Chapter 211

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The Antagonist VIII

No matter how important rooftops are in subculture—be they for love letters or dramatic confrontations—this wasn’t the best place to have a relaxing conversation with the Saintess. The backdrop was just too grim. Even though time had stopped, the hellish landscape below spiraled outward into the distance.

“Let’s go somewhere else to talk.”

“Yes, let’s.”

“But is there no way to unfreeze the others from Time Stop?”

The Saintess shook her head. “That would be difficult. I need to be physically holding their hand to move them through the frozen world.”

Now that she mentioned it, she was still holding my hand tightly. But then, I wondered—couldn’t we just use the ‘walking hand-in-hand’ method to bring at least one more person along?

Before I could say anything, she added, “Unless they have a level of aura mastery like yours, it would be hard for them to survive. They would need to overcome the concept of ‘time’ itself.”

“Hmm. That makes sense.”

It was like surviving in the vacuum of space. For a regular person—or even a fairly trained Awakener—it would be nearly impossible to do something as simple as speaking.

“That’s why I can pull off little tricks like this.”

The Saintess let go of my hand. In my vision, her palm slowly drifted away, as if moving in slow motion, floating just 0.1 centimeters above my hand.

Clap.

And then, suddenly, I found myself standing in the first-floor lobby of the National Road Management Corps headquarters.

“......?”

“I just stopped time.”

Her face remained expressionless. But as the self-proclaimed Guinness World Record Holder for Interpreting the Saintess’s Expressions, I could detect the subtle air hidden beneath that cold exterior.

This woman... was having fun. She was feeling a bit elated.

“Wait a second, Saintess.”

“The World.”

Again, she let go of my hand. The next moment, I was standing in the middle of Babel Tower Plaza.

“......”

“Ta-da.”

She said it in the most emotionless tone imaginable. Which meant she was probably the one who had carried me here while time was stopped.

“...Saintess.”

“Yes?”

“You’re in a really good mood, aren’t you?”

“Yes. It’s been 2,000 years since I last talked to someone.”

“Yeah, I was alone for about 212 years after the Infinite Metagame screwed me over, so I can understand how it feels...”

It was the round when Ah-ryeon found me and said, “I love the café mocha you make, Guild Leader.” I had hugged her like a child and cried.

Those 200 years of solitude had broken me, turning me into a pathetic regressor who could be beaten by that weirdo. This person in front of me had survived ten times that length of solitude...

In short, the Saintess was now in a “hyper-weakened” state.

Realizing this, I immediately scooped her up into a princess carry.

“Oh.”

“You’ve been through a lot. Thank you, Saintess.”

“......”

“If you hadn’t stopped time, I honestly would have given up on this mission. I might have ended up as a regressor trapped in an eternal hell of repeating time.”

During my 200-year isolation, the thing I needed most was human warmth. That was probably why I hugged Ah-ryeon so instinctively when I saw her. People understand others by reflecting on their own experiences, so I had a good idea of what the Saintess might want right now.

“......”

The glass. It was the metaphor for ‘something you can see through but can’t cross.’

I wished I could just punch through that glass, but the barrier Nut had constructed was far stronger than the bulletproof glass used for the U.S. president’s limousine.

Now that I thought about it, when Fairy No. 264 took me into the Inner World, that had been our best chance to break through...

But what’s done is done. Regretting the past wouldn’t help now.

“Tell me all the methods you tried.”

“Of course.”

We discussed the countless failed attempts the Saintess had made over the past 2,000 years.

Let me clarify—this wasn’t a sign of her incompetence. In fact, Nut hadn’t been able to interfere with the Saintess’s Time Stop in all that time either. The Outer God had the power to turn the world into hell in a single day, yet it couldn’t touch the frozen time that the Saintess had created.

When anomalies with the power of an Outer God clashed, their territorial battles played out in this way.

“Actually, your power and Nut’s are polar opposites.”

The Saintess tilted her head. “Really?”

“Yes. The world you freeze is, in a sense, ‘nothingness.’ Since time has stopped, there is no life, no pain, and no awareness.”

And paradoxically, that nothingness was the complete opposite of hell.

“Hell, or the afterlife, is where people’s souls continue to exist after death, a place of endless something,” I concluded.

“I see.”

“So, Nut can’t invade your realm of nothingness, just as you can’t invade her realm of something. You’re opposites.”

“...So, we’re in an eternal stalemate, doomed to fight forever.”

“If you’re on your own.” I rubbed my chin. “Glass. Glass. We need to break that glass. Anomalies related to glass....”

“Shouldn’t we also consider mirrors?” the Saintess suggested. “You said that when you entered the Inner World, you saw your real-world self reflected in the glass.”

“Yes. My image was projected below me, showing what I looked like in the real world.”

“Then it’s more like a ‘mirror’ than just ‘glass.’ After all, the afterlife is a copy of the living world.”

“That’s a good point. Hmm...”

The people of this world had been “copied and pasted” into Nut’s domain. Then Nut claimed that the copy was the real thing, while we on the other side were just the souls suffering in hell. So, yes, the concept of a “mirror” was more accurate than just “glass.”

“Mirrors. Mirrors, huh. That makes me think of doppelgangers... No, doppelgangers are part of the Hell of Infinite Time. It’s more about identity confusion, then.”

“The Ship of Theseus?”

“Possibly. If we list anomalies connected to identity confusion, we’ve got the Ship of Theseus, the Uyuni Desert, Cringe History Mosquito, and... Potato Saintess...”

“Please leave out the last one.”

What? Who knows, that might be the most important clue of all.

“In any case,” I acquiesced, “none of those seem directly connected to entering Nut’s domain... Oh.”

My mental database of anomalies had been combing through the past, and at that moment, it hit on a keyword.

“Mirrors!” I shot to my feet, still holding the Saintess’s hand.

“Yes?”

“There’s an anomaly related to mirrors, hell, and the living world! How could I have forgotten?”

How could I have missed it?

The anomaly that endlessly repeated the idea that this world is hell itself, thus, being born into such a world is a sin.

-Kill yourself.

The Magic Mirror, an anomaly born from the tale of Snow White.

That psychopath Yu Ji-won always had that mirror in her room. It was the perfect clue leading to the Goddess of the Night, Nut.

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