Volume 5, 3: Stairway of Rebirth * Spirit Potion Ambrosia

Volume 5, Chapter 3: Stairway of Rebirth * Spirit Potion Ambrosia

Part 1

While pushing back the dead army that sporadically pushed in, Fairy Queen Sutriona and Vampire Kallikantzaros hid in the island’s forest and observed the giant Underworld which was visible in the distance. ...Although that also meant they were in the line of fire even from this far away.

“Hey, things might have entered a lull, but are you really going to wait until the next dawn? You can maintain this advantage after I’ve returned to my coffin at dawn, I hope.”

“...So that really will be the limit, will it?”

Even the time it took to speak face-to-face felt like a waste. Some of the dead who had invaded the island in the early stage were still walking around and, more importantly, a single mistake could overturn everything. It may have looked like a lull, but ruin would rear its ugly head as soon as they let their guards down.

They could not afford to wait until Kallikantzaros withdrew again.

There was no sign of further activity from the Underworld, but the makeup of their forces would change entirely if Boo Boo’s Party had been wiped out. They had gotten lucky with how effective the humans’ Recovery Magic was, but that would cease to be an option.

They did not want to consider it, but they had to prepare for the worst case scenario.

Sutriona hated how oddly coldly she could think about that.

She realized it had been the same when the Thousand Dragon had been devouring the Fairies. If she had given into emotion and attacked out of revenge, she might have been able to stop the black Dragon’s tyranny, but if the Fairy Queen’s toxin had caused the Thousand Dragon to writhe in pain and lash out indiscriminately, it could have led to far more damage. So she had let it continue. She had only been able to make that decision because she was the queen that stood above all the others.

(This too is my role as the one responsible for them...)

The Vampire standing next to her was the opposite: she looked calm at first glance, but she tended to get emotional about these things. Although that may have been why she was forced to live alone in a ghost ship instead of banding together in a group.

“The next dawn is our time limit. If Boo Boo and the others haven’t emerged yet by then, we’ll have to end this ourselves. We’ll gather together all of the Break News that can fight and finish off the Underworld in a simultaneous attack.”

Part 2

She was dead.

Dead, dead, dead,

“Ugh...?”

Beatrice groaned as all the skin on her body felt something akin to cold. Her recent memories were not at all clear. Where was she and what had she been doing? Driven by that strange sense of unease, she held herself in her slender arms. Her awareness finally caught up when she noticed the odd feeling that reached her fingers.

She was not in her usual red armor or miniskirt.

Half her vision seemed oddly dark and a touch from her fingers told her she had an eyepatch on. She felt no real pain, but it would not come off no matter how much she tugged. After giving up on that, she looked down and saw her bright skin and the bandages wrapped roughly around it. The only other things she wore were some rags around her chest and hips. The skin naturally left more of an impression than the clothing.

It was like a fresh Zombie costume.

The bandages were obvious, but the scraps of cloth seemed to have originally been part of a surgical gown. However, it was completely useless as it hung loosely down with the connections torn. The thing digging tightly into her body may have been a clear IV tube.

“Kh.”

When she quickly held the chest part down and moved a bit, she heard a heavy metallic sound. She looked down and saw a metal ring around her right ankle with a thick chain and metal ball attached.

She was in a square space made of stone and metal, so it did indeed look like a prison.

“Wait...wh-what is this!? Was I captured by someone!?”

Just as she looked around in search of an exit, she really felt the weight of the metal ball. No, its weight actually seemed to change...???

Two other people were lying down nearby. When she checked their faces, she found exactly who she expected: Filinion and Armelina. They too had been robbed of their equipment and forced into something like a costume.

(Halloween...? No, it might be a death or Undead motif.)

She was reminded of the party the three maid sisters had thrown for her in the Detached Magic Palace, but that probably was not the answer. She had to focus on the reality before her eyes.

She wanted as much information as possible.

A closer look showed that Filinion was dressed in the white kimono of a Japanese-style ghost and she had bluish-white super-deformed cow and glasses girl spirits floating around her. Her large breasts were pushed up by the thick corset she wore. It appeared to be made to squeeze her torso in stages and supply pain instead of just being fashionable.

Armelina wore a hat and had a large charm on her forehead. Her clothing could be described as Taoist or as a China dress. Simply put, she was a jiangshi girl. Her skin color was a little unhealthy, but Beatrice may not have been one to talk. But more than the costume itself, her neck and wrists were held in place by a single thin wooden structure much like at the bottom of a guillotine.

While holding the rags and bandages to her chest, Beatrice dragged the heavy ball-and-chain to approach.

She did not know proper prisoner etiquette, but would it be easier to move while carrying it in her hands?

“Filinion, Armelina, hey! Can either of you explain how we ended up like this!?”

Beatrice held her confused head and desperately worked to reach any kind of understanding. Yes, that was right. Their clothing was Magic taking that form, so if it had been taken from them...could they not use Magic at all?

“Ah!? Th-that’s right. What about our Shining Weapons?”

They were gone.

She reached for her hip to check and did not find that reliable and solid weight. Instead, she found the IV tube carelessly wrapped around her body and the clear package dangling meaninglessly from it.

(What do we do...?)

Her vague anxiety had finally been overwritten by realistic fear. Their Shining Weapons were more than just terminals for managing their Magic; they were also used to travel between worlds via the Gates. Without them, they could not return to earth.

Since they could only spend a few days in this foreign world, it was a lot like a slow-paced execution. As the needle moved from fear to despair, Beatrice heard the familiar voices of the other girls.

“Ugh...my head feels so heavy...”

“What is this place? What happened? Gh!? What is this!? A-a board!?”

Filinion and Armelina seemed to have finally woken up, but their eyes had yet to fully focus. Just like Beatrice, they must not have noticed the change to their clothing at first.

However.

It was because she did not understand the gravity of her words that Filinion said something devastating as her tight corset lifted her breasts from below.

“Huh? What happened with that thick cable'...???”

Time slowed.

This time, it slowed to a halt.

The Holy Swordswoman brought a hand to the center of her chest. She was a fresh Zombie with only the bare minimum of bandages and rags covering her. Her chest was mostly exposed...but there was nothing there. There was no pain and there was no horrifically crushed wound.

And.

Looking in the mirror would have had a similar effect, but she felt some déjà vu when she looked back at Filinion’s Japanese ghost costume and Armelina’s jiangshi girl costume.

She had seen something like this before. And then it hit her.

“I don’t have the boots with blades inside, but I have the surgical gown scraps and the bandages. And then there’s the metal restraints. Is this the same as the ancient humans who were destroyed by the Underworld Lord and then had even their souls subjugated by him?”

The only difference she could see was the lack of marine creatures like univalves and octopuses.

She might have only given the worst possible answer in the hopes that someone would say it was not so. But only silence answered her. They wanted to deny it, but they could not. They could only accept it, but they did not want to. That was the kind of stifling silence that ruled the scene.

And in that case...

Had Beatrice and the others lost their battle against the Underworld Lord, been killed, and had their souls taken? Was there no chance of a comeback and were they doomed to eternally work for that monster made from a patchwork of marine creature corpses?

It was not just their Shining Weapons they were missing. They were nothing but souls, so they did not even know what had happened to their bodies. That meant it was not the time to test things through trial and error like they had with the astral projection using that strange jellyfish-shaped terminal. It was possible defeat would mean they could never return.

As the girls desperately worked their minds, a sound reached their ears. It came from beyond the thick door leading out of this cold square space.

It was a solid and regular series of sounds.

They were footsteps.

Part 3

Someone was calling to him.

They were kindly calling his name.

“Boo Boo, wake up.”

The warm tone reminded the last of the Iberian Orcs of that girl he knew so well.

And when he opened his eyes, he saw the Sage smiling right in front of his face.

“!?”

“Hi, Boo Boo. You’ve gotten quite manly since I last saw you.”

He shot to his feet and found he was in a vast space. He was below something like a rotted ceiling, but the entire space may have been bigger than the whole Iberian Orc village.

It was not entirely dark. A small flame flickered at the end of the hair sticking up from the top of Sage’s head while she held a hand to her mouth and laughed.

“Squeal...”

When he brought a hand to his mouth, he realized it was somewhat sticky. A sweet and sour flavor remained on his tongue.

“You’re quite powerful, but you have terrible fuel efficiency. Shouldn’t you have prepared some food like this before challenging the Underworld? There’s no guarantee you can find anything edible in this land of rotting flesh and contaminated water.” The Sage lightly waved around a skewer that was far too large for a human. “Skewered Master Rabbit and Sliced Fish soaked in yogurt. That was always popular with the Iberian Orcs, but how did you like it, Boo Boo?”

“...When Armelina gave everyone food, the others got mad at her. Something about luring in pure hearts using treats.”

“Cough, cough!!”

She used some blatantly fake coughing to drive that suggestion into the darkness.

Without even suspecting that food from an enemy might be poisoned, Boo Boo began chowing down on the skewer she gave him, so the Sage smiled at him again.

“I never expected to take five hits. You must have been really angry, Boo Boo. It took a lot of doing to calm you down.”

“?”

Had all of that only been a bad dream?

Boo Boo lightly shook his head.

“So are you alive or dead?”

“Heh heh. Which do you think?”

“...”

“Just kidding. As you can see, I’m very much alive. Here, check for yourself, Boo Boo.”

That person who looked so very much like Beatrice casually took the Iberian Orc’s giant hand and guided the large fingertips toward the center of her chest.

He felt a definite rhythmic pulse within the feminine warmth.

He doubted this was a cold and dead person.

He thought the same thing when he saw the Sage’s soft expression, but an ominous scent cut off his thoughts.

He turned his head and saw something lying there.

It was the remains of the Underworld Lord after being torn limb from limb and having his giant lobster-like head crushed underfoot.

“What...!?”

“Yes, you did that, Boo Boo. You should honestly rejoice that you found someone who let you go all out, even if it meant bending your principles.☆”

He had done something unthinkable.

He had given in and done something horrific.

Boo Boo began to tremble, but the Sage simply smiled. She acted like he was a small child clinging to his mother’s skirt after having a nightmare.

And there was someone else below them.

“Oh, you woke up?”

“Boo Boo isn’t about to die from something like that.”

“Sage, how can you say that after hitting him fifteen times at full power? Although I suppose it is very like you to insist on repaying him three times over even at a time like this...”

“How did things go on your end?”

“Those three are stable.”

Boo Boo’s head shot up when he heard that.

Those three. Yes, that number held an important meaning.

“Squeal!! Wh-what happened to Beatrice!? And Filinion and Armelina too!”

“They’re fine,” immediately replied Royal Elf Sibyl.

Did that mean they had been saved? It had not looked like there was any room for a miracle after the attack from that metal snake, but had their wounds been healed with some kind of complex Magic he did not understand?

However, that was not the case.

Sibyl clarified.

“The Sage enclosed them in ice coffins, so there will be no damage to their brain cells even though their hearts have stopped. Well, you could think of it as a type of cold sleep. Seeing that reminds me of Vivian who lived in that ocean-bottom palace cut off from the flow of time.”

“???”

“Thawing them now would only return them to a state of death from blood loss, so the only question now is whether being encased in ice counts as alive or dead.”

What she meant gradually sunk in.

...You could not call them alive in that state. But they were not simply dead either. Weren’t they stuck in the gap between life and death?

“Yes, this does not solve the problem.” The Sage readily admitted it while raising her index finger. “And, Boo Boo, there is only one thing you can do if you want to save that girl you care so much for: find a method of directly controlling souls somewhere in the Underworld. They can only be saved by healing both their bodies and souls.”

“...”

“And that fits with my goal. Well, technically speaking, it isn’t them I want to save, but I am willing to work with you as long as our interests align.”

Boo Boo could not immediately reply.

Accepting the tragedy that had befallen Beatrice and the others was difficult enough, but now he was being pressed to make a decision by the Sage who stood a few steps beyond that.

And the Sage spoke the usual line to give his worried back a push forward.

“You need to make your decision sooner rather than later.”

“W-will Beatrice and the others not last forever?”

“That is an issue, but my point was that our enemy is not gone.”

With the red armor, the white miniskirt, and everything else, she looked just like Beatrice, yet she was fundamentally different. She then pointed at the symbol of Boo Boo’s crime.

She pointed at the Underworld Lord who had been torn to pieces and entirely ceased to function.

“The ancient humans feared the Underworld Lord so much that they left it all up to Abyss, so surely you didn’t think this was enough to stop him.”

“...Even after all that...he can still move?”

“It’s more complicated than that.” The Sage laughed and gave one last reminder. “If you really want to save Beatrice and the others, you should probably hurry.”

Part 4

The place looked like a room made from a collection of rotting organs.

The Underworld Lord opened his eyes there.

The scene appeared somehow blurry, but that had nothing to do with his bodily functions. His body was contained within a 3m spherical container filled with a clear preservative fluid.

“...”

However, his body did not have a lobster head or squid tentacles. It was not made from multiple marine creatures sewn together with needle and thread. Thin hands broke through the fish-egg-like film from within and a completely different body crawled into the outside world along with lots of a sticky chemical fluid. It was a slender mermaid with wavy blue hair and bright skin. The scale-covered legs could become a giant tail fin if need be.

She too was the Underworld Lord.

