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Chapter 7: Crime and Punishment
SOMETHING strange and indescribable hung in the air. It was an abnormal presence that Isla struggled to define, but if she had to put it into words, it was like all organic matter throughout the world had been stirred together and left to rot. This disgusting presence wafted in from every direction.
Something bad is happening. That deadly premonition screamed nonstop from the depths of her very being, but she couldn’t do anything about it without knowing what that something was.
What in…the world is going on?
Silence reigned. There was nothing strange near her. But the warning bells blaring in Isla’s head since she’d defeated Flamin and lost the ability to contact Takuto had submerged her in a sea of panic, unlike anything she’d experienced before.
“…Huh?”
W̃ е̃ b̃ ńо̇ v̂ е̇l̈ Е.n̆ ùm а̀
“Um, where are we?”
Two sweet voices that didn’t belong suddenly broke the silence.
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“…You girls! Why did you come here?!” Isla cried.
“Dunno.”
“We were with His Majesty until a second ago… H-How did we get here?”
The Elfuur Sisters were standing where they shouldn’t be. They were the Dark Elf twins who looked after Takuto and the young girls with a tragic past who Isla deeply cared for. They should have been evacuating with the other civilians. This was the last place they should be.
Ё ǹ ům̀ a .ïd
Isla suspected they were an illusion or fakes for a moment, but the information she received from her inhuman senses told her they were the real Elfuur Sisters.
They had been forcefully summoned to this spot by some game mechanic. Isla had no doubt they were in the middle of a fatal, ongoing event. As soon as she came to that conclusion, she was quick to make her next move.
“All my little children, protect the twins!”
Isla called for all the Larva and reserve Long-legged Bugs in the area. She also forced the unhatched eggs that had escaped being destroyed in the last battle to awaken.
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But nothing happened.
“Brain Eaters! If you hear me, come to me now!!”
W̌ е b̈ n̆ о v ёl. Е̃nu m а̂
Isla tilted her head back to roar toward the skies for the Medics to come. She was trying to call them back from where they were dealing with other enemy forces within the forest.
But nothing happened.
“Great and mighty king! O wise Commander of our forces, Takuto Ira! Please answer me! Please respond to my call!”
Isla sent both a telepathic and an audible message to the person she trusted the most in the world and the only soul capable of getting them out of this pinch.
But nothing happened.
“Wh-Why?! Why can’t I get in touch with anyone?!”
Dilarang mengopy novel dari Enuma.id.
“Are you hurting?” Maria asked.
“Oh no… What should Cary and Big Sista do…?” Caria asked.
Every action Isla took ended up futile, as if the very spot they stood had been ripped out of space and time. She tried to pull the twins close to escape with them, but when she moved her arm, some invisible force reset the movement, making it so it never happened.
Isla’s unease ballooned. She didn’t know what was happening, but she was certain that if she let things progress unchecked, she’d come to regret it.
Put simply, she was unable to take any action. She was locked into a forced standby state until the event continued.
The twins anxiously looked up at her. Just as Isla reached out to pat them reassuringly on the heads with her forearms—
Е̌ n u̇mȧ. іď
“Kuhehe! Kuhahaha! GYAHAHAHAHA!”
Jarring laughter forced the stagnated time to move once more. The owner of that grating voice was right before her. It was the same annoying voice she’d conversed with not that long ago. Immediately assessing her situation, Isla pierced the laugher—pierced Flamin—with the same agility of a praying mantis pouncing on its prey, her movements more fluid than seemingly possible for such a large body.
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“Yeeaaaah, sorry, this thing can’t die.”
The man who should’ve died answered her.
As it was, his torso had been split clean in half, and Isla’s subsequent attack completely destroyed his skull. And yet, despite that, Flamin was talking just the same as before. Isla instinctively stepped back from the anomaly happening before her.
“How…? I know I killed you!”
Е̇ ṅũ_mä
In this single moment, she was so astonished at what happened that she lost her normal calm. She was in a situation where she couldn’t obtain instructions from Takuto. Without a clear course of action, time just passed by, frustrating her.
This was the moment it became clear just how powerless units from Eternal Nations are when they are completely isolated from their Commander.
“Yeah, I died. I’m as dead as can be. So dead, there’s no room for debate, botfly,” Flamin’s corpse spoke. His skull was cracked, his brains were spilling out, and his bulging eyeballs stared into empty space.
