Chapter 60. The Flame that Opens the Future (1)
‘This is…’
Messages rapidly disappearing before his eyes.
It was the description of the newly unlocked ‘Hidden Ability’. Seeing it, Enoch stood frozen for a moment.
_
? Memory Archive
: Activates upon inheriting the memory of a person who experienced a specific event and accessing ‘unrecorded history’.
Responds to specific keywords recognized by the World of Impermanence user, enabling inheritance of corresponding memories.
-
‘Inherit target memories in response to specific keywords…’
The keyword reacted to earlier was the Beast-kin’s Magical Beastification experiment.
‘Then it means I can inherit the Sword Saint's memories related to that.’
Come to think of it, the sensation felt now was distinctly different from the experience inheritance until now.
The cause of that was quickly discernible.
? Increased synchronization rate with target memory: Viewpoint synchronization
? Warning: Maintaining the current level of synchronization for long risks severe side effects to the ego
Enoch could understand the meaning quickly.
‘…This isn’t me.’
Before he knew it, Enoch was looking around the world with a markedly different perspective than before.
A small physique and the lowered line of sight resulting from it.
Before long, he had become the young Sword Saint.
And his childhood, as experienced by the past Sword Saint, was materializing and unfolding before his eyes.
? Memory Source: Reconstruction Start!
Swish…
In the World of Impermanence, the past within the young Sword Saint's memory was being reconstructed very vividly.
The Sword Saint in his childhood.
The first memory imprinted upon his youth was─
─The sight of his parents dying horribly.
His mother, trying to hide her child from the dark mage until the very end, coughs up blood and breathes her last.
His father’s body, already dismembered and limbless, had long gone cold.
The house they lived in was burning, licking at and consuming the two who had become corpses.
The breath of the child who lost his parents right before his eyes was filled with the sharp smell of blood and acrid smoke.
Fwoosh.
The child blinked his eyes against the heat of the fire.
Flames flickered, reflected in his pupils.
Beyond that, the voice of the Sword Saint reminiscing about the past echoed softly.
[…How is good and evil in the world defined.]
Upon the pool of his parents’ blood.
The child slowly raises his head.
Reflected in those eyes is the massive flame engulfing the house and his parents’ bodies whole.
[The Empire defined dark magic as evil. But in reality, the greater sin in the Empire was incompetence.]
Falling and stumbling countless times, the blood-soaked young boy runs.
Enoch watched the horrific sights flashing past as he ran, lost for words.
[An era soon after the Empire founded by mages unified the continent, when more than half the Imperial citizens became mages.]
At the entrance of the burnt and devastated village, numerous corpses already lay scattered.
[The few people unable to use magic were persecuted, and they eventually gathered on the Empire's frontiers, forming small villages.]
Dark mages gripping magic gears draw magic circles over the corpses of parents and villagers.
[Meanwhile, dark mages, defined as evil by the Empire and ostracized, settled near those villages.]
[And then, for their own research, used those powerless to resist as materials for biological experiments.]
The child, running desperately, trips on a stone and falls. Breath bursts from his lungs.
[As if it were natural. As if it were a right rightfully possessed by talented mages.]
The child, fallen in the muddy water, gasps repeatedly for breath that reaches his chin, looking up at the sky full of dark clouds.
Rain fell on the child’s cheek as he looked up at the sky.
Under the gray sky of such an era, the child lay collapsed.
Talent and incompetence.
An era where mages and non-mages in the world began to be starkly divided.
An era where the incompetent, unable to manifest magic, began to be thoroughly ignored and abandoned.
The cloudy, leaden sky of such a world was reflected coldly and colorlessly in the child’s two eyes.
[What distinguishes good and evil is none other than power.]
The child clenches his fist.
[Though everyone ignores it, that is precisely the foundation of the right to define goodness and evil. The dark mages taught me that fact.]
Eventually, in the dark mages’ magic circles, the corpses swell up and transform grotesquely.
The dark mages smile with satisfaction as if successful, recording the experiment's results.
[Therefore, I too decided to possess a justifiable right regarding their actions.]
Engraving all those sights into his pupils, the child holds his breath and desperately gets up, fleeing.
One dark mage spots the fleeing child and extends his magic gear annoyedly, but another fellow dark mage stops him, telling him to focus on the experiment.
Thus, the child runs endlessly.
The flames burning the village are reflected in the child's eyes.
-That day.
From his heart, a small flame ignited.
The ember dwelling within him whispered.
[I will surely survive and take revenge.]
His cheeks and legs were already terribly scratched by the bushes. His throat was hoarse, his eyes red with burst capillaries.
[The dark mages killed my family and neighbors.]
But the child no longer cried.
[They took everything from me. If so, I will surely return the pain I received back to them.]
Under the cold winter night sky.
