"—Al-sama, can we stop being burned by the sun?"
He had no way of knowing what feelings or calculations lay behind those words when she spoke them.
He was in a position of binding her with hatred, commanding her through terror, and leveraging her desire for revenge as collateral. To someone in her shoes, seeing him cornered like this must have been deeply satisfying.
And yet, her responses had been subtly inconsistent with that theory—more than the facts alone could explain.
So what lay hidden behind her contradictory behavior?
He gave up trying to find the answer. —Only one thing was certain.
"—Domain Expansion. Matrix Redefinition."
Not one he had placed consciously, but an unconscious one—a safeguard, a threshold. Roughly speaking, a mental chain that served as a brake on the overwhelming power of Aldebaran's authority.
With that removed, Aldebaran's options expanded without limit.
"Targeting, twelve o'clock to three o'clock. —Do it, Olta."
"Alright, Origin."
Responding without hesitation, the 'Aldebaran' hovering right behind spread its wings.
There was no confusion at being called Olta. He had already updated and shared his intentions with it through the Book of the Dead. Being called Origin, too, was a triviality, plain and simple.
Before he could put any further thoughts on the matter into words, white light—the Dragon's Breath—was unleashed.
"————"
The power of the breath, drawn from the Divine Dragon's skeletal frame and unleashed at maximum specification, was devastating—the sort of thing that even the Sword Saint,
And now it was swept across a battlefield without the Sword Saint—no, across an area that didn't even qualify as a battlefield—scouring away nature, artificial structures, and above all, living things: plants, animals, and humans alike, wiped from existence.
At full power, the Dragon's Breath reached across several kilometers. Anyone swallowed by that light of annihilation, arriving without the faintest omen, would cease to exist before ever feeling pain.
—And now, Aldebaran had ordered 'Aldebaran' to do exactly that.
"————"
As instructed, the blast scorched the sector from twelve to three o'clock—the clock position—and everything in its path was returned to nothing.
The lives lost would not number in the hundreds or thousands. The count would not fall short of tens of thousands.
"Ha ha ha— not bad!"
Hanging by his bonds,
But the fact that Roy was the only one clamoring was itself significant. No one present had any intention of condemning Aldebaran's actions.
What filled their gazes were pleasure, understanding, submission, fear—all of them accomplices, willingly or otherwise.
And bathed in those stares, Aldebaran looked up at the sky.
"————"
The Dragon's Breath had not merely scorched the earth. Its impact reached into the sky and the atmosphere itself.
Clouds were scattered. The rain and wind that should have driven in were chased away. In their place, deep marks of the Dragon were carved across the land—claw marks of the Dragon's wrath, one might say.
As a matter of course, no living thing exists that does not fear the wrath of the Dragon. There is no being that can stand against a raging Dragon. Every creature bows its head to the Dragon's tantrums, hides its very existence, and waits for the storm to pass—that is the iron rule.
—Which is precisely why birds or insects approaching those claw marks of wrath prematurely would be supremely unnatural.
"Wrong number."
Aldebaran murmured the words—dissolving inside his helmet—as he spotted a flock of birds converging on the scorched area to survey the damage.
Most animals are straightforward, loyal to their instincts. If one acts against those instincts—if its behavior turns dishonest with respect to its natural impulses—it is proof that some unnatural force is interfering.
In other words: proof that the being responsible for that unnatural interference has survived.
Having confirmed this, Aldebaran— "—Next."
—and within that same murmured breath, broke open the poison vial and took a draught of lethal toxin.
And then— × × × "Targeting, three o'clock to six o'clock. —Do it, Olta."
Having returned to the restart point, he ordered the Dragon to ravage the next sector.
△▼△▼△▼△ "Targeting, six o'clock to nine o'clock. —Do it, Olta."
"Targeting, six o'clock to eight o'clock. Minor correction."
"Targeting, six o'clock to seven."
"Targeting, fixed at seven o'clock. Adjust range. Breath at eighty percent."
"Seventy percent."
"Sixty percent."
"Sixty-five percent."
"Sixty-five and a half percent."
"—Sixty-five and a half percent. Confirmed."
△▼△▼△▼△ —Seven hundred and fourteen.
Having been told by Yae that he was doing this too cleanly, Aldebaran reconsidered his approach.
He became conscious of his unconscious arrogance, examined with genuine seriousness what was truly necessary to achieve his purpose, and arrived at an answer.
—The Bind of Non-Killing.
This was a line he had determined must, at minimum, be crossed from the moment he decided to eliminate
But in his stubborn adherence to that vow, Aldebaran had unconsciously shackled his own authority.
To honor his oath of taking no life, he had imposed the same restriction on the path to get there.
With Aldebaran's authority—his Domain—events occurring in the world he repeatedly reverted would be undone, endlessly, until a period was placed on the matrix. If, in the end, the Non-Killing ledger balanced out, then deaths along the way need not be a concern.
Keeping that conclusion outside his consciousness was the shackle he had unconsciously placed on himself. In freeing himself from it, Aldebaran had wasted precious time. —No, without Yae's words, he might still be unaware.
"I knew the big brother was using his Blessing to chip away at us. The problem was his thoroughness and his infinite hand—and the fact that we had absolutely no way to counter it."
Aldebaran had broken through that problem through sheer brute force now that the shackle was off.
It wasn't complicated at all. The pursuer had been borrowing the eyes and mobility of insects, fish, and small animals to track their movements and carry out a wide range of interference. But considering the apparent range of the enemy's Blessing, the control over those animals was neither telepathic in its immediacy nor absolute like brainwashing.
In each case, the pursuer must have been issuing oral instructions as situations arose.
And to execute those instructions, the directing pursuer themselves had to maintain a close-but-not-too-close distance while continuing to follow. —It was the pursuer's position, forcibly triangulated through the Dragon's Breath, that Aldebaran had pinpointed.
"Narrow the area with clock positions, then measure distance with the breath's depth. If I do something outrageous on my end, the other side has no choice but to burn cards to figure out what happened. Burning a card means big brother is safe. But when they don't burn cards?"
Cards—the forces the pursuer had enlisted through their Blessing—wiped from existence without a trace.
Having confirmed that, Aldebaran reverted his Domain, narrowed down the pursuer's bearing, measured the distance, and pinned their position as precisely as possible. Naturally, mountains, forests, and even towns became collateral in the process—but all of it was subsequently undone.
Through the final reconciliation of the Domain, the only casualty outside Aldebaran himself was zero. —No, even Aldebaran's "death" wasn't counted. The casualties were zero.
"Combined with the tower's selection round, that's one thousand three hundred and forty-seven... They put up a fight."
He had been drained to the point of near-exhaustion by an opponent he thought he'd already eliminated—someone who'd managed to trip him up one more time.
In that sense, the pursuer—
Of course, it was precisely because Aldebaran had judged him to be that much of a threat that he'd spent his resources without hesitation and succeeded in flushing out this formidable enemy.
"Al-sama, over here, over here~!"
Fluttering her hand, Yae beckoned Aldebaran's group from below. Following her call, 'Aldebaran' descended to the ground, and Aldebaran leapt from its back.
On the mountainside, where Yae had already reached the objective point ahead of the others, she stood smiling. Behind her, a green-clad civil official hung from a tree, and an earth dragon lay trussed on the ground with its limbs bound.
The earth dragon had fought against its wire restraints with all its strength—streaks of blood seeping across its pale blue hide. Even now it twisted desperately, exhaling exhausted breaths.
"As expected of an earth dragon's loyalty—truly impressive. Come to think of it, the current
"I did consider making an example of him, but he looked like the type who'd get more stubborn before he broke. So I left him alone. How's that for Yae's judgment?"
"I think that's the right call. Besides, an example's no good if nobody can see it."
Aldebaran smiled behind his helmet at Yae, who had tilted her head in greeting. In his field of vision, the civil official hung above the writhing earth dragon—Otto, his eyes, his mouth, and everything from his neck to his toes sealed tight with steel wire, utterly unable to do anything.
Normally, a single strand of steel wire was something you had to squint to confirm was even there. That it was now clearly visible as a restraint spoke to how many layers had been wound around him—unimaginable.
"No light, no sound leakage. Not even a whisper—breathing alone could serve as a channel of communication with the outside. So I bound him without a gap across his entire body, leaving only a single airway through his ankles. That way he's too busy breathing to embed any intent."
"...I know this isn't just petty revenge—that it's proof you're taking precautions. But I'd rather not give big brother the chance to talk, given what he might pull."
"Oh, this isn't personal~ Yae-chan isn't that kind of shinobi, you know?"
Pressing a finger to her cheek and grinning, Yae was in excellent spirits.
After all, she had endured a long string of harassment and attrition warfare at Otto's hands. Even without personal grudges, there was plenty of pent-up frustration. In the first place, carrying out harassment and attrition tactics against the enemy was supposed to be the shinobi's exclusive domain.
"Finally getting one up on him—I can see why you're in high spirits."
"Pfft~ Al-sama, you really don't understand a woman's heart, do you? Come on, subduing someone who's been slimy, relentless, persistent, and just plain awful with their attacks? Of course that feels good!"
"You sound worse than I do."
"But more than anything, I'm glad Al-sama properly played the monster. You didn't cling to something as petty as your humanity—you committed to being a monster."
"————"
"If that's what it takes, being thrown with full force by Lord Volf is nothing."
"Sounds like you've got complaints about the strategy too..."
Yae corrected herself, adding that last part at the end.
The strategy involved changing how the Domain was used, locating the pursuer's position through it, and then—before the enemy could read their intent—getting to them as fast as possible. The method: have 'Aldebaran' take flight and hurl Yae to the target's location.
It was rough and put Yae's life in serious danger. But because the enemy was in a mountainous area rich with cushioning material, and Yae could use her steel-thread art to create cushions, she was deemed the best candidate.
"This particular role—getting tossed around without dying—isn't something I can leave to the current Heinkel-sama, no matter how you slice it."
"Even if a Heinkel-shaped hole appeared in the mountain, the old man would be just fine. But yeah, putting something important on his shoulders in his current state... no."
The rift between Heinkel and
Given that it could reignite for any number of reasons, the consensus between Aldebaran and Yae was to leave it untouched for now.
In any case— "—At last, checkmate."
Aldebaran looked up at Otto—movements and resistance sealed, now reduced to what could only be called a silver cocoon—and claimed victory in the match that had dragged on and on.
But the opponent Aldebaran was playing against wasn't just Otto. It was a multi-front game against adversaries on a kingdom-wide and even world-wide scale. Just because he'd taken one piece off the board didn't mean he could carry that satisfaction with him.
Most importantly, he had to be thorough in eliminating Otto Suwen so that he could never return as an opponent.
"Even if you took my eyes, ears, tongue, and limbs, I could still follow Al-sama's orders~"
"—Yae."
"Yessir~ Al-sama, how scary~"
Inflicting wounds that left someone unable to recover while keeping them alive—that was self-deception.
Aldebaran's Bind of Non-Killing was not so flexible that it could be called honored simply because the target hadn't died. It shouldn't be. Such an oath would be no different from declaring world peace achievable by cutting off everyone's hands and feet.
So Aldebaran would not take Otto Suwen's eyes, tongue, hands, or feet. What he would take instead was the reason to fight.
"—Roy. Ease the range of the curse mark. It's your turn."
△▼△▼△▼△ "—Roy. Ease the range of the curse mark. It's your turn."
Yes, Otto Suwen—bound from head to toe—definitely heard the voice of the one gazing up at him. —On one point, Aldebaran and his group had misunderstood the power of Otto's Blessing of Words.
Words—or rather, voices—were vibrations of sound. And vibrations, even if Otto's ears were sealed, would reach his body as long as they were within physical range. The Blessing of Words was not translating sounds that entered through the ears. It was detecting the vibrations of intent that touched Otto's very being, and picking them up.
Therefore— "What a strange coincidence, big brother. At
That voice too—Roy Alphard, the Archbishop of Gluttony, licking his lips—reached Otto with perfect clarity.
"————"
But to his deepest frustration, there was nothing left for Otto to do.
He was still picking up the voices around him through the Blessing of Words. But with his mouth sealed, his limbs bound, and his ability to project his own will cut off, Otto was utterly powerless.
What are you going to do to the boy... Please, stop this...!
From just below, where he hung, the pained cries of the girl reached him—and it tore at his heart.
For the time being, Aldebaran and his group had no intention of further harming the girl, let alone killing her. In that case, he wished she would simply endure, stay quiet, and wait for the storm to pass. That was his greatest wish right now.
As for the rest— "——"
In a voiceless voice, he worried from the bottom of his heart for the comrades who were not here.
He heard that Emilia,
And to rescue the captured Subaru and
Slowly, he felt the defiled appetite of Gluttony closing in on him. Otto received it with no means of resistance, nothing left but to be chewed up.
And so Otto Suwen continued to pray. Continued to wish. Continued to think.
That his final stratagem would come to pass.
"—Then, time to eat!"
△▼△▼△▼△ "Thanks for the meal."
The authority of Gluttony activated, and the bound Otto Suwen was devoured.
There was no spectacular visual effect, no magical light show. The process was solemn and quiet—a well-mannered meal, except the diner's manners were atrocious. A dish was consumed by a rudely eager stomach. Nothing more.
"I just saw it, but it really does feel like a cheat move. The resistance in my threads vanished in an instant."
Yae touched the ring that emitted her steel thread, speaking without hiding the revulsion in her voice.
Her words meant that the opponent—Otto Suwen—had been resisting the steel wire's restraint, and that resistance had now disappeared.
This was proof that Roy Alphard's Erosion had taken effect.
"And we still remember that big brother of ours, as promised. —Sounds like he held back and only ate the 'memories.'"
"Ahaha, what's that? You're not even grateful enough! Let me tell you—gnawing off just the 'name' and just the 'memories' separately is actually pretty hard! It's like picking the filling out of a sandwich without opening the bread, you know?"
"Couldn't care less. If you can't do it, you die. Grind your way through it."
Before the limp, wire-wrapped form of Otto Suwen, Aldebaran snorted at Roy's complaints about the difficulty of his authority.
In truth, no matter how Roy insisted this was an advanced technique, Aldebaran had no intention of listening. —If Roy failed, the curse mark carved into his body—the oath binding him to Aldebaran—would burn his soul to nothing. Simple as that.
Of course, Aldebaran couldn't afford to let Roy die, so he intended to redo it on each failure and let Roy find his own way.
"Al-sama~ That Archbishop is getting a little full of himself, isn't he? If you can control his actions with the curse mark, couldn't you just manipulate him into obedience instead of going through all the trouble of coaxing and persuading him?"
"Carving a curse mark isn't as casual as you think. For starters, a curse mark carries risk for the carver too. You only get one chance to carve a curse mark in your lifetime. It's a trump card for subjects who absolutely refuse to listen."
Yae whispered in his ear, and Aldebaran pressed a hand to her forehead while explaining.
As the name implied, carving a curse mark was a form of sorcery that predated the split between magic and curses—closer, in its nature, to the origins of magic. If he started explaining based on the image the word "curse mark" conjured, the person who had taught Aldebaran how to carve one would subject him to half a day of tedious lecturing.
"To use such a precious opportunity for our sake...! Fine, fine, absolutely fine, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine—I believe it's fine, so: binge drinking! Binge eating! That's basically love, isn't it~"
"What?! A sweet, sultry, devoted maid like Yae-chan isn't enough for you? You'd rather have the buck-toothed Archbishop? What a cheater, Al-sama!"
"You're the one making seamless teamwork with an Archbishop..."
Aldebaran was exasperated by the one-two punch of the relentless Roy and the no-less-relentless Yae.
Yae likely had no intention of being friendly with Roy, but she would use anything to sway Aldebaran's heart—the mark of a true shinobi. Roy, meanwhile, carried himself in a way that could easily make one mistake an Archbishop of Sin for someone reasonable.
But they shouldn't be mistaken. For Aldebaran, both Yae and Roy were equally tools to be used for his purposes—and both posed the risk of slitting his throat if the opportunity arose.
And that was precisely— "Roy, don't get ahead of yourself. Spit it out—what was big brother planning? That's why I had you eat him."
Keeping Roy firmly within range of attack, Aldebaran delivered the cold warning.
Roy had been freed from his restraints and his broken limbs restored by 'Aldebaran's' healing magic. But that didn't mean Aldebaran trusted him, nor did it mean Roy had been granted free movement. It was simply that, in the detailed planning ahead, dragging around a hung Roy wasn't practical.
For instance, when the moment came to lean on Roy's power as the Archbishop of Gluttony—as it just had—keeping that card tucked away would be a terrible waste. Aldebaran never relaxed his guard against Roy. What was needed was a means to keep Roy under control without that.
Fortunately, the curse mark was doing its job admirably.
"I hope we hear something useful~"
As she spoke, Yae flexed her slender fingers, flashing the presence of invisible steel wire to keep Roy in check.
It was Yae who had been most opposed to using Roy's authority to the very end. While she welcomed Aldebaran's declaration that her advice had freed him from his shackle, she had also strongly argued that if he was going to remove the restriction, he should remove the Bind of Non-Killing itself.
In truth, she was right. If Aldebaran lifted the Bind of Non-Killing entirely and claimed free rein over the life and death of any opponent, his objective would be achieved effortlessly. He could simply scatter 'Aldebaran's' breath in all directions and keep enemies at bay.
But Aldebaran refused. Instead, he proposed a middle ground: tolerating death in the process, and employing Roy Alphard's authority as a new option.
In practice, this meant lifting the prohibition on actively using an Archbishop's authority.
This was entirely different from Aldebaran exercising his own dormant authority. He was putting to use the inherited evil of the Gluttony Archbishop—an authority responsible for countless tragedies and sacrifices—for his own purposes, simply because it was useful.
This was, in all likelihood, a transgression that only one person other than Aldebaran had ever committed since the birth of
In short: he had crossed a line.
And without results to show for it, there was no point in betraying the sun— "So, out with it. You've ruined someone's life on purpose. Don't tell me you've got nothing—"
"Whoa, whoa, hold on. Don't rush me. You might have the wrong idea, but we don't instantly understand everything about the person we eat. Things you only knew from the start—well, they don't just pop into your head without the right moment, right? Same thing here..."
"—I won't say the same thing twice."
"...Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Ah, I see, I see. This big brother here had quite the life experience—we were a little surprised—"
Roy, about to launch into a long-winded string of excuses, focused instead on excavating the newly acquired memories of Otto. His point could be understood as a combination of Otto's eventful days as the Blessing of Words holder and the sheer volume of voices he must have heard over a lifetime.
But then Roy's irritating words cut off abruptly, and Aldebaran frowned.
That was unmistakably the sign of having struck something that snagged— "What? What is it?"
"Ha—Looks like we were more thorough than I thought. —A fail-safe, in case we were ever taken out."
"————"
Fail-safe—a safeguard against foolish mistakes.
The moment Roy uttered that word, a violent chill shot through Aldebaran's entire body.
Not a countermeasure for when an attack came, but a contingency for after he was defeated.
If Otto Suwen had prepared something like that, then this was precisely the moment.
"Yae! Immediately—"
Escape from this location, and revert the situation through self-destruction.
The two options flashed through his mind, but Aldebaran moved without settling on a course of action. In one sense this proved beneficial; in another, it led to his downfall.
That is— "It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lord Aldebaran."
A lovely young girl's voice struck his ear like a surprise attack.
She was, in the most literal sense, a foreign element that appeared in the blink of an eye, and her unannounced arrival was too abrupt for even instinct to sound the alarm.
He should not have laid eyes on the blue-haired girl, altered in appearance and attire from her time in the
In that instant, the girl's name, her existence, and her very nature hammered at his brain in rapid succession.
"————"
Once devoured of her "name" and "memories" by the Gluttony authority, stricken from the register of Od Laguna—where every living thing's name was inscribed—then expelled on account of the Vile Consumption's malice and left to languish without exerting any real harm... that girl exploded into Aldebaran's consciousness.
The impact of being forcibly reminded of her existence—dragged back into thought by brute force—was such that even Aldebaran, who should have been bound by a destiny that forbade him from stopping his thoughts, was left stranded in a moment of frozen thought— "—Al-sama!!"
Instinctively, Yae's slender arm shot toward him. Even as he caught the white of her fingers at the edge of his vision, Aldebaran could not move.
Frozen, his thoughts stolen in the span of a single second, the situation moved around him.
—In that instant, Aldebaran's body was severed from the space it had occupied and flung into the open air, buffeted by savage wind.
"————"
The brilliance of a sun that had stopped burning scorched the black eyes of Aldebaran as he tumbled through midair. —This was the unexpected beginning of the final reckoning for Aldebaran's party.
—The struggle for the Mogrode Caldera, which would decide the fate of the world, had begun.