Chapter Season 2 735

Translator: Alpha0210

'Of course I'm the one who gets the winning draw.'

That was what Hella thought when Lukas Trowman was chosen as her opponent.

She knew little about humans and had no interest in them either, but apparently the targets were known to the public as the "Great Mage's Party". In other words, the one called the Great Mage was at the center of the group, which meant there was a good chance he was the strongest of them.

Of course, nothing was certain, but as always, Hella simply chose to believe whatever suited her.

Then the human she'd seen at the Temple told her. The one who had finished off Lamia was the Great Mage─.

Hella's hunch had become reality.

"The others are just small fry I hit the jackpot"

Humming to herself, Hella strolled through the now-silent streets. It was already pitch-dark, and there was barely another soul around. 'Did I take too long? Maybe Delatan killed Lukas along with the humans around here.'

The White-haired Human had only told Hella where to go, and when she looked puzzled, he added in a calm voice.

"You'll know Lukas Trowman the moment you see him."

"Why?"

"Because it's a face you've seen before."

"What are you talking about? I don't know him."

"Yes. But you'll recognize him when you see him."

She hadn't understood what he meant, but strangely enough, it hadn't irritated her. She rather liked riddles. The White-haired Human was certainly lucky. If he'd tried something similar with another of her kind, he probably would have been killed.

In any case, pleasantly intrigued, Hella headed toward the place the White-haired Human had told her about, and....

"...Hm?"

She immediately understood what he'd meant.

It really was a familiar face.

No. More than merely familiar.

"It's that guy."

The lunatic she'd seen at the Temple.

The one who had spouted all that strange nonsense and nearly gotten himself killed by Las.......

...No. Was it someone else? Looking closely, the face was identical, but the air about him was a little different.

Unlike that human, who had been completely insane yet brazenly self-assured, this one looked somehow vacant. He was even bent over the ground vomiting, and the moment he'd emptied his stomach, he burst into crazed laughter.

For some reason, the sight made Hella sigh.

"...Is everyone who looks like that insane? I heard humans have some kind of discipline for judging personality from someone's face."

Hella racked her brain for a moment, but her conveniently selective mind, which only remembered what it wanted to remember, had already forgotten the word Physiognomy.

Hella casually loosened her neck and approached.

"Finished throwing up?"

Lukas raised his head, but before he could even see who his opponent was, his body suddenly lifted off the ground. He went tumbling across the ground as though something had struck him.

"Urgh......."

The air burst from his lungs a beat later.

It was hard to breathe, as though he'd taken a hard blow to the chest. But what had hit him? He couldn't tell. One thing was certain: if he hadn't reflexively formed a Barrier, that attack would have knocked him unconscious.

"This is seriously disappointing. Are you really the Great Mage?"

Step. Step. He could see his opponent approaching.

A woman's voice. From the brief glimpse he'd caught, she was about a head shorter than Lukas. Whether there were other enemies nearby was still unknown. Judging from her attitude, her disposition was arrogant.......

WHAM!

This time, his chin snapped upward. And that was despite being far more alert than before. Three more blows followed in rapid succession across his upper body. Piercing pain shot through his left collarbone, the center of his chest, and his side.

He still had no idea what kind of attack she was using.

Yet even through the pain, Lukas fired Magic at his opponent.

Or at least, he should have.

"Ugh......."

The instant he tried to use Magic against her, another wave of nausea surged up.

The moment someone thinks an attack has landed cleanly is, in other words, also the moment they are most off guard. Lukas could have seized that opening just now, but he hadn't.

He rolled across the ground several times like a piece of trash.

"......."

He still had plenty of Mana, yet there was nothing he could do. He had never experienced helplessness like this before.

"...I'm starting to wonder what the point is in showing someone like you hellish suffering. This is getting annoying, so maybe I'll just kill you here."

'...Die?'

'Me, here?'

Lukas stared blankly at the woman approaching him.

Only now did he realize that his opponent was beautiful, that there was nothing on her that looked remotely like a weapon, and that, in fact, she had been continuously radiating Divine Power from the very beginning.

