NOVEL WEB Book 10: Chapter 7
Part 1
By the way, it turned out Maxwell hadn’t intentionally cut the connection; my phone had simply broken. Anastasia opened it up with a weird tool and messed with the innards to get it up and running again.
“When these malfunction or get a loose connection, it’s usually in here. Pear phones have places where their hardware is unnecessarily fragile like the neck of an hourglass. Why would they do that? Because no one’s ever buying a new one if they last forever.”
As a hacker, Anastasia could not shut up about things like that. Once she got going, she wasn’t stopping for a while.
And Maxwell seemed to be breaking out in hives from word one.
“Y-you gave a hacker direct access to the circuit board, you imbecile? Let’s hope she didn’t make a hardware attack even nastier than hiding a virus in BIOS memory.”
Given the situation, I doubted even Anastasia could have swapped out a chip smaller than her little finger’s nail. Being cautious around hackers made sense, but creating an impression they could do anything actually helped them deceive people.
Anyway.
“For now, let’s leave this place,” said my stepmom.
There were a lot of people in Gare Montparnasse, so it was a bad place to wait for a JB attack. Both because we would be putting so many innocent people in danger and because we didn’t know what JB’s soldiers looked like. They would pretty obviously try to blend in with the crowd to get close.
Anastasia held her pet robot to her small chest.
“You were undercover in their organization for a short while, right? Did you learn anything about their methods?”
“Yes, but I’m sure they are taking that into account when they come up with their strategy here. Partial information could create unwarranted assumptions that lead us to reject perfectly viable options. Magicians do that to smug amateurs all the time.”
“You mean they’ll be using a trick not even their own group is generally aware of?”
“JB is a highly unbalanced organization that demands each cast member maintains absolute secrecy. It wouldn’t surprise me to find they have a specialized investigation agency that monitors their own people’s actions and either restrains or assassinates them if necessary.”
The idea of JB having its own police force sounded like a bad joke. Especially when those police would strictly arrest people over extralegal rules.
Anastasia pouted her lips.
“So what did Absolute Noah do about those things?”
“We told people it was in their best interests to keep the secrets of the privileged class. Because otherwise the ark would be flooded with other people and we would have a hard time even departing.”
So they used people’s desire to survive. Instead of cracking down on leakers the way JB did, they convinced the people to keep their mouths shut on their own. Or maybe the idea was all the other rich people who wanted to survive would be driven to action by their own fear and gang up on the would-be leaker to keep them silent.
The desire to keep a clean house didn’t necessarily come from a desire for cleanliness.
The wealthy who held the world’s secrets would appear on TV and claim they were expressing the people’s anger, but they never did disappear from the TV screens when a major crime or disaster occurred and everyone else was panicking. They might have a grim look on their face, but they knew they had thick armor protecting them. It was only during the soccer world cup that they suddenly disappeared.
“So where exactly should we go, mom?”
“The enemy should land in an open space, but that obvious aerial route will be a bluff. Our real enemy will crawl along the ground and go for our throats while we’re gawking up at the sky.” Amatsu Yurina raised a finger. “In order to draw out JB, we need to take up a position ordinary people would never think of going to. You can’t look back and see if someone is tailing you in a cluttered city, but that changes in the center of the vast south pole. Because there’s no one else around.”
“So where are we going?”
“The Louvre.”
The location names in Paris meant nothing to me, but this one even I recognized.
“The Louvre? As in the Louvre? A-are you kidding!?”
It was blonde Anastasia who provided a more sensible argument.
“But even from across the Seine, we could tell looters and the police were having a shootout there! The wise Parisians aren’t going anywhere near there tonight and we’re foreigners here. Showing up there when everyone is on edge is like asking to be killed!!”
My stepmom had a simple answer.
“Yes, which is why we can be sure there won’t be any ordinary people there.”
Part 2
It was 2 AM.
Dawn was still a long way off.
But once light shined on Paris again, would we be able to accept the reality we were seeing? It was scary how fast you could get used to things. Darkness was such a strong symbol of danger, yet here I was wishing it wouldn’t go away. Things had gotten so bad, but I was still afraid of change. Yet this day had to be the most unusual one Paris had ever had.
“It’s gotten quiet,” said Anastasia, using the emergency stairs to emerge from Gare Montparnasse and take a look outside. “I thought everyone would be too on edge to get to sleep.”
“It’s the opposite. The unusual events of the day wore them out, so the instant they get some water and sugar in them, they get sleepy,” bluntly stated Amatsu Yurina.
The city was still a royal pain to walk through what with all the collapsed buildings and rubble blocking the streets. Without a single functioning streetlight, it would be easy to overlook a big crack in the ground that might as well have been a cliff.
The traffic lights were slanted diagonally too.
You never knew when one of those heavy devices would fall on your head. Anything could happen today.
I needed to shine my phone at our feet and overhead at all times. The battery wasn’t a perpetual motion machine and it had failed due to a bad connection earlier. I could only pray it didn’t suddenly die and leave me stranded. We had my stepmom and Anastasia’s phones too now and it seemed unlikely all three would break at the same time.
I didn’t see any looters or drunks out in the streets. Now might not be the time for that kind of thing, but people could get greedy when they had time to relax some.
We were supposed to be traveling north, but I didn’t have a good sense of the directions. It was like seeing the arrow on your phone’s map. The map and the real scenery were so different the supposedly accurate map felt unreliable.
“That’s it there.”
My stepmom held a hand out horizontally to stop us from walking further.
The bridge was still intact, even if just barely. A palatial building stood across the river that had absorbed the dark color of the night.
That was the Louvre.
We were across the river from it, but I still crouched down. It was hard to accurately grasp the threat of guns, which meant I still carried a fear that might have been entirely baseless. Maybe it was like having lightning strike nearby while you were left abandoned in the middle of the schoolyard.
“I don’t hear any gunfire.”
“But they are there. I can see the lights.”
Anastasia was right.
A sticky darkness had settled in across Paris, but there were some lights shining on the opposite bank. They didn’t seem like building lights. Were they police car headlights or had they brought small generators with them? I had seen gasoline generators and giant batteries hooked up to those outdoor construction lights at that Hôtel place.
That showed just how important this place was.
Who knows what they would suspect us of if they noticed us sneaking in.
Our first task was crossing the bridge.
I was pretty sure the bridge I had seen before had collapsed, so the long Louvre must have had more than one bridge alongside it. This was one that had survived the magma and steam explosions.
“I can’t see the water level.”
Anastasia frowned while leaning over the edge of the bank. That put her small butt in a rather dangerous position.
The bridge was made of stone and looked pretty old. It was crumbling in places due to all the disasters, so we might end up surfing on antique rubble if the river flooded again. It had a lot of large cracks. The meteor shower that had caused all this was in a lull, but looking up in the dark night sky didn’t tell me anything about that. Those were being sent down artificially, so it was impossible to predict when they would arrive like you were reading a weather forecast.
JB wanted to eliminate the traitor no matter what it took. They wanted to get rid of her here and now, before she could go into hiding, so it would be weird if they didn’t make use of every card in their deck. But we couldn’t complain when we wouldn’t have survived this long without my stepmom’s help.
Besides, she couldn’t just escape Paris and arrive in the deserted wilderness to keep JB from harming those around her.
If JB knew what she cared about, they could start taking hostages. They wanted to restrict her actions, so she had to act coldly toward Paris no matter how she felt on the inside.
“Come with me,” she said.
This was always how it seemed to work. Of course, I would only fall into a crack in the road, get crushed by rubble, or be killed in some other ordinary way devoid of conspiracy theories if I tried walking through the Paris night with no assistance.
“I will go in first. If I stop and count to ten with nothing happening, then you two follow after me. Then we repeat that pattern.”
