Episode 234
* * *
There was a young girl with black bandages wrapped around her eyes. However, the one inhabiting her body was not a child at all. She was the younger sister of the Immortal, and the mother of Saxony.
“Lady Persephone.”
“Did you end up coming all the way here?”
“I don’t want to get into a pointless argument with you. Please step aside.”
Persephone laughed quietly at those words.
“Why did you save my son?”
“I have not come here to annihilate the Shadows. I have only come to prove myself worthy of being the ruler you are to serve. I have no intention of showing mercy, but I also have no intention of committing cruelty.”
“Once you have seized the throne of the Shadow Empire, what will you do with that throne?”
“I will do what I have to do.”
Persephone did not answer.
─ Get out of the way, my lovely little sister.
Just then, a voice was heard.
“Brother.”
Persephone hesitated for a moment, but her hesitation did not last long.
“Go away.”
After a moment of silence, Persephone spoke.
“As you say, the title of king is a title granted only to those who are worthy of being king.”
Persephone stepped back, and Dale continued walking.
The one who praises the blood of the ancestor flowing through his body, another shadow lord.
To challenge the Immortal Frederick.
* * *
There was a young boy there, and when he removed the black bandages wrapped around his eyes, an empty darkness was revealed.
“I have been waiting for you, youngest child of Saxony.”
“We will meet our ancestors again.”
The boy, the immortal Frederick, laughed.
I remember the bitter defeat of the other day. It was not even a battle, strictly speaking. But many things have changed.
“Come, my lovely daughter.”
At the Immortal’s words, the tentacles squeezing Dale’s heart twitched.
“I guess we have no choice but to accept it now. As parents, our child is leaving our hands.”
“It was you who offered her up as a living sacrifice. You killed a child with your own hands. How shameless.”
In order to write the book of grimoires, the Immortal offered up his young daughter, who coincidentally was named Lize.
“I killed the child?”
The Immortal coldly responded to Dale’s ridicule.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Then what on earth is the ‘Book of the Black Goat’?”
“My daughter, Lize, has been in my heart for eons. They, and now you, have taken that from me.”
The Immortal muttered coldly. He could feel the cold hatred in his voice. Dale responded in bewilderment at that hatred.
“Just because Shub is wearing your daughter’s shell doesn’t make her your daughter. Shub is Shub.”
“Yes, that must be the truth. And it is also the duty of the Shadow Lord to accept the truth.”
Frederick said.
“So forgive me, Lize. There is no longer a place for you in my heart.”
“… … .”
It was not difficult to understand the meaning of those words. The 『Book of the Black Goat』, which he had once dedicated to his daughter, should have existed in the heart of the Immortal. However, the Immortal realized that she would never return to his heart again.
Therefore, there was only one thing that had to be done as a wizard.
“Bubble of End.”
The Immortal opened his mouth. At the same time, a sound like something bubbling was heard.
Bubbles of various colors, shining like pearls, rose up in the sky. And each of those bubbles had its own unique landscape drawn on it.
Furthermore, the ground where the Immortal was standing began to shake.
It was a land made of living tentacles, and those tentacles were constantly spewing bubbles.
I saw landscapes with bubbles.
These were landscapes that Dale had already known.
It contained a landscape of the earth destroyed and reduced to ruins, a world at the end of the world where nothing remained, and furthermore, an endlessly swirling cold and winter.
The boundless ends of the world were reflected in the bubbling bubbles.
“I have been seeking the truth for eons. I have seen countless fools like your father who believed without a doubt that the meaning of life was true. But alas, truth rarely takes us humans into consideration.”
“Is this the truth you seek?”
“Behold the cruel truth.”
The phoenix laughed.
“Our world is like a fleeting bubble that endlessly appears and disappears on the canvas of space and time.”
“… … .”
“In the past, I gave myself the name of immortality, but in the end, in the eternal years, even my existence will be nothing more than the struggle of a mayfly.”
The phoenix laughed.
“This transience is the truth we are so desperately seeking.”
The empty, blank eyes were shining brightly as if they were filled with joy.
“As an apostle of truth and a monarch of truth, it is my duty to cover the Empire of Fire and Light with this shadow.”
“Unfortunately, I have little interest in the truth.”
Dale answered blandly.
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“The same goes for your duties as a Shadow Lord.”
At the same time, the armor of the Dark Blood wrapped around his body, and the Eye of Truth stared at him. But now he could understand.
Even the truth is not ultimately a single form.