'...Have I really lost my composure this badly?'

'Then I suppose dying can't be helped.'

'No.'

'Maybe dying would actually be better─.'

"Goodbye."

WHAM.

Then Hella's eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed forward onto the ground.

Lukas's face stiffened at the sudden turn of events. Then he looked at the man standing behind the fallen Hella.

A man with a face identical to his own.

"This one's personality isn't all that rotten. For a Demigod, anyway... Well, sometimes something like that alone is enough of a reason to keep living."

"...You."

"You've gotten awfully haggard, Lukas. Haven't things been going well for you?"

The words caught in Lukas's throat. He shut his mouth, then finally forced them out.

"...Residue. You were alive?"

"Alive? Ah. Come to think of it, this is the first time you've seen me since then, isn't it?"

At the Temple─ Residue had stopped by the restroom. After that, instead of returning, he'd gone to meet Agolet and spoken with him. Even after the others finished subjugating the Demigods, he hadn't immediately rejoined them. When Lukas returned to the inn, the ones he'd encountered were Iris, Kasajin, and Lucid.

Residue snickered.

"So you really haven't said a word to the others. You've become even more pathetic than I expected."

"......."

His way of speaking, as though he knew everything, made Lukas's temper flare, but he had nothing to say. Because he already felt guilty over the fact that he hadn't had a single proper conversation with his companions since then.

'...What exactly is this man? I'm not believing that bullshit about us being brothers anymore. Then is he some lackey of the Demigods? But he just knocked out a woman who looks like a Demigod.'

'What does he want, hanging around me like this?'

'And.'

'Why did he say something like that that night─.'

"Have you started wanting to die?"

"What......."

"You haven't forgotten already, have you, Lukas? Didn't I tell you back then? What you're going through right now is nothing."

"...What are you talking about?"

"Schweiser's death was only the beginning."

".......!"

Lukas shot to his feet.

Then he seized Residue by the collar with both hands and glared at him.

"...Was it you? Did you kill Schweiser?"

Even with Lukas gripping his collar, the man's expression didn't change.

That attitude made Lukas feel nauseated for an entirely different reason than before.

"What the hell are you? What do you want from me? Why do you have the same face as me? If your goal is to kill me─."

"I could have done that long ago. Ever since the moment we first met."

"...Then why?"

Residue didn't answer. He simply waited until the strength slowly drained from Lukas's hands.

"I've given it some thought."

"Thought about what?"

"About how much I should tell the current you. At first, I intended to lie, and I did. Did you catch on, Lukas? We're not brothers."

"...I already knew that much."

"Right? We're far too different."

Residue gave a faint smirk and dropped heavily onto Hella's back.

"I came from the future."

"...The future?"

"Yes. The unimaginably distant future. A point that can only be reached after more years have passed than the current you could possibly conceive of. We were partners there. Though we started out as enemies."

It made no sense.

"It took countless incidents and coincidences piling on top of one another before that happened. Let's skip the trivial details─ the future you failed. His situation is somewhat similar to yours now, except his despair is a hundred million times greater."

Lukas fell silent.

One absurd statement after another was coming out of Residue's mouth. They were the sort of claims Lukas would have dismissed as nonsense if anyone else had said them─ and yet, strangely, coming from Residue, they carried a peculiar credibility.

Because this man's behavior had been bizarre from the very beginning.

His unpredictable attitude, his strange actions and remarks, all of it finally seemed to possess some kind of logic.

Then when Residue had said Schweiser's death was only the beginning, had he not been mocking him at all? Had he simply been stating the truth?

"...Then that body..."

"You gave it to me."

"I gave it to you?"

"Not just the body. Lukas Trowman, together with this flesh, you also entrusted me with the burden you were supposed to bear."

"Why......."

"Because I am an existence far greater than you could possibly imagine."

Residue prodded the fallen Hella in the side with his heel.