To begin with, let us define an astral body as a form of energy. The fundamental soul is like an imaginary number in that it does not exist in the visible world but some things cannot be explained without it. And it is a source of a certain kind of energy that exists along with a physical body. It may be something like massless chloroplast or mitochondria or like an electrified cloud that envelops the physical body and spreads to the surrounding area.

The Underworld Lord had been born as a being modeled after that soul.

He had no physical mass.

And yet calculations showed he did produce quite a bit of energy. He surrounded a physical body like an electrified cloud and continually poured energy into that physical vessel to give the cold corpse the power it needed to move like it was alive once more. That was the true form of the lifeless Underworld Lord.

If someone was willing to define torn muscles made to expand and contract with chemicals as “alive”, then they might be able to say the Underworld Lord was alive. It was unlikely anyone else would, though.

The Underworld Lord could be seen as a type of perpetual motion machine, but he was not all-powerful. He too was bound by the conditions that defined him.

1. The Underworld Lord cannot live as just his massless real self.

2. As an imitation, the Underworld Lord cannot coexist within a living body that already has a soul.

Simply put, he had to remain within a soulless dead body. And not just anything dead would do. Nerves, muscles, blood vessels, bones, and organs... He could only “change into” a fresh flesh vessel that could maintain all of its bodily functions yet lacked a soul. And critical damage to the brain cells would occur only a dozen or so minutes after the heart stopped, so it was not realistic for him to come across a useable body by chance.

In fact, it was much faster to produce a soulless flesh vessel on his own. For example, he could sew together the best pieces of various marine creatures, he could cultivate one at the cellular level from scratch, or he could rearrange the elemental structure of inorganic materials to produce organic parts.

(The Gothic Monster had no effect.)

He had thirteen distinct methodologies.

Several spherical containers filled with a clear preservative fluid were lined up in the flesh room and two of them had already been broken open. Eleven remained intact. That could be seen as the Underworld Lord’s remaining lives.

(I anatomically assemble the method and then move on to flask chemistry. Next, I will test the effectiveness of the Homunculus.)

To confirm he had safely attached to this nude body, the Underworld Lord opened and closed the right hand and constructed his next plan using the physically-borrowed brain.

He had lost the battle. But if he had successfully convinced the enemy that the Underworld Lord and the Gothic Monster were one and the same, the next surprise attack was guaranteed to succeed. And if they thought the Underworld Lord was dead and the threat was gone, then his odds of success rose even further.

The thirteen methods were a surefire cage for all life forms.

They were all the strongest. It might be possible for the enemy to defeat a specific method – be it of land, sea, or air – if they went all out, but once the target shifted all of their variables in that direction, they could not defeat the next method. If a fish was dragged up onto land or a bird was submerged in the ocean, they could not make use of their strong points and would in fact have difficulty surviving at all. He would bring out a completely different affiliation, completely different traits, and completely different values. The victor against one would lose to another, so with all thirteen methods available, all life forms and all beings would be forced to kneel before the Underworld Lord.

The most inconvenient opponent for the Gothic Monster’s victor was the Homunculus.

It was like using Water attacks against someone who specialized in Fire.

The Underworld Lord had a clear vision of victory in mind, but then he came to a stop.

His previously unmoving lips gave a tremor.

“It can’t be...”

The pre-established harmony was crumbling.

With his beautiful girl’s body still entirely bare, he grabbed a creepy-looking lab tool from a table with enough force for the wet blue hair to swing behind him. As soon as he grabbed the straight club made of crystal, a blue or purple light filled the room. With the stick-shaped light source in hand, he approached what he needed.

“It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be!?”

Something was amiss.

He still had eleven bodies left in stock. Each of those flesh vessels had been designed in the strongest form he could think of at the time, but there was a blatantly obvious “signature” left on them. There were no fingerprints, but the purple light showed definite handprints on their surface.

“...!?”

There was no point in preserving them now.

There were also several handprints on the wavy blue-haired girl’s body he was moving now. This could not stand. He tore open a random one of the spherical containers, pulled the precious body out of the sticky preservative fluid, and did not hesitate to rip open its belly with his bare hands. He dragged out the innards, shined the purple light on them, and...there they were.

There were handprints there as well.

He did not know who, but some third party had snuck in here, pulled out, examined, and fully analyzed all of his bodies both inside and out, and then put them all back together before leaving. There was no other way of explaining the absurdity of having someone else’s handprints inside his own bodies.

“Curses!!”

The body did not so much as stir as he had ripped open its belly and the Underworld Lord yelled as he tossed it aside. Without even washing his hands, he thought about who this could have been.

...He realized something had indeed seemed off when he clashed with the Holy Swordswoman, White Witch, and Fighter Priest there. Instead of coincidental contact, it had felt more like they were being guided by some third party. While the Underworld Lord had been dealing with them, the true threat had come here, completed their work, and safely left. That was likely what had happened.

The Underworld Lord’s greatest advantage was his ability to switch between flesh vessels. While remaining the exact same being, he could swap out his surface vessel for entirely different abilities, elements, and values. That led to the ideal combat pattern in which he attacked his target from multiple angles.

But all of those options had been analyzed. Their deepest depths and every nook and cranny had been divulged.

Information was the greatest weapon. In that case, he could no longer defeat this third party. No matter which body he used, they would attack its greatest weakness and he would be defeated every time. The only way of defeating this third party was to construct a new flowchart that existed outside the thirteen strategies he had already prepared.

“...”

The girl with wavy blue hair and bright nudity exposed thought for a while.

And he took immediate action. He tore apart all of the spherical containers with his bloody hands and dragged the surviving bodies out onto the wet floor. He consulted the diagram in his head to line up each piece, carefully examine them, sew them together, and draw out a brand new design. It was a lot like rearranging robotic arms and weapons to create your own idea of the strongest mech.

And his current body was no exception.

Just like someone unbuttoning and removing a shirt, he did not hesitate to use his fingers to “open” up his body along the central vertical line. He used needle and thread, bolts and plates, and various other tools to forcibly sew together a bizarre body that should never have fit together.

(...Not yet.)

This tenacity was the Underworld Lord’s true strength.

The ancient humans had not just helplessly let the army of the dead annihilate them. Before so many continents and islands had been sunk, they had attempted many countermeasures that almost made the Underworld seem cute in comparison.

And yet the Underworld Lord had not been wholly destroyed.

He had tenaciously, persistently, and stubbornly dug in, kept up the attack at a set pace no matter what, and ultimately emerged victorious as the one who devoured the humans who had been worn down by the intense ups and downs produced by their own history.

He was the one who desecrated life and toyed with souls.

So a mere death or two was not going to stop him. He controlled the needle and thread with the accuracy of a clock.

(This will not end here. I am lord. And a lord cannot be defeated so easily...)

Part 5

Thanks to the ball-and-chain around the ankle or wooden stocks around the arms and neck, there was nothing Beatrice and the others could do as the thick door to the square cell of stone and steel was unlocked. They were already dead and they were helpless without their Shining Weapons.

And who was it that walked in?

“...Good. It seems you successfully got your heads out of the dirt.”

“Omega...?”

The muscular man in thick armor wielded a giant axe. He had been the cornerstone of the Underworld’s invasion force and he had held together the former soldiers of Elkiad, so perhaps he was in charge of training newcomers. With that in mind, Beatrice and the others huddled together in their Halloween or Undead-themed costumes, but the large man himself rudely scratched his head.

“If you were just being left to the Underworld, I wouldn’t have bothered bringing you somewhere like this. What do you think this room made of solid rock and metal is for? The normal cycle has you mature inside the rotting flesh until your soul has transformed into one of the Underworld’s pawns.”

“To put that more simply, are you saying you saved us? If so, why?”

Jiangshi Girl Armelina sounded suspicious while unable to hold down the dress’s wide-open slits on her thighs thanks to the wooden stocks. Omega responded by lightly striking the center of his chest and winking.

Something like a white light flashed faintly where his fist hit.

“I guess you could say that solid blow from my wife woke me up a little. Whatever the Underworld might want, I have to do something if Tselika is going to lose her home. But as you can see, it’s too late for my soul. I’ve already been turned into the Underworld’s slave and there’s no saving me. So I needed to secure some pawns to act in my place and I couldn’t let the Underworld know about it.”

“...What proof do we have that we can trust you aren’t working for the Underworld in this?”

Japanese-style Ghost Filinion asked that while clenching her fists in front of the chest lifted by the corset and with cow and glasses girl spirits floating around her.

Omega only shrugged before answering.

“What if I said you weren’t the first?”

As the one girl frowned while feeling irritated at the eyepatch covering one eye, the large man stepped aside to clear the way.

Two familiar faces poked their heads in instead.

“Ch-Chief? Are you alive???”

“If they’re here, then they’ve died and become no more than souls, you idiot.”

It was Alchemist Cheerleader Huldra and Ice Waterfall Princess Wildefrau.

Just like Beatrice, the pink twintail girl and blue ringlet curl girl wore something like Halloween or Undead-themed costumes and were bound by different types of restraints.

Huldra must have been a Werewolf because a V-shaped fur outfit covered the bare minimum of her bare skin’s seductive curves. ...However, it did look like the ears and tail were moving on their own. She also had her right arm in a cast that was supported from her shoulder by a sling. A look at her expression showed no sign of real pain, so it may have only been the outside held in place by plaster.

Wildefrau was either a demon or a Vampire...but what was that? She was naked except for a cape and a black bikini bottom that looked a lot like a bat. Kallikantzaros from the beach would have probably been enraged had she seen that costume. As for her restraint...was that a thumbscrew? Two small steel plates could be tightened together with a screw and both of her thumbs were currently contained in it like it was a pair of handcuffs.

(Have our souls been bound by our own mind’s image of the wandering dead?)

When she thought about it, Beatrice realized her Zombie costume was different from the Haitian sorcery or the beings given that name because of how they wandered around Ground’s Nir. The medical and infection theme was evidence that this was reliant on the baseless visual produced by the entertainment industry. Still, she needed to assume there was something that made it function.

(Do the others have some meaning to them? Huldra being a Werewolf could be a representation of the dual nature of being male on earth and female in Ground’s Nir... Although that makes me question Armelina’s strict restraints since she could always move...)

Beatrice rubbed the metal ring around her ankle as she considered all this, but she could not come up with a consistent view. It bothered her that she could not organize the information in the usual frames and flame lines.

Also, they had to have arrived in the Underworld through different routes, but what had the Ice Waterfall Princess in a small-horned and hooded cape and the Alchemist Cheerleader in a Werewolf swimsuit been doing while Beatrice’s group fought the Underworld Lord (likely after being led their by the Sage and Sibyl)?

“Why are you two here?” asked Armelina while unable to move her arms.

For some reason, the pair awkwardly averted their gaze.

“I-I told her not to do it.”

“Please don’t lie. You were the one that kept complaining about how hot it was and insisted on relying on your ice Magic!”

“What!? Why would you reveal your companion’s shame now!? You could have just let it slide, you know!? There was no use in telling everyone we collapsed with something like Italian king trumpet mushrooms growing from our bodies!!”

“What is this Italian nonsense? Stop trying to make it sound nice! This rotting flesh land uses the lava blood’s heat to sterilize itself, but a certain someone and her giant tits kept cheating and secretly cooling herself down, so all the mold and spores rushed in and- ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!?”

“Besides, you’re the one that only has an Instant Death attack that relies on probability and does no damage which left you completely helpless against the Undead since they’re already dead in the first place!!”

“U-uuhhh... I just hope everyone pitches a tent in their pants when they hear someone mentioning that cute Huldra-chan was surrounded and ganged up on...”

“And wasn’t it you who got covered in mold when you scurried off and hid inside a dark foxhole? C’mon, tell everyone the truth, you nameko bastard.”

Bandage and Rag Zombie Beatrice sighed.

This was a field where the slightest opening led to death.

Those two had apparently not accomplished much before collapsing somewhere in the Underworld. It might sound pathetic, but entering a deadly land without any preliminary research would allow that sort of thing to happen.

Omega spoke up while still leaning against the open door.

“If I hadn’t nabbed them first, they would have been collected by the Underworld like normal. Is that enough for you to trust me a little?”

“...What is it you want us to do?”

“I’m glad to see you’re quick on the uptake.” Omega readily made a suggestion. “I want you to bring this all to an end by doing what those of who are already controlled cannot. In other words, I want you to crush the Underworld Lord’s plans.”

Part 6

When the Sage and Sibyl began to move, Boo Boo was forced to go along with them.

The monster in red armor and a miniskirt cheerfully walked alongside him.

“The internal bleeding has continued a fair bit. The rot has made more progress than is apparent on the surface.”

For the Underworld, bleeding meant erupting with lava.

The large cave of flesh was illuminated by a sinister orange glow. It was hot, but there was no sign of the moisture vanishing and it all weighed on Boo Boo as an unpleasant pressure.

“Where exactly are we going?”

“That is a very good question, Boo Boo. This is near the unused third floodgate of the right gill hole which is currently undergoing regular maintenance. Or to put it more simply, this is the base of the jaws that form its enormous mouth. There are probably a lot of checkpoints before directly reaching the cerebrum, so I hope we can at least get near the spine...”

“?”

“We mentioned that we only predicted Ground’s Nir Abyss and never suspected the Underworld might exist, right? We’ve acquired a fair amount of information through some fieldwork investigation, but it would be best to access a database and acquire some more detailed information to prove our estimations correct.”