In the outskirts of the village where everyone died and burned, the surviving boy pulled down the hood of his tattered robe and turned away.
The wandering child takes refuge in an orphanage established by the Empire’s Order.
Before the massive statue of the goddess believed by people to imbue the world with mana, he learns to kneel and pray, learns to ‘forgive’ the past.
However, the eyes of the child wearing the robe hood despise the healer-mages preaching teachings.
[Forgiveness is merely hypocrisy forced upon the incompetent like us.]
The flames reflected in the child's eyes that day had already spread to his heart.
[Forgiveness, the final choice given to the incompetent powerless even to take revenge on the perpetrators.]
[Merely rationalization inevitably performed by the weak for their own surviving well-being.]
Instantly, time flowed around him.
[Instead of rationalization, I chose conviction.]
The boy secretly slips out of the Order.
Like a panorama, time and scenery flow rapidly around him as he slowly walks away.
[With my own hands, I will surely return what those bastards did, exactly the same, back to them.]
Seasons repeat over the land the child walks.
The fully grown child gradually becomes a boy.
[The dark mage bastards who killed my family, and even their families, must all be killed by my hand.]
That day he lost all his family. The fierce flames the child saw burned ever stronger, spreading throughout his body.
[Because that is the only way for me, the incompetent, to atone to my unjustly killed family.]
Before long, the boy held a single sword.
[Searching for a way, I took up the sword. Unable to use magic, there was no other choice.]
Memories of harsh training days flash by. The boy swings the sword until his grip tears open.
[But precisely in that unexpected field, I found my own complete talent to face mages.]
Blood flows from his hand, bone exposed due to overexertion.
[I heard faintly.]
Still, he never stopped swinging the sword.
[About those who reached the realm of the ‘Sword Saint’, active before the Empire appeared.]
The flames reflected in his eyes the day his parents died had already spread deep into the heart of the boy wearing the hood, burning fiercely.
[Unlike magic that draws external mana, superhuman monsters projecting unique mana manifested from their own inner self into their swords. I could become them. No, I had to become them.]
His gaze, reflected on the cool sword blade, shone darkly beneath the shadow of the robe hood.
[Otherwise, the flames of vengeance burning deep in my chest would consume me first.]
Before long, the Sword Saint, now a young man, quietly raised his sword before his eyes.
On the blade of the one-handed sword he held, dazzling flames instantly exploded forth, engulfing it.
[Therefore, flames bloomed on my sword meant for vengeance.]
-Fwoooosh!
The sword blade burned in the form of flames, surging with crimson mana.
The form of flames attained by mana signaled his arrival at the realm of the Sword Saint he aimed for, becoming a beacon announcing the time for vengeance.
[All that remained was returning to the ruined village and finding the dark mages, the targets of vengeance.]
However, when the Sword Saint finally found the dark mages who murdered his parents.
Before his eyes unfolded a completely unexpected, shocking scene.
[But I knew nothing.]
The dark mages who killed his family. They had all already been murdered when the Sword Saint found them.
[Not even the fact that the targets my flames of vengeance were meant to incinerate had already vanished.]
The Sword Saint’s hand gripping the sword trembles slightly.
The targets of vengeance he desperately sought to achieve were already all breathless.
And over their ruined corpses, grotesque shadows loomed.
[That day, the hometown I returned to for vengeance…]
The Sword Saint raises his head.
Above the torn bodies of his vengeance targets, grotesque monsters dripping viscous saliva glare at the Sword Saint, eyes gleaming.
[Was the day beings later called 「Magical Beasts」 first appeared en masse upon the vast lands of the Empire.]
-Kararararak!
The Magical Beasts, having snatched away and killed all his targets of vengeance, roar terribly before him.
[…Thus.]
The Sword Saint aims his sword at them. Instantly, the flames blooming from the Sword Saint’s sword engulfed his vision.
[My sword lost what it was meant to cut.]
Fwoooosh!
Engulfed in flames burning furiously as if incinerating memory itself, the Sword Saint's past memories faded away.
And above the flames filling his vision, white text began to arrange itself.
-
? 「Memory Archive」: New information saved!
? Chapter.1: The Unrecorded War
An era of transformation when the Empire unified the continent with magic, and mages began to exceed half the population.
Upon the lands of that chaotic era, an alien threat, 「Magical Beasts」, first appeared.
Countless appearing Magical Beasts revealed themselves coincidentally upon the homeland the 「Empire's Last Sword Saint」 returned to for vengeance.
It was the frontier where marginalized non-mages gathered to live.
-
Enoch tilted his head.
‘A war in the past? With Magical Beasts?’
Information encountered for the first time.
He knew as much as there was to know about the original work's Magical Beasts.
In reality, 「Magical Beasts」 were also a hostile faction with much lore and information revealed in the original work.
