Chapter 325

(325)

The space was endless, and it was both infinitely black and clear.

It was similar to looking at a very, very clear night sky.

The difference was that right now, we were not lying on a veranda looking at the night sky; we felt as though we had been thrown into the very center of it.

Far away, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of red, blue, and white stars were scattered like grains of sand on a beach.

“Senpai, senpai! What on earth is going on?”

Niar’s eyes spun in different directions.

The ends of her red cream-colored hair floated upward as if it had lost its weight.

“I don’t know either, little sister! What the hell is this?”

Sererassie, too, held onto her hat that was flying into the sky with one hand while tightly gripping my hand with her other hand.

It felt as if we were experiencing a convulsion.

“Do you think I’ve ever been in a situation like this? Just calm down. Don’t faint.”

Without a doubt, I had never seen anything like this even before the Return.

“Sister. Get a grip. Don’t scream—.”

“Isn’t it amazing?!”

“Huh?”

Sererassie wore an ecstatic expression.

“Little sister. Niar. Can’t you feel it? It’s an incredible amount of mana!”

Hearing that, I felt the mana surrounding us.

“……You’re right?”

“……That’s true?”

The air itself was sweet.

An immense amount of mana flowed majestically throughout this vast space—no, throughout the entire world.

Even the greenhouse room where Jeilliris was resting did not have this level of mana.

“F-first, let’s go back. Do you even know where we are to stay here?”

Fortunately, the suction that had pulled us out through the window had already disappeared.

I poured mana into my invisible gauntlet and wrapped the three of us in telekinesis.

Whooooom!

When I looked back, the window we had been flung out of was floating in midair.

It looked rather small; if we had looked back later, we might not have found it at all.

Thinking about what might have happened then sent chills down my spine.

Crack!

Sererassie and Niar also applied spells using their own fields to propel our waist belts and bodies toward the window.

It felt like we were flying through the sky.

“This isn’t half bad!”

Niar shouted with apparent excitement.

The surrounding scenery was quite beautiful, the concentration of mana was high, and there was the window far off in the distance.

For now, it was a situation that wasn’t as bad as I had initially thought.

“Still, don’t let your guard down. That mage wouldn’t have shown us anything good. Whatever it is, they must have seen something that no human could survive.”

“That’s true. What do you think, senpai?”

Responding to Niar’s question, Sererassie pondered for a moment as she moved her lips.

“Niar, you mentioned that a magical realm opened earlier.”

“Yes. I said that after seeing what happened on the 71st floor.”

“……If this space itself is a magical realm, where do you think the core would be?”

The feeling was suffocating.

Where on earth could we find the core in this vast space, and how strong would the anomaly that came out from this vast space be?

Just thinking about it gave me goosebumps.

“Sister. That window seems to be different from ordinary magical realms….”

“Does it make sense to apply ordinary standards to things related to the ancient?”

Neither I nor Niar could say a word.

I finally broke the prolonged silence.

“……Let’s go back and investigate first. Until we find out something, we’ll close the 71st floor. What do you say?”

We reached the window and looked back at the starry space.

Fortunately, the laboratory was still visible through the window, and there were no transparent walls blocking us.

I pushed Niar into the window first.

Outside, it felt like I could hardly feel my body weight, but the moment I crossed the window, it felt like the weight returned.

Thud!

“Ow!”

Niar stumbled and rolled onto the table, landing ungracefully on the floor.

“Careful, sister.”

“Your Excellency!”

Next was Sererassie.

She gracefully crossed the window’s edge and stepped onto the table, carefully lowering herself to the floor.

“Little sister. Hurry up and come in.”

“Got it.”

Just as I was about to cross over, a strange wave emanated from above.

Kyaaaaaaaaa—!

It was a mental wave that resonated deep inside my head.

However, this mental wave felt different from any I had heard up until now.

Kyaaaaaaaaa—!

I furrowed my brow and, after some contemplation, realized the difference.

This wave did not carry malice, animosity, or any sense of contamination.

