Chapter 52 - Aldebaran I

「――No one can beat you—I made you.」

Aldebaran can remember being told that by the Witch as if it were yesterday.

In real time, it was nearly twenty years ago, and in terms of felt time it isn’t even in the same league. He remembers how many times he re-challenged a single juncture, but he doesn’t remember the total number of attempts, and he certainly doesn’t want to think about the sum of all the time he spent—that’s too staggering. What is certain is that he has spent far longer than it would take to live one ordinary life and die once.

That said, if you asked whether Aldebaran’s mind, after spending that much time, had reached the same state as an elf who lives for centuries without aging, the answer would be no. If a human spirit grows from immature to mature, and in time becomes seasoned and arrives at detachment, it’s because, over the time they live, they experience the bitter and the sweet and are given space for the mind to grow. But all the time Aldebaran spent outside of real time was, for the sake of breaking through the difficulty lying before him—in other words, a string of stalled instants. In reality it was only a few seconds to, at most, a few minutes, and repeating just that much time countless times offers no prospect of human growth. Hence, Aldebaran regarded the accumulation of time repeated by his Authority as idle time that only wears down his heart without cultivating it.

Even if it’s idle time like that, repeat it dozens of times, hundreds of times, tens of thousands of times, hundreds of millions of times, and the brain will naturally sort memories and try to rob Aldebaran of his genuine recollections. And yet there are memories that cannot fade, ones that seem etched not into the brain but into the soul, and the words at the beginning were exactly that.

If, on top of not remembering all that time, he were to say he didn’t even want to remember it, he could picture the embodiment of curiosity who wants to know everything—the Witch—murmuring, “I see, what a shame,” under her breath.

She boasts she can’t understand emotions, yet she’s good at acting to bend others to her will—the Witch. Even knowing that, Aldebaran cannot go against the Witch’s words and demeanor. To say he was trained that way and remade that way—put that way, it might be a close match for the inhumanity of the Shinobi Village, which he only heard a little about from Yae. In this case, whether it’s the Shinobi Village, treated on the same level as the Witch, that’s insane, or the Witch, who can go toe to toe single-handedly with the Shinobi Village’s entire history, that’s just too outrageous—call it even.

—At any rate, the Aldebaran of now is a thing created by the Witch.

「Even so, you have the right to live your own life. That alone is a realm that, even if I were your creator, must not be invaded unilaterally. So if you ever feel, from the bottom of your heart, that you can’t follow me, you can drop out of the plan at any time. That is your freedom.」

From time to time, the Witch would say that, as if to question Aldebaran’s resolve. For the Witch, it was an unusual bit of consideration. As a rule, once she’d obtained someone’s consent, her standard practice was to maneuver so the pledged words could never be taken back. In fact, among the lessons and assignments the Witch imposed on Aldebaran were any number of nightmarish tasks that would make you balk unless you’d been made to agree beforehand not to give up. When making him do things like that, once she’d gotten him to nod, the Witch never asked again whether he wanted to stop.

And yet, when it came to the foundation—the root—the very first resolve, she pressed him on it time and again.

Aldebaran interprets that as the Witch’s own guilt and inner conflict, but who can say. The Witch, who claimed she couldn’t understand emotions, nevertheless didn’t lack knowledge of anger, sorrow, or joy. If she could give vent to such joys and sorrows, then perhaps she could also harbor guilt and fear for the future. At the very least, in the time he spent with the Witch, while he sometimes thought of her as a Witch who couldn’t understand people’s hearts, he never thought of her as a Witch without a heart.

Between not having and not understanding stretches a completely different landscape. Perhaps that took shape as the Witch’s questions. If so, did she waver as many times as she asked? Did she grieve over the harsh road she would make Aldebaran walk, respect Aldebaran’s own will, and struggle with letting him choose that life?

