Black ash was falling from the sky. Little by little, as though the darkness was peeling away, it fluttered down quietly and piled up on the Two-Law Usurper’s body. Moments passed, his magic power fading by the second.
Colorless eyes turned to me.
“Why did you save me?” he asked slowly.
“Why didn’t you evade the spell? You still had enough magic power left to use Leion.”
The Two-Law Usurper replied. “If I had evaded it, this world wouldn’t have survived.”
“And now you’re dying.”
The Two-Law Usurper stared into space instead of responding. A single tear fell from his eye down his face. I had just met him, so there was no way for me to know what he was thinking.
“What a magically inefficient body,” I remarked. “You won’t last a week like that.”
“Yeah...”
Even as he did nothing, magic flowed out of his body. It was probably why he hadn’t tried for a drawn-out battle.
“You should reincarnate. If you lack the strength, I can help you with it,” I said.
If he reincarnated into a better body, he’d live a little longer.
“Is that a normal occurrence in your world?” he asked.
“Surely it’s something you know how to do.”
The Two-Law Usurper pulled a face that neither confirmed nor denied this.
“I will not reincarnate,” he said clearly.
“Why not?”
“It’s what I decided. I will wait here until my master returns.”
The look on his face said his mind was already made up—that he had accepted his destruction long ago. Perhaps his body had been at its limit long before he and I had ever crossed paths.
“Even if your master returns tomorrow, it’ll be too late.”
“Yeah...”
“Where are they?”
The Two-Law Usurper didn’t respond. But the lonely yet prideful expression that crossed his face was one I was familiar with—I had seen it more than I wanted, two thousand years ago.
“I see.”
It seemed his master was no longer of this world.
“Why,” the Two-Law Usurper said quietly, “did you join the Pablohetra Academy Treaty?”
That was what bothered him when he was on the verge of destruction? But it didn’t seem like idle small talk either.
“You’ve got it wrong,” I said. “Some guys were targeting my mother, and they all had the same foam and ripple insignia as Baltzarond. So I tried to talk to him. That’s all. I have no idea what a Pablohetra even is.”
He looked at me in silence.
“No, I have nothing to prove it either,” I said. “Just forget it.”
“Yet there is nothing to be gained from deceiving the dead,” the Two-Law Usurper said. He lay there in silence for a while, then eventually opened his mouth. “Will you listen to my final regrets?”
I nodded. If he were to perish any moment, then he should leave with as little baggage as possible.
“Speak your mind. I will take your honor to the grave.”
The Two-Law Usurper’s expression softened slightly. He began speaking in a hoarse voice. “The Silverwater Academy Pablohetra is an ancient, huge, and evil embodiment of the class system. Without reciprocity or regard it exploits the ephemeral worlds of everything they have.”
Exploitation didn’t sound like a good thing, but I had no idea what an ephemeral world was.
“Ephemeral worlds are worlds that have yet to evolve,” the Two-Law Usurper explained, seeing my reaction. “Your home had a chief god in charge of the world, no? In evolved worlds, the chief god is capable of perceiving the outer world and crossing the Sacred Silverwater Seas. But in ephemeral worlds, there is no purist, no evolution, and no chief god. The residents of an ephemeral world have no means of noticing what goes on outside.”
I see. The situation in Militia’s world was a little different, though.
“It’s a complex system for someone who just arrived in the Sacred Silverwater Sea, but in essence Pablohetra is stealing vital magic power from those ephemeral worlds.”
That was easy to imagine. Militia’s world had gone through that just recently.
“Firedew?” I asked.
“How perceptive. Indeed, in the Sacred Silverwater Sea, the residents of the depths are stealing from the residents of the shallows. They steal everything, including lives. The residents of the ephemeral worlds cannot even detect them doing it. To them, there is nothing outside of their world, so everything appears to be moving according to order.”
Equis had claimed to use the firedew to maintain the world, but maybe they hadn’t known the full truth of the thing either; they’d believed they were stealing firedew, when it seemed that in reality it was being stolen from them all along.
“My master was someone who stood up against the evil class system. Undefeatable and proud, he was the wind of freedom that blew through the sea bound by order. Who laughed in the face of danger. But one day, a wall of death, unavoidable and insurmountable, appeared before my master.”
His hoarse voice echoed through the wasteland, heavy with feeling.
“It was a strong and powerful wall of death. In truth, he still could have repelled it, but for the sake of another, my master chose to dive into death instead. That was the kind of person he was,” he said, pausing. “My master, the Two-Law Usurper.”
By the last statement, his tone was the softest it had been yet.
“No wonder your magic efficiency was so terrible,” I said, staring into his abyss. “This isn’t your original body.”
“It’s the precious body my master entrusted to me when he set out for death.”
There was a connection between source and body that could never be broken. The reason Ingall could be used even after the flesh faded away was that the source remembered the body. Placing a different source in a body made it very difficult for that body to function. This man had used a massive amount of magic power to simply control this body, and had exhausted his lifespan as a result.
“Without the Two-Law Usurper, this area will fall to the hands of Pablohetra. My master told me not to wait for him. He told me to protect it,” the man said as his magic faded. There was no sign of the strength that had allowed him to throw the apocalyptic fireball of Egil Grone Angdroa without flinching. “I waited here in these lands, spreading the name of the Two-Law Usurper, protecting this sea from them. The whole time I believed my master would return someday. I waited here a long, long, long time.”
The subordinate of the Two-Law Usurper clenched his fist. But the movement was terribly weak, as though his body wasn’t listening to him anymore.
“But he never came back. Finally, I realized I was wrong. Perhaps he was telling me to protect myself. That I didn’t need to wait, because he was no longer returning...”
Regret spilled from him.
“I waited for a master that would never return...”
By this point, his voice was as hoarse and scratchy as the wounds littering his body.
“I should have stopped him. I should have stopped him from marching to his death, even if it cost me my own life. And if I couldn’t have done that then I should have gone with him. Even if it meant discarding my life, as my master’s butler, I should have done it. But instead, I missed that opportunity and outlived him without ever understanding what I should have been protected. Living in a daze...”
He struggled for words, squeezing them out in agony.
“Waiting...in a daze...”