What is an indisputable truth to the Immortal, would not be so to Dale’s father, and vice versa.
There is no such thing as one truth in the world. Even when looking at an event, each person interprets the truth from their own perspective.
That was the truth.
“I do not agree with your truth.”
That was why the Shadow Lord laughed quietly. At the same time, the bubbles that had been floating around for a long time began to burst all at once.
The worlds contained within the bubbles collapsed one after another.
The collapsing world covered the ground that Dale and the Immortal stood on.
“The truth doesn’t care about us, child.”
The Immortal smiled without caring.
At the same time, the bubbles burst, and the end of the world contained within the bubbles began to cover the world of Dale and the Immortal like a flood.
Among them, there were worlds destroyed by meteorites, worlds where nuclear weapons covered the earth and devastated the planet, and worlds where an unknown weapon that even Dale could not understand destroyed an entire planet, or even turned the entire planet into glass.
An apocalyptic form in which countless planets, worlds, and the world of primates collapse.
That very form was descending upon the worlds of the two simultaneously.
Meteors fell, nuclear bombs exploded, and unknown weapons of the past struck down.
What the Immortal Frederick showed was the god of destruction himself, unfolding all forms of apocalypse that existed on Earth.
“Even now, in this world, countless stars are perishing and disappearing, just like bubbles rising and disappearing on the surface of water.”
And what the Immortal records is precisely the process of destruction.
He was literally the god of punishment.
“Isn’t it truly fleeting and vain?”
“Is that the truth you will bring to this world?”
The Immortal Frederick laughed silently, holding his breath in the face of the thrilling power he possessed.
A power so great that even Dale’s absurd growth seems fleeting.
But nothing changed.
“I will keep my promise to Shub until the end.”
Dale answered blandly.
“No matter what I witness in this world, I promise to remain human until the end.”
“How fleeting.”
“Nothing is fleeting.”
Dale shook his head.
The Shadow Lord draped himself in his dark-blooded armor, and the fourteen circles he possessed began to accelerate.
At the same time, the Immortal waved his arms.
The bubbles he was spreading, the destruction of the world contained in the ‘Bubble of the End’, engulfed Dale’s existence.
Nuclear explosions, planets destroyed by unknown weapons, destruction by unknown plagues, and even time winding down and the world freezing in the winter of the apocalypse.
The ‘end’ that no one could resist endlessly swallowed up Dale, and Dale’s existence was nothing more than a fly in it.
The bubbles poured out all the apocalypse they contained, and the Immortal was there.
Leaving behind the countless remaining bubbles.
“There isn’t even a shape left.”
There was nothing there.
The number of apocalypses that have been laid out where Dale should be is estimated to be in the thousands, a number that no mere mortal can possibly handle.
It should have been so.
“Even bubbles are bubbles.”
“… … !”
A voice was heard where there should have been nothing. The Immortal’s expression froze.
There are those who destroy, and there are those who build.
Just as the Immortal had obtained the power of destruction, what Dale had obtained was of an equally equal nature.
His shadow can be anything.
A shadow that contains endless potential and possibilities.
“No matter what you say, the truth never cares about us.”
The Shadow Lord was there.
“And this is the real truth, which does not care about you.”
The Immortal once again scattered the bubbles containing the end, and when the bubbles burst, the destruction they contained poured out.
But no matter how much the apocalypse contained in the bubble flowed down and submerged Dale’s existence, nothing changed.
“That this world is not as vain and fleeting as you think.”
“… … .”
“Isn’t denying this world and thinking it is fleeting ultimately a lie to rationalize your defeat and affirm yourself?”
The Shadow Lord spoke, seeing the truth that lies within the shadow of the Immortal.
“To accept that this world is not fleeting is to deny your own existence.”
As each world was destroyed and destruction poured down, another world was born and created.
Let there be light.
When the god of this world first spoke those words, light was born in the darkness.
“This world was created by darkness.”
Only then could the Shadow Lord understand the darkness he possessed.
The meaning of the words of the old dark mother as well.
“And what you think of as the ‘end’ isn’t even the end, strictly speaking.”
Dale then sneered again. The end of the world he had shown was no different from the disappearance of a speck of dust from the perspective of the entire universe.
“I will tell you the true end that this world must face.”
That is why the Shadow Lord said:
As an apostle of the beginning and the end, carrying the darkness of the beginning and the cold of the end.
A true apocalypse engulfed the world of two people.
