Chapter 65 – Meteor

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Translated by Heavenly Cat

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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Many people had been lost.

Though the depth of our bonds may have differed, they were all people I should have protected.

They were people who had gathered in pursuit of the light I had shown.

But the other side had also suffered no small losses.

The Black Sun could not rise for some time.

Blood-Soaked Mud, settled in the deep sea, had lost many monsters in the previous assault.

If I was to strike back, now was the time.

The only one who raised an objection upon hearing this decision was the old cleric Bartol.

“Is there nothing else we can do?”

I felt pity at the sight of him endlessly craving a role.

More regrettable was the fact that I, myself, had begun to feel the limits.

I could not protect all these people on my own.

Even if no surviving god existed, I needed those who could fight in my stead.

To do that, I would have to receive help from the very people I wished to protect.

It meant I had to drive the people I had barely managed to rescue into mortal danger myself.

It was difficult to face the truth one had deliberately been looking away from.

I had decided to deliver cold truth rather than comfortable ignorance to the people, yet I myself had been the one failing to uphold it first.

In the end, I had to nod.

“I’ll tell you when I return.”

“Just give the command. Everyone will follow gladly.”

Bartol, who had been stiff and hardened lately, finally let a bright smile cross his face.

The future Bartol hoped for was quite different from what I had imagined.

A relationship in which neither side unilaterally demanded or gave, but rather helped one another from a somewhat equal footing.

The relationship between a god and a human was… far more complicated than I had thought.

I shrugged and turned.

“You are skilled at flattery.”

The conversation before my departure ended with that.

Ordinarily I would have needed to lure or track the enemy, but this time was different.

I already knew exactly where Blood-Soaked Mud was lurking.

I set out following the scene the prophetic dream had shown me.

***

Where white waves broke and mingled with sand, a beach where only sticky foam stains remained drying on the shore.

There, the traces of people who had writhed remained intact.

Mixed with strange mucus that the monsters had expelled and a handful of human hair.

This was the place the prophetic dream had shown.

Before being dragged into the sea, the people who had been devoured or captured and crying out had gathered right here.

An awful smell was rising from the tiny scraps of flesh absorbed between the grains of sand.

The inside of my mouth was salty and bitter, and a foul, dank stench like something rising from a sewer filled the air.

Fear, resignation, and desperate yearning.

…I ground my heel into the salty trace and kicked off the ground.

Only the faint horizon, barely visible in the far distance, was drawing the line between sky and sea.

It was at this moment a familiar voice reached me.

[Young god, is it that you cannot accept it? Or is it merely to make a show?]

Every time the great demon opened its mouth, the calm waves trembled.

So it thought there was nothing left to hold back.

Blood-Soaked Mud was plainly revealing who it had devoured.

“To smash you to pieces.”

[You were also present in your own ominous prophecy. It was none other than you who peeked in and saw that you cannot reach me.]

I passed over the small waves rising here and there.

The sea began to vibrate fiercely, as if about to rise up at any moment.

“It was you who struggled to escape the prophecy.”

[Struggled?]

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you were anxious about even the future where I arrive before you, and sent that pathetic half-finished lugworm to throw off even a single line of it?”

Blood-Soaked Mud was a remarkably consistent great demon.

It was reluctant to fight me, and if it had to fight, it dragged things into a war of attrition to ensure its true body never came under direct attack.

Blood-Soaked Mud had not once personally stepped forward.

“Attempts to escape prophecy tend to be what fulfills it.”

[But gods are different. It is you who observe and spin out this cursed fate. I changed the prophesied future with your own hand.]

“Then I’ll change it once more.”

[…God Who Makes Stars. I acknowledge that an opportunity has been given to you.]

The repeated answers had finally drawn out the great demon’s true intentions.

True to what it was, a simple creature driven solely by the thirst for life and power.

The continued attempts at persuasion had found no purchase, and the great demon dropped its servile posture.

Instead, like a frightened beast barking, it puffed itself full of bluster and arrogance.

[But by what means do you intend to reach me? This sea is a fortress and a blanket made for me alone, to which even the Sun God cannot easily gain access.]

Whoooosh!

Furious whirlpools sprang up all across the sea.

Momentum so fierce that even rashly approaching would mean being torn apart by the current.

Deep below, at the very floor of the abyss, the great demon lurked.

[It is a darkness to which even night cannot compare.]

If there were one belief this great demon held amidst its many anxieties.

[There is no starlight anywhere that can pierce through this and reach me.]

That was its certainty that no light could reach all the way to that pitch-dark deep sea in one sweep.

Regrettably, it was not entirely wrong.

While piercing through that thick body of water, any beam of light would inevitably be diluted.

Even the Sun God, who could be called the strongest in the world, would have to pour in considerable power to manage it.

Blood-Soaked Mud had every right to be confident.

Being in a place that even the brightest sunlight could not reach was only natural.

But a roguelike was a game where…

Even without making it into a game, there had to always be a way to crack a difficult situation.

The prophetic dream had given me the most certain clue long ago.

“That’s natural, since you only try to stay in the sky.”

[…Stay in the sky?]

