Chapter 130: Those the Light Falls On [2]
He was there, in the middle of his cave on the Southern Continent, just like his heroine. One of the other main characters, one of the seven Overlords.
At first, he had crossed his path by chance, simply outside, out of nowhere. A man with black hair and black eyes, dark circles beneath them, who drifted everywhere half-asleep on his feet. But through his fly, he had felt it: this man gave off something different.
So he had begun watching him the way he watched the others, following him all the way to his dungeon, until he discovered something.
Despite the way he carried himself, this man was the most terrifying person he had seen in two worlds, far more so than Freya herself.
Unlike Freya, who had doubts, mood swings, moments of self-questioning and all those things that made her imperfect, this man was a monster.
He was sure of himself and intelligent in a way the boy had never seen. His decisions came faster and landed truer than anyone else’s, his strength was colossal, and everything else about him made him, in the boy’s eyes, the most terrifying man on the continent.
So why hadn’t he chosen him as the true hero of this story?
Quite simply, because of his sin.
Sloth.
This man slept most of the time, around twenty hours out of twenty-four. He moved forward quietly in his own corner, but he would never move as fast as Freya, who, as a Dungeon Lord, could not sleep at all and therefore had every one of her twenty-four hours each day.
The man with the dark circles pulled his gaze away from the empty air, most likely a system window, and set his eyes on the fly.
A single glance.
And Belzebuth was suddenly seized by an enormous fatigue, one that didn’t come from his body but settled into it all the same, heavy and total, and it carried off that part of him before he could pull it back.
But he was used to it, so he wasn’t surprised, and he was already watching the scene through a new fly.
Myriad Mind saved him every time. It put only one part of him to sleep, the part locked inside that particular fly, while he carried on through another.
The man let out a resigned breath, yawned once more and went back to sleep.
He lay in the middle of a sunlit meadow, beneath a tree that gave him a little shade. It was the perfect floor for him, the one he had laid out on the last level of his dungeon.
But once again, as Sloth sank into a heavy sleep, Belzebuth couldn’t help but shiver.
Because he could see it. He had discovered it one day, while concentrating.
Quantimanas of every color were leaving their flows and drifting down toward him while he slept. They came from everywhere at once, in slow sheets, and vanished the moment they touched him.
"How the hell can this man train while he’s asleep?"
He didn’t know how he did it, or what it was for, or even why he did it.
But he knew one thing.
"This man is a monster."
He was a monster that Belzebuth had to bring down, and whose title of Overlord he had to take, if he wanted to attend the meetings next time.
"So how do I do it?"
In the dark, the mouth of his real body tightened a little more around his thumbnail.
"Alone, I could never beat him, not even with a few more lives. So how?"
𝐟𝘳𝖾ℯ𝑤𝙚𝒃𝔫𝖔𝘃𝖾𝖑.𝙘𝒐𝕞
He thought for a moment, then remembered where his true strength lay.
"Crowd control..." he murmured.
"Can I control things so that he falls by someone else’s hand, and I collect everything?"
He didn’t know yet. But on top of making Freya shine, he now had another goal: bring Sloth down, so that he could witness the whole of her story.
And at that very moment, among the countless perceptions flowing into him, he brought another to the forefront. It belonged to a fly watching a woman whose hair and eyes were as black as Sloth’s.
She was in the south-eastern part of the Southern Continent.
The wind struck her head-on, a biting, ice-laden high-altitude wind that climbed the rock face and whipped her hair across her face without ever making her lower her head.
A storm churned above her. The clouds passed so low that they grazed the ridge, and every time lightning tore through them, the whole mountain range lit up at once, from the peaks down to the valleys, before plunging back into darkness and leaving the thunder to roll from one summit to the next.
She stood up there, motionless, her clothes snapping behind her.
They were simple, modern clothes, the kind worn on the streets of the other world. There was nothing martial about them, nothing ornamental, only dark, cleanly cut fabric that hugged a slender body with perfect curves.
And she was beautiful.
Her skin was white as porcelain, smooth and flawless, and the lightning slid across it without finding a single mark. Her features were fine and delicate, so perfect they looked carved, and neither the cold nor the wind seemed able to touch them.
Her black hair whipped across her face like strokes of ink on white paper.
And her eyes were black as the bottom of a well, so black they should have swallowed all light, yet with every flash of lightning they caught it and threw it back into the night.
