Ch.229Outside. The Faceless Fixer’s Closing Ceremony (7)

It was a reflexive response.

An attack on anything that moved. Hostility toward everything that wasn’t her own.

It was an acquired instinct, engraved through repetition over a long time. For the nameless child, the world itself had always been the enemy.

She was now, for the first time, facing dialogue instead of attack.

It was difficult to understand. Each syllable was like something unknown.

As knowledge, she knew the meaning of the words, but she couldn’t guess why someone would speak them to her.

“It’s okay.” No problems, no worries. A situation with nothing bad about it.

Was she really okay? Before she could even ponder the question, emotion flowed out unconsciously.

“It hurts…”

Pain. The most primal word to express suffering. Without adding or subtracting any complex rhetoric, she simply hurt.

The nameless girl with white hair lowered her raised finger. And she kept muttering the word “hurts.” The pain she had forgotten while surrendering to rage and destructive impulses now overwhelmed her.

The real world was cold and desolate.

The origin of the nameless girl, the fundamental memory that bound together all the false worlds that had died, was that of a fetus hated by its mother.

In the womb, she had been warm despite the pain. But the real world she finally materialized into was completely cold.

She was a child deprived even of her mother’s warmth. Mentally, she had already disappeared in the calculations of the false world, and physically, she had lost her warmth after being banished to reality.

Against the cold that penetrated her heart, she raged. This was why she had launched indiscriminate attacks against the experimental designers of the real world who had killed and killed again the false worlds.

But now. There was someone showing her human warmth for the first time.

Because of this, the nameless child collapsed. To her, who had raged against a completely cold world, warmth was such a fatal poison.

Ortes looked at the white-haired magician who was hugging him while muttering “it hurts.” Because she was leaning her entire body against him, all he could see was her flowing white hair.

Ortes’s eyes instinctively identified the sword path. It was a signpost leading to certain death.

At the same time, beyond the white hair, he could see the life she had lived. He couldn’t fully interpret that life filled with death. Nevertheless, there was one thing he could clearly feel.

A sense of loss.

Like himself, the loneliness of drifting alone in a place far from home. The white-haired magician was now so defenseless, and at the same time, so close.

Ortes, who had been fumbling for the hilt of his high-frequency blaze, eventually sighed and lowered his sword.

“…First.”

The white-haired magician looked up at him.

“What’s your name?”

Blinking her golden eyes, the magician asked back.

“Is that really necessary?”

Ortes rubbed the back of his neck.

***

After thinking for a moment, Ortes gave her the name Carisia.

There was no special meaning. It was a name inspired by the way Old Man Hector used to call him. The white-haired magician, muttering “Carisia, Carisia,” nodded.

“…Not bad.”

She seemed to accept the name. It wasn’t a particularly thoughtful naming method, but they wouldn’t be seeing each other for more than a few hours, or at most a few days anyway.

If she didn’t like the name he gave her, she could change it herself. Ortes nodded and looked Carisia over once. He was trying to see if she had any artifacts that assisted with magic use.

A few seconds later, Ortes sighed and handed over the coat of the suit he was wearing.

“Why this?”

“You must be cold. Please wear this at least.”

Only now did he realize that beneath the white hair, she was naked. From Carisia’s words and actions, Ortes confirmed the hypothesis he had formed.

‘It seems…’

The “research outcome” his client was looking for appeared to be this person herself.

Perhaps they had obtained the DNA of some powerful ancient magician and were trying to cultivate a clone. In the process, they lost control of a high-density, large volume of magical power, causing an extra-dimensional shift.

The awakened clone of the magician, in confusion, engaged in purposeless destruction and collided with the research facility’s automatic defense system, resulting in the current situation.

It was a hypothesis that could explain both her strangely childlike attitude and her excellent magical skills that were inversely proportional to it.

Ortes blinked a few times, and eventually spoke.

“I’ll be honest with you, Ms. Carisia.”

Ortes explained without concealment how he came to the research facility and his hypothesis about Carisia’s identity. Even that the client’s side had promised massive rewards if he brought back research results from inside the facility.

“You are likely an irreproducible experimental subject. There’s no need to worry about the client disposing of you.”

Considering Carisia’s transcendent magical capabilities, it was highly likely that the client forces would try hard to curry favor with her to win her goodwill.

Originally, they would have implanted some kind of control device while creating the magician’s clone, but no such device was visible in Carisia’s body now.

A child with incomparably powerful strength.

Rather than provoking her and creating a threatening adversary, it would be a rational choice to coax and soothe her to make her their own power.

“…What are you trying to say?”

To Carisia, who was looking at him with a prim expression, Ortes replied in a casual tone.

“Let’s leave together. I can get a means to return home, and you can get a comfortable life away from this wretched research facility, can’t you?”

Carisia tilted her head. She slightly raised her right hand and pointed at Ortes’s heart. That posture was so close to the preparatory motion she had been using to fire death rays just moments ago.

Ortes flinched for a moment but, realizing there was no killing intent, showed no further reaction.

“You’re weak.”

This was a judgment based on a very simple criterion. Magical power. In Carisia’s memories, there were many worlds that had been discarded because they lacked magical power.

Ortes grabbed the back of his neck, which was becoming stiff.

‘Well, from a great magician’s perspective, it would be hard to highly evaluate someone like me who breaks through ruins using brute force and tricks…’

“That’s right. I cannot break through that space of extinction alone. But I have good eyes.”

“Eyes?”

“You have power but don’t know the way. I found the path from the outside to here. You and I can go outside together.”

The embodiment of deletion that had killed her countless times. The space of extinction. It was an object of hatred and fear for Carisia. A nightmarish magic that kept her trapped in this research facility by continuously distorting space even when she tried to escape.

She could shake off the nightmare. She could go outside this cold prison.

“Let’s leave together. For the future of both you and me.”

Ortes extended his hand. Carisia took it.

***

“This is surprising.”

Haltos, the vice-commander of Blasphemia, was genuinely impressed. The “monster of white light” said to be in the research facility was a killing machine that denied all approaches.

The peculiarity of the extra-dimensional zone, the protective devices of the research facility, and finally, the aggressiveness of the white light monster. Drones would stop functioning within a day, caught in extra-dimensional contamination, and even decent magicians would perish at the entrance of the research facility, struck by light beams.

Even those said to be top-tier fixers seemed to have fled. Two out of five were certainly dead, and two were captured.

‘It’s a mistake to think you can escape Blasphemia’s surveillance network just by taking a slightly longer detour.’

Blasphemia had widely dispersed detection drones in the boundary area where extra-dimensional contamination weakened, centered on the research facility.

Two fixers who abandoned their mission and tried to escape were captured and killed that way. How full of rebellious thoughts they must have been to attempt escape instead of dutifully reporting after accessing the secrets of the Ten Towers.

‘But that one…’

Ortes. The fixer everyone unanimously called the most dangerous figure in the extra-dimensional borderlands.

Somehow, he had managed to charm the monster of white light and was approaching together with it.

Straight to the intermediate rendezvous point designated by the client.

Even more surprising was that no mechanical equipment was involved in that “straight line.” Ortes, having lost his desert navigation tools including the sand bike due to conflict with his initial companion, was approaching solely using his own abilities to determine direction.

‘There must be a reason for the rumors about his obsession with extra-dimensional spaces.’

“Prepare to respond.”

But no matter how dangerous he might be, there would be limits. Blasphemia was armed with specialized weapons to counter light attribute magic users, and additionally, they had borrowed special equipment from Eidolon to hunt infiltrators.

Whether it was the monster of white light or an extra-dimensional obsessed doomsday cultist, both were destabilizing factors for the Ten Towers system.

Both would be eliminated here.

“How pitiful.”

If that fixer called Ortes had been a being who conformed to the system like other fixers, he might have received some kind of reward.

He hadn’t shown signs of being a dissident, like other fixers who witnessed secrets and tried to escape.

But his dream was to travel beyond this world, to extra-dimensional spaces.

That was not a dream permitted in magical society.

Haltos surveyed the vast extra-dimensional desert. The desert in the extra-dimensional contamination zone, where the landscape changed with each moment, would consume the blood of two people without leaving a trace.