Boo Boo looked puzzled, and Sibyl politely explained.

Boo Boo felt like he was walking alongside a lava river, but then he saw a flickering orange-illuminated silhouette through the steam up ahead.

“Squeal?”

“Oh, guess one of the patrolling guards caught us.”

The Sage sounded entirely carefree.

Immediately afterwards, the black rotting flesh on the ceiling swelled out. Hands and faces emerged one after another and fell down to surround their prey. The dead wielded sword and spear Shining Weapons and rifles that used gunpowder. These probably had the same origins as the Elkiad soldiers Boo Boo and the others had fought on the island of Ground’s Nir, but they were not just fighting on their own this time. There were quadrupedal monsters with a giant eagle’s head, a lion’s body, and giant wings. Yes, the soldiers were riding the powerful Griffins used for races in the inn town.

These were the elites who had been trained to the very limit.

And they were further strengthened by creatures of a foreign world that surpassed human knowledge.

“Zero to all. Charlie Team has made contact with the enemy. One to Thirty, you-...”

A wet sound overwrote it all.

The Sage had not waited until they were done reporting.

Her left hand had already drawn her patchwork rapier from its sheath.

By the time the blade’s tip had spun all the way around like a clock’s hand, everything was pummeled by gusts, shockwaves, and all other forms of Wind Magic. Was Charlie Zero even able to count how many forms of death were embedded in his dead body? He was bent and torn to pieces in midair and he was crushed into nothingness before he hit the ground again.

There was no need for trial-and-error reconnaissance with an astral body. Nor did the Sage need to use Recovery Magic like Filinion. A single mistake meant instant death in the Underworld, but she swept it all aside with direct firepower.

This could only be called extraordinary.

“Yes, yes. I know I’m really just lashing out. And I know I’m not one to talk after attacking the Iberian Orc village...”

The Sage laughed in a mocking way that Beatrice never would.

Her expression was filled with a dark, dark, and endlessly decadent joy.

“But this was a stroke of fortune. All of you killed the elder and the others out of pure bigotry and discrimination with nothing hidden below the surface, but I never thought I would get a chance to execute you all a second time. The Underworld can be considerate when it wants to be...”

The Sage’s weapon was a patchwork of many Shining Weapons, but whose had those been?

Charlie Team fought back almost entirely mechanically and the Sage turned three more of them into charcoal with scarlet flames, so the dead finally tried to put more distance between them. They were already dead, yet they seemed to fear for their lives.

Royal Elf Sibyl put her hands on her hips and breathed an exasperated sigh.

“You’re just being unnecessarily cruel. You can use any kind of Magic you want, so you could always just use Recovery Magic. Are you intentionally avoiding a means of killing them instantly?”

“But that would be so boring.” The dark smile remained on her face. “The ones who haven’t had enough after I kill them will reappear for a second or third round. So this time, I have to give them a taste of death that won’t leave them unsatisfied.”

“Oh, honestly...”

Sibyl breathed from her nose just as several blasts of wind assaulted them. That was to be expected for Charlie Team and their Griffins which could easily send a large horse flying. Since they could not stand up to the Sage herself, they may have decided to take a hostage and gain the upper hand that way.

If you completely ignored morality and ethics, their methodology itself was not wrong.

They charged toward the slender girl as if they planned to more hit her than grab her. And they had enough momentum to break a few bones before collecting her. They shifted their impact time between each other so one of the later ones was sure to hit her even if she dodged the initial attack.

But they had still made a mistake.

They had failed to take a Royal Elf’s power into account.

“Fools.”

It only took a word.

A moment later, Sibyl had activated her longbow and launched dreadful beams of light. Charlie Team had been charging toward her with the weight and speed of a crane’s wrecking ball, but now they flew backwards with twice the speed.

“Land, sea, and air each have their unique rulers. As one of the forest rulers, my Skill is the materialization of residual thoughts. That means I can only use recreations of the past.” She brushed aside the thin bit of hair that fell on her cheek. “So you could also say that it was all of you who constructed the violence lurking in this place. Be swallowed by your own deeds and vanish into the light, insurgents of a foreign world.”

There was nothing for Boo Boo to do.

A unilateral wave of violence had begun. There was no need to pursue and hunt down individual targets. As the Sage and Sibyl moved further in, the enemy was erased from that entire unit of territory.

“This is the obvious result.” Sibyl spoke to Boo Boo with a calm expression while raising her Shining Weapon that looked like a purifying staff with a large crystal ball embedded at the top. “The Sage and I were always meant to do this together. Ending your rampage and bringing you along was no more than an accident. So we were never counting you as a necessary part of our fighting force. Life born in the forest, please stand back and enjoy the show.”

Those facing them head-on and even those who tried to hide behind cover were blown through the walls. Those who fled or sought reinforcements were shot in the back and knocked into the lava river. There was no mercy there. Just watching the unilateral slaughter caused a sense of guilt to grow in Boo Boo’s chest.

“Keh heh heh...”

“Sage?”

“Hwa ha ha ha, ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!”

“Hey, Sage.”

Sibyl eventually gave the Sage a suspicious look and fired her longbow at the woman’s defenseless back from close range. The Sage’s body tilted a bit, but she took no damage. She turned toward her beautiful companion with a strained movement, blinked her eyes a few times, and gave her a completely confused look.

“Huh? Sibyl? What was I doing just now???”

“This would be frightening enough on its own, but let’s focus on our objective. I don’t want to be dragged along on some decadent quest for revenge. Really, is this any way to act in front of a gentleman?”

Sibyl gave an exasperated look as she coldly fired beams of light from the crystal head of her staff to take out the few remaining enemies. Charlie Team had been fully silenced. Although this technically only meant they had begun their wait to be respawned. The Sage and Sibyl apparently had no intention of sneaking in.

Whenever they ran into Soviets who tried to use their numbers to push through or ancient humans who used special boots containing several long blades, the two of them slaughtered all of the witnesses before they could flee or make a report. They did not use a special compatibility issue like Filinion, so this was nothing but brute force. It was hard to believe this was the same Underworld army that not even all the Break News working together could hold back on the island of Ground’s Nir. When faced with the Sage and the Royal Elf, the dead army seemed like baby birds fleeing along the ground after falling from their nest.

“Squeal...”

“Oh? Forest child, is something the matter?”

“If you have this much power, it seems to me you could get past them without fighting.”

“You are exactly right, but you can see how the Sage is. She intentionally triggers an Encounter when she sees someone from Elkiad, so there’s no avoiding them.”

There were no real barriers impeding them. Or rather, there were some impressive hurdles, but those two knocked them all down, leaving them with an easy journey.

Eventually, something appeared before them.

“Boo. ...A door?”

“Hmm, this looks like it was added in later.”

It was a tall double door. Even Boo Boo had to look up at it and it looked quite thick. Locked or not, it looked like you would need some kind of tool to even grab and turn the knob. It was colored white and the material looked more like bone than stone or metal.

The two doors were held together by an extremely large purse-shaped lock that hung down. The lock alone was the size of a small safe.

“What should we do?” asked Boo Boo.

“Let me ask you this instead: is there any reason to hold back?”

The lock did not matter.

After an explosion, the entire door collapsed inward.

The atmosphere inside was different.

It was still a tunnel, but the cross section was nearly a perfect circle. There was no way of distinguishing the walls from the floor or the ceiling and something like gear teeth lined the circumference. They were all bookcases taller than Boo Boo. They could not see all the way to the back of the tunnel, so they could not even imagine the full extent of the knowledge contained within.

The tunnel was divided into ring-shaped blocks that slowly rotated left or right, presumably according to some kind of rule.

And...

“Ohh?”

“Squeal!? The Sage is attached to the wall!”

“The gravity setting must change. I guess that’s why the floor, walls, and ceiling are all an indistinguishable circle. It’s made so you can walk all the way around.”

“Is this all of the knowledge contained inside the Underworld?”

“No, the database itself is probably the cerebrum mainframe. The spine is simply the gateway. When the peripheral nerves in all the different body parts send an information request, it checks the list and decides whether or not to answer the request.” Despite her large breasts and miniskirt, the Sage hopped up and down like a child to test the artificial gravity. “That said, we can get all the information we need here if we really can directly access the cerebrum. Now. What part of the list do we have to destroy to break open the floodgates of information?”

“It’s always destruction with you,” said Sibyl. “Why not be smarter about it and hack in?”

“I guess because there’s no real reason to try to be nice?”

Before she had even finished speaking, the Sage randomly pulled thick reference books from a nearby bookcase. Not satisfied with just that, she pulled out the actual shelves and tossed them aside. The circular tunnel itself rotated harshly to the right and left and the entire thing seemed to writhe in pain, but she did not care.

Without warning, something floated up into the air.

It was about the size of a human head. It had a nearly transparent body and two wing-like objects. A human from earth might have described it as a clione ghost.

And it spoke in human language.

“Warning, warning! Inflammation from foreign intruders detected in a first-degree sterilization area. If the foreign intruders show no intent of heeding the evacuation request or lack the intelligence to understand it, begin an antibody reaction request and begin an immediate injection of SSS-class white blood cells.”

“Oh, shut up. Here’s what I think of you.”

“Gyah, gyah, gyah, gyah, gyah, gyahhhhh!!!???”

Something happened. To Boo Boo, it looked like several long needles had pierced the transparent body, but that seemed to rearrange the internal structure. With her right hand on her hip, the beautiful Sage instructor lightly flicked the floating clione’s forehead and winked.

“What are you?”

“Sir!! I was originally one of the evolutionary patterns that branched off from that renamed Iberian Orc there!! My line evolved for life in the ocean and specialized in data processing!!”

“I see... I guess that would be a possibility since all the dead of this world are on his side. And the elder did mention an age when they tried moving out into the sea. But I guess that means you’re from a failed line that hit a dead end.”

“I now function as a quasi-living search engine that effectively manages the massive amount of information gathered by the Underworld!! You can think of me as a hippocampus that functions independently. It is an honor to meet you, sir!!”

It seemed there were some things in the world more frightening than ghosts. Boo Boo was curled up in a ball and tearfully trembling, so Sibyl stretched up to gently rub his head.

Part 7

Beatrice was bound by her image of the wandering dead which had dressed her in the bandages and rags of a fresh Zombie. She also had a ball-and-chain attached to her ankle.

And as soon as she opened the door to hell...

“Uuh...!?”

“Beatrice?”

When the red-and-silver-haired girl groaned, Filinion tilted her head with the cow and glasses spirits floating around her.

Once again, the metal ball’s weight had changed.

(I-is it reacting to something? Like to my intent to “run away” or “escape”?)

“You should be careful,” said Wildefrau. “This thing on my thumbs reacts to my sticky fingers by tightening like a vise.”

“U-uuh,” groaned Huldra. “When I try to act cutesy, it increases the number of casts.”

“So you’re supposed to tone down the fake girliness, huh?” asked Armelina. “If they’re all hitting people where it hurts, then what do my stocks do?”

Beatrice’s outfit was only possible in a foreign world that utterly ignored things like human rights, so she held down what little clothes she had and dragged the ball-and-chain along as she hesitantly left the cell. The scene outside was entirely different.

She had thought they were in one room of a giant, gloomy prison, but that was not the case.

It was something else entirely that filled the half of her vision not covered by the eyepatch.

“What is this? A village...no, a town?”

The Holy Swordswoman who now lacked her red armor and miniskirt could not be blamed for saying that. There were many “rooms” of the same size. And they were not all standalone. Some were stacked on top of each other or lined up alongside each other as they multiplied every which way like cubic bubbles.

The ground was still made of black rotting flesh, but the layout of buildings was orderly enough to create a large road between them. Something like pumpkins swayed irregularly and shined light on it all.

And there were people.

There were men and woman of all ages. Some had costume-like bandages and rags plus a restraint just like Beatrice, but others were combat personnel with Percentage-type armor and a Shining Weapon just like Omega. The Arachne spider-crab fusion contraptions they had seen on the island of Ground’s Nir were also pulling around carts like horses.

“Hm?”

“What is it, Armelina?”

“Now that we’re out in the open...hmm, I’m really self-conscious about this charm on my forehead.”

The only real difference from Beatrice’s group was the marine creatures attached to all the others. For some reason, the girls lacked that.

“You shouldn’t have any of those,” said Omega. “Or would you rather have barnacles covering your spine like me?”

“Ew,” said Filinion while she and her spirits grew pale in order to be courteous(?).

“But, wow.”

The place was more bustling with activity than they had expected.

The people moving about had none of the resentment or dark joy seen on the island of Ground’s Nir. Did that “transformation” not occur unless they met someone who had directly harmed them or appeared on a scene related to their desires in life?

The town was fairly well developed and there was even a guide sign in the center of an intersection. It was unclear what it meant, but a comical ghost doll wearing a white sheet was pointing down each road and exit.

Filinion, the needlessly curvy Japanese-style ghost, seemed somewhat exasperated with how she felt about all this.

“I was surprised when I heard we’d died, but the panic kind of fades away when there are so many people who just accept it as normal. The adaptability of the human mind is a frightening thing...”

Ghost stories were overrun with tales of the dead envying the living and attempting to take the living away with them, but was that really accurate? If the dead were left somewhere like this, wouldn’t they just go with the flow and accept the peace they found?