Death is inevitable for all living things. Even the undead will eventually find themselves stopped dead in their tracks.
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And yet, that very dead man was talking about his unique situation as calmly as someone commenting on the weather.
“But daaaamn…it’s exactly as it said. This is a shitty world. A hella shitty world where clumps of shit believe they’re alive and live out shitty lives.”
Е́ n̄_uṁа.іď
Isla ignored his monologue and stabbed Flamin’s corpse with yet another decisive move that should’ve finished him off.
〈！〉Auto-defend Enabled
Protects key characters to continue the event.
But an invisible force field activated, preventing the attack as if to imply further destruction of the corpse wasn’t allowed.
“Buahaha! You can’t kill me… Since y’know, I’m already dead! HAHAHA!”
Flamin laughed. The mutilated corpse laughed.
Dilarang mengopy novel dari Enuma.id.
For the first time since coming to this world—no, for the first time ever, including her experiences within Eternal Nations—Isla couldn’t grasp the true nature of the event taking place. Perhaps Takuto could’ve made an educated guess about what was happening, but her options were limited while she was locked out of communicating with her Commander.
“Mama…”
“Wh-What should we do? Um, is there anything we can do to help…?”
The Dark Elf twins anxiously clung to Isla. They were both noncombatant civilians—they didn’t have an astounding defense or exorbitant regeneration abilities like Isla. They were fragile little lives that could get hurt and die from the most trivial things. That fact worried Isla more than she had ever worried before.
But as their mother figure, she concealed all her worries behind a gentle smile as she soothingly addressed her girls.
“Goodness me, aren’t you the most precious little worrywarts?” she cooed. “It’s going to be all right, darlings. You are safe with me. Your Mama Isla will never let anything bad happen to you…”
Е̌ n̄ u.m̈ ä
But we can never fully protect our children from the cruelty of reality. Even more so when your reality is fodder for a story, and stories always seek out tragedy and misery to make their narrative all the more engaging…
Their situation was harrowing, to say the least.
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“Somebody get me a tissue, you’re making my rotting corpse tear up!” Flamin sneered. “So heartwarming! Now that’s love for you! Okay, I’ve decided! It’s gotta be those two! Won’t that strike the best chord with ya? Wouldn’t ya say, monster?”
At first, Isla didn’t understand what he meant, but the events that followed made it abundantly clear. For some reason, the twin sisters staggered away from Isla’s bosom in the direction of Flamin’s corpse. It seemed so natural at first, that even Isla temporarily blanked out that it was a bad thing despite being on full alert to anything unusual.
“What are you girls doing?!” Isla shouted. “Hide behind me! Why are you walking that way?!”
“Ah… Huh? I didn’t mean to…” Maria said in a daze.
Е n̂ ú m̈ а̌.іd́
“Eh? Wh-Why?! My feet aren’t listening to me!” Caria cried.
Isla reached for them. The girls dug their feet into the ground and tried to retreat back to her.
But all their attempts to stop ended in vain.
Flamin’s shattered jaw clattered in a distorted laugh as his eyeless eye sockets fixed on the approaching girls.
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“You can’t fight it, can ya? You can’t defy it, can ya? I’m about to tell you something good, so you’d better listen while you can. Your precious ones will die. They will absolutely, positively die. No matter how strong, mighty, or important they are, they will die. Yes, ya heard me right. They WILL die. Get it? Make sure to lemme know with a smile once your buggy pea brain processes that part.”
This was the moment Isla was convinced this was a forced game event. Mynoghra’s characters were influenced by Eternal Nations’ game mechanics. Those mechanics could also affect beings outside the game, as proven by Takuto accepting the Dark Elves into Mynoghra as refugee citizens and then switching them from neutral to evil alignment.
Ẇ е̃ b n̄ о v е̄ l̊ Ё ǹ_ùm a_
With that in mind, the same should be true for other games in this world.
Clearly, something was causing the game mechanics from Flamin’s Brave Questers to have complete control over what was happening to them. But even though Isla knew what was happening…
“Impossible! How is this happening?! It doesn’t make sense! It just doesn’t! This can’t be happening!”
…she just couldn’t accept the unreasonableness of it all.
