Sacrificing
Those who opposed it.
Opinions were split cleanly in two, but the former held an overwhelming majority.
Even those who felt guilty about repaying the kindness they had received with betrayal still recognized that, if nothing changed, they would die alongside the planet.
And so it was only human nature to want to survive, even at the cost of ignoring that guilt.
Among those who opposed the plan, few actually moved to protect Sariel in practice, despite their words.
And the very few who did act—the Sariela Society—were suppressed.
They refused the demand to hand Sariel over and put up fierce resistance.
That, too, was crushed when the Dazdrdordia nation deployed its military.
Acting on the resolute orders of President
That they suppressed the resistance with non-lethal equipment and ensured not a single person died was due to the president's conscience.
That, and because the Sariela Society's resistance had been committed to non-lethal methods.
They had originally been a charity.
Their mission was to save people—to harm them was the last thing they wished.
That was precisely why, true to their convictions, they fought with everything they had while refusing to kill anyone.
This noble stance drastically lowered the morale of the Dazdrdordia forces.
Every soldier in the military knew that what they were doing was shameful.
And yet, they had no option to ease their assault.
Had the Sariela Society not been committed to non-lethal methods, Dustin would not have hesitated to annihilate them.
President Dustin had the resolve to commit that level of atrocity.
In the end, it was the Sariela Society's belief in non-killing that saved their lives.
When the Dazdrdordia soldiers breached Sariel's location, she was surrounded by children clinging to her.
Children pressed against her from every side, front and back, clinging to her as though they were physically restraining her.
And indeed, the children were restraining Sariel.
They understood that if they didn't, she would leave.
"If you try to rip her away by force, I'll bite off my tongue and die. If you absolutely insist on taking her, you'll have to kill us first."
The children clinging to Sariel held themselves hostage to threaten and restrain her.
The children knew.
They knew that without this, Sariel would accept being sacrificed.
She would likely volunteer to do it herself.
So they held her back.
They knew that threatening her this way would render Sariel unable to move.
The children—especially the older ones—knew that this was nothing more than a pathetic, unsightly stalling tactic.
The younger children surely understood it somewhere in their hearts as well.
And yet, there was no choice not to do it.
People called her a goddess, a savior. The dragons cursed her as a broken, lost angel who couldn't see the big picture. Bystanders looked down on them as fools. None of that mattered to the children.
To the children, Sariel was none of those grand things—she was simply a mother who was a little awkward with emotions, but kind.
And that was enough.
The soldiers pried the crying, screaming children away from Sariel one by one.
The children hit, bit, and scratched the soldiers, but the soldiers didn't fight back—even as they mercilessly pulled Sariel away.
And when the last child was finally pulled free, Sariel was led away by the soldiers.
"Everyone. Please live happily. Just… live in peace."
Those were her only parting words.
Sariel readily consented to being sacrificed and converted into the planet's energy.
"Because that is my mission," she said.
The president bowed his head deeply—deeply—to Sariel as she spoke those words.
And then came the day of execution.
By this day,
Under strict surveillance, to ensure he pulled no tricks.
Potimas modified the device for converting living beings into MA energy, as instructed, and developed the apparatus to convert Sariel into MA energy and return it to the planet.
The surveillance was too tight for him to tamper with the device.
And Potimas, bound and with his life in their hands, had no choice but to comply.
The president had seen through Potimas's true goal: immortality.
As long as they held the life that Potimas valued above all else, cooperation was inevitable.
At least, that would have been the case if it were the real Potimas.
The Potimas held by Dazdrdordia was not the real one.
He was a clone of Potimas.
Before beginning his research into magic, Potimas had been exploring whether clone technology could achieve immortality.
And he had succeeded in producing human clones.
But that wasn't what Potimas was after.
The clones produced were, in the end, merely clones.
Even if they were genetically identical, they were not Potimas himself.
They were simply different people who shared Potimas's appearance.
Using the brain transplant technology he'd been researching simultaneously, they could serve as spare bodies, but it wasn't true immortality.
Even if you switched bodies, the brain itself would eventually age, and death would come.
However, this clone technology would prove enormously useful for future research.
Potimas mass-produced clones of himself and set those clones to work on immortality research as well.
Clones who were equal in ability to the original Potimas.
Of course, accumulated experience and knowledge couldn't be acquired overnight.
But there was no denying that Potimas was a genius, and his clones were no less exceptional.
And even their problematic personalities had been tampered with by the original.
What the original wanted were pawns for his research, not beings who thought the way he did.
The clones were given knowledge for research, but only a shallow, mechanical sense of self with virtually no ego.
They didn't even have the original's fear of death.
One of those clones was the Potimas that Dazdrdordia had detained.
The original had arranged it that way.
The original Potimas had a single objective.
To obtain Sariel's power.
Sariel was a being even more monstrous than the dragons—creatures that were themselves symbols of death—whom she could dispatch with effortless ease.
If he could obtain Sariel's power, Potimas would have nothing left to fear.
But Potimas himself had no vessel to contain that energy.
Through repeated experiments in human Evolution, he had confirmed that the human body could not withstand excessive energy supply.
The body could only accept enough to marginally improve physical abilities and slightly extend lifespan.
Ideally, he would absorb the divine energy directly, but that was impossible.
So Potimas decided to channel Sariel's energy into something else.
That something else was the prototype of what would later be called Gloria Omega.
A blood-soaked weapon, forged by processing the souls of his clones in bulk as receptacles.
MA energy could not be stored for extended periods unless converted into other forms like electricity.
But the conversion efficiency was extremely poor.
To fully harness Sariel's power, it needed to be preserved as MA energy.
That was why a receptacle—a vessel for souls—was necessary.
Potimas created it using his own clones.
He would channel Sariel's power into those vessels.
The device the clones had built contained no tampering.
Potimas had deployed every shred of his knowledge to construct a device that would genuinely decompose Sariel and inject her energy into the planet.
It was simply designed to allow a side channel to siphon off energy during the injection process.
Potimas intended to harvest that energy and depart the planet.
Once he had Sariel's power, there would be nothing left to fear.
And he had no more attachment to this dying planet.
He would set off into space and continue his immortality research at his leisure.
And so, Sariel stepped into the device.
Under the watchful eyes of the president and the others, the decomposition of Sariel began, and her energy was injected into the planet.
Potimas would intercept it.
That was how it was supposed to happen.
But the very instant Sariel set foot inside the device, the world was transformed.