Beatrice, Filinion, and Armelina were dumbfounded and overwhelmed by the very un-ghostlike energy they felt. Wildefrau and Huldra seemed to be somewhat accustomed to it since they had been rescued by Omega earlier.

“This apparently wasn’t originally a part of the Underworld. The Fairies used their Craft skills to build it after they got here. And we can only thank them for that since they let everyone else use it all for free.”

...Would the dead Fairies be the ones that had been sacrificed to the Thousand Dragon? Well, they could probably die plenty of other ways in the survival-of-the-fittest natural world.

The Fairies were apparently quite interested in anything productive because they had a few food stands lined up on the roadside where they were preparing strange baked goods and candies. While the kitchen tools were the perfect size for a human, the Fairies looked like they were swinging spears around.

“All of it’s sweets.”

“It’s probably meant as combat rations. It might seem silly, but a small treat can be effective for pro and amateur alike. And some small but high-calorie candy or chocolate makes for excellent emergency rations.”

The aroma of some kind of flat and spread-out dough being cooked on a large metal plate did inspire hunger, but...

“Oh, but I wouldn’t rely on the drinking water and food here, Chief.”

“Yes, this is meant for the people who are only thinking about how long until they respawn after being killed. We aren’t being controlled by the Underworld, so consuming it would be a very bad idea for us. Since they don’t have cooking sake, they just dump in the methanol that seeps out of the rotting flesh.”

Wildefrau explained that while toying with one of the small horns on her hood. However, her thumbs were bound together, so she nearly had to raise her hands straight up to touch her ringlet-curled head. Since she only wore a bat bikini bottom below, her cape had to put up a valiant effort all on its own to protect her.

“Ehh? But it smells so good...bfhhh!?”

“She hasn’t even eaten a single cookie yet! Was the thought alone enough for Filinion to gain weight!?”

“No...I...the corset is squeezing...why is this...khhh...”

Tears welled up in Filinion’s eyes as the squeezing of her torso only further accentuated her too-ample breasts, so Beatrice glanced down at the ball-and-chain attached to her ankle.

(Does it have some kind of trigger like with my metal ball...?)

“Oh, does the crank on your back turn to penalize any wasteful thoughts? The corset around your waist may be a way of warning you you’ll get fat and lazy.”

“That might actually be good for her. Let’s get the cow working until she loses two or three cup sizes.”

The glasses girl’s breathing started sounding more like groaning at this point, so she did not have it in her to complain.

Since everyone else was dressed similarly, Armelina seemed to have gotten used to her flashy hat, clothing, and restraint. It may have been like being at a costume party or nudist beach.

“What is it that separates the equipped people from the unequipped ones?” she asked.

“We don’t get to choose ourselves,” said Omega. “It most likely comes from the social system the Underworld placed on us. Kind of like how there are worker ants and soldier ants. You could say the Underworld is the colony and the Underworld Lord is the queen ant.”

“Would that make us the worker ants?”

“And that means the Underworld and the Underworld Lord can’t do everything on their own. It’s probably similar to how we can’t see for ourselves what’s going on in our stomachs. We’re free to do as we wish until the Underworld Lord directly sees us and gives us an order.”

A closer look showed that the palm-sized Fairies wore something like Halloween costumes as they expanded the town and used the black spider threads to close up the wounds oozing lava. They had to be worker ants.

Meaning...

“Does that mean you didn’t confiscate our Shining Weapons? Were they simply ‘not there’ from the moment we became ghosts?”

“Yes, and that means you can’t use Magic while in ghost mode. So don’t think you can enjoy this foreign world like normal. You might be free of the Underworld’s bonds, but you are also as fragile as a raw egg. You are Level 1. You should assume brushing up against any random weakling will break you. And you of course don’t get any redoes like you do with a partial astral projection.”

“...”

“This is more or less what it means to be merely human. You won’t have any problems while blending in here, but watch out for anyone you directly interacted with in the past. Like the Underworld Lord. It’s not really my place to talk, but-...”

“Oh, what are you doing here, Omega?”

Someone suddenly called out to him from the side, so the muscular man shoved eyepatched Beatrice into the crowd to the other side.

It was Alpha Zero of Elkiad. The gray-haired old soldier and large man faced each other.

“Do you need something, Alpha Zero? I believe I ordered you to get some rest.”

“My apologies. The honor of fighting alongside you once more has left these old bones unable to contain my youthful vigor...”

Not good, not good, thought Beatrice as she pushed through the crowd to leave the source of the voices. And the ball-and-chain around her ankle only grew heavier and heavier in response to her desire to flee. That opponent would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but they lacked their Shining Weapons at the moment. Omega had neatly sidestepped the issue, but if they stood out in the crowd and gathered the old soldiers’ attention, they could not avoid being tormented to death. The Halloween costume and restraint made for very mismatched outfits, but that was actually the best way of blending in here. The Underworld was completely insane.

“(Over here, over here...!)”

“(Yes...!?)”

They had managed to move away from Omega and Alpha Zero while keeping a wall of people between them, but they could not completely hide on the main street or back alleys. That left only one option: hiding the tree in the forest. Beatrice and the others naturally pressed together and worked to blend into the group of worker ants wearing similar costumes.

“Cow, this is hardly the time to press those overly-large things against me. Are you trying to show off!?”

“Just so you know, those are Wildefrau’s boobs.”

“Hey, Inoue, don’t think I’ve forgotten you’re a guy. Quit tearfully trying to slip in with the rest of us!!”

“Ahhh, please don’t kick me out when being spotted means death! I’m Alchemist Cheerleader Huldra-chan while I’m here!”

“...Are none of you seriously trying to survive this?”

Omega seemed to have saved Beatrice and the others so they could recover enough to stop the Underworld Lord’s plans, but he had not managed to give them any details. They did not know where to go or what to do if they wanted to strike back at the Underworld Lord.

“Hey, doesn’t Filinion have way too much clothing? I’ve got almost nothing but bandages! If your sleeves are so long you have to roll them up, then give me some of that fabric!!”

“Wait, Beatrice! Don’t pull! The corset is so tight that there’s no way to get anything off! Gwehhhh!?”

“You complain, but look at these stocks I have to deal with. Nothing about your costume is fair, Filinion. Corsets are fashionable and you can rest your boobs on it. You lucked out!!”

“Umm, as I said, we really should be taking this more seriously,” said Wildefrau.

“You don’t have much room to talk when you’re walking around in public wearing almost nothing but a cape,” said Huldra.

It all led to a lot of tugging, shaking, stripping, and fighting. However, that may have been a good way of blending into the lively city.

Beatrice and the others followed the flow of foot traffic while keeping an eye out for any Elkiad soldiers. On the way, Japanese-style Ghost Filinion (whose glasses must have become a part of her very soul since she still wore them with all her other equipment removed) made a suggestion.

“Things will only get worse if we don’t do anything, so how about we work out a plan? First of all, will we stay in the town or leave it?”

“The town is full of Elkiad soldiers who are familiar faces in a very bad way, so wouldn’t it be safer to leave as soon as possible?”

“They’re soldier ants, so they’ll probably be patrolling outside the town too. And we might find it harder to hide once we leave the crowds.”

“The Underworld is quite large, so I want to avoid having to search around at random when it’s so dangerous.”

“Does that mean we need to find a treasure map first?”

Beatrice’s comment gathered everyone’s attention on her as she dragged the ball-and-chain along.

...They couldn’t exactly go up and ask people to tell them the secrets that the Underworld Lord had been hiding, but if they stayed near a random food stand and listened in, they could pick up on the various conversations mixed into all the noise.

“Did you hear the new request? Now they want combat rations that won’t melt in the heat.”

“These are supposed to be luxuries, but they’re starting to take them for granted, aren’t they? Well, I do have a bad habit of doing my best work when someone sets up a hurdle for me.”

“Before, they kept asking for vodka, for a wooden stock on their favorite gun, or for vodka, vodka, and more vodka. They clearly don’t understand how hard it is to grow plants in the Underworld.”

Naturally, they did not hit the jackpot right away, but...

“Drool...”

“Stop it, cow. You’ll get even fatter and suffer for it.”

“Again, it’s not that I’m gaining weight. How many times do I have to tell you it’s the corset’s crank torturing me!? Oh, I know! I’ll take that charm right off this pale China girl’s forehead!!”

“W-wait, stop! I have a really bad feeling about that! Like I won’t be myself anymore if you take that off... This’ll be worse than after some depressed drinking when I miss the last train home at night!”

“You mean it’ll trigger a bonus round in horny mode?”

“Cough, cough, cough! Women lose all their inhibitions when they’re drunk in dirty guys’ fantasies!”

“Is it a misfire of a preservation instinct? Like wanting to warm each other up during a snowy mountain blizzard?”

“It’s all fantasy!! H-humans aren’t that simple!!”

Armelina’s arms were held inside the thick stocks, so she shook her blushing head back and forth to keep Filinion’s fingers away, but that actually seemed to make the charm flutter dangerously on her forehead.

“Heh heh, eh heh heh. Coming out on top for once is a nice feeling.”

“But, four eyes, did you forget I can still use my legs?”

There was a solid sound of impact and a defeated cry from the cow mixed in, but they spent time gathering any useful information.

The Fairies were throwing strange pumpkin ghosts in a large mystery pot that emitted screams of agony and they boiled those pumpkin ghosts to get the sugar out of them. The Fairies were chatting as they stood on the smooth porcelain edge and prepared the sweets ingredients by flipping them with wooden spatulas far too large for their bodies.

“The deliveries are a real pain, aren’t they?”

“Has that path still not been opened?”

“That Next Generation Embryo area is so complex, isn’t it? It’s an important area, so I wish they wouldn’t summon us there for errands.”

Omega had said he wanted them to do something that he and the others controlled by the Underworld Lord could not. That meant an area that was designated off limits for the dead was highly suspicious.

More importantly, bandaged and eyepatched Beatrice repeated one notable term.

“...Next Generation Embryo?”

Part 8

After reaching the giant rotting marine creature’s spine, Boo Boo, the Sage, and Sibyl ran into a vast sea of information. The Sage whispered to the search engine that resembled a clione the size of a human head.

“First, basic information on the Underworld.”

“Yes, sir. The Underworld itself is an important natural existence.”

“...It doesn’t really matter, but isn’t it ‘ma’am’ with women?”

“Is there really much of a difference for a meathead like- bwabwegweh!?”

After being beaten all over by fists covered in metal gauntlets, the clione was trembling and the Sage urged it on with a smile.

“A natural...what was that again?”

“Ubh...yes, sir... The Underworld is not a biological weapon designed by the ancient humans. It is a natural existence that appeared in response to the world’s dark side.”

“So the ancient humans were destroyed after they found themselves helpless against the giant monster that appeared out of nowhere?”

“The elimination of all life, including the humans, was merely one step in an ongoing process. The Underworld was originally a god of harvest, making it very different from a male god of destruction.”

“I don’t understand...”

Boo Boo could not help but say that when this had to do with ancient technology.

Sibyl winked.

“Asking a vague question won’t lead us to the next answer. So, Mr...Engine was it? Is the Underworld trying to accomplish something else using all of the human souls?”

“I am only afraid of the Sage, so I have no real reason to do what you-...”

“...”

“Wait, please no. Not anything else to my body!! The currently-existing Underworld has overruled the wishes of all life to carry out a single role: resurrecting the world, sir!!”

“Resurrecting...the world?”

“In other words, reconstructing the world once the resources and environment have reached a dead end. All the world’s civilizations, including the humans, will eventually cease to grow due to a variety of reasons: lack of resources, the spread of disease, worsening pollution, etc. Just before that happens, all life is to be preserved such that they will be unable to advance or decline by even a millimeter, the planet’s resources and environment are to be reset, and all life is to be released once more. By repeating this, the Underworld ensures that civilization can develop endlessly without worrying about the environment or their consumption rate.” The giant floating clione had a soft-looking body, but it still managed to stand at attention. “However, this task requires the rising and sinking of continents and great changes to the air and sea currents, the world climate, the composition of the atmosphere, the planet’s magnetic field and axis of rotation, and much more, so failure to prepare properly would mean wiping out the old age’s life forms while preparing the land. So as previously stated, it was necessary to preserve the souls of all those life forms.”

The Sage brought a hand to her slender chin.

“And that led to the process of collecting dead souls, hm?”

“Preservation of the physical bodies was rejected because there is simply not enough space and the living costs would be too high. But storing the immaterial souls as data accomplishes the same thing.”

So the ancient humans had been unilaterally told they would be saved from environmental destruction and resource depletion and then their savior had reaped their lives one after another.

Since the humans had created Abyss, a different monster in the depths of their giant armory, it was obvious that they had not simply accepted this.

They had been more advanced than anyone and they had received less salvation than anyone.

“Squeal? This is really confusing...”

“Dumb pigs only need to stay quiet and listen.”

“...Drool.”

“No, Boo Boo. Don’t eat him yet.”

“What do you mean ‘yet’!? And that would sort of be cannibalism! Eeeeek!?”

The giant clione was trembling, but the Sage did not care and urged it to continue.

“U-until the safety of every last life form on this world has been confirmed, the main resurrection task cannot begin. The protection of every continent and island is complete, but in recent years, life forms were detected on the surface of the artificial island of Ground’s Nir, so all work was halted to resume the emergency protection task.”

