Chapter 401

“Hmm.”

I rubbed my chin, then my temple, tilted my head, frowned, and finally nodded. Elias still wore the expression of someone about to announce something of great importance. Smiling, I replied before turning my head.

“My head hurts. Where’s Pie?”

“Over here~”

Narke pointed to one corner of the desk. Pie was asleep right beside my head. I scooped him up into my hands and gestured for Elias to continue. Seeing my reaction, Elias let out a sigh, then straightened up as though steeling himself.

“…Right. It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d understand all at once. So let me walk you through how I got there.”

“Sure. Start from the beginning.”

To be honest, I still couldn’t see why it mattered that Ismailov was both Ishmael and Leviathan. The only reason I’d bothered listening to what sounded like complete nonsense was because this was Elias. He always solved cases in ways I’d never imagined and thought along paths no one else would. It was worth hearing how he reached his conclusions, even if they sounded absurd at first.

“First of all, this is how I used to think about it. I figured whoever named him had to be a Moby-Dick fan. A huge fan, even. Do we really need more proof than that? ‘Call me Ishmael.’ The very first line! That alone says enough. The way Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, saw Ishmael doesn’t seem all that different from how the Pleroma you mentioned—Helga Brandt—sees him.”

“If it’s just because they share the same name, then like I said yesterday, that’s probably because Helga Brandt saw himself in Ishmael. At this point, I’d say the entire Pleroma probably does. Though what you’re saying is that Helga Brandt went through every work that features Ishmael, right?”

“Maybe. But looking at it from where I stand now… maybe he hasn’t read it at all.”

“…All right. I need to clear some space in my brain before this starts. How did you end up reading Moby-Dick?”

“What else was I supposed to do? I had nothing to do except read newspapers and books. Besides, there’s a character in it who has the same name as me. I happened to flip open the page where that character appears and started reading, but in the end, I just found myself wishing that character would shut his mouth every time he opened it.”

The character Elias was talking about was Elijah. He was a prophet-like figure who kept muttering ominous remarks before they set sail into dangerous waters, so Elias had probably spent the whole book wishing he’d just kept his mouth shut.

“Anyway, back to the point. I’m pretty sure the Mikhail Ismailov we know is both the biblical Ishmael and Moby-Dick‘s Ishmael. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s a problem. If Pleroma really read Moby-Dick and used its characters as the basis for creating Ismailov, then there’s no way they’d want the novel’s ending to come true. Everyone aboard the whaling ship dies! Everyone except Ishmael.”

“Or maybe everyone in Pleroma saw themselves as Ishmael. Not just Ismailov.”

To summarize Moby-Dick very briefly, it’s about Captain Ahab, who lost a leg to the white whale long ago and becomes obsessed with killing it. In the end, he fails, and everyone dies except the narrator, Ishmael.

“True. Or maybe Mikhail Ismailov is the Leviathan—the white sperm whale itself, Moby Dick. That could work too. After all, it represents nature, this force that makes people accept fate. That already lines up with why Ismailov was created. And if there’s a Leviathan, then there has to be a Behemoth¹ too, right? If the Messenger of the Covenant has the qualities of Leviathan, then we’d have the qualities of Behemoth…”

“Just how far are you planning to stretch this?”

This time he’d moved on from Melville’s Moby-Dick to Hobbes’ Leviathan. This was how Elias’ train of thought always worked. It really was pure stream of consciousness.

“You have to drag in everything you know! We’re chaos, remember? And the Messenger of the Covenant is this overwhelmingly powerful, indestructible being—the path to another world, the key to it, or maybe the world itself. So if the Messenger of the Covenant is Leviathan, then we’re Behemoth, and Leviathan’s going to crush us like bugs. It fits!”

“Why are you connecting everything in such a straight line…? Though I guess if that’s the future, the Book of Revelation already spoiled it.”

“Exactly. We’ve got to get out of here before the burning locusts show up². From now on, let’s become Buddhists.”

“…….”

I buried my face in my hands. The bigger problem, though, was that Narke actually cracked a grin.

“Me too~”

“You? Where are you going? Out of the three of us, you’re the one who definitely can’t.”

“Think of religion as a form of spiritual practice. Clearing your mind through discipline isn’t a bad thing. Once you truly reach the essence of a religion, you’ll find that those essences resonate with each other.”

“…….”

One of them was rambling like he always did, and the other sounded like someone who’d been dragged to church since childhood and was so worn out he was willing to say anything. One thing was certain—they were both exhausted. Or maybe I’d never seriously practiced any kind of spiritual discipline, so I was just brushing off what Narke said.

As I sat there looking completely drained, Elias turned serious again.

“All right. Here’s what I think. Mikhail Ismailov was created as a Leviathan. But if that’s true, then is Pleroma, like you said, supposed to be Ishmael—the sailor from Moby-Dick?”