Far below, she was looking at a village nestled in the valley.
There were only a few lights, lost at the bottom of the dark, flickering with every gust, small enough to be mistaken for embers by anyone who didn’t know what they were.
And behind her stood an army.
Several thousand skeletons lined the entire ridge and the surrounding slopes, spilling over the crests and filling every ledge until the mountain itself seemed made of bone. Humanoids, monsters, animals: everything that had once lived in these mountain ranges and that she had killed, then brought back.
Not one of them moved. There was not a rattle, not a step, only thousands of bodies standing in the storm, utterly still, while the wind passed through their ribcages and whistled between their ribs.
She turned away from the village to look at them.
Then she raised her hand in front of her and studied what she was holding.
A skeleton’s foot.
She examined it for a few moments, slowly turning it between her fingers in the glare of the lightning, her eyes following each joint in search of something precise.
"Still not perfect, huh?"
And she tossed it over her shoulder, where it vanished down the mountainside.
Then she turned her attention back to her army.
Without her saying a single word, a thousand skeletons broke from the ranks, gathered off to one side and knelt together in a single movement, not one of them a fraction behind the rest.
She stepped toward them and raised her hand.
"Ossuary Ascension."
The thousand kneeling skeletons collapsed all at once.
They came apart bone by bone in an unbroken clatter that, for a moment, drowned out the storm, a long crackle of stone rolling along the entire ridge. Then the bones turned into a black, liquid mass that rose from the ground and gathered into a circle floating before her.
The circle spun on itself, faster and faster, compacting until no light could pass through it.
Then it opened.
Two hands emerged first, then a body.
What rose before her stood a head and a half taller than every skeleton in her army. Its bones were thicker and denser, a dark grey that did not reflect the lightning. Plates had formed along its forearms and shins, armor grown straight from the skeleton itself.
And on its back, two wings of bone slowly unfolded, wide enough to blot out a stretch of the sky, and the wind began to whistle as it passed between their struts.
She circled it in surprise, examining it from every angle, while it didn’t move an inch.
"So this is a Skeleton General...?"
She stopped in front of it.
"Then what would a Skeleton God even look like?"
She seemed to lose herself in her thoughts and stayed like that for a few moments, motionless in the wind, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond the thing standing before her.
Then she turned once more toward the village below.
She raised one arm into the air.
And brought it down in one stroke.
The entire army charged at once.
Thousands of bones left the ridge together and hurtled down the slope with a crash that drowned out the whole storm, tearing up rock and snow in their path, a grey tide pouring down toward the small, flickering lights of the valley.
At the same time, he was watching hundreds of key points across the Southern Continent.
Other Dungeon Lords, like her and like him, were all beginning to settle in and seriously assert themselves.
Three of the twelve Templars sent by the Hands of Humanity were on their way to Evangel. They were soldiers made from scratch, genetically enhanced homunculi trained from birth to stand against beings who surpassed humans.
The Heroes’ Association office in Evangel was also about to open. It played the same role as the adventurers’ guilds, but for the heroes of this world.
He even knew that the terrifying woman who led the adventurers on this continent was heading for Evangel.
Everything was going well. Everything was moving forward the way he had wanted, the way a story was supposed to unfold for him.
"So why? Why did Aria tell her to go to the Western Continent? Why don’t I know? Why couldn’t I attend that meeting? What is Aria hiding?"
He asked himself other questions of the same kind without getting the slightest answer, despite all the key points of the world he was watching.
On top of that, he now had a new goal, clear in his mind, the second of both his lives: bring Sloth down by any means necessary.
A smile spread across his face.
And the excitement rose.
Because this was exactly what he had been missing: goals, unanswered questions, things he didn’t know and would have to go find out for himself.
And as this long night came to an end, a night in which so much had changed for his heroine and for him alike, dawn broke over the Southern Continent.
It spilled over the mountains, over the forests and the roofs of the cities, and came to fall across the greater part of his mind. Hundreds of thousands of flies felt it at once, on leaves, on stones, on the outer sill of a window somewhere, on the right side of the glass this time.
At the bottom of his dungeon, nothing had changed. His real body still lay curled in the same darkness, his thumb against his teeth, and not a single ray would ever reach that floor.
And yet he felt it, everywhere at once.
He closed his eyes, and the smile on his lips softened.
"The light is so warm today."