Wizard of the Deep Sea

TL/ED – Miso

“This place is way too vast…”

“…”

Nearly a week.

In this place where there was no distinction between night and day, I had spent all that time climbing mountains until my head ached and scouring every small valley with Current Sense, over and over again.

Far from finding any trace of Decay, the only harvest had been a few wolves.

Those wolves had now become the silver coat I was wearing. Handmade by Dersia, no less. I was a little surprised, as her senses were sharp enough to rival any proper tailor.

“Why were there wolves here in the first place?”

“It seems that in the final moments Decay experienced, living wolves must have existed.”

“…Is that even possible?” “Look at this endless mountain range stretching out before us. This was never a real world to begin with. It is the last scene that the man called Decay saw just before dying. He was probably devoured by wolves. Ah, do you need a scarf?”

She casually fashioned a scarf from the leftover scraps and offered it to me with a composed expression.

“Thank you. But I don’t think this will be enough to block all the Burden.”

I rubbed my reddened fingertips and muttered.

A whole week had passed, and I was gradually losing sensation in my extremities.

At this rate, I would truly freeze to death. I stole a glance at Dersia and quietly clenched my teeth.

“Do you have any idea where to look?”

“I’m sorry I haven’t been of much help. With just this one body, I couldn’t even search a single mountain. This is the first time I’ve ever traveled such a great distance.”

“…”

The fact that we had combed the snowfield for an entire week without producing any real results meant the same thing as saying we needed a different approach.

Was there no way?

After mulling it over for a moment, I tapped my foot irritably before a thought suddenly occurred to me.

“Please wait here a moment. Just in case.”

“?”

Leaving a puzzled Dersia tilting her head, I held this space firmly in my grasp and collapsed the balance of the World.

There was a splash, a low gurgling… or at least it sounded like it.

When I opened my eyes again, I felt the dark Deep Sea, its cold rivaling that blizzard-filled plain without yielding an inch.

‘Tch…’

I clicked my tongue inwardly. This damned sea apparently had no intention of ever letting me go, whether I went to the future, the past, or even got trapped inside a Death’s Flashback that didn’t truly exist.

Thanks to that, though, I could try a different method.

“Hey, you. Come here.”

[…]

I searched the area and casually called over some nimble marlins darting about, then flinched in surprise.

The thing had teeth in its mouth that looked exactly like a human’s. So neat and white, they seemed like they could be pulled out and used as dentures right away.

It was one I had never seen before. Which also meant I had sunk to an even deeper depth.

“Here, put this on…”

I drew Threads from the ring and attached them to the Deep Sea Creatures.

They accepted the Threads without resistance and became my loyal slaves. They consumed quite a bit of the Thread capacity, so four was the limit.

“Now, watch closely from here on.”

In that state, I returned to reality.

Not entirely, just a little.

“…Jern?”

Dersia came back into view, her face scrunched up again.

From her perspective, I had vanished and then suddenly reappeared, so it was only natural she would be startled.

“Can you see me now?”

“See you? That’s an understatement.”

“Huh?”

She wordlessly pointed at my hand.

When I lifted it, a thick liquid dripped down with a pattering sound, thoroughly soaking the ground.

Black water, dark enough to be mistaken for oil on Snow Mountain, fell and melted the ice as it slowly seeped into the ground.

It wasn’t just my hand. Seawater was streaming down my entire body.

“Hm… please don’t take this the wrong way.”

Dersia chose her words carefully, wearing an enigmatic expression.

“If you asked a hundred people in the Empire, all hundred would think you were a Crimson Circle executive. You look exactly like one of them.”

“Ah, yes. I have eyes too, you know.”

So that was why the Upper Tier members always looked so bizarre. It must have been because they were carefully adjusting the ratio between their World and the Real World.

Neither fully submerged to the point of having no effect on the Real World, nor disappearing entirely to sever the connection.

…Of course, the latter was impossible anyway.

“Why are you maintaining such a dangerous overlapping state?”

“I’m going to make use of these creatures. Can you see them too, by any chance?”

“I can’t see anything.”

Dersia could not see the marlins swimming around me.

However, these marlins connected to me by Threads could, in reverse, see the World.

Exerting influence seemed impossible, but merely observing was within their ability.

“Go find anything that looks like us, then come back.”

The moment the command was given, the marlins shot off, swimming like mad.

Since I had wound the Threads around their necks, there was no risk of them snapping. Watching them rocket out in all four directions as fast as bullets, I let out a sigh of relief, and Dersia stared at me with her eyes wide.

“You speak it quite fluently. What did you say?”

“I told them to come back if they find people who look like us.”

“Hmm. What if they’re hiding inside one of the snow mountains?”

“They can use Current Sense too. They should be able to manage that much on their own.”

“…”

“Is there something wrong with my method? Why are you glaring at me?”

Dersia was stroking her chin and studying me, which made me feel somewhat uneasy, so I asked. She shook her head lightly as if it were nothing.

“Half of it is that the way you look right now is quite unusual. And the other half is that you just said, perfectly naturally, that you’d use the Deep Sea Creatures to survey this entire vast Snow Mountain, and it occurred to me that if you applied the same method in reality, you could essentially observe the whole world through Current Sense.”

