Godhorn Tech:Volume3 Chapter9

Status: Incomplete

1/4 parts completed

   

Chapter 9 Section 1

In the beginning was the Mother of all Wicked Gods. In the end was the Mother of all Wicked Gods.

She said destruction and creation are one and the same.

The battle against Dark Elf Elaine Greenforest was over.

The Huge Eye Godhorn Tech had been destroyed.

Either due to the intense fires dying down or just the sun setting, it was starting to feel chilly. The way Kananka Fulpen rubbed at his skin told Miyabi he was not just imagining that.

However…

“Not even the revenge mercenary was the 11th.”

Miyabi Blackgarden tilted his head.

A short distance away, ashy and sooty Alicia Blueforest still refused to let go of the dark elf. Goggled Elaine pushed her palm against her childhood friend’s cheek in slight annoyance, but she also seemed to be enjoying herself.

And Alma looked somewhat sad, despite normally pushing the elf away when she tried to rub her cheek against it. Miyabi smiled a little.

“Come here, Alma.”

“Koo…”

They had defeated the enemy and supposedly solved the problem, but they still had not answered one crucial question. Stopping Elaine’s revenge mercenary work had of course been important, but none of it added up.

She had in fact used the power of a Wicked God horn to destroy the massive Empire.

So many people living there would have played no direct role in the razing of the dark elf forest. The people who had never even set foot outside their hometown – like Miyabi until recently – might not have even known the forest existed. But Elaine had still done it.

The destruction had been her goal, so she had not sought any further benefit from it. She lost interest in what she had destroyed and moved on to her next target. She had traveled the continent spreading destruction even more freely than the Necromancer who valued dead spirits and corpses as a resource and had holed up in a rotten world, so Elaine did seem like a good match for those sorcery bombs.

However…

“Elaine did not use any,” whispered Number 8. The black-haired butler was looking to something much wider than just Miyabi. “Not in this battle or when she destroyed the Empire. I have never once seen her use a sorcery bomb.”

“What?”

“It took some time to arrive at this conclusion because I had to run a self-diagnostic to ensure these memories were not damaged, but I am certain of it now. Nothing is missing from these memories. The dark elf did not need any more than her high-altitude blimp. The Huge Eye’s cataclysmic effects are simply that powerful. Not to mention that she only managed to contaminate a full third of the continent by inducing explosions in the Empire’s own magical facilities.”

The Green Forest had to be full of precious memories for Elaine, but once a certain switch flipped inside her, she prioritized destruction above all else. She had in fact set traps in the forest, made a surprise attack on Miyabi there, and even created a fiery cyclone by igniting the forest’s ashes and charcoal and catching them in a hurricane.

“It’s like I said,” murmured Miyabi. “It doesn’t make sense for Elaine to be the 11th. If she really was the bomber, she would have used those bombs to defeat us.”

Yes.

She had not been the type to be stopped by sentimental reasons like her memories of the place or not wanting to disturb the dark elves’ slumber.

“What if she had scattered sorcery bombs from that blimp? Or what if she had built a giant C of bombs in the forest and then closed the ring behind us after we walked inside? We would have been helpless to stop her from blowing us to smithereens. Maybe not anymore, but back when she was a revenge mercenary, she definitely would have taken it that far if she could.”

What did it mean if Elaine Greenforest had gone all out and used every card in her deck but she had never used a sorcery bomb?

“Elaine…isn’t the 11th?”

“But we have also run out of Godhorn Tech users.” The magical automaton pointed out that fundamental issue once more. “Miyabi, Celina, Eliza, Kananka, Onelife, the Necromancer, Acacia, Ixea, the Lord of Ruin, Elaine, and me. With the twins, that makes 11 users for 10 Godhorn Techs. That’s all of them. Or we could include Mobius in the count if former users qualify.”

“No, it isn’t him,” confidently stated Miyabi.

He had suspected Mobius before after he sent a letter to the Arsenal Kingdom to set up the Schwarz Schütze.

That had turned out to be a diversion meant to draw out Number 8 who had been made into a pawn of the 11th, but that would have been meaningless if Mobius really was the 11th. That letter had been the only hint Miyabi’s group had, so without it, Mobius could have continued using Number 8 to blow up locations across the continent without drawing any suspicion to himself.

In other words, intentionally drawing suspicion to himself just to have his name cleared, which provided him even more safety than no suspicion in the first place, was just too risky and unnecessary. That was the kind of desperate gamble someone took when they were already under suspicion.

Number 8 accurately stated the only possibilities.

“Either there is someone else out there we have yet to see or someone on that list is the 11th.”

“…”

Miyabi had no answer.

Or maybe he didn’t want to find an answer.

It seemed unlikely they would find new information in the dark elf forest where ashes and moss covered the ground and all the trees had carbonized. They had traveled across the continent in a large U-shape, so if they continued west from here, they would complete the loop and end up in the snowy Arsenal Kingdom. And searching the forest’s past would only give them information about the destroyed Empire.

That did not sound like where they would find an entirely new country or someone they had yet to see.

So…

“Miyabi,” said the small brown prince named Kananka Fulpen. “I know eavesdropping is rude, but I couldn’t help but overhear. I recommend we organize all of our information.”

“Why?”

“There are still a few questions we have yet to answer. The disaster that struck my kingdom being one of them.” Kananka winked and pressed a small hand against his chest. “We have dealt with the Necromancer, the Lord of Ruin, and Elaine now, but have we really finished speaking with the people who were manipulated by the 11th’s conspiracy? We were so focused on traveling across the continent we might have missed something during our quest.”

If they got everyone’s story, they could locate any discrepancies that suggested someone was lying or hiding something. And if they were all telling the truth, they could conclude that someone else was still out there. Either way, it would be worth their while.

And on that note…

“The Lord of Ruin should be waking soon,” said the Necromancer, her bewitching fingers toying with the brim of her witch’s hat.

Miyabi tilted his head.

“How can you know that when he was so badly injured?”

“Because his anesthesia is running out. Do you know what anesthesia is? If he isn’t writhing in pain at this point, then he’s never waking up again.”

“Boss, don’t pretend you wouldn’t be happy to get another specimen to research on☆”

The hat spoke with the voice of a small child, but Miyabi had to think for a bit.

Getting everyone’s story wasn’t a bad idea.

But bringing the recovering Lord of Ruin here would be a problem. He was badly injured, he was old, and Miyabi himself did not want to stay in this forest of ashes, charcoal, and green moss any longer than he had to. In fact, they would have difficulty setting up camp once the sun set. How were they supposed to acquire food around here?

So…

“It might be best for us all to pay Horn Fortress a visit.”

“Eh? Please tell me I misheard that!” Helen’s uncanny hearing caused her to jump up and join the conversation. “Um, it isn’t possible to walk to Horn Fortress, right? Isn’t it a remote island surrounded by the miasma-spewing cracks in the world or by an artificial barrier? But in that case…”

Miyabi stabbed the tip of his control sword into the hardened ash at his feet.

A large magic circle appeared there.

The glasses woman panicked even more.

“Wait, stop, let’s not be rash!! It’s too soon! Please be reasonable, Miyabi! Isn’t this where the Lucifer Horn snatches us up with a wire and flies us over the horizon? I’ll die! Straight up die! If the hook slips off of my collar on the way, I’ll be splattered against the ground and die instantly!!”

Helen Clockgear was nearly in tears, but she was interrupted by an exasperated sigh by another curvy young woman: the Necromancer.

“Oh? I made the trip twice and I’m fine.”

“I do not trust assurances of safety from people who reek of death. Who knows what kind of tricks you used to survive.”

“No tricks. I simply put myself in a state of suspended animation by freezing myself inside a coffin until I arrived. The freezing part is easy, but getting the unfreezing to happen on schedule takes some doing.”

“Are you sure Horn Fortress isn’t part of the afterlife and only the dead can get there!?”

Both sides of that argument were taking such extreme stances that it was hard to agree with either one. And if the argument held over the boy’s head grew anymore heated, those two young women might just crush his head between their boobs.

But this did give him an important hint for gathering his thoughts.

He needed to solve this one problem at a time.

“Um, Helen? I really don’t think we can stay here for long. There doesn’t seem to be anyone other than Elaine to talk to in the forest, so we won’t find any new information.”

“Uh…b-but we can still wait until we’re back in civilization before we have this strategy meeting.”

“Were you planning to head east to the desert nation or west to the snowy Arsenal Kingdom? Either way, we’ll find a harsh environment blocking our way even after we leave the forest. And based on the position of the sun, night will have fallen before we even get out of the forest.”

Helen’s shoulders shook.

Since Alicia wasn’t paying it any attention, Alma was tugging on Helen’s ankles for once. The creature was asking for food.

That meant it was dinnertime.

The position of the sun made it clear it was more evening than afternoon at this point.

Helen had mostly handled their travel funds and camp arrangements, so she would know the problems facing them better than anyone. But since she still didn’t want to admit to them, Miyabi said them for her.

And he put it bluntly.

“Helen, we can’t get food here. There’s nothing but ashy ground and carbonized trees. And even if we walk through the night to leave the forest, we’ll only find ourselves in either a desert or a snowy field.”

“Kh!?”

“Or were you thinking of eating this moss? New life does seem to be taking root here, but there isn’t much variety yet. For now at least, everything here seems to be that soft and creepy stuff the Necromancer loves, but can you really get a good night’s sleep after eating that? I wouldn’t want to eat it no matter how you cooked it up, but what about you? You could always turn it into a smoothie to help it go down quick, if gloppy. And there appear to be a lot of glowing bugs here, so at least it’ll look pretty.”

“Kooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!”

Helen let out a very Alma-like cry.

Yes, before even getting to the Lord of Ruin issue, they had no real choice other than visiting Horn Fortress if they wanted to survive. Would they brave a game of culinary concentration using all sorts of gross creepy crawlies not found in any reference book, or would they brave a dangerous midair jaunt, supported by a single wire? No one had guaranteed them a safe and comfortable path, so if they had to risk their lives, they might as well weigh the options against each other.

The Necromancer’s witch hat spoke in a singsong voice.

“It isn’t every day you get to see a cute girl tearfully and reluctantly stuffing some grotesque thing in her mouth. N-now there’s an image I can mentally combine with some other choice images. You know, like with a thick banana or a long piece of bread!! Through the power of imagination!!!!!!”

“I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but I’m disinclined to choose anything that delights a hat that thinks on the same level as the radio,” said Miyabi. “What about you, Helen? Will you leave this with me?”

Helen Clockgear responded by clenching her tight skirt in her fists, biting her lip, and nodding like a child trying to hold it in while waiting for the bathroom. It was rare indeed for that busty glasses woman to fully admit defeat like this.

Now that he had permission, Miyabi sighed.

His sword was already stabbed into the ground, so he grabbed the grip again and spoke the words in his head.

“Take care of it, Lucifer Horn.”

Something tore through the air right next to Miyabi and scraped along the ground as it flew off somewhere.

It took a few seconds to realize the catching hook at the end of the thick wire had scraped by right next to the boy. And hadn’t there been some orange sparks flying?

The Lucifer Horn had already vanished into the distance.

The only signs of its passage were the long, thin clouds that looked like claw marks left by a massive beast.

Helen Clockgear’s legs gave out and she fell right back onto her butt with her eyes wide behind her glasses. She was like a cup filled to the limit. She could not get back up, so she trembled and clung to Miyabi’s hips.

And she yelled with the look of someone who would piss herself if just one more drop was added to the cup.

“I can’t. I can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t possibly do that!! How is that even supposed to safely catch you!? Reach your hand out in the wrong spot and you’ll lose more than just a few fingers at that speed! How did that ever work!? Please can we just give up on this terrible idea!? I’ll do anything else! Anything!!!!!!”

