TL/ED – Miso

I couldn’t really tell how much of my strength I’d poured out.

At most a minute, and probably not even a quarter of that. Quite literally, I had shouldered a level of Burden capable of crushing boulders.

“Ptuh…”

I was about to spit out the blood-laced saliva when I realized I was still inside the Deep Sea and stopped myself. If Deep Sea Creatures swarmed me now, it wouldn’t end as a joke.

Even setting aside the taste of blood flooding my mouth, it was reckless beyond anything I’d ever want to repeat. The plan had basically come down to luck, a gamble over who was tougher, Decay or me.

However.

I had spent far longer inside the Deep Sea.

-…Crrack!

“…Ah.”

At the same moment strength drained from my limp limbs, the situation returned, just slightly, to normal.

Decay was no longer blurred.

Of course, for someone who had taken that Burden head-on, he was in remarkably good shape. Aside from the hairline fractures running across his body as though he were made of ice, he stood intact, gazing down at me.

By comparison, I was quite literally half-dead.

Every bone in my body was shattered to the point where, had I not been inside the Deep Sea, I would have been sprawled out miserably on the ground.

There I was, slowly sinking while looking up at Decay, and there he was, seemingly unscathed, his expression calm.

Compared to our first encounter, anyone would call this my defeat, but…

There was exactly one thing working in my favor.

“Let your guard down, did you?”

Right now, my Current Sense was picking up the bitter expression on Decay’s face.

In other words, Decay’s lifeline was in my grasp.

He made no move to attack me, nor did he harbor any thought of fleeing.

Both he and I knew that from the moment he entered this space called the Deep Sea and lost any means of resisting the Water Pressure, none of that mattered anymore.

“If you’ve got any last words, go ahead.”

My pronunciation came out slurred since a few of my teeth had broken, but the meaning must have gotten through.

Having just received the full brunt of that Burden, Decay could no longer delay my thoughts.

He had probably burned through every last ounce of his power just to endure the Water Pressure. When I returned what he’d been given, he slowly opened his mouth.

“What do you plan to do after this?”

“Pick off your comrades one by one, I suppose?”

“To escape the Deep Sea as a world?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re choosing the hard road.”

Decay grimaced and answered with a sigh.

“Having killed Puppet, do you know what she was?”

“A world borrowing a human body. You’re the same damn thing.”

Monsters that Void had somehow re-personified from dead Fallen’s worlds, possessing the memories of the originals but operating under an entirely different way of thinking.

Living by chewing over their memories as humans and striving to fulfill them…

“…?”

Mid-thought, something clicked, and I tilted my head, staring at Decay.

Puppet, a fellow member, had assigned human beings the roles of family and forcibly kept them by her side, all to realize the wish of the princess she had once been: a world where everyone lived happily as a family.

Then… what about Decay?

What kind of wish could an unborn fetus possibly hold?

“Surprisingly, even I, who was never born, had something I desired.”

“And what’s that?”

“To not be born.”

“…What?”

“It isn’t a wish unique to me. It’s the wish of every child. Why do you think babies cry the moment they’re born?”

Decay continued in a detached tone.

“I fulfilled my wish from the very start. Thanks to that, I never set foot in this world.”

“…Ah, right.”

As I thought, these things were out of their minds.

As that conviction solidified within me, Decay turned his gaze back to me.

“You’re different. You harbor a far more dangerous wish.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Puppet wanted a family. I wished not to be born. Both were simple matters, but your goal is a contradiction. Escaping the Deep Sea.”

Decay tilted his head as though genuinely curious.

“The wish of the Deep Sea is to escape the Deep Sea… I can’t even begin to imagine what you’d carry within you to live with that.”

“I see. One last thing, then. There’s something I can’t understand at all.”

I nodded and slowly raised my broken hand.

There was no real need to, but still.

“Why do you all assume I’ll give up being human like you did? Is that some optimistic prediction that Void will beat me?”