The goal was creation, not destruction.

This sweep of the world was meant to stop the old age before it derailed and build up new rails that never ended.

“...A never-ending supply of fuel. No, it’s just like Noah’s Ark.”

“Squeal? Noah’s Ark???”

“But in that case, why is the Underworld Lord forcing the ‘protected’ souls to do his bidding? Was the Underworld Lord like a monstrous search engine that tells you how convenient it is while stealing all your personal information?”

“My guess is that discrepancy is related to the nature of the Underworld Lord who controls the entire Underworld, sir.”

“What, did the obedient maids go on strike?”

“The Underworld Lord is indeed an important ruler on this giant marine creature. His power is great enough to claim and control all of the souls in this world. But that is a temporary privilege that only lasts until the next age is complete. Once the new rails have been laid out to pass the derailing dead end, he will be just as unneeded as the Underworld itself and both will be forgotten. ”

“Well, it is true the ark’s value rises considerably during the catastrophic climax but there’s no use for it once the flood has been safely overcome.”

“What if the Underworld Lord refused to let himself become unneeded?”

“Are you saying he has no intention of ever letting go of those souls and he wants them to live here forever? ...We’ve heard a lot of impressive things about this Underworld Lord, but it would seem he’s nothing more than a petty banker embezzling the money he’s left with.”

“?”

“?”

Boo Boo and Sibyl could only exchange a glance and tilt their heads. No matter how intelligent the pig-faced humanoid and Royal Elf were, they could not keep up with earth-centric comparisons.

As a result, it was the Sage and the clione-shaped search engine that maintained control of the scene.

They had gotten some information on the Underworld and the Underworld Lord, but that was not what really mattered to the Sage.

“Does that mean something is hidden in here that has the power to construct an entire world or age? Part of that has got to be a technique related to life.”

Regardless of what it was actually doing, the Underworld was meant to preserve the human souls and safely place those souls in different vessels once the world resurrection was complete.

In that case.

Couldn’t that same technique be used to transplant the Iberian Orc souls from Boo Boo’s Shining Weapon and into some other vessels?

“Yes, sir.”

The giant clione-like search engine answered without delay.

“That would be the one-and-only Next Generation Embryo.”

The Sage was constantly guiding the history of the world with technology, but not even she was familiar with that term.

“The Next Generation Embryo is the Underworld’s most important organ and a masterpiece currently being bred within it. It is the next originator that will form the core of a new age. The Underworld is gradually rotting away and its flesh is turning into nutrients much like humus, but once it has entirely rotted, that will be injected into the Next Generation Embryo and the resurrection task will be complete.”

“...”

“The Underworld Lord does not want to end the task, travel down the path of self-abandonment, and be forgotten by everyone, so he will not want that process to complete. Originally, the Underworld Lord was meant to procure a new giant creature at that point. The fact that the Underworld’s rot is slowing is a sign that he is holding it back. After killing so many humans and stealing their technology, he has used data cables and skeletal reinforcements to extend the life of the current generation Underworld by turning it into a sort of cyborg. And that has left the Next Generation Embryo unused and untouched in the deepest depths. Of course, outright destroying the Next Generation Embryo would mean the task could not be continued and the Underworld would cease to function, so that lord is caught between a rock and a hard place there.”

Part 9

A sticky sound echoed through one of the Underworld’s rotting pathways.

(The Next Generation Embryo...)

Information rose into the mind of a twisted being sewn together with needle and thread.

He once more had a chance at victory. But it was still not a sure thing.

He needed just one more thing.

Acquire that and victory would be his.

(...I just need the Next Generation Embryo.)

Part 10

Once they knew where to go, it did not take long for Boo Boo, the Sage, and Sibyl to take action.

“This is the spine...so our destination is on almost the exact opposite side. It’s called the Next Generation Embryo, so I’m guessing it would be around there.”

“Ahem. Try to show act more dignified, Sage.”

“If it happens to be that time of the month, will the entire tunnel be filled with lava? Oh, but I guess that would stop while the embryo is growing inside.”

“Now you’re just being vulgar.”

Sibyl closed her eyes and blushed all the way to the tips of her ears, but Boo Boo had no idea what they meant and tilted his head.

“Oh, right, right. Sharks are live-bearing even though they have eggs, right? So what’s this going to be like?”

All the while, tremendous sounds of destruction surrounded them.

The farther they had to travel, the more likely they were to run into the dead and have to fight, but the Sage and Sibyl did not seem to care. They used their incredible Magic and Skill to easily sweep aside everyone who stood in their way. They primarily sent in a flurry of long-distance projectile attacks, so the dead never had a chance to approach close enough for Boo Boo’s close-range attacks. The entirety of the horizontal downpour seemed to have transformed into bombs as the dead were pushed back by the powerful pressure and blown away into the distance.

The closer they got to their destination, the narrower the passageway grew. At the same time, it curved every which way, rose and fell quite a bit, and connected to other paths quite frequently.

“Squeal, it’s like a maze.”

“Is the complex layout meant to confuse us and keep us from continuing on? Whoops.”

Now that the passageway did not follow a straight line, there were more surprise attacks from around corners. They could no longer rely on projectiles like before. It naturally came down to the Sage and Boo Boo making short work of the dead with their Shining Weapons while Sibyl fell back with her weapon that resembled both a longbow and a staff.

“Hm, hm. Hm, hm, hm, hmm.”

“Squeal?”

“Oh, excuse me. It’s just that I feel like I’m fighting alongside the elder and the others again.”

The dead army had swept across the island of Ground’s Nir, but they were so little a challenge for the Sage that she seemed more focused on humming and remembering the past. He had been with Beatrice and the others at the time, but Boo Boo was still impressed that they had managed to drive back this monster before.

“...It really has been too long since I felt like this.”

“Gah...bh...!?”

“And thinking back reminds me how much you’ve grown, Boo Boo. Although you still lack some dignity compared to the elder and the others.”

“Ghgwah!! Pant, pant...gahhhh!?”

She gently narrowed her eyes, but it was an overwhelming storm of violence she was creating in reality.

As they continued on, they came across a large door made of what looked like white bone. They had needed to pass through the complex maze of passageways and it seemed that would only lead to a dead end or a thick gate sealed with a solid lock, but the Sage showed no mercy.

“This isn’t the hymen, is it? I mean, this gate isn’t leading to the outside.”

“You...You really need to learn some tact, you idiot!!”

They destroyed the entire door and walked on through. A slight change occurred from there on.

“...The dead aren’t attacking anymore, are they?”

“The area might be off limits. The Underworld Lord will want to protect the Next Generation Embryo at all costs.”

“Well, white blood cells and antibody reactions can cause problems in the human body too.”

The intricate maze of narrow pathways widened back out to a single large one. As the Sage had predicted, they must have passed the final line of defense. The rot and bleeding was a lot less severe here and they eventually reached something like a large plaza. It was in fact so large they could not see the other side.

And there they found a small world.

A transparent cube was positioned at the center of the vast space. It measured about thirty meters on each side. The fact that even it looked small was a testament to the room’s great size.

Despite the normal shape of an egg or embryo, it was a cube instead of a sphere or ellipsoid.

It was made of straight lines instead of curves.

Was that symbolic of the fact that this was something which did not exist in the natural world? It was likely filled with a clear liquid and it contained something other than an embryonic form of life.

It was a tree.

A single giant tree was contained inside with its roots planted firm, its thick trunk extending toward the heavens, and green leaves sprouting from its many branches. The entire thing looked like a large aquarium and the Sage sounded impressed as she looked up at it with a hand on her hip.

“So after all this, we’re back to the idea of a world tree? Well, I suppose that’s the kind of scale you need if you’re talking about constructing the next age.”

“Squeal?”

“Life began in the sea, climbed up onto land, and then ruled the sky. A tree symbolizes all three stages of that process, Boo Boo. Although if we’re talking about a tree that directly absorbs water from the sea, it would have to be more like a mangrove. But looking at it that way, the Underworld is pretty simple. It’s a giant marine creature, but it also rots away to form soil and repeats its bleeding and clotting process to construct minerals. It’s been preparing to build some land up from the ocean so that tree can grow there.” The Sage paused for a moment. “And if you suddenly plant a tree large enough to truly pierce the heavens, it would probably alter the planet’s rotation. Just like adding a weight to one side of a top. By intentionally altering the rotational axis and the flow of lava, it can also build up continents, change the planetary magnetic field, and affect the global climate through the air and sea currents. If the fruit growing on the branches can also be controlled, then its weight balance can be adjusted to smoothly shift the axis. It’s like a program-run controller for the sea, continents, and global climate. If the plan was on this large a scale, I can see why they needed to remove all life first. ...But in that case, how was it supposed to bring back the underground resources? Cause untouched ocean-bottom resources to rise up as continents, or maybe drop lots of fruit and let it rot? No, if it intentionally created and wiped out an animal and insect ecosystem for a few generations before bringing back the people, it might be able to rapidly turn them into underground oil.”

Sibyl ruled the forests, but even she had never seen a tree like this before.

The girl looked up at it and the Sage’s next words rang in her ears.

“But we don’t need the entire world.”

That statement was essentially rejecting the entire world, including every continent and island.

Used properly, this may have been able to bring back the ancient human civilization, but the Sage’s way of thinking ignored that and only worried about the small island of Ground’s Nir.

“All we need to do is save some specific lives right away. We don’t need to affect the planet’s axis, cause any violent changes in the crust, or build up continents around the world to create a brand new ecosystem. There must be some system for producing and evolving a specific form of life using the environmental changes. We only have to break down the Next Generation Embryo, thoroughly investigate it, and then downsize it. What kind of location is necessary for humans to breathe with lungs and walk on two legs? Or for the elder and the others to obtain their large tusks and noses? By throwing the souls in question into a properly prepared territory, the rapidly developing and changing environment will give life to the desired physical body. Even if we don’t change the world as a whole, we can still use a small experimental field. But just like with an artificial diamond, it consumes energy, so this will use up the rotting flesh. ...Now, Boo Boo, cut this free. Its original purpose doesn’t matter. We are the victors who survived this long, so let’s take our prize.”

This was the exact opposite of Darwin’s theory of evolution. To ensure the completion of an ideal lifeform, they would stir up the surrounding environment. To return a specific soul to the appropriate body, they would use everything else as a guiding framework.

But something happened just before the Sage took another step toward the Next Generation Embryo.

The rotting ceiling writhed overhead.

And a bizarre form dropped down.

Overall, it looked like a mermaid with slender bodylines. It had long, blue, and wavy hair, a fairly flat chest, and a scale-covered lower body that looked a bit like a fish’s tail fin. But it also had two slender legs. The graceful arms of a girl were joined by giant crab claws growing from the shoulders. The large octopus-like head growing from the back may have been synchronized with the girl’s brain. The octopus’s tentacles were wrapped around the girl’s chest and slender arms. It wore no real clothing, so its skin was only covered by the octopus tentacles, the univalves directly clinging to the skin, and a single scrap of cloth. A ring on one of the girl’s skinny fingers reflected the lava’s glow.

“Vivian...?” muttered Sibyl when she saw the girl with a spiral shell horn on her forehead. “No, is her body simply being reused after it washed up here?”

It was obvious this thing had not been born in this form.

The Underworld Lord had already appeared as a collection of marine creatures, but the Sage understood since she had already examined all of his spare bodies.

“How twisted.”

“...”

“I had taken apart and analyzed each and every organ of your thirteen methods, but I guess you realized something was off. It would seem you tried to sew together those black boxes to create an unknown new one. But the Next Generation Embryo can finish your original task, so it should be nothing but a nuisance for you since you don’t want to be discarded. So if you’re still so fixated on it...”

“——...”

“You couldn’t relax after sewing together that patchwork body. You left all thirteen of your rails, but it still wasn’t enough. So the only way you think you can win is to use the Next Generation Embryo to create a brand new flesh vessel and include it in that patchwork body. You wanted to use up what we’re trying to use for others. And yet if you lose the Next Generation Embryo, the entire Underworld’s work task will be stopped and you won’t be able to remain its lord. You lost sight of that.”

No more words were necessary.

With a heavy thud, large pieces of metal dropped from the many tentacles that accompanied the Underworld Lord’s arms. Several thick chains extended from the end of a long handle and each one was attached to the kind of metal hook used with cranes.

Was it a morning star?

Or a cat o’ nine tails?

Its exact classification was unclear, but the way he carried the long handle over his shoulder and let the several shells dangle down from the chains brought a different weapon to mind.

In other words, the symbol of the underworld’s ruler.

The scythe wielded by Death.

The Underworld Lord quickly approached in his girl form. He swung the death scythe toward Boo Boo who was closest. At first, Boo Boo reflexively raised his giant log or steel beam of a Shining Weapon to defend, but he immediately changed his mind and jumped straight back.

The enemy’s weapon used chains. Even if Boo Boo could stop a sword or a blunt object, a chain would bend and continue on. And if it hit him, the many hooks would tear apart his flesh and organs.

In the human society of earth, Death used a scythe because it was a harvesting tool. Instead of fighting and taking the life, he would unilaterally reap the soul of a specific human. But the Underworld Lord came from a marine creature, so his weapon may have been meant as a fishing hook instead.

