TLed by NolepGuy
Chapter 154
The flood caused by the overflowing acid rain suddenly struck.
Without any time to respond, the rapidly rising flood swept away everything in an instant.
And to protect everyone, Muzkang, the mage, burned his magic to hold it back within the lake.
In return, Muzkang, drained of all his strength, breathed his last.
It was the price of giving his all.
There was no regret on his face.
Regret was left for those who remained.
[You fool, you idiot…]
Especially, Ruzlang struggled immensely.
[…We can’t take the corpse.]
Just before his death, Muzkang took out everything he could from the subspace and left.
There was no mage left to manage their belongings.
Each had to carry their own burden moving forward.
Moreover, they could no longer enjoy the protection of magic.
[I’ll… I’ll take care of it.]
[No, leave it be.]
Ruzlang, tears streaming down her face, shook her head at Ebelasque’s suggestion to take the corpse.
[Your strength isn’t infinite, you know. This will have to be enough.]
Ruzlang held her stomach.
Seeing her gesture, Ebelasque realized what she meant.
Amidst the acid rain.
Muzkang, with a face free of regret, vanished completely like that.
The journey of the three continued on.
And not long after, the second sacrifice was made.
The second to fall was Ruzlang.
Even as a one-armed swordsman, she displayed unparalleled skill, but her missing arm sealed her fate.
The monsters’ poison liquid struck her exposed shoulder and reached her heart.
[Ruzlang, no! No!]
Ebelasque screamed and used all the medicine she had brought to save her.
But Ruzlang’s life faded rapidly.
[Haha… Muzkang… I couldn’t even protect what she passed on…]
Ruzlang, coughing up blood, closed her eyes slowly with a deeply regretful expression.
[If only I had been alone, it would’ve been okay…]
Holding her stomach, with overwhelming guilt, Ruzlang met her end.
Of course, her corpse, too, could not be taken with them.
Ebelasque’s mana had already reached its limit.
[…Let’s go.]
Wireman and Ebelasque continued their journey, the two now left alone.
The conversations between them began to dwindle more and more.
Noticing this, Wireman slowly began to talk about his daughter, almost as if to himself.
Ebelasque could do nothing but silently listen to his words.
Then one day.
As usual, while confirming a corpse in advance, the ground beneath Ebelasque gave way.
Unluckily, underground acid water had pooled below, dissolving the lower ground in an instant, causing the surface to collapse as well.
Ah, so this is how I die.
Ebelasque thought this as she watched the sky grow farther away.
I wanted to see Aimi again.
Her heart had long since been broken, and her body exhausted. She held onto that lingering regret as she closed her eyes.
In the moment she was about to plunge into the acid lake.
It was Wireman who grabbed her.
Then, her body began to lift.
When Ebelasque, suddenly elevated, opened her eyes wide.
She found herself somehow rolling across the surface.
After tumbling for a while, she coughed violently and raised her head.
What she saw was an empty surface stretching out before her.
[…Wireman?]
Ebelasque called out to him.
But he was nowhere to be seen.
Ebelasque’s face turned pale.
Hurrying back to the spot where she had fallen, she saw only the fiercely flowing underground acid water.
In his final moment.
Wireman had thrown himself to toss Ebelasque to safety, sacrificing himself as he plunged into the acid lake.
[Ah… Ahhh…]
Overwhelmed by despair over the consequences of her mistake, she was consumed by guilt.
He had come to the surface to save his daughter.
And yet, instead of prioritizing his daughter, he had saved her.
Ebelasque understood.
She knew that, unconsciously, Wireman had begun to see her as his daughter.
She was the same age as his child, and so, at times, his actions reflected that.
Wireman’s gaze toward her had always been filled with longing and sorrow.
And in the end, he chose to save her.
Ebelasque stood up.
With skin and legs corroded by exposure to acid rain, she began to move forward once again.
Wireman had given his life to save hers.
If that was the case, she had to achieve what he had aimed for.
His one and only goal.
To save his daughter.
And to achieve Benapoch’s goal.
To save the city.
Living up to the name of hope, she refused to give up and pressed on.
It was grueling.
The world spiraling toward destruction constantly dragged at Ebelasque’s feet, and her body grew more and more battered.
[Cough… Guh…]
Eventually, her body reached its limit.
Death loomed just ahead.
But she couldn’t afford to die.