“Now that’s what I want to hear from a panicked beautiful woman! Saying you’ll do ‘anything’ as a last-ditch attempt at bargaining is hot, hot, hot!!”

Since the radio and the hat were both rejoicing, they had to be doing something wrong.

The Necromancer sighed with a hand on her cheek in a way that gave her a surprisingly respectable air.

“Well, a bomber wouldn’t be designed for vertical takeoff and landing. That wire must be a makeshift solution. I mean, it can only carry one person or item at a time. Using that to carry the entire group is not going to be easy.”

“Eh? Can’t I just send each of you one at a time and then grab the wire myself the last time?”

Helen desperately shook her head while still clinging to the boy. It didn’t really matter, but with her sitting on the ground and holding onto the younger boy’s hips, her soft cheek, shapely nose, and (maybe someone out there cares) some part of her glasses were touching him in weird places. The healthy teenage boy really wished she would not shake her head like that, but she was too afraid of her impending death to care.

Also, Alma was holding onto his calf and mimicking the woman for fun. The horn hurt as it poked at his leg.

The Necromancer pinched and toyed with the brim of her witch hat sort of like someone poking their finger inside a small bird’s cage.

“Would what you did for me come in handy?”

“?”

“Or what you did for the Lord of Ruin. When I was injured, didn’t you create a stretcher and then attach the wire to that? So if you carry us as a single large item and not individual people, you can ignore how many of us there are.”

The death scientist may have been a tutor at heart.

When she saw the puzzled tilt of Miyabi’s head, she happily explained.

“Create a big box or container that we can all fit inside. Miyabi, if you use your control sword to have the wire latch onto the box, we can enjoy a luxurious trip through the sky. That way we don’t even have to worry about the cold air. And inside that ‘room’, there is no risk of a sudden crosswind dislodging the hook from our clothing.”

“Yeah, that would work!”

“Nooo, don’t give him a workable solution! Now he’s really going to do iiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!”

Now that they had a plan, they got to work creating the big box.

They had seen professional containers and boxes on Celina’s armored train and at the criminal city’s port and Miyabi had created shelters to protect the islanders from the magical automatons in the remote island kingdom. That should have worked well enough, but he did not want to break apart and reuse the trees and stones leftover in this damaged forest. They were like the dark elves’ tombstones. He did not want to eat a grave offering or build a home out of tombstones. There were pieces of broken imperial weapons abandoned here and there, but they were a part of the forest at this point.

He had trashed the place while saving Elaine like the Forest Guardian and the dark elves had wanted, but he did not want to do that again for his own purposes.

Which meant…

“The pieces are scattered everywhere,” he said while looking around.

He was talking about the items that were clearly not the carbonized trees or the ashy ground.

Yes, the wreckage from the Huge Eye.

But if he could simply hold out his hand and break the Godhorn Tech down into Palette Dice and remake those into a structure or tool, then his past battles would have been a lot easier. He was not expecting that to work. Some big pieces were buried among all the jagged armor fragments and strange gears.

For example, a metal box that looked large enough to shelter from the rain inside.

For example, a tunnel-like pipe that he could have walked through without even ducking.

“I think we could use this and this. We cover up the front and back of the huge pipe with those gears taller than I am.”

“It would be like a human-sized canned good. But even if we use heat to weld the covers on, the side of the pipe has nothing for the Lucifer Horn’s hook to catch on. How will you solve that?”

The Necromancer was sexy enough to make for a very inappropriate tutor, but her question (asked while her crossed arms pushed up her large breasts) got Miyabi thinking. He crouched down on the spot.

“I found a wire. We can tie this to the pipe and create a loop at the top.”

Helen was tearfully shouting something about being terrified of a device handmade by someone who didn’t know what they were doing and comparing this to jumping off a cliff in an amateur inventor’s flying machine, but without a viable alternative, she had no way of stopping the redhead boy and the death scientist.

The used leverage to roll the giant pipe on top of the wire they had laid out on the ground. Then Miyabi climbed atop the cylinder to tightly tie the wire around it. With the pipe itself bound, he added a smaller loop to help the Lucifer Horn grab it. With the loop on top, the wire kind of looked like a giant ring on an even bigger finger.

“Why are you so good at tying knots and stuff, Necromancer? I would’ve expected a sailor like Onelife to be the expert there.”

“Hee hee. Hoping to drown in my darkness, boy?”

“No one’s better at sexy bondage than the boss! Admittedly, she developed the skills so she could restrain some overeager and uncontrollable specimens without damaging their rotten limbs. But only when they were too important to just dump in the acid pool for disposal.”

The rest of the party approached while those two worked.

Celina Bodenburg put her hands on her hips and looked up at the boy from the ashy ground.

“Oh? Developing a new delivery service using the Lucifer Horn, Miyabi!? Using such a large device to carry just the one container is extremely inefficient, but we might be able to make it profitable if we market it as premium air delivery for the wealthy hoping to receive gourmet ingredients before they go bad or transport valuables without fear of bandits attacking. This isn’t specialized for delivering messages like the messenger harpies, so it would be a first on the continent! I need to get in on the ground floor of this, so g-give me a second to work out some figures!!”

Celina started using a stick to scratch out some numbers on the ashy ground, so Miyabi decided to leave her be.

With just a metal wire tied around the thick pipe, he feared the pipe would slip out in midair. Alicia solved that problem with her knowledge of alchemy. She used a special chemical to melt the surface of the wire just enough for it to stick to the pipe. She said the process was called unheated welding.

“Climb in, everyone,” said the elf. “I will seal the other lid from the inside. There is no door, so we can’t get in after it’s sealed up.”

“Fine, but don’t seal it too tightly. It would be tragic indeed if we were trapped inside as some living canned goods.”

Death was a constant companion for the Necromancer, so if she called it tragic, it would have to be tragic indeed.

At any rate, their preparations were complete.

Helen was still trembling and throwing a tantrum, so Miyabi had to grab her hand and drag her inside. Once they were all inside the tunnel-like interior of the thick pipe, they sealed up that end as well. They could no longer see outside. Miyabi stabbed his control sword into the tube below his feet. The magic circle followed the surface of the pipe’s interior, so it circled around and covered the area overhead as well.

And Miyabi gave the final command.

“Take care of it, Lucifer Horn!!”

If he was being honest, Miyabi did not feel all that much fear.

They were journeying through the sky, but the pipe they were using as a container had both ends covered by giant gears. With no windows or doors, they could not see anything outside.

“Koo, koo.”

Alma cried worriedly in the darkness, presumably in Alicia’s arms. The creature may have been complaining about the lack of windows.

A strange sense of acceleration clutched at Miyabi’s gut, but he did not feel the vertigo of peering off the edge of a cliff. He could not even imagine what was happening to them, so the fear could not catch up with him.

(Well, Eliza’s castle was pretty high up too, but that was indoors and the building was so solid you didn’t feel the height. Is this similar?)

“Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Helen, meanwhile, had the misfortune of knowing exactly how to calculate out all the appropriate values in her head. She had been clinging to seated Miyabi and trembling for a while now. But even if she was acting like a small child after a nightmare, she was still a fully-grown woman. Her large breasts were well on their way to suffocating Miyabi and she was holding him tight with her arms and even her legs, creating such close contact that he had no way to escape her body heat and sweet aroma. And the darkness meant he sensed that scent and the heat of her breath on his neck all the more vividly.

Also, he had failed to consider another factor.

Dangling this “room” from the Lucifer Horn by a wire was all well and good, but how were they going to land?

The tunnel-like pipe had no wings, nor could it decelerate by opening a giant umbrella like in a comedy play.

There was only one way it was going to end:

“Gwaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!???”

A great shock ran through his entire body and the world flipped around him over and over.

The hook had release them in midair, dropping them to a sandy surface. It took him some time to realize the pipe was rolling along the beach.

But how did he know they were on a beach?

The fall had caused the gears to pop off the ends of the tube. A not insignificant amount of white sand got inside and he sensed an ocean scent that reminded him of the criminal city or the remote island kingdom.

“I am never following one of your plans again, Miyabi. Never ever…”

Miyabi heard Helen’s exhausted voice from the tangle of bodies below him, but he did not let his guard down. That was only her voice. The warm mass below him could still be muscular Onelife. He needed to make absolutely certain before rubbing his cheek against whoever it was.

“Oh, th-that’s me all right.”

“Mh? So it really is Helen? Then what is this concerningly dangerous thing I feel here?”

“That would be my knife.”

“Stop! I like my head attached!!”

Groaning (after nearly angering the glasses woman by getting a little too carried away), Miyabi picked up Alma and crawled outside.

His spine froze when he saw how close they were to a palm tree. It was just standing there on the beach, but hitting that would have killed them.

“Ugh, it’s gotten everywhere. Peh, peh. I really need a shower or a bath.”

Celina grabbed the bottom of her skirt and shook off the ash and sand. The unintentional thigh flashing caused the miniskirt to blow a mysterious wind on the boy’s face like a fan. Which meant he was close enough for that wind to reach him. That restored some of the happiness the young woman’s knife had taken from him. The world was a wonderful place after all.

Assuming no bizarre accidents had taken place, the Lucifer Horn would have taken them to their destination.

That meant Horn Fortress.

The view opened up before their eyes.

The orange light of the setting sun shined on a tropical island. It was similar to Kananka’s remote island kingdom, but there were differences. The flowers and shellfish visible on the beach were enough to know the island contained flora and fauna not found in that island kingdom. But more than that, the type of building was entirely different from how that kingdom had created felled palm trees and made roofs of grass to build very open homes without four walls surrounding them.

“Koo…”

Alma looked up at the impressive structure.

It was made of rock and metal.

It felt similar to the royal castle at the center of the snowy Arsenal Kingdom. But while that symmetrical castle had been built based on a plan, no such order was found here. It must have started as a few small huts that eventually fused together into one massive structure as additions were made. From there, more and more rooms were added horizontally and vertically, causing it to expand like soap bubbles.

Based on the windows, it had 7 – no, 8 floors in all.

Alicia planted her feet on the fine sand, put her hands on her hips, and looked up at it with exasperation on her face.

“Gather a bunch of humans on a desert island and they build this? Human greed knows no bounds, does it?”

“Yeah, like your room back home isn’t full of trash and lab equipment. You never let Miyabi visit by claiming the Blueforest hidden village doesn’t allow outsiders, but I bet you just didn’t want him to see what a pigsty you live-”

The radio was silenced by a fist from its owner.

“…”

This was Horn Fortress.

Miyabi himself only stared at that isolated world for a while.

They had worked hard to reach this point, but even after searching across the entire continent, they had found no solid evidence concerning the 11th. But it had not been for nothing. He had gathered a party here that had supported his journey so far.

A single boy had come all this way and the result could be seen here.

“Hm, hm, hm.”

He heard some cheerful humming.

It came from Elaine Greenforest as she walked across the sandy beach.

In fact, she walked right up to Miyabi and wrapped her arms around his arm.

“Um, um, Elaine? Do you…need something?”

Surprised, he tried being polite and she whispered in his ear.

“Dark elves rarely leave our forest. When we do visit an unfamiliar land, we ask the master of that land to escort us until we feel comfortable there.”

“?”

“And at Horn Fortress I believe you qualify as the master. Just think of it as an old custom and bear with it.”

“I-if you say so…”

“Also, we like to get to know the land by sampling the local cuisine. So give me something to eat.”

“Ehh? But all I have are a few cookies.”

“I just know I’m going to die if I don’t eat them all. Oh, and it’s a dark elf custom for you to help me relax by giving me a shoulder massage. And then a leg massage.”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait!!” cut in Alicia Blueforest from the other side. “N-now, I know that part isn’t real!! You’re just making things up since there aren’t any other Greenforest elves around to say otherwise, aren’t you!?”