‘However, the fact that a major incident occurred in the past Empire, to the extent of being called a war with them, was never revealed at all throughout my playthroughs.’
That very point bothered him.
Furthermore, even after becoming Enoch, when he requested research materials from Lien, he hadn't neglected studying the Empire's history while looking for information on the Sword Saint.
But just like ‘information about the Sword Saint’, the fact that there was a ‘war with Magical Beasts’ in the past remained nowhere in the historical materials he checked.
‘As if both were entirely erased from the records.’
Feeling somewhat uneasy, Enoch frowned.
Anyway, the Memory Archive, a new function obtained in this inner world called the World of Impermanence.
It was certainly an unexpected gain.
Now that he obtained this, he needed to learn more about the Sword Saint's backstory, even just for inheriting swordsmanship.
‘…And at this point, I’m just curious about the Sword Saint’s life itself.’
He slowly raised his head.
‘Anyway, need to quickly see the Sword Saint’s next memory…’
But just as he thought that far, the next moment.
A phrase he had truly never thought of until now popped up abruptly.
? World of Impermanence: Overimmersion Prevention!
? Temporarily suspending experience reconstruction to prevent side effects from overimmersion.
‘Wait, what?’
Enoch’s expression instantly turned sour. He had seen something similar somewhere before.
‘…Shutdown system?’
If this were a game, he would have smashed the monitor.
‘Cutting it off here?’
Although there was much he still didn't know about the World of Impermanence, this was truly taking things too far.
But whatever he thought, Enoch’s inner world was already gradually dissolving and fading.
And just around the time the senses of returning to reality as usual began slowly returning to his body.
Instantly, Enoch’s thoughts abruptly stopped.
“Heok!”
Air rushed desperately into his lungs.
He was drenched in cold sweat.
Before his eyes, the image and voice of the Sword Saint seen earlier flickered faintly like afterimages.
--[I will surely survive and take revenge.]
--[I will surely survive and take revenge.]
--[I will surely survive and take revenge.]
A clear abnormal phenomenon.
Enoch calmly focused his mind and regulated his breathing. Fortunately, the tinnitus and hallucinations quickly faded.
However, the heavy fatigue still remaining tormented all senses throughout his body terribly.
Enoch realized instantly.
‘Overimmersion prevention, surely…’
Judging by this fatigue, the memory inheritance just now clearly affected even his physical body in reality.
Instantly, the warning message from earlier came to mind.
? Warning: Maintaining the current level of synchronization for long risks severe side effects!
Enoch laughed wryly once.
So that's why the memory inheritance was cut off.
‘Safety measures are certainly thorough.’
His blurred vision began to recover.
He scanned his surroundings once.
Already, massive fallen rocks from the fortress’s collapsed ceiling were piled high all around.
‘Fortunately, wasn't flattened like a pancake under there.’
Seems Leontos had installed some kind of self-destruct artifact in the fortress to escape in emergencies.
Looking towards where the guy disappeared, Enoch muttered.
“…Didn’t know there was an escape route.”
Beyond the debris of the ceiling he collapsed. A secret passage leading off the side of the fortress’s top floor was visible.
Likely an emergency escape route secretly connecting the top floor to the outside of the fortress, prepared for emergencies.
Enoch briefly considered pursuing, then shook his head.
Even if he chased after the guy now, it would likely be too late to track his trail and catch him immediately.
‘Anyway, not a bad outcome for now.’
Enoch gathered his breath and organized his thoughts.
Since the leader fled alone, the most important objective of collapsing the fortress interior command structure was achieved.
Outstanding Elsyde mages would likely find it easy to mop up the scattered remnants who lost their command system.
‘And anyway, if my prediction is correct, I’ll meet Leontos again soon enough.’
And just then.
Clatter!
Beyond the massive stone fragments filling the surroundings, one large rock rolled down.
Pop
And from beyond the gap of the rolled stone, Sirocco popped her face out abruptly.
“Ah!”
Perhaps searching desperately for him, her eyes widened the moment they met Enoch’s.
Then Sirocco spoke, seemingly relieved.
“Thank goodness, you’re not flattened!”
Sirocco’s perked wolf ears atop her head, having only popped her face out from the rubble pile, drooped down as if relieved.
Enoch spoke briefly.
“Let’s head back for now.”
Before long, the sounds of battle from the mages, heard sporadically from outside, had stopped, growing quiet.
It was a signal that the Elsyde mages had subdued them and secured the fortress as planned.
“Earlier, you said you were curious why those guys were doing such things?”
“Yup.”
At Sirocco’s small answer, Enoch turned his gaze towards the front yard outside the fortress window.
There, captured exile prisoners were held.
Looking at them, Enoch opened his mouth.
“Let’s ask the parties involved themselves.”