In their worlds, might made right. Power was everything. This power could be anything from the basic concepts of military might and physical prowess to more indirect forms, such as knowledge and wealth. The only one and true rule was that the people with the power acquire everything and have their way in the end, while the powerless experience the agony of being robbed of all they have. It was an absolute rule because of its simplicity.
And that was exactly why she couldn’t accept the event happening now.
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Isla immediately came to the conclusion that this event was triggered by Flamin’s death. But she was the one who’d won their battle. If winning meant she was forced to face such a dire crisis, then what was the point of power in the first place? Was there even a point in winning when her fate was sealed regardless of her actions?
“Yeaaaah, I get how you’re feelin’. There are some things you just can’t change no matter how hard you struggle. But I ain’t too upset knowing that I can see your ugly mug twist with your suffering at the end like this.”
Isla paid no attention to the gleeful gloating coming from Flamin’s smashed face. His baiting was the least of her concerns now. For Isla was the only one capable of saving the two girls from the brink of death now that they’d all been cut off from their Commander and king, Takuto.
Isla struggled against the invisible force binding her in place with all her might and then some. But it was futile.
“GUUH! GAH! GRAAAAAAAAAAAH!! Don’t think you can restrain me with something like thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!!”
“Okay, botfly, I’ll give you one last tip. Make sure you hear this. You see…I call this shitty mechanic…”
W̆е̇ b̄n̄ о v́е̌l̆ Е̂ n̊ ŭm а
In this world, there are some things that can’t be overturned or changed no matter how hard you try. Those are called…
“…Forced Story Events,” Flamin finished.
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The true nature of this hopeless situation was steadily proceeding against their will.
“…I don’t know what world you came from, but I can tell it was freer than the world I’m from.”
Flamin almost sounded philosophic as he spoke. Isla found herself intuitively listening to him despite her intense impatience and explosive emotions because there was an echo of sympathy within his voice that resounded clearly in her ears.
“But did ya know? There are these events that are scripted to be unavoidable no matter how hard you try to get around them. Puppets like us can never escape from that destiny. There’s but one thing we can do—give up.”
Ё ńum̆ ӑ . і̌d̀
Isla didn’t know what he had seen and lived through before now. She didn’t know how he’d struggled and eventually came to give up on resisting at all. But she could never accept having that same fate forced upon her. She could never just nod and give up because someone said she was destined to.
“Mama… Wh-What do we do?”
“Mama Isla! H-Help us…!”
There was no way in hell she was going to give up in front of her girls.
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Because Isla was a mother, and her beloved daughters needed her help.
“AaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”
W̊ ѐ b̃ nо̄v̂ e l̊ Е n̄ ûm_â
Her muscles rumbled like beating drums. Massive amounts of power rampaged within her body with no way to be released, her carapace that was stronger than steel cracked, and green blood poured out. And still, Isla didn’t stop fighting the invisible force.
“Yeah! That’s right! They’re important to you, aren’t they? You want to protect them, don’t you?! You can’t let this happen, can you?! Good luck! Fight back! Maybe a miracle will happen! Though it’s never happened before!”
The distance between Flamin’s corpse and the twins was like grains of sand falling in an hourglass counting down to the guillotine, and with each step the girls took, the greater the sense of doom became.
“It’s impossible. It’s damn impossible to stop… Once you get this far, it’s game over. Bang, you’re done. I typically get the Hero when he lets down his guard thinking I’m dead, but it seems like this world doesn’t care about the small details.”
The girls turned just their heads toward Isla and exchanged looks with her. Was that something enforced by the game event? Or did they realize they could move their upper bodies and did so as a last means of resistance?
Isla offered the terrified girls the sweetest, most motherly smile in the world.
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“It’s all right, sweeties… I will save you. No matter what it takes. I will.”
Isla strained power through her immobilized body and tried every skill at her disposal. She frantically racked her brain for a way out but only became further frustrated by the lack of ideas.
“Aaaah, every last one of them’s a friggen idiot!” Flamin raved. “They’re all functioning under the false assumption that they’ve got a will of their own, a conviction to fight for, that they’re acting based on what they want!”
The girls took one step closer.
“The Hero, the Demon Lord, and everyone and everything else think that way, never realizing that they’re being deceived! They haven’t the damnedest clue that they’re pawns on a game board that’ll be tossed into the trash the moment they don’t work how they’re supposed to!”
