Wizard of the Deep Sea

TL/ED – Miso

I wanted to know what Dersia had done to my body, but the situation was urgent.

“I’ll keep a good watch on the carriage!”

Leaving Damyu, who was grinning ear to ear now that she’d served her purpose, behind at the carriage, we began walking stealthily toward the mountain.

“Shouldn’t take long.”

“Why does this damn snow have to fall so fast…”

I walked on, listening to Balkan grumble, and after some time…

“…”

Something felt off.

Sensing something strange, I stopped in my tracks. Since I had been walking at the front thanks to my Current Sense, everyone looked at me curiously when I suddenly halted.

After taking a moment to figure out where this feeling was coming from, I chose my words carefully and asked.

“How long has it been since we departed?”

“?”

Balkan tilted his head as if I were talking nonsense.

“What are you on about? We just left.”

“…”

I looked at Dersia and Brimdal, but both wore expressions that said they had no idea what I was getting at either.

“I count every second as I live. If we define ‘departure’ as the moment we stood up from our seats, then three minutes and twenty-nine seconds have passed.”

“Sounds about right. Did you notice something strange?”

Three minutes and twenty-nine seconds.

After a moment of thought, I turned to Dersia and asked.

“Dersia.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, but would it be possible for you to measure time using a more, let’s say, physical method?”

“I don’t normally use one, but I do have a pocket watch that was given to me. I’ll set it now.”

Despite the somewhat odd request, she calmly pulled a pocket watch from inside her robe, adjusted it, wound it, and slipped it into her pocket.

I gazed at the tall mountain where Decay was likely hiding for a moment, then took a few steps forward before,

immediately turning my head to ask.

“How long has it been since we departed now?”

“What are you going on about again…”

Less than a minute had passed since I last asked.

Balkan was furrowing his brow, about to say something, when.

“One hour, three minutes, and thirty seconds.”

Dersia murmured slowly as she opened the watch.

“…We’ve been walking for an hour.”

“Is that true?”

Dersia handed over the pocket watch.

The second hand was spinning wildly. So fast it almost looked broken.

“…What in the world is going on here?”

Brimdal stared at me with a bewildered expression.

But Balkan, who had maintained his composure surprisingly well, rummaged through his pockets.

“Yes. This is…”

“I already know. It’s an illusion.”

“Pardon?”

“I know how to break it. Here, everyone take one of these.”

He pulled out some black gum from his pocket that looked absolutely revolting at first glance.

The moment he took it out, a terrible smell filled the air around us. Imagining the taste was easy enough, and I recoiled, shaking my head.

“Absolutely not.”

“The best way to break an illusion is through shock. The taste is certainly atrocious, but it leaves no external or internal injuries, making it the most reasonable method.”

Balkan hesitated for just a moment before popping the gum into his mouth and chewing.

Even someone chewing a live insect wouldn’t have made that face. Enduring it like he was withstanding torture, he chewed a few times before pulling out more pieces.

“Hurry. The situation is urgent. We don’t know what’s happening outside this illusion, so…”

“Go ahead and tell us, then. How is it?”

“Let’s see, right now we’re…”

“…This can’t be right.”

Of course, Balkan had not broken free of any illusion.

He looked around in confusion before asking.

“There are Fallen that can manipulate illusions too?”

“No. Our cognitive abilities have simply been impaired.”

“What?”

“Decay’s Extreme Ice can slow the thinking of everyone around him to an extreme degree. Slow enough to make a tortoise look like a rabbit. If your thinking slows down, naturally every action slows down too. That’s the state we’re in right now.”

“…It’s not an illusion?”

“That’s correct. I was about to explain, but then you suddenly started chewing the gum.”

“…”

Leaving Balkan, who now wore the most aggrieved expression imaginable, behind, I rubbed my chin and sank into thought.

“I never imagined Thought Deceleration could cover this wide an area, though.”

In truth, expecting something like this would have been unreasonable. It was sheer tyranny.

If I had to make a comparison, it would be like me turning the space within thousands of meters around me into a zone of Water Pressure so crushing that simply stepping inside would kill a person. A brutish feat of raw force.

I could understand that he had spread his world out into reality to create this effect, but… could he really do something like this?

‘What happens when we actually get close?’

After mulling it over, I focused on the present.

“Based on what we can confirm through the watch, one second as we perceive it equals sixty seconds in reality. One step we take in what feels like one second appears, from outside this Thought Deceleration, as if we’re walking for sixty seconds. So let’s call it a sixty-times deceleration rate, sixty-times for short.”

“Do you know a way out?”

“There isn’t one. As long as we’re within Decay’s range, this Burden is unavoidable.”

Just like my Water Pressure.

“And this probably isn’t the end of it. Sixty-times, a hundred and twenty-times, a hundred and eighty-times… I’m not sure about the exact multiples, but it’ll keep climbing the closer we get. Naturally, other Burdens will stack on top of each other by the same margin. No, they already are.”

I looked down at the feet of Balkan and Brimdal, who had stopped walking mid-conversation.

“What the hell…”

Their feet, which had been standing on the snowfield, were already buried under snow that had fallen just during our brief exchange.

Watching them hurriedly pull their feet free, I continued my explanation calmly.

“Thanks to Dersia, we can mitigate the Burden to some extent, but ultimately it’s a pit of quicksand. By the time we arrive, it’ll be as though we’ve endured over a year in the freezing cold. Hands and feet would be the least of it; arms and legs would be lost entirely.”

“Tch, is there no way to go underground? Using that Damyu girl’s power?”

“No.”

I shook my head quietly.

“For all of you, Damyu’s swamp is nothing more than an attack that prevents you from breathing. More importantly, it’s the same down below.”

“The same?”

“Yes. I can’t go into detail, but that’s how it is.”

