Wizard of the Deep Sea

TL/ED – Miso

Lump was the kind of bastard who enjoyed making people feel like shit.

I had never formally studied psychology, but if I had to guess why he did it, I would say it stemmed from fear.

He could not distinguish himself from himself. There was no way to tell whether the self before sleep and the self after waking were the same being.

No purpose, no consciousness. A mere Psychic Aggregate, a collection of many humans with no independence in anything.

A desperate struggle to prove he was not just that, to create something more provocative, some quality that set him apart from others.

That was what it might have been.

Of course, it was only speculation. In truth, the more likely explanation was that he was simply a piece of shit.

And that shitty personality of his had now created a problem.

“The hell are you, you little bastard?” “…”

“Gkh, keh. Damn… shit… did I stay dormant too long?”

In a situation strange enough to be called bizarre, I was able to grasp what was happening quickly, since I knew how Lump mimicked people.

‘…Balkan’s sense of self overpowered Lump?’

Lump mimicked humans. In the process, he absorbed all of their memories.

He was, quite literally, a storage vault packed with countless memories. Once those memories were absorbed, no matter how strong-willed the person was, they would eventually be consumed by Lump’s overwhelming consciousness. But…

For some reason, Balkan had managed to surface to the forefront of Lump’s consciousness, against all odds.

If that was the case, it was an unbelievable stroke of luck. This might be the chance to eliminate even Lump.

I hurriedly spoke to Lump, who was still resisting even now.

“Balkan, can you hear me?”

“I can hear you. You worthless Fallen wretch.”

“Hmm, is this Lump?”

“…No, it’s me.”

Balkan, for some reason, glared at me and drew his sword.

His trembling hands seemed to be trying to stop the action, but the muscles, veins bulging grotesquely, forced his will through.

With the sword raised awkwardly, Balkan tossed out a blunt question.

“Jern. What exactly are you?”

“…Excuse me?”

“Yes, I see. So this is the resolution His Majesty spoke of. This is why that man’s gaze upon me carried a tinge of sorrow… Even with this muddled mind, I can understand at least that much.”

Balkan stared at his hand for a moment, his eyes filled with melancholy, before they were instantly consumed by madness.

“This is why I said I shouldn’t have eaten a lunatic! Shit, shit!”

Then he switched right back to Balkan, who wore a shrewd expression.

“-Still, I cannot fathom why that man chose a Fallen like you.”

“I don’t recall being chosen…”

“You were. Without a doubt.”

-Slash!

My eyes trembled slightly.

Balkan had slashed his own ankle with the sword.

The knight’s blade severed his own ankle as effortlessly as if it were a weed. Naturally unable to walk, Balkan dropped to his knees, and the ground was stained with blood.

It was his own body. Yet there had been not a shred of hesitation, and even I was shaken, but Balkan himself did not so much as blink as he continued.

“Go.”

“Where?”

“I will stay here and keep this thing that devoured my body from moving.”

At the same time, he pulled a necklace set with a red gemstone from his pocket and tossed it to me.

“That necklace will lead you to where the Elf is.”

“…Understood. But first, there is something I must tell you.”

I spoke to Balkan, who looked puzzled.

“Of course subjugating Decay is important, but if you succeed in dominating Lump’s consciousness, Sir Balkan, that would also be an enormous achievement. Lump is a Colony Entity, an unkillable swarm. Right now, you are the only one who can defeat Lump…”

“-That is impossible.”

Balkan shook his head with his eyes closed.

“What?”

“The only reason I am able to maintain consciousness right now is because this monster allowed me too much time. To avoid being discovered by the Priestess, gkh, the Princess, it left me as myself for a long while and only nudged the faintest impulses.”

Balkan clutched his head as if struck by a splitting headache and continued.

“That is why I had time to forget. Right now, most of this monster’s memories have faded from my mind. They are resurfacing one by one as we speak. This brief window I gained from that is the only resistance I am capable of.”

“Then… after I defeat Decay…”

“I will carry out His Majesty’s command.”

Resolution.

Even through the agony, his eyes shone as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

His resolve was far stronger than I had imagined.

“…”

When I could not find the words to respond, Balkan let out a dry laugh, mocking himself.

“Lump, you called it? As I said, it only stoked the smallest of desires. Perhaps my head was filled not with loyalty to His Majesty, but with nothing but the ambition to climb higher…”

“…That is not true, Sir Balkan. You are the second most devout knight I have ever seen.”

There might be a handful of retainers who could pledge loyalty unto death.

But to lay down one’s life on command, that was something no one could do without at least some hesitation, no matter how deep their loyalty ran.

Yet Balkan had done just that. The moment he understood the situation, he did what needed to be done without an ounce of hesitation.

-He accepted that he was a card meant to be discarded.

No mere careerist could ever make that decision.

“What a stupid fool…”

I had meant it with a touch of awe, but Balkan scrunched his face as if he could not believe what he was hearing.

“In a moment like this, you should at least say first. Who in the world is the greatest knight you know?”

“My apologies. It is Sir Karos.”

“Tch. Can’t argue with that.”

