Episode 81: Yusera (4)
*
It was already late evening, and the sun had completely set.
As expected of a metropolitan city, Hailen was still bustling with noise.
Of course, to her, who had climbed to the rooftop of her school, the sounds felt distant.
“Is this really the right path?”
She looked up at the night sky with a sad expression.
Thanks to the transparent barrier surrounding Hailen, the stars were shining brightly overhead.
“Some of those stars are already extinguished.”
She felt fear.
What if her Divine Seat was also a star that had already burned out?
What if she had been holding onto a fallen Divine Seat all this time?
“Please answer me, Divine Seat.”
Her gaze was full of desperation, as if begging for life.
But there was no reply.
Yusera’s face grew colder with every passing moment.
“Are you planning to keep your mouth shut like that?”
She started to move forward.
Step by step, towards the edge of the rooftop.
And finally, she reached the very edge.
“Is it okay to do this?”
She looked down at what lay below.
The depths seemed to stir her senses.
It wasn’t an extremely high height, but there was no guarantee she could survive the fall.
“Please speak quickly. Stop me.”
She was sincere.
She had already come too far to turn back.
At the very least, she wanted confirmation that the path she had taken was the right one.
But there was still no answer.
“It’s the end.”
She leaned forward.
The ground below her aligned with her line of sight.
At that moment, she felt the sensation of falling wrap around her body.
“Uh?”
A gust of wind suddenly swept in.
And someone embraced her.
“Damn it!”
It was a somewhat familiar voice.
She turned her head to see who had caught her.
It was Sung Yoo-rang, a member of her team.
“Why?”
Before she could even think about how he had found her, her mind raced with the question of why he was hugging her.
After all, she was already falling.
At this rate, it could only be a case of double suicide.
…That’s certainly how it was.
At that moment, a miracle occurred.
Her falling speed began to decrease.
“What the…?”
*
Sung Yoo-rang realized why he had been so concerned about Yusera.
It was a sense of kinship.
Her lost and wandering state mirrored his own.
And the moment he saw her about to throw herself off the rooftop, there was no time for logical thinking.
He harnessed the Wind’s Power to rush in and catch her.
“Damn it!”
However, she was already falling at a considerable speed.
He was trying his best to slow her descent with the Wind’s Power, but perhaps due to her weight, it seemed he couldn’t exert his usual strength.
Crunch.
Fortunately, a tree was directly below them.
He managed to slow their impact with the Wind’s Power, and the branches cushioned the shock.
In the end, it hurt a bit, but he found himself rolling on the ground, alive.
“That was close.”
Double suicide was simply unacceptable.
As he lay on the ground, gasping for breath, Yusera asked, “Why?”
He responded nonchalantly.
“Well, if someone is trying to die, they should at least be saved first.”
She was asking something so obvious.
He thought it was an odd question for someone he had just rescued, but given the memories of Sung Yoo-rang he had, he could understand her confusion.
He himself had tried to commit suicide the moment he entered the first trial.
“Well then…”
He had passed one hurdle.
However, hoping that Yusera would change on her own was a rather optimistic thought.
He had already been negligent in understanding her situation.
He couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again.
“Yusera, when was the last time you contacted your Divine Seat?”
Though she appeared a bit flustered at his knowledge of the Divine Seat, she answered.
“…Three years ago.”
What the hell.
Three years ago was before he even received Sung Yoo-rang’s memories.
This meant that her issue was entirely separate from what he and Wilhelm had experienced.
‘No cultivation, then.’
In truth, he should have thought of this earlier when assessing her cultivation state.
However, perhaps due to adapting more quickly to this side as a player than as Sung Yoo-rang, it hadn’t come to him immediately.
‘Does this mean she had still been following the Divine Seat’s orders from three years ago?’
Yusera must have been something else.
If she weren’t excessively dependent on her Divine Seat, she wouldn’t have gone this far.
Thinking back to how Sung Yoo-rang had also chosen to abandon his cultivation at one point brought a pang to his heart.
