“Let me go, Kanata! I can’t let him get away with this!” Lunaère turned to me with tears in her eyes, her face red from embarrassment.
“Lunaère-san, please calm down!” I said desperately. “I love you! I do, I love you! Please just calm down a little!”
-6-
LUNAÈRE HAD BEEN one step away from killing Lovis when she learned he’d deceived her, but I somehow managed to calm her down.
“I’m sorry, it looks like I lost my composure somewhat,” she said.
“I-it’s okay.”
“Somewhat?” said Noble, butting in. I gently jabbed his chest lid with my elbow.
“Veranta has been helping, and I do have experience with this from when I raised your level, Kanata, so we’ve succeeded in raising these four people’s levels to around 1,000. I believe Kotone and Mitsuru will be able to perform higher than normal for their level,” said Lunaère once she got a hold of herself. Her cheeks were still tinged with pink, though, so it seemed like she wasn’t entirely calm. More like she was desperately trying to control herself so as not to make the situation worse.
It sounded like the main reason they agreed to train Lovis was that he was my friend, so they thought he could be trusted. I honestly wasn’t certain it was a good idea to keep him here now. Though, maybe it’d be a bigger loss to get rid of him since they’d already invested this much time into raising his level to this middling range.
“About the Ravia Tablet, the item you brought that has a record of a higher being’s magic,” said Lunaère, “to be honest, deciphering it isn’t looking promising. It is more complex and higher ranked than I originally anticipated. More importantly, I think it is likely that even if I do manage to decipher it, we might not have enough magical power to use it.” She sounded a little disappointed.
…We didn’t even know what the spell was. We were hoping that if we could just understand this spell used by a higher being, then we could use it for…something. Unfortunately, there seemed to be little point in rushing to decipher it.
“I thought it would be some sort of clue…but I guess it was too hard,” I said.
“Right now, I’m focusing on training these four. But it’s not actually difficult to work on analyzing the Tablet while I train them. It might turn out to be useful in some unexpected way, so I’ll keep looking into it.”
If Lunaère thought it might be better to let her keep investigating it, I wasn’t going to disagree. “Well, all we’re doing right now is waiting for the higher beings to make their move anyway,” I said, turning around to confirm with Veranta.
He nodded slightly. “Kanata. The higher beings’ first attacker…Reniement, he did say there were three like him, correct?”
“Yeah…”
In his last moments, Reniement said, “Curse Locklore! I only pray the other two will bring destruction upon the world!”
So besides Reniement and Lucifer, Naiarotop must have one last ace up his sleeve. The first two had serious personality flaws, meaning it was unlikely the last one would be pleasant to be around. Reniement and Lucifer were imprisoned for thousands of years in an alternate dimension for the crime of trying to destroy Locklore. The third person was definitely going to be a criminal of the same kind.
“All pawns remaining in the world have been neutralized or are under protection,” said Veranta. “The higher beings were likely planning to send those three individuals at us in a series of tumultuous events. Until that third person arrives, we can—”
Just then, a small section of space warped and what looked like a tiny toy bird appeared. It had a mask like Veranta’s on its head.
“Hmph…one of my windup birds. I’ve deployed them around the world to gather information. They come report to me if they detect anything unusual,” explained Veranta. He raised his arm, and the windup bird landed on it.
Did he make that with his Omnipotent Alchemy too?
“That gift skill really is powerful,” I said. “I’m glad Lunaère beat you before I had to face you.”
“You say that, but my level is not that high. If I were to face you in combat, the best I could manage would be to run away. You wouldn’t have been able to handle Zero, though.” Veranta glanced a little resentfully in Lunaère’s direction. It seemed like Veranta had had complete faith in Zero, who had tried to run away before the battle with Lunaère could start, but she managed to capture him and knock him out easily.
The bird’s beak chattered open and closed. “Zero, the Silent Void, assigned to defend the World Tree. Defeated by an attacker.”
“What!” Veranta reeled backward, struck by shock.
“Zero-san is useless!” I snapped at Veranta without thinking.
Veranta cradled his head in his hands with a groan. “Th-this can’t be…but…argh…”
The World Tree was connected to the roots of Locklore itself, meaning it was one of the pawns we couldn’t easily destroy. It was a massive tree that served as protection for the Spirit World. Zero was put in charge of defending the World Tree, so the higher beings couldn’t use it for evil. So much for that.
Zero was the highest level out of the members of the Unseen Hand and an expert of the greatest caliber in Death Magic, Space-time Magic, and Barrier Magic. If someone defeated him, we should probably assume it was the last of the three people we were just talking about.
