Chapter 114: Destiny, Already Unpredictable! (Patreon)

"Twang—!!"

The words had barely left her lips when Liliana's callused fingers snapped across the strings. One clear, soaring note rang out like a cry at daybreak and tore through the heavy, sticky air of the plaza!

It was no devastating attack spell. There wasn't even a flicker of dazzling mana. Yet the instant that sound reached everyone's ears, the dead-still surface of the canal rippled in small, perfectly regular rings.

This was Liliana's "Divine Protection of Telepathy": the power to carry her thoughts and feelings, her joys and sorrows, straight into the deepest part of her listeners' hearts without a single barrier in the way.

"La la laaa—!!"

Liliana threw back her head, her twin tails whipping with every exaggerated motion, even the soles of her shoes stamping a springy beat into the flagstones. Her singing wasn't gentle or delicate. It had a minstrel's wildness and sincerity, like a handful of icy, crystal-clear spring water flung full in the faces of the dazed crowd!

Sirius's Soulwashing Authority had been like an invisible web of emotion, roughly twisting everyone's nerves onto a single cable and forcing them to share pain for the sake of an empty "love."

Liliana's Divine Protection, by contrast, was a reckless missile of notes. With pure passion, freedom and vivid humanity, it barged savagely into that synchronized network!

"Ugh… ahh?!"

"What… what am I doing?!"

In the middle of the plaza, several red-eyed commoners shuddered all over, the emptiness and fervor draining from their eyes like a tide. The cuts at their necks, which had only just begun to bead with blood, stopped widening the moment the empathic link was severed. The clarity spread quickly through the crowd, letting them hear Liliana's song ever more clearly.

"Wh… what?!"

The chain at Sirius's throat jerked violently. Her exposed, bulging eye glared at the little shorty below, who strummed and danced as if no one else existed, and she let out a shrill roar:

"Noise! That's faithless noise!! How dare you cut off my resonance of love with everyone?! Unforgivable! I'll kill you!! I'll rip your tongue out first!!"

But before she could finish her threats, Geuse's Unseen Hands seized her limbs without mercy, leaving her unable to move at all.

As for the innocent commoners who had snapped out of it, they did what humans instinctively do when faced with the unknown: run!

"It's a Sin Archbishop! Run for your lives!"

And not just a Sin Archbishop. There was a silver-haired half-elf who might well be the Witch, a murderous multi-armed giant, and a freak who looked exactly like Theresia, the previous-generation holder of the Sword Saint title. The only halfway normal ones were the tiny songstress and the green-haired young man wrestling with who-knew-what. Either way, this was clearly no place to linger.

Amid screams like a landslide and a tidal wave, the commoners scattered in every direction, leaving Sirius with no hostages at all.

With the hostages gone, the chains of Soulwashing lost their anchor completely!

"Nice work, nameless little songstress!"

Emilia shot Liliana a grateful look from a short distance away. She had finally found a chance to set down the little boy in her arms, and she told him:

"Quick, go with everyone, young Lusbel!"

"Okay! I get it. Please be careful, big sister!"

Lusbel nodded. He knew that staying would only get in the way, so he immediately scampered off from Emilia's side. At the same moment, the multi-armed giant, who had torn free of the sand worm's jaws, charged forward in long strides and brought his scimitar chopping down.

"Don't underestimate me!"

Emilia, finally free of worries, barked the words and met him head-on, both hands gripping her ice greatsword. The clash of the two huge blades sent out a deafening shockwave.

"Mother, we're here too!"

Using the recoil of the colliding blades, the two of them each stepped back. In the now-empty plaza, a big crowd in Witch Cult black robes suddenly appeared. They clearly hadn't come to help the multi-armed giant, because leading them was Clarissa, the one Emilia had earlier told to assist Kiritaka.

As a veteran Beloved Child and a fundamentalist Witch Cultist, Clarissa could hardly be said to have worked closely with Kiritaka. It would be fairer to say they loathed each other, and the more they looked at one another, the less they liked what they saw. Kiritaka thought that having a bunch of Witch Cultists help organize the evacuation would only cause greater panic, while Clarissa had no intention of rescuing commoners in the first place. The result was easy to guess.

