Chapter 151 : Despair (5)

[I see. So you’re the one who came from another universe…]

[What do you know, muttering to yourself since earlier.]

[What do you mean? ‘You’ explained it.]

[What?]

[Ah, no. I got confused. It wasn’t ‘you’ who said it.]

[…]

Why is the Magical Girl of [Stars] looking at me with a familiar expression?

Why is she showing goodwill while wearing the face of a gentle girl?

I couldn’t guess at all the thoughts underlying that behavior.

Magical girls always carrying the seed of divinity were like this.

Animus,

[Death],

Erebos,

And Hecate before she got her name.

[Hmm, by the way, this ‘you’ is quite relaxed. Are you perhaps getting used to it too?]

[…]

The fragments born on this star with twisted fate all just muttered their own words. Trapped in their own thoughts, ignoring others’ thoughts, unable to even imagine being with others. They forced their terrible imaginations drawn out alone in their minds.

‘Their thoughts weren’t completely incomprehensible mysteries after all.’

Because they were beings originating from humans, even within their powerful authorities, they felt anxiety about the unstable world and limitations of their imperfect selves, and had things they desperately wished for in their hearts.

Animus who wanted humans to grow

[Death] who wanted the girl to realize

Erebos who wanted herself to survive

Hecate who wanted the order to succeed

And the three goddesses who wanted to return to the flow of stars and become daughters of the world again.

They all looked at the world through different perspectives, and advanced on twisted and distorted paths from their different positions. They didn’t truly understand ‘humans’, but tried to create a ‘world’.

World.

The world that magical girls carrying divinity should create.

‘Even if we can’t compromise, we decide on the best.’

Suddenly, I recalled the advice given by the dark blue crow.

What kind of world does this incomprehensible magical girl want to create?

Originally, I was going to attack with cause and effect reversal as soon as I recognized her existence, but recalling the four apostles that flashed through my mind, I asked the divinity calling herself the final magical girl.

[What kind of world do you want to create?]

[…This is a first.]

[Answer.]

[Will you understand if I answer?]

[…]

[…Then I’ll answer.]

It felt like I needed to know this to completely defeat the magical girl wrapped in chaotic power while representing the voice of the star.

[A world where we live as one with the star.]

It wasn’t clumsy coexistence.

It didn’t simply mean living on the same land facing each other like neighbors, nor did it mean living by drawing boundaries between each other’s territories like animals and humans.

Complete unity.

It meant stealing human will completely, pushing everyone into the primordial chaos and nothingness claimed to be a perfect world, to seal the wounds.

[You really are a being with no relation to humans.]

[Yes, that’s right. ‘You’ are the first to guess this too.]

[…]

A face exactly like Yuki’s.

In the familiar expression of chaos answering as if we’d met before, though we never had, I recalled my first meeting with Yuki. Even in the memories I had preciously kept deep in my heart, Yuki had suddenly acted like she knew me too.

‘…No way.’

I quietly looked at the Magical Girl of [Stars] while raising the power of cause and effect reversal. At the same time, the Magical Girl of [Stars] ‘familiarly’ took out a fragment of the world. She ‘familiarly’ deals with my unique skill that should be an unknown ability to beings she’s meeting for the first time.

[You, you know what I’m trying to do, don’t you?]

[This is also the first time ‘you’ve’ caught on to this.]

Eternal Return.

It was a massive miracle that a girl abandoned to gain a second chance in destruction.

A miracle that even the goddess of [Beginning] couldn’t use carelessly and passed on using all sorts of deception.

A face resembling Yuki. Familiar use of Eternal Return.

It’s unbelievable, but rather because of that, the identity of the Magical Girl of [Stars] becomes more convincing.

This one didn’t come from the human era.

Guessing as a divinity affirming humanity’s future, this one is a being born in a place unrelated to humans.

A being that arose after the silence of everyone’s destruction.

[You… flowed in from the time of destruction?]

[…Yes.]

[You’ve been answering quite readily since earlier.]

[It’s been nearly 20 days of repeated time for me. I can’t keep my mouth shut and stay tense forever.]

[…]

Hearing those words gave me chills.

[And anyway, this star’s fate is destined to return to one even across time and space.]

[I’ll stop it.]

[You can’t. Because I’ve already twisted one of the star’s laws before you arrived.]

The Magical Girl of [Stars] smiled while looking at small fragments fluttering around. Amidst those fragments, faint sounds of sobbing and screams uttered by the goddess of plague could be heard.

-Aah…! No, this isn’t it. I just…!!

They just wanted to return to the flow of stars.

That’s all the evil gods wanted.