“Do you have any way of proving that, my heartless childhood friend? You can head back to the forest and search for some surviving texts or art among all the ash and charcoal, but don’t bother coming back until you find something.”

Alicia pointed back with her thumb and replied with the bluntness found among old friends.

“We’ve already caught ourselves a wild dark elf by the name of Lillian Greenforest. That masochist might love being experimented on, but she can still reveal your lies!!”

“Tch.” The goggled dark elf clicked her tongue. Sadly, this suited her better than the previous enthusiasm. “After hearing you had raised this human from birth to cater to your every need, I was hoping to get a taste of the services he provided.”

“Bweflwhwlehf!? C-come to me, boy. Stay away from her!! You can’t trust someone who always keeps her face covered!!!!!!”

Elaine actually seemed puzzled by the accusation.

She tilted her head for a moment and…

“There, problem solved.”

“She took the goggles off!?” yelled Miyabi. “Without even a moment’s hesitation!!!???”

They were only goggles and had not covered her entire face, but seeing her eyes gave her an entirely different look. Her gemlike green eyes seemed to radiate an emotional energy she had lacked before.

The mysterious revenge mercenary had transformed into a teenage girl.

Also, her eyes contained a look of a feline curiosity.

“This is a wearable support device that provides all the data I need for my meteorological magic sniping: temperature, humidity, wind direction, magic, and miasma. So I don’t need to wear it outside of combat…hm? Why did you just fall to your knees, Miyabi?”

“I thought…I thought for sure there was some special meaning there. Like it was a cursed item that could only be removed with a passionate kiss, or you had to hide your secret identity as the descendant of some special priest’s bloodline.”

Miyabi had the look of someone who had delved deep inside a dungeon, found a suspicious row of four treasure chests, and opened them all to find not one contained a trap and they all contained no more than a cheap healing herb.

“Don’t worry, Miyabi. We can start up a Goggle Alliance together.”

“Not even I’m into something that weirdly specific!!”

Then the island party members noticed him.

First, Curse Cleaner Sophia Calamity-Jinx and Martial Artist Victia Magnumfist. They had not seen each other the entire time, but these party members had fought alongside his main party.

“Oh, Miyabi.”

“It’s Miyabi!”

There were others too.

“Hm, it’s been a while.”

There was the dwarf named Garett Goldcave and others too.

They all emerged to greet the new arrivals.

They ran over with smiles to the dazed group, and…

“There you are, you scumbag! First, you force me onto your party to hide that you peeped on me in the bath and then you leave me stranded on this inescapable island instead of at least having the decency of taking me on your journey!?”

“I was the very first one. I thought I was going to die of loneliness after you dumped me on the desert island all alone!!”

“Surround him!! Hey, go call the others. We can physically beat the shit out of this kid to get back at him for what he’s done to us!!!!!!”

It was a hellish scene.

Even the bunny girl and the legged mermaid surrounded the redhead boy to mercilessly pummel him with kicks. Nothing was quite as frightening as people denied food or left to rot backstage. It was not some faint twinge of good will that prevented them from killing him right away – they just wanted him to suffer for longer.

What happened when a new jailer or guard showed up at a prison overrun by dangerous inmates?

This was the answer.

“Bh, bhh, gbhhh.”

“What was that?” icily asked the will-o’-the-wisp girl named Sophia.

The pig trembled.

“M-Mobius. Where is Mobius? Isn’t he here?”

“Oh, the bastard who gave you that dangerous Godhorn Tech? If not for him, none of this would have happened to us, so we found him earlier and beat the shit out of him too. He’s probably lying in a bloody heap somewhere around here.”

Victia gave him a thin smile of barely hidden irritation.

They were apparently a lot more frustrated with their situation than he had accounted for. They had not even shown mercy to an injured man in a wheelchair, albeit an extremely sketchy one.

“Hey, his sense of pain has dulled. He isn’t reacting when I splash seawater on his wounds, so there’s no point in hitting him anymore. Give him a chance to recover enough for round two.”

Phobia Neverjudge, the daughter of the most feared gang in the criminal city, called off the beating out of something other than kindness.

Miyabi could only talk in the language of pigs at this point, but his party members seemed satisfied for the time being. After pulling out the strange marine creatures (not quite bugs and not quite fish) someone had shoved into his nostrils, he got up on unsteady legs.

They still had not solved the puzzle of the 11th.

Speaking with all the Godhorn Tech owners required visiting the clinic where the Lord of Ruin slept.

“C’mon, stand up, Miyabi. Are you okay?”

“Helen. Ugh, I don’t really mind, but I will never forget that you made no move to help me. Bleh…”

“I am still upset you forced me to take that absurd flight.”

With that, he borrowed the shoulder of the glasses woman (every part of whom was sexy) to enter Horn Fortress’s castle.

It was dark inside.

The magical lights appeared to be left on day and night, so it was not at all ecological.

Celina and Kananka were excited, but Eliza, who had served in a real castle, and the twins, who had frequented a stone pyramid, looked around in abject horror. There was a reason it was so dark inside before the sun was done setting.

In fact…

“There are windows for light that only lead out into the hallway,” noted Miyabi.

“That would be the result of all the unplanned additions. I doubt this castle obeys any safety standards at all,” sighed expressionless Acacia.

The hallway took unnatural right angles and various rooms had been installed to fill in any available space. It was all fairly dark with no windows facing directly outside.

“A kitchen and a sewing room.”

“Wh-why is the kitchen visible from the main hall? And that looks like a ceremonial ground over there.”

“That’s for alchemy and it has a smithy workshop attached,” said Alicia. “Was someone planning to create an elemental magic sword?”

There were rooms for daily necessities like a food pantry and a laundry and there were even entertainment or hobby rooms like a bar and lounge or a greenhouse. It had all been built because someone had deemed it necessary. There had to be as many rooms as there were desires among the people here.

There was no light in the rooms that had been swallowed up, windows and all, by the additions, so candles and lamps were necessary all day long.

The violent group that lived here must have gotten lost in the labyrinthine castle they had built. There were arrow signs installed on the walls and even colorful lines on the floor showing the way to important facilities.

“A-anyway, I want to get a bath,” said Alicia. “My hair and clothes are covered in ashes from the burnt forest and sand from the beach.”

“We have business to attend to.”

“Shut up, four eyes. The Lord of Ruin is in the clinic. We would only cause trouble barging in there covered in ashes and sand.”

Helen groaned and fell silent for once.

Alicia had created medicines and White Sorcery Items at the village clinic, so she may have known more about clinic etiquette than most.

But Miyabi was against it.

“But a bath is so much trouble. And I’m pretty sure I’ll pass out if I warm myself up.”

The Necromancer responded with laughter. And she spoke from the perspective of someone who had already visited Horn Fortress’s clinic.

“Yes, but it would be best if you at least took off your clothes and wiped down your hair and body with a towel.”

“Miyabi, if you start to resent any amount of trouble, you will soon find yourself unable to leave your room! And once you start using plastic bottles because walking all the way to the bathroom is too much trouble, your life is truly over!”

The elf shut up the shouting radio by shoving it in a random locker along the hallway wall. It apparently did not get to accompany her into the dressing room and bath. Alma, on the other hand, was welcome.

The girls were on their way to the bath together. Onelife Shiftup and Kananka Fulpen of the boys were as well. Some were looking for a shower instead and others were more interested in exploring the place.

The next thing he knew, the redhead boy was all alone in the hallway.

He was exhausted.

He was pretty sure he would fall asleep in the bath, but he felt like he would pass out if he stood around waiting too. He wanted to get down to business, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

Could they take a break like this because this place felt like home?

He leaned against the wall and sighed softly. Then he noticed a metal box taller than he was by the wall. It appeared to be a vending machine that produced various types of coffee at the press of a button.

“They built this themselves? …Wait, it takes money when it’s inside our own secret base?”

He didn’t even need the coffee when the demand for money shocked away some of his drowsiness. Who had built and installed this? Apparently the Bodenburg Company weren’t the only money lovers around.

And…

“Huh?”

Something puzzled Miyabi.

Horn Fortress was a chaotic collection of additions, room added to room both horizontally and vertically. Oddities abounded, like chimneys rising from the floor, the outside of windows ending up on the inside of hallways, and stairs being blocked by a ceiling.

And right here, the air felt unusually damp.

Some steam was escaping from somewhere.

Was the coffee vending machine malfunctioning? He checked and found a thick metal pipe attached to the back. It must have originally bent at a right angle to let the steam vent through the outside wall, but that joint had been removed and now the steam escaped into the room.

He moved the heavy machine and faced the thick pipe jutting out from the floor.

(What the hell? Where does this even lead now? I hope it isn’t something unhealthy like the blacksmith or alchemy stuff.)

He decided it would be best to cover up the hole and then ask Garett about it. He grabbed a piece of waterproof fabric large enough to cover the entire end of the pipe and some string to tie it on.

“…lly…”

That was when he heard something from the pipe.

“You’re really sharing all of this? Seems to me it would be more luxurious to build everyone their own personal bath. Does someone here just really like large baths?”

Miyabi Blackgarden froze in place.

He tilted his head, thought for a bit, and then looked down the steamy pipe to see if he was right.

It led down to the bath.

The bath was directly below here.

He saw a large marble floor which must have been quarried from somewhere on the island. The tub itself was unusually large and the bathwater poured from a golden lion statue. It may have been more like a giant fountain in a fancy garden than a home bath. Who had designed this? It was in the style of the Empire which was now buried in red dust, so had octopus-masked Marietta gotten greedy after seeing similar baths while looting?

And something moved through his limited field of vision.

It was Celina Bodenburg’s head. But this was not her disembodied head floating by. Her body was very much attached below it.

And all of its skin was showing.

A true rich girl apparently did not wrap a towel around her body in the bath.

“Whew, hard to believe it’s been less than a day since we left the desert nation.”

“Oh, no. This warmth is soaking into my body… I think I’m going to fall asleep…”

He could plainly tell what they washed first when they bathed. Just as Alicia had not brought the radio with her, the Necromancer did not have her hat with her. Helen still wore her glasses and Celina apparently needed something valuable on her person at all times, judging by the red jewels the size of chicken eggs embedded in the towel wrapped around her head. But he had to stop. He had seen too much already. He spread out the waterproof fabric, but then he paused. Was it really safe to block up this steam pipe? He didn’t want to have everyone in the women’s bath collapsing from some kind of poisoning.

Time passed while he hesitated.

“Acacia, I’m going to swell up in all this water.”

“Ixea, I imagine it is rude to float on the surface spread-eagle like that.”

Those twins would only have ever taken quick baths meant to preserve water. And despite how much the heat of the tropical island and desert had gotten to her, Eliza seemed to prefer hot baths. She turned the round hot-water handle at the base of the golden lion, earning her a series of attacks from the other girls. Specifically, her soft skin she was whipped by towels soaked with cold water. The attacks drained her body heat more than they hurt, but it got the chosen knight fleeing around the washing area all the same. Her screams were surprisingly cute. But that punishment could become deadly if taken too far, so always be careful.

And.

Elaine Greenforest had her legs stretched out in the large tub and her head resting on the white marble edge, her long ears twitching. She blinked a few times when she noticed something at the ceiling. She was not wearing her goggles in the bath, so her gemlike eyes met his.

She had seen him.

…Except all she did was narrow her eyes a little. And gain a smile on her lips. In fact, she even moved her fingers to blow him a kiss.

When people truly panicked, they apparently tried to calm themselves by pursuing the cause of their fear over trying to run away. So this terrifying mystery froze him in place.

(I appreciate it, but why? Why is she just letting me watch? Is this an invitation!? But wait, what price did I pay for such a wonderful reward? It actually scares me when someone is this inexplicably generous!!!!!!)

Eliza (who did not wear a towel in the bath) found Elaine’s upwards gaze curious, so she followed it.