Yeah. That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. If you absolutely had to force everything into the framework of Moby-Dick, anyway.

Elias nodded as if he’d reached the same conclusion.

“Right. That’s what they’d claim. And there’s also that line from the Book of Job quoted in the epilogue of Moby-Dick: ‘And I alone have escaped to tell you.’ It really does feel like something Pleroma would identify with through Moby-Dick ‘Ishmael’.”

‘And I alone have escaped to tell you’ is spoken by Job’s servant in Chapter 1 of the Book of Job. In Moby-Dick, it’s quoted to announce that Ishmael is the lone survivor.

While he was talking, Narke set down cups of evening primrose tea in front of us. Elias thanked him with a smile before turning serious again.

“You know, deep down they probably didn’t want to say, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ They wanted to say, ‘Call me Job.’ But ‘Call me Job’ is a little too… Job-like. It’s so obvious it almost sounds like something Satan would say. More importantly, it has absolutely no style.”

“True.”

Just as Daniel had said, Pleroma sought suffering. They believed the one who suffered was the one destined for salvation. And when it comes to suffering in the Bible, no one embodies it more than Job.

“But the Ishmael in Moby-Dick openly takes on traits of both Jonah and Job. That’s exactly the kind of thing Pleroma would love. They made Mikhail Ismailov represent Leviathan, while casting themselves as Ishmael and Job. That’s where my train of thought had gotten to.”

“Right. That’s what I’ve been saying. But why did you decide Mikhail Ismailov also represents Moby-Dick‘s Ishmael?”

“…You asked that at just the right time. Because that’s exactly where my thinking went next. I sound completely confident talking to you two now, but honestly, I kept wondering if I’d let my imagination run too far again. The Bible was written over a thousand years ago, sure, but Moby-Dick isn’t nearly that old, and it’s hardly a famous book.”

I exchanged a glance with Narke. So he was aware of it.

But drawing on every scrap of knowledge stored in his head, expanding on it, then stepping beyond the original work to build new hypotheses and countermeasures—that was Elias’ greatest strength. When he started criticizing his own reasoning, there was no need for me to pile on and shut it down. By the end of this conversation, Moby-Dick itself might no longer matter, but the new perspective it inspired certainly would.

“I started thinking I’d forced everything to fit. Remember what I asked you earlier? About why you’re so sure Heike and Ismailov being attacked at the same time couldn’t be the result of someone’s ability. I realized I might’ve gotten swept up in the sweet certainty that I’d uncovered some groundbreaking truth, only to end up trapped in a delusion built on an obscure American novel that hardly anyone even reads.”

“…….”

See? I didn’t even have to say anything, and he’d already started digging himself into a hole. A delusion, huh. Then what did that make me, sitting here because I wanted to hear it? I’d always known he was more rational, more levelheaded, and harsher on himself than anyone else, but hearing him say it like that still worried me a little. Whatever happened, those scattered trains of thought had always led him to the truth in the end. No matter what words he used to tear down his own ideas, I still wanted to hear them through.

I simply nodded and waited for him to continue.

“So I got scared I was doing the same thing again, so I tried looking at it differently. Maybe they aren’t die-hard Moby-Dick fans after all. But we… maybe we can write our own Moby-Dick. What if we took that new idea and made sure Ismailov—the whale—never ends up caught by Pleroma-Ahab’s whaling ship, and gets to live freely instead? There are enough similarities that Moby-Dick makes the perfect foundation to build our own theory on.”

Narke had started rubbing his ears. It was obvious he’d had enough of the noise.

“If they’re casting themselves as Captain Ahab, then there’s no way they’d want Moby-Dick to end the way it did! And then something just clicked. I remember shouting this to myself.”

Elias stopped, his eyes widening and his mouth hanging open. Narke let out a disbelieving laugh as he watched the performance. Elias paid him no mind and acted it out anyway.

“Ah… Wait. No. That’s not it… That’s not what this is. No!”

Terrifying. I exchanged another look with Narke and instinctively shrank back. Elias suddenly shot to his feet.

“How boring! I was the boring one all along. Symbols aren’t one-to-one correspondences. They can stand for this, and they can stand for that. I happened to pick up a literary journal the other day—normally I’d only use literary journals as firewood—but do you know what it said? That one line completely changed how I looked at this.”

Planting both hands flat on the table, Elias swept a sharp gaze over the two of us. I wanted to ask what kind of tragedy had driven literary critics to become nothing more than firewood to him, but this didn’t seem like the time. What had it said? I had no idea. He clearly expected an answer, but I had nothing to give.

I simply narrowed my eyes and gestured for him to continue. Elias slammed a hand onto the table, leaned toward us, and whispered, “‘Even Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick, probably didn’t know what the white whale truly was.’”

“How could he not? He’s the one who wrote it.”

