Chapter 228
Chapter 228
The space, the world, was collapsing.
The flesh of the dying Ouroboros tore away, and Iris appeared from within.
The moment Mordin saw her unconscious form with her eyes closed, his steps halted.
“…Nuna.”
He felt sick to his stomach.
If the space collapsed and the exit closed, it would mean being trapped forever in a seal that would never be undone.
He didn’t want to die. He had betrayed Nuna because he wanted to live. That was the clear truth, without even an inch of falsehood.
He sincerely did not want to die.
In the first place, who in this world wanted to die?
So this action of his was horribly impulsive and insane.
Our promise, asking her to kill me with her own hands if I was going to die, had been fulfilled in one form or another. And in any case, the only place sinners like us would fall was hell.
‘I won’t die even if I get out.’
He was too useful a human to kill.
Rather than killing him, it would be more beneficial to place him under the Academy or the Imperial Family and make him create staves.
Moreover, Mordin was, publicly speaking, the owner of Golden.
If they covered up all of this truth and somehow kept his mouth shut, they could seize the Empire’s greatest merchant group and make full use of it.
The Emperor was a capable leader and ruler. He would surely keep him alive.
‘I can live.’
But he would end up alone.
“Nuna.”
Mordin had always thought he was together with Iris.
But being physically together surely did not mean they were truly together.
‘We were together, but not for even a single moment were we truly together.’
Mordin finally realized what the emotion he had felt all along when he had been ‘Mordegar’ was.
It was endless loneliness that could never be resolved.
They said nothing to each other and stayed silent.
Rather than easing that loneliness, the person beside him had only amplified that loneliness, that emptiness, even further.
From that moment on, our ending had already been decided.
“Ha.”
This was madness. To leap in so he could be sealed together with the person who had ripped out his heart was not something the word insane could fully describe.
But now, he couldn’t resist this powerful impulse that was shaking his entire world.
Mordin ran with all his strength in the opposite direction.
Not toward the passage, but toward Iris, who lay far away and dying.
“Mordin?”
Theo’s confused voice reached him.
This seal was as good as death.
Theo’s dumbfounded gaze touched the hem of his clothes.
Come to think of it, had he never apologized?
Still, he had made him a fairly useful staff, so he could only hope that would count as repaying his debt to some extent.
“I’m sorry.”
With that apology, Mordin threw himself with all his strength down the cliff formed as the space collapsed.
And he pulled Iris tightly into his arms.
“Mordin?”
Perhaps she had regained consciousness from the sudden contact, because Iris opened her eyes with difficulty.
The body temperature of Iris’s body in his arms was falling by the second.
Iris’s death was not far away.
And this cold space was stealing even Mordin’s warmth.
Before long, Mordin, too, would probably be completely trapped in this space and meet his death.
For the first time, with death approaching right before his eyes, Mordin wanted to live.
He wanted to live so badly it drove him mad.
No matter what horrible ending awaited him, he earnestly wished it would not be this moment.
“Still, this is enough of an ending.”
“Why on earth would you?”
At that question, which was like a faint groan, Mordin shed tears.
I am sorry.
I realized it far, far too late.
It was far too late to apologize, far too late to undo everything, far too late to fill your endless emptiness.
That fact made his heart ache as if it would split apart.
The pain of having his heart ripped out would have hurt less. The fact that a heart could beat this painfully was agonizing enough to drive him mad.
“I won’t leave you alone anymore, Nuna.”
At the very least, when Nuna died, may she not be lonely.
May that aimless loneliness be filled.
For that, Mordin could willingly burn even his own life.
---
“Zephyros, wait!”
Just before I could urgently stop Zephyros, I saw Mordin throwing himself into the distant void, and Zephyros and I, who had been at the very back, escaped the space.
What came into view was not the space where Iris had been sealed, but a vast forest.
I tried to maintain the skill, but it was impossible.
Even the mana I had been receiving from Mordin was cut off, and I could no longer maintain the skill. Just like that, the passage closed.
It was effectively death.
That was how the seal had been designed.
A seal created with no method of release in the first place. A seal where one would fall endlessly into eternal darkness and die that way.
“Nooooooooo!!!”
I hurriedly tried to throw my barely moving body toward the passage, but the passage closed faster.
“Theo.”
“…Th-This isn’t right.”
It wasn’t that I liked Mordin. If anything, I hated him.
We had fought as if to kill each other, and he had nearly become the first person I directly killed.
“N-No.”
There was no way that person’s death could be like this.
Mordin’s eyes had sincerely said that he was all right.
If anything, he even seemed happy that he could die with Iris. Even so—
“Who dies like that?!”
BANG—!
I slammed the ground with all my strength.
My palm stung.
But more than that, my heart throbbed painfully.
“Theo….”
I heard Lucian calling me.