It wasn’t something that could turn a person into a monster just by existing.

Sererassie and Niar, perhaps unable to hear it properly, looked at me with puzzled expressions.

“Little sister?”

“Valenciaunos?”

I lightly raised my left hand and looked up.

“Crazy.”

An enormous anomaly was slowly approaching us.

……Is that really an anomaly?

* * *

Valenciaunos could not grasp its form.

It was endlessly changing shape against the backdrop of the black space.

It resembled an octopus with dozens of long tentacles, glowing white, continuously creating new tentacles while devouring the old ones.

“Ha.”

The strangeness sent chills down his spine, made his insides tingle, dried his lips, and throbbed his head.

Yet, even in that situation, he did not lose his reason and accepted that this scenery was just the beginning.

Oooooooh—!

With a high and majestic sound, something rose from below.

To Valenciaunos, it appeared to be a giant whale with twelve pairs of eyes.

There was no object around for comparison, so he could not properly estimate its size.

He could only guess that one eyeball could hold a whole lake, more or less.

In such an immense existence, there were also entities several dozen meters in size.

One resembled a horse clad in armor of bones, plastered with dozens of legs, constantly creating and losing new legs.

A serpent with six pairs of wings, a massive head with faces on all sides, an ice chunk encased in flames burning green.

Valenciaunos floated alone in the middle of the vast space, watching all of them approach.

With his unique mental power, he captured everything clearly in his sight.

Snap!

He heard something snapping in his mind.

A red aura overlay appeared before his eyes.

His head felt painfully swollen as if it were going to burst.

‘So that mage has gone insane because of this.’

Those beings were things that should not be seen by a human being.

Tsut tsut tsut!

Valenciaunos raised the power of Az and the power of incantations simultaneously, mutating his body.

His insides became crystal, his exterior fashioned with scales and horns, and the headache and pressure in his head vanished.

‘That’s not some anomaly. That is the ancient itself. This place…… is a kind of dimensional rift.’

The ancient beings lived in another world, and to cross over from that world to this one, they created cores and constructed magical realms to give their bodies time to adapt.

‘They’re waiting to cross over. Perhaps they are currently opening a magical realm in this world. Damn it.’

Valenciaunos hesitated for a moment when he was about to summon flames.

Behind him was an open window.

If he attacked carelessly, those ancient beings would come through that door, and the capital would go up in flames.

He hesitated, unsure of what to do.

At that moment, the serpent with six wings spoke.

Siaaaaaaa—!

For an ordinary person, the moment they heard the first syllable, their blood would boil and explode, and monsters that seemed to arise from a nightmare would emerge from every drop of that blood.

Though it wasn’t in language, Valenciaunos could fully comprehend its meaning.

– Jealous.

‘Jealous? What kind of nonsensical talk is that?’

– You already have your own door.

‘!’

From that short line, Valenciaunos deduced dozens of pieces of information, combining what he already knew.

‘Right. Opening a magical realm and such is a kind of tuning process for them. They cannot just move straight into our world. This door is like a banquet in a portrait for them.’

‘They must think of me as a similar being who has already crossed over. After all, I swallowed Cuith Az.’

‘That mage must have opened this door by accident and saw this spectacle. If I’m getting a headache, how much worse would it have been for them? It’s understandable that they would think of suicide or corruption as salvation.’

The Bandit Duke opened wide his yellow eyes and stared at the world before him.

The vast space and the powerful beings that could crush everything without malice were enough to make everything in the human realm feel meaningless.

An ordinary person would consider all of life pointless, offering their existence to those powerful entities.

However, Valenciaunos had also been someone who had experienced being a similar existence to them.

That was long before he became strong enough to face them.

A single numeral he wrote, a single piece of paper he signed, affected the lives of countless subjects, swinging them between heaven and hell.

Would he spend the budget for winter poverty relief or for the knights’ winter training?

Would he use the river at the front as a defensive line or the mountains at the back?

Would he negotiate with this country or drop meteorites on the capital of that country?

