WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 560

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The One Who Foresees, the One Who Watches

In the dark of night, a cluster of light shimmered high among the trees. A strange glow built from tens of thousands of fireflies, hard to make out from a distance, but it held the shape of a young girl.

Hair as smooth as black velvet. Eyes gently closed. Soft lips. A beauty no sculpture could capture, rendered now in living light. The Holy Maiden of Heaven, Maiél, had descended to this earth in the form of radiance and pointed the way.

[Look. Shei. Look at the King of Humanity.]

And beside her, Shei stood at the crown of the tallest tree and watched over the immortal village below.

The distance was vast. Far enough that without the Seven-Colored Eyes, people would blur into heat shimmer. From that impossible remove, the regressor tracked every detail of the carnage unfolding in the immortal village with eyes built to see to the horizon.

[He is the destroyer of order. He denies civilization and history, and sees humans as nothing but pure, unmediated human beings. Where you were born, what you learned, the history you lived through, none of it holds any meaning for him. He is the king of the pure 'human,' stripped of all that. The representative of every 'human' walking this earth right now.]

Shei could not find words. What she was seeing was too unfamiliar.

She had known he carried an undying body. She had never seen him fight with it. And the way he fought was utterly savage.

He trusted his immortality and threw his body around like a tool. A broken arm, flowing blood, those were just instruments now. He shattered his own limbs to drive headbutts home, ran skewers through himself, bled deliberately to incapacitate.

The blood of a blood demon was a curse. Alone it was not enough to kill an immortal. But he moved with precise intent, targeting only the divine body, the link connecting each immortal to their patron deity. By staining those links with the curse and severing them, he shaved the immortals' strength away at a steady pace.

A fight between immortals was a war of attrition. Bodies regenerated, so the only path to victory was wearing the other side down. Rather than saving power for a single decisive blow, you had to keep making favorable exchanges, again and again.

And no one made those exchanges more brutally than he did.

[He affirms everything. No method is off-limits. He twists rules, circumvents the Pact, finds the gaps in order and slips through them. He has no taboos. Can or cannot, that is the only question that matters to him.]

The immortals swarmed him, trying to pin him down with sheer numbers. They could not be killed by a blade and they knew it, so they came with reckless ferocity. A storm that would have torn any ordinary person to shreds crashed over him.

Hughes did not retreat. He dove straight into the gap between three of them. An elbow cracked against his skull. Fingers spread wide, sharp nails punched through his stomach.

His body was being torn apart, and his hands never stopped moving. He scraped the elbow away with a skewer, scooped up the blood running from his gut, and flung it. The Demon God's power wielded absolute dominion, but only through his own blood. Doused in blood carrying the Progenitor's blessing, the immortals began to slow.

The Demon God's power touched the rules of the world itself. Within the bounds of its principle, it granted strength that was infinite and unconditional. The immortals recoiled at another form of undying power, one that showed no sign of running dry.

[If every human were good, perhaps it would be fine. But some humans are wicked, and some are cowardly, and some simply do not care. Humans who wound others, deceive them, and feel nothing about what happens to them-the world is full of them beyond counting. Leave them alone, and evil spreads like a stain. It darkens everything around it.]

The endless brawl, the exchange of mutually cursing forces. By any measure, Hughes was just one person against a tide of powerful immortals, and that should have meant he was weak.

Yet the longer the fight dragged on, the more the advantage tilted toward him.

[He is the King of Humanity. An ancient evil that has existed since time immemorial, one that has indulged humanity's sins without restraint. Shei. He is... even now, weakened as he is by his exile from humanity, he is that dangerous.]

It was only then that Shei understood what the Holy Maiden of Heaven had meant by the ancient evil that needed to be destroyed.

The King of Humanity. A being that stirred the wicked impulses sleeping inside the human heart. An ancient evil far more dangerous than the demons of the past who had died and become patron deities.

The Holy Maiden of Heaven had foreseen all of this. She had shown Shei the landscape she herself saw.

