Using Skywarbler, which held the sky in its temper and had swallowed lightning, as a catalyst, she drew out the absolute limit of wind and thunder magic.

The Mountain Lord had already reduced the Black Tiger Corps to ruin and killed the Marquis, but now it turned its head. Two whiskers twitched.

The regressor met it with everything she had.

"Celestial Sword Qi, Storm Cormorant!"

The air unfurled into a massive storm and beat its wings. Wind ran wild in every direction, sucking up everything nearby and hurling it skyward. Sand and dust billowed wide, shrieking like a bird of prey. Air and earth ground against each other, and static crackled up with no authority behind it at all.

At this point it was barely wind anymore. Even a powerful waterfall would have meant nothing next to this force. Ordinary people caught in that gale suffered just from the exposure. Beastkin screamed as the wind threatened to tear every hair from their bodies.

"Aaaagh!"

"Run!"

"No! Get down!"

The old saying about boulders being unmoved by storms must have assumed weaker storms. The Storm Cormorant's wingbeats drove the earth down and sent rocks rolling like pebbles. Mercifully, the rocks didn't keep rolling into people but caught on something and tilted, forming makeshift windbreaks.

"We're alive...!"

"Bleeeeeeeeeeeeugh!"

"Oh, shut up!"

If not for Kito, the shockwave alone would have killed dozens, but the regressor had no attention to spare for that. If she didn't drive the Mountain Lord off, they might all die anyway.

"Get out of here!"

She threw everything into a swing of Skywarbler. The Storm Cormorant, now dark enough to have a visible shape, launched toward the Mountain Lord, a raptor greedily seizing everything on the ground and trying to carry it off.

The shape was that of an eagle, but there was no substance to it. Sweeping a hand through the air a few times raised a large disturbance in the wind, but the storm itself didn't vanish. The Mountain Lord's brow furrowed as it lowered its body. The jacket and skirt whipped and thrashed wildly.

But it didn't get pushed back. It gripped the earth with its feet, took the glancing impacts from flying rocks, held its stance, locked its luminous eyes on the regressor, and walked forward through it all. Even with the wind blinding everything else, those shining eyes cut through and kept their fix on her.

It was the kind of sight that should have sent her fleeing in terror. Instead, the regressor reached for more power. Lightning flashed from Skywarbler.

"Celestial Sword Qi, Thunder Shriek!"

A vivid yellow light blazed from the Storm Cormorant's maw. The lightning the regressor had gathered from the lightning falls at Claudia, released now inside the storm.

She had no intention of landing a hit. How much damage would lightning do to the Mountain Lord through a storm of churning dirt? Instead she poured her power into the thunder. The lightning struck through the wind and sent vibrations rolling outward.

Rummmmble.

A roar as vast as the Mountain Lord's own tore the world apart. Enormous force converted entirely to noise and ran across the ground and sky, loud enough to carry across the whole of the Enger Plain. Boulders and sand leaped in place from the vibration, and the air itself shook until heat haze shimmered above the ground.

She bent that noise through space with Skywarbler and fired it at the Mountain Lord. A shattering roar that should have burst any animal's eardrums and sent it running with its paws pressed to its head.

For just a moment it felt as though every sound in the world had been spent at once, and a ringing silence settled over everything.

Storm, light, noise. The regressor had thrown every force an animal would hate at it. She lifted her head.

'...Wait. Where's the Mountain Lord?'

Its presence had vanished. The regressor's senses were nearly as sharp as an animal's. With the Eye of Fate open and seeing everything, there should have been nothing she could miss.

'Did it run? Please say it ran. Please! But if it didn't...'

She couldn't let her guard down.

Tigers are fast. Tigers are strong. And above all, tigers are quiet. They close the distance to prey in silence, then snap the neck in a single motion.

The Mountain Lord's ability to conceal its presence was almost like an authority of its own. The regressor, Eye of Fate open, cast her energy sense wide. She had lost track of it for a moment, but the regressor's eyes were a treasure that nothing else could match.

Three types of sight, reading temperature, reading depth, reading through things, split through the storm and the noise and found something leaping toward her. Terrifyingly fast. Inside the swirling cloud of dust and dirt, she had the illusion of tiger stripes growing larger, rushing toward her.

The moment she sensed it, she moved. And in that same instant, the Mountain Lord burst from the darkness and came at her like a lightning bolt.

"Skywarbler...!"

She spread space, scattered wind, and answered with the Heavenly Mirror.

The Mountain Lord's paw cut through all of it and struck her.

The small body punched through the storm and the dust like a bullet. The regressor, Skywarbler still in hand, was swept up by the gale, spinning through the air without ever touching the ground, tumbling like a kite.

'Ugh...!'

Even so, the regressor fared better than Marquis Lapaeno. The Heavenly Mirror, the supreme energy technique shaped by the Swordmistress, had responded even to the Mountain Lord's blow. Energy, magical power, muscle, force: everything in her moved to deflect the strike of a being incomprehensibly beyond her, and her life was saved.