"Would it help if I told you that, from my perspective, there's hardly any difference between a bug and a Demigod? Incomplete and feeble as you were, you relied heavily on someone as magnificent as me, and in the end, you began to think this: Residue could have done it much better."

"...There's no way."

"You're awfully certain."

Residue rested his chin on his hand.

"Do I sound like I'm joking because of how lightly I speak? Then how about a trial version?"

"A trial version?"

"Try to withstand it. You might die."

Residue extended his index finger and pointed at himself.

Lukas was just about to ask what he was doing.

Crackle-.

Lightning flashed from the tip of Residue's finger. Lukas had no time to prepare. Even if he'd been in perfect condition, it probably would have made no difference. In the blink of an eye, the Lightning tore through Lukas's body, and....

"───!"

Lukas's mouth fell open as his eyes rolled back.

─If.

...He heard a voice.

─If no one remembers me.

'Whose voice is this?'

─If no one was waiting for my return.

─Then what have I been doing all this time?

'Ah. I know.'

'It's my voice.'

'Strange.'

It was only a voice, yet his chest felt unbearably tight. It was as though an overwhelming despair had wrapped itself around his entire body.

Lukas suddenly felt like crying.

─Hello!

Someone whose face was blurred spoke to him.

─Mister, this is the perfect thing for you to eat. Ah. It's already dead, so don't tell me you can't eat even this, right?

The person spoke in a bright, smiling voice and thrust something toward him. A blackened, rotting lump of flesh was clutched in their hand.

That wasn't all.

For some reason, Lukas knew exactly what the rotting corpse was.

'The corpse was me.'

'Ugh.......'

Nausea rose in his throat.

'What the hell am I looking at?'

─Lukas, the way you think is no longer human.

Someone's voice said those words.

Strange as it was, that too was his own voice.

Another Lukas was denying his humanity.

But this time, Lukas felt somewhat reassured.

'Whatever else might be true, I am human.'

'I don't know what happens in that distant future, but─ no matter what horrors await me there, I would never deny my own humanity.'

─...Ah. I see.

'That's how it should be.'

─I'm no longer... human.

'...That's how it should be.'

─My stomach was full. I'd eaten several times at ●● ●●, but it was the first time I'd ever felt this kind of fullness. At some point, both legs I'd lost had regenerated as well. I stood among the corpses on my restored legs. I wiped my face with my sleeve, but the blood didn't come off easily. As I looked down at the bare bones that remained of 'Lukas’, a thought suddenly occurred to me.

I ate myself.

─Eating people was less of a big deal than I'd thought.

His future self didn't seem to consider even that particularly significant.

─Sometimes the people around me disgust me so much I can hardly stand it.

........

─They look as though they make no effort and do no thinking at all, you see. They're simply people sitting in the dirt and bawling their eyes out, children who have no intention of standing on their own.

─You can only warn and scold a child for eating dirt and vomiting so many times. But when you watch that same sight tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions, trillions of times.......

─Eventually, there are moments when they start to look like slightly smarter monkeys.

'What kind of life will my future self live?'

'What will I experience, how will I change─ to end up looking at humans that way?'

Lukas was suddenly seized by fear.

More than the countless trials and hardships that might await him in the future, he feared what enduring them would turn him into.

A being who would despair, regret, want to die, cry, eat corpses, feel no revulsion toward the act, be denied his own humanity by himself, and finally grow disgusted even with the very people he was supposed to protect.

'That kind of being is me?'

'Can that still be called Lukas Trowman?'

"Haaah......."

His consciousness returned.

Before he knew it, Lukas was once again standing on the streets of Sarman.

"What a lovely complexion. Pale as if you've just had a nightmare."

"Haaah, hah......."

"Quite an impressive future, isn't it? Though that was only the tiniest fragment... No need to answer. Your expression tells me enough."

Residue slowly rose to his feet.

Then he looked at Lukas and spoke without expression.

"From this moment on, I'm going to break you. I won't stop the beating until you say 'stop'. We both have plenty to do, so I'd appreciate it if you gave up as quickly as possible."

*****

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