Another step closer.
W̃ѐ b n̄о v́ e̊ l Е̃ň û m̆ а̇
“Haven’t I done enough?” he continued with a hint of pleading in his tone now. “Can’t I be put to rest now? I did my best. I did enough. I fulfilled my damn role!”
Another step closer.
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“You can all just go to hell! Stop making me the butt of your jokes! Does my life only exist as a bump along the way in the Hero’s story? That’s friggen screwed up!”
Each step brought them ever closer to the end of the road.
No one was listening to Flamin’s monologue anymore. Isla, the Elfuur Sisters, and even Takuto Ira, who’d detected the anomaly there, were doing their best to avert the tragedy that would soon come.
Did Flamin understand no one was listening to him, or was he just too angry to think straight? Whatever the reasoning, he directed his hissed curses at something not there.
Е̌ nu mа̇
“You too! I know you’re listening, dammit! You’re watching, aren’t you?! Why the hell did you say ‘You will become free if you conquer the world’ when you never planned on keeping your damn promise! Huuuuuuh?!”
There wasn’t anyone around with the wherewithal to pay Flamin and his comments any attention. Or perhaps…there was one person who had, but there was no way to know for sure. At the very least, the actors participating in this event couldn’t have.
“And there you have it! This is the closing act!” Flamin shouted at them again. “I’m draggin’ the lot of you down the road to hell with me. Your precious little kiddos are comin’ with me too! You can hear me, can’t you, King Takuto Ira? You’re a bloody player too, aren’t you? You read all about our story somewhere just like that person, didn’t you? Did you have fun thinking stuff like ‘Oh, I’d better craft some new equipment after defeating this boss’ while you watched me fighting for my life against the damn Hero?”
No one answered him.
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“Screw you! I exist! This is where I live! I’m friggen alive! That’s why I’m gonna make you pay in the worst way I can! I’ll kill the ones you care about most! Because that’s the kind of screwed up event this iiiiiiiiiissssssss!”
Flamin was laughing. He roared with laughter like a madman. There wasn’t even a shell of the man known for his cunning ruthlessness—only the grief of a pitiful creature who cursed his fate and despised his life was left. He didn’t even know if this was how he really wanted to behave. All he knew for sure was that the event was playing out how he’d hoped it would.
Е̂ n̆ ŭm̀ а́
At long last, the two girls arrived in front of the cackling corpse. Their faces had crumpled with the fear of dying, and tears poured from their big eyes. Not only Caria but even Maria, who rarely showed an emotional reaction to anything, was reduced to frightened sobs.
The sisters who’d cursed their lot in life and always longed for death found themselves paralyzed with fear when they were finally faced with it. Or rather, they had grown terrified of dying now that they’d experienced the warmth and affection of their new family and mother. Their experience starkly contrasted with the man before them, who also cursed his lot in life but never found someone who understood him. Not even once.
There was a clicking noise as a flag was raised. It wasn’t heard by anyone or understood by anyone, it just signaled that the end had come and that their fate had been sealed.
Death comes equally to all.
Despair comes equally to all.
Even monsters existing outside the realms of the imaginable are equally susceptible. Those two things can never be escaped.
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“Wait! Please! Don’t!” Isla screamed at the top of her lungs with a sliver of hope that it’d do something.
“Nu-uh! Ain’t waiting! Not for you! I hate you! I hate all of you! That’s why this is my parting gift! You’d better enjoy it! GyahahaHAHAHAHAHA!!”
Hope as we may, reality is ruthless.
“Mama Is—” the girls cried for their mother.
Flamin’s corpse shined for a moment before an explosive flame with an indescribable amount of heat and destructive power consumed everything. The whole area turned to ash, and the burning hot wind became a storm that blew everything away. The already devastated land was further razed to the ground like a bomb had gone off for the second time in the same spot, and a mushroom cloud of dust blocked out the sun, bringing about night during the day.
Splintered chunks of charred wood rained down, and the scorched air quietly swayed.
Е̇ nú m̂ а̌
Eventually, true stillness reigned with no one claiming victory…
The story event came to a close, with everything happening exactly as it was scripted without the slightest deviation whatsoever.
Dilarang mengopy novel dari Enuma.id.
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