No one could match the regressor for the number of times she had faced someone so overwhelmingly stronger in a fight to the death. Lifetimes of accumulated experience were what let her stay conscious even inside that storm.

'Don't fall! This won't kill me! Even if it does, it's not over! Compared to the King of Sin, this thing's will to kill me is weaker, and so is its strength!'

Airborne now, she drifted on the wind and looked down. The Mountain Lord, thankfully, had its eyes only on her.

'If I hold out in the air, I can buy time! Tigers don't have wings, it can't jump this high. If I stall and then run...!'

But even for the regressor, fighting the Mountain Lord one on one was something she had no experience with. There was no reason to go sticking her head into a tiger's mouth.

The great tiger burst upward through the storm. It bounded off floating rocks and pebbles, snatched tree roots and planks out of the air to push itself higher. In the time it took the regressor to collect herself, the Mountain Lord had already closed to within arm's reach.

Too fast and too powerful to dodge. The regressor felt the sheer gap in raw strength and gritted her teeth.

'...Is this really... not enough...?!'

A tiger is called a calamity because it is as unavoidable as one. A death that no human could resist poured its ferocious star down on her from directly above. The paw fell at a speed the eye could barely follow. Feeling helpless, feeling despair, the regressor still swung Skywarbler along the upward momentum she already carried.

Skywarbler's sharp edge carved across the Mountain Lord's paw. Coarse fur was cut away, and a tiny scratch opened on the skin.

A tiny scratch. The price for it was catastrophic.

Crash. The regressor's body fell like a lightning bolt. Skin tore, muscle and bone twisted. She spat blood from her mouth, nose, and ears as she plummeted toward the ground. She was already at death's door before she hit it, and after was worse.

"Aaaaah!"

Blood burst from her mouth like a geyser. She couldn't move, only shook violently from the overwhelming pain. The Mountain Lord's pawprint showed clearly across her body, and something red pulsed beneath her clothing.

'It... hurts...!'

Skywarbler and the Heavenly Mirror had absorbed some of the impact from the fall itself, but the original blow had been far too heavy for that to cover everything. Blood vessels had burst, and her eyes were red from that rather than the Seven-Colored Eyes. The magical energy that had filled her scattered in all directions.

The Mountain Lord, having driven her down so hard, was itself still airborne from the force. Once it landed, that would be the end of the regressor.

She'd be moving on to the next regression.

"Of all things, the Mountain Lord..."

Nothing would have been the right answer anyway. If I had fled with Azzy while the regressor bought time, would we have kept our lives? Losing this quickly and being run down afterward wouldn't be surprising either.

I hadn't read any thoughts. I hadn't seen the future. What I came up with in a desperate situation was a slender possibility.

Wolves. A promise. The Mountain Lord had made a promise with the wolves. A king's promise, it would have been. So then.

"Azzy!"

I didn't need to say anything. Azzy had finished her treatment and was already running toward the Mountain Lord. Except...

"Ruff?!"

Her whole body flickered for a moment and she stumbled, losing her balance. She gathered herself and tried to run again, but even her stride looked wrong.

A slim possibility. Azzy was a dog, not a wolf, and she had already surrendered the crown. Hoping the Mountain Lord would see her as someone with standing in this promise was far too optimistic.

Still, it had to be tried.

I fixed my eyes on the falling Mountain Lord and ran toward it. Gravity worked the same for tigers, it seemed, it was falling with its skirt flipped up over its head.

Even so, its eyes were still locked on the regressor. Whether it sensed a threat or simply intended to kill, killing intent radiated off it.

I looked at the Mountain Lord and shouted.

"Tiger!"

What did I actually have on me right now? Cards? Useless here. The Demon God? Using it as a tool rather than treating it as a being felt embarrassing.

Damn, nothing. All I had left was the hollow symbol of King of Humanity. No idea if it would work, but.

"I'm human! The promise was kept. The wolves are gone now! What's there is wolf-kin!"

I screamed it with everything I had, but it didn't even glance at me. My voice wasn't the problem, not with those sharp ears. It was simply that my presence was too thin, that I wasn't representing anyone, and it was ignoring me for that.

Then what about this. I drove Jizan into the ground and scooped upward like a shovel. Dirt and chunks of rock burst into the air.

I might be nothing, but Jizan was something else. The Mountain Lord finally looked my way. With its attention on me, I shouted.

"Tiger, wait! The one you made the promise with is gone, so your reason to leave the mountain is now..."

Right as I shouted it, the Mountain Lord suddenly tucked its body in. Then it threw its limbs out with full force, and its body accelerated toward the ground in an instant. What? What did it push off? It looked like it was just swimming through the dusty air.

I had its attention, at least. That would be fine, right? I was technically a king. It wouldn't just kill me outright.

I was still thinking that when the Mountain Lord touched down and vanished. Before I could react, it was right in front of my face. A ferocious star that locked my knees turned its force on me.

My hands and feet stopped working. Cold sweat soaked through me. Standing before that primal terror, I desperately managed a greeting.

"Tiger, nice to mee..."