If—if, by some chance, by one in ten thousand, by one in a hundred million—the Witch truly had such feelings, then, ironically, that would be precisely the reason Aldebaran would not overturn his resolve. Therefore—

「――I see」

Aldebaran’s always-the-same reply always drew the same response from the Witch as well.

Perhaps he was being deceived. From the time Aldebaran was born until the day arrived, the Witch might have taken her time thoroughly brainwashing him. The guilt or hesitation Aldebaran had expected—she might not have had any of that at all.

Maybe she was that kind of bad Witch. But even if he asked her that head-on, the Witch would wear that beautiful black-and-white smile and—

"Naturally. — I'm a bad magician, y'know."

And with an answer he couldn't tell was truth or a lie, she would toy with Aldebaran.

△▼△▼△▼△

Battered by a roaring wind, Aldebaran is in a high-speed glide. Spreading the wings he had made of stone on his back and riding the air with them, he figured he must look ridiculous, but he couldn't afford to care. While Yae was holding them up, he had to gain as much distance as he could and erase the difference in altitude.

"I don't wanna believe they were taking aim at my Domain."

Even as Aldebaran muttered that, most of his attention was being eaten up by forming and controlling the stone wings on his back. Crafting the stone wings demanded a delicate balance, and their size and hardness needed fine adjustments. Too big and the wind would buffet him too much; too small and they wouldn't serve their purpose at all. The gradations of hardness and density tied into weight as well, and shave off too much or leave too much and he wouldn't escape a crash.

"Gotta respect Icarus for pulling it off in one go...!"

When you talk about flying with artificial wings, the forerunner who comes to mind is Icarus, who made wings of wax. Leaving his fate aside, the fact that he not only glided with artificial wings but actually flapped and drew near the sun was frankly astonishing. As for Aldebaran, how many times had he crashed because of his poorly made wings? That was just what the enemy wanted, and only after countless retries did he finally manage these stone wings he had now. Even they were a reckless trick that wouldn't hold together without extreme concentration and the utmost care, but—

"I couldn't just keep falling like that."

That fact and his impatience were the main reasons Aldebaran hurriedly leveled up from Stone Wings Level 1 to at least a level where he could fly. He prided himself on possessing an invincible Authority, but Domain did not come without weaknesses. The enemy's surprise attack this time, unintentionally, struck two of those weaknesses at once. Strictly speaking, it attacked the same weakness from two different angles.

Domain, Aldebaran's Authority, has an effective range. The teleport brought about by the ambush shoved Aldebaran outside the area he had set as his Domain. On top of that, the destination involved a fall from extreme altitude, and that became a second way to crush the Domain, assailing Aldebaran.

As a result, while plummeting at furious speed, Aldebaran killed himself before he could fly out of his Domain, then restarted from mid-fall, repeating that over and over. In the midst of those repeats, he decided that from such ultra-high altitude, with so little freedom, solving the situation while falling was impossible, and after trying various other measures, he arrived at attempting to break away using stone wings.

At the very least, this made the change in altitude gentler and made maintaining the Domain comparatively easier. Just as Aldebaran finally managed to untie one of the tangled knots—

"—Al!!"

A silver-bell voice sharply called out to Aldebaran, who was desperately trying to stabilize himself. With just a quick tilt of his head to look back, from a much lower altitude than Aldebaran—and yet flying through the air in the same direction—an angel—no, Emilia—was clearly visible. She wore wings of ice on her slender back, and though she was using the same method as Aldebaran, she was closing the distance rapidly while leaving him overwhelmingly behind in terms of how good it looked.

"Unbelievable."

Please understand it's only natural that an awestruck, almost admiring mutter slipped out. As mentioned earlier, it had taken Aldebaran a great deal of effort to complete these stone wings, clumsy as they are. Precisely because of that struggle, he felt respect for Icarus with his wax wings. But Emilia's knack—succeeding with artificial wings in one try like the mythical Icarus and achieving the same results as Aldebaran, who had piled up failure after failure—made him feel not respect so much as a decisive gap, even a sense of defeat.