“Exactly. That’s why I usually use literary critics as firewood. But that’s not the point. That line was… actually great fuel for thought.”

Elias took a breath, cleared his throat, then spread both arms wide as if he were about to deliver a speech.

“A single being can carry far too many meanings. That’s why all it leaves behind for outsiders—people like that critic—is questions. People can’t imagine beyond the limits of their own thinking. If their limit is fifty, they assume nobody else could’ve gone past fifty either.”

“So?”

“And unfortunately, we’re those people with a limit of fifty. We think only the world we understand makes sense. We accept ideas up to a certain point, then say, ‘Anything beyond that is impossible.’ But what if it isn’t? What if Pleroma projected even the interpretations we’d dismiss as too far-fetched onto Ismailov? He could be Ishmael from Moby-Dick, and Moby-Dick‘s Leviathan, while also being the Leviathan from the Book of Job—and maybe the Leviathan from Isaiah too. Or maybe he’s everything except Isaiah’s Leviathan.”

Woah, Narke groaned, rubbing his forehead as a laugh escaped him. It looked like all the strength had drained out of him. As he slumped forward, the honorary cardinal’s stole slipped from his shoulder with a soft rustle. Elias kept going.

“Pleroma might’ve loaded themselves with all kinds of symbolism too. What myths did they have in mind when they created the Messenger of the Covenant? Maybe those ‘Fausts’ actually want us to use Mikhail Ismailov as material and write our own Moby-Dick. ‘Just as Cain slew Abel inside the ring’—the stage has already been set. Now it’s our turn to write a new battle between Ahab and Moby Dick.”

Inside the ring. He was quoting Moby-Dick again. More importantly, what he’d just said was absurdly shocking. Rubbing my chin, I tried translating the story he’d spun in four dimensions into something my one-dimensional brain could actually follow.

“So if Mikhail Ismailov is the sailor Ishmael… then does the side that takes Ismailov in become Captain Ahab…?”

“Pleroma wanted Ismailov to look like he represented the Leviathan. They gave him white hair and white eyes to make him seem divine, tampered with his memories, and piled all kinds of myths onto him. Isn’t the whole setup meant to make it look like we’re the ones who have to stand in for the God of Isaiah and slay the Leviathan?”

Narke watched Elias without a trace of expression. He hadn’t seemed particularly interested in Elias’s theory for a while now. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear it.

“At the same time, though, Ismailov is also Moby-Dick‘s Ishmael.”

“On what grounds?”

“He’s caught between two groups that both insist the other has to die. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael gradually buys into Ahab’s obsession with killing the white whale. Blank-slate Ismailov is the same. Tell him ‘Pleroma is evil’ a hundred times, and he’ll end up completely on our side, trying to protect us.”

“…….”

“But isn’t that strange? Pleroma knew that could happen, and they still sent Ismailov to us. Even if he really can absorb abilities like you and Narke said, that’s an enormous risk. If it were me, I’d take him into battle, have him watch us get completely crushed one by one, and only then let him take our abilities. And besides, how could they know the government wouldn’t just lock him in a dungeon forever instead of sticking him with you?”

“Hmm.”

He’d hit the heart of the issue. That question had always bothered me. Elias kept going.

“They want us to make Ismailov completely ours. They want us to become Ahab and hunt down the Leviathan. Right now, there are three possibilities for who—or what—the Leviathan is. First, Ismailov. Second, Pleroma. Third… some other entity.”

He was framing it through Moby-Dick, but the point stood even without the analogy. Good. This was what Elias excelled at—pulling in an unrelated source and digging toward the core of the problem. Everyone dismissed it as him going off on tangents, and even he criticized himself for it. But what he was really searching for was a new way of looking at things.

I closed my eyes for a moment before speaking slowly.

“What you’re saying is built on a pretty hard-to-swallow assumption. If we go with your second possibility, then you’re saying Pleroma wants us to use Ismailov to kill Pleroma. What do they gain from that?”

“Finding the true god.”

“…….”

My heart nearly stopped.

The true Messenger of the Covenant. How could Elias possibly know about that? Fortunately, what he said next made it clear he had no idea about my situation.

“You were the one who guessed that Pleroma is waiting for Ismailov’s divinity to awaken, Luka. They want us to use him and come after Pleroma. But it doesn’t matter if we do, because they won’t die anyway. They’d already planned for that the moment they deliberately sent Ismailov to us. Just like Leviathan in Moby-Dick can’t be pierced by the captain’s harpoon, Pleroma can’t be killed by us.”

“Interesting.”

It was Narke who spoke. Encouraged by that reaction, Elias nodded.

