“Now then, with all that’s happened, I think I’m going to have to kill you.” After finishing his exchange with the samurai-like man, the Great Sage turned to Yogiri.
“You should have done that from the start,” Yogiri said. “I don’t know why you dragged it out so much.” They had already met at the top of the pyramid in Cavern Quest. If he was going to kill Yogiri anyway, he should have just done it then. That would have saved Yogiri a lot of trouble fighting and killing people. He felt like he had gone through a lot of needless effort.
“I thought it would be more interesting this way. A lot of unexpected things happened thanks to all this, so I’ve been enjoying it. But it’s about time I finished things. The future looks pretty boring from here.”
“‘Interesting’ this, ‘boring’ that. Are you that starved for entertainment?” Yogiri was starting to feel fed up. He couldn’t help his frustration that all of this was being done just for the sake of killing time.
“Yeah, I’m usually pretty bored. So could you go ahead and use your power for me? You like the same thing, right? You enjoy seeing the faces of people who are overly confident in themselves when they realize they’re actually powerless, right?”
“Not especially. And even if my power didn’t work on you, I wouldn’t make some funny face for you.” If his power didn’t affect the Great Sage, that would be all there was to it. Yogiri’s ability hadn’t made him arrogant. As far as he knew, it worked on everything he had encountered so far, but he wouldn’t be surprised if there were exceptions. In a sense, he took his power for granted, but he didn’t understand how it worked in the least. He didn’t know enough about it to think it strange that it might fail. “Let me ask first, just in case, but can you get us back to our home world?”
“I probably could, but then the people you killed would never come back to life,” the Great Sage replied.
“If this is all your dream, why can’t you manage it?” Yogiri didn’t consider himself to be a part of the Great Sage’s dream, but when he had been told that this was, in fact, a dreamworld, there hadn’t been much he could say to argue. As long as he still had his own free will, there wasn’t a lot to complain about either.
“When you came, a rule was placed on this world that anyone you kill can’t be brought back to life. I need to get rid of that rule, which is why you have to die.”
“Fine. But if you try to kill me, I’ll resist.”
“But how am I going to do it? Just plain old instant death is no fun.” The Great Sage lifted his right hand, where a small light began to glow.
That looks incredibly dangerous! Mokomoko exclaimed.
“It does, doesn’t it?” As someone with no experience with magic, there was no way Yogiri could gauge the power of a spell just by looking at it. But the intense, frenzied pressure of the light he was seeing was clear to everyone.
“Let’s call it an erasure bolt,” the Great Sage said. “If it hits you, it deletes your entire past, present, and future. I guess in really simple terms, it’ll make it so that I totally forget you ever existed.”
“So because it’s your dream, if you forget someone exists, they disappear?”
“Exactly. I don’t really need to use something this extreme, but I thought I’d make it a bit of a show. It only moves as fast as I can throw it, so if you try hard enough, you should be able to dodge it. Okay, let’s start.”
“Please wait!” As the Great Sage made to throw the ball of light, Alexia stopped him.
“What’s wrong?”
“I investigated the boy, just to be safe,” Alexia explained, “and he is no more than an ordinary teenager. Any mundane method of taking his life should be sufficient. But that in and of itself is strange. He has killed all kinds of people. He has even created a situation where someone as powerful as you cannot bring the dead back to life! So I decided he merited a deeper investigation!” Alexia was clearly in a panic. Yogiri didn’t care about her much, but her desperation was enough to draw his attention.
“But I couldn’t find out anything. It’s too strange! This cannot be the case! As I attempt to investigate further, my will to investigate disappears! I am forced to turn my eyes away! There must be something at work on me, some kind of protection for him! I have given everything I have to you, Lord Mitsuki. I gave you all of my power, all of my being, leaving me only a hollow shell of what I once was. But even so, there is still something left in me! Something fundamental to my being, something I cannot separate from myself!”
“I see,” Mitsuki replied. “So what do you think I should do?”
“Let us return this boy to his home world! Leave the dead as they are and restart the world without them! There is no need for us to expose ourselves to this kind of danger!”
“Hmm. Coming from you, of all people, that is pretty persuasive. But that doesn’t change that this is my world. There’s no way a character in my dream can kill me. Even if he could, that would just mean the world was destroyed, right?”
The Great Sage’s words made Yogiri realize something. If this world was actually a dream the Great Sage was having, what would happen to it if Yogiri used his power to kill him? Normally, one would expect the whole thing to disappear, which meant Yogiri would be killed too. That would be entirely pointless.
“Please!”
“Stop getting in the way,” the Great Sage replied, making Alexia go stiff. Whatever Alexia had been trying to do, the Great Sage had stopped her. It was like time had frozen for her alone. “Sorry. Things have started looking pretty sloppy, haven’t they?”
“It’s fine,” Yogiri replied. “This’ll be over pretty fast anyway.”
What would happen if he killed the Great Sage? How much of an impact would that have on the world? Yogiri believed he was telling the truth, and killing the Great Sage would lead to the world being destroyed. So he released the seal on his powers. He opened the second gate, and beyond it the third gate, unleashing the full extent of his own abilities. There was now nothing limiting him, returning him to his natural state.
Killing the Great Sage would destroy the world. If Mitsuki and this world were so closely linked, even Yogiri’s second level wouldn’t be enough to deal with him.
“This time I’m attacking for real, okay?” The Great Sage threw the ball of light like he was playing a game of catch.
Yogiri activated his power.