“Well, I sorta figured you’d say that.”
“Then why did you bother?”
“Because you can’t win,” Ende said. “One last warning: just because you’ll run into Mutsuko up ahead doesn’t mean you’ll be returned to her worldview right away. So don’t count on that.”
Yuichi couldn’t even comprehend Ende’s warning. She was talking about him being torn out of Mutsuko’s worldview, but he hadn’t noticed any signs of that happening. He certainly didn’t feel any weaker.
“What about Rokuhara?” Yuichi asked. “Did he get his wish?”
Supposedly, the Evil God could grant any wish. It seemed impossible, but if it was that powerful, then he didn’t stand a chance.
“Hiromichi? He’s dead.”
“What, was his wish to rest in peace or something?” Yuichi asked dubiously.
“His wish was to become the Evil God and destroy the world. That wish was granted. The Evil God has manifested using his body as a host.”
“I didn’t realize he was so mad at the world,” Yuichi said. He’d seemed like a real jerk to Yuichi, certainly, but he hadn’t thought the guy would go that far.
“The more Divine Vessels he took into his body, the greater his urge for destruction grew,” Ende said. “Their influence made him long for the destruction of humanity. That’s apparently how it works.”
“So that’s the gimmick, huh? What a con game...”
The god couldn’t just break a promise, so he’d used a technicality to get around it. But that meant that Monika’s wish couldn’t be granted, and neither could Yuichi’s original wish, to get rid of Soul Reader.
“Heh. Mutsuko said the same thing. I guess siblings really do think alike...”
Yuichi felt a little annoyed by the comparison, but this did make it sound like the Evil God wasn’t omnipotent. After all, if he was omnipotent, he wouldn’t have been sealed in the first place.
If he was truly omnipotent, humanity would have been destroyed a long time ago. Which meant Yuichi had some hope of fighting him.
“If I keep going, will I run into the Evil God?” Yuichi asked.
“Yeah. It’s a one-way road. There’s a door at the end of it. I don’t think he came out after me, so he’s probably still there.”
“I’ll go, but what will you do?” Yuichi felt a little hesitant to leave her here all alone. As an Outer, she might be okay, but he still felt obligated to ask.
“I think I might show you the way,” Ende said. “I tried to run away, but I really do want to see how it ends.”
“Fine. I don’t know how it’ll turn out, but just stay in a corner.”
Yuichi pulled Ende onto his back. She had a small frame, so she wasn’t much of a burden.
Yuichi resumed walking down the spiral corridor.
As he walked, Ende told him everything she knew about the Evil God. He was skeptical about any information given to him by her, but it still seemed worthwhile to keep it in mind.
Eventually he arrived at the end of the hall.
There was a door there — an ordinary sliding door like one you might see in any classroom. Yuichi opened it and came out into a ringed room.
It was the opposite of the hall he had been walking in: the walls and floor were made of stone, and in its extravagance and tranquility, it did seem worthy of the name “sacred territory.” But it was also filled with the smell of blood.
Perhaps this was natural in the Evil God’s realm, but there were also dead bodies scattered all around them. Most of them were deformed, with nothing but a lower half.
“I’m so tired of waiting! There’s nothing here! What could he even be doing?” He could hear Mutsuko’s voice coming from the center of the room.
Straight ahead of him, in the middle of the room, Mutsuko was bound to a cross.
“What are you doing, Sis? Did you get betrayed or something?” Yuichi demanded.
Her hands, feet, and torso were bound with chains, and she was covered in blood, suggesting she had been beaten.
Three figures stood in front of the cross, presumably the Evil God.
Hiromichi Rokuhara, carrying a katana.
A slender man with wings.
An eyeless woman who was a snake below the waist.
A threatening aura hung around each of them.
“I forgot to mention this, but the Evil God is a trinity now,” Ende said from where she clung to his back.
“Yeah, I got that.” Yuichi set Ende down. It might be dangerous for her inside the room, but if she wanted to see how things turned out, this was her only choice. “Hey, why did you tie up my dumb big sister?”