"It's no comfort that the line 'I'm a hack who crashed over six hundred times' sounds more plausible than the line 'the girl's a genius.'"

The strength of Aldebaran’s 『Domain』 lies in a battle of attrition where, by means of infinite retries, he can hang on until the tiniest sliver of a chance to win arrives. His greatest advantage is being able to keep flipping through his options until the opponent makes a mistake and the situation turns in his favor. However—as his fight with Reinhard showed—there are, albeit rarely, beings in this world who keep drawing the correct answer without fail. What that “correct answer” is differs depending on the person’s abilities and victory conditions, but what they share, unlike Aldebaran, is that they are loved by fate.

――Aldebaran is hated by fate.

Whether Aldebaran hated it first, or fate hated Aldebaran first, is no longer clear, but that much is an unshakable fact. Whatever else loves or hates him, fate was Aldebaran’s absolute enemy.

So it must be killed.――Even if he has to make the whole world his enemy, he will kill fate.

Because it does not want that to happen, fate keeps sending in its favorites one after another as assassins. Here and now, that meant Emilia and Rem.

「―― What a twist of fate.」

Who was it who first advised picking Rem as the surprise attacker? Whoever proposed it, in terms of creating a blank space in Aldebaran, she was as qualified as it gets. When she had been a victim of the Authority of 『Gluttony』, Aldebaran, who had been under that influence, failed to notice how anomalous Rem’s very existence was and, without meaning to, built a perfectly ordinary relationship with her. Therefore, at that flashbang moment when he realized that Priscilla was dead and that Rem, too, had been released from the yoke of 『Gluttony』, he suffered a larger void than anyone else.

――Because he had run into someone who shouldn’t be here—someone who ought to have been dead.

「――――」

There is no room to debate by what method that result was brought about. Beyond a doubt, he pulled it off. Subaru Natsuki defied fate and beat it. Subaru Natsuki has that power. The proof is Rem’s existence.

And yet, even so—he did not save Priscilla Barielle.

「――If that’s how you’re going to do it, I won’t show any mercy either.」

All the tears shed, the self-inflicted fists, the thoughtfulness of trying to be by his side—none of it has meaning. What was wanted wasn’t tears, or wounds, or consolation. It was a single life, just one.

「――ッ」

Behind his helm, Aldebaran clenched his teeth hard enough to taste blood and looked back over his shoulder. At the same time, he altered the angle and thickness of his wings, minimizing the loss of speed and maneuverability, and met Emilia’s gaze in midair as she clung to his tail. The beautiful ice wings suited Emilia well, but no matter how angelic and delicate she looked, she couldn’t gain speed or altitude by flapping artificial wings. She had gotten her initial velocity from the recoil of Rem punching the ice slab, but the chase since then came by another method—

「Ya! Ta! Tei!」

Just like when she attacks, Emilia’s kiai are disarmingly airy, but every time she cries out, her speed and altitude tick up another notch, and another. The method is simple and clear—she conjures ice pillars in midair to serve as footholds, then kicks off them to keep gaining acceleration and momentum. After a brief pause, the pillars she makes get booted down toward the canyon floor by Emilia’s leg strength, but they promptly dissipate into mana, return to the air, and are born anew as fresh footholds. She kicks those again to build speed. Repeating this, she kept on nipping at Aldebaran’s heels.

「This is ridiculous…」

It’s a brute-force approach made possible only because she has extraordinary magical sense and can burn through a vast amount of mana. Thanks to his link with 『Aldebaran』, Aldebaran can borrow the power of an external mana tank called the 『Divine Dragon』, but even if you told him to do the same thing as Emilia, he simply couldn’t. It isn’t a matter of mana capacity; the differences in sense and physical ability are too great.――Even if sense can be compensated for within infinite retries, the gap in physical ability cannot.