In the end, Kiritaka simply shoved all of the Beloved Children off to one side, saying with a smile that never reached his eyes, "We have plenty of hands. No help needed for now."

Since he'd put it that way, Clarissa saw no reason to keep pressing herself on someone giving her the cold shoulder. She made a decision that couldn't possibly be wrong: go back and help Mother.

Standing around doing nothing would be slacking off. Meddling in the evacuation might accidentally cause some "incident" and earn her a scolding from Mother. So what was left? Just stick faithfully to Mother's side and do whatever she said.

"Shatter—!!"

Clarissa pulled two plain bluish-gray pebbles from her cloth bag and tossed them at the feet of the two Witch Cult corpse soldiers. With the sharp crack of the stones hitting the ground and breaking apart, the paving stones within a radius of several meters turned in an instant to powder finer than flour.

The multi-armed giant and the red-haired woman both stepped into nothing and sank into the pit in the ground. The pulverized stone dust slid down grain by grain like quicksand, swallowing all four of their limbs.

"Nice support~"

Elsa gave a coy laugh, her figure stretching into an afterimage in the shadows like a gliding snake. Her two jet-black scimitars thrust mercilessly at the wrist of the opponent's sword hand. Driven on by Meili, the sand worm also rose again and opened its huge maw, and a rainstorm of mud and gravel pinned the multi-armed giant back down into the pit.

"Hehe, big guy, be a good boy and stay put~"

But Theresia twisted her body in midair at an impossible angle, her longsword knocking Elsa's scimitars aside. A strange light flickered in her eyes, and under someone's control she chose to retreat. Her toes touched the flat of Elsa's blade, she vaulted into the air, and she vanished around a corner, stepping off the canal's pillars.

The eight-armed giant, meanwhile, let out a muffled roar and forcibly pulled the sand worm's jaws off him with another pair of arms, then staggered up out of the quicksand pit.

"Mother, we're late! Please forgive us!"

Emilia looked at the pits and ruins all around and blinked, a little dazed. It took her a good while to come back to herself, and then a sincere look of gratitude spread across her face:

"Thank you, Miss Clarissa, and everyone else too… Without you, it really would have been dangerous just now."

Hearing this wholly genuine praise, Clarissa's tense shoulders relaxed all at once, and she couldn't resist gloating a little inside. It seemed this brand-new Mother was not only kinder but could actually show her respect. Wasn't that a bargain?!

If she'd known, she should have knelt even faster back in the royal capital's sewers!

*

Far away, near the sluice gates of Water Gate City's Second District, Reinhard stood atop the towering flood embankment, his brow furrowed.

By his reckoning, whatever the Witch Cultists were after, they would surely come to the sluice gates to open them and flood the city. But no matter how he used his Divine Protection and his extraordinary intuition to sweep the entire waterway, all he could find was the faint sound of the breeze and the waves. Never mind a Sin Archbishop, there wasn't so much as an ordinary Witch Cultist.

"There's no sign of them here either."

Julius retracted the lesser spirits he had sent out and shook his head gravely.

"Three main gates and two auxiliary gates, all intact. There isn't even a trace of anyone having touched them."

"Don't relax, Julius! This could be an ambush!"

Reinhard rested his hand on the Dragon Sword Reid at his waist and looked toward the central control platform, a puzzled expression on his face.

"Still, why haven't those people made a move on the sluice gates here even now? Could they have some other purpose?"

Reinhard's guess was right, in a way. At that very moment, Lye Batenkaitos, the Gluttony "Gourmet," and Roy Alphard, the "Gorger," had no intention whatsoever of seizing the sluice-gate control towers, and for once the two were of one mind.

On an ordinary day, the two had eating habits like fire and water. Lye was fastidious and picky, and would only swallow souls bearing a hero's name and brimming with exceptional skill and profound memories. Roy was a thoroughgoing glutton and bottomless garbage bin who accepted anything that fit in his belly, even the worthless name of a commonplace nobody.

They didn't come to blows the moment they met, but asking the two of them to cooperate seamlessly was still too much. That was also why, though there were three Gluttony Sin Archbishops, almost every time only one of them showed up: each found the others simply too off-putting!