“This isn’t simply about winning or losing.”

Decay shrugged.

“Your willpower rivals Void’s. Melting me down alone won’t be enough, but who knows what might happen once you devour the others. Still, that isn’t what truly matters.”

-Crk, crack.

Even as fractures spread across his entire body, Decay kept talking.

“Void gifted us our worlds, but beyond that, he did nothing.”

“…”

“I’ll be watching from right beside you. It shouldn’t take very long.”

Shards of ice scattered through the Deep Sea.

They were the remnants of a world that, until just moments ago, had been human… no, had taken human form.

Watching that sight, I tried to think about what Decay had said at the end.

Unfortunately, I failed.

“…Not yet.”

I can’t.

I could no longer hold back my descending eyelids.

***

“You want to know about the Deep Sea?”

A dream.

From that single line of dialogue alone, I could immediately tell that what I was experiencing was a dream.

As dreams tend to go, I nodded in agreement against my own will.

“He’ll come looking eventually, so I figured it’d be good to do some digging.”

“Hmm…”

Expressionless, with a slight furrow in her brow, Sharmia… Cheon-hwa let out a pensive hum and rose from her seat to scan the study.

“We don’t have much information on our end either. It’s largely similar to the Ocean, but the Water Pressure is incomparably severe, so every Fallen dies the instant it manifests. And it’s one of The Three Evils… That’s about all there is.”

“That’s why I came to you.”

“I’ve told you everything I know. Decay.”

Decay’s dream.

Why was I dreaming his dream? Furrowing my brow and groping through hazy memories, I as, Decay, spoke in a somewhat sharper tone.

“Let me ask precisely. I want to hear what you told Void but didn’t tell me.”

“…”

Cheon-hwa clamped her mouth shut at those words. Then she glared at Decay even more sharply.

Decay continued with a crooked grin, as if it were none of his concern.

“I’m not here to complain about the fact that you’ve been hiding something from me. You and I both, none of us are telling the whole truth. Me to you, you to me, Void to me, me to Void…”

Stringing his words together slowly and playfully as if toying with language, he abruptly trailed his gaze across the desk and locked eyes with Cheon-hwa.

“…You to Void.”

After holding the staring contest without yielding an inch, she finally shook her head.

“You’re going to die.”

“Oh? Is that a threat?”

“No. It’s what you wanted to know.”

Cheon-hwa replied as though it were nothing.

“Let me be clear. I know nothing about the Deep Sea. But I do know that the one guarding ‘that tree’ was a Fallen of the Ocean. I discovered it and informed Void… Do you know how long Void was gone when he went underground?”

“I wasn’t with the group during that period.”

“One week. Void barely made it out alive. He nearly died a second time to a corpse that was already dead.”

“…”

“Just a corpse.”

…Most likely, “that tree” referred to whatever produced the soil used as the raw ingredient for the World-Sealing Pill.

But the remains near the tree, and the fact that Void had nearly died fighting them, that was news to me. I had been certain it was a Fallen of the Deep Sea.

“If that really is the Deep Sea, the one doing the hunting won’t be you. It’ll be him.”

To Cheon-hwa, whose expression asked whether this was the answer he’d been hoping for, Decay stroked his chin and countered.

“Is that so… And yet no matter how I consider it, I can’t quite picture myself losing to the Deep Sea.”

“You’re right. That’s the correct assessment. But you’re mistaken about one thing. The reason I’ve foretold your death isn’t because your opponent possesses the Deep Sea as a world.”

Cheon-hwa shook her head and glanced behind her.

Only then did I notice that this place was the underground level of the Spire that Crimson Circle used as their base.

Meaning behind that wall, there would be submerged corpses, placed there to create me.

“It’s a conclusion I reached because I simply cannot fathom what it means that someone survived bearing the hostility of a world far deeper than the one that drove Void to the brink of death.”

“…I see.”

