Chapter 295: Deception (4)

TL/ED – Miso

"I'd do anything for you, Jern!... B-but... I'm not sure how much help I'll actually be."

"Hm?"

Elysia hesitated, as if her confidence had faltered a little.

"It's true that I'm a threatening existence to the Outer Gods. But I'm not good at fighting. I... I've hardly ever fought before."

"Yeah. I figured as much."

It made sense. Elysia's role had been that of an eraser, wiping away the worlds of the Outer Gods that had existed before, so that this world could be created.

Calling her an eraser was one thing, but the moment she made contact she was essentially a deadly poison that shrank a Domain, the most precious resource an Outer God possessed. Raising a hand against such a poison was pointless; there was nothing to gain and only losses to be had.

The Outer Gods didn't pick fights with her, and Elysia herself wasn't a belligerent sort. In other words, it was no environment for fighting.

"So, what should I do?"

"Hmm..."

I entered the Capital where Elysia was and looked around.

It was a remarkably well-realized space. Even a longtime local would have found it hard to tell the difference between this Capital and the fake one.

In that case.

"You made all of this with the Authority of Creation, right?"

"The Authority of Creation?"

"You know, creating life or objects out of a part of your Domain, like this."

"Oh, right. So that's what it's called, the Authority of Creation."

When I shaped a small Jellyfish, Elysia nodded and raised her hand.

"I do it like this."

-Whoosh... the sand on the ground rose up, gathered in her hand, and turned into a small apple.

I blinked in mild surprise. To the uninformed eye it would have looked as though she'd made an apple out of sand, but this sand wasn't real.

Fake sand of the fake Capital. She was altering the shape of something that had already been created once.

Nihility's Domain was a rather curious thing.

"So you govern things that don't exist..."

"Yeah. Things that have already vanished. That's my Domain."

"That doesn't make sense. You can handle everything that's ever disappeared?"

If that were true, then the world called Nihility was staggering beyond anything I could imagine. On a level comparable to Void.

But Elysia, with a slightly embarrassed look, set me straight.

"If it really were like that, I'd have been of help from the very start. I can only do it with things that vanished while I knew of them. And even then, I have to actually know about them."

"...So that's why it's the Capital."

"Yeah. Because I knew it, and it disappeared right in front of me."

"Hmm, did you make me that way too?"

"N-no, not that. It took a lot more effort than that... I'd rather not talk about it."

Elysia seemed embarrassed about having made an avatar of me, so I changed the subject.

"Let me test something for a second."

"Hm?"

I picked up the apple Elysia had just made and took a bite.

It was an ordinary apple, sweet, with cool, refreshing juice. But Elysia went pale and pounded on my back.

"What are you doing?! Spit it out! The things I make are really dangerous!"

"It's fine. One apple won't..."

Just as I was about to brush it off, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach.

The ache soon became agony. Since I had expected it to some degree, I didn't panic, and instead calmly observed my own condition.

'...Dangerous indeed.'

Elysia hadn't kept her distance from me, hadn't refused to help me, for no reason.

Nihility was dangerous. I had swallowed nothing more than a single piece of apple, that small a portion, and yet I felt my Deep Sea being contaminated.

Converted into units, well over several dozen liters of Sea Water had vanished to a single piece of apple. Only then, as the pain finally began to ease, did I dwell on what my body had felt firsthand.

"This literally erases a world. A part of it became 'nonexistent'."

"That's exactly why I told you not to eat it...! Haah..."

Elysia let out a heavy sigh, as if she'd known this would happen, and lowered her hand.

"...I want to help, but even if you don't go out of your way to eat a piece of me, just my being there will put you in danger. Especially if I go outside. Whether I want to or not, I'll come to know the Deep Sea, and whether I want to or not, the Deep Sea will vanish in the middle of the fight. And then..."

"Your Domain would grow."

"That, I can't stop. It'll become a tumor."

To sum it up.

If I dragged Elysia out of the Capital to get her help, the world would begin to be contaminated from that moment on.

If, before Elysia's eyes, something she knew died, or underwent anything that could be called disappearing, the world would grow by exactly that much.

The world that had grown would come to exist. And if it existed, it would be the same as swallowing that apple. Because outside was the Deep Sea.

"Now you understand, right? Why I stayed put inside."

Elysia scuffed her foot against the ground with a slightly gloomy expression.

"Of course I want to help, but if you send me out, I'll do harm just by existing. Are you still okay with that?"

"I don't... think I'm okay with it, actually."

There was no way I could withdraw the Deep Sea on the spot.