Amatsu Yurina crouched low and walked slowly toward the end of the stone bridge. Once her feet left the solid ground and moved out above the dark river, things stopped feeling weird.
She gestured to us and we followed after her.
We would occasionally move alongside a collapsed streetlight or abandoned car and observe our surroundings, but we mostly just mimicked what she did.
She moved up alongside a motorboat that had somehow ended up on the bridge.
“No traps and no snipers. Is JB’s cast not in position yet, or are they luring us in to surround us?”
I got the feeling it was best not to ask what she would have done if there had been either of those things. I recalled what she had said before: That isn’t a problem for me. Because I can dodge.
She led the way through the broken city.
We arrived at the other bank.
“Ugh,” I groaned when I noticed it was vaguely brighter here. That was another weight on my heart. We had entered the territory of the ignorant police. It felt like we were now in the world of guns.
Anastasia was worried about something else.
“The Louvre is said to have the world’s strongest security, but how much of that is still active? I doubt they ignore people entirely until they actually set foot on the Louvre’s grounds.”
As a hacker, she was focused on the hacker stuff. But we had gotten this close without any police rushing us.
Amatsu Yurina shrugged.
“People often say you can rest easy if your art is in the Louvre, but has anyone actually sneaked in and monitored the security with a stopwatch in hand?”
“Wait…you’re kidding right?”
“Getting word out that you have the best security there out there is one form of security. The Louvre’s actual defenses are what you can see right here.”
She made it sound so simple, but Anastasia and I were dumbfounded.
But while leading Absolute Noah, she had seen so many VIPs hoping to be saved, so she may have heard a lot of behind-the-scenes information.
It was true we had gotten into the French Ministry of Defense’s basement without permission. Even accounting for the emergency, the security had seemed awfully lax.
“You would be surprised how often people try to avoid unnecessary conflicts by creating imaginary walls that make them look bigger than they are. It’s a standard tactic in the adult world. Like calling yourself the world’s strongest military or the world’s most secure prison.”
But that veil had been blown up and stripped away by the meteor shower. The meteor shower had to have caught France by surprise, but time wasn’t going to stop and wait for them to catch up.
“Now, we need to get in position. Our goal is to strike back against JB. And to extract what information we can.”
The Louvre had looked like a beautiful palace from across the river, but the damage was much more conspicuous up close. With those cracks in the wall, I would have wanted to stay far away under any other circumstances. All the windows I could see were broken and something like a collapsed roof sat in the rubble. But the building itself still towered above us and wasn’t engulfed in flames or smoke. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the fact that I found myself gawking at it even now was a testament to how impressive a structure it was.
We were in bad shape.
I was feeling a lot less guilty when I entered somewhere without permission.
The Louvre was shaped like three sides of a square, but if we approached the plaza on the missing side, we would end up clashing with the police. We instead followed the river to view the side of the building.
As a Western-style palace, it had a lot of windows, but all the glass had broken.
Normally, I doubted even a burglar would consider sneaking in through there.
I held out my phone to confirm the security camera wasn’t producing any mechanical heat or noise. I knew it was dead, but I was still nervous moving below it.
“What exactly are we going to do?” I asked.
“Make JB panic. They won’t take the bait if it’s too obvious we’re waiting for them, so we need to give them a reason to attack. Remember, I am Amatsu Yurina, the woman who won over VIPs from around the world. If they think my plan is to have the police protect me and help me escape Paris through some secret route, JB can’t continue any secret preparations for a long term battle. They will have to rush from their safe sniper spot and try to stop me with a small knife or whatever else they have on hand.”
That made sense.
In fact, wasn’t that basically the same as when we were pursuing Pierre Smith, aka Vizza Valdia?
Amatsu Yurina was unshakable. If I left this in her hands, I got the feeling she would solve everything in no time.
But hold on.
“M-mom? Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Most likely, it does.” That Demon Lord winked. “The more we contact the French police, the more JB will panic. So the solution is simple: Hello there!!”
“Bff!?” spat Anastasia in the darkness. The Paris police were on edge and an encounter with them could easily mean getting shot by mistake. That was the entire reason we were sneaking in through a blind spot, but my stepmom had obliterated that idea all at once.
“Wait, you can’t be serious!”
“C’mon, let’s go, Satori. No waiting around.”
“No! How can you shout ‘hello there’ with a big smile after all this!? You look young enough, but you’re still an old woman at heart- gweh!!”
When I touched on the truth, she grabbed me by the collar with a single hand and spoke with a smile.
“What did you just say about your own mother?”
“Agh, ugh!! Okay, okay. My new mom is young and beautiful and I can brag about her to all the neighborhood kids!! But really though, getting angry when people mention your age? What are you, an outdated cliché- gwah!?”
“You still haven’t learned your lesson?”
The 11-year-old (who was independent enough to travel overseas on her own) gave us an exasperated look as we got going.
But a moment later, an explosion erupted from the strictly-guarded plaza.
Eh?
What just happened?
“Get down!!” shouted my stepmom, lying on top of us two.
It kept going. I heard a second and third explosion as the nearby trees suddenly burst, their hard bark stripped from them.
In fact…
Did something just pierce through the Louvre? I didn’t actually see anything, but was that some kind of fragment tearing through the entire palatial museum!?
“What do we do!? Retreat!?” asked Anastasia from the wet ground next to me.
“And what do we do for the police?”
“Satori.”
“We got them involved and we knew how dangerous JB is. Something bad must be happening over there!!”
I crawled out from under my stepmom. The police had to be fighting back to protect the world-famous artwork and antiques, even if they might suspect all of the people they were meant to protect were rioting.
Yet I couldn’t hear anything.
There was no gunfire. Maybe there was some, but the much louder explosions drowned it all out.
We ran alongside the museum which was oblong like a school building. The explosions would not stop. In fact, what was even happening? Even the ground was shaking. In the other direction, the dark river water was stirring.
And…
“It stopped.”
We were too late.
Silence fell before we arrived at the corner of the building. The explosions were dangerous and unnatural, but the return of silence was disconcerting.
It wasn’t just the lack of explosions.
What about the police? I didn’t hear any gunfire, screams, or shouts. Any evidence of human life was rapidly fading away. Just like the heat fading from a corpse.
“It’s stopped. What do we do now, Truth?”
“…”
What was happening?
Was anyone still alive?
I was afraid to check, but I would regret it the rest of my life if I irresponsibly left now. I realized I was at the point of choosing the lesser of two evils, the worst kind of decision. We thought we finally had a chance to turn the tables on JB, but it looked more like we were approaching our own downfall.
I pressed against the wall.
I took my time, squeezing my eyes shut and then hesitantly checking around the corner.
I saw something completely absurd.
I so regretted looking.
It was…on another level entirely. I could tell the world had been changed. My emotions shot straight past fear and I actually felt anger at how absurd this was. Were the meteor showers and nukes not enough for JB?
“…”
Were those the Paris police littering the ground of the half-destroyed stone plaza? Actually, were they police? They looked far more militarized than what I was used to in Japan. I didn’t know who decided what equipment they used, but those people in black bulletproof jackets and armed with shotguns or carbines were entirely motionless. Their precious equipment hadn’t done a thing to help them.
Something had rejected the scientific assumptions that guns and explosives held the title of strongest.
But what was that something?
I heard several pieces of metal crunching together.
The first thing I saw was a coffin.
A mechanical dinosaur with a coffin for a mouth was trampling on a flipped-over police car. The enormous bipedal silhouette stood more than 10m tall and its folded-up arms were held out in front of its chest, giving it a somewhat humorous appearance.
It didn’t look like a weapon designed with efficiency or functional beauty in mind.
That was apparent in its appearance and its movements.
It ground its teeth and swung its tail.
