A terrible sound—smack!—echoed through the castle. Sobbing, the humanoid Hunter Unit, who had vowed to lose her own life protecting her master, slapped the cheek of the man she loved.
“What was that?”
Blitzdonner and Meitzer came running. What they saw was Sven, frozen and wearing an expression that said “Now I’ve done it!” and Lud, knocked unconscious against the wall.
“What have you done, Svelgen? You’ve...!” Blitzdonner gawped.
“N-No, I haven’t!! Well, I did, but... I didn’t kill him!”
Lud was unconscious but his arms and legs were twitching. Sven had sworn absolute loyalty to Lud. No matter how distraught, no matter how angry, she had always stopped short of crossing this line.
“I j-just... slipped... I couldn’t control myself. What have I done?!” Sven looked at her hand, the one she had used to slap Lud, as if it were a monster.
“Well, um... it couldn’t be helped. This time, it was his fault.” Blitzdonner scratched his head as he spoke. He wasn’t consoling her. He was just stating a fact.
“His fault?! He’s a victim!”
“That’s not true.” Sven had argued back, and Blitzdonner tried to reassure her. “Langart was to blame the moment he made you so unhappy.”
“What?” Sven didn’t notice she was crying until Blitzdonner told her.
“This has been hard for you, Sven.” Meitzer looked at her as he spoke.
“You’re safe? I’m glad.”
“What? You were worried about me?”
“No! It’s just... without you, we can’t return Master to normal.”
“Oh, I see.” With a wry laugh, Meitzer approached the unconscious Lud. “I see... This?” He picked something up. “What is that?”
“It’s a small transmitter.”
The transmitter was so small it was unnoticeable inside Lud’s ear.
“She... The Saint was speaking to Langart with this. That’s how she was controlling him.”
It was a tiny transmitter that neither August nor Wiltia had developed yet. The Saint had made it with the knowledge she possessed from the ancient empire.
“It’s a dirty trick.” Meitzer crushed it in his hand.
“So, since he isn’t wearing it anymore, Master will return to normal?”
“No. She has overwritten Langart’s memory and changed his feelings about the girl he calls Sven. That has to be corrected.”
“How do we do that?”
Meitzer looked at Sven.
“You have to do it. The only way is for you to enter his heart and destroy any remnants of the Saint.”
“Enter his heart?”
That was easier said than done.
“There is a faint trace of rezanium in Langart’s body.”
Lud had died once. It was around the time Sven first visited Tockerbrot. A relic of the ancient empire had been kept behind a Door, and she had used it to mediate with rezanium in order to revive him.
“Sven, you have the power to control all the rezanium vessels in this world.”
“I have that power? Why?”
Rezanium was a red crystal said to be a natural generator and a calculation device. Under a certain amount of pressure, it would generate electricity, and at a specific voltage, it would release vibrations. It was structurally the same as the oscillators of quartz built into small clocks. However, its output was much more powerful.
The rare genius Daian Fortuner had used that principle to create the artificial intelligence in the power reactors of Hunter Units.
“It’s possible because you have rezanium inside you and rezanium is what God left on the surface of the earth as a final blessing.”
“God... The voice that spoke to me. What is that? What’s your relationship to it?”
Sven had long thought the two were the same. However, the voice had denied it.
“I’m like an avatar. God can no longer intervene in the world so God created me as a representative of his will.”
Meitzer called himself the Devil. According to some religions, the Devil was born from God’s shadow. The Devil had committed the unforgivable sin of imitating God.
“My second coming into the world was fifteen years ago, about the time Wiltia opened a Door and started developing weapons powered by rezanium. I had died once in battle against the Saint, but when God learned that rezanium was active in the world again, I was reborn to arbitrate with and protect the human race.”
“W-Wait a second. I can’t keep up with this.” Sven was growing surprised and afraid at Meitzer’s tale, which was starting to surpass her understanding and imagination. “What is rezanium?! It’s not just some rare ore?!”
Even though it was a foundation for the world’s military, science and technology, mysteries remained. According to traditional myth, the red stone was the mineralized heart of an ancient dragon.
“Anyway... here’s what it is...” Meitzer paused before revealing a secret about the origin of the world. “It’s God. The ancient empire made the True System, an enormous crystallized calculation device. It broke apart and pieces scattered across the continent of Europea. Those pieces are rezanium and they are pieces of God.”
The True System was a god manufactured by the ancient empire. It was a crystal calculation device made up of giant rezanium crystals. The empire had synchronized and bound the brains of ten million citizens. By combining all into one, it created a world of eternal tranquility, as well as the True System to manage it.
“But a slight disturbance emerged in God—the being who was all for one and one for all—and that was his ego.”
You might say it was God’s will. God desired someone. God wanted someone to look upon him. He desired an other upon whom he could gaze.
“God learned of a girl in the imperial capital of Europea, the only citizen refusing computerization and not included in synchronization. He wanted to know more about her. Wanting her to know him, his first spontaneous desire was to make that girl his bride.”
The girl detested the idea of being included in the system, so she would never agree to become “the Saint.”
She would sometimes slip out of the imperial capital and had become friends with a young man living in the slum outside. She fell in love with him and decided to abandon the imperial capital.
“The Saint rejected God’s affection. That is a truth the world doesn’t know.”
“Hey, that’s...”
Meitzer spoke the truth of the old world. Blitzdonner had once heard the same story from Daian.
“Saint Europa rejected God’s advances, so he got mad and destroyed the world.”
“According to God’s contract with the Saint, he would grant her every wish. The Saint could control everything that contained rezanium.”