I had to find Iris and Mordin somehow.
Separate from punishment, I couldn’t let the two of them die like this.
“Theo, it’s all right.”
A warm heat seeped into my back.
A hand slightly larger than mine patted my back.
“Father.”
I saw Father smiling faintly.
The moment I saw Father, safe and unharmed, with no injuries anywhere, it felt as though everything was collapsing.
The warmth against my back and that familiar touch made me happy.
But was it right to be happy?
I felt unbearable self-loathing and contempt suddenly surge up from deep in my core.
‘Did I just feel happy?’
Mordin was dead. Those two people, who would have lived in the Original Storyline, were dead.
And I was happy because Father had survived instead?
“Urgh.”
I wanted to empty myself out instead.
Was I always this horrible a human being?
To feel joy in the face of another person’s death⋯.
“How horrible.”
With those words, I lost consciousness.
---
“How horrible.”
After murmuring that quietly, Theo collapsed in Evan’s hands.
That murmur of horror was not directed at anyone else, but at himself.
Supporting the unconscious Theo, Evan spoke to Beatrice.
“I will take the injured and return to the Academy first.”
“Mm, all right.”
Mordin had not returned.
In a situation that was clear without any need for explanation, Beatrice slowly nodded and answered.
“I’ll clean things up and return soon too.”
It seemed they would have to hold a deep meeting.
This was also a major matter for which they would have to call the Headmaster, who had been absent all this time, so the Academy would likely be noisy for a while.
“Thank you.”
Originally, Evan was more suited than Beatrice for cleanup in a place like this.
But Beatrice willingly let Evan return first.
“No, I was the one who directed the plan in the first place, and your physical condition can’t be good either, so just hurry back to the Academy.”
At Beatrice’s answer, Evan lightly bowed his head in thanks, then left the Gate and departed with the students who were half-unconscious from exhaustion.
Watching Evan’s back, Beatrice felt only bitterness in her mouth.
This entire seal had been made on the premise of Iris’s death.
If someone had to die in the process, she had thought Mordin should be the first to face death.
She had actually placed a Restriction on him, ordering him to act that way.
“…Damn bastard.”
But she had never imagined he would actually die.
She had never imagined that Mordin, who had answered with a shameless face that he did not want to die, without even thinking of the sins he had committed, would die.
Telling him to be the first to face death had ultimately also meant that no one should die and everyone should return safely.
“Phew.”
This was no time to be steeped in emotion.
Did she think the cleanup would handle itself?
SLAP!
Beatrice struck her cheek hard enough for the sound to ring out, then turned around and shouted.
“We will begin the cleanup.”
There was no time to be sentimental over the death of an acquaintance.
Beatrice’s flame-like red eyes blazed.
---
“In the end, she died quite spectacularly.”
At the sight of Caelus sneering at Iris’s death, the man said nothing in reproach and simply looked down.
None of the people beginning the cleanup below imagined that the escaped former Pope and his assistant were above them.
Even if they looked up, it was doubtful whether they would notice the former Pope and the man.
The man’s silence continued for a long time.
Watching him, the Pope asked sarcastically,
“So what happened to that, the essence of Ouroboros?”
“It was stolen.”
“Huh?”
Caelus looked at the man with bewildered eyes.
“Wasn’t that the core of the plan going forward?”
“It is not important enough to be called the core.”
It would be useful if they had it, but it would not be a great problem if they did not.
But⋯ he had never imagined it would be stolen.
He had gone to all sorts of efforts so that Iris would die and only the essence could be obtained. He had never imagined it would go wrong from the very start like this, not even he, who knew ‘countless’ things.
“Kuhak!”
‘God,’ who had been waiting only for his failure, finally tore apart his lungs once more.
Watching the man familiarly swallow blood, Caelus merely remained silent.
Whenever things did not go according to plan, that man always ended up like that.
There was no information in Caelus’s memory that the man had suffered from a lung disease, but anyone who underwent countless changes would surely suffer from one or two illnesses.
He merely thought of it as one of those.
“So you are moving without the essence?”
“…I will have to find a new piece and take it.”
“A new piece?”
“Finding one will not be much of a problem.”
Iris had been a capable collaborator.
Unlike Caelus, who overstepped his bounds, or that person they would bring in later, she had carefully built a relationship where they could walk a fine line and use each other.
In truth, the man had known even that side of her completely, and he had only used her thoroughly while keeping to a line where Iris could consider it a ‘fair trade.’
“Iris had already found one.”
The person more capable than anyone else, and one who would welcome the help of the man and Caelus.
All of this was ultimately God’s arrangement.
The man quietly watched the situation being handled, then turned around and disappeared into the darkness.
“After all, I am the creator of this world.”
Only those cryptic words, which would reach no one, drifted hollowly through the empty space.