“…They have the intelligence of fish, so they can’t carry out detailed espionage missions like that. The only reason they listened was because it’s a simple command: find someone who stands out in an empty snowfield.”

“I see. Though if you were to find a clever Deep Sea Creature, who knows what might be possible.”

“…”

Dersia’s point did have some merit.

If I found a Deep Sea Creature that could understand not just “find someone who looks like me on Snow Mountain,” but commands like “go to that nation and report back on what their leader is doing,” then I would become something closer to the Crimson Circle than to a human, someone who could sit in one place and survey every affair in the world.

“I just won’t do it.”

But there was no reason to.

Unless it was an emergency like this, what good would it do to dig into every private life on the continent? It probably wouldn’t even help against the Upper Tier, whose whereabouts were largely unknown.

“…True, you were always that kind of person.”

Seeing my firm expression, Dersia said something that seemed to carry a deeper meaning.

Not long after that, I saw one of the Thread-bound marlins returning at the same speed it had left.

[…]

“Oh, one came back from the east.”

Barely thirty minutes had passed.

As I gave it the command to slowly guide us to the location, Dersia smiled faintly beside me.

“Truly efficient.”

“…”

For some reason, the compliment didn’t sound like a compliment.

***

[Close, approach…]

“Master.”

“Yes.”

The moment the marlin sent the signal that we were almost there, I dismissed it and pushed my Current Sense to its absolute limit.

It meant that Decay, or rather, the corpse within his Death’s Flashback, was nearby.

No matter what the circumstances, there was no way Decay would have left it completely unguarded.

Combat was inevitable.

“I won’t be of much help, but I have prepared a few things in advance.”

“…”

“Jern?”

She was pulling something out when she glanced back at me, having suddenly stopped in my tracks, and murmured with a puzzled look.

And I was too preoccupied processing what I had confirmed through Current Sense to pay her any attention.

Only after spending a good while verifying that I hadn’t lost my mind did I manage to speak.

“Uh… um, Master?”

“What is it, all of a sudden.”

“Well, um. Yes. I think you need to see this for yourself.”

I pointed a finger at the sky.

There, a faint wisp of smoke was drifting.

Dersia studied it, blinking, then asked quietly.

“Jern, what did you see?”

“It’s not Decay, at least.”

“…”

We walked in silence.

Until a small castle came into view at the end of our path.

From up close, the trails of smoke rising were even more distinct, and through the blizzard came the faint sound of children laughing and a merchant haggling over goods.

A guard standing on the watchtower, shivering from the cold. Lit lanterns. Footpaths trampled into the snow around the perimeter.

I couldn’t contain myself any longer and turned to Dersia.

“What is that?”

“…Part of the Death’s Flashback… I would assume.”

A brief vision seen just before death. That was what a Death’s Flashback was.

But at the same time, all of it ended in death. What remained in the end was this Snow Mountain and the wolves. Even if a castle and people existed, they should have existed only as frozen corpses and crumbled walls.

“Perhaps because Decay’s Death’s Flashback continues without him actually dying, it may still be in progress.”

“If a living person is dreaming a dream of everything up until their death, isn’t that just… life?”

“…I think we’ll need to go inside to know for certain.”

“I’ll need to go in too if I want to scan everything with Current Sense.”

The castle was quite large. Not as large as the Capital, but to inspect everything thoroughly and listen in on all the conversations, we had to go inside.

We approached the castle walls. Avoiding the guards’ line of sight and the firmly shut gates, we reached the wall and spent some time looking for any gaps or openings.

But it was sealed tight. And it wasn’t as though we could walk up to the guards and ask them to lower the gate.

“Would it be a problem if we broke through?”

“Obviously. Whatever is inside, the most important thing for now is not to provoke it.”

“Hmm…”

In that case.

“Excuse me for a moment.”

“Huh?”

I lifted Dersia with Water Pressure as gently as I could manage, fixed my own feet to the wall’s surface, and slowly scaled the castle wall.

Dersia, suddenly airborne without warning, looked at me with disbelief and said quietly.

“You grow closer to a force of nature than a human with each passing day.”

“That’s the kind of remark that triggers my trauma. I’m being as careful as I can.”

I checked every guard’s line of sight as we slowly slipped over the top of the wall.

Once we made it inside, I hopped lightly down into the inner castle. I had already confirmed it with Current Sense, but looking down at the city again with my own eyes, I drew in a hollow breath.

“Master. Look at that.”

“…Yes.”

The city was a beautiful place, draped in snow and ice.

Most of the citizens appeared to be soldiers; it was harder to find anyone not equipped with a sword and armor. There were an excessive number of forges.

But it wasn’t only soldiers. There were also elderly people who seemed to be their family, women, and even a few children. Amenities existed for them as well, but that wasn’t what mattered.

In the center of the city, a single statue stood as though honoring someone.

It was not wearing a mask.

But that build and those heavy garments were not something easily forgotten.

Dersia let out a sigh and summed up the sight in a single sentence.

“He was the type to dream in great detail, it seems.”

The lord of this city was Decay.