And it did not end there.

With a spiral shell for a horn, the Underworld Lord kept attacking Boo Boo while the Sage and Sibyl managed to move to a more advantageous distance. This was especially fortunate for Sibyl whose weapon resembled both a longbow and a staff. She attempted to convert the surrounding residual thoughts into an attack.

(...? There’s nothing here??? Oh, no. This area is off limits, so almost no one comes here!)

During that slight lag, the Underworld Lord sent out his left crab claw.

Sibyl had supposedly put a fair distance between them, but it did not matter.

The shell inflated like a giant balloon, burst from within, and scattered the fleshy contents. Then it was compressed down as if being squeezed within a giant hand, so a mysterious liquid was released in an ultra-high-pressure straight line that resembled a laser.

If the Sage had not immediately kicked the back of Sibyl’s knees to knock her down, her head might have been taken off.

And this was not just water.

The slight spray that did reach Sibyl sent stinging pain racing across her skin.

“Acid!?”

“No, it’s liquid methane! Once it vaporizes at room temperature...”

They heard a quiet sound much like clacking teeth.

The Underworld Lord was striking together the stubbornly remaining fragments of the crab shell.

“...Even the slightest spark or static electricity will trigger an explosion!”

Light burst out and all sound vanished.

Sibyl could only materialize residual thoughts, so she was not actually protected by any Magical Elemental Defenses. The only way she could escape the flames and explosive blast was to rely on the Sage who had knocked her to the floor.

The Underworld Lord had the outline of a slender girl and that also provided him a mermaid’s tail fin which extended behind him like a thick, thick tail. He gently swung it around as he took his next action.

Another large crab claw grew to replace the one that had shattered from his shoulder and he resumed the attack.

There was a way to stop him.

Boo Boo charged in and swung his giant Shining Weapon down at the Underworld Lord. He had learned something during the previous battle where Beatrice and the others had been lost.

(If you don’t completely destroy his arm, he won’t change his attack method!! Instead of tearing it off, I need to break it so it just dangles there!!)

“Boo!!”

The Underworld Lord could not make any further attacks while focused on defense. Boo Boo slammed his blunt weapon against him with enough force to break both the shelled arm and the torso, but the Underworld Lord did not so much as budge.

Something like an octopus tentacle was wrapped around the shelled arm. And it did not give off a sticky glean. It had rapidly dried itself out and tightened itself to make itself incredibly hard.

As a counterattack, the girl’s slender arm gave a horizontal swing of the scythe made from crane hooks attached to chains. To avoid having his gut torn open, Boo Boo fell back. Then his nose detected something odd.

He immediately held his breath, but his body still tilted diagonally.

Had he realized that a rapid fermentation was robbing the air of all its oxygen? That being was known as the Underworld Lord and he literally ruled over every part of death. That meant he controlled all sorts of changes that occurred after death: rotting, fermentation, oxidation, saponification, oil formation, etc.

The Underworld Lord picked up further momentum and threw the many chains toward Boo Boo now that he had stopped moving, but...

“Bodily fluids and gasses... Have you no shame!?”

The Underworld Lord was hit by explosive flames from the side. He balled up his torso and mermaid tail, bounced across the ground like a soccer ball, and raised his scythe once the momentum had escaped him.

“Tch. I hit him a little too hard.”

“Squeal!? Don’t do that! Destroying a part of his body makes him use a major attack!!”

The red-armored Sage held a giant crab claw in her hand. She did not know what to do with it, so she tossed it aside just as the Underworld Lord grew a new arm without speaking a word.

Having recovered their position, Boo Boo and the Sage ran in from the left and the right.

The octopus head on the enemy’s back rapidly swelled out and something black erupted out in every direction: ink. Boo Boo quickly swung down his Shining Weapon, but he felt nothing there. The ink was probably meant to rob him of his senses, but it felt like being stirred up and dissolved within muddy water.

And...

“Boo Boo, get down!!”

“Squeal!?”

The Sage’s rapier sheath suddenly swept Boo Boo’s feet out from under him. After he tripped and she ducked, Royal Elf Sibyl used the cleared line of fire to raise her Shining Weapon with its crystal at the top and take aim at the mass of ink. Her weapon could look like a variety of different things depending on how she held it, but she tended to hold it like a staff for her biggest techniques.

Sibyl could materialize an object’s residual thoughts and convert it into her own attack.

There had been no useful residual thoughts in this off-limits area, but she had a trump card.

(Using up your hidden technique means you can’t use it later and that creates a lot of psychological pressure, but I have no choice this time!!)

She had only needed to carry a medium for residual thoughts inside her pocket.

Carrying it around for too long would mix in her own thoughts and reduce its accuracy, so this often led to failed attacks and malfunctions. It was really only useful as a “good luck charm” she hoped not to use, but she had no choice but to rely on it here.

She brushed back her hair and pulled out something that had been held in her long ear all this time.

She now held something smaller than her little finger’s nail.

The solid object that had lost its luster was a body part that the enemy had recently prepared in order to trap Sibyl in the Girl’s Grill. She had collected it from the ruins during the confusion of the Underworld’s attack and she had thought about using it as the medium for a curse similar to the human witch doctor, but it had come in handy in an unexpected way.

In other words.

It was Beatrice’s back tooth.

Once someone lost their life, they were treated as a “thing”. Anyone who knew of Demon Lord Tselika’s struggles was aware of that cold equation that the world obeyed.

“Metal Jet: check.”

The crystal ball released a flash of light and eight deadly heat beams charged toward the black darkness.

The attacks arrived with staggered time delays, so the first three used their heat to induce a chemical change in the smokescreen ink and wiped away the colloidal optical veil. Then the remaining five rushed toward the Underworld Lord himself.

The leading two struck the scythe made of chains and crane hooks, knocking it back so he could not move. Then the primary attack flew toward his vitals while the last two cut off his escape on the left and right.

Even so, the Underworld Lord tenaciously worked toward survival.

To avoid the primary attack, he forcibly twisted his body out of the way. Heat beams had of course been fired to his left and right, but he held one of them back with the shell of his large crab claw. The beam punched through the armor and tore into the flesh within, but that slightly altered its course. Life and death had shifted. He just barely managed to move to the side the few millimeters needed to avoid a fatal hit.

A fingertip-sized hole was opened in the center of his girl’s stomach, but he sneered.

His body continued to move.

And a major attack was always followed by a defenseless moment. He must have intended to crush Sibyl with a counterattack because he swung around the scythe to directly hit her with the hook shells.

“Metal Jet: once more!!”

Another eight shots came from where the Sage and Boo Boo had gotten down on the ground.

The Sage could freely reallocate her Experience Points to use any Magic she wanted, so she could do anything Beatrice could.

The scythe was hit just as it was swung forward and the Underworld Lord, who had a spiral shell horn on his forehead, staggered backwards. Not even balling up his torso and mermaid tail would be enough to avoid this one. Unable to keep his balance, he fell onto his back.

If someone did not do something, they would all be killed.

The one who got up with a fierce momentum was Boo Boo.

He held his giant Shining Weapon that could be mistaken for a log or a steel beam. With a crushing rather than stabbing motion, he slammed the flat tip against the fallen girl’s chest.

Something was flattened with a dull sound.

Red blood spilled from the Underworld Lord’s lovely lips which must have belonged to someone’s corpse.

He was pinned to the ground, so only the mermaid tail could flail back and forth.

Boo Boo’s face also twisted in pain, but Sibyl spoke to him from the side.

“You need not feel any guilt. This will have saved Vivian and the others who were used as tools even after their deaths.”

“Kh...”

The Underworld Lord’s tongue writhed as if some bonds or restraints within his body had been directly destroyed.

For the first time, words left his mouth.

“...So this is the end. Take the Next Generation Embryo for yourselves. It seems to have been too great a burden for me.”

“You...”

“Boo Boo, don’t feel bad. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Indeed you have not.”

The quitter looked up at Boo Boo while lying on his back.

Even now that lord continued to sneer.

“And now it is your turn. The woman is clearly clever and I doubt the beast is as dense as he looks. So surely you’ve started to catch on. The Next Generation Embryo is not as convenient as it sounds. I don’t know which of you will obtain it, but it cannot bring salvation to you both.”

“What...?”

“The Next Generation Embryo is a giant tree with the ability to bring about a new age by influencing the planet’s axis of rotation and building up continents, but there is a species barrier at the foundation. So if you chose humanity as the species to stand at the center, it will design an age in which that species can most easily prosper. For some reason, the humans of the past blindly believed that species would unconditionally be themselves.”

“...”

“In other words, the Next Generation Embryo can only save a single species. No matter how much you analyze its structure and attempt to downsize it, that limitation cannot be overturned if you wish to save a specific individual.”

It was a decisive statement.

That evil which had taken a girl’s form gave them a sticky sneer to the very end.

“I have been monitoring your situation through the autonomous hippocampus that manages the spine gateway. Breaking down a single Next Generation Embryo will only provide the equation for saving one species. As they each have different effective values, you must choose humans if you wish to save Beatrice and you must choose Iberian Orcs if you wish to save the elder. It all boils down to that decision.”

Part 11

“...”

“...”

Silence followed.

Neither Boo Boo nor the Sage spoke a word.

The Underworld Lord was effectively no longer present. Someone that could never move again was not an obstacle. There were no tricks or traps here.

Beatrice’s Party or the Iberian Orc village?

The single Next Generation Embryo could only save one or the other. Needless to say, they would not reach an agreement if they tried to talk it out. They only had this one chance. And if they could not talk it out, what other method was there? The answer could not have been more obvious.

In a way, Sibyl may have been in a position to view this most impartially and objectively.

So she could only watch as the battle began.

It was a direct clash with no trickery.

The Sage stopped Boo Boo’s giant Shining Weapon with only the rapier held by her slender arm. They pressed their weapons against each other, clenched their teeth, and flung their words at each other like shells.

“Boo Boo, reviving the Iberian Orc village was what you wanted too, wasn’t it!? Those are the parents who gave birth to you, the siblings who raised you, and the friends who played with you! Are you really going to reject all of that!?”

“...I can’t do it.”

“Why not!?”

“No matter what, I can’t just abandon Beatrice and the others who were so nice to me!!!!!”

He was crying.

Even as he poured in all of his great body’s strength, large tears poured down his face even as he stood right in front of his enemy. This was not an easy decision for Boo Boo. He would love it if he could release all the souls sealed in his Shining Weapon.

The Sage made it look like she was going to push through with even more force, but then she suddenly pulled her sword back.

Just as the competition of strength ended, the Sage relied more on Magic than her blade.

“Wind Explo- Sky Bla- Shot Stor- Hurricane Ga- Lost Ai- Aero Hamm- Blitz Atta- Homing Bomb!!!!!”

Countless forms of Wind Magic almost seemed to fuse together into a single great torrent. But Boo Boo did not fall back which would only leave him in the path of danger. Nor did he try to block it which would only get him gradually torn apart. He dodged it by rolling toward the Sage’s side.

“!?”

“!!”

They clashed again.

Boo Boo and the Sage’s Shining Weapons directly clashed two or three times.

“...I will go to hell.”

That giant body spoke with a tremor in his voice.

And it soon rose to a shout that seemed like it would trigger an explosion.

“I’ve been through so much pain. My family was killed, I lost my home, and I had stones thrown at me while people called me ugly... But I managed to clench my teeth and bear with it. I had no other choice. But...but!! I can’t do the same thing when it comes to Beatrice and the others!! I-I...sob...I won’t give up. I don’t want to. Just imagining never seeing her again is making my fingers tremble and I can’t make it go awayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!”

The rules he used to judge himself had completely failed. All he had left were the ugly emotions that told him to achieve his goal even if it meant forcing the consequences onto someone else. But the Sage would not laugh at that monster.

She even felt respect for Boo Boo for having found someone he was willing to go that far for.

“I’m the same, Boo Boo...”

Nevertheless, she did not let up. A dark flame seemed to envelop her body as she faced Boo Boo’s pure rampage.

“Even if all of them accepted their deaths, I can’t bring myself to accept it... I would sell my soul to the devil if it would let me save the elder and the others. So, Boo Boo, your wish cannot be granted. Because I will defeat you here!!”

“I will save Beatrice and the others.”

“I will save the elder and the others.”

“So! Move!! Out of the way!!!!!!”

“So! Move!! Out of the way!!!!!!”

Part 12

Sutriona sensed a hopeless “current” forming.

She knew it was bad news, but there was no way of fighting it.

She slowly exhaled.

And the Fairy Queen gave an order to palm-sized Morgan who waited alongside her.

She asked the Fairy to relay a message to all of the Break News who could move.

“Prepare to attack. ...It will be dawn soon.”

Part 13

More and more impacts reverberated through the air.

Sibyl simply watched that fight to the death between Boo Boo and the Sage.

She thought this may have been what it was like to watch the end of the world.

If it was simply good against evil, one side simply had to exterminate the other. If it was evil against evil, they could smile thinly and exchange a dirty handshake. But what about with good against good? There was no correct answer there. There was no compromise or resignation. So the only result was for them to continue fighting to the end even if it meant throwing the world itself into the furnace.

They were foolish yet kind.

But they were not that simple either.