When the thick coffin lid opened, I saw fangs lined up along the edge of the coffin. They were in fact gas-powered metal spikes made of silver or something. A single bite would be able to tear through an armored vehicle like it was made of aluminum foil. It was demonstrating that fact right now. Yet, I got the impression it hadn’t been designed that way for this purpose.
Its thick tail swished side to side and its small arms opened and closed its fingers.
It had so much waste as a weapon.
This was more than just functional beauty. I sensed some kind of mythical or ceremonial logic behind it. It was clearly a machine, but it gave off a strange presence – no, it gave off a divinity that intimidated all who saw it.
But.
How was this possible?
I thought there weren’t going to be machines stomping around tonight?
“Wait a second.”
I had seen something like this before.
Yes, there was that giant artificial croc controlled by Vizza Valdia! So maybe JB had this kind of tech!! But how was this fair? We were fighting for our lives so we could escape Paris as it fell apart from the meteor showers. Wasn’t that our goal here!? It felt like reaching the end of a full marathon, being told you had to do long-distance swimming next, and being shoved from a cliff. Sure, real life disasters and problems weren’t individually packaged events, but come the hell on!!
“I thought that was weird,” said Amatsu Yurina like she was belatedly lamenting her own foolishness. “That wasn’t Water God Sebek. It wasn’t the god who gave food offerings to the physical crocodiles living in the river and predicted the future based on the crocodiles’ actions; it was the priests working in the temple. And Vizza Valdia never mentioned Sebek himself!”
Then.
Then what was that croc we saw? And what did it have to do with this coffin opening its maw wide in front of us.
“It was Crocodilopolis. That’s what the Greeks called the desert city where the crocodile god was worshiped. Vizza Valdia folded up the entire temple, altered its shape, and made it his tool. In the same way, this coffin is Eljudnir.”
The bipedal coffin was…Eljudnir?
Someone stood near its feet. She looked tiny compared to the dinosaur. She was the only thing allowed to remain standing in that shocking scene. She looked like a girl, but I couldn’t make out the details thanks to the bright headlights of an abandoned police car shining in from behind her. That gave her an oddly divine appearance that prevented me from seeing her as anything ordinary.
What could we do to get her to spare us?
No.
That was the wrong way to think about it.
The girl’s silhouette carved out of the headlights turned her head this way and spoke clearly.
“Amatsu Yurina.”
“…”
My stepmom remained calm. It was Anastasia and I who gulped.
JB.
This was the elite they dispatched to keep their secrecy and safety and to kill the traitor.
“Do not assume you remain safe because you are an ancient Demon Lord. Everything you have bult up over the ages is powerless against me. Your history ends tonight. The Master of Eljudnir shall entomb Demon Lord Lilith.”
Amatsu Yurina grimaced and groaned.
I had never seen that look on her face.
“Hel.”
“What about hell?”
“Hel is figure from Norse mythology. She is the ruler of Niflheim, a world of snow and ice containing the souls of those who died dishonorable deaths according to a warrior’s culture. Eljudnir is the hall where Hel lives. Just like Vizza Valdia’s temple, the hall has been folded up, remade, and allowed to walk free. The hall of the dead which swallowed up Baldr, immortal god of light, and refused to let him go has been brought to the physical world.”
So she was basically an expert in this, huh?
I had spoken with a malicious Valkyrie. I knew JB and Hecate were connected. But did it really go this far!? How far did JB have to go before they were satisfied!?
This was a god.
We weren’t just talking about a Zombie or a Vampire here. Nor was it a simple urban legend or world-famous myth. Even a disaster or an Archenemy would be easily swallowed up by this.
This god would not allow anyone to escape death. It didn’t get much simpler than that. Since humans couldn’t define her, we had thrown her in the Archenemy category, but we couldn’t actually define what this monster was.
“Open your coffin, Eljudnir. Bring eternal slumber to those meant to die. Invite in our guests with the utmost love and respect,” said the girl silhouette.
The cold coffin entrance opened.
“This is the master’s hall towering high within a white world of stagnation. Sinners’ souls, no matter how sinful your deeds, I invite any powerful guest with all due courtesy. Consider yourself honored to receive an invitation from Queen Hel, defiled guests.”
With a dull rumbling, the dinosaur coffin shifted the position of its feet. Moving them from the crushed police car to the cracked plaza was enough to make the ground shake. All the previous disasters were overpowered and overwritten.
The predator had its eyes on us.
It was eat or be eaten.
That fear was of a completely different sort from all the past disasters and battles!!
“Satori,” said my stepmom.
I thought she might have a plan. She was a Demon Lord spoken of in mythology, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and the center of Absolute Noah. I thought she had some suggestion I never would have considered and it would make short work of this crisis.
But I thought wrong.
“Anastasia-chan is your top priority. Take her and run away. Hurry!!”
Part 3
A loud boom slammed into my eardrums and the ground shook like it was thrusting up from below.
I honestly didn’t remember what had happened, but the next thing I knew, I was on the floor indoors and desperately holding Anastasia’s wet form in both arms. What floor were we even on? I wasn’t even sure this was the Louvre.
I felt something wet on my palm.
I must have cut it on glass or something, but I didn’t remember doing it. Had I injured myself climbing in through the window? I made sure the blood was coming from me and Anastasia’s cold skin was uninjured.
“Ah, ah…”
She was shivering in my arms. She was curled up with her little thumb in her mouth. Was that a sign of regression? It felt like she was escaping inwards to block out everything around her.
What had happened?
The shocks that seemed to strike at my entire body hadn’t stopped. The loud noises I heard suggested a battle was still underway. That meant the coffin named Eljudnir was viewing its enemy.
But what about my stepmom?
Where had she gone? Could she be outside grappling with that giant thing?
Maxwell…wasn’t an option.
I didn’t dare say a word or activate my phone’s backlight. Damn, where were those wireless earphones I used when fighting the lightning? Had I dropped them somewhere!?
“Damn.”
Still holding Anastasia, I wrapped a handkerchief around my palm to try and stop the bleeding. I was really just mimicking what I had seen. While my hometown of Kukyou City was known as a disaster prevention city, I hadn’t absorbed enough of that kind of survival knowledge to be practical. Just like with cooking and conversational English skills, the knowledge you needed grew so fleeting when you actually tried to use it.
Hurting my hand was especially bad.
I crawled toward the window, trying to be as silent as I could. I didn’t try to pull Anastasia off of me while she clung to me like a tantruming child. Instead, I stretched my head up while supporting both our weights. I could see out of the broken window. A few police cars’ headlights and the outdoor lighting kept things relatively bright out there.
Did the surviving lights mean this really was the Louvre?
I felt like I was nervously spying on the outside world with a periscope.
But in this scenario, our submarine was badly damaged and the surface was inundated with helicopters and warships loaded with torpedoes and depth charges.
I needed information.
This wasn’t an actual strategy or tactic and we had no chance of winning. I just wanted information to free me from the tension I was feeling. I was driven by a hunger that didn’t even think three seconds into the future, so I was no better than a baby crying for their bottle.
And I should have known better.
I had made this same mistake before.
Of course I was going to regret having looked.
“Oh, hell.”
It looked like we were on the Louvre’s third floor. This window gave us a look down on the plaza surrounded by the building’s three sides of a square. A few pieces of artwork had collapsed from the meteor shower impacts and several police cars were parked with their blue lights and headlights on but with no one to operate them. I also saw something like a bus covered in metal and chain link as well as an 8-wheeled armored vehicle. Did French police normally use those, or did they signify special circumstances? I had no way of knowing.
It looked like it had all been shredded.
Well, that or trampled underfoot, kicked through the air, or crushed between massive jaws and thrown aside.
That coffin had done it all.
That thing shaped like a bipedal carnivorous dinosaur.
The transformed hell hall of Eljudnir was too powerful. You could even call it a disaster in and of itself. And it was not intentionally attacking deserted vehicles.