That was quite the uppercut, leaving me with a strangely peculiar feeling. Crimson Circle, or at least Cheon-hwa, seemed to be vastly overestimating me.

Decay nodded as though he understood, then, as if he’d gotten a satisfactory answer, turned and made for the exit of the Spire.

“Leaving?”

“Yes.”

“Tch, what was the point of telling you all that? If you weren’t going to change your mind anyway, why did you even threaten me?”

“No. Cheon-hwa, you most certainly changed my mind.”

“…?”

“Until I heard what you had to say, I had no intention of meeting him. But it seems I still have the emotion called curiosity left in me.”

Closing the door behind him, Decay left one final remark to the bewildered Cheon-hwa.

“Both Void and I, we thought of him as nothing more than the suitable host for the Deep Sea that Dersia had chosen. Whether we’re right or you are… I’ll go experience it firsthand.”

“…”

-Thud.

The moment the door shut, my eyes snapped open.

“Ugh…”

It was a dream after all. An excessively realistic one, but still.

I tried to jerk my head up, but a wave of dizziness struck and I slumped back down. A somewhat soft sensation had tricked me into thinking I was lying in a bed.

“You’re awake.”

“…?”

But I wasn’t.

I was still inside the carriage. Beside me sat Brimdal, soaked in blood with a worried expression, and Dersia, her face no different from usual.

Realizing I’d been using Dersia’s lap as a pillow, I hurriedly righted myself and surveyed the surroundings.

“What happened? Lump, that bastard was there too. Did he get to Balkan…”

“Calm down. It’s all over. Sir Balkan, he…”

Dersia paused for a moment, and Brimdal picked up with a bitter expression.

“He’s gone. Went out like a true knight.”

“…I see.”

Fortunately, it seemed Lump hadn’t regained control of Balkan’s body to deceive and betray them.

As I let out a sigh of relief, this time Dersia posed a question to me.

“And as for Decay… we’d like to ask you. After you returned from the Death’s Flashback, the only ones left were myself and this dwarf. On our way to rescue you, avalanches violent enough to nearly overturn the snowfield struck again and again, reshaping the terrain entirely.”

“Coming here directly was probably the wrong call. Inside a space like the snowfield, that thing was no different from a god.”

Brimdal’s expression was grim, and the sword slung on his back told the story of that ferocity, its blade riddled with chips.

“After hacking at it a good ten times or so, it finally quieted down. I thought it might’ve run out of steam, and then…”

“I found you.”

I could already guess the question Dersia was about to ask, so I scratched my head and nodded.

“Yes. Decay… I think I might have taken him down? Maybe.”

“What do you mean, ‘might have’?”

“He got away from me way too many times.”

He’d vanished right before the killing blow more than three times.

The bastard was every bit as skilled at running as Lump, so even after feeling the distinct sensation of crushing him with Water Pressure, I couldn’t be sure he was dead.

His composure at the very end had been far too serene for a final moment, too.

At this point, even if he clawed his way out of that snowdrift and showed up again to threaten us, I’d been worn down enough to just shrug and say, “Yeah, that figures.”

Dersia nodded as if she fully sympathized, then extended her hand.

“Did you take him down inside the Deep Sea?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can verify it.”

“…”

When I killed Puppet, her corpse had remained inside my Deep Sea, and I’d extracted the Thread ring from it.

But this time, there was no sign of Decay’s body. What Dersia wanted to test, however, was a different point.

“His world is the kind that leaves physical traces, after all.”

“That’s true.”

I closed my eyes and spread my Current Sense, surveying the interior of my Deep Sea.

In that dark, pitch-black ocean depths…

I spotted something enormous that hadn’t been there before.

“…It’s there.”

I answered, struggling to contain the surge rising in my chest.

A mass of ice, as if a glacier had sunk to the bottom.

It was embedded throughout the Deep Sea, fragment by fragment.

That was proof I had taken down Decay, and…

[….?]

It also meant the Deep Sea Creatures had gained the power of Extreme Ice.