“Hey, you haven’t overheated, have you, Elaine? Why are you staring up at the ceiling and smil-”

(Ah!?)

The villain was given no time to think.

Eliza Silverstorm ran into the dressing room, grabbed her giant lance, and ran back into the bath before gouging a giant hole in the ceiling.

“Intruder detected!! Attack, attaaack!!!!!!”

All hell broke loose.

The straitlaced idiot was so powerful the entire ceiling crumbled, dumping Miyabi and a bunch of rubble right into the women’s bath.

Once he was dragged into the extreme antlion pit of a bath, the occupants of the bath beat him up.

That made twice in one day.

He began to wonder if Horn Fortress had a curse that caused its master to be killed by his own party members.

The great variation in attack styles was a real problem at times like this. He had to contend with a wooden branch staff, a thick dagger, a rifle with bayonet, a lance, a giant axe (x2), a bow and arrow, and bizarre necromancy.

“Hmph.”

Afterwards, Celina refused to look him in the eye.

She was flushing in the cheeks, had tears in her eyes, and was biting her lip.

Elaine had put her special goggles back on (Did they not fog up after taking a bath? Helen’s glasses probably caused her trouble there.) and she was laughing. She even whispered in Miyabi’s ear with a floral scent coming from her damp silver hair.

(“You know, if you wanted to see, you only had to ask.)”

“Bff!?”

“(Then we could have slipped away to somewhere more private and kept it our little secret.)”

“Stay away from the pervert! Get too close and you’ll end up pregnant!!”

Helen’s accusation was uncalled for, but he concluded that arguing with her would get him sent to the clinic for real.

And at the moment they needed to speak with the Lord of Ruin who had finally come to.

Only Alma was willing to innocently approach Miyabi at the moment.

They followed one of the colorful lines on the floor to reach the clinic.

It turned out to be on the third story.

Or rather, Miyabi counted two staircases they climbed on the way there, but not all the rooms here necessarily had the same height. Each room’s roof became the floor of another one and the chimneys rising from the floor had extension pipes attached to redirect them at a right angle and out through an exterior wall. The concept of “stories” did not really apply to this building, so maybe there was no point in counting them.

“Now, then,” said Alicia before they entered the room. “We wanted to speak with the Lord of Ruin to compare notes between all of the Godhorn Tech owners, right? Come to think of it, we generally didn’t have the time to ask for a detailed account from everyone.”

“We need to hear from everyone and that includes you, Necromancer.”

Eliza meant that as a warning, but the Necromancer held her head high with pride for some reason.

“Heh heh. I’m more than willing to give you a lecture, but do try not to let this baptism of forbidden knowledge shatter your mind.”

“Hah. I’m more worried about this old hag’s lecture putting me to sleep.”

“Take that back!!”

The radio and hat got into an argument and young King Kananka sighed.

“Hey, can’t you quiet those two down?”

“I am admittedly an artificial being, but I assure you I have nothing in common with them.”

The ever-obedient butler automaton actually refused to comply for once.

Everyone here had met over the course of their quest.

Miyabi looked to each one in turn.

“Okay.”

Miyabi, Celina, Eliza, Number 8, Kananka, Onelife, the Necromancer, Acacia, Ixea, the Lord of Ruin, and Elaine.

“Including me, we’ve gathered all 11 users of the 10 Godhorn Techs. If it isn’t Elaine either, then who is the 11th?”

First up was the Lord of Ruin.

They knocked and opened the clinic door.

A lot of rooms had been enveloped by other additions, cutting them off from the outside light, but they found the sunset and breeze in here. The windows still opened on the outside, perhaps for health reasons.

For some reason, the dancer named Iris was running the clinic. Hadn’t she been at the clinic at the first village too?

The woman with a silver braid and exposed midriff spoke up as soon as she saw Miyabi. She may have always wanted to be a doctor because she appeared to be enjoying herself as she sat on a round stool with her legs crossed.

“The Lord of Ruin? Yes, he woke up earlier. But try to keep it short. It can be hard to tell since he tries to hide it, but he has to be in a lot of pain.”

“Um, what is little Rose doing here?”

“They wear those uniforms at the hospitals in big cities. I have my own cute little nurse now☆”

Iris Tempinvy slapped Miyabi’s shoulder and then left the clinic along with her new nurse. …But wait. She never actually explained why Rose Dollycastle, a 12-year-old girl bound by a cursed chain, was helping out in the clinic while dressed in glasses and a red nurse uniform, did she?

“(I get the feeling she agreed to research how to break the curse if Rose became her guinea pig,)” speculated Alicia.

“(The chain must be more naïve than it lets on if it went along with that plan without questioning it. It’s a stereotypical child abduction, just using a promised decursing instead of a lollipop,)” added Helen.

At any rate, it was finally time to get down to business. The clinic was of slightly higher quality than the one in the first village. It was divided into three areas: the examination space, a few beds, and the shelves of medicines. Alicia had said there was an alchemy ceremonial ground elsewhere, so the medicines and White Sorcery Items were probably mixed and combined in another room.

There was a small door in the back and the Necromancer said it led to an operating room. The tricky door was made to be opened and closed with the feet and a red magic light was installed above it.

The Lord of Ruin lay behind a pristine curtain on a bed by the window.

He still had not removed his white mask. The Necromancer shrugged, suggesting he had never once removed it.

Thus, the only sign of life was the subtle stirring of his body.

“Nhh…”

“Hey, the old bastard really is alive,” said the radio.

“We need him to be,” pointed out Miyabi.

(Let’s see. Things have been chaotic for a bit now, but who is it we haven’t had a chance to speak with?)

The Necromancer, the Lord of Ruin, and Elaine.

“I guess it’s mostly those three.”

“Zzzkoo…”

Alma had already fallen asleep on the bedside table.

“…”

“…”

The Necromancer, who had planted her shapely butt on the back of a chair, and her hat both fell silent.

They reveled in their own irreverence, but they wanted the others to do this right.

Alicia whispered in his ear.

“H-hey, Miyabi. Wake up Alma. But gently. The little thing isn’t trying to cause trouble!”

He slapped Alma on the head like a button in a quiz game.

The shock must have caused some sort of malfunction because Alma’s colors rapidly changed several times before returning to the original white stuffed animal look.

“K-koo!?”

“Ahem.”

Miyabi cleared his throat and Alicia got started.

“So what exactly happened? You, the one who reeks of death, do you know anything about the 11th who uses sorcery bombs?”

“Not a thing.” The Necromancer shrugged. “I just had the Lord of Ruin suddenly attack me.”

“Right, boss? We’re the victims here.”

There was no point in arguing.

Helen sat on a random piece of equipment just to have something to do and only realized afterwards it was a sitting height meter. She cleared her throat and quickly stood back up.

“But we do know the Lord of Ruin was working with Elaine.”

“He wanted to destroy every Godhorn Tech.” He had been obsessed with it. “And he hired her as a pawn.”

“Now, what does Elaine have to say for herself?” asked Celina, her hands on Kananka’s shoulders from behind while the young king curiously viewed the eye chart.

“I just did as he asked,” bluntly answered Elaine who stood by the wall. “If he wanted all of the owners dead, then he had to die as well.”

“Nhh? Nhhhh???”

Onelife, whose muscular body caused the round stool to creak below him, wasn’t the only one confused.

Eliza held out a hand while unsure what to do with her enormous lance.

“Hold on.”

“So…what does this mean?” Miyabi himself could scarcely believe it. “That none of us are the 11th? Was the 11th someone else entirely this whole time!?”

“No, something isn’t right.”

Her back against the wall, Elaine had been watching it all from a step removed and now she put a stop to the conversation.

The doubts roiling in her mind were obvious even through the goggles.

She took a long pause to think.

“…”

“What is this about!?” impatiently demanded Alicia, so the dark elf cautiously answered.

“Well, I can only sum up what you just said, but you said the Necromancer is a victim who was just cut down by the Lord of Ruin without warning, right?”

“Yes, what of it? Ohh, how it hurts! I can still feel the wound throbbing!”

“…”

“Restrain yourself, ancient king.”

Something unseen erupted from the eyes hidden below the white mask and Eliza pressured him to stop. Meanwhile, Elaine continued speaking.

“So what does that mean for the automaton and the pirate? Someone ordered the imperial automaton to plant those bombs and someone used some parasites to threaten the machoman into sending a bomb to that island kingdom, right? Who was behind those two incidents?”

“Oh,” said Miyabi, looking over to the decadent woman seated on the back of a chair.

She frantically stood up.

“W-wait just a second. I was nearly killed by the Lord of Ruin! So I was stuck in a bed here in this Horn Fortress clinic during the incident with the Executive Ground and Calamity Revenge. You can’t accuse me of being the 11th when I wasn’t even on the continent then!!”

She had a point.

Except…

“Um. I don’t remember there being any sorcery bombs during the desert incident.”

“…”

Her back against the wall and her arms crossed, Elaine stared straight at the suspect through her distinctive goggles.

Yes, she had seen everything that happened in that desert nation. She had been spying on it all from the shadows to ensure she did not miss any of the targets needed for the Lord of Ruin’s revenge.

“From what I’ve heard, the only time Miyabi actually saw one of the 11th’s bombs was in that island kingdom. Incidents without one of those aren’t going to establish an alibi.”

She was guilty.

Undeniably guilty.

“Ha…ah ha ha.”

And in the blink of an eye…

“Oh, no! My ‘gotta research necromancy now or I’ll die’ disease is flaring up!!”

The Necromancer’s attempted escape ended the instant that demon sword was held right up to the tip of her nose. Even if the “contents” of the sword had been burned away, preventing it from functioning as a Wicked God horn, its edge as a simple sword and the Lord’s own skill remained.

The wielder did not leave his bed, so he could not even shift his body weight with his legs and hips. He used only his arm to swing the blade at superhuman speed.

What could he do if he went all out?

He spoke from behind the smooth eyeless and mouthless mask.

“Answer honestly.”

“O-o-o-okay!!”

But someone had actually fallen asleep with all this going on.

“Zzzz.”

It was Alicia Blueforest.

Had the post-bath drowsiness gotten the better of her?

The elf who lacked the wisdom their species was known for was napping while leaning against a scale larger than a grandfather clock, with the scale’s needle shifting under her weight.

And the Lord of Ruin took everything seriously.

“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

“Miyabi, wake up that useless elf before he takes matters into his own hands!!”

Miyabi followed Eliza’s advice.

When he gave one of her long ears a hard flick, she woke up in a hurry. She reacted like a bomb had gone off nearby.

“Gwahhh!!!??? Wh-wh-what, what!?”

“It’s true I had a connection to the 11th,” began the Necromancer. “We had a contract which required me to set up the sorcery bombs I was given.”

Everyone’s gazes pierced the woman.

A contract implied she received something in exchange. What had she been given for setting up Number 8 and Onelife and putting the entire continent in danger?

The decadent woman shouted the answer in half desperation.

“The Deadman’s Fenrir was created by sticking another horn into a Wicked God. Wicked God horns are rare enough, so do you have any idea how hard it is to find an entire Wicked God corpse too!? And the horn and corpse have to be from separate one, so you need two whole Wicked Gods. That masterpiece is so much rarer than your mechanical ones that reek of oil. That’s the kind of research material anyone would betray the world for!!”

“Boss, you are shockingly villainous.”

“Hey, don’t you act all innocent! You were my accomplice!!”

Just then, something glowed faintly, starting from the center of the Necromancer’s chest and continuing down to her navel.

It was like a bright light shining through something else. Yes, like through a thin layer of skin.

“Ah, what?”

“I-is there something inside her body?” asked Helen.

“Now this gross researcher has set up some kind of disgusting prank inside her own body!?” This had woken Alicia up pretty fast. “How much more can there be!?”

“N-no, I don’t know what this is…”

“Shut up,” snapped Alicia. “I’m not believing a thing you say until I’ve given you a good, hard spanking!”

