Zoras’s expression immediately froze, then quickly turned to rage. “So, you are aware of how misaligned your actions are. Lunaère, you should have been on the same side as me from the very beginning. Do you really think you should loathe the higher beings but not the world of Locklore itself? You’re wrong! How can you think that when the higher beings made these filthy lands and shaped how the fools in it live? We were betrayed! We have a duty to bring an end to this farce!” he shouted.
His anger was so intense that he was on the verge of tears. I had noticed Zoras was oddly hung up on Lunaère, but I never guessed it was because he saw her as a peer.
“I devoted my life to ensuring the prosperity of my kingdom, but they stole the person I loved, took away my position, and persecuted me like a cursed criminal. And they were only fools being forced to dance for the higher beings! I will offer Locklore and the higher beings to Elsie’s memory! I can’t rot away halfway through! You can die now, forced to dance for them, while being used by them, thoughtless and still believing you’re a good person!”
Zoras pointed his staff at us.
He’d already taken fatal wounds. The forced resurrection using death magic just wore down his mana and soul even further. He was only still standing out of sheer force of will, determined to carry out his obsessive goal.
“I’m not the same as you, Zoras,” said Lunaère, glaring at him. “My past was the result of me dabbling in forbidden magics.”
He looked back and snorted with laughter. “Still spouting pretty words of no substance?!”
He formed a magic circle.
Lunaère made one too, at the same time, as she jumped in front of me.
The fight was decided in a moment.
Zoras sent a monster at us using Primordial Predator, which Lunaère wiped out with a Gravity Bomb—and then I slashed across his chest in his moment of weakness after he cast a spell.
It was nothing more than a final, pointless strike. He didn’t have enough strength for a real fight.
He collapsed to his knees.
“I…I can’t go yet… Not until…I’ve offered Locklore and…the higher beings to her!”
He lay on the ground as he groaned resentfully, and Lunaère looked down at him with pity.
-10-
ZORAS
HE WENT DOWN with the strike from Kanata’s sword, falling to his knees, then collapsing to the ground.
He wasn’t in any condition to fight anymore. His dreams of killing Kanata and Lunaère with his own hands then returning alive to become a Lower God were dashed.
But he still couldn’t give in.
“Your Majesty… Please avenge me. This world is too filled with evil.”
He remembered Elsie’s last words. Thousands of years had passed, and he still remembered those thoughts with stark clarity as they filled his mind.
He had to avenge her. That’s why it wasn’t enough to just destroy all life on Locklore with a curse. He had to settle the score against the higher beings, those who made this filthy world to be their plaything.
“I…I can’t go yet… Not until…I’ve offered Locklore and…the higher beings to her!”
He mustered the strength to raise his head and saw her looking down at him with pity. His eyes met hers.
“…I would be lying if I said I never despised this world,” she said. “But I still love it. Kanata, the one I love, is in this world, and that is enough to make me love the world itself. I have no regrets spending my life to protect this world, to protect him. Maybe you can’t understand because you are the one who was left behind.”
Memories of Elsie flitted through his mind.
“Your Majesty… I love this world, because you are in it!”
Elsie once loved this world as well. And, oddly, her reason was the same as Lunaère’s.
But that was just something Elsie had said far before the tragedy occurred. In her last moments, Elsie hated Locklore.
“Don’t you dare…try to speak of what was in her heart…”
It sounded like Lunaère was almost trying to say that the person who passed away didn’t hate the world, but what did she know? He was sick of Lunaère, even now trying to push flowery ideas on him like she knew anything about Elsie.
“Did that person you care about really hate Locklore so much they would force you to endure ten thousand years of suffering?” she said. “To me, it looks like you’re simply looking for a target for your rage.”
He could feel his anger building. It sounded like Lunaère was belittling Elsie. In her last moments, she really had asked him to curse Locklore. He couldn’t possibly be wrong about that.
“I told you not to speak of Elsie! Her words are still fresh in my mind! What she said—!”
And then he realized something did seem wrong.
“Your Majesty… Please avenge me. This world is too filled with evil.”
The words he remembered Elsie expressing to him were too clear.
She’d been gagged; she couldn’t speak. That’s why she used the spell she developed that projected her thoughts, so she could leave her last words with him.
But that spell wasn’t perfect. It has improved somewhat since Elsie made it when she was a child, but no matter what, there was always some loss caused by the process that turned the thoughts into something that could be transmitted.
And yet, when he thought back to her words, they were perfectly clear, not broken up at all. Was it possible that over all these many years, he’d adjusted, interpreted it until he convinced himself those were really her words?
No, that couldn’t be. He was obeying her wish when he killed Fudolf, the Prime Minister.
He wasn’t so sure now that those really were Elsie’s words. Perhaps he had been driven so mad with rage that he twisted those last words of Elsie’s to fit his own purposes, then convinced himself they were true all along.
Would Elsie really want him to live that sort of life if their positions had been reversed? Would he have forced her to avenge him? Did she really kill herself just to force him to mete out her vengeance?
If Zoras’s hatred really had warped her words, then what had she really wanted to tell him in that moment, using the spell that brought back such memories for both of them?