“Engrave this well. It is the answer that will crumble your arrogance.”

With those words, I floated upward.

The fierce wind clawing at my cloak filled the surroundings with sound.

The faster I went, the higher I climbed, the more the scenery around me began to change.

Whoooooooosh…

First the surface of the water grew distant.

The savage sea transformed into nothing more than a vast open plain of blue spread out wide.

The world I had thought utterly flat began to curve slightly.

Into gentler shapes, sharp straight lines into soft curves.

At this height, clouds tangled with stardust and cosmic debris were drifting past right beside me.

Most excited of all were the stars of the night sky.

Herald Star, Sentinel Constellation, Consoling Constellation, Ever-Weeping Constellation, Atonement Constellation, Afterglow Constellation, Seeding Constellation.

The moment the stars noticed me ascending, they halted what they had been doing and began to twinkle.

The night sky was no longer a pitch-black canvas.

The only one displeased was the Sun God, sunken below the horizon.

[Do you dare encroach upon the heavens before you have defeated me?]

A base young god daring to covet the sublime heavens.

What would follow was easy enough to predict that the words practically snapped together in my mind.

I chuckled at the Sun God’s furious rebuke.

“I didn’t come here to ascend to the heavens.”

Just a little higher lay the heavens the angels sang such songs about.

A place where within one’s own domain, whatever one wished would instantly come to be, a paradise where necessity did not exist.

A place where one needed only to pursue one’s own conviction and desire. That was the heavens.

Though I had never once reached it, I knew the heavens naturally.

Enough to fully understand why angels yearned for it.

But it was not my place, nor was it what I desired.

“I only came up to go deeper down.”

The heavens were still empty.

After all the stars had fallen, apart from the stars I had created, there was nothing.

But below… was far more bustling.

My gaze drifted naturally downward, looking down at the world curled up below.

[….]

The Sun God did not answer my words.

It merely stayed silent and shared the sight I was looking at.

The world that I had thought completely buried under black shadow — but even here, gods could find light.

‘Oh, Bida! Same time as yesterday!’

‘I told you to do the laundry properly. You shouldn’t be cutting corners on this to save water.’

‘Isn’t it strange. A mushroom that tastes like lard. Why did something like this suddenly appear?’

‘Look at this, the petals are sparkling!’

‘The assaults have stopped… is it really true? The God Who Makes Stars?’

‘Again. Another star is rising!’

Even if I had taken a share of it, the one governing the heavens was still the Sun God.

Due to its strong influence, the range of what I could perceive was extremely limited.

But as a result of the Sun God’s recklessness, I had managed to ascend to near the heavens.

I engraved into myself the campfires of the shelters flickering up even under the dark night sky, one by one.

Then I spoke to the Sun God maintaining its unpleasant silence.

“Having collected the remains of dead gods, I came to understand. What a god truly was.”

The power I intended to use this time was none other than the authority of Bearing Responsibility.

Objectively speaking, the power of Bearing Responsibility was somewhat ambiguous.

It increased one’s weight in proportion to the weight of the responsibility one felt.

An authority befitting of the Armed Church, focused on combat, but I had honestly thought there would be nowhere to use it.

Of course, it was too early a judgment.

“A god is a star.”

[So the maggot seems to be metamorphosing in its own way.]

“And a star must burn itself to give light.”

There were no ambiguous authorities.

Depending on how they were used, they were limitless.

The stars within my flesh began to fall as comets toward the extremities of every limb.

Do not fixate solely on making stars.

This moment was when I truly understood the countless meanings hidden in those words.

I, who until now had made stars and merely kept them stored inside my body…

“A star that fears burning itself and gives up on shining is not a star.”

…had to become a star directly myself.

Unique Miracle, Crushing Starlight

Each responsibility I bore began to materialize one by one.

The missions entrusted to me by the gods who had offered themselves for a brighter light, the hopes that those who had yielded had once held, and the expectations toward the future held by those who still survived and longed for light.

All of it was an incomparably heavy weight. Not even in empty words could it be called light.

Before making my resolve, I surveyed the world once more, just one last time.

The world where at least scattered pinpoints of light still remained.

There I felt one more responsibility.

The weight of a world where life yet remained would never be light.

“Could handle the water pressure of the sea at least.”

“From the highest heaven to beneath the waves!”

Having completed my resolve, I spun my body.

And released every force that had been holding me bound to the sky until that moment.

“If starlight cannot reach!”

The sky slowly tilted.

The world that had been curled into a sphere began to unfold once more.

And as speed began to build, change took hold in my body too.

Tssssstssssst…

Before the wind could approach, I tore through it first.

The fierce friction of the torn wind shaved at my body.

Countless fragments of star. Enough for the path left behind to glitter.

Before long, when the world was ripped to ribbons and connected only by lines and lines, the only thing that held its shape was the dark blue sea that lay before my eyes.

The closer I drew, the more I could know.

The stench soaked through with terror.

A foul odor so thick it seemed as if the entire sea had rotted.

I aimed everything I had, with all my strength, plunging downward and cried out.

“If all are unwilling to descend, then I shall go down myself and shine!”

Before the sea could swallow me.

I arrived first.