‘But Yusera must have sensed that fact to some degree.’
If not, she wouldn’t have made such an extreme choice.
It meant that sweet lies would not work on her now.
Ultimately, there was only one way.
“Then, your Divine Seat has already given up on you three years ago.”
Straightforward approach.
There was no other option.
“Thanks for saving me, but who are you to speak so casually about my Divine Seat?”
“Well, I wonder if that Divine Seat even remembers you.”
Of course, it might remember her.
As one of the characters it had messed up.
That failure experience might serve as a valuable lesson for the next time they cultivated Yusera.
However, that held no meaning to Yusera here and now.
“That’s…”
“See? You don’t know anything about that Divine Seat.”
Yusera retorted angrily.
“Do you know better?”
“Yes.”
Of course he did.
He held the complete memories of one Divine Seat.
Though he couldn’t boldly claim to be a Divine Seat like before, he still bore half of its essence.
“My Divine Seat was a chain smoker with an alcohol problem. A fool reflecting its own failures onto me.”
“How do you know that…?”
“Knowing how I know doesn’t matter. What’s important is that they are imperfect beings just like us.”
With that, Yusera’s eyes widened.
“Imperfect beings?”
“You must have known it too. After all, that path of the sword they ordered you on is riddled with flaws.”
Yusera fell silent.
That could be taken as an affirmation.
“Well then, does this mean that the Divine Seat is irrelevant to anyone?”
“What do you mean by that?”
This was where the main point began.
His frontal assault strategy to rescue her.
He began to speak the words that would set it in motion.
“How about we make a bet?”
“A bet all of a sudden?”
“Yes, the winner takes the loser’s Divine Seat.”
Yusera looked taken aback by that statement.
It was indeed a suggestion that warranted such a response.
“But I don’t really know what a Divine Seat is.”
“It’s simple. A Divine Seat can give orders. But those orders have no real coercion.”
She looked even more confused.
“If that’s the case, isn’t it meaningless?”
Meaningless, huh?
The biggest proof of that meaninglessness was standing right before her.
“But you’ve been tied to the words of that meaningless Divine Seat for three years.”
Yusera’s expression hardened.
It seemed she was finally realizing something.
She asked him, “That’s all well and good. But what will be the terms of our bet?”
Terms of the bet.
Since he had chosen the frontal assault, he had only one thing he was confident in.
Though it was a bit underhanded.
“Let’s settle it with swordsmanship. We’ll do it with swordsmanship.”
Yusera looked surprised again at those words.
And then she began to ponder.
She must have been assessing whether this bet was a trap.
However, she had no choice but to accept it.
After all, she didn’t really know how good his swordsmanship was and she was likely in a situation where she had nothing to lose.
“Just acknowledge that it’s a trap and hurry up and accept it.”
After a moment of contemplation, Yusera finally spoke.
“Alright. Let’s give it a shot.”
With that, he had succeeded halfway.
*
“Are you really okay with this?”
Yusera kept asking, seemingly concerned and checking with him repeatedly.
Naturally, he was completely fine.
“I said I’m fine. I’m surprisingly good at swordsmanship, you know?”
“No, I mean, I’m asking if it’s really okay for me to use overload.”
He had made it a rule for the bet that they had to go all out.
That included Yusera’s overload.
“Use whatever you need. I’m really good at swordsmanship.”
He was somewhat serious, but it seemed Yusera didn’t believe him.
Well, it didn’t matter.
He could just show her.
“Alright, let’s get started.”
The trial was initially unusable for any purpose beyond training, but due to the contract he had made with that nameless god last time, it was now easily accessible.
Though he felt a bit indebted to the god for a favor, it couldn’t be helped.
To draw out Yusera’s full strength while keeping his swordsmanship under wraps, the trial was the only appropriate venue.
‘Should I stretch out a bit after a long time?’
He had felt his body stiffening from only shooting bows lately from a distance.
Of course, he’d still be careful to take it easy.
He didn’t know how Yusera would feel about it.
*
