Through his conversation with the woman, Ferd confirmed that he did exist in this virtual world. But she said something odd next.
“But it seems that he’s been trying to leave the village recently. He said that something was strange, so he was going to check outside.”
“‘Something strange,’ huh?” If Ferd’s memory served him right, he’d never said anything like that and tried to leave the village. But the Ferd in this world apparently thought something was strange.
“Hmm? Who are you people?” A young man—no, more like a little brat—suddenly arrived and looked at the unfamiliar old people with confusion.
“Pfft.” A bit of air escaped Max’s lips, while Elrica unconsciously covered her mouth.
The boy’s golden hair jutted out everywhere—perhaps because of bedhead or he’d simply not groomed it at all—and his strong-willed, blue eyes stared at the elderly people. His clothes were shabby, with clear signs that they’d been sewn back together, and his nails were full of dirt. Anyone who saw him in person wouldn’t need to speculate about him being a descendant of the royal family or a demigod; they’d just consider him an ordinary village boy.
“If it isn’t Ferd. This man says he’s your father’s friend,” the woman said.
“He knows my old man? I’ve never seen him before. Did they meet before I was born?” The boy—the young Ferd—seemed puzzled and continued observing the old people.
Damn, I remember this. His face shows that he’s thinking I’m human mixed with something else. Max, who was being more closely watched, remembered how Ferd had stared at him seventy years ago and almost burst into laughter.
“Well, whatever. I’d like to take you to my dad, but I have some urgent job to take care of.” The young Ferd stopped observing the old group and started walking toward the village’s exit. He was headed to the world. He was going to slip out of the fake blue sky disguised with illusion magic and go fight to smash the deep red skyyyyy...
The calculations failed. It tried again and again, but no matter how many attempts it went through, it was all in vain. This time, it had even tried using illusion magic to make it appear that nothing strange was happening in the world, but Ferd had felt that something was off, like the answer was somewhere nearby, and left the village.
The scene changed.
Even when the army that burned down Ferd’s village was doubled in number, he’d managed to escape.
The scene changed.
Even when Ferd’s village alone wasn’t attacked, he’d left his village determined to fight for life and the blue sky.
The scene changed.
The biggest problem was that the virtual world was unable to perceive Ferd when he’d been reproduced with increased accuracy, leaving it unable to understand where he was or what he was doing.
The virtual world collapsed.
“What happened?” Ferd was confused as the village around them crumbled and they were thrown into a space filled with a swirling torrent of mirrors.
“This world miraculously managed to re-create part of you, but you wouldn’t listen to it, so it tried to isolate you. But things didn’t go well, so now it’s falling apart. It would have been better if it had been unable to simulate you from the get-go. This is an example of what happens when someone overly theoretical tries to understand something like a singularity. But still, it would be an issue if this were to leak into reality in a strange form, so we definitely need to stop the source.” Lara, having more or less grasped the situation, explained with a mix of exasperation.
The virtual world had briefly isolated the beginning that was Ferd and prepared convenient calculations up to a point, but this had resulted in it continuously spewing out abnormal errors. Prophets, dragons, gods, and numerous astrologers had concluded that they would be defeated at the hands of the Great Demon King. If it was impossible to perfectly re-create the man who had overturned that fate, it would also be impossible to manipulate him as expected.
“Hmm. Is it impossible for it to hypothesize about killing me before I was born or when I was a little kid?” Ferd asked.
“It seems that the core, which is having its fun in that timeline, is getting in the way. I’d like to tell it to focus on something else for a bit. Oh, there it is. I’ll make a path,” Lara replied as she poured mana into an especially large mirror in order to break into it.
Errors had to be corrected, and people had to wake up from their dreams. The Hero’s party peered into the dreamlike delusion reflected in the mirror.
“Please stop it, sir. It’s pointless to take this any further,” a young man replied to his upperclassman, shaking his head.
This young man had been granted special entry to a school of magic which was located in a different country than Greer’s Magic Academy. For someone like him, who was already on the verge of stepping into the Deep layer, it could be asserted that fighting with an upperclassman was pointless. But in any era, exceptional people tended to attract enmity and jealousy. When his upperclassman had accused him of cheating at school in some way, the young man had responded by demonstrating his overwhelming skill.
“Good job, man!”
“You showed him!”
The young man’s classmates praised him for driving away their arrogant upperclassman.
“No, I didn’t do that much...” The young man scratched his cheek in embarrassment.
He had big eyes, a youthful face, and a slender build to boot, so the girls were sending some slightly dangerous looks his way, while the teachers recognized him as the greatest prodigy since the school’s founding. There was no doubt that he was the center of attention among the new students.
But it was time to wake up from this dream. The mirror that Lara had poured mana into stopped functioning.
“Huh?” the young man muttered. He was no longer inside the school, and his classmates were nowhere to be seen. He was instead in an outdoor exam venue, where the ground was littered with the charred, carbonized remains of the youngsters that would have become his classmates and the adults that would have become his teachers, all victims of the aftermath of his extermination magic.
“N-No...” The young man’s face changed in an instant, turning into the old mage Udo. “M-My mentor was to blame! It was his fault for only teaching me extermination magic! A-And the school was also to blame! Why did no one tell me in advance not to use such dangerous magic?! B-Because of them, I was treated like a disposable weapon! No, that’s all wrong! We’re a child prodigy and top of our class in this school! We have many friends and even a girlfriend!”
Udo was no longer sane. He was a little older than Ferd and the rest, and he should have been beheaded for using extermination magic at his entrance examination. Yet, behind the scenes, a special magical device had been placed around his neck, and the country used him as its convenient weapon. Though he’d managed to regain his freedom during the chaos of the war, he became completely obsessed with his failure and turned delusional.
The Arzyna Kingdom had made contact with this dangerous individual. While the kingdom had been trying to create a treasured article that could perfectly calculate the future, Udo had attempted to have the device perform calculations to his own convenience, correct his past mistakes, and impose them onto reality; complete and utter foolishness on his part. Of course, even if he were to redo his school life, the great war would start soon after that, so it would have been completely pointless.
In the end, Udo had executed his plan, but he’d gotten trapped in the virtual world before he could secure the two keys necessary for imposing those calculations onto the real world: Hagen, who could best harness the artifact, and Emmeline, the biological component that could assist with the calculations. As for the artifact itself, which had run amok and was on the verge of exploding as it tried to repaint reality, Hagen was actually a nuisance, since he had even the tiniest possibility of being able to control it, and Udo was sufficient for assisting with the calculations, since he’d stepped foot into the Deep layer.
“Aaaaah! You wretchessssss!” Udo—a man who’d kept making the wrong decisions and was trapped in all kinds of delusions—screamed when he noticed the Hero’s party still outside the mirror.
The mirror cracked and the virtual world offered its last resistance, revealing a secret about Udo that he didn’t even know himself.
“Huh?” Memories poured into Udo’s mind: A magic circle inscribed with a technique for transferring souls. A young Udo suspended in a container overflowing with liquid. A vessel for escaping an old body.