Something like an apple was fine. Inorganic matter like that wouldn't mix with the Deep Sea unless I ingested it myself.

But what if, before Elysia's eyes, some part that made up my Deep Sea were destroyed?

It would be generated as part of Nihility's Domain, mix into my Deep Sea, and immediately something similar to what had just happened would occur.

In short, sending Elysia outside this fake Capital was an extremely dangerous thing to do. Because I would be wounded before I ever managed to wound Void.

Of course, that didn't matter.

"Then should I do some kind of self-destruct attack? Outer Gods don't die, so I think something like that's possible. This power of mine was actually made for that sort of thing..."

"Absolutely not. I didn't come to you asking you to fight directly in the first place."

"You didn't? Then why...?"

"You said your Authority is making things that vanished before your eyes, right?"

"U-uh, yeah."

I opened my workshop and took out the Dwarf-made weapons stored inside, laying them out.

Swords, spears, shields, armor... all manner of melee weapons, those and more, were laid out before Elysia and me.

And then, crack!

Under overwhelming Water Pressure they crumpled in an instant, soon becoming a single lump of steel.

"The tools that just got destroyed, do they count as having disappeared?"

"Yeah. Because they were destroyed in front of me."

"Can you make the same ones?"

"...Ah!"

Elysia nodded as if she'd realized something and raised her hand.

-Crrrk... around the ruined lump of steel, the melee weapons Elysia created came into being. They were exactly the same weapons.

"I see. So you're planning to take on Void with the contaminated weapons I make?"

"Yeah. No matter how nearly infinite his world is, if a single piece of apple does this much, we should be able to land some real damage."

It wouldn't kill him. It wouldn't even deal a fatal wound.

That was fine. What mattered, in the end, was buying time.

"You can keep making these for me, right?!"

"Mm! This much is easy!"

Elysia raised her hand and began copying out the melee weapons again.

As I watched the weapons the Dwarves had labored to craft being duplicated as though stamped out by a copy machine, feeling just how absurdly broken an Outer God was, Elysia asked, sounding curious.

"But why make swords like these? If you're going to hurl something at Void, shouldn't you make something like a giant spike? Someone like you could easily launch something like that."

"I could launch it, sure. But he'd dodge it, or smash it. It's best for me to keep using Sea Water the way I've been doing."

"Th-then why make swords? It's not like you're going to fight with a sword in hand."

"To get some help."

Elysia, who had been baffled, soon caught my true intent, and her eyes went wide.

"...The Knights?"

"Yeah."

"Jern, that's..."

Elysia swallowed the rest of her words, but I could tell what she meant.

No matter how much damage they might manage, a human facing an Outer God could amount to nothing more than a pointless death.

Would a mouse holding a needle be of any use in a fight against a tiger? Even bringing a hundred of them would, at most, be a nuisance; no, the odds were high that they wouldn't even amount to that.

"...Will it be all right?"

"I know what you're worried about. But it'll be fine. I'm not going to just dress them in this gear and order them to fight."

In that case, I simply had to put something other than a needle in their hands.

"I realized there's no way I can do this on my own. You, the Knights, other things too... I need all of it. It's a little unsightly, but I'm going to use everything I can."

"...Mm!"

Hearing me, Elysia smiled gently and nodded.

"Honestly, I don't know how Knights are going to help against an Outer God... but since you're the one saying it, I'll believe you!"

"Thanks. And there's something you've slightly misunderstood."

"...Hm?"

I gave a small chuckle as I looked at the puzzled Elysia.

"I am going to ask the Knights for help, but the truth is, apart from the strong ones like Linmel and Karos, most of them won't be much use. I have no intention of telling people like that to fight."

That really would be sending them to a pointless death. No matter how much I had to make use of everything available, there was no bringing a one-year-old baby into a brawl.

At that, Elysia made an even more bewildered expression.

"Th-then why make so many of them?"

The armor and full-body Armor already piled up like a mountain were far more than those few Knights could ever make use of.

"Take a guess. Who do you think they're for?"

I tossed out the question with a smile.

Beings who weren't Knights, numerous enough to fight an Outer God, existing in more than sufficient numbers.

Such people, no, such a race did exist.

"??"

Since Elysia couldn't get a read on it, I told her the answer.

"Elves."

"...What?"

"There are cowards who ran away because they couldn't handle their own power. Right now they're fast asleep, but..."

They weren't dead.

A race being managed by a single Shepherd.

And I knew where that Shepherd was.

"It's about time to wake them up."

Roughly a day left until the world's destruction, was it?

For a race that had once been a Calamity to this world in so many ways, it was just the right time to extract a long-overdue atonement.

*

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