TL/ED – Miso

Time is the only resource given equally to everyone.

No matter how much money one has, no matter what degree of power one holds, they must live through the same ten seconds as a beggar. No matter what they do, it is physically impossible to live through eleven.

However, it is possible to live through them at a different density.

The same ten seconds, yet a sprinter can cover a hundred meters.

The same ten seconds, yet a boxer can shatter my jaw ten times over.

Depending on effort, and sometimes on the gap in talent. Depending on the wealth one possesses and the retainers one commands, disparities can be created even within the same span of time.

Decay had stretched that disparity by tens of thousands of times.

‘The dulling of thought.’

In the time it took me to walk a single step, he could walk thousands. In the time it took me to grasp one thing, he could grasp thousands.

No matter what I did, Decay had the time to carefully deliberate my intent, reach a decision, and act in response.

So the current situation must have been rather absurd from Decay’s perspective.

“…I didn’t sense it at all.”

Decay looked down at his broken ankle as though in genuine surprise.

It was because I had crushed his foot the moment the battle began.

“You indiscriminately targeted everything around… no, you aimed precisely at my ankle.”

Technically, I had aimed for his neck.

The margin of error was far too large. But I pretended I had targeted him on purpose and forced a sneer.

“How does it feel to be caught by a tortoise?”

“I’d have to say it’s not particularly pleasant.”

Decay smiled bitterly, and then vanished.

I hurriedly spread my Current Sense, but all I could see were blurred shapes fanning out around me like phantoms.

As if a single drop of black ink had been released into water.

From within those far darker afterimages, something came flying.

“Ugh!”

It was an enormous chunk of ice. But it was meaningless.

-Crrrrunch!

The armor of Water Pressure I had layered around my body was an invincible barrier that prevented any object from touching me. Its overwhelming mass compressed the ice and turned it into a single stream of water flowing across the ground.

But the ice chunks did not stop at just one.

-Crack, boom, crunch!

“…”

The afterimage of Decay, which had been faintly visible, disappeared behind the sight of shattering ice.

Noise piled on noise, and more noise piled on top of that. He was hurling ice at a grotesque speed, as if firing a machine gun, forcibly triggering my Water Pressure over and over.

Feeling my body grow heavier with each passing moment amid the unrelenting barrage, I realized Decay’s intent and furrowed my brow.

‘He’s trying to overwhelm me.’

It felt like only a few seconds had passed, but from Decay’s perspective, at least several dozen minutes must have gone by.

For all those dozens of minutes, I had kept my Water Pressure firing without pause. His goal was not to land a blow that would get through, but to make me exhausted.

Decay slowly opened his mouth while watching me ceaselessly crush the ice chunks.

“Battles against Great Worlds are often compared to siege warfare.”

If things continued like this, I would be the one crushed to death by Burden. Before I could even find a way out.

The sky went dark.

I looked up in bewilderment, and an impossibly massive slab of ice was hovering directly above me.

“…!”

“A properly constructed World is essentially a colossal fortress in and of itself. So… the method for breaking through it should be approached the same way one would a fortress.”

And with Decay’s murmur, that slab of ice began to plummet at an absurd speed.

An unnatural speed, even accounting for the pull of gravity.

There was no dodging it. I clenched my teeth and balled my fist. Crushing a mountain like that all at once would bring a tremendous Burden, but I could not just stand still either.

-Crrrrrrunch!

Slowly compressed and crushed into a small sphere, the chunk of ice dropped to the ground and rolled away.

“Gkh, kgh…”

As I felt the sensation of something slowly tightening around me and struggled to steady my spinning head, Decay’s afterimage watched me and spoke in a tone that sounded almost relieved.

“In that sense, you’ve built yourself quite a sturdy wall.”

The endlessly deep Deep Sea.

It was certainly a terrible shackle, but on the other hand, it also served as the strongest weapon.

Simply by keeping the World deployed, most opponents would be brought to their knees.

The problem was…

Despite having the Deep Sea spread all around this entire time, this method did not work on him.

From the very start, Decay minimized the Deep Sea’s effects by living in a different flow of time from mine, all while tightening my shackles even further.

“Will I be crushed to death by your Burden first, or will it be the other way around?”

“…”

It felt as though a blade had been pressed against the underside of my throat. The difference being…

That blade was one I had already been cut by once before.

-…Crack!

“…?”

Suddenly, Decay’s afterimage, which had only been a blur, snapped clearly into my field of vision.

He looked perfectly fine, as expected.

Except for one spot.

“Well, that makes two.”

Decay looked at his own hand. A hand mangled and twisted as though it had been fed through a press.

He didn’t seem to be in much pain; his reply was calmer than expected.

“…That’s impossible. You can’t keep up with me.”

“You’re right. I can’t see you. I don’t even know where you are.”

No one is stupid enough to be hit by an arrow shot by a sloth.

All anyone would have to do is walk behind it, and it would take the sloth ages just to turn around and aim again.

And yet, an arrow fired skyward had pierced his ankle dead-on. Even if the first time could be dismissed as coincidence, being hit like that twice ought to raise some suspicion.

“What, can’t figure out how I did it? Go ahead and take a guess.”