The canyon stretched on long and wide, and the rock walls flanking the two fliers continued just as far. So long as their heading was the same, Emilia’s pursuit would not cease. Seeing this, Aldebaran watched Emilia kick off another fresh ice pillar and, though there was still distance between them, match his altitude. Then, keeping her balance with her ice wings—

「――Al! Please, let’s talk! I’ll listen properly!」

「You’ve got some nerve. ‘No questions asked,’ huh? You were trying to freeze me solid without holding back. If I’d kept falling all the way to the bottom, you were going to freeze the whole river and haul me in, weren’t you?」

「But! That plan already failed!」

「Being too honest can be a problem too, Royal Selection candidate!」

If he just sat on his hands and dropped all the way to the bottom, that would be walking straight into the enemy’s trap. To avoid that, he gambled on veering off the ice slab’s falling trajectory; even if he couldn’t take the two of them at once, he should count it good enough that he at least split Emilia from Rem. The answer to that is—

“I’ll give it now. —My stance is the same as back in the Royal Capital!”

Holding out his hand, and to shake off Emilia as she closed in, Aldebaran conjured boulders in midair and forced her to plunge into a barrage of stone shrapnel. Unexpectedly, a scene like a straight-up shooter unfolded, and, greeted by that hail of stone, Emilia made her ice wings glitter as—

“I’ll say it as many times as it takes. I don’t want to cry anymore, telling myself it couldn’t be helped that anyone is gone!!”

So declaring at the top of her voice, Emilia dove into the barrage, and the shriek of shattering ice and freezing air rang piercingly across Agzadd Canyon.

△▼△▼△▼△

—Aldebaran had hardly ever agonized over the meaning of his existence as a Following Star.

They say that at least once in adolescence everyone wonders why they were born, where life comes from and where it goes, and feels an unreasoning rebelliousness toward their parents—but all of these were fairly distant questions to Aldebaran.

In Aldebaran’s case, it was hard even to decide whom to set as the parent he was supposed to rebel against, and by the nature of his Authority, he couldn’t really gain the sense that a lost life disappears in the first place. As for what he was born for, he had been given a clear answer, and as for why he was born, he figured he could, for the time being, answer with “love.” So Aldebaran never faced the problems one is supposed to grapple with in adolescence.

He didn’t think that was a failure, nor that he’d missed out on something. People say you should buy hardship while you’re young, but there’s no value in experiences that only become an embarrassing, cringeworthy “black history” once you’re an adult. Experiences you don’t need, you don’t need to have—just as anyone only needs to die once, at the very end of their life.

“So, I can’t expect adolescent emotions or impulses from you? That’s a little disappointing. I’d been considering various responses to whatever form your rebellious phase might take.”

So went the lament of the Witch who—though he didn’t think she lacked a heart—would often make heartless comments toward the well-behaved, low-maintenance Aldebaran.

To Aldebaran, the Witch was the one with whom he had spent the longest stretch of time since he was born, but she had a bad habit of wanting to behold every human choice and emotion, every myriad possibility. Moreover, in most cases, it was in the nature of a Witch that such desires knew no brakes. Aldebaran was acquainted with other Witches besides her, and, though the degree varied, he found it terribly blasphemous how none of them could go against that nature.

So if he wrote off the Witch’s unsatisfied wait for Aldebaran’s adolescence as something brought about by an irresistible nature, there was a side of it he could accept as inevitable. That said, he saw no point in playacting adolescence just to please the Witch. In a sense, that very spirit of contrariness felt like the adolescent emotion in question.

“In the end, is it too convenient for someone like me, who isn’t even your parent, to try to trace only the surface of a parental experience? ...If I’d created Beatrice, I wonder if I could have experienced that over there.”

At the Witch who self-questioned like that as if muttering to herself, the sense of desolation Aldebaran felt was, he thought, something unrelated to adolescence—something else entirely. Only, it was hard to seek it out in a concrete form, and theirs was a complicated relationship for doing so. So, just as the Witch had set it, the relationship between Aldebaran and her was—

“—Teacher.”