But they were all cut off by an unexpected source: the radio.

“No, wait.”

“Is that what I think it is?” added the hat.

The two philosopher’s stones had picked up on something here.

“This noise is bad news. This is even more blatant than an IP address… These numbers are plain coordinates! Our location is being transmitted to someone!!”

They all heard an explosion – a tremor of destruction that shook the entirety of Horn Fortress.

“Whoa! Wh-what!?”

Miyabi looked all around.

The light coming from the Necromancer’s upper body was gone.

The twins looked like they had just stepped in something they didn’t recognize.

“Ugh!? What is this distortion?”

“I feel it too. This is far worse than when our Godhorn Tech was out of control.”

Miyabi had no special ability to speak with the spirits like Kananka or to link with ancient ruins like the priestesses, but he only needed to look out the window to see something was wrong.

He should have seen a rainbow blur on the horizon.

Maybe it was a crack in the world and maybe it was a special barrier, but he knew it kept anyone else in or out, turning Horn Fortress into the safest place in the world.

But that had collapsed.

Each of the seven lines of colors snapped like a thread under too much tension. It all vanished like stray strands of thread. The ordinary horizon appeared afterwards, but that ordinariness concisely showed just how abnormal this situation was.

Something of unknown origin had been destroyed by something else of unknown origin.

Kananka grimaced, took a deep breath, and spoke.

That young king who lived with nature could see a lot more than Miyabi.

“That was not just an accidental explosion.”

“I sense a battle coming,” said Eliza. “Prepare yourself, Miyabi. Something is headed this way!!”

Miyabi used a bomber, so he knew that a signal of light or sound from the surface made it easy to accurately target that location from a distance. Even if that signal could not be sensed using any ordinary senses. The Necromancer had unwittingly called something here.

She was only an accomplice. So who was the actual 11th she had made her contract with?

Miyabi and the others left the clinic. The Necromancer and the Lord of Ruin came with them.

The radio swaying at Alicia’s neck gave a panicked shout.

“Hey, Mobius is on this island too, isn’t he!?”

“There’s no time to find him! Besides, he’d have a hard time drawing a sword in his wheelchair. If he’s not at the center of this, he’s safer if he stays there!! Alma, don’t you get separated from us!!”

“K-koo!”

They wanted to leave the building entirely.

The labyrinthine layout of Horn Fortress frustrated them to no end now. For most of them, it was their first time here, so even finding the stairs down was a challenge. They could not see what was happening since most rooms had no windows on actual exterior walls, so their anxiety and tension continued to grow like an overinflated balloon about to pop.

Miyabi shouted at the gang daughter when he spotted her on the way.

“Phobia!! Put out all those tallow lights!!”

“Huh!? What gives you the right to boss me a-”

“Open flames are a bad idea with all this shaking! If they fall, the whole place goes up in a blaze!!”

He could think of any number of sources of danger: the kitchen, the bath, the alchemy ceremonial ground, the smithy workshop, etc.

The place had not been built for this. Even if the additions had been made without a plan, they had mostly been made by stacking up stone and reinforcing it with metal.

Yet it felt like a small boat being tossed by the stormy waves.

Something was happening outside. Everything was shaking. Either blasts of wind or actual explosions were intermittently crashing into the building in a way that suggested actual intent and not just an accident or natural disaster. Whatever this was, it may have been powerful enough to tear apart Horn Fortress itself.

“Um, wh-what is happening here?”

“Stay put! Do not leave your room!!”

Angela Custardmare, the maid trapped in a giant suit of armor, emerged from a room with a doubtful look, but Miyabi shouted back at her while running down the stairs.

He tackled open the large double doors with his shoulder.

He found a massive sunset that looked so much like burning flames.

And he saw something standing in front of that blazing background.

He gasped. All his momentum ground to a halt, like he had crashed into an invisible wall. He simply came to a stop.

He did not recognize this person.

There was an outsider among all the party members he had invited in.

An uninvited guest obliterated the entire purpose of the impregnable Horn Fortress.

“Hee hee hee.”

What?

What was that?

“I just knew a decoy was a good idea. If the Necromancer succeeded, I won. But if she was defeated, I could find another use for her.”

She looked just like a human girl.

Either the same age as Miyabi or a little older.

She carelessly showed off so much of her bright skin and her navel. What was that she was wearing?

The best comparison may have been solid white armor over her chest and around her hips, but that was not quite accurate. The bare belly and thighs made no sense if it was meant as armor, but the overall silhouette was far too sinister for one of the swimsuits he had seen before.

Yes.

She was showing off her feminine skin, yet she came off as ominous and evil.

That was due to the blade-like objects jutting out from various parts of her body. They spread from her back like wings, they burst from the back of her hips like tails, they emerged from the joints of her arms and legs, they extended from her fingertips, and one even rose from her forehead.

Her long hair was not quite red and not quite blonde. If anything, it was an unnaturally bright pink, further marking her as an abnormality.

“I tried ignoring you for a while, but it looks like that wasn’t just a fluke. Her being pressured into abandoning her plan triggered the signal. And to do that you must possess quite a bit of power.”

“What the hell is that!?”

Miyabi was completely overwhelmed.

He was aware that his question itself was a few steps behind.

“This island isn’t part of the continent – it’s entirely cut off from the world – so how did you get in!?”

“My, my, my.” She had a complicated look, half amusement and half exasperation. “I believe you have already seen several examples of crossing the ocean or traveling the skies using a Wicked God horn. As for the miasma and manmade barriers…well, they don’t function quite like the elf hidden villages that exist in an alternate dimension, but they aren’t hard to break through. There’s nothing your mommy can’t do.” She kindly and meltingly whispered something unbelievable. “Isn’t that right, my sweet Alma?”

“Koo!? Koo…”

“Whoever she is, she’s definitely trouble,” said Celina. “Miyabi, let’s pour everything we’ve got into this one!!”

He wanted to fight.

He wanted to subdue her and question her.

But.

Before he could even squeeze his control sword’s grip, noise exploded in his head.

Even the orange sunset distorted before his eyes.

The warning was so loud his consciousness was nearly driven from his mind.

(Am I sensing…a sorcery bomb?)

“Hee hee. Take this.”

He did not have time for pain or for questions.

The girl gave a slight flourish of a finger covered by a long blade and the warning sound filled his mind.

Something appeared out of thin air.

It floated gently at her eye level…but what was it? It had an extremely unnatural cubic shape and a pink light trailed behind it. It looked something like a bizarre will-o’-the-wisp.

Its surface was rough.

The gray grid pattern on the pink cube’s surface bothered Miyabi for some reason.

(Is that…?)

The memory nearly eluded him, but then he figured it out. This was like a single piece of a puzzle, so it didn’t perfectly match what he remembered. But when he stared at it more carefully, he made the connection.

Yes.

(Is that the pattern on the stone walls of Horn Fortress’s hallways?)

“They stay hidden, causing devastation whenever they feel like it. And unlike the other 10, their Wicked God horn is not built into a weapon. They use the energy flowing from that horn to create massive sorcery bombs.”

Mobius’s words when they had first met throbbed deep in the boy’s mind.

“And these bombs are made to look identical to trees, rocks, or whatever else.”

“What?” Alicia sounded confused in the sunset. But she was not staring at the mysterious girl. She was looking at the same thing Miyabi was. “A Palette Die? Why should we care about that?”

“Kh.”

(Do the others not know what it is? Then it must be what’s causing this ringing in my ears. Is that what a Sorcery Bomb looks like before it’s planted somewhere…and only I can sense it!)

“Miyabi, that thing’s dangerous,” said Kananka. Had he sensed something through the “spirits”? “It’s continuing to grow on the inside, so it will eventually explode. And once it does, this entire island might be vaporized!! We can remake the building, but if you want to protect your party members’ lives, you can’t let her do this!!”

“Dammit!! Number 8, you work with us too!”

“Understood.”

Kananka, Number 8, and Miyabi took action. The bomb was floating in the air for now, but once it vanished from view, it would be hidden somewhere and no ordinary person would be able to detect it. These three were the only ones who could sense it, so they had to do this.

The girl let her long pink hair fly as she swung one of her long bladelike fingertips.

Something flew in along a straight line.

Another dropped to the ground and then flew straight up before scattering destructive stones.

Another launched a formidable number of glowing beams to blind the enemy.

Others smashed like a morning star or flew like a boomerang.

There was no time to worry about what was and wasn’t a decoy. They had no choice but to destroy everything that was sent their way.

But none of them were the true attack.

This mysterious girl most likely did not intend any of this to overwhelm them.

And Miyabi recognized the sensation of smashing them.

“These really are sorcery bombs, aren’t they!?” he shouted through clenched teeth.

The projectiles, fragments, and scars that escaped their attacks functioned as sorcery bombs. They had already replaced a portion of their surroundings.

At this rate, they would detonate.

How could they stop them before that? Miyabi had dealt with this several time already.

So he had no other choice.

His thick control sword loudly smashed things.

He smashed up Horn Fortress.

He smashed other things on the island.

Not even the stones and palm trees outside were exempt.

He alone could determine the location of a sorcery bomb, so he had to grit his teeth and use his full strength to swing that blade. The violent sounds of exterior walls, lights, windows, rocks, and glass being broken squeezed at his heart.

This was the only way to protect his party.

It was the only way to keep anyone from dying.

Charlotte, the pirate mermaid, had no idea what was happening, so she stared in shock.

“Whoa!? Wh-what are you doing!?”

“Stand back! There are sorcery bombs here!!”

“B-but we worked so hard to build this castle…”

“Just go hide in a sturdy room if you want to survive!!!!!!”

Forcing out the words was as painful as coughing up blood.

His sword forcibly broke down a large pair of double doors.

Things could be repaired, but his party’s lives could not. He repeated that under his breath over and over, but it did little to assuage his guilt.

His thick blade bounced off of an even thicker marble pillar.

There was no time, so he stabbed the sword into the ground, called up the magic circle, and used the Lucifer Horn to break down the stone wall, causing an entire layer of chaotic additions to crumble away. A cloud of dust burst into the air, but the warning bell in his head continued to ring.

The pink-trailing cubic will-o’-the-wisps came in more than one variety.

One had a reddish-brown stone texture.

One had a metallic gold shine.

One had a dark wooden luster.

They were just one piece of a larger puzzle, making it hard to tell what they were supposed to be on their own. But when he stared closely at them, he could tell they were pieces of a brick wall, a brass pipe, and an ebony desk respectively.

Those were the things they would be replacing.

(I have some hints. I can’t overlook this. I can use this to save everyone who trusted in me!!)

The will-o’-the-wisps with various colors and textures passed right through solid walls. They floated slowly but surely toward their destinations, be they walls, floors, furniture, or equipment. They would all replace something here and count down to the moment of annihilation.

The number of sorcery bombs continued to grow.

“Hee hee hee.”

He heard laughter from outside a filthy curtain.

Something wicked shined bright while seeming to stroll elegantly about.

“Ah ha ha, ha ha ha ha. Yes, yes, mommy’s bombs can replace anything. And if you miss just one, every last one of you dies. So you can’t afford any mistakes here. Then again, they still might resent you even if you make no mistakes.”

“Goddammiiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!”

This was his first time here, but he knew the people here had worked to support his adventure all this time.

And yet…

“Garett.”

Miyabi addressed the dwarf blacksmith.

This must have been a hallway to begin with, but it had crumbled away like a waterfall partway through. He saw the short old man standing on the second floor portion of the building’s layered cross section.

The stone castle felt out of place in this tropical environment. It reminded Miyabi of the castle Eliza had served, but that may have been due to this dwarf from the Arsenal Kingdom putting so much work into its construction.

Hadn’t he originally built autonomous traps?