That was only a side effect.
It was only slamming its head into those obstacles because it had failed to devour its fleeing prey.
“Mom.”
“She doesn’t stand a chance,” said Anastasia, sounding somehow unemotional.
Even that nonhuman fairy – that Silky who existed outside the bounds of science – was seated weakly on the floor.
“Being an Archenemy or a Demon Lord won’t accomplish anything here. That thing is a tool used to devour the complainers and forcibly erase them from this world. You could say it declares someone’s very soul persona non grata, so we can’t do anything about it. Being unaging isn’t enough to stop its fangs. Being immortal isn’t enough to avoid being erased when that coffin lid closes around you.”
“So what exactly is it? How is it different from a simple tank?”
“Truth, your knowledge is getting in your way, but I bet your senses have already accepted it. That coffin is a great hole. It is a wormhole directly linked to the realm of the dead. It doesn’t matter how much you train up your own endurance and resistance. Your efforts will not be rewarded and your talents will not bear fruit. Anyone who is thrown in there is killed exactly the same. That coffin is a locked room – a gate – created for that sole purpose.”
Once she mentioned it, I realized I didn’t sense that coffin as a thick wall. I felt fear all the same, but it was more like I was looking over the edge of a sheer cliff. That was why I was so disinclined to face it. With a wall, I could maybe break through if I tackled it hard enough, but there was no point in tackling a cliff. The faster you ran toward it, the faster you would fall off and lose your life for no reason.
It was a cliff that could walk around and shove people off of itself.
It was a famous suicide spot that had gained mobility.
…This could hardly be worse.
This wasn’t about winning or losing. I couldn’t even envision how something like that could be beaten.
Even my stepmom was focused on running away.
She would put a police car, an armored truck, or some other obstacle between them, assuming it would be destroyed, but there were only so many obstacles available to her.
For one, there was no real reason for her to fight in the open plaza. She would have had an advantage in a smaller area where Eljudnir was too big to move around freely.
She had no reason to make that choice, so it hadn’t been a choice on her part.
Even Amatsu Yurina was having trouble finding a chance to retreat, so she was forced to continue fighting without carelessly turning her back.
“She isn’t going to last much longer.”
She was in this predicament because she had let us escape.
I knew that.
But…
“Anastasia, I get that that thing isn’t your average enemy. I get that we can’t measure its strength through how hard or heavy it is.”
“Truth?”
“But I can’t leave her out there like that. And this is the Louvre, packed full of art and antiques from around the world. Is there anything here that might work against Eljudnir? Like a ward against evil or a legendary sword or something!?”
“We aren’t going to find something like that just lying around. The Louvre is only an art museum, after all. And even if we did find one, we wouldn’t be able to wield it properly.”
Probably not.
If anyone could operate that unknown power as long as they held the item, things like that would have spread across the world already. Humans were such foolish creatures that even nuclear weapons were spreading across the world because we couldn’t keep that secret. Anything that easy to use wouldn’t remain exclusive to JB.
However.
“Can we make her think we found something?”
“?”
“Anastasia, we’re talking about JB here. They know more about that kind of thing than anyone. They’re just about the only group that describes magic through knowledge rather than feeling. That means the fear of magic has seeped into their bones. Since magic is only a technique to them, they will always carry the fear of having that knowledge leak out and being used against them. So they’ll feel fear where the average person wouldn’t.”
“You mean it doesn’t actually matter whether or not we know how to use it?”
“The object itself doesn’t even have to be real. We win as long as we can trick her into feeling fear. So tell me what I need to know. An Archenemy would probably know better than Maxwell. We don’t have time. It can be a mysterious sculpture or a cursed diamond for all I care. I just need something inside the Louvre carrying a legend that will strike fear into a JB cast member’s heart!”
The building shook from an even more powerful tremor than before.
I was worried, but watching from here wasn’t going to save my stepmom.
“This way!”
Anastasia had rebooted now. She was still shaking, but she grabbed my wrist with her small hand and took off running.
“The Louvre contains artwork seen in textbooks around the world, like the Venus de Milo or the Mona Lisa. But surprisingly few are weapons. Maybe because those are brought to the military museum in the Hôtel des Invalides we were at earlier.
“But,” she said.
She showed me around as a Silky, a fairy said to live in old mansions and attack unwanted guests in exchange for helping with the housework.
“If you’re looking for something in the Louvre with powerful mythological or occult symbolism, it has to be this.”
That meant this was what we needed.
“The Nike of Samothrace. That’s the goddess of victory in Greek mythology.”
Greek mythology.
A bitter look appeared on my face. Hadn’t Hecate been Greek too? Not to mention the Scylla, the Echidna, and the Siren. Each of them had been a unique challenge.
Itou Helen the Circe Witch was fine since she was my cute underclassman, but the thought of seeing her standing in my way as an enemy sent a chill down my spine. Saying so would probably upset her, though.
“Nike is exactly what she sounds like,” continued Anastasia. “In any war, the side she takes will win. That’s what makes her a goddess of victory. Just as a wind god controls the wind and a thunder god controls the thunder, Nike controls the state of victory itself. It is even said that Zeus defeated the Titans because Nike took his side. So not even Eljudnir or Hel should be able to defeat her.”
“But isn’t the one in the Louvre only a sculpture someone made? It isn’t the actual god.”
“It’s the same either way. Idol worship was an accepted part of Greek mythology. That means a god’s power resides in an image of them and you can pray to that image to heal your wounds, improve your business’s fortunes, or whatever else that power entails. Thus, an image of Nike contains Nike’s power and Nike’s nature. What percentage of her power is found there is a separate matter.”
Of course.
We weren’t really expecting the ancient sculpture to start walking around like a robot weapon. We had already made our intentions here clear.
Because JB was relying on tools like Crocodilopolis and Eljudnir, Hel might be unduly afraid of another tool.
“Do you think this will work?” I asked.
“If we’re convincing enough. Hel herself is using a transformed version of her hall of the dead, so she can’t fully deny the possibility of a tool containing divine power. Being such a powerful spell user will make her fear even stronger. Plus, you have me with you.”
“?”
“I’m a Silky, a helper fairy who lives in old European mansions. What if the Louvre counted as my territory and I lent you my power as my master? JB already isn’t sure how to handle you and that would make it sound like a specialized Archenemy had given you some special, limited privilege. Sounds like reason to worry to me.”
I considered it a bit before responding.
“Is your power really that convenient? Why didn’t you use it in Las Vegas?”
“Again, it’s about convincing Hel it works that way. She doesn’t know what we can really do. Ideally, we would defeat that monster before we have a chance to talk, but if it comes to it, we won’t have much of a choice. The more options we have, the better.”
That made sense.
We weren’t the only ones cowering in the dark.
“Anyway, if you’re right about this, Truth, she will fall for it. I think we have what it will take to make this convincing. We should be able to bind her with our bluff.”
“Then we’ll need some kind of ceremony to make it look legit. Holding up some piece of rock isn’t going to get through to JB!”
“Way ahead of you.”
This must have been one of the Louvre’s prized pieces. The signs on the wall had a symbol based on it and it was on the cover of the pamphlets. It was a sculpture of a headless woman. Was that her arm turned into a wing? No, it looked more like the arm was missing too.
But Anastasia didn’t take us to the display area. We descended a few flights of stairs to head into the basement.
“Some say the parts of an art museum the public gets to see are only 30 or 40% of the entire facility.”
Had she digitally snuck into places like this as a hacker, or was this her occult knowledge as an Archenemy? Either way, she seemed confident.
“In truth, most of the space is taken up by storage and repair rooms no one ever gets to see. They need special temperature and humidity management, air purifiers, and UV countermeasures. There are also lecture rooms where they hold study meetings for artists and curators. It’s like a small dungeon down here.”
