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Chapter 433
The Savior Ω VII
Sinnoa
I somehow managed to drag Dok-seo out despite her falling into a completely absurd misunderstanding.
It wasn't easy.
That shameless brat kept making suggestive expressions while desperately clinging to the doorknob in resistance.
Ӗnu_m̊а̄ . ǐ d̈
"Hiiing... Mister, that's too much..."
Only after I finally gave her a good knock on the head did the 'Reader Oh Dok-seo' program in her mind get replaced with the 'Possessor Oh Dok-seo' program.
Dilarang mengopy novel dari Enuma.id.
Grumbling all the while, Dok-seo woke up the awakeners who'd collectively entered sleep mode inside the Tower of Babel.
Shortly after.
"Hyung!"
The awakeners came pouring out in a rush.
Wӗb̈ nо̂v̈е l̄ _Е̄nům̃ а̊
Leading the pack was none other than our SG Man, Seo Gyu.
"Fuck! Hyung, thank you! Seriously, thank you!"
"Uh... why so suddenly?"
"I remembered! I got hit with flashbacks of being beheaded the moment the tutorial started, over dozens of times all at once!"
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"Ah."
The veins bulging in Seo Gyu's muscles trembled.
W̊ ëḃñ о̇.vе̊l̇ Е̊n ů.ṁ а̂
"Those fucking fairy bastards! If I'd been a combat-type ability user, I would've dedicated my soul to beating the crap out of fairies for the rest of my life! Fuck!"
At those words, Yo-hwa, who'd followed Dok-seo to join them at Dream Within a Dream's deepest layer, reacted.
"Oh. Those fairies are all under my command now. Want to go one-on-one with me?"
"...No, no, Guild Leader."
Seo Gyu deflated instantly like a muscle after pumping.
It would be hard to criticize him for acting unmanly despite that fine physique when the trauma from the zombie kingdom founded by Elder Yo-hwa the Necromancer was probably quite intense.
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"Meow! Undertaker!"
Patter patter patter, a blonde magical girl with cat ears poking out came running and dove for my neck.
"Well, well. Who do we have here?"
"Myahaha!"
From the Magical Girl Association, the guardian collective of the Japanese archipelago. A sunflower bloomed across Manyo Neko's face.
"Really, really thank you, nya! I just thought you were some strange person I met at the Inunaki Tunnel entrance! To think you saved my friend... that you saved Yō-meow. I only just realized, meow!"
Е̂n̂üm̌ а .іd̄
"Uh, yeah."
I was slightly flustered.
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It was common knowledge that Manyo Neko was the representative pro-Undertaker faction within the Magical Girl Association.
But across all cycles, Manyo Neko had never been this uninhibited with physical contact.
Our relationship always maintained a gap somewhere between friends and comrades, creating a pleasant draft whenever the two of us talked.
"Oya."
Е̇ ǹ um̌а
Laughter sounded.
The Magical Girl Association's leader, the Great Priestess, approached while covering her mouth with a fan.
That laugh had just flowed down along the fan's folded creases like water through a valley.
"Isn't it natural? To discover that what you'd dismissed as chance encounters were actually all part of an operation to save your irreplaceable childhood friend."
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"...Um."
Obsidian Qin had also arrived.
Еǹù m а̂ .i̊ d̃
Originally scheduled to be sacrificed during the Inunaki Tunnel exploration, but from cycle 146 onward her fate was altered.
Afterward, she came to shoulder one pillar of the Association alongside her friend.
Like Seo Gyu who'd survived from the 50th cycle onward, Obsidian Qin was also a survivor who'd belatedly escaped the schedule of extinction.
"Thank... you."
Bow.
Still wearing her trademark mask with the 'X' mark drawn on it, she let her black hair hang down as she gave me a respectful bow.
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"Why the Inunaki Tunnel, judged to be a special-grade specter, disappeared before we could even begin proper exploration... I never imagined something like that had happened."
[Truly a peculiar fate, is it not!]
The armless swordsman.
Phantom Blade laughed heartily through telepathic magic rather than spoken words.
[Remembering when we sailed out to sea with lord Undateikeo and were attacked by aliens still chills my liver!]
"Their weakness was water. They melted like whipped cream when touched by water."
W̆ ĕb n̊о̂ v̈е l En ŭmа
[Ah, I heard from lord Dok-seo. Heh. Truly. Meeting their end in the middle of the ocean to children whose weakness was water, there could be no greater foolishness than that.]