Her final hope, and her first despair, both laid before Shei.

[Even so. Will you still shelter the King of Humanity?]

Shei watched the ancient evil in silence.

***

Tyr's Demon God promised an immortal body to 'me' and no one else. My blood was bound with a dominion as powerful as any vampire's. I had been letting it flow deliberately, letting it seep into the immortals' flesh.

It was not enough to marinate them in blood the way Tyr could, so I had only been injecting it through the skewers into the bodies I had already dedicated. The blood loss had long since passed anemia and into territory that could kill through exsanguination, but a Demon God could withstand losses on this scale.

"What are you all dragging your feet for?! The patron deity demands a sacrifice!"

One immortal grabbed a short blade and charged. I read his thoughts quickly. The dedicated part was the right hip, an awkward spot to aim for.

"I really don't want to be going for a man's backside."

I muttered the useless complaint and threw out my hand to block the blade. The sharp edge tore through my palm and punched out through the back of my hand. Pain rang down the nerves of my arm.

Turning my own hand into a sheath, something I would never have risked without regeneration to fall back on. I closed my fingers around the blade. Muscle contracted and gripped it. Then I dragged my arm back and kicked him in the ankle.

For just an instant he lost his footing and slipped. In the same moment I converted the blade to a card and pulled my hand free, stepping easily around to his back. The skewer found his unguarded hip without resistance.

My hand was torn. His hip was skewered. In a straight trade that looked like an overwhelming loss on my end. But among immortals, it was different.

My hand closed on its own. On his hip, the black mark of the curse spread slowly outward.

"How-how is my patron deity !"

"Don't be too hard on yourself about it. I find the whole thing unpleasant too."

I shook out my hand, felt the pain fading, and looked around. A great many immortals surrounded me, all of them hanging back.

The fighting spirit they usually wore so easily had quietly dissolved. No matter how many times they punched or tore at living flesh, it healed right away. By contrast, I was using bloodcraft to gnaw at their bodies one piece at a time, slowly and steadily.

Remarkably, the immortals were now feeling the same helpless frustration they would normally only face when fighting other immortals.

"What's wrong? You're immortals. You don't die, shouldn't you be fighting without fear?"

The taunt landed on nothing. They were scared.

They had always held the advantage because they could not die, and now the visible damage made them hesitate. They were not dead yet, but the regeneration slowing by degrees was hitting something instinctive in them. A primal dread.

The fear of the end, something no immortal had felt since the day they stopped being mortal, was whispering that this might actually kill them if it went on.

Honestly, if they had all rushed me at once from the start and torn my body apart, I would have been finished. Lack of conviction. I kept the casual act going and spoke.

"This level of strength is common past the grasslands, you know. Have you spent all this time throwing your weight around with only mortals to bully? I am the enemy your patron deity ordered killed personally. Don't come at me without being ready to die."

"Hmph! Talk is cheap when your mouth runs that freely!"

An immortal a full head taller than the rest parted the crowd and stepped through. An elderly woman, white hair loosely undone, a tattered sleeve trailing behind her, thick muscle showing beneath it. She clicked her tongue.

The other immortals looked to her.

"Left Arm! Where have you been until now?"

"Hanging back. Attacking someone we were treating as a guest until yesterday didn't sit right with me. If you receive someone once, you look after them until they leave. That's the tradition."

A bronze frame built by endless training. Her left arm stood out most of all, the sleeve had been torn completely away. She was Left Arm: among the immortal village's elders, she ranked first or second in raw fighting strength, and she was the immortals' godmother.

The others relaxed slightly and called out to her.

"Now is not the time for that! The patron deity commanded it directly!"

"My ears still work fine. Stop screeching."

She dug a finger in one ear, looking bored as ever, and stepped to the front.

"That's exactly why I left it to you lot. If it's an intruder rather than a guest being put down, I sleep easier afterward. Tsk, tsk. And yet here I am anyway."