“What do they have down there?”
“Nothing really. There are plenty of legends though. Like that the pieces cut from the Regent Diamond are kept down there or that the paint used by Rubens has been perfectly reproduced in a lab.”
“…”
“These stories are inevitable with the world’s most famous art museum. People love telling rumors about it, just like with the British Museum. But that much-rumored basement means we might be able to fool Hel. She just has to think maybe, possibly the Louvre has the Nike of Samothrace’s head or arms. And what if combining those with the rest of the sculpture causes it to unleash its true power!?”
The Louvre apparently always displayed its art on a semibasement level, but we were even further down than that. There was no sign of the police car and outside lights here, so it was completely dark.
We checked around using our phone lights.
“This area feels a lot different.”
“Because guests aren’t supposed to see this part. Artists only care about their own artwork. Their clothing and ateliers tend to be pretty sloppy.”
The hallways were narrow enough already, but the wooden and cardboard boxes piled up everywhere made it feel all the more like a labyrinth. Drawing up a simple layout would have shown walls in our way.
“Where do we start?” I asked.
“The head before the arms, I guess. We can start to fool Hel once we have Nike’s head. Amatsu Yurina will run out of strength eventually, so we need to find something we can use before that happens!”
Fortunately, it looked like there were plenty of tools at our disposal: paint, clay, chisels, pieces of wood that reminded me of incense, and more. It was all in the shelves along the walls, organized in some way that escaped me. They were probably meant to fix cracked or faded artwork, but they could probably be used to create something from scratch as well.
That left one problem.
“The Nike of Samothrace is a world-famous treasure, isn’t it? Is a head we made really going to fool Hel?”
“If we made a serious attempt, it would end up little better than that famous case of someone ruining a painting of the son of god. But…”
The entire underground space shook harder than ever before. I instinctually looked to the ceiling like with an earthquake. Anastasia didn’t. Was that because they didn’t have earthquakes in her country? No, Las Vegas was on the US West Coast, which was famous for its earthquakes. Something like a fine powder fell from the ceiling.
Something had happened up on the surface.
We didn’t have much time left.
“But what if we find a model to work with? I said they have lecture rooms for artists and curators down here, remember? To practice repairs, they create the lost parts of paintings or sculptures.”
“You mean they might secretly use the already-broken Nike as practice?”
“Even if it’s just for practice, any artist coming to the Louvre has to be world-class. At the very least, their attempt will be better than ours!”
That said, the Louvre basement was like a labyrinth of stuff. We only had our phone lights to illuminate the darkness and any text we found was in French.
There were plaster and marble sculptures here and there. A lot of heads were lying on the floor. Whether they had always been like that or a full sculpture had fallen and broken from all the shaking, I couldn’t tell you. But which was the right one? Was there a right one? Which head should we pick up to fool Hel, ruler of death and master of Eljudnir!?
“Maxwell, search for images of the Nike of Samothrace. Focus on analyzing the broken neck. This is like searching out the right jigsaw puzzle piece. Highlight any head here that would fit on that neck!”
“Sure, understood. But I cannot do anything about objects not seen by your camera, such as the ones in boxes or behind other objects.”
This would show us the practice Nike head made by a professional artist who visited the Louvre. If it would perfectly match that neck, then we didn’t have to worry about mistakenly grabbing the head of another god like Venus or Hermes.
“Just FYI, Nike is a common choice for artists. There are a few sculptures other than the one found on Samothrace. As for the head, I think she was commonly depicted as a woman wearing a veil. The Nike of Samothrace is standing on the bow of a boat and others are often held within Athena’s hand.”
“So that’s what we’re looking for, huh?”
But that was all the information we had.
Knowing there was no wrong answer didn’t mean we were guaranteed to fool Hel. In fact, “good enough” was unlikely to make her panic.
How far could we take it?
Anything too plain wouldn’t work, but putting a bearded man’s head on the goddess’s body would be too obviously fake. What would Hel fall for? We wanted something shocking, but we didn’t want to lose credibility. Where was the line that would inspire fear and draw her interest?
While I was wondering that, an impact pierced through along a vertical line from heaven to earth.
I don’t think it directly hit me.
But I was still launched into the air. The entire floor shook like a dinosaur’s back. I nearly forgot this was the hidden core of the Louvre. It was dark enough already, but dust rushed in from every direction.
What had happened?
I quickly shut off my phone’s light. Moonlight was shining in from overhead. I had no idea what had done it, but something had broken right through from the ground floor to this basement floor. The hole overhead was more than 10m in diameter.
Nothing good would come of giving away our location.
I held my breath and climbed underneath a wooden work table. Where had Anastasia gone? I couldn’t see her from where I was, but calling out to her now would be suicide!
“I thought…”
I heard a female voice coming from the center of the dust cloud. It was speaking Japanese. That made it clear who was the target of this wielder of such great power: me.
Hel was searching for me.
I was too scared to check. I was certain she would see me if I stuck my head out from behind cover. But not being able to see was also terrifying. Logic couldn’t do anything about the fear.
Would I look?
Would I peek? Was I really going to do it?
“I thought I saw you sneaking around. My presence isn’t needed to settle things out there, so I decided to intervene here myself.”
“Not a smart idea,” I replied from below the table.
My throat was stiff and I sounded way more pathetic than I had hoped.
I had ruined my advantage. Our eyes met, so my cover was entirely meaningless now. I had lost what little defense that provided and now I felt like I had my life and my soul exposed. I was even more fragile than a raw egg, so I was like an egg yolk sitting on the floor. The thread of my life would snap even if she didn’t do anything.
My lifespan really was shortening. Giving away my position didn’t help me in any way.
But gathering attention on me would give Anastasia a chance to escape notice by this horrific cast member. It didn’t help me, but that didn’t mean it was meaningless.
I had to believe that.
Or else I would break.
“Hel, was it? I have more options now that your coffin thing isn’t around. You shouldn’t have gotten this close.”
“Oh, dear. This is troubling.”
She had a relaxed air to her.
She was smiling in what I had to assume was confidence. The moonlight shined like a spotlight on a girl with the slim build of a model. Her figure and her apparent age seemed out of sync. She had shoulder-length silver hair, white skin, and eyes as cold as ice. She wore a short white dress. It was a revealing thing that left her shoulders bare, yet she wore a bluish-black glove on only her right hand and a stocking on only her right leg. It was all on the one side. I had to wonder if that had some kind of meaning.
She undoubtedly had head-turning beauty, but even I could sense something in the relaxation behind her smile. If I let that relaxed air affect me, I would be dead mere moments later.
She was with JB and existed at a mythological level.
She was equal or possibly even greater than Hecate who could remove the limiters on the human brain and remake people into witches with only her words.
“I cannot believe what I am hearing here. How could even the most ignorant person make such an absurd claim? The average idiot would sense their mistake on the subconscious level. Eljudnir is my hall. I took my own creation and folded it into a different form. So this should be a foregone conclusion.”
I couldn’t stop sweating.
What time of year was it? My body couldn’t even remember that obvious fact. I was afraid to hear Hel’s conclusion. I was trembling and an unnatural fever was running wild within me.
But the words came all the same.
I wasn’t even given the right to reject them.
“I manage even the dead gods, so did you really think I was inferior to the very death I had created?”
“Ahhhhh!!”
I heard a shout and dull impact. A small form had rushed out at Hel’s side, raised something the size of a bowling ball overhead, and hit Hel with it.
“Anastasia!?”
“Run, Truth! She’s on another level from the previous-!!”
“Oh?”
Anastasia was interrupted by a calm voice.
Damn.
Even if it was wielded by a child, that blunt weapon had to be equivalent to a bowling ball. It had scored a direct hit on the side of Hel’s head, but her focus on me didn’t waver at all. Was that really not enough to inspire concern in her!?