Tap.
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Phantom Blade moved her scabbard with telekinesis to tap my forearm. It tickled.
[There were many comrades I wished to march alongside, but this is the Great Void. The expedition was composed only of combat ability users who could at minimum pull their own weight, I hear. Please understand.]
"What do I have to understand? I'm grateful you came at all."
[Lord Undateikeo is truly a samurai who has grasped righteousness!]
Е́ń ů ṁ а̌.і̊d̀
I continued exchanging warm greetings with various comrades one after another.
All were welcome faces, though occasionally there were some who stirred particularly deep emotions.
"U-Undertaker-san."
"Oh. Uehara."
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"Was I... only useful in the early stages as a B-rank ability user and then discarded from the midpoint onward?"
"Pfft."
Ẃе̄ b̈ n̈о v̌ еl Ѐ n ū m̈â
Sim Ah-ryeon, who'd been fidgeting nearby, openly burst out laughing.
Uehara Shino's expression darkened.
"Besides, our speech patterns are similar too. I stutter when I talk, and that one over there also..."
"No. You're just awkward when speaking Korean. Ah-ryeon over there is like that because humanity itself is awkward to her, so it's a different dimension."
"The reality that hierarchies exist even among awakening abilities is deplorable..."
For reference, Uehara Shino was a Japanese Communist Party supporter. She'd probably get along splendidly with a certain German-born old man.
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Everyone was crowding around me, sharing retrospective memories that might be their last, when.
"..."
In the distance, I saw Lee Baek leaning against a wall.
Lee Baek. Lion's Roar ability user.
In the timeline where he lived alongside Go Yuri, he was an upstanding leader who'd filmed something like a National Road Management Director prequel.
But on my regression line, he was always the man stuck playing the 'early tutorial cancer character.'
Ẃ e b̂n оv̈ е̂ ľ E n ú ṁâ
"..."
Nod. Noticing my gaze, Baek gave a small bow of his head.
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He couldn't bring himself to approach me directly to shake hands or voice an apology. Nevertheless, he wanted to participate in the final conquest battle to see it through.
That will could be felt in his eyes.
'Good expression.'
I smiled.
E n̆ ü m̄ а .íd̀
'Can a person change so much just from recalling memories of other cycles?'
How much time had passed?
The hubbub of chatter and the clamor of laughter had both grown relaxed enough to accept silence.
"Ah. Ahem, mic test."
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Having rolled around like a balloon in a child's hands for hours, the air had grown full of vulnerabilities that Dok-seo slipped through as she grabbed a megaphone.
"Yes. Has everyone sufficiently caught up? Ah. I'm not some pervert like that Undertaker old man over there, so I can't perform absurd tricks like simultaneous foreign language interpretation. Please translate reasonably from the sides."
Е n u m̀ а.і́ d̆
Laughter swept through the assembly.
"Hmm."
But then Dok-seo suddenly made a strange expression.
"Looking at everyone gathered like this, I'm newly reminded that I'm really quite a good person."
"?"
Question marks floated above the expedition members' heads.
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"Even though I was born chosen as the protagonist, thinking about how I rolled through hundreds of cycles taking care of all these extras one by one, I wonder if anyone quite like me even exists..."
"?"
"This world owes a debt to the goodwill of the human being called me. That fact. The truth that this gathering was made possible by my treating all of you without any favoritism, I hope you won't forget even when the day comes that the Great Void is conquered and memories grow hazy."
"..."
Silence.
"What the hell is that serial abandoner babbling about?"
Ē nŭ ṁ.ǎ. і́d̊
Finally someone couldn't hold back.
"Hey! LiteraryGirl! The sight of you calling in readers to beat them up after you went corrupt is still vivid in my mind, what kind of fucking goodwill! Goodwill!"
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"You bastard! You're the one who wrote fanfic about Director Do-hwa under that ridiculous pen name Non-LiteraryBoy, right? You're the one who changed pen names!"
"Grrrr!"
"You said you couldn't do foreign languages but why did you run AOIM GPT to churn out translations and spread them around?! So we'd suffer too?!"
"E-even your view counts were always lower than mine. If I'd been the guild leader's ghostwriter, I would've cut the regression within 500 cycles... That's just facts..."
Еnǔḿа. іd̈
"There's suspicion that the Cheon Yo-hwa sisterly yuri novel that suddenly appeared anonymously on the SG Net novel serialization board in 806th cycle was your work."