“Did you just call me dumb, Yu?! That’s such a dumb thing to say!” Mutsuko shot back. She didn’t have her usual forcefulness, perhaps because she knew she was responsible for the mess she was in.
“I did think it might be funny if she was dead by the time you got here,” Hiromichi said. “But I thought that if you arrived here and still couldn’t save her, that would cause even deeper despair. Don’t you?”
The entity had Hiromichi’s face and spoke with his voice, but Ende had said that Hiromichi was dead, and that this was the Evil God, whose personality was merely influenced by the boy that they had known.
Yuichi had been thinking of his fight against the Evil God as a grudging inevitability. The lives of the people in his school were on the line, and given the way things had gone, he couldn’t just abandon them. He had been acting mostly out of a sense of duty.
But now it was different. The moment he had seen his sister there, bound up and listless, this had become Yuichi’s personal fight.
He was angry.
He was going to crush the ones who had done this to his big sister. He made that decision in an instant.
With perfectly natural steps, Yuichi began walking towards Hiromichi.
✦ ✦ ✦
“I recall you had a run-in with my avatar before. Are you planning on using the same move twice?” the Evil God asked.
The three of them shared the avatar’s memories. They remembered what Yuichi had done the last time.
“Hmm, you really seem to be mad,” he added.
Yuichi wasn’t trying to hide his anger, but he also wasn’t acting recklessly; his every move conveyed calm. Of course, nothing he did would work on them. Yuichi seemed to have confidence in his speed, but they could just steal that ability away from him.
Yuichi was in Skill Eater range.
They activated Skill Eater.
Yuichi’s fist was in their gut.
“Huh?”
They couldn’t steal the skill.
Their defenses had been breached.
They didn’t understand.
They had tested their defensive prowess earlier; no matter how many times they were attacked, they shouldn’t even be able to feel pain. Yet Hiromichi’s body, as part of the Evil God, staggered in pain.
“What the hell is a ‘skill,’ exactly? If you’re talking about a technique, that’s not something you can take from a person,” Yuichi said, answering the question in the Evil God’s mind.
“Dammit!” The Evil God swung the sword.
It was Dimension Cutter. There was no defense that could stop this skill. It would work flawlessly against any opponent.
But Yuichi ducked and dodged it, and lashed out with his foot at the same time.
Hiromichi’s hand couldn’t withstand the force, and the katana went flying.
Glassy-eyed, the Evil God looked at Hiromichi’s fingers, which were bent in impossible directions.
“So what if you can cut through anything? Most swords will already kill you if they hit you, just like bullets,” Yuichi said.
Yuichi’s strength defied common sense.
This was impossible.
The Evil God was confused.
Even if they had taken on vulgar priorities from their blending with Hiromichi, a god was still a god. They couldn’t possibly be beaten by a human. Yet the Evil God couldn’t keep up with Yuichi’s movements.
They formed a fist with Hiromichi’s broken fingers and swung as hard as they could. It was a powerful enough blow to knock a person’s head off. Once it hit, it would be over.
But Yuichi didn’t dodge it. He stepped straight forward and struck with his fingers straight out, a piercing blow.
Yuichi’s arm moved forward, past Hiromichi’s strike, and kept going.
Hiromichi’s knees buckled; just making contact with Yuichi had thrown him off balance.
Yuichi plunged his outstretched fingers into Hiromichi’s chest. Breaking through the breastbone, his fingers dug into the body’s heart and snatched out the core that lay within.
“Not this one, huh?” Yuichi said, crushing the core before immediately disappearing from Hiromichi’s sight.
The flagstones shattered with an explosive sound.
The Evil God tried to use the snake-woman’s pit organ to seek out Yuichi’s location, but it was no use.
The snake-woman had already been cleaved in half, the core inside her stomach sliced through.
The Evil God looked at Yuichi through the winged man’s eyes.
Yuichi had already made his attack.
A sharp blade was protruding from the winged man’s back. A blade that had sprung out from Yuichi’s elbow had speared him through the heart.
It had skewered the true core that controlled the trinity.