“Garett!!” Miyabi shouted up from below. “Are there any tricks or traps built into this castle? I have my hands full dealing with the sorcery bombs, so do whatever you can to damage her!!”

But there was no response.

Miyabi initially thought the dwarf may have been harmed in some way, but that couldn’t be. The 11th was only using sorcery bombs. With those, you were either fine or dead with nothing in between. Since the island hadn’t been blown away, Garett had to be unharmed.

(I’m the one actually destroying the fortress they built, not the 11th.)

Was that why Garett Goldcave just stood there? Was that why he didn’t send any commands to the gargoyles he had used to help with construction?

(I’m the only one that can sense the sorcery bombs once they blend into the background. If they don’t recognize the danger, they might just find me more frightening than the 11th!!)

Things could be repaired, but his party’s lives could not. That was true, but people’s hearts and feelings were not so simple. There were plenty of things out there that could not be truly replaced by a physically identical item.

Miyabi had to do this to save them.

Destruction was the only option available to him here.

He smashed a porcelain mug underfoot. He tore open a blanket, scattering stuffing everywhere. A pressure cooker was bent too badly for the lid to fit and left to lie in the sand. They were all handmade. They were all the result of someone’s sweat and tears as they took a trial-and-error approach to figuring out what they could build with the materials available on the island. And he was destroying them. He was mercilessly and unfairly raising his heavy control sword to smash them to pieces.

This was how he repaid them for all their assistance.

He stepped on something he assumed was a tablecloth, but he winced when he looked down. This cloth used colorful letters to spell out a message: Welcome to Horn Fortress, Miyabi.

“Ooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!???”

They had gathered around to pummel him when he first arrived. They had yelled at him, asking why he had brought them here. But it had all been to distract him while they prepared this surprise.

And now he was destroying it all.

All the kindness they had gathered together was falling to pieces.

“…”

The weakness in his heart begged him to shut his eyes, but he suppressed the urge. He could not afford to slow down. He had to prevent everyone here from being blown away by a sorcery bomb.

So he had to stay strong.

He wiped away those indecisive tears and faced forward before the thick curtain of sand was swept away by the wind. He had to gather the courage to trample on their kindness and affection. Even if the act would tear him up inside later on.

He had to become the destroyer who could protect everyone’s lives.

He clenched his teeth and focused his mind on one thing only: protecting the party members who had agreed to share this adventure with him.

“Miyabi.”

Then he heard another a voice through the curtain of sand. It was Helen.

“Are there any sorcery bomb readings left, Miyabi!? You’re the only one who can sense them after they’ve been planted, so you need to tell us if there are any more!!”

It wasn’t something that could be ranked with a single scale, but Kananka and Number 8 may have had greater sensitivity to the signal. However, Miyabi was the most suited for defusing sorcery bombs (including Mobius’s bluffs).

“But,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that right now. If just one of them goes off, none of us will survive!!”

He bit his lip.

Had she sensed the feelings he had left unsaid? There were others here willing to do the dirty work – others who wanted to share the burden so they wouldn’t be forcing it all onto Miyabi’s shoulders.

“The third wall lamp from the back.”

Helen would die too if a sorcery bomb detonated.

Miyabi gripped his control sword tight.

“Also that low table and the ship in a bottle. They’re both sorcery bombs!!”

He squeezed it so tight he started to bleed.

And he faced forward. By relying on his party members, he was dragging them back onto the path of destruction. So he could not just stand around trembling and crying.

He had to take the lead.

He wasn’t going to let a single one of them die. He had decided to save them, so he couldn’t hesitate now.

“I’ll play your game, 11th! And I’ll win, goddammiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!”

After an especially loud smashing sound, a powerful crosswind carried in the scent of the sea.

By the time the filthy dust was swept away, nothing remained in the corners of Miyabi’s eyes.

He decapitated a stuffed bear doll and destroyed a large piano.

He clenched his teeth and faced forward.

He ran through Horn Fortress destroying walls and pillars. The place crumbled around him.

He had decided to use the full destructive power of his Godhorn Tech to save everyone.

“Hee hee.”

For a brief moment, the flow of time seemed to stop.

Miyabi and the girl glared at each other while a dusty wind blew between them.

There was no longer a distinction between indoors and outdoors. They simply stood on a pile of rubble. Everyone had worked so hard to construct that building and Miyabi had reduced it to this.

Everything was dyed the orange of sunset.

That was enough to prove that all the walls and ceilings had collapsed.

The girl covered in sharp protrusions extended a slender hand. She aimed her five bladelike fingers at him.

“Did you think I was done? Not even close!”

He thought his mind had been obliterated.

All of his resolve was shattered in an instant. He froze up, so Alicia hesitantly called out to him with a test tube of physical boosting potion in her hand.

“What’s wrong, Miyabi?”

“…”

“Hey! We can see the bombs when she pulls them out, but only you can accurately locate them once they’ve taken the place of something. We can’t do this on our own and we all know what you’re doing is for the best, so hurry up and tell us where they are!!”

Number 8 supported young Kananka who staggered to the side with a hand on his head like something was about to crush his skull in from every direction at once. How horrific did this look to someone who could sense such things?

Miyabi stiffly turned toward Alicia.

He had desperately worked up the resolve to save his trusting companions no matter what it took, but even he felt lost and adrift now.

Miyabi Blackgarden provided the answer while the mystery girl smiled.

“…where.”

“What!? What did you say!?”

“They’re everywhere. There’s too many of them!!”

His throat went dry.

And he saw the detonation.

Miyabi Blackgarden had collapsed.

He had fallen to the ground, writhed in pain, and then reached a point where even that pain vanished. Only then did he realize something.

If all of those bombs had exploded, how did he still have a head that could think?

People littered the ground around him.

Horn Fortress no longer existed. What little had remained of the building had been reduced to a pile of rubble, much like a birthday cake cruelly squashed below a filthy boot.

The sound of rushing water pounded on his ears.

He did not know what that meant.

But he feared it might be the seawater flowing in through a hole torn in the ground and shining in the light of the sunset. He feared that an aerial view from the Lucifer Horn would show the island was now shaped like a crescent moon.

At this point, he could not explain how he had survived.

He suspected maybe he had died and this was just his soul fighting on, not realizing it was dead.

If not, did it mean that girl had used so many sorcery bombs and was still only toying with him? Did she think his current level of fear and terror were insufficient, so she was going to wring as much of it out of him as she could before finally killing him?

“Kh!!”

It was a silly fantasy.

And the long-haired girl smiled as if to mock him for failing to reach a better conclusion.

“Wait. Those things.”

Miyabi Blackgarden could not stop sweating.

He stared at the bladelike protrusions covering the girl’s slender body.

But living beings did not have “blades”. There were other names for such things.

Like claws.

Or fangs.

Or…

“It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be! Are those all what I think they are!?”

“Ding ding ding♪”

She sounded amused.

Miyabi’s tension was so great his entire throat had gone dry. He had moved past confusion to wondering if struggling to find meaning was even the right thing to do.

The girl held herself in her arms while a sensual tremor ran up her spine. That was enough for the sharp protrusions at her elbows and around her hips to squirm, fall out, and land at her feet.

Miyabi could only groan in a terribly scratchy voice.

Yes, she had those protrusions all over her body.

And the most distinctive one jutted out from the center of her forehead.

“Wicked God…”

“Horns♪” she sweetly whispered with a giggle.

She held her long, sharp fingers toward her feet and they seemed to melt and rot away.

Yes.

The sharp horns fell away from her fingers and landed on the ground like it was nothing.

“If you want some, feel free to gather them up. You just have to come crawling at my feet.”

These were all the Wicked God horns that nations, companies, temples, and revenge mercenaries sought so desperately and were so manipulated by.

Those great power sources were necessary to be considered a powerful country and they had even destroyed an entire empire through the grudge caused by another tragedy they had caused.

And here they were falling like petals from a tree to be swept up and thrown out.

Could he really defeat a monster like this? Did he have even the slimmest of chances!? When he was fighting using a Godhorn Tech that encased a broken horn inside a mechanical contraption and surrounded it with thick armor? Wasn’t that about as absurd as challenging the king of the jungle with only one hair from its luscious mane as a weapon!?

The bizarre girl easily grew new horns to replace the removed ones as she continued smiling and speaking. Those sharp horns resembled wings and armor and Miyabi could not work up any resolve while facing something like that.

Yet she kept things moving.

“Hee hee. Yes, about what I expected.”

“No, this isn’t over yet! After all those sorcery bombs, I’ve finally seen how they’re created. It’s those pink-trailing cubic will-o’-the-wisps. …This means I’ve finally tracked you down. You’re the 11th, aren’t you!?”

“I really do not like that name.” She sounded utterly exasperated and placed a somewhat troubled hand on her cheek. “I have been involved in the creation of every last Wicked God since before you humans came to be. You could even say I am the mother of all Wicked Gods, so if you must give me a numeric title, at least show some humor and call me the 0th.”

“Of all…?”

“People have a lot of names for me: the Balloon of Apocalypse, the Bell of Calamity, the Creator of Evil, She who Sleeps in the Miasmic Depths, and so on.”

She giggled.

Or maybe it was more of a chuckle.

Either way, it was meant to ridicule.

“I really wish they would just use my actual name: Philia Shout.”

Philia Shout.

The one who shouts of love.

But this was not a mutual love. It was only a one-sided obsession – a philia.

Miyabi did not know how serious she meant any of this, but he shook his head all the same.

Before even getting into the logic of it, the very depths of his soul demanded he not accept this.

“No, that can’t be true. You must be bluffing!”

“You’re free to believe me or not. It is your life after all.” Philia Shout leisurely spread one hand in the light of the sunset, new sharp horns slowly growing from the fingertips. “Not that it really matters one way or the other when that life will be over a second from now.”

“This isn’t over yet!!”

“Maybe not for you. But what about for all the people who protected you?”

“…!?”

He heard quiet groans from all around.

Yes.

What had happened to Alicia, Helen, Celina, Eliza, Number 8, Onelife, Kananka, the Necromancer, the Lord of Ruin, Acacia, Ixea, and Elaine?

And what about Garett, Iris, and all the others who had built up Horn Fortress behind the scenes?

He was afraid to look away from the enemy before him, but he could catch glimpses out of the corner of his eyes. And his nose picked up a rusty odor.

They were all leaning against rubble walls or collapsed in the dirt or mud.

They were all bleeding a terrifying amount and yet barely even stirring.

“This fortress and your companions will not last much longer.”

(This is bad! Real bad!!)

He could not look away.

But if he did not move immediately, they were dead.

(I need to treat their wounds ASAP!!)

“Now, I wonder who will kick the bucket first?”

Miyabi crept slowly to the side before breaking out into a run.

He ran to his collapsed and unmoving party members.

To Alicia Blueforest.

“Don’t…give me that look. I’m fine!”

“Damn straight. Pretty girls and pretty boys are damn near unkillable.”

To Helen Clockgear.

“Don’t worry about me. Just finish this.”

To Celina Bodenburg.

“That’s…right. Don’t hold back on my account.”

To Eliza Silverstorm.

“If you need more power, just give the command. I will stand back up as many times as you need!”

To Number 8.

“I am sick of being manipulated by her. Please end this!”

To Kananka Fulpen.

“If you don’t stop her, so many of my people will die. So please!”

To Onelife Shiftup.

“Nhh! I’m just catching a quick nap! I’ll be back on my feet in no time!!”

To the Necromancer.

“Well, this is a shock. I was helping a bigger name than I thought.”

“You’re so cool, boss! I know you won’t let this beat you!!”

To Acacia Flightheart.

“I still haven’t found what it is I want to do.”

To Ixea Flightheart.

“But I know it isn’t to be a burden on you here!”

To the Lord of Ruin.

“She may be the ancestor of the Wicked Gods, but she makes them suffer. She must be slain!”