She dusted off her hands, grumbling, then picked up a nearby log and hurled it straight at me. A massive trunk filled my entire field of vision in an instant. There was no blocking that, no clever answer for it. The log hit me dead on and I went tumbling across the ground.

"But now that it's come to this, this old body doesn't get to rest either! That's enough rampaging! Get up, young man!"

Tch. Not even a moment of carelessness on her part.

I shoved aside the log, already sprouting a dense growth of leaves and branches, and stood. Druidism had pushed out the branches and leaves on impact, cushioning most of the blow. Just because I could regenerate did not mean I had to take every hit.

"Really, though. The whole village turning out because the patron deity said one word. Is that really all right?"

"The patron deity commanded it! But that hardly matters now! If we can't catch a single rat that burrowed into our village, how are we supposed to protect our traditions and our children!"

Left Arm wound a strip of leather she had pulled from somewhere tightly around her left arm. She flexed it, and the arm she had dedicated to the patron deity compressed hard as stone.

"We were born warriors! On the pride of warriors, we will fight you!"

***

"Yeah. Maiél. I understand what you were trying to say. But."

Shei had been watching the fight in silence and finally spoke. The Holy Maiden of Heaven turned her gaze slightly and listened.

"Hughes isn't as bad a person as you're making him sound."

The Holy Maiden of Heaven saw the future. To her, even this scene, the King of Humanity in pitched battle against a village of immortals, was one thread of a future she had already seen. Nothing surprised her, whatever unfolded. It was all inside the prophecy.

But she could not see the future of someone who shared the same holy maiden lineage. Every doubt Shei raised fell outside the bounds of prophecy.

The Holy Maiden of Heaven was herself a girl who had been designated long ago by the First Holy Maiden of ages past. Even power this great had its limits. Maiél considered carefully before she answered.

[Shei. I am not trying to argue his virtue or his wickedness. I am showing you his nature. If he has no respect for what has been built up over time, he will keep colliding with it. And if he wins and brings order crashing down, what remains in its place will be nothing but the law of the strong devouring the weak. That in itself can be called evil.]

"Yeah, that part I can see. It's more like... Hughes wasn't exactly trying to tear down every rule and piece of order he came across, was he? He was needling people, sure."

Shei was also one of the most unpredictable people Maiél had ever encountered.

"And I had my own issues with the immortal village too, a little. Hughes was probably just poking at that."

[What issues?]

"Hard to put into words exactly. A bit smug, maybe. It felt less like they were genuinely helping and more like they were looking down on you. A quiet kind of unpleasantness."

She was going on feeling. Whatever bond Shei had built with the King of Humanity, she was taking his side partly because the immortal village had rubbed her the wrong way in a way she could not quite name.

Shei was simple. That was exactly what made her hard to read. Maiél, watching the girl who would become the lynchpin of what lay ahead, let out a small quiet sigh.

[The immortal village is the only settlement on this land with a stable order. Even when the World Tree burned and the Warrior died, this village survived. However it was born from evil, their order has been holding up one pillar of the Kingdom of Ten Thousand. And yet you think bloodshed needs to come to the immortal village?]

"Hm? I don't think it'll go that far, actually. Would Hughes really try to kill all of them?"

[Yes. He accepted the challenge. He will fight and win against those who stake their lives on defending a threadbare pride, a primitive faith, a barbaric tradition. Those who fought prepared to die, he will kill. Those who choose life through cowardice, he will spare.]

"Is that the future you saw?"

[It is a future already fulfilled.]

The future the Holy Maiden of Heaven saw was as close to absolute as anything could be. Short of Shei stepping in herself to twist it, what she saw came to pass. Shei knew this from experience, and still could not quite bring herself to fully believe it.

"Strange. I wouldn't have thought he'd do that."

There are many people who cannot believe something unless they see it with their own eyes. Maiél decided to show her the truth.

[Watch, Shei. Watch what he has done.]

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