"Slurp… delicious, so delicious!"

Lye bit down hard on his own finger, his sharp fangs breaking the flesh. Blood dripped down his chin and he never noticed. His eyes bulged, the pupils reflecting the dark outlines of the underground passage:

"Can you smell it, Roy? That earth-rending weight… that hatred beyond the framework of the world, the scent of molten lava! That's the Dragon of Finality! Just one bite… no, if only I could be crushed in the jaws of such a colossal beast and swallowed, melted into those flames as bait… ahhh, what supreme fullness that would be!!"

"Kah kah, eat! Eat it all up! Or be eaten by it!"

Roy likewise grinned, his mouth split to his ears, his whole body twitching and convulsing with excitement.

"Dragon or world, who cares, swallow it all! The gates? Flooding? That boring stuff is whatever! Eat it first! Let's go eat it!!"

Clearly, the task Pandora had given them had long since been tossed beyond the ninth heaven. For these two brothers, nothing mattered more than satisfying their appetites. But this trip might be fated to disappoint them, because Natsuki Subaru himself was no longer there. He had long since disguised himself as Emilia and gone off to meet his own "destined one."

Just as the brothers could no longer hold themselves back and were about to rush out, a silvery peal of airy laughter suddenly echoed in their heads.

—Hehe, brothers really can't keep calm, can they~

Louis Arneb, the "Sated." The third Gluttony Sin Archbishop had never had a body of her own. She lodged only as a fragment of pure soul in the depths of her two older brothers' minds, and she was rolling around comfortably in the bed of their consciousness.

—Just eating? Isn't that way too vulgar, brothers~

Louis rolled over, her eyes glittering with sheer malice.

—With such a big stage finally here, of course all the guests should be gathered for it to be lively! And since it's a banquet, how could we leave out our cute playmates?

—Louis has already gone to call over our good friends, the "Great Rabbit"! They're bored staying over at the Sanctuary anyway, so why not have them come keep us company here~

Lye and Roy both froze at the same moment. Even they couldn't help being stunned beyond words by their little sister's idea.

The Great Rabbit.

One of the Three Great Mabeasts, created four hundred years ago by Daphne, the Witch of Gluttony. It had a near-limitless ability to divide and an insatiable hunger to devour, a walking calamity that left not even a blade of grass wherever it passed!

—A flooded city, a burning black dragon, and tens of thousands of little white cuties… That's the perfect feast Louis wants!

In the sunless underground passage, two short figures threw back their heads at the same time and burst into heart-rending, maniacal laughter.

Almost at the very instant the two Gluttony Sin Archbishops began to laugh, the communication mirror on Emilia suddenly shook violently, emitting a grating hum.

Emilia had no time for anything else. She hadn't even asked how Geuse, who was holding Sirius down, was faring. With a grave look she flipped open the mirror's cover and gazed at the familiar yet unfamiliar face in the glass: Margrave Roswaal L Mathers.

"Roswaal?" she said, surprised. "Has something happened in the royal capital again?!"

"No… not so, the royal capital is not the trouble."

Roswaal strained to keep up his usual humorous, exaggerated tone, but without the clown makeup his expression was far easier to read. One glance was enough to see that he was truly, thoroughly rattled.

"I am at the branch mansion near the Sanctuary now, together with Frederica. I have just received a report from Garfiel: a blizzard of staggering scale has begun to fall near the Sanctuary…"

A blizzard was the omen of the Mabeast, the Great Rabbit, appearing. But unlike the artificial snow Roswaal had made by hand in the original timeline, this time the Sanctuary was truly being hit by a genuine, all-natural, no-additives blizzard.

If he wasn't mistaken, an unprecedented upheaval, enough to overturn every fate that had previously been set, was about to begin!

"Please be extremely careful, Lady Emilia. The course of fate has gone completely into the unknown… I cannot grasp it, cannot confirm it… Is this also the omen of that being's arrival? Ah… how foolish I once was—!"

Roswaal's voice soon began to break up, and then the mirror's signal was cut off completely.