To Elaine Greenforest.

“You can show me a form of hope other than revenge, can’t you? Then hurry up and do it!!”

The boy worked to treat their wounds while he listened to them all.

“Gh…”

But even his own hands refused to do what he told them.

His vision blurred unnaturally. It took him a moment to realize his tear ducts had opened up and the tears were spilling out. Those tears must have worried the others, which explained why they all worked to cheer him up while barely still breathing.

The more of their voices he heard, the more he felt things falling apart. A dreadful acceleration clutched at his stomach.

“Sniff.”

He knew that.

He really did.

What was even the point of treating their wounds? He could stop the bleeding and save their lives, but then what? If Philia Shout launched just one more sorcery bomb on a whim, they would all be killed. He would only have prolonged their agony before they were blown to pieces.

(I can’t win this.)

He felt pathetic.

And worthless.

(There’s no way. She’s got Wicked God horns all over her! How is that fair?)

But he still could not stop himself from crying in front of Philia Shout who he so hated. Those injured people had spoken up to console him but he could not do the same for them because he didn’t want them to hear the tremor in his voice!!

He could tell those precious lives were slipping from his fingers.

His Godhorn Tech and everything he had overcome over the course of his adventure were useless now. He was simply afraid. His heart could not bear the unavoidable and cruel reality that he was helpless to stop all these lives from being taken!!

Philia Shout could lower the curtain at any moment, but that demon still grinned.

She smiled and observed his every movement.

He managed to calm down enough to wonder if he was overlooking something crucial here. Why was Philia Shout leaving him be when he was so defenseless?

Was there more to this?

Did she want to tear back open Alicia and the others’ wounds once he was done treating them?

His panic and exhaustion were so great his vision was growing dark.

He clearly felt the thread of tension snap when he finished treating the last one – either Victia or Sophia, he couldn’t remember. Now he felt like he was going to pass out himself.

The sun had set.

Everything had gone dark.

He half thought his soul had burned out.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Just then, he heard a voice from the darkness.

“Miyabi, Miyabi.”

It was Alicia’s.

This was not a life on the verge of being snuffed out.

It was the solid voice of a living person.

He moved his dry and cracked lips to get out a faint voice.

He could not see a thing in his blurred vision.

“Thanks goodness I can hear your voices.”

“No, Miyabi! Ugh, the 11th!!”

His mind was rapidly tugged back to reality by the tension in Helen’s voice.

Several sorcery bombs had been set up on the ground around Philia Shout like the numbers on a clock.

She was no longer bothering to hide them. They did not take on the texture of stone walls, trees, or the sandy beach, nor did they float into the air with a pink color trailing behind them.

That mother let them glow with a magic circle that anyone could see. The lines of light connected the bombs together and they were positioned where she herself would be caught in the blast. She simply smiled in a way that wordlessly said she was powerful enough to hold back the blast.

This was not a nightmare.

Nor was it a cruel joke.

The preparations were complete, so she had no need to rush.

The end was beginning.

“Will this one end it?”

“…Dammit.”

(Yeah.)

He couldn’t stop it.

It was out of his reach.

(This time it’s completely hopeless.)

He could not even speak. He felt like he had his hands full just breathing.

He supposedly had the full power of destruction and creation at his disposal, but there was nothing he could do.

There was no one he could rely on here. He had been given the Lucifer Horn, left on a journey with Alicia and Helen, cheered up Celina, protected Eliza’s kingdom, fixed Number 8, stopped Onelife, saved Kananka’s island, treated the Necromancer’s wound, dragged out Acacia and Ixea’s true desires, made peace with the Lord of Ruin, and freed Elaine from the bonds of vengeance.

Yet it all vanished in an instant.

It truly only took an instant for it to fall to the ground and shatter.

What could he do while it was all taken from him?

He could hold his control sword in both hands, but his brain couldn’t move past that point. He could not come up with any plan of what to do in order to protect them all.

He bit his lip. Hard.

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!”

Darkness covered everything.

No, Miyabi had shut his eyes.

“…”

He waited.

“…”

And waited.

“…?”

And waited until doubt crept into his mind.

The last color he had seen was not white. He had not seen the blinding white of pure violence. He saw a gentle darkness. The same darkness he saw when he shut his eyes and drifted off to sleep at night.

The sorcery bombs…hadn’t detonated?

Slowly and hesitantly, he forced his seemingly petrified eyelids open and found the world still existed around him.

“Th-they didn’t go off?”

He could not believe his own words.

And Philia Shout did not seem remotely bothered.

“Oh, they went off all right.” Did she even intend for the human to understand the rest of what she said? “But the blast was diluted to near 0 in each direction by scattering it across the infinite directions found beyond the X, Y, and Z axes of 3D space. Much like a bullet capable of shooting through a metal plate being stopped by a stack of papers, or like someone sitting gently in a spike-covered torture chair so their weight is distributed across the spikes and they avoid injury.”

“???”

“And since you don’t even understand what I mean, this obviously wasn’t your doing. For that matter, it simply isn’t possible with human magic, no matter how much you specialize it.”

She seemed oddly amused for her attack having failed.

Could she see something different within the orange light of sunset?

“You still have a lot of room to grow, but your mommy is so happy you’ve learned how to use your horn’s power to detect the blank Palette Dice.”

She was looking to the one being that had not needed treatment after being exposed to all those explosions.

“Isn’t that right, my sweet Alma?”

“Koo!!!!!!”

That was a threat.

Alma swelled out its small stuffed animal body and glared up at Philia Shout.

Miyabi looked back in disbelief.

Meanwhile, the juvenile Wicked God moved its small hind legs to walk forward while holding its small fore legs out in front like it was pushing back at an invisible wall. It passed Miyabi with the intention of shielding the boy.

He had never even imagined seeing Alma choosing to fight something in an obvious expression of hostility.

But something along those lines was definitely happening here.

“Is Alma…doing something?”

“Oh, dear. Did you never wonder how it was a juvenile Wicked God can change form so frequently? It clearly violates the rules of anatomy. While young, they rearrange themselves using the smallest units making up the world, testing out different forms to find the strongest one.”

She once more jumped beyond anything Miyabi – or anyone else in this world – could understand.

“Think of it like trying on weapons or clothes and checking the stat changes to decide if you wanted to make them a permanent part of your equipment.”

“That…doesn’t make…”

“It doesn’t make sense? Are you sure about that?” Her exasperated voice spoke to him from the shadows. “This world is made of countless Palette Dice. You should know that after stacking them up to create so many different things.”

“…”

“But that doesn’t mean the empty space you’re currently standing in and breathing from is truly empty. You can still exist there even if it hasn’t been filled in yet. That form of mass does not exist, but you can calculate out some theoretical information about it. Those are the Missing Dice that fill the blank spaces in the world☆”

When Miyabi was walking through a tunnel, he focused on the two walls and ceiling surrounding him.

But Philia Shout was different. Did she think there were invisible and intangible “blank” dice filling the space you walked through?

“The Missing Dice? They aren’t here, but they exist? You…you can’t expect me to just accept this out of the blue.”

“It is impossible for any space to be truly empty in this world. In a world where everything is built up from something else, a negative sign is simply an error. So you must define it as a ‘blank’, not an absence of anything. In chess or reversi, the spaces you can move to aren’t truly ‘empty’ are they? There is a clearly defined square there. Just because there isn’t currently a game piece on that space doesn’t mean it no longer exists on the board. Not that you need to understand any of this.” Philia Shout made it all sound so simple. “Oh, and be warned: if Alma falls, the rest of you are dead less than a second later.”

“!?”

“Koo!!”

The juvenile Wicked God stood in front of Miyabi and planted its feet on the ground to protect the rest of the party. The fluffy white fur covering Alma’s stuffed animal body was visibly bristling. That indirectly visualized the invisible power at play here, like the waves in a wheat field revealing the unseen wind washing across it.

Miyabi could sense sorcery bombs, but not even he could tell what was happening here.

But he knew some kind of tremendous pressure had to exist here.

He shuddered.

For one thing, he had no idea how long that juvenile Wicked God’s endurance would last. He didn’t even know if he had been raising the creature correctly.

How long could it last?

Was there anything he could do in the meantime?

Dragging all of his collapsed party members to safety would be difficult. People were heavy. Not to mention there was nowhere safe for them on this remote island.

“It isn’t easy believing in something you can’t see our touch, is it? But you have caught glimpses here and there.”

“?”

“What are the invisible spirits spoken of on that remote island kingdom?”

The twisted mother raised one sharp finger.

“What brings a lifeless automaton to life?”

She raised a second horned finger.

“What is the true nature of the abnormal obsession that has trapped the Lord of Ruin for so very long?”

She raised more and more.

“And what is the vessel for carrying ghosts that the Necromancer sought?”

He felt dizzy.

“Why did the Executive Ground lose control in the desert nation?”

He realized the number of fingers had surpassed one hand.

“What lurked within the desert ruins no one knows how to build anymore?”

He couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Oh, right. And what about the Celestial Tree? No normal tree could grow that large, could it?”

“……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

Miyabi couldn’t say a thing.

Not one thing.

Horn Fortress had been so full of life, but now no one remained standing. Miyabi was close to collapsing himself while Philia Shout continued her amused monologue.

This was even more sinister than the desolate winds blowing through the red-stained Empire, the toxic Bio Rainforest, or the dak elf forest where nothing but charcoal, ashes, and moss remained.

He stood in the middle of the rubble that had been torn down in order to save the others.

This must have originally been a decursing and enchanting facility built by Curse Cleaner Sophia Calamity-Jinx to cater to her specialty. The Wicked God mother smiled in amusement as she stepped on the church’s broken altar and leaned against a now headless goddess statue.

The single beam of light shining down through gaps in the rubble made it look like that loathsome being was receiving heaven’s blessing.

That sweetly dangerous being whispered softly.

“And you yourself have partially touched on that taboo.”

“?”

“Creation.” That one word said it all. “You would destroy the Palette Dice, gather them back together, and rearrange them as you pleased. When you broke their bonds and filled the empty space with them, you were unwittingly destroying the Missing Dice that are the blank spaces. Think of it like surrounding a row of white with black in reversi.”

“Eh!?”

“Or maybe you count that as creation too.” She held a hand over her mouth and laughed. “You humans claim to be ‘creating’ roads and campfires when you chop down the forest’s trees, after all.”

“…”

“But nothing you have done is creation.” She rejected the idea in a singsong voice. “A Wicked God’s power exists only to destroy. It just so happened that an error in the contract transfer expanded the range of the destruction you gained access to.”

“But…”

Miyabi’s breathing grew so erratic it actually calmed back down again.

If Alicia or the Necromancer could see him now, they might have grimaced. It was a dangerous sign when the signals from the brain or heart grew regular and unchanging.

“Then what are you saying I’ve been destroying all this time?”

“Don’t you worry about that. These have always carried the power to destroy the world. Even when you humans steal the horns for yourselves, you still use the power correctly. I can’t accuse you of using it incorrectly after failing to read the manual.”

“K-kyoo…”

“Alma!”

If Alma broke here, they were all dead.

What was going on inside that small body? The juvenile Wicked God trembled violently, but there was nothing Miyabi could do to help.

Meanwhile…

“Now, a question.”

The wicked being who called herself Alma’s “mommy”, sneered in front of the juvenile.

She knew what was happening and continued to torment the creature.

“The Missing Dice cannot be seen or touched, but they make up more than 90% of the world. So what if you could perceive and manipulate them? How much do you think you could accomplish with a power like that?”

“N-ninety?”

Miyabi could not believe his ears.

His voice trembled and cracked.

“More than 90%!?”

“Just look above you. You use a bomber, so you should know better than most how much sky there is above us. The surface is only a small fraction of the world as a whole. Land and sea don’t even come close. Even this failed attempt at a sanctuary is mostly empty space. That is what it means to defy me. The power of the horns is great enough to distort everything. Even light, gravity, time, and space. So it can also interfere with the massless Missing Dice.”