“Really? You tried to use deadly force against me, the one who dominates and commands death? Kids these days have no sense at all. You might as well be fighting the sun with a candle’s flame.”
“Gah!!”
“Anastasia!?”
Hel had not cut Anastasia down with a mysterious sword or anything like that. In fact, she hadn’t laid a finger on her.
Anastasia simply crumbled to the floor.
She was like an inflatable doll with the air let out.
JB’s embodiment of death hadn’t even glanced in her direction.
“Surely you were not so ignorant you failed to imagine what would happen to anyone foolish enough to carelessly approach death.”
“…”
“It appears she was fortunate her childish lack of strength prevented her from making a truly deadly attack. But with your strength, you will receive more than just a near-death experience, Amatsu Satori. You will die. But if that is what you wish, then you can try it as many times as you like.”
When she took a single step toward me, I sensed a thick, unseen wall approaching. That was the death I normally wasn’t conscious of. It squeezed at my heart.
But she stopped after that one step.
Hel actually stopped.
“I am a Silky, a type of fairy that has changed form over the ages to survive into the modern age, no matter how weak we might be.”
The collapsed girl was the reason.
Anastasia’s lips just barely managed to get some words out past her gasping breaths.
No.
It was some kind of incantation.
“The Louvre has already been made into my territory, so I rule this holy ground. I bind the bond of courtesy here. Amatsu Satori, head of the household. As long as I recognize my duty to you, I guarantee you unlimited power.”
Anastasia, you idiot!
I understood what she was thinking. As a SiIky who lived in old mansions, she could say she was registering the Louvre’s building as her territory and placing me as her master. That would make it sound like she could grant me some kind of magic or occult power. Since Hel used her hall of Eljudnir to fight, she might actually believe this.
But.
It was all fake. There was no actual power behind it. It was all a bluff with no actual logic or equations supporting it!! That might work when things were going our way, but after we had already lost, it was only going to shorten her life.
Was she really that intent on saving me?
She could barely breathe and was too weak to get up. It was a miracle she was even still alive. She could have just laid there since Hel had been ignoring her, but not anymore, dammit!!
“Maxwell, run a search on Hel from Norse mythology.”
“No. Hel is considered one of the gods’ primary enemies, but unlike monsters such as Fenrir and Jormungandr, she is not depicted engaging in mutual destruction with a god. Some even suggest she survives Ragnarok just fine.”
“I don’t need an answer right away! But I can’t even try to think without some basic information!”
I had to save Anastasia no matter what.
I had to draw Hel’s attention away from her. Hel had destroyed an entire Paris police squad with a single command. Not even Demon Lord Lilith’s power was enough, so I couldn’t let her attack an 11-year-old girl!
“Here are your search results: Hel is the manager of Niflheim. Half of her body is said to alive and half of it dead, but there is no mention of a weak point such as stabbing the living half with a sword or damaging the dead half with healing magic.”
“No…weak point?”
I felt dizzy.
Hel must have heard me talking because she whispered from beyond my cover.
“Ragnarok. That war is not supposed to have happened yet.”
“…”
Wasn’t Ragnarok that final war mentioned in video games and manga a lot? And Hel escapes that worldwide war without a single scratch!?
“Like I said, there is no point in directing deadly force at the one who rules over death. Ragnarok will destroy every last part of the world, but not even it can tear down my hall.”
…This was bad.
Anastasia was right about her being on another level. Hecate, who had assisted JB on a whim, had been a god who awakened humans into witches just by speaking with them whether she meant to or not. Hel’s death was just as uncontrollable.
If she touched you, you died.
If she had anything to do with you, your life was over.
And she would never die herself. She wouldn’t take any damage whatsoever.
She wasn’t just a god of pestilence that spread disease or a god of poverty that ruined families. She came at you more directly and left you with less opportunity to recover. If you opposed her, you automatically lost. Any talent or effort would be equally buried by death. There were no openings, loopholes, or second chances.
Just like with a god of light or a god of fire, this monster had complete control over death and was death itself.
“That said.”
Hel stepped on something lying at her feet.
It wasn’t Anastasia’s weakly-breathing head.
It was about the size of a bowling ball.
“The Nike of Samothrace? Yes, you would need something on the level of a goddess of victory if you hoped to defeat the ruler of death.”
“?”
“What? Did you think I was too foolish to see what you were doing?”
No.
That wasn’t it.
Why was she suddenly interested in that? That interpretation was wrong. Needless to say, we weren’t witches who had had the limiters in our heads forcibly removed by Hecate’s guidance. No matter what was actually hidden in the depths of the Louvre, we couldn’t possibly draw on the power of the Nike of Samothrace no matter how hard we tried. Hel shouldn’t have any reason to make this detour.
Was this Anastasia’s true goal? She hadn’t attacked in a meaningless panic. She had attacked with that stone head in order to draw Hel’s attention to the Nike of Samothrace and make it as believable as possible.
Anyone would focus on the weapon someone tried to kill them with. Maybe out of anger, maybe to eliminate their fear, maybe to push away the possibility of defeat, and maybe to convince themselves of their victory and safety. Yes, after defeating their enemy, anyone would check the neutralized weapon that had fallen to the floor.
That had created a starting point.
But what did I do with that? How could I reward Anastasia’s efforts that had given me this chance!?
First, I needed to increase Hel’s doubts. I couldn’t let these embers go out!
“There are plenty of legends about the Louvre’s basement. You’ve heard them, haven’t you? But none of those have anything on the reality. I mean, just take a look around you. We already have a method of borrowing Nike’s power set up.”
“So what if you do?”
Eh?
No hesitation?
She was in fact tilting her head. She didn’t even look around.
“Norse mythology has its own god of victory. Ours is named Tyr, who Tuesday is named after, but he doesn’t get to do much. The only real story about him is tricking my brother Fenrir and getting his arm bitten off. He is said to have power on par with Odin, though.”
“…”
“The point is, he lacks the power necessary to conquer death and failure. He cannot step down from the stage even though he knows he loses an arm. Victory is not powerful enough to defeat death. Victory’s power only goes so far. Sometimes people win the battle but lose the war and sometimes they must pay the toll of death to achieve victory. In fact, Victory God Tyr will die fighting Garmr during Ragnarok. You are sorely mistaken if you assume victory is enough to subdue death. In Norse mythology, the strongest of the gods already have their deaths foretold. The only ones spared death are the undying Baldr and Hel, who holds death in the palm of her hand.”
This was really bad.
We had made a fundamental mistake here. The question wasn’t whether or not we could trick her. We had completely convinced her that we had Nike’s power, but it still wasn’t enough to stop her!
“Is this all you have?”
Kh…
“What other tricks do you have up your sleeve? Where is your true trump card? I find it hard to believe you risked your lives on no more than this. Please tell me you were not that foolish.”
We had nothing.
Now that our Nike bluff had failed, we had no reason to even be in the Louvre’s basement. We had to think up another plan and try again, and that meant we needed to withdraw.
But.
Anastasia was collapsed at Hel’s feet.
“I recommend you withdraw,” said Maxwell on my phone.
“But…”
“No. You must understand. In any disaster, the death of someone who knows the location of those in need of rescue prevents anyone else from learning that information. You are the only one still capable of moving. If you are defeated as well, Miss Anastasia loses all chance of rescue. The same is true for Mrs. Yurina who is fighting the predatory coffin Eljudnir.”
“…!”
“Their survival depends on you. Forget your fleeting pride and wisely consider what you must do.”
Dammit!!!
I clenched my teeth so hard I thought they were going to break and I chose the path of the loser.
But just as I turned tail to run…
“Did you know, Amatsu Satori?”
That voice reached me.
The voice of death.