I had absolutely no intention of telling him the secret.

The taunting was solely to plant doubt and restrain his actions.

Decay slowly nodded in acknowledgment.

“Indeed. I should look into what’s going on.”

-Crrrack-!

With a sickening burst, Decay’s hand exploded.

Dark red blood sprayed outward and fragments of bone scattered in all directions. For a moment, I could not comprehend what had just happened.

“?”

I had done nothing.

Decay had simply detonated his own hand by himself.

“…What are you doing?”

“It’s just that the only means available to me at the moment are something like this.”

The blood that sprayed from his hand did not immediately fall to the ground, but slowly spread through the surrounding area.

Only then did I realize the intent behind destroying his hand, and my expression twisted.

“I’ve heard that life exists within the worlds of the Three Evils.”

“…”

Decay, who had been scanning the surroundings, suddenly fixed his gaze on a point in the empty space.

-Clunk, a small shard of ice formed and slowly sank to the ground.

Inside it, curled up as if fossilized, was a trapped anglerfish.

“So that’s what you’ve been using.”

The existence of Deep Sea Creatures was something they already knew about. I had used them in the fight against Lump, after all.

Decay realized I had been using the Deep Sea Creatures in some manner, and had scattered his own blood through the Deep Sea. He was trying to visually detect the flow of the Currents without using them himself.

Just by watching the slight disturbance in the blood drifting along the Currents, he had frozen a Deep Sea Creature that should have been invisible.

‘The reason he discarded his hand… was because it was already ruined.’

His judgment was chillingly precise. No matter how badly it had been crushed, an ordinary person could never make the decision to discard their own hand.

But the instant he recognized that his body was too damaged to be of any use in combat, he immediately gave it up and repurposed it as mere bait.

“You had them charge in from far away. Quite an interesting method.”

“…Yeah.”

He let out a more serious note of admiration than I expected and smiled.

Decay’s Extreme Ice gradually dulled the thinking of any living creature in his vicinity.

So I had kept the Deep Sea Creatures on standby as far away as possible, sending them charging in at set intervals to target his neck. That was the only means of attack available to me.

‘Two bullets left…’

The total number of Deep Sea Creatures I had bound using Threads was four. If I used Servitude on fewer than that, I would not be able to select specimens capable of dealing real damage to Decay.

One had been spent. The first one I used had already succumbed to Decay’s thought suppression and was now swimming in the same flow of time as me.

If the two Deep Sea Creatures currently charging in from the distance failed to inflict meaningful damage, there would be no options left.

On top of that, I had been found out. As the situation spiraled toward the worst case, Decay, clearly aware that the momentum was his, wore a relaxed expression as he turned an ice chunk over in his remaining hand.

“But that’s strange. These things shouldn’t be the kind of creatures that obey you…”

Suddenly, Decay stopped mid-sentence.

He had seen the Thread wound once around the Deep Sea Creature’s neck.

He stared at that Thread as though he himself had been frozen solid, then…

“…Puppet?”

He murmured, as if unable to believe what his own eyes were showing him.

“How are you using a Puppet-type Burden?”

“?”

I tilted my head.

I had already concluded that the reason Crimson Circle was so obsessed with the Deep Sea was because of the being that could permanently seal and exploit other Upper Tier members. So I had assumed Decay would naturally know about it.

But it seemed Void had hidden that fact from Decay. In that case, I had no reason to tell him either.

No, in fact, now that Decay had fallen into confusion, this was my one and only chance.

[Neck.]

I quietly uttered the word and relayed it to the two Deep Sea Creatures waiting in the distance.

“You’ve got it wrong.”

“…What?”

I glared at the slightly bewildered Decay and spoke.

“This isn’t inside your Death’s Flashback.”

Enemies were everywhere. Everything was out to get me.

From above, from below, from the sides. There was no day and no night. My Current Sense always had to reach beyond thousands of meters to detect any possible threat.

Because by the time a threat was right in front of me, it was already too late.

“This is the Deep Sea.”

After calling the Deep Sea Creatures, I contracted the entire range of my Current Sense.

And I confined that range to an extremely narrow area, barely ten meters around me.

“Mmph.”

I had thought that shrinking the space would reduce the Burden accordingly, but it was the exact opposite.

It actually felt worse. Within this cramped space, Decay’s blood swimming leisurely through the water of the Deep Sea, every single strand of my hair, and beyond that, hundreds of thousands of miscellaneous bits of floating debris all flooded my mind at once.

I clenched my teeth and endured it. I had to move on to the next step.

“Simply put, if my thinking is slowed by a factor of six hundred…”

“…I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but it’s too late.”

“…then I just need to accelerate by that much!”

Within my slowed thoughts, the blurred form of Decay gradually began to sharpen.

His walking, his footsteps, they slowly began to register in my Current Sense.

The ice shards that had been flying at me at incredible speed gradually started arriving at the proper velocity, properly resisted by water.

My vision dyed red. Blood had stained my corneas.

But in that fraction of a moment, less than a single second…

I was able to discern the direction Decay intended to move.

Crunch.

“Wha…”

Looking at Decay, frozen in place with a stunned expression, I felt certain.

Got him.