They had to understand that throwing someone else under the bus to resurrect those people would not lead to the bright smiles they pictured in their heads. No matter how bright the outside world was, they would still know the truth and that very brightness would eventually be too much to bear.

Even so.

No matter what.

Like a drowning man grasping at straws, they could not stop fighting. They seemed to be putting their regrets off until later as they worked to crush the “enemy” before their eyes to bring someone precious back to life.

Steel clashed with steel and the intersection of tremendous arm strength and incredible Magic produced more and more deafening sounds. Neither of them was unscathed. They were both scattering dark red blood all around them.

Looking purely at the specs, Boo Boo could not defeat the Sage when he was fighting all on his own with no form of support whatsoever. The previous victory over her had been in an elevator that restricted movement and with three Level Cappers on his side.

And yet he continued to fight even as he was bloodied.

It did not add up. If you tried to explain it with simple emotion and said his feelings were simply that strong, it was unlikely that the Sage would laugh at you even if she had supposedly brought logic and efficiency to their limit.

After all, the pillar she was trying to break here was formed from Boo Boo’s ideals, his desire, his future, and his happiness. Unless she broke all of that, she could not reach her goal of resurrecting the Iberian Orc village and the elder.

Royal Elf Sibyl could not take either side.

“...”

Was that because she was impartial?

Because she was a coward? Because she was indecisive?

Sibyl herself could not find the answer. She simply decided not to pretty up the fact that she could not choose.

But that may have been why she was the first to notice a slight oddity. It was objective Sibyl who noticed, not Boo Boo or the Sage who were actually participating in the fight.

“Oh?”

Something that should have been there was not.

Yes.

“...Where did the Underworld Lord go?”

Part 14

Some others were watching from even further away.

They were hiding behind the cover provided by a boulder-like section of the ground built up from the repeated rotting and regeneration. Needless to say, this was Beatrice and the others’ souls who had been given some level of freedom thanks to Omega’s protection.

They had overheard some information concerning the Next Generation Embryo in the town of the dead. With nothing else to go on, they had come here in order to steal a treasure they figured the Underworld Lord would not want taken. However...

“Dammit, what is Boo Boo doing!? We can’t let this continue!”

“Stop, Beatrice! Without our Shining Weapons, we’ll be obliterated the instant we head out there!!”

Yes, Beatrice was only equipped with bandages, scraps of cloth, and a restraint, so she did not even have the bare minimum of muscular reinforcement from Magic. She was no more than a frail girl who might die if a stray dog bit her. And since they had escaped the Underworld Lord’s surveillance, they could not enter the normal process in which the dead could wait to respawn after dying. They would only be placed under the Underworld Lord’s control if they did.

However.

“Haven’t things reached a much larger scale since we last spoke with them?”

“It seems that Next Generation Embryo can be used to resurrect us,” said Wildefrau in her horned and hooded cape and bat bikini (bottom only) and whose thumbs were restrained, forcing her arms to squeeze her large breasts between them.

“Are Boo Boo and the Sage fighting over who gets to use that!? Th-th-th-th-this is no joke!!” shouted Werewolf-mode Huldra as her face grew pale and her ears and tail stood straight up.

Someone else had placed their fates on the scales and this decision could take away their chance at resurrection. That would certainly be frightening...but that was not the issue here.

The fluffy Werewolf girl had more to say.

“I mean, there are tons more Next Generation Embryos further back, aren’t there!? It’s wrong to fight so desperately over one when there are so many more!!”

Boo Boo and the Sage should have considered it.

The octopus head on the back of the Underworld Lord’s patchwork girl body had used ink to scatter a colloidal optical veil. That meant they could not necessarily see everything there was to see. That had hidden what existed further back.

Even if the hidden objects were gigantic and lined up like harbor warehouses.

It was true that the Next Generation Embryo was something special. It was not an inorganic weapon like Ground’s Nir Abyss. It was a biological structure that could only be formed within the giant marine creature that was the Underworld.

However.

A single embryo per womb was a logic that only applied to humans or similarly-structured lifeforms. For example, some of the sharks, which were seen as the strongest marine creatures, could release dozens or even hundreds of eggs at once.

That said, there was only one world. Having tons of those trees growing at once would be a problem, so they were likely divided into different sections. One section was for creating and preserving the embryos and another was used for actually raising one and allowing the next age to blossom. Boo Boo’s group had been viewing the one sent to the latter section. If the first one succeeded, all the others would be abandoned. If the first one failed to complete the next age, another embryo would be dragged into that section. The process would repeat endlessly until success was finally achieved.

Sharks used eggs to reproduce, but they also had a unique habit of warming the eggs within their wombs.

This was nothing unusual.

There was not just the one Next Generation Embryo. There was a thick forest of them.

Their incalculable value had tricked Boo Boo and the Sage into thinking they were rare. But since the entire planetary axis had to be shifted and continents had to be built up from the sea in order to create the next age, the Underworld may have wanted as much insurance as possible.

But Boo Boo and the Sage had not realized that.

They had been convinced it was an ultra-rare and one-of-a-kind item.

“...Was their information being controlled?”

The Holy Swordswoman frowned and speculated while annoyed by the feeling of the eyepatch and dragging the ball-and-chain along.

“How did Boo Boo and the Sage learn about the Next Generation Embryos? I just hope it wasn’t something like a search engine where the host can intentionally influence what information they see.”

Unexpectedly, that was the truth.

If someone viewed search results that hid the fact that there were multiple Next Generation Embryos, they could only accept that mistaken information.

However, while Boo Boo was one thing, the Sage was not the kind of person to fall for that sort of thing. Had she simply had too little information on the Underworld, or had she lost her cool because it had to do with the Iberian Orc village and the elder.

With the bluish-white spirits floating around her, Japanese-style Ghost Filinion waved her hands in front of her large chest.

“A-anyway, what do we do? I don’t want to let Boo Boo and the Sage continue that pointless battle and, since this has to do with Magic, we need a living person to do the necessary work if we’re going to be resurrected. We can’t have Boo Boo lose and give up on our lives!”

“But if we set foot on the front line there, we could easily be turned to mincemeat before they even noticed we were there,” reminded Wildefrau in her horned and hooded cape and her bat bikini bottom with her arms squishing her large breasts together due to the thumb restraint.

Her opinion was added to by Armelina who was bothered by her hat and who had her arms and neck in stocks.

“And they’re going to be skeptical of an idea that’s too convenient for everyone. We can’t have them thinking about defeating everyone first and figuring things out later.”

“Chief, are you saying we need to get Boo Boo and the Sage to search the surrounding area of their own volition?”

“Yes, but how do we do that? The most obvious treasure is right in front of them, so I doubt they’re going to take their eyes off it for even a second. And for the Sage in particular, this is going to sound like enemy trickery.”

Beatrice brought a hand to her slender chin and thought for a while.

What did they need to convince Boo Boo and the Sage to look away from the obvious goal in front of them and calmly observe their surroundings once more?

(When you get down to it, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the Next Generation Embryo dangling in front of their eyes. It doesn’t matter to us if the Sage uses it or if it gets destroyed in the battle. Not when there are so many more located further in. In that case, it isn’t the crux of the issue.)

She poked at her eyepatch with her index finger and made a statement.

It did not feel right to say anything was at the center of this.

She needed to focus on the people.

“...About Boo Boo and the Sage.”

“Y-yes? What about them, Beatrice?”

“Let’s kick one of their asses. They’re only fighting because of their conflicting goals, so that fighting will automatically stop if one of them is removed from the equation.”

“You really are the worst sometimes, you know that?’

The main point was the fact that she had not said they would necessarily support Boo Boo and defeat the Sage.

In fact, supporting Boo Boo would not change much of anything. The Sage would see that as the natural arrangement and Beatrice’s group was fragile enough to be smashed to smithereens if someone lightly bumped into them since they lacked the Magical support provided by their Shining Weapons. They would not accomplish much if they supported Boo Boo.

They needed to supply the largest shock.

They needed something that would provide an impact overwhelming enough to freeze the atmosphere.

Those two were turning the gears in the simplest direction as they continued their fight, so what did the others have to do if they were to briefly stop those two’s movements and create an opening for their thoughts to calm down?

There was only one possible answer.

“...It looks like the only option is to hit Boo Boo with something significant.”

“He really might cry...”

Armelina sounded exasperated, but Beatrice was not going to rethink this.

Boo Boo trusted Beatrice’s group, so if he received a serious attack from them here, it was sure to come as a major shock. Meanwhile, the Sage would never expect eyepatched Beatrice to take her side. Seeing that unexpected attack would lead her to think about the purpose behind it. Hopefully, that would be enough for her to observe her surroundings once more and realize the truth of the Next Generation Embryos.

“B-but,” said Huldra. “We still can’t use Magic right now. I doubt Boo Boo will even flinch if a weak girl like me punches him.”

“We all know you’re really a guy, you fake girl.”

“We all know you’re really a guy, you fake girl.”

“We all know you’re really a guy, you fake girl.”

“We all know you’re really a guy, you fake girl.”

“I-I’m Alchemist Cheerleader Huldra-chan while I’m here...”

But whatever her gender, the tearful cast girl(?) had still raised a valid concern. Hitting Boo Boo with an unassisted human’s strength would accomplish nothing. Even if Boo Boo did not intend to attack them, they could be torn to pieces like they had been caught under a turning dump truck’s back wheel.

They needed some technology other than Magic to reach Boo Boo and the Sage’s level.

Only one thing came to mind.

“The Underworld Lord is an ancient being just like the humans of this world, so just like Abyss, he isn’t using modern Magic, right?”

“What about it?”

“...Now, there’s a scythe made from chains and crane hooks lying over there. I don’t know what it’s made from or how, but if we swung that around, could it deliver an effective blow to Boo Boo?”

Part 15

The limit was approaching.

While Boo Boo and the Sage’s repeated clashes shook their eardrums and the ground below their feet, Beatrice and the other girls got to work.

They were after the Underworld Lord’s scythe made of chains and crane hooks that had been discarded on the writhing ground. By hitting her beloved Boo Boo with that, Beatrice could supply enough of a psychological blow to stop the battle between him and the Sage.

However.

“...”

Unluckily, Royal Elf Sibyl had chosen the exact same moment to view her surroundings to find the vanished Underworld Lord.

“You there.”

And as soon as she drew her longbow, Beatrice’s heart tightened a bit.

(Oh, no. I need to dodge or run away...but when I think that...!)

The ball-and-chain grew heavier.

And a beam of light burst out and struck the scythe on the ground. Beatrice’s outstretched hand only just missed reaching the crane hook scythe before it was sent rolling off into the distance.

If Beatrice’s ball-and-chain had not changed – or if she was supported by Magic – she would have been able to nab the weapon before Sibyl’s attack reached it.

But what happened was what happened.

And the interference had not gone unnoticed by Boo Boo and the Sage. They had detected the new people that had snuck onto the battlefield.

The red-armored and miniskirted Sage clenched her teeth and let out a roar.

“Why must...why must you get in my way toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!???”

The roar was accompanied by a vicious torrent of various forms of Fire Magic that rushed toward Beatrice. After all this, it came down to fire. Normally, this wouldn’t have even scratched Beatrice thanks to her Resistance, but it would be fatal at the moment.

The Holy Swordswoman’s eyes widened, but someone else charged in from the side.

“Honestly...the trouble you put me through!!”

“...Wilde...frau...!!!???”

There was nothing she could do.

As Beatrice floated in the air, her eyepatch-obscured vision definitely saw a slight smile from that girl whose horned hood covered her curled blue hair.

The sound was unbelievably light.

A moment later, something red hot pierced through the blue girl, she lost her outline, she briefly seemed to glow faintly, and she shattered like crystal. Only some traces of sparkling light remained. She was gone.

All sound had vanished.

Beatrice could not even think about what this meant.

Only Werewolf Mode Huldra in her V-shaped fur outfit was calm enough to lower her ears and speak.

“Okay, I really think I should explain this. You see, Wildefrau and I accidentally got ourselves covered in something like king trumpet mushrooms and collapsed, so she had no choice but to freeze us in -273-degree coffins to sterilize us with the extreme low temperature. That put is in a state that wasn’t quite dead but wasn’t quite alive either, but once the process was complete and our bodies were safe, it was set to automatically thaw us out. And I was just thinking it was probably about time for that. Tee hee☆”

“Huldra!?”

Another shot arrived.

Huldra disappeared into glittering light just like Wildefrau, but...yes, once she thought about it, Beatrice realized this was odd. When Omega or Alpha Zero had been defeated back on the island of Ground’s Nir, had they vanished in such a dramatic fashion?

(Oh, so that’s it... This isn’t chess; it’s shogi. Do you switch sides depending on whether your body is alive or dead at the moment? By resurrecting their physical bodies at just the right time, Wildefrau and Huldra teleported their souls back to their bodies.)

“...I see.” A dark smile appeared on the Sage’s face as she seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. “If the quasi-dead bodies are reactivated, the intruders will be automatically returned to them. In that case...Beatrice, I can unfreeze your dying bodies to summon you back to them. Of course, you’ll just die of your wounds shortly thereafter!!”

“Geh, geh!? You were storing our bodies like that!?”

Japanese-style Glasses Ghost Filinion, whose breasts rested atop her corset, grew as pale as her super-deformed spirits, but the Sage did not actually move on to the next action.