What was elementary to her felt like an attack on the core of Miyabi’s being.

“But this here is the real trick. The juveniles can freely control the Missing Dice, but their bodies are so fragile. But when they grow up big and strong, they forget how to control the Missing Dice.” She breathed a sweet sigh. “Perhaps they use the entire world itself like a protective eggshell. Or is it an issue of purity? There just don’t seem to be any others that can do both like their mommy can.”

“…”

“So you had better hope a juvenile can accomplish at least this much. Otherwise we aren’t going to find anything unexpected in this tiny world.”

Alma groaned.

Miyabi noticed a strange sparking sound coming from his control sword.

No, not just from the sword.

What about the horn it was linked with?

“Wh-what!? The Godhorn Tech!”

He lowered his gaze to the control sword making such disconcerting noises.

(Is this to blame? I don’t care if it’s a temporary fix, I need to patch it up!)

But he could not.

Even though he knew exactly what he needed to do.

He could not take his eyes off of Philia Shout. There might be some tools among the rubble that had been Horn Fortress, but he could never look away from this enemy.

This was not like when he had treated the others’ wounds. The look in Philia Shout’s eyes said she was ready to hunt.

“Giving up before you begin is the wise choice here. And I doubt giving you more time would change anything,” she said. “You can do anything by rearranging the massless Missing Dice ‘behind the scenes’. But no matter how densely you pack them, the magic in the atmosphere will not flow smoothly through them, which creates noise. But that isn’t the real problem here.”

“What?”

“Alma is a juvenile and juveniles learn from their surroundings. And do you think Alma never learned anything more interesting than that while following you around? You only gained the role because Alma imprinted on you, but you became Alma’s daddy. Hee hee. So you need to look at your child’s growth from a much larger viewpoint.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He thought his heart was going to stop.

“!?”

He was looking into the sky, but not at the Lucifer Horn.

He was looking even higher than that.

He could see something unbelievably large slowly falling toward the ground.

It was yellow.

It was not stone or sand. Nor was it iron or steel.

It was a smooth substance that did not exist in nature.

And it was massive.

“There’s something even higher than my Godhorn Tech? What is it? A giant shooting star!!!???”

(Did…did Alma make this happen?)

The Lucifer Horn looked like a small black dot in comparison.

Something that dwarfed a Godhorn Tech was approaching. It was starting to fill the entire sky overhead.

“Like I said, you can do anything with that power.”

Philia Shout spoke slowly, like a mother bird feeding her chicks.

Her beautiful pink hair blew in the dusty sea breeze.

“The possibilities of the Missing Dice surpass anything you could ever imagine.”

“Wh-what?”

“The Missing Divine indicate a blank space. Destroy them and that space is no longer blank. And with the space’s blankness removed, it fills with mass and a scar comes to the surface. It is the polar opposite of the Palette Dice that create a blank when destroyed.” Just a touch of admiration entered Philia Shout’s voice while she leaned against the headless goddess statue. “You taught your child to wield the power of creation, not destruction. Of course, your future only holds calamity and apocalypse either way☆”

“C-creating in order to destroy? That’s just wrong.”

“Is it? Alma’s mommy likes it quite a bit.”

“!?”

“Juveniles can take any form they want, no matter what their external appearance or internal skeleton might suggest. So what do you think happens if Alma transforms itself to match the type and element of the horn used in your Godhorn Tech?” The Wicked God mother tilted her head just a bit, her pink hair swaying. “Contract Owner: Under Lilith, grant me the power to move the Palette Dice.”

“What!?”

“Hee hee. Mommy is a liiiittle jealous little Alma is relying on another Demon Lord, though. But this is still plenty exciting. Your control sword and Alma are temporarily linked, so do you really think the little thing can’t steal the plans, techniques, and details for just one of the human creation methods stored inside that sword?”

“…”

“Now, I don’t know how conscious Alma is of the process, but it’s incredible all the same. Creating the apocalypse? The cynicism of small children pierces deep. It’s so wonderfully cruel☆”

Defeat the enemy and everyone can live in peace. If justice prevails, you can protect the people you care for.

Those were such childish ideas.

Young children only familiar with children’s books probably all thought that way, but what if someone could actually drop a massive shooting star on the surface based on those simple ideas?

Miyabi could not move.

The great mass of the destructive shooting star blew away the clouds overhead.

“But are you sure this is a good idea?”

Part of Miyabi’s mind begged him to not figure out what she meant.

“What will happen to the people remaining here in Horn Fortress when that hits? Both the Godhorn Tech users and the ordinary people?”

“!?”

But he could not afford to not understand.

Refusing to make a choice would fix nothing. Things would only get worse.

“Wait, Alma!! That’s enough. We don’t need that, so get rid of it!! Right now, we need to rescue the others more than defeat her!”

“Now, now. Let’s enjoy this some more. If this isn’t thrilling enough for you, I can help out.”

She casually removed the sharp horns from the fingers of one hand and held the soft palm up to her mouth.

It looked like she simply blew a sweet breath onto them.

And yet he heard dull footsteps, deafening roars, and massive forms he had to look up at.

These were not the cubic will-o’-the-wisps of the sorcery bombs.

They were worse.

He saw a three-headed black guard dog.

He saw lizard with thin, bat-like wings spread wide.

He saw a great serpent with countless heads spread out like a bouquet of flowers.

Each of them was at least several dozen meters tall. The largest ones were an order of magnitude larger. These monsters looked like they could directly grapple with a Godhorn Tech.

“Good luck.” The horned girl giggled so sweetly – so wickedly. “If anything happens to Alma here, you lose the key to survival and you die. As do all your companions.”

“Goddammit!!”

He didn’t understand.

But the enemy was attacking and he had to stand up to them or die.

He raised his sparking control sword.

Now was not the time to sit around figuring out all the answers.

He shifted slowly to the right with the sword in both hands. The rubble scattered underfoot made each step a different length, making his footwork a terrifying ordeal. He never knew what could draw the enemy’s attention.

“Trying to put the sun behind you? No, that’s not it.”

Philia Shout whispered with a tone of amusement while still leaning against the headless goddess statue from the side. The way she placed her pointer finger on her chin and narrowed her eyes was just like a mother given a riddle by her small child.

He couldn’t let her figure it out.

If she did, she would strike there. So he silently begged her not to catch on while he slowly moved his feet. Each step seemed to take years off his life. He paid with his own lifespan to gain the room to turn to the right.

“Or are you moving upwind? Hee hee. Hoping to send a smokescreen or a powdered drug toward mommy?”

“…”

In truth, Miyabi didn’t have it in him to so vigilantly detect a chance at victory.

But he had just barely removed the fishing hook from his mouth.

He was confident of it.

Yes, after turning just enough to ensure his collapsed companions would not be caught in the blast, he stabbed his control sword into the ground. He stepped on the rubble, grimaced when he saw a broken flower pot there, and roared like he was coughing up blood.

Now that he had accomplished that, he could let loose.

“Do it, Lucifer Horrrrrrrrn!!!!!!”

A beam of light dropped from the sky.

When the black guard dog flinched, Miyabi himself rushed in with his blade at the ready.

Several dull impacts rang out in quick succession.

Miyabi had built up a lot of strength after fighting so many fierce battles and defeating so many Godhorn Techs. Something had fundamentally changed inside him from when Mobius had given him the Lucifer Horn back in his village. The sword produced a very different roar as it sliced through the air. Or so he thought.

However…

“Pant, pant. I-I can’t make a dent in them…”

He was stopped.

Repelled.

The battleplan he had built up in his head was easily shattered when exposed to harsh reality.

Philia Shout’s voice grew even softer.

Like a mother introducing her child to everyone at the park.

“What did you expect? Those are all real Wicked Gods.”

“Real…what!?”

“Oh, dear. Had you never seen an adult before? And when you’ve been using one of their horns so much.”

He heard a dull cracking sound.

The massive monsters’ foreheads split open and something sharp slowly emerged. The protrusions were slick with blood and fat and they could only be called horns.

“I imagine they’re even stronger than the Deadman’s Fenrir that had its power dulled by the strange modifications made to it.”

It didn’t matter how much he wanted to deny it.

Black beams shot skyward. The multiheaded serpent had opened its many mouths and spewed some kind of toxic fluid. It was so highly compressed it could cut like a blade.

It was a like a hedgehog piercing the sky.

The bomber twisted around, but that was not enough to dodge them all.

The Lucifer Horn’s wings were taken out, so it lost its balance and started falling toward the ocean.

Miyabi could no longer use his Godhorn Tech.

Yet he had not reduced the number of enemies. In fact, they were multiplying.

“This is how the first generation ones are produced.”

She claimed a connection to the Wicked Gods and called herself their “mommy”.

But what did that really mean?

He finally received an answer. Along with undeniable proof that the bad feeling inside him was becoming a reality.

Philia Shout clearly had no intention to fight with any fancy footwork. She set her shapely butt down on the broken altar and crossed her legs.

She also held a hand up to her mouth.

As if she were preparing to blow a kiss.

“The later generations are born from eggs and cocoons all on their own. And why is this such a surprise anyway? With me and Alma, you have already seen the threat of a real Wicked God.”

“!?”

“Now, a question.” She laughed and spoke, but not to Miyabi. “Your imprinted daddy is weak and can no longer rely on his Godhorn Tech. If you don’t do anything, all of your companions will 100% be devoured by the Wicked Gods. Even if no one you know can believe it, what should a monster like you do if you want even the slightest chance at a happy ending?”

“Wait, Alma! Don’t!”

What would happen to Alicia or Helen?

They were unconscious, dying, and struggling to breath, so they could never withstand that kind of counterattack.

They could not even run away or curl up in fear of the coming shockwave.

“Yes, my child. You are correct! Peh heh heh. Overwhelmingly so!! The power of the tyrant must be put to proper use! Hee hee! Oh, my side! Ah ha ha ha ha hee ha ha hah hah hah ha ha!!!!!”

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!”

“Koooo!!!!!!”

The meteor – a manifestation of utter destruction – was falling.

A true apocalypse dropped from the sky where the Lucifer Horn no longer flew.

This time, Miyabi’s vision really did fill with white destruction.

But even as he flew through the air, he could hear the 11th speaking.

“You know.” Her voice was gentle and extremely disappointed. “I sent all of you out into the world to be the strongest beasts.”

It sounded so strange, like a mother speaking to the child still within her swollen belly. Miyabi could tell this kind voice was not directed at him.

And it continued from there.

“So why do you keep letting those fangless and wingless humans break off your horns and build machines out of them? A threat that can be slain in a fight is worthless. No one resigns themselves to their fate when faced with non-absolute violence. It’s just fear, despair, and regret. It’s just a hurdle to be overcome. You’re supposed to be more twisted! A true Wicked God should trample everyone else’s plans and live as it pleases!! When thinking beings see true terror, they bow down and accept it. You’re supposed to convince everyone at a glance that their fate is sealed the instant they laid eyes on you, so they can only weakly smile and accept their fate!!!!!!”

She came to a complete stop.

After all that shouting, something had changed.

“Or so I thought.”

Now she sounded amused.

“But now I find a Godhorn Tech user who unwittingly destroys the Missing Dice by the dozen and a juvenile who can manipulate those Missing Dice.”

This may have indicated even greater danger.

“I thought maybe a juvenile would acquire the violence of an adult while retaining its pure form if it had to watch its daddy die. Hee hee. But this is interesting too.”

Miyabi was helpless.

“This might be entertaining after all, Alma and his human.”

He could only listen.

A moment later, the flow of time reverted to normal and Miyabi Blackgarden slammed back-first into the ground.

Into the deadly ground of assorted rubble.

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