“And if the plot of Moby-Dick plays out, then we’re the ones who all die, leaving only the Messenger of the Covenant whose divinity has awakened—Ismailov, the one sitting in that prison cell right now. The Leviathans end up punishing us through the force of nature itself, and in the end they’re saved without losing a thing. On the other hand, if you interpret Leviathan through the Bible, then Ismailov isn’t the real Leviathan at all. It means there’s another, true Leviathan somewhere in this world—one destined to be destroyed by the Lord Himself. Think back to what that critic said. The one who claimed Moby-Dick carries so many layers of meaning that even Melville himself probably didn’t know everything he’d written. We need to read it the same way—as something with multiple layers.”

“…….”

My head hurts. Elias had no idea that I was the true Messenger of the Covenant Pleroma was searching for, yet every analogy he had just drawn struck painfully close to home. If his reasoning was correct, then it amounted to saying that I must never stand against Pleroma. Because somewhere along the way, I’d awaken a damn “divinity” that might not even exist and send everyone aboard the whaling ship to the bottom of the sea.

Would it be better to dismiss everything Elias had said as wild speculation? But Moby-Dick had only been the framework. By now, he’d built so much on top of it that even if you stripped away the framework, the shape of his argument wouldn’t change. I already knew that. What mattered wasn’t Moby-Dick. It was the ideas and conclusions Elias had hidden inside the metaphor. Even without the comparison, a lot of his reasoning still fit the facts.

In other words, if I boiled down his entire speech to its bare essentials, he was saying this: Pleroma’s leadership could very well be wiped out by the Messenger of the Covenant. And that was exactly what they wanted.

‘…So it’s just the Book of Revelation, isn’t it?’

Whether it was Moby-Dick or anything else, stories where almost everyone dies except a handful all ended up pointing in the same direction. Right now, we were standing in the middle of Pleroma’s Revelation. And the central figure was me. Every warning Elias had passionately given was, in the end, a warning I had to heed—and then do the opposite of. But what if, just like Elijah in Moby-Dick, everything he’d warned us to be careful of actually came true?

“…….”

I’d gone in circles trying to find a way to deal with the Messenger of the Covenant. Ever since learning that I was the Messenger of the Covenant, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might already be standing on the still-wet ink of Oedipus Rex³.

Just then, Narke rested a hand on my shoulder.

“You have exactly one hour. We’ll come in every ten minutes to make sure everything is alright, so you must let us in each time.”

The temporary prison guard holding Ismailov—an Imperial Mage—finally gave in to our near-relentless demands and left the room. Normally, someone classified as this dangerous had to remain under constant supervision. But we were directly involved in the case, there were six of us, and we kept pressing the point that we were Imperial Mages ourselves. Honestly, they shouldn’t have agreed at all, but after we wore them down long enough, they backed off with the warning that if anything went wrong, we’d be the ones held responsible.

I took a seat in front of the thick reinforced glass and looked at Ismailov, who sat restrained on the other side. He looked back at me but said nothing. He simply lowered his eyes.

“Mr. Yuri Alekseyev.”

“…….”

At the very least, I didn’t want to call someone who had been stripped of his own name by the one his tormentors had forced on him. As always, he gave no response. I snapped my fingers to draw his gaze back to me, then smiled.

“From now on, this is what I’ll call you. I think it suits you better than the name you’re using now.”

“…….”

Ulrike, who had no idea what was going on, looked back and forth between me and Ismailov with anxious eyes. I gave him a reassuring smile before my expression turned serious again.

“While you were with Pleroma, you were regularly given massive blood transfusions. Is that correct?”

“I’m sorry.”

“…….”

He was probably apologizing for biting my neck. But that wasn’t important right now. I’d come here to solve that very incident, and at the same time to prove beyond doubt my answer to the Vatican’s question—what ability had been imbued into the Holy Nail. Any apology related to that could wait.

“Whose blood did they transfuse into you?”

A look that seemed to ask, Why does that matter? settled on me. Naturally, it was Leo. Ignoring his stare, I continued, “You probably don’t know. They wouldn’t have told you whose blood they were injecting. So let’s do this another way. Every time you received a transfusion, the ‘something’ that entered you would’ve felt different.”

By now, it wasn’t just Leo. Everyone wore the same puzzled expression. It was understandable. Having blood injected into your veins wouldn’t normally let you sense anything besides mana. But Ismailov was different.

“Tell me what each one felt like. I need to figure out whose souls ended up inside you.”

Translator Note

1. Leviathan and Behemoth are enormous creatures mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, most notably in the Book of Job. Leviathan is generally associated with the sea, while Behemoth represents the land. Over time, the two became symbolic counterparts of overwhelming, untamable power. ↩︎
2. A reference to the apocalyptic imagery of the Book of Revelation, where swarms of supernatural locusts are unleashed as one of God’s judgments upon the earth (Revelation 9). ↩︎
3. Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) is an ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles. It tells the story of Oedipus, who desperately tries to escape a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, only to fulfill it through the very actions he takes to avoid it. ↩︎