He was an aristocrat who lived affecting the lives of numerous people without clear malice or benevolence.

At the same time, he acknowledged the enormity and power of the enemies that he and his twin sister would have to confront in the future.

“Still, you’re wrong.”

Valenciaunos mocked the choices of the mage he had just seen.

“What you chose is not truth but surrender. I enjoy compromise, but I do not wish to give up. I’ve tried surrender once before. You must have regretted it in your last moments, right?”

He ignited flames within himself.

A vast amount of high-purity mana filled the air, and all of that became the power he could wield.

Fwoosh!

Flames resonated from the crystal of Az, amplifying their power infinitely.

Whooooom!

Crack, crackle!

Cracks like broken pottery raced across his entire body, and the red light flickered in the gaps between them.

Oooooooh—!

The giant beings directed strange gazes toward him.

“Until now, you were our nightmare.”

Valenciaunos cried out sweetly.

“Now, I will be your nightmare!”

Ah, aaaaah—!

He looked up at the sky and shouted, and dark red mental waves shot out in all directions, drawing a circle.

It was a strike filled with clear animosity, malice, and intent to kill.

Fwoosh!

Endless flames spread endlessly across the boundless space.

It was a flame that seemed it would completely burn the dimensional rift.

Seeing that the right and left ends were completely filled with flames, Valenciaunos laughed madly.

“Hahaha, hahahahaha, hahahahaha!”

He laughed for a while, before spitting out venomously.

“I won’t let any unknown entities interfere with the path that child takes.”

And then he leaped beyond the window, smashing the window frame with his scaled hands.

Bang!

Crack!

With the sound of shattering glass, the ‘door’ closed.

The black space vanished as if it had never existed.

“Ah.”

What remained was the shattered window and the blazing sunlight pouring down.

“How do I deal with the aftermath now?”

* * *

We closed the door safely, and I stood there dazed for a while.

The voices of those beings still echoed in my head.

Even disregarding the existence of the ancients, it would have been a situation where the magicians of the Ivory Tower might have gone on a rampage in the middle of the capital.

“Haah.”

The responsibility of failing to manage the Infiltrator Archbishop’s finger lay with the Ivory Tower, and it was Sererassie who had secretly passed it along, and as soon as the church heard this news, they delightfully lambasted the Ivory Tower and the imperial court in speeches…….

“I have a headache.”

I felt lost about how to handle it.

Surprisingly, Sererassie was the one who organized the scene instead.

“First, we need to recover. After that, let’s bring in the fire mages and destruction mages.”

She had recovered the Infiltrator Archbishop’s finger and the direct copy of Alman del, and along with the mages from the Ivory Tower, she handled the Infiltrators left on the 71st floor.

“Processing of Room 7102 has been completed!”

“Room 7133 has also been cleared.”

“Did everyone check the vents and window frames?”

Sererassie, alongside Gestarte, reviewed the research records of the Infiltrator mages and organized the sequence of events of this situation.

And surprisingly, they even proceeded with negotiations regarding the accountability for this incident.

“It seems that in studying the Infiltrator Archbishop’s finger, they were contaminated by the corruption, and opened a door leading to ‘that place’ by retro-calculating the direct copy of Alman del, where they completely went insane after witnessing the ancient there. This seems to be the case, Your Excellency.”

“Yes, Master. I agree. So all the responsibility lies with the Ivory Tower.”

“However, it was you who initially had the Infiltrator Archbishop’s finger brought secretly.”

“Let’s bury everything that happened today in the sands of time.”

It was unfathomable that she was negotiating responsibility against her hometown.

I had even poured holy water on her head, thinking she had been mentally contaminated.

“What are you doing?”

“Are you alright? I never thought I would hear you speak of responsibility against your beloved hometown.”

Sererassie teasingly smiled and zapped my wrist with electricity.

Zzap!

“Now I know. No matter how much I love it, blindly giving it away isn’t a solution.”

What a remarkable transformation.