I recalled the ice fragments I had seen beneath Decay’s ground.

Thinking back on it now, those had only appeared when I was near Decay.

The meaning of the ice fragments was, most likely, that my thoughts were freezing over in this vicinity.

In other words, even when I had been underground, I was being slowed.

‘If I hadn’t saved some time, I really would have been buried alive.’

As a chill ran through me, Balkan clenched his jaw and shook his head.

“Is there truly no way? Are you saying we should just give up?”

“No. There is a way.”

“…There is?”

“Yes. A rather crude method, though.”

I turned to look at Dersia, who wore a puzzled expression, and asked.

“Dersia. Can you launch us at that mountain like cannonballs?”

“Ah, I see.”

“Oh…”

“S-So that’s it. You’re saying we create the motion before our thinking has time to slow down.”

If what was being slowed was only our thinking, then all we had to do was act before the deceleration could take hold.

No matter how slowly an arrow thinks once it’s been loosed, it would still slam into the mountain in a matter of seconds.

“But then, from that point on…”

“Yes. That’s the problem.”

We would reach the mountain. But once there, we would have to act under even worse deceleration.

“That’s why I’ve used my Current Sense to identify three likely points where Decay might be.”

“A-Are you sure about them?”

“I’m not certain. It’s possible he won’t be at any of them. In that case… we’ll just have to endure the Thought Deceleration and push through on our own.”

Brimdal, who had been examining the map of the mountain I’d prepared in advance, nodded in apparent admiration.

“This map is so detailed it’s as if you went and surveyed the place yourself.”

“I have my world to thank for that. Dersia, please split us up and launch us here, here, and here.”

“You intend to split the group?”

“Yes. Frankly speaking, any one of you could defeat Decay alone.”

It might have been called a boss raid, but from Decay’s perspective, it wouldn’t have been strange to see it as three bosses forming an alliance to gang up on him. After all, Decay had only ever stacked debuff abilities, so his actual combat strength wasn’t all that impressive.

Dersia had defeated Decay multiple times before. Even if he had spread his world, no, precisely because he had, he couldn’t have great odds against her.

As for Brimdal, what was there even to say? It wouldn’t have been the least bit surprising if he lopped Decay’s head off the moment they met.

“If Decay is in your zone, engage immediately. If not, endure the Thought Deceleration, regroup, and eliminate him together. That’s the basic plan. Any questions?”

“Can’t the Elf just bring the whole mountain down at once with her magic?”

“These aren’t the kind of people who’d die from a collapsing mountain. If anything, they’d realize they were being ambushed and flee. That would make things far more complicated.”

“Fair enough. I like this plan.”

Neither Balkan nor Dersia seemed to have any objections.

“But Jern. If there are three points, who do you plan to go with?”

“I’ll go with Balkan.”

“…Me?”

Balkan tilted his head as if he hadn’t expected to be chosen.

I had no particular desire to pair up with this ill-tempered Guardian Knight, but I also didn’t think he could take Decay down in one go.

If Balkan happened to encounter Decay, I needed to be at his side.

Dersia and Brimdal could handle it without me.

“That’s reasonable.”

“Mm, that’s for the best.”

Whether they’d caught my unspoken reasoning, both nodded in agreement.

“Then let’s move immediately. The Burden is accumulating with every passing moment.”

Dersia formed a hand sign and lit stars in her eyes.

The ground beneath my feet began to grow warm, slowly heating up.

“Even at this very moment, there’s a chance Decay has noticed us. We don’t have much time. So I’ll send you off as fast as I possibly can.”

“…How fast, exactly?”

“For a mountain of this distance, I’ll have to make it no different from opening a gate and stepping through.”

A launch at a speed virtually indistinguishable from teleportation.

As I clenched my teeth and braced for the impact, she paused for just a brief moment before speaking.

“And, this may simply be my own worry, but… I have a feeling there’s something hidden about Decay’s Thought Deceleration.”

“Hidden?”

“Yes. After losing most of my memories from the last battle, I went over that fight again and again. Even if the memories were frozen, I thought I might glean something by revisiting them. Well…”

She trailed off, uncharacteristically lacking in confidence.

“I sensed a great deal that felt wrong. There’s a good chance it’s just my imagination. But stay on your guard.”

“I will. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, what exactly did you do to my body…”

“Launching now.”

Crack!

The ground beneath me erupted and I was catapulted forward as if fired from a cannon.

The impact was less severe than I’d expected. From the moment I was launched at tremendous speed until the instant I arrived at the winding mountain path,

I was able to land lightly enough that the crunching snow barely cratered at all.

“…safe.”

“Ptuh, ptuh! Decay? Is he here?!”

Unlike me, Balkan had landed face-first, but he immediately drew his sword.

Comical as it looked, he seemed well aware of the dangers of Thought Deceleration; killing intent radiated from him in waves. I could feel his fierce determination to slit Decay’s throat the second he laid eyes on him.

I, too, immediately activated my Current Sense.

Then I narrowed my brow and shook my head.

“No luck.”

Decay wasn’t in this zone.

He had most likely ended up in either Dersia’s or Brimdal’s area.

“Damn. What rotten luck.”

Balkan kept his sword drawn and began walking immediately.

“Brimdal, Dersia. Which of them ran into Decay? Or did either of them even find him?”

“If we can see it, it’s Dersia. If not, it’s Brimdal.”

“?”

Balkan was tilting his head, unable to follow my calm explanation, when.

BOOM!!

“What…!”

A black line carved across the massive mountain, slashing from its midsection all the way down to its base.

Balkan, unfamiliar with the sight, gasped and stumbled backward, but I knew exactly who that line belonged to.

“It’s Dersia.”

From Decay’s perspective, he was the one who’d drawn the short straw.