For that, they spewed curses that sacrificed countless people.

The unsightly end of one of the evil gods who spewed curses to interfere with humanity with their weakened bodies, and incited according to the will of stars for their own purposes.

A sacrifice for the world’s miracle.

A massive miracle.

Our star began to shake.

The sky full of red atmosphere signifying the star’s anger collapsed, the earth split, and incomparably more people’s pain and despair than ever before could be heard.

Starlight was diminishing.

Despair was growing rapidly.

The light of hope was becoming smaller than a candle flame.

Even fate threads were breaking, and even magical girls’ communications were falling silent.

[Before you came, I already denied the land and sky divided by the first daughter, and dyed the surface where humans live with chaos.]

[…]

[Even now, the humans you loved so much are killing or abandoning each other to live just a little longer, just because the star’s surface is being ‘slightly’ overturned.]

[…]

[Is there meaning in us fighting now? What you’ve protected until now has been blocked so simply.]

[…]

[This world is struggling to return to chaos like this, to the point of collapsing with such a simple will.]

[…]

[Leave.]

Gooooo―

As the Magical Girl of [Stars] waved her hand, a massive miracle originating from the will of stars was activated. A miracle that could finally be activated through the world’s power recovered by the deaths of countless humans.

Power transcending dimensions.

Blue star.

Through the gate wrapped in chaotic starlight, that star gradually shrank and expanded into an incredibly familiar appearance. The expanded image gradually focused beyond a familiar country, familiar city, towards a familiar fruit shop in some rural area.

<Hyeonwoo’s Fruit Shop>

There, an old woman with completely white hair and a limp in one leg was putting apples in a bag with a stiff expression. The smile she had always shown kindly to neighbors had completely vanished.

With an expressionless face, she handed the bag of apples to a customer, rummaged through the cash register to put away cash, then pulled a blanket from the corner of the shop and lay down listlessly.

On the cash register where she took out cash, photos of a middle-aged man and a young man smiling brightly were hung. The frame holding those photos was completely worn at the edges from being caressed so much.

Father and me.

And my living mother.

My heart was pounding as if it would burst completely, and tears poured from my eyes.

Seeing the red star full of screams and being dyed in chaos contrasted with the blue star where mother was calmly running the shop. It was so sad that tears came out.

Though I could feel the loss of divinity in real-time from the red star where people were dying, I couldn’t take my eyes off the blue star where mother was lying.

If I take just ten steps forward, I can hug mother and shout that her son is alive.

I can lie down next to mother who has lost strength from old age and shout that I’m sorry for leaving her alone.

I can start a new life as an ordinary girl in that Earth I know.

[Leave this star.]

[…]

[Most of the miracles originating from the will of stars you possess will disappear in another dimension, but at least you can live as a human in the place you were.]

[Hu…man.]

[Yes. Fate determined while a star orbits the sun billions of times cannot be defied.]

The years that humans appeared on the star and created.

The years that started from the era of goddesses and humans.

[It’s just one day out of a year at most.]

From the star’s perspective, it was an extremely fleeting and short, futile time.

Billions of years of chaos

Tens of thousands of years of history

The weight of years determining fate was different,

The scale at which fate was determined was different.s and goddesses are just bubbles that briefly rise from nothingness and return to nothingness after all.

[This is natural.]

[…]

I too was a small human agonizing as a mother’s son, not a goddess of stars.

[Go.]

[…]

The star’s fate cannot be defied.

[…]

[…]

Is that really so?

I spat out a question that arose from indignation amidst flowing tears.

While watching mother’s back, I forcibly grasped and covered my heart pounding as if it would explode, and bit my lips that felt like screaming from sadness until they bled. I forcibly twisted and fixed my trembling legs, and tensed my endlessly shaking arms until veins popped out.

Barely holding back my body trying to flee hastily through the gate in front of despair.

I shouted at the Magical Girl of [Stars] and the will of stars.

[Then why… are you trying to persuade me like this? If it doesn’t matter what I do, why are you trying to send me back?]

[…Huh?]

[If the difference is so overwhelming, why couldn’t you wait for humans to naturally perish?]

[…]

[You said human history is just a day!! Why couldn’t you wait even about a week!!]

[…]

Ah

I see.

[You are not the will of stars.]

[You are not truly representing the indescribable, great will of stars.]

[You too are just ‘fake gods’ trapped in your own stubbornness.]

Hearing those words, the Magical Girl of [Stars] showed a cold expression for the first time.

I think I understand why you were upset.

If someone wrote a terrible story that drives humans into a corner and sneers that this is human nature.

[That’s you.]