“Um…I was just thinking…if we had the time to beat the First Dragon and to spend in training, then shouldn’t we have increased the guard on the World Tree…?” murmured Pomera.
“U-ugh…” Veranta shuddered at her cruel comment.
Feeling bad for him, she added, “A-actually, the First Dragon could have been stronger than we expected! It’s just, hindsight makes things clearer, right?”
First of all, Veranta built the base here to prevent an attack against Cocytus, and there were a few other pawns like the World Tree that were valuable and couldn’t easily be destroyed. The strategy might have failed in the end, but the higher beings were making their moves after seeing what cards we had in our hand. We were bound to take a few hits.
Besides, we were the ones who put Veranta in charge. We shouldn’t be blaming him for this.
“Uh… Windup Bird-san, how bad is the damage to the World Tree?” I asked.
The windup bird opened its beak again and said, “No damage to the World Tree. The attacker has already left the Spirit World.”
So, they weren’t trying to use the World Tree to prepare a stronger fighting force or to try and inflict damage on Locklore?
I didn’t know what this person was trying to do, but at least the World Tree was safe.
“…What happened to Zero?” Veranta hesitantly asked the windup bird.
Again, it opened its beak. “The attacker defeated Zero. They took him and left the Spirit World.”
That confused me. Was the attacker after Zero the whole time, not the World Tree?
“Wh-what?!” shouted Veranta in a panic. “They kidnapped Zero?!”
“Veranta-san, please calm down! I understand you’re worried, but Zero-san is still alive. And we haven’t lost the World Tree. We’ve avoided the worst-case scenario,” I said.
With his head still in his hands, Veranta shook his head “…You’re wrong. We haven’t.”
“How am I wrong?”
“Zero is a homunculus I made in preparation for the worst-case scenario.”
Oh.
I’d never wondered where Zero came from. Now I knew his backstory, I still wasn’t sure what to make of this news. “This is my first time hearing this, but…what does it even mean?”
“When I took on the role of adjusting the world, there was something I had trouble dealing with,” Veranta explained. “It was a mass of unknown power, disasters and curses that couldn’t be regulated… I needed somewhere to bury it, somewhere that wasn’t Cocytus. I made a specialized space, forced the power into it, and sealed it away. However, I couldn’t get rid of the space entirely. After contemplating what to do, I decided it would be a good idea to provide the seal itself with a personality to act as my guard.”
“And that was…”
“Zero. This bane, this power beyond all reason…is Zero, the Silent Void. If Zero’s power is used for ill, it may very well destroy the entire world.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. Then, without thinking, I grabbed Veranta by his lapels. “Th-th-that is clearly a more important pawn than the Dragon Vortex, Cocytus, and even the World Tree! And you just sent Zero off like he’s some sort of errand boy?!”
“I-I didn’t think there was any way Zero could lose! And even if he did, then we would have no other means of resisting…”
“He already got trounced by Lunaère-san! Even if you weren’t confident you could protect him, it would’ve been way better to keep him here in the tower with Lunaère-san! We shouldn’t have been chasing after the First Dragon, that thing was just an old lizard!”
“B-but even if Zero is captured, they can’t possibly undo the seal to use him for ill! Even I would need several years to undo those chains!”
“…Except this person is so confident they can undo the seal and do what they want with this power that they just left the World Tree alone, even though it was defenseless and carried Zero-san off.”
“…” Veranta fell silent. He must have reached that conclusion, that the enemy was after Zero, the moment he learned the World Tree was unharmed.
“C-calm down, Kanata!” Pomera grabbed my arms. “You’re going to kill Veranta if you keep strangling him like that! Remember, hindsight makes things clearer! We couldn’t just assume someone more powerful than Zero and better at magic than Veranta was going to come attack! Besides, we’re the ones who left Veranta in command!”
“But we’re supposed to be assuming the worst,” I said. “If it’s bad enough that he immediately realized Zero was kidnapped, then it doesn’t matter how strong Zero is, we should have been treating him as something that needed protection.”
“…Well, yes, I guess…” said Pomera.
“I might have gotten too carried away, as we’d already openly declared war against the higher beings and there seemed no way to avoid extreme situations now. I apologize… I made a mistake when assigning Zero,” said Veranta as he coughed and rubbed his throat. “And it may not be my place to say this, but now that the situation is what it is, we don’t have the time to bicker among ourselves. We must find this attacker, defeat them, and take Zero back. I will face any criticisms you have after that.”