Everyone had sacrificed themselves to bring her this far.
Thus, she chose to become a corpse herself.
[Aaaaaargh!]
With a scream, she extracted her own heart and cast necromancer magic upon herself.
As a result, she became a monster, human yet no longer human.
Clutching her blood-dripping heart, she began to move her lifeless body.
Freed from the grasp of death, her body could now move ceaselessly forward.
[It’s… It’s close now.]
The signal grew stronger and stronger.
With all her strength, she pressed on and on.
And then.
At long last.
Her journey finally came to an end.
Tap-
Ebelasque slowly lifted the Magic Signal Device buried in the sand.
The acid rain had certainly stopped there.
True to the place uncovered with the life-risking efforts of the First Investigation Team, there was indeed no acid rain.
However, it was not a place where humans could live.
It was simply that—there was no acid rain.
Because the unrelenting sun, free from the acid rain’s interference, melted and erased everything.
Ebelasque looked at the sun she saw on the first day and felt its warmth.
But with the ozone layer and even the atmosphere destroyed, humans could not survive under the blazing, direct sunlight.
The investigation team looked at the cloudless, empty sky and thought the surface had recovered.
But the reality was this.
There were no corpses of the First Investigation Team.
They had lost all their provisions, and with the storm of acid rain and the magic field cutting off their return,
in the end, they melted under this sun and turned entirely into sand.
The only thing barely maintaining its protective magic was the rescue request Magic Signal Device imbued with their remaining will.
[This is too cruel.]
Ebelasque began to cry out loud, her cracked voice breaking as she let go of her suppressed sobs.
It was the place she and her four companions had risked their lives to reach.
Someone had come for their daughter.
Someone for their friend.
Someone to become a beacon of hope.
Someone to find paradise.
They had all come this far.
And yet, this was the result.
Ebelasque sank into an unbearable, overwhelming emotion.
It felt as though all their efforts had been in vain.
Swoooosh—
Kabang!
And then, as if to announce her end, the storm of acid rain began approaching the path she would need to return.
As she watched it, she smiled as if she had attained enlightenment.
Then, under the sun she had once believed was paradise, she began walking aimlessly.
Simply hoping there might be a sliver of paradise here.
Amidst destruction, she wandered aimlessly.
When she had poured all her mana into maintaining the protection and had nothing left to spare,
she finally collapsed.
The blazing sun began melting her body.
But she no longer had the strength to resist it.
She simply thought that perhaps she should have done this from the beginning.
Now, she thought of reuniting with her comrades.
Of seeing her friend Aimi again.
It was at that moment, as she closed her eyes for the last time.
The sand beneath her suddenly gave way with a soft sound.
And as her lifeless body sank into the hollowed sand,
she opened her eyes once more.
Cold water touched her head.
When she came to her senses, what she saw was a lake surrounded by a forest.
In that moment, as she blankly stared at the scene she had only read about in books,
the word “paradise” came to her mind.
[Everyone!]
Ebelasque hurriedly lifted her body.
But there was only the same forest there.
She walked forward in a daze.
Nothing.
The searing sun, the acid rain—none of it was anywhere to be found.
And neither were her companions or the world they had once belonged to.
Even though she had found paradise, there was nothing left for her anymore.
As that reality crept in once more, she felt the biting chill of loneliness seep into her.
Cold.
So cold, it felt as though her insides were rotting.
The feeling of being abandoned alone in this world began gnawing at her in an instant.
[No, no! I’m still here! I’m a Necromancer!]
And soon, she began to deny the reality before her.
She was a Necromancer.
One who dealt with corpses.
The ultimate goal of a Necromancer was to revive corpses to the point where they could no longer be distinguished from the living.
If she could reach that pinnacle, she could be with her comrades again in paradise.
In the paradise they had all so desperately longed for.
She clenched her fists tightly, denying the reality where not even a single trace of a corpse remained to be revived.
Ebelasque Benapoch.
The world’s sole Necromancer had now become a World Erosion Being.
And that World Erosion Being was now standing face-to-face with a boy.
[Ebelasque Benapoch.]
The boy looked at her directly with his piercing blue eyes.
[How long will you keep living in denial of reality?]
Kraush’s words struck deeply into Ebelasque’s heart.
Her hair quivered faintly.
She knew.
She had long been living in denial of reality.