The words didn't finish. The Mountain Lord's blow caved in my chest.

Front and back pressed into each other. Blood burst from my crushed lungs. A punch thrown in irritation, and my flesh and bones twisted from it. Like pressing down on a dumpling and having the filling burst through the skin, something vivid red forced its way out through torn skin and flooded my vision. The shockwave exploded across my clothes, and my body flew like it had been kicked by a horse.

Well, damn. I caught a Tiger Calamity.

This was exactly why I should have stayed away from the regressor.

There was no time to feel pain. Like an ordinary person who had walked into a furious tiger, I had been crushed under that enormous paw. A Tiger Calamity.

And with that, my consciousness cut out.

It felt like falling back-first into warm, soft water. A floating sensation, neither rising nor sinking, wrapped around my body.

Comfortable. Like not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, I found myself wanting to just keep sinking. But then the Mountain Lord crossed my mind, and I kicked out and pulled myself back.

What was this? When I came to, everything in every direction was pitch dark. Waving my arms and legs around hit nothing. My feet found no ground, just kept kicking at empty air.

Was this the afterlife? That didn't seem right.

The space where a dead creature's soul is sent while the body is left behind, where some religious standard judges your life and assigns you eternal punishment or reward, that actually exists? That was less plausible to me than regression. At least regression is straightforward.

But I was just an ordinary person. If such an implausible space did exist and had dragged me here, I should play the role of the most sincere believer possible, right now, adapted to the situation. No-not even a performance. If it was real, I should be repenting on the spot and pledging my faith.

[Unpleasant thought.]

What? Who's reading a mind-reader's thoughts?

If you're a god, I apologize. This foolish creature cannot believe in what it cannot see and so failed to receive your teachings. As punishment for that, I was torn apart by the Mountain Lord. Please, with generous mercy, see fit to forgive...

[You're not dead yet. Don't close your eyes.]

...I wasn't dead? That couldn't be right. I had no Heavenly Mirror, no divine power, I wasn't a vampire. How could I have survived that blow?

[You can. I'm inside you.]

Who are you?

[I am you. You are me. I am the one who came inside you.]

That makes no sense. There can't be two of me. Show yourself.

[-Alright.]

What appeared before my eyes was a beautiful girl with silver hair and red eyes, her skin pale to the point of being snow-white. The last place I had expected to see that face, and it left me genuinely thrown.

What? I heard I am you and assumed it would be something to do with the King of Humanity, like the dog and wolf business... Why does she look like Tyr?

She spoke to me in a manner that was nothing like Tyr at all.

[You can't die. You're not allowed to die. You have to live. We have to meet again.]

That's kind, but words alone won't keep me alive. Staying alive takes more than that.

[Open your eyes. Breathe. Move your heart.]

You make it sound easy.

[You have to.]

I don't have the strength, I'm telling you.

[You do.]

What strength?

[Strength.]

Something touched a hand that must have been empty. Spade 6, the Demon God's card. It probably housed Tyr's Demon God, but it had only made my body a little more durable. Even if I could understand my own body, without energy there was no way to use it...

[You will not change. You'll stay exactly the same. Just as you gave me a heart, I gave you a god.]

The Demon God is not perfect. The Demon God is a universal concept, a magnificent tool, but it does not give perfect help to every human. Like the vampire that robs free will, or the Golden Mirror that breaks bodies down, it ignores the small differences between individual people and pulls them into its own current.

...No.

It isn't the Demon God that's imperfect. It's humans. The Demon God's universal principle is too vast and too wondrous to concern itself with each individual person. The harm comes in the process of the Demon God being used, when individuals are ground down and suppressed.

That is why it is called the Demon God.

[Live.]

But Tyr's Demon God was pulsing inside me.

A vampire? No. If I had become a vampire, even the Heart Potion would have had no effect on me. This wasn't stopping me from changing. It was only keeping me alive. Keeping me from dying.

Normally, being revived like this should have had the homunculus's dilemma warping me. Because my fundamental nature would be changed, the way the Golden Mirror's homunculi are changed, or Tyr's vampires, I had fought desperately against that transformation before.

[As you are. Because we have to meet again.]

Innate arcane, Hyu.

Tyr's shadow spoke from inside the darkness, wearing a face identical to Tyr's.

Just as I had given Tyr a heart, Tyr had given me a Demon God. Just as I had recalled the rhythm of Tyr's heartbeat exactly and given it as a gift, Tyr had taken the exact shape of my body and breathed it back into me.

The reason I was able to give Tyr a heart without corrupting it was that I was the King of Humanity. And conversely, the reason Tyr's Demon God could revive me without causing corruption was that I was the King of Humanity. I read the Demon God and made it my own tool.

Because it had become a Demon God, I had gained Regeneration. Or perhaps Tyr had become a Demon God specifically to give me Regeneration.

I wasn't sure, but at minimum, I wasn't going to be beaten to death. It hadn't stopped change itself from happening, so if my body was actually torn to pieces that might be a different story.

For now, that was enough.

With a sensation of surging upward, I opened my eyes and came back to life.

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