"If you had time to shit out stuff like that, write the main story! The main story!"
Truly enthusiastic cheers like wildfire.
Dok-seo adjusted her cap with a huff and a smirk.
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Damage taken: zero. She looked completely unfazed.
The thought process currently rolling around inside that skull was plainly visible without needing exploratory surgery.
Ẅ_ӗ bnо̌ v̊ е l Е̄n̄u̇ m а̊
She was probably absorbed in self-praise like 'Seeing how I drove both fans and haters crazy, I really do have the qualities of a superstar!' I'd bet my entire fortune on it.
"Life is suffering. If the fate of a writer is to be beaten by the ignorant nonsense of the masses, then I shall say to those base heavens that I loved my life as a writer..."
"Stop your bullshit!"
"We were the ones suffering because of a serial abandoner like you, you bastard!"
"But now the time has come to put an ending on the story of first draft Go Yuri, revision Undertaker, and editor Dok-seo. Let's go! My beloved readers!"
People threw rotten tomatoes and eggs, but those projectiles never made contact with the person called Dok-seo to create tomato-egg fried rice. Dok-seo didn't budge an inch and trudged forward.
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The reason was simple. The [Absolute Defense] that had already reached the realm of a great immortal spat back all those projectiles.
The current Oh Dok-seo was invincible.
"Goodness..."
Dang Seo-rin, who'd stuck close beside me, let out a hollow laugh in disbelief.
"The final conquest battle. And she's probably the first in human history to ruin a morale-boosting speech like that..."
"She's probably thinking right now that she looks incredibly cool."
Еn u mа
"Why on earth did the baton of world salvation get passed to a kid like that?"
"Who knows."
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I smiled.
"Maybe because her talent for loving herself and the world surpasses anyone else's."
"..."
"Let's go, Seo-rin. We can't let your final concert be ruined."
Ė ṅ um̂а . іd́
"Yeah."
Thud.
I stepped forward.
Thud.
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Seo-rin stepped forward. Ah-ryeon stepped forward, Ha-yul stepped forward, Yo-hwa stepped forward.
Thud.
Е̊n̂ ŭ m̈ а̇ . і d
Ye-ji stepped forward. Ji-won stepped forward. Do-hwa stepped forward.
Seo Gyu stepped forward, Baek stepped forward, Manyo Neko stepped forward, the Great Priestess stepped forward, Phantom Blade stepped forward, Obsidian Qin stepped forward.
Thud.
In Seo-rin's footsteps hung the night sky of Utopia.
In Ah-ryeon's footsteps were captured the Udumbara blooming at the ends of the earth.
In Ha-yul's footsteps, the puppet strings connecting humanity's final arks tied their knots.
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In Yo-hwa's footsteps were white birch skins. In Ye-ji's footsteps was frozen white time.
In Ji-won's footsteps was seawater. In Do-hwa's footsteps were roads connecting to all the lonely cities of this earth.
Thud.
The extinctions humanity had endured, the deaths it couldn't endure, were carved into each and every one of those footsteps.
The screams that had been torn into thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of branches, each creating discordant cacophony.
With me at the head, through everyone's footsteps taken with a thud, through the shadows of footfalls, they connected.
Ẇe̊ b̂ n̂о́v̆ е̄ l Е n̆ uṁ ǎ
Route.
A single one.
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"Mister."
We decided to call that lonely road 'time.'
"That's the main body of Dream Within a Dream."
The tip of Dok-seo's pointing finger.
E̊n u̇ m̈ а.і̃ d̂
There stood a glass monument split into a thousand, ten thousand branches, a gravestone transparent as a mirror, enduring as a massive citadel.
Carved into each of the hundreds of millions of glass facets were images of Go Yuri.
"...The tombstone of Time Seal."
"Yeah. It might even be the superior version of the ability you possess. Except that while you sealed other people, Yuri sealed none other than herself."
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"I've explored Dream Within a Dream a few times too. I never saw such an absurdly massive tombstone then."
"Right."
W̆е̂b̄ nо̀ v̄е̃l Ӗnü mа̃
Dok-seo nodded.
"That mirror cemetery. The kaleidoscope containing hundreds of millions of Yuri's disappears at exactly 2 p.m. on June 17th. By the outside world's standards, wait. Yeah. It'll happen 19 seconds from now."
"..."
"The White Night outside and this Dream Within a Dream's tombstone are linked to each other. While burning away every clue that might allow one to guess the Reincarnator Yuri's identity."