That’s why she had holed herself up even further, refusing to face that reality.
[What do you know? What could you possibly understand?]
Tears began streaming down from Ebelasque’s eyes.
It had been such a painful journey.
And yet, she wanted to return to that journey once more.
Because no other time in her life had she been able to move forward as much as she had back then.
Here, she was an Erosion Being.
A mere outsider.
[I know.]
Kraush let out a bitter laugh as he looked at Ebelasque.
Indeed, he had heard it countless times to the point of exhaustion.
She had recounted her past every single day when she was imprisoned alone.
Back then, Kraush hadn’t been able to understand Ebelasque’s feelings.
But now, he understood.
Even though he had stubbornly endured through the deaths of those he knew,
he had ultimately failed to prevent the destruction that day.
Kraush had fallen into a despair so profound it was almost unbearable.
The weight of carrying everyone’s hope had crushed him without mercy.
[Even those I spent my days with are no longer in this world.]
Even if they were the same people, the ones in Kraush’s memories no longer existed.
They could never return from the ruined world they had been in.
Just as Ebelasque couldn’t save a single one of her comrades,
Kraush, too, had failed to save even one of his companions from back then.
All that remains are memories.
“Still, I keep on living. Because they saved me and brought me this far.”
So as not to repeat the same mistakes.
Kraush was giving his all to live in the present.
Because he believed that was the only way to repay them.
“And it’s the same for you, isn’t it? You’ve clung to your goal and kept living all this time.”
Kraush took a step forward.
At that, Ebelasque flinched.
“It’s scary, isn’t it? Being left all alone.”
Loneliness is cruel.
The loneliness of having no one to remember the world you once knew is indescribable.
And so, Ebelasque had denied reality.
Because otherwise, she felt she would be forever alone in this world.
“So you hid, didn’t you? Afraid that even if you left something behind in this world again, you’d lose it all once more.”
Ebelasque’s eyes wavered.
Snow began to fall softly from the sky.
And amidst the falling snow, Kraush’s eyes shone a vivid blue.
In the snowfall, Ebelasque’s lips quivered.
“Ebelasque.”
Kraush spoke to Ebelasque, who was now overcome with tears, unable to say a word.
“Let’s make a deal, like we did back then.”
Ebelasque’s then and Kraush’s first were undoubtedly different.
[Kraush, let’s make just one deal.]
After the death of the Black Witch, she had asked Kraush for this while in her prison cell.
[I’ll tell you one secret hidden by the Ephania Imperial Palace.]
Wearing a resigned smile, she had leaned her head against the iron bars.
[Destroy the heart Arthur holds for me.]
At that time, Kraush had undoubtedly made a deal for her death.
“I will inherit the immortality of Crimson Garden.”
But now, he was speaking of a completely different deal.
Ebelasque’s eyes widened in shock.
Ebelasque, in a way different from Crimson Garden, was immortal.
However, if she wished, she could destroy her heart and die.
She simply chose not to die, for the sake of her comrades who had saved her.
She was a half-penny immortal.
But Crimson Garden was different.
She was truly immortal in every sense of the word.
And Kraush, who would inherit that, was the same.
“Even if you crumble into nothing, I will continue to live in this world.”
Everyone who had been by her side until now had crumbled and disappeared.
Her comrades, her friends, her world—none of it remained.
Terrified of that loneliness, she had clung to resurrection as if fleeing from reality.
Even now, she was afraid.
The sight of those beside her leaving, and the loneliness that would follow, terrified her deeply.
Amid her solitude,
The boy who had unknowingly stepped into her life began to paint over her pitch-black loneliness.
Kraush’s hand wrapped around Ebelasque’s head.
Thanks to using Annihilation Erosion, the warmth in his hand traveled through her head and seeped into her.
Ebelasque raised her head.
Through her tear-filled eyes, she saw the boy smiling innocently.
“If you’re lonely, just stick by my side. I’ll make sure you’re absolutely sick of me.”
Tears streamed down Ebelasque’s trembling eyes, trailing down her cheeks.
Kraush would inherit the loneliness she had endured.
After all, stealing curses was his specialty.
“So, help me out a little.”
Kraush pointed toward the other side of the mountain.
“How about we save this world together this time?”
Upon the snow-covered mountain,
Two people who had faced a ruined world and lost everything,
Had finally come together in the present world.