Lunaère was the world’s greatest expert on magic and curses. She would be able to find a way to stop Zero’s curse if no one else could.
We didn’t have the time for caution. This couldn’t wait until after we defeated Zoras—she had to go now.
“Ha ha ha! I told you from the very beginning you two were trapped,” said Zoras. “Zero’s curse is already active. Even I can’t stop it easily. That lich girl will never stop it, even if she uses every trick up her sleeve. And anyway, I have my orders, and I can’t let the curse get me as well. I need to kill you two immediately. You don’t think I’m going to sit and wait for you?”
I looked at him and glared. “I’m going to take you down while Lunaère-san goes to undo the curse.”
“…You’re still that confident, after I beat you so terribly before?” Zora’s eyes opened wide as he looked at me. “You’re just the lich girl’s baggage.”
“Kanata…it won’t work. He’s too dangerous,” said Lunaère uneasily.
“I knew this would be a dangerous fright from the very beginning. This is our best chance at succeeding. Besides, I acted cool in front of Noble, I can’t back down now,” I said.
Lunaère bit her lip. I imagined she agreed with me that she couldn’t leave Zero’s curse as it was for any longer. She also knew Zoras wasn’t the kind of opponent we could defeat quickly, even working together.
I didn’t have the knowledge to deal with a complex curse. That meant Lunaère was the only one who could handle it.
“Kanata…if you die, I will never forgive you. Promise me you won’t,” she said.
“I promise,” I said. At once, a magic circle surrounded her, and she disappeared. She must have teleported into the castle.
“Ha ha, this is fine by me, I can kill you faster if it’s one-on-one,” said Zoras. “It doesn’t matter, she can’t stop Zero’s curse. Honestly, there never was a path that led to a happy ending for you two, so I suppose it doesn’t matter if you satisfy yourselves by struggling as much as you like. Did you really think the higher beings would use a curse as insurance if it could be easily dealt with? If you want to outwit a god, you must play by the same rules.”
“You really like the sound of your own voice. Let’s get this over with, Zoras. You don’t want the curse to go off before you kill us either, right?” I raised my sword so the tip was level with Zora’s neck.
“How impudent. I can kill you in less than a minute now that the lich girl is gone.”
-5-
LUNAÈRE LEFT THE FIGHT with Zoras and entered the castle to find Zero and stop the curse he was being used to activate. The soldiers and royalty had already fled, leaving the place abandoned.
She quickly followed the traces of evil magic to a spacious hall on the first floor, where she encountered an odd sight. A beautiful boy with pale white skin was fixed in midair, surrounded by a fissure; black mist seeped through the crack in space. The cloth normally covering him had been torn away, but she immediately knew this was Zero by the odd nature of his magic. She also recognized the same strange magic formulas on his arm that she’d gotten a peek of when she fought him before.
The floor around him was covered in obsessively inscribed, finely written magic formulas.
“So this is Zero… Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the thing behind him is Zero,” she said, turning her eyes toward the spatial distortion near the boy. There was a vast interior beyond, where she could see a large, mannequin-like head inside a black haze. Its eyes were closed, but occasionally the eyelids would flicker like they were about to open. Lunaère instinctively knew that when that thing began moving, Locklore would be finished.
Lunaère thought back to what Veranta said.
“When I took on the role of adjusting the world, there was something I had trouble dealing with. 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 itself. 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.”
That space behind the boy was the uncontrollable mass of power Veranta pushed into Zero. Which meant Zero was nothing more than something created to guard that.
And, just as Zoras had said, Zero’s seal was already almost completely undone. It didn’t need any more outside help, the space would soon be wide open, and the world would be devoured by the curse of death.
“Veranta…you just had to make something this extreme, didn’t you? It couldn’t be eliminated, so instead you made it as complex as you could…”
Lunaère bit her lip.
Zero’s curse was far beyond what Lunaère anticipated. She honestly didn’t think she could reseal something like this…at least not in this situation. She couldn’t eliminate it either. She understood why Zoras was so confident.
The worst part was she was running out of time. She wasn’t certain exactly how long she had, but it likely wouldn’t last more than half an hour.
“There’s nothing I can do about something like this…”
She’d had a hard enough time holding off Zoras, who was capable of both powerful attacks and magical defense, but he’d set up this unstoppable curse to be unleashed while they were distracted. At first, this curse seemed to just be an addition to the main event—but in reality, the curse was far more difficult to deal with than any battle with an enemy. Forget half an hour, she didn’t think she could stop this curse if she had a hundred years.
Perhaps it would be better if she gave up on undoing or resealing Zero’s curse and went back to Kanata to help him fight Zoras. The thought crossed her mind, but she knew that if she left Zero here like this, Locklore would have no way of escaping its destruction.
“…I have no choice. I don’t have any more time to worry,” she muttered to herself as she touched Zero’s head with her fingertips. Intellectually, she knew it was pointless, hopeless. But she had no other option than to give her all to overcome the difficulty in front of her.