When he called her that, the Witch, who had been enjoying a romp through the labyrinth of her thoughts, lifted her face. Every time he saw those black eyes reflect Aldebaran, and her pure-white hair flow down over the shoulder she tilted with a “What is it?”, he couldn’t help thinking what an unfair Witch she was. Always absorbed in her own business, honest about her desires, never once even trying to consider another’s heart—yet whenever Aldebaran called out to her, she would always meet his eyes.

It was only natural that he felt no adolescent urge to rebel against that Witch. He scarcely had any motive to begin with, and his body and mind had long since yielded to the fact that going against the Witch was useless. Under the banner of performance tests to master his Authority, the Witch had subjected Aldebaran to over a million “deaths,” and the pecking order had long since been settled. Of course, no matter how much he said as much, the Witch at the center of it all would only brush it off with, “Since not one of them remains in my memory, telling me to feel guilty only puts me in a bind,” and let it bounce right off her.

Anyway, I can understand why the Witch would go that far. After all, by this time, the only Witch still alive—if you excluded the woman before his eyes—was the one who had been the direct or indirect cause of the other Witches’ deaths. Aldebaran’s points of contact with the Witches were not with them while they were alive. He could only meet them in the limited space the Witch prepared. The ones he met there were already dead, existences made up solely of collected souls. And under the Witch’s instruction, Aldebaran was to take the one who had made them that way—

"—I need you to kill her."

That was the reason for being given to Aldebaran, a Following Star, before he even reached puberty, a compass for his life that he had to fulfill even if he died a million times. To make Aldebaran into this, the Witch was condemned by the other Witches and severed ties with her companions; her resolve was absolute.

"—No one can beat you—I made you."

Being told that was Aldebaran’s pride and the basis of his existence. Honestly, he thought the Witch’s personality was the worst, and there were plenty of things he wanted to say about her methods and the way she set her course, but even so, he never hesitated to live up to the Witch’s expectations.

He believed he could do it. Back then—when Aldebaran still had his left arm—even though he knew “death,” he didn’t know true defeat, and so he could believe.

He didn’t have an adolescence, but—without question, it was a mortifying, indelible black mark on his past.

△▼△▼△▼△

"Tch—!"

As Emilia plunged straight into the downpouring curtain of shrapnel, Aldebaran smothered the hesitation in his heart and wrung out unrestrained firepower.

As in the clash at the Royal Capital, Aldebaran is instinctively weak against Emilia. It’s a kind of weakness life bears at the most fundamental level, and because of that he couldn’t take the drastic measures against her there that he could against other opponents. Back then he borrowed 'Aldebaran’s' power to drop a massive boulder and, in exchange for making it protect the capital, he halted Emilia’s pursuit, but here there’s nothing he can use as collateral to drag in. In that sense too, casting the fight down into this gigantic canyon shows he’s properly reflected on the previous battle.

"I don’t have the luxury to appreciate that growth!"

Unfortunately, Aldebaran’s heart isn’t generous enough to celebrate his own or his enemy’s growth. For an instant he balked at defining Emilia as an enemy, but he squeezed his eyes shut against it. That resolve—he’d had it long before now, even before meeting Priscilla. Strictly speaking, the one Aldebaran chose for that resolve isn’t the Emilia before him, but—

"Even recycled resolve is good enough to serve as a cardboard cutout."

Hoisting that resolve, whose hollowness he fully recognizes, he moved to sever Emilia’s pursuit.

Head-on, Emilia dove with her ice wings gleaming into the storm of fist-sized rock fragments. The attack had been meant to force her into an evasive or deflecting posture, to make her actions lag even a little, but just as his bad feeling predicted, Emilia went along the shortest line—a straight fastball—ice wings on her back, ice pillars for footholds, on top of that firing ice stakes to counter the barrage, and for the stones that slipped through the interception she even batted them aