Ch.312What if… we had tried to catch Sol Invictus a little earlier?

The factory district was behind him, but he remained both a god and a vagrant. People frowned at his appearance, but when he approached, they easily recognized him as an unworshipped god.

Keeping the promise to buy a meal wasn’t difficult. Though restaurants might not welcome him, cafés with outdoor seating wouldn’t turn away customers.

They entered a café near a police station, famous for its shrimp sandwiches. After ordering an elf-sized portion for herself and an ogre-sized portion for him, she took out her notebook.

“I need to hear more from you, at least until the food arrives. So… what’s it like being an unworshipped god? To us… you’re somewhat admirable. Gods who gave up worship to live among humans. I wonder if you feel the same way.”

Sol Invictus stroked his beard again. Running his fingers through his long beard, he tapped the café table with his large hand and spoke.

“Giving up worship? You think too kindly. Among the unworshipped gods, those who willingly gave it up…”

He suddenly stopped speaking. He wrinkled his nose as if smelling something strange and looked around. Sol Invictus had caught the scent of divinity. He couldn’t identify what it was, but there were quite a few.

Rose noticed that the café patrons had suddenly disappeared. It was strange that there wasn’t even a single car passing by, despite being near a police station.

Then, someone walked toward them from across the street. It was the detective. He approached Sol Invictus and briefly looked down at Rose. Very briefly.

Rose called out to the detective in a somewhat confused voice. Judging by how he bent down to hear her, he didn’t seem to be here on business.

“Um, Mr. New York! Why are you here? Do you know where everyone went? Maybe…”

The detective briefly bent toward Rose, then placed his hand on her chest. With twice the strength and twice the vigor, he threw her toward the street.

The strength of an Argonne Invincible was not something an elf could withstand. Before Rose could hit the ground, a man in a red suit with bushy hair caught her.

Rose’s vision blurred. It wasn’t tears that blurred her sight. A barrier created by the God-President’s word isolated the detective and Sol Invictus inside.

Sol Invictus let out a hollow laugh. It was knowledge and action, as expected. They were trying to capture him before he even began his journey to regain his divinity. But the method was strange.

He surely had agents from the Divine Security Bureau who could easily subdue someone like him who had lost his divinity. They were visible to him but remained outside the barrier.

What Sol Invictus could see was a man burning with cursed flames. The curse had penetrated so deeply into his soul that even Sol Invictus’s eyes had difficulty tracking his form.

But he was not a god who shied away from battle. Sol Invictus drew a gladius from his chest. It looked like a dagger in his large frame, but it was a one-handed sword rarely seen in modern times.

Sol Invictus looked at him with a good-natured laugh. He was the kind of god who showed respect to those who fought with their lives at stake.

“What is your name, warrior! If you don’t wish to tell, then why have you come here! A warrior deserves proper respect! Are you not struggling now! The undefeated sun loves one such as you. Speak!”

The detective had nothing to tell Sol Invictus. He was simply a man who had come here for his comrades. He had come to purchase salvation with the blood of the god before him.

He spoke with clear intent to create an opening. To avoid raising Sol Invictus’s suspicion, he had brought only a pistol and hunting knife as weapons. A surprise attack would be effective.

“They said they’d forgive my debt if I bring them a god’s head.”

“What did you say, warrior! You don’t intend to…”

Sol Invictus lowered his gladius momentarily to hear the detective’s story. And that was the moment. The detective drew his gun with a smooth, prepared motion and aimed at Sol Invictus’s chest.

While a head shot might miss its mark if slightly off, a god armed only with a sword couldn’t fight with a bullet in his chest. Besides, the detective had twice the strength and twice the vigor.

Sol Invictus tried to raise his gladius to shield himself, but a prepared action was inevitably faster. Without even a recoil, the detective fired all eight shots.

“I asked why. That was the contract condition.”

The gunshots didn’t echo beyond the barrier. Rose could barely see the barrier vibrating and could deduce that the God-President was using Michael to try to kill Sol Invictus.

Why Michael of all people? Rose wondered. Sol Invictus, bleeding transparent blood, shook off two bullets blocked by his gladius and two more stopped by his body. The wounds were deep.

Instead of growling in anger, he burst into laughter. Using the little divinity left in his gladius, he cauterized his wounds and barely held together his insides, which had become slick with blood.

“Cunning! Not bad. Not bad at all… True to your actions. Whatever the reason, winning is all that matters. But what debt are you talking about! Do you mean that curse?”

Michael felt like having a seizure at the realization that Sol Invictus could see his curse. It felt like someone discovering a secret he never wanted to share.

The detective started running toward Sol Invictus with his hunting knife. The war god, to be quite honest, couldn’t help but admire the sight. It was a movement only his great warriors could show.

He was swinging the knife with killing intent. Since the detective couldn’t reach Sol Invictus’s neck, he aimed for the lower abdomen. It was a slash meant to disembowel him.

The war god barely blocked the knife with his gladius. Shamefully for someone called a war god, both his movement and reaction speed were much slower than the young man’s.

Sol Invictus felt a thrill. This was what it felt like to face another war god’s great warrior. When the detective immediately twisted the knife in mid-air to aim for his thigh, he knocked the blade away.

“Since you don’t answer, I assume you mean the curse. Listen, warrior. My blood can wash away curses. Just as the glorious sun washes darkness from the land with light, my blood will cleanse the curse that dwells within you. What do you say? Won’t you make a deal with me instead! I was in need of a great warrior…”

It seemed like listening to those words any longer would sway him. The detective abandoned his lost knife and grabbed Sol Invictus’s hand holding the gladius, pushing it toward the unworshipped god’s chest.

He was simply here to purchase salvation with one contract killing. It wasn’t for himself. It was for his comrades. Michael fighting Sol Invictus now was ultimately no different from his usual work.

Sol Invictus gripped his sword tightly, resisting with a smile. He saw an opening. Just as sunlight reaches even the deepest mouse hole, he knew how to penetrate.

“It’s not for yourself, warrior! This healing sun loves you. You’re doing this for others in the same situation. Comrades? Could it be for your comrades?”

The detective didn’t answer and continued pushing Sol Invictus’s hand toward his chest. Sol Invictus tried to grab the detective’s shoulder to pull him away, but the determined Argonne soldier couldn’t be removed.

Sol Invictus whispered like a gambler taking a chance. For Sol Invictus, who didn’t even possess divinity at the moment, this was all he could try. Making him a worshipper was his only option.

“Since you don’t answer again, I must be right. Then are you afraid of being persuaded by my words? That curse was a mistake. You simply loved life and received an irreversible curse. My power will heal you. My blood…”

Sol Invictus rolled the dice. Pretending to lose strength in his hand, he reduced the resistance against the detective’s attempt to drive the sword into his heart. With the resistance gone, the blade plunged into Sol Invictus’s chest.

The detective gripped the sword handle with full malice and pushed upward. The blade began cutting through the god’s skin as if it were nothing. The detective felt heat in his hands.

Hot, transparent liquid poured over Michael’s body. It was the blood of a god, without even the smell of blood. Sol Invictus burst into laughter despite the large crack from his chest to his shoulder.

He was holding on with divine power. With his last remaining divinity, he maintained his mind and reason. He continued to laugh uncontrollably as he looked at Michael.

“Blinded by salvation, warrior! Thanks to you, the undefeated sun will gain not a new great warrior but a new body! This is what it means when a god should act directly. Knowledge and action!”

With those words, Sol Invictus’s body fell backward, but his laughter didn’t stop. The detective wiped his face with his palm in disgust, but the blood wouldn’t come off. Instead, his hand stuck to his face.

The gladius in his hand began to burn, but the detective felt no heat. The god’s blood, which had baptized him, was injecting divinity into him. The god’s will, full of life, was seeping in.

Now Sol Invictus’s voice echoed inside his head. The god, who understood well what the detective’s silence meant, continued his seductive whispers.

“It was a life you didn’t want anyway, wasn’t it? You despise it completely. Then just let it go. I will use it for a greater cause, for a new world. I promise you this. You are a warrior without equal, having endured this far! This glorious sun loves you. So… forget.”

Sol Invictus, who had attached himself to Michael, began to consume him. Sol Invictus’s memories and Michael’s own memories mixed chaotically until he couldn’t tell where he ended and the other began.

His mind grew foggy. His consciousness blurred. The detective tried to recall his name, but it was unstable, as if his memories had been smudged. The images of 1920s New York and ancient Rome overlapped too intensely.

He was certainly running a detective agency in New York. A man might not go to battle without a red cape, but without a gun he couldn’t go outside… The memories became increasingly jumbled, scattering into incoherent fragments.

There was only one thing he could remember. Even with just a shallow sense of self remaining, barely able to answer what he once was, he could still recall one thing.

The fragment of his fading self, amid the laughter of Sol Invictus—perhaps his own, perhaps someone else’s—barely remembered one thing. He remembered the person he despised most.

There was a reason for his hatred. He was a traitor! He had betrayed love, betrayed his comrades, betrayed honor, and stolen another’s glory by falsely claiming their name.

The one too disgusting to even mention was a warlock! He extended his life through alchemy and pretended to forge a life with the revolting power gained from that alchemy. Warlocks deserved to be killed.

That bastard who deserved death was also a coward! Avoiding responsibility, again and again… continuing an ambiguous life that was neither dying nor living his comrades’ share.

He was an Argonne Invincible. He was once part of the 308th Infantry Regiment. He was… his name was… Michael. Michael Husband. The fading self reached out one last time.

The one he wholeheartedly, desperately hated and despised was… that man named Michael Husband… was himself.

Michael followed his self-hatred like a thread and held onto himself even as his mind blurred with Sol Invictus’s memories. Sol Invictus hadn’t expected this.

He had thought that while hating something was fine, excessive hatred would ruin things… but every rule had exceptions. However, a rule with exceptions didn’t become wrong.

Sol Invictus was taken aback. He had planned to easily expel the native inhabitant and take over that strong body, but somehow the man had managed to hold onto his self.

The situation was less than ideal. Somehow he had separated Sol Invictus’s experiences and memories from his own, but his mind was still too noisy.

Nearly losing his sense of self completely was… too extreme an experience for a human to endure. The indomitable body of an Argonne Invincible had easily hunted a god, but their minds were still those of ordinary people.

Or perhaps their minds were somewhat stronger, but not enough to withstand this terrible invasion. The detective had somehow preserved his self, but he fell to his knees clutching his head.

From outside the barrier, it wasn’t even visible whether the detective was screaming or not. No matter how much Rose pounded on the barrier, the Divine Security Bureau agents just watched without interfering.

Meanwhile, Sol Invictus’s voice continued to echo endlessly in the detective’s mind, superimposed over him.

“Why, why do you struggle so desperately to resist! What value do those things have! You’ll just repeat the same mistakes! Look, I’ll show you the future! See what future will come! You’ll number your Great Wars. You’ll have another Great War! This time it will truly be a world war! No matter what you do, it will happen!”

The detective couldn’t properly survey his surroundings. With endless cannon fire, though there were no trenches, the hellish scenes of Argonne he had experienced were spread around him. People were at war again.

The weapons were very new. Machine guns had become lighter, rifles could fire faster, and tanks… were shaped differently than he knew. Perhaps it was a scene from the future. The detective clutched his head again.

It’s an illusion. Just an illusion. But the report had clearly stated that Sol Invictus was a god who didn’t understand modern times and therefore had to be killed.

How could someone who doesn’t understand modern times predict the future so accurately? It sent chills down the detective’s spine. Perhaps it wasn’t a prediction at all.

Perhaps this was… showing the future through divine power. The detective trembled and screamed. This mustn’t happen. We shouldn’t do such things again. But we will.

He saw other visions too. Dwarves killing goblins. Killing with the diligence and sincerity characteristic of their race. Killing people as if manufacturing items in a factory.

What you want to cry out as unreal is probably real. People who lived in the peaceful period before the Great War and then witnessed it… all reacted like the detective now.

In the end, it’s all meaningless. No matter how hard he tries to find salvation, people will have another Great War. Someone will go to war like him, and everything will be the same.

Did my actions have even the slightest meaning, enough to change even a single punctuation mark? The detective desperately asked himself. The answer was merciless.

No. All the visions the detective was seeing shattered that hope. Even that hope was childish. It’s natural for childish hopes to break.

Yes, the detective murmured. People can’t change. If people can’t change, the world can’t change either, and in the end, there will only be endless repetition. Perhaps it was a natural principle.

But what meaning was there in doing this forever? Meaning had no value. No matter what one desired, the future was predetermined, so desire had no value either.

Whether Sol Invictus took over the detective’s body or not, it made no difference.

In the end, everything would burn in the flames of war like karma, and the survivors would dream of damned hope while looking at the ashes.

Michael could now feel the divinity that Sol Invictus had injected into his body. He also knew that he was still in control of himself.

He moved properly and shook off his hands. The gladius flew away and stuck into the road. Michael reached out. The gladius’s handle flew into his grip.

Using power correctly or trying to do something would be meaningless anyway. Since everything was meaningless, and that meaninglessness was infuriatingly terrible… he might as well vent his anger.

It wouldn’t matter anyway.

The detective whispered to Sol Invictus parasitizing his mind.

“Thank you, Sol Invictus. Thanks to you, I could understand. Everything… fuck… was just completely meaningless. So… I’ll give you rest. Forget everything.”

Michael had the right to prevent Sol Invictus from maintaining his self, and Sol Invictus had no right to refuse that command. It had been predetermined from the moment he lost control of the divinity.

The detective finally felt his mind become quiet. Still trembling from the prophetic visions that remained as hallucinations, he approached the edge of the barrier. He walked toward the agent who had saved Rose.

War burst into hearty laughter at his approach. He thought this was exactly the future his esteemed superior had foreseen. The barrier dissolved. He opened his arms to Michael.

“Hey, Argonne! What did I tell you? This is all because our esteemed superior…”

Michael, who should have been quite a distance from War, was suddenly standing before him, and with one swing of the gladius, it instantly transformed into an axe whose owner had been forgotten.

Michael raised the axe, and before War could draw his sword, he split the War spirit created by the God-President in half from top to bottom. He burned it with colorless flames.

He shouted as if spewing blood and hatred. It wasn’t the voice of a sane person. The content of his words was filled with deep hatred, but his tone was bone dry.

“It’s your fault, War. Because of you, people will go to war again… and have that damned Great War one more time. Sol Invictus showed me. I saw battlefields too realistic for that stupid divinity to imagine, and sights too horrific for that heroic idealist to conceive. It was reality. It’s your fault. Your…”

The detective was seized by madness. He stomped on War’s burning corpse, crushing it. Other agents rushed to subdue him, but Rose ran to the detective right in front of her and grabbed him by the waist.

Michael looked down at Rose expressionlessly. She was a reporter. He felt no particular emotion. Even if he did, it would be meaningless.

“I-I don’t know what you saw! But it’s not his fault! He was the one who taught you that! The world isn’t black and white, it’s a spectrum! It’s not even a spectrum, it’s a palette! With just one lux of light, every color shows a different face, so there’s no black or white—that’s what you taught me, Michael! Please stop!”

Michael paused at those words. He looked around. Everything was too colorful. The leaves were too red or too brown, and the sky was too blue. It was beautiful.

But the people enjoying that beauty didn’t deserve it. They didn’t deserve the beautiful palette world where good and evil couldn’t be distinguished. Michael’s body rose into the air.

Rose couldn’t hold onto his waist for long and had to let go. Michael murmured quietly.

“You… no, we. We don’t deserve this, Rose. Black and white suits us better. A diverse palette? Colors? Then… we should dry them until black and white and good and evil are visible.”

Michael raised his right hand, filled with divinity. Colors were being extracted from his body and consumed by that divinity. It wasn’t just his body. Everything around him was losing color.

That self-destructive abandonment spread outward. Only emptiness filled the space. Everything that lost its color became black and white without even gray.

A god had been hunted here, but from that corpse, a god filled with emptiness who had given up everything was born.