He clicked his tongue, then waved his trembling hand to dismiss me.

“Go.”

“…”

To hesitate here would be to disrespect Balkan’s resolve.

I clenched my teeth and ran toward the direction the necklace was pulling.

“…Please.”

His head slumped low, teeth clenched as if fighting against something, he ground out each word as though chewing on them.

“The Empire. May the nation built on the blood of our ancestors… never be drowned in the blood of our own… I beg of you…”

The weight carried in that sentence was immeasurable.

“…I swear it will be so.”

Heavy enough to choke even me, already buried beneath hundreds of millions of tons of seawater.

***

The place the necklace led to was a small cave buried in the snow.

A blizzard had begun raging at some point, and the cave I barely managed to push through into was deathly silent, as if the storm outside were nothing but a lie.

“Ptuh. So this is it…”

With a resolve a little heavier than before, I surveyed the inside of the cave.

But aside from being somewhat spacious, there was no trace of anyone having been here.

As I walked, extending my Current Sense in fine detail…

“…?!”

I discovered something my Current Sense had picked up and recoiled in shock, sweeping the floor with my gaze.

The floor was covered in ice. That alone would not have been surprising, but what was trapped inside that translucent ice was not something I could simply overlook.

“Br-Brimdal?”

Brimdal, frozen in a pose as if scanning his surroundings on guard, was preserved right there in the floor.

…Looking as though he could spring to life at any moment.

A chill ran across my entire body, and I was slowly stepping backward when it happened.

“Lump did not come?”

“Gkh!”

Instantly, I blasted Water Pressure in every direction behind me.

It was pointless. Decay was not there.

Because of that, even my Current Sense could not detect him.

I searched the area over and over, even meticulously combing through several hundred meters outside the cave.

“Look ahead.”

“…”

I scowled and slowly turned my head.

There, something pale and hazy was shimmering.

A black and white heat haze. Something closer to a phenomenon than anything that could be called human.

“…?”

That was Decay?

It looked nothing like what I had seen before. Even through my Current Sense, I could feel that there was nothing in front of me.

I instinctively stepped back with my guard up, and the haze vibrated, shaping itself into laughter.

“Ah, I must have worried you too much. What you are looking at is… hmm, yes. An Afterimage.”

“An After… image?”

“Even if you can see a flying arrow, does it truly look the same as an arrow at rest? What you are seeing is the arrow in flight. That is what I mean.”

“…”

What that meant was that I was already under an absurd level of Burden, and my movements appeared no better than a crawling turtle’s from his perspective.

-It was something I had expected.

“If the gap is that wide, it’s a wonder we can even hold a conversation.”

“Speaking slowly enough for you to hear is difficult, I’ll admit. And… it’s not easy to lay a hand on you from this end, either.”

As I thought.

Decay could not touch me right now.

Of course he couldn’t.

“Why don’t you try?”

The moment he did, he would die.

Right now, I was crushing everything around my skin with tens of thousands of tons of Water Pressure, literally compressing anything that approached.

Even if I stood perfectly still, if Decay carelessly touched me, he would be crushed and burst on the spot.

Even if he threw something, it would meet the same fate.

An armor of Water Pressure, serving the exact opposite function of Water Barrier.

I sneered and extended my hand, walking toward the haze.

Naturally, it vanished just before I could reach it, as if taunting me. He knew.

“…Tch.”

It seemed my defense was holding to some degree, but offense was a distant hope.

In the end, there was no way to defeat an opponent I could not touch.

For now, I had to find some means of attacking, no matter what.

“What did you do with Dersia?”

It would have been so much better if I could leave that role to her.

I had not asked with much thought behind it.

From the start, I did not trust this bastard.

I could not even be sure whether it was truly Brimdal beneath the ice.

Still, it was clear that he had separated the two of them by some means from the moment they arrived at the mountain.

“Hmmm…”

Decay let out a contemplative hum, then made his suggestion in a leisurely tone.

“Would you like to go see her?”

“What, are you saying you killed her?”

“No. She is alive. To be honest, I have no confidence that I could defeat her on my own, a woman whose individual power has touched the world itself. So I ran.”

“…?”

“The weather is cold, isn’t it?”

A sudden, out-of-nowhere pleasantry.

From those words, I felt a terror that no pen could ever describe.

The feeling that death had arrived right before my eyes.

“-Winter has not yet ended.”

With those words…

The entire world froze.

“…What the.”

To be precise, it stopped.

Decay had already vanished to somewhere.

“…?”

Tilting my head, I stepped out of the cave and noticed something off from the usual.

The surroundings were quiet.

Because the blizzard had stopped falling.

“Ugh.”

Walking with an uneasy expression, I felt something brush against my clothes and went to casually brush it off, when…

My heart sank like a stone.

‘My Water Pressure…’

The shield of Water Pressure was no longer doing its job.

Pouring every ounce of strength into wrapping my surroundings in Water Pressure once more, I looked at whatever had pierced even my barrier.

I needed to see what had broken through my Water Pressure.

“?”

It was a snowflake.

A single, ordinary snowflake that had just fallen from the sky.