That was because the surrounding air roared around them as Boo Boo used all his weight to charge toward the Sage.

“Nhh, Boo Boo!!”

The Sage swung her patchwork rapier, but there were no longer any tactics in Boo Boo’s mind. He did not insist on using his log or steel beam of a Shining Weapon to attack.

He chose something more certain.

He chose something that was guaranteed to protect Beatrice and the others’ souls.

A wet sound rang out. Boo Boo had chosen not to avoid the Sage’s patchwork rapier and instead caught it with his shoulder. The thin blade was embedded in his thick skin and muscles. A red liquid flowed out. But he did not cry out. He used even more strength to hold the rapier inside the wound using just his muscles and then he took a step forward.

No form of Resistance mattered any longer. He used the simple pressure on the wrist holding the grip in order to tear the Shining Weapon from the Sage’s hand.

“Wha-!?”

The Sage could not even complete her exclamation.

With the force of a dump trunk, Boo Boo tackled the Sage’s entire body with his shoulder. Even if she had gone beyond being the strongest, she could not send any commands to her Shining Weapon with it out of her hand. She completely forgot to endure it with her Impact Resistance and her slender body was sent flying in almost comical fashion.

The patchwork rapier remained in Boo Boo’s shoulder.

“S-squeal... Beatrice...”

He turned toward the precious person he had successfully protected, but then he seemed to tense up in surprise. Eyepatched and bandaged Beatrice continued moving and reached for the crane hook scythe lying on the ground.

That weapon was as heavy as a steel beam and Beatrice had no Parameter adjustments supporting her, so she could not lightly swing it around one-handed like it was a bamboo or wooden sword. But that did not matter. As long as she could clench her teeth and just barely managed to lift it, there was a way she could use it.

“You too, Boo Boo...”

She spun her entire body around.

A heavy and intimidating wind picked up speed and force as she made more rotations.

This throwing form may have been more like the hammer throw than baseball pitching or javelin throwing.

“You need to come to your sensesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!”

The final weapon rotated as it flew through the air.

That pig-faced giant was nearly four meters tall.

He made such a large target that no one could have missed him.

“Ah.”

And it seemed Boo Boo was slow to react.

The many thick chains danced. The tip of one heavy crane hook caught his cheek in a horizontal blow. Since it had been thrown by a girl’s slender arms instead of the Underworld Lord, it could not have had much force behind it, but to Boo Boo, it had probably been like a sudden slap from the companion he had been fully relying on.

While ruled by his combat instincts, his senses of pain and fear numbed over, but that thread of tension could snap surprisingly easily.

And that was where this unexpected shock came in.

It was like how a large natural disaster could lead to cooperation between two armies who had been glaring at each other during a war.

“S-squeal, Beatrice...”

“Well, Boo Boo? You seem to have started a fight to the death over our futures, but did that slap help cool your head? Who ever asked you to do this? Were you really calm enough to view the world around you?”

“...Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!!!!!!”

“Do you want to know why I did this and if I have any hope of winning after this? If you calm down, I’ll tell you. Don’t worry, I won’t treat you badly.”

Boo Boo was so utterly confused that he started crying like a child, but Beatrice smiled at him despite the violent measures she had taken.

However, it was not over yet. The Underworld Lord had gotten off to somewhere.

“This is bad. He really is gone!”

“Well, he can apparently destroy all the ghosts around him and make them restart from the beginning, so we might actually be lucky he isn’t here.”

“How is this lucky!? U-um, he can’t rely on the Next Generation Embryo and he can’t use Huldra or Wildefrau’s bodies since they’ve already been resurrected. Oh, I really don’t like the conclusion I’m reaching here, but wouldn’t he be targeting our bodies!? If he isn’t here, he might be trying to shatter the ice coffins to truly kill us!!”

That said, there was not much Beatrice and the others could do.

As had already been revealed, none of the ghosts around the Underworld Lord could maintain their forms if he used his full power. Before even getting to the lack of support from Shining Weapons, they simply could not approach him in their current forms.

But that was not the main question in the bandaged girl’s mind.

Something else bothered her more.

“Wait a second. Where’s Boo Boo?”

She knew the answer, but there was nothing she could do about it.

If their guess was correct, they could not even approach.

“Did Boo Boo leave to go settle this on his own!?”

Part 16

A creepily wet sound echoed through the darkness.

It came from the Underworld Lord who had a single spiral shell horn on his forehead.

With a blue-haired girl at his core, he supported himself on an irregularly pulsating flesh wall and staggered onward with a clear destination in mind.

The scale-covered mermaid tail swayed weakly behind the girl’s hips.

Several dead flesh vessels had been sewn together and were being used like a robot. Crushing some organs and bones meant little when he was not too attached to any one body.

(No matter how many of the analyzed bodies I sew together, I still can’t escape the enemy’s expectations.)

Each time he coughed, a dark red liquid splattered to the ground.

Pain and suffering exploded within his body, but that was only an issue for the temporary vessel of flesh. However, the emotion of fear was a different matter. It squeezed at the center of his chest like a strange tentacle.

(But it isn’t over yet.)

The Underworld Lord continued to struggle while dragging along his body which really was mostly just a corpse at this point.

(This is a flesh vessel I prepared for myself. But if I use fresh flesh not of my design, I can escape their equations and achieve victory...)

Only one possibility came to mind.

He resented the very existence of dead beings not under his control, but since those girls’ souls were floating around, the bodies they had come from would have to be entirely defenseless.

He could not immediately hijack them since they were being kept in an in-between state of cold storage, but that was not a major problem. He only had to destroy the containers to break the bodies out of cold storage and quickly turn them into fresh corpses.

“Ohh...”

And then he found them.

As the Underworld’s flesh rotted, countless caves were formed. There were too many of those small rooms for even the Underworld Lord to keep track of them all, but in one, he found three ice coffins that would never melt even at room temperature. If what the enemy had said was accurate, those were storage containers supported by the Sage’s Magic.

Holy Swordswoman Beatrice.

White Witch Filinion.

Fighter Priest Armelina.

“Ohh, ohh, ohh!!”

He cried out in joy for the first time in a very long time.

All thirteen of the flesh vessels he had created using different methodologies had been thoroughly investigated by the Sage, inside and out, so she knew their strengths and weaknesses. Rearranging those existing pieces could not change the predetermined outcome, so he was unable to overturn the game board.

But if he used these...

He now had a total of three hunks of flesh. If he tore them apart, sewed them together, and created a new flesh vessel to “change into”, the enemy’s equations would fall apart. By including values the Sage was unfamiliar with, he could reach a result outside her expectations. At that point, defeating them all would be a simple task.

He smiled while coughing up blood, leaning against one of the ice coffins, and rubbing his cheek against it.

This was why he had made that bluff.

He just needed to “change into” this fresh flesh vessel while the enemy was busy fighting each other.

Inside the chilly, clear coffin, Beatrice appeared to be sleeping, but she was not breathing. The coffin was no protection whatsoever. He would dig up this grave and transform the fresh dead into his own power.

“Heh heh.”

The corpse seemed to shine like it had been prepared for him by heaven from the very, very beginning.

Nothing was more persistent than death. In the end, no one could escape its grasp.

In the same way, the ancient humans had built up a civilization more advanced than any other, but it was their own actions that had brought victory to the Underworld Lord.

“Ah ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!”

But his explosion of laughter did not last long.

With his single spiral shell horn, the Underworld Lord heard something from directly behind him.

It was a far too loud and heavy footstep that was overflowing with life force.

“...”

Still leaning against the ice coffin, the Underworld Lord slowly – yes, slowly – looked back.

He saw Death standing there.

This being would bring about the demise of the lord of all death. He was approaching with a giant Shining Weapon resting on his shoulder.

“I...”

The Underworld Lord spoke without meaning to.

No, his mouth had been pried open by the pressure.

“I was meant to resurrect the world.”

His breathing was heavy.

But that was not simply due to his puny flesh vessel’s crushed lungs.

“But I was only allowed to exist until the creation of the next age! There was no place for me in the new age once my work was complete!! Me, only me!! I had put in all the work and save everyone, but only I would be shut out of the next age so that I could rot, be forgotten, and die...!!!!!!”

“Were you lonely?”

Death asked just once.

He narrowed his eyes and spoke in an almost irreverently quiet tone.

“Would you not have done all this if someone had joined you?”

“...Don’t make me laugh.”

The Underworld Lord may have had a few different options.

One of those may have been to wisely stall for time until another opportunity presented itself.

But he instead spat out some words. No matter how twisted a form it took, he was the greatest tyrant. He was known as the Underworld Lord and he had acted accordingly.

“I am a savior. Everything will be saved by my hand! Thus, everyone has a duty to be saved! They have no choice in the matter!! Offer up your souls and I will manage them all fairly. And it is all in the name of the lord of all death!!”

“...”

“Kneel, kneel, kneel!! A system with no king is worthless. After surviving so much ugliness, surely you have some sliver of understanding of the mayhem brought about when everyone chaotically seeks their own individual happiness... I will not create a new age and I will not return the world to the living!! For death is another form of order!!!!!”

That was as far as he got.

The Shining Weapon rose ever-so-slightly from Death’s large shoulder.

Boo Boo had decided to kill the Underworld Lord. His anger had reached its limit.

He no longer cared about his rule about only killing to eat and only taking lives to survive. Anything was fine as long as he could protect Beatrice, Filinion, and Armelina.

He would truly become the bloody monster that deserved to have stones thrown at him.

But.

However.

At the very last moment, a certain girl’s face appeared in his mind. Hearing her voice against may have affected him more than he thought.

They had promised to become people who would not disappoint each other when they met again.

That may not have been something to remember at a time like this.

But the pain of his struck cheek returned to him. This was not someone who would simply smile thinly, nod in agreement to whatever he said, and watch as he walked toward the cliff’s edge. There were people who would risk their own lives to stop him if he lost control.

She had stopped him once already, so was he really going to cross that line again?

She had put her life on the line to protect him from that stain, so would he really waste her effort?

Boo Boo could not bring himself to move his raised Shining Weapon. Instead, a wet sound burst from his gut.

“Gah!?”

“...This isn’t over...”

He had been hit with an attack from dead ahead. In his crushed girl form, the Underworld Lord had flicked something with his fingers to launch it at high speed. A small spiral shell acted as a bullet that spun like a drill to punch through Boo Boo’s thick armor of fat and muscle.

Boo Boo used his thick Shining Weapon as a staff to just barely stop himself from collapsing and the single-horned lord sneered wickedly.

“I will not let it end here. I will take the specimens in the ice and I will take you as you fall here! I will sew it all together and create myself a new ultimate form!!”

Just then, a voice spoke.

“You did well lasting this long, child of the forest. But you need not wear down your soul and dignity with the sin of murder.”

The voice carried tranquility.

It altered the area’s atmosphere just like the ring of a bell.

“...Sibyl...?”

“No new sins are needed to defeat the wicked. The world is made so the evil will fall at the hand of their own deeds. Underworld Lord, if you insist on calling yourself a lord, then show the people you have a way of life worth following, even in death.”

“You...dare...”

The thing borrowing a girl’s form coughed up blood and leaned against one of the ice coffins while glaring back at the Royal Elf with bloodshot eyes. No matter how close he was, he could not change into that body without breaking the ice first.

“You are no more than a doll sitting upon a throne that was given to you. You rule no more than the moss coating the surface of an artificial island and you dare act like the equal of one who rules over the death of all continents?”

“I never once thought of us as equal, you lowest of villains. Now prepare yourself.”

With that, Royal Elf Sibyl raised her Shining Weapon. That weapon resembled a bow or staff depending on how you looked at it and the decisive result had already occurred by the time it glowed.

Royal Elves could materialize the residual thoughts left in objects and turn them into attacks.

And no matter how much it might move around, a corpse was still a thing.

So.

What was it Sibyl had summoned this time?

“Wha-...ah...?”

For the first time, the Underworld Lord uttered a sound of true confusion. He had sewn several marine creatures to a slender girl’s body to create something like the final evolution of a mermaid...but the arms of that body began to move against their owner’s will.

“...It took a while before I could perceive this correctly, but, well, it’s sort of like a piece of trick art. Whether it’s moving or not, a corpse is a thing, not a person. Once I thought of it as the same as using Beatrice’s back tooth, what I had to do all started to click into place.”

No.

In this case, who really was the “owner”? When Sibyl next spoke, her gentle voice was clearly directed at someone else.

“Come forth, Vivian. This is a tribute from the ruler of the forests to the ruler of the seas.”

“Wait, this belongs to me! This is my body until I can take over another!!”

“But it is now a mere thing. A thing that once belonged to someone else. And didn’t you hear me? No new sins are needed to defeat the wicked. The world is made so the evil will fall at the hand of their own deeds.”

Nothing more was needed.

(Oh, ohhhh.)

That girl – who was clearly a different person than the single-horned Underworld Lord – gave a smile that Boo Boo had not seen before.

Someone who no longer existed gave them a bow. And then....

(Owaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?)

The villain was not even allowed a death cry.

She placed her hands on either side of her head like she was preparing to remove a helmet and she slowly applied pressure to her skull and brain. She took action to end everything that had begun with her body.

Without a single candidate to hijack in her place, the Underworld Lord could not maintain his existence.

She seemed to be saying this was her body and she was free to do with it as she pleased.