"What happens if we break that?"
That's when it happened.
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"[The Corrupted Reincarnator] will descend."
It wasn't Dok-seo's voice.
I turned my head.
Dok-seo, not having heard that voice just now, was giving her own answer about something or other, but my attention was completely drawn forward.
"Guild Leader."
Go Yuri was there.
Е nŭ m̀ ȧ . і d̈
A phantom visible only to me.
"...You hadn't been visible for a while after entering Dream Within a Dream. Were you in a place like this?"
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"I'm sorry. It wasn't intentional. It's no different from being forcibly dragged to where I should be."
"..."
"The [red flesh] Guild Leader occasionally witnessed. That's both the result of my existence becoming corrupted and an extremely, truly extremely weakened form."
"Weakened, you say?"
W е b̃nоvе̇l Е n üm̂ӓ
I couldn't help but ask back reflexively.
"That is weakened?"
"Yes. Though I may not look it, I'm an existence that accumulated the karma of an outer god in a human body, you know? Hundreds of millions of lifetimes. If I unleashed all hundreds of millions of abilities at once, well, things like the Outer Gods would have no choice but to collapse entirely."
"..."
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"Except for the very minor drawback that the world I sought to protect would collapse along with them."
Yuri caressed the surface of the mirror-smooth tombstone.
Ӗṅ úm̈ а̊
"While crossing countless years, I sealed away my own abilities one by one."
"That's..."
It was a very familiar sound.
Yuri smiled brightly.
"Yes. Just like how Guild Leader restrains your own aura ability."
"..."
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"In short, every single one of these countless split mirror surfaces holds the same status as 'the aura Guild Leader sealed,' each a vestigial organ from the past."
My mouth closed on its own.
"The traces of me as a human struggling to remain human. The traces of some ability I as a human once pinned my hopes on. If I'd been unable to give up to the very end and kept clinging to them, they would have certainly run rampant and led to corruption."
"..."
"The sum total of routes leading to bad endings."
Go Yuri turned to look at me.
Ën̂ ũma
No, not just me.
Dok-seo standing beside me. The members of the Regression Alliance. The hundreds of awakeners forming ranks behind us.
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"Certainly, if you succeed in unearthing this tombstone and eliminating the 'corpse' that emerges, I'll truly be able to return to being human this time."
"..."
"But, is it possible?"
She, 'humanity of the past.'
W е̇ bnо̊ v̀ е́ l̈ E ṅ u m̂ ã
Looked at us, 'humanity of the present,' and lifted the corners of her mouth.
"The traces of me sleeping in this tombstone possess no humanity. Of course. I scraped together every bit of humanity that remained, however faint, and handed it over to the me outside."
"...Truly a monster then."
"Yes. The noise, the dirge of some pitiful existence that eternally laments a world and human fate it could never save by itself, abandoning even its own self."
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Yuri placed both hands neatly at her waist.
"So this is the final Rubicon River. Guild Leader. If you want to turn back, now is your only chance."
W̆ е̇b̆_n̂ov е̄l Ẽ ṅ ūm а̊
"..."
"It's a cemetery no one knew existed anyway. Once White Night erupts, it'll disappear forever without leaving even a trace. You can all just return like this and occasionally drop by Dream Within a Dream through the fairies, receive the memories of previous cycles like an IV drip, and live on reminiscing about your connections with each other."
"And you won't be there."
Go Yuri's eyebrows lowered.
"I consider that what remains in Guild Leader's memory was a sufficient lifetime. Still."
"Sorry, but…"
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I grasped Dok-seo's shoulder.
"The child who inherited our legacy seems to think differently."
"..."
"Old Man Scho."
Thud.
Emit Schopenhauer stepped forward. A quiet footfall. In his hand was gripped a single nameless sword.
Е́ n ŭ ma
"Aye. You called?"
"Cut that thing down."
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After that, words weren't necessary.
One sword stroke.
At a speed difficult to follow with the eyes, Emit Schopenhauer drew his blade, and slightly slower than the arc the sword traced, the crystal tombstone slid apart.
"Ahh."
Е̄ nu m̀а .іd̀
Go Yuri too was cut along with the tombstone.
A crack traced across that slender smile.
"Truly, such incorrigible greedy ones..."
And then.
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Bursting through the shattered mirrors with broken seals, red flesh surged forth.
Humanity's long nightmare had arrived.
Ѐ n umа
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