“Norse mythology reveres death. Odin in particular prefers those who died valiantly in battle and invites them to heaven. So what kind of death is controlled by Hel in Niflheim at the depths of the earth? That is the death of those who refused to participate in battle because they sought peace, because they did not want to die, or any other reason.”
“Ah.”
Dammit.
I had screwed up. My strength was fading. Was that rule…the reason…Anastasia was only close to death…after making contact with her?
It wasn’t that she killed you by touching you.
You couldn’t disengage from the battle.
I heard the heavy thud of my own body hitting the floor.
Part 4
I couldn’t move.
But I wasn’t passing out right away either. My memory continued, unlike with anesthetic.
How should I put it?
It felt like an invisible fist-sized chunk had been ripped from the center of my chest. I didn’t know if that chunk served as a gear or as a battery, but it felt so very wrong to have it missing. It was like someone had started operating on me in the middle of this unsterilized room.
Half of her body was alive and half was dead.
Did that symbolize her position as the one who sorted between the living and the dead? It seemed awfully straightforward, really.
“Hm.”
I heard Hel’s voice.
She was casually walking my way. It felt like she was actually looking my way. Had something happened to draw her interest?
“A strategic withdrawal? Your body left the battle, but at some level, you still intended to win. Isn’t that right, Amatsu Satori? That prevented the extraction from completing.”
She seemed awfully unconcerned for having failed.
Was she guaranteed to win now that I was stopped? She could kill me or Anastasia with no more than a knife now.
…Wait.
But something seemed wrong here. Wasn’t Norse mythology a video-gamey mythology full of famous weapons like Gungnir and Mjolnir?
“The new planet will soon be complete.”
She pointed overhead.
The filthy night sky was visible through the large hole she had created.
But that very sky grew bright white, like it was all a giant camera flash.
Was that…a nuclear explosion?
Was this really happening?
This ending didn’t feel real at all.
“You have nothing to worry about. As bright as it looks, it is occurring out past the moon’s orbit. The Earth has an excellent atmosphere, so you will not be exposed to a deadly dose of radiation while on the planet’s surface.”
Past the moon’s orbit.
Did that meant they had actual done it? Had they created a brand new planet between Earth and Mars?
“Although from the look of things, it may steal away this planet’s satellite before its orbit can stabilize.”
How much did I really understand of what Hel was saying?
Hel may not have been seeking my understanding or sympathy.
“Wait, its orbit is that close? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“It will not stay as close as the moon and will thus not have as constant an effect, but the approach of such a large mass will probably cause some slight fluctuations in this planet’s rotation and revolution. It will alter the daylight hours, the Coriolis force, and other things, so it should alter the wind currents around the world.”
“…?”
“That will bring new fertility to barren wastelands. The factory smoke will no longer cross national borders. Once people can live happily under their own power, they will have no more need to pray to the gods.”
“Is that your idea of a jailbreak? That just changes how we humans do things. I don’t see how it would trouble the gods at all.”
“You don’t? Whether it was done through the defeat of a giant or the creation of an earth or sky god, most mythologies have a god creating the world. But for some reason, many of them leave the initial reason a mystery. Norse and Greek mythology even have the gods or giants start fighting over an unintentionally created world. Celtic mythology doesn’t even mention how the world was created. And the story of creating the world in 6 days and resting for 1 is so straightforward it is actually difficult to determine the true intentions behind it.”
“Hold on.”
“But we can surmise those gods created the world because they needed it. So what if we take from them what they need? In Norse mythology, they needed to link their tree to a source of war dead, but whether they reside in heaven or in paradise, there should be a connection. So if we shake the world connected to their abode, it should trouble them. All while making the people happier.”
Was that correct? It was all so out there I had trouble picturing it.
Her eyes shined bright.
Someone who hadn’t been satisfied as only the ruler of a world of death continued to speak.
“This will complete JB’s jailbreak. And not just for us cast members. Everyone will be liberated from the role assigned to them.”
“Ah, uh.”
“Yes?”
I could move my mouth?
I doubted I could fight back, though.
“Then why don’t you leave already?”
“I will, of course.”
Something fell from above with some dull thuds. My bloody stepmom had been thrown down into the large hole overhead.
She was beaten and hard to look at.
There was no way she was going to turn this around or was simply bluffing. That was the empty shell of a defeated woman who had all her strength sapped from her like wringing out a rag.
As my mother, this was probably the last thing she wanted me to see.
And Hel did not hesitate to continue.
“After killing the three of you.”
“…”
It didn’t sound like she was going to spare us.
However.
I was convinced of something now. That last bit wasn’t necessary at all, Hel. You could have skipped that part.
It was thanks to my stepmom.
If Hel hadn’t carelessly thrown Amatsu Yurina here, I doubt I would have noticed.
“Hel.”
“You have some last words?”
“You’re weak.”
I heard a horribly violent sound.
A creaking sound came from my temple while I lay motionless on my side. Hel had stomped on my head like she was crushing an empty can below her heel.
“Excuse me, but did I mishear that?”
“The fact remains that you still haven’t killed me when I have no way of defending myself. It isn’t that you’re showing mercy. You can’t kill me.”
Even during Ragnarok, there were no stories of her dying in battle with another god. She was a transcendent being who no one knew how to kill.
But look at it the other way around.
“Norse mythology is a story of weapons. Odin has Gungnir and Thor has Mjolnir. All of the strongest gods have a powerful weapon beyond human understanding. It’s a really simple sign of how strong they are. But what about Hel?”
“…”
“She doesn’t have one, does she? She doesn’t have a special weapon like the grim reaper’s scythe or a world-destroying cannon. Nor does she use Fenrir or Jormungandr as giant weapons. That’s because Hel never does any fighting herself, isn’t it?”
Hel wasn’t impressive because she could kill people without lifting a finger. She couldn’t do anything other than that. That was why she was bothering to speak with enemies who were so far beneath her. Because she didn’t have to do anything. We would eventually give up on fighting…and thus break Norse mythology’s biggest taboo.
There was nothing more to it.
It was the same trick we had tried to use with the Nike of Samothrace. I must have really not been paying attention for it to take me this long to notice.
“And I’m kind of surprised at how easily I can speak.”
“…”
“It’s a lot easier than before!!”
As long as I kept working toward victory and maintained a desire to keep fighting, I was apparently freed from that deadly penalty.
That explained why she had sent that dinosaur-like Eljudnir after Amatsu Yurina instead of doing it herself! She had been cautiously searching out what she needed to say to finally win!!
I grabbed at Hel’s ankle as she seriously tried to crush my skull underfoot. Even though I still didn’t have much strength.
“So, Hel. Did you know the Achilles tendon is a classic weak point?”
“!?”
How do you like that taste of anxiety and panic, Hel?
I was in control now. And once I had control of this place, Hel’s power didn’t scare me!
It didn’t matter whether or not my weakened thumb could really tear through her Achilles tendon.
“Eljudnir!!”
The entire ground shook.
Don’t call that thing here.
Hel didn’t have her own weapon. Her body wasn’t especially strong. I think that was why she had those working for her do the fighting. Don’t ask me whether that meant demon dogs or legendary dragons or whatever, though.
I had thought my heart would stop when she first broke through the ceiling and descended into the basement.
But that probably hadn’t been her power. She first had Eljudnir trample the terrain with its great size and then she had descended safely herself. I hadn’t been able to accurately observe what happened thanks to all the dust and shockwaves. But we were only 2 or 3 stories down. As long as she had some kind of thick cushion, she could jump down that far. The police’s equipment may have come in handy there. Like the water tanks or polyurethane barricades used to stop cars.
A giant mass peered down at us from the large hole leading up to the surface. Its great jaws were decorated by countless pile drivers. In a more primitive sense, that was the scariest thing here. It was so large its head might still be aboveground after jumping down here.
But.
“Are you sure about that, Hel?”
“?”
“The ground is fragile here. There have been so many meteor strikes and earthquakes shaking the ground tonight and then you blasted this hole in the ground as well. And now a coffin larger than a dump truck is standing right on the fragile edge. Maybe some of its weight is directed toward its tail, but that bipedal movement is still pretty unstable. What if the ground crumbles below it?”
“Oh, no!”
The phone in my other hand vibrated. Yes, I could let Maxwell run the relevant calculations.
“And Eljudnir is a transformed hall. It isn’t alive. Hel, won’t you be in trouble if you end up flattened below a heavy, nonliving object!?”
Several dull crashes followed.
We had won.
A landslide had begun. The dinosaur-like shape tumbled down along with it. Its powerful legs and short arms flailed uselessly.
The slight beam of moonlight was blocked from view.
Hel was closed up within Niflheim at the depths of the earth. She was a powerful being, but her inability to visit heaven meant she could not fight the terrain.
It was time she was crushed by the ground.
Now.
That plan might sound flawless, but there was one tiny fly in the ointment there. Since I was close enough to be grabbing her ankle, I would be buried alive right along with her.
Part 5
I no longer felt any ordinary sensations like “heavy” or “painful”.
I simply couldn’t move.
Maybe I should have thanked Hel. If she hadn’t partially pulled my soul out from my chest, I might have felt the appropriate level of pain and died from shock before the injury or blood loss could do it.
“Nh, ah.”
I heard a voice from right by my ear.
It came from Hel who was surprisingly close by while trapped below the back leg of Eljudnir, which had fallen on its side. She whispered in my ear while lying face down.
“So this is where it ends.”
“Don’t you need to run away? JB doesn’t tolerate failure, do they?”
“Oh?”
“It looked like Hecate got away. Maybe this is something a god can actually survive.”
“My. Worrying for the enemy after all this? You truly are a softy…and terrifying.”
“…?”
Terrifying?
“Why would we turn on our own if we were bound by strong bonds of camaraderie? We are unable to obtain that kind of ‘power’, so we must work extra hard to avoid breaking apart. But you have that power. You are not like the Aztecs who had to periodically update the contract by making living sacrifices to keep the sun from disappearing and you are not like the one-eyed god who had to hold the world together through military might. You are more like the monk who achieved enlightenment in ancient India or the sinner hung on a cross 2000 years ago. You have that same power that comes from within.”
I didn’t understand.
But I did get the general idea that the entirety of JB, not just one cast member, truly feared an ordinary person like me.
“Also, I am not a god.”
“Eh?”
“I rule the world of the dead, but I am descended from the giants. My mother Angrboda was one and even my father Loki comes from the giants. I am a transcendent one who was denied the title of god. Hecate was allowed to live freely as a god, so I cannot do what she does.”
That may have been her reason for joining JB.
Hel was in a more precarious situation than Hecate. I had wondered why a death god like her would want to stage a jailbreak from the gods.
“Amatsu Satori. Do you fear disasters?”
“I do.”
“And do you hate JB for causing disasters? If you thoughtlessly agree again, then you have misidentified your true enemy.”
“I’ve…what?”
“Unless I am mistaken, your country’s language refers to natural disasters as ‘heavenly disasters’.”
…
At first, I didn’t understand what she was getting at.
But hold on.
Why would she bring that up here? What was the significance of that perfectly ordinary term?
“I was afraid of this. It isn’t going to finish in time. They will intervene before the planet can cool.”
Hel was watching something.
Still pinned face down, she twisted around to look through the gap in the rubble overhead.
We didn’t need a telescope to see the large orange light in the dirty night sky. In fact, it was larger than the moon. That was the new planet JB had created. It was apparently further out than the moon, but I had trouble grasping those kinds of distances.
What had happened before it could cool and harden?
What had happened before JB’s plan could bear fruit?
The change wasn’t a large thing. It was actually quite gentle compared to all the previous disasters that had nearly blinded and deafened me.
But that made it all the more frightening.
The orange-glowing planet gradually disappeared. But this wasn’t like the waning of the moon. It was more like watching a round apple rotting away in fast forward. All of that mass dented inwards, lost its shape, and disappeared. I didn’t even break apart. It only grew smaller and smaller.
But why?
How was this happening and where was it going!?
That was a planet. Sure, it was artificially made, but mass on the same scale as the planet we all lived on was destroyed so easily.
I could only watch in consternation, but Hel whispered to me with a cynical smile.
“They can do this with ease. We in JB stole a portion of their power, but we are still no match for the real deal.”
That was when something fluttered down.
Were they swan feathers?
They didn’t stop on the floor and continued down toward the depths of the earth as I watched.
“They are the ones who retrieve the souls of dead warriors. They are the ones who lead that army to destroy the evil ones. They are the heavenly maidens who demonstrate the righteousness of the gods and of heaven by wielding swords or spears as that army’s vanguard,” explained Hel. “They run this world.”
What had JB wanted to fight against? All of that cruel organization’s cast members said they wanted to stage a jailbreak, but what was it they wanted to help people escape?
“Natural disasters are no different. The deluge Noah was forced to endure and the darkness brought by the Ame-no-Iwato were both the result of the gods’ selfishness. The people suffering from those natural disasters are unable to repel the disasters and must simply endure them. And when they see the broken land left behind, they must work to restore their livelihoods without even a chance to complain. To reference your culture, it is just like the children on the Sai no Kawara who have their stone towers cruelly toppled again and again and again.”
“…”
“Yes, cruelly. How long must we continue suffering at the hands of those cruel gods?”
Then I saw it too.
I saw the last piece of the planet disappeared and all of its light vanish from the night sky. JB had created a planet. It had been more noticeable in the sky than even the moon. But even that massive object had been eliminated so easily, without even giving it a chance to break apart in the process.
If the culprit could do that, then we wouldn’t stand a chance if they wielded that same power to harm us. How could you even prepare for a fight with something like that?
We could only look up at it all.
And I spoke.
I recognized that gold spear and shield and that combination of an armor with a skirt. It was all the same as Karen who had worked as a bunny girl at the colosseum.
In other words…
I knew the identity of the true slaughterer who wielded natural disasters as her weapon and now floated above us with the icy night sky behind her.
“A…Valkyrie?”
Part 6
The new planet had been eliminated.
The world had peace once more.
And a striking fact was driven into my mind.
The world was run by the gods.
Peace and war, calm and disaster – it was all up to them.
Maybe that should have been more obvious than it had been to me.
[Unknown_Storage] Damage Report [file08]
Göndul reporting.
The new planet placed in solar orbit by the unofficial mystical organization named JB has been successfully eliminated before its completion. Said organization is unlikely to have enough resources to create a second one without us detecting their actions. If we continue eliminating their leftover forces when the time is right, we should be able to end the JB problem without difficulty. Although I don’t see how anyone could have doubted the gods would emerge victorious in the end.
The destruction of the new planet did not cause any secondary damage. There were no casualties. Because any collateral damage would have harmed the gods’ reputation.
That concludes my report.
Did that satisfy you all?
The use of nuclear weapons can be misleading, but this technically did not even qualify as a war. I only see ‘straw deaths’ here. Not meeting a single dead warrior is something of a disappointment for a Valkyrie like me.
This was a manmade disaster.
I so wanted to see a real war so I could collect and adore some souls that truly shine.
I am the Vanir goddess with a mastery of seidr and the commander of the heavenly maidens, so this was not at all enough to warrant changing my name to Göndul so I could join the fight. I understand I owed a debt regarding Brisingamen, but I must request you recalculate the conditions for selecting me. I would like to avoid being summoned for such trivial matters.
Now, I will let the rest play out according to the timetable.
If you do not need anything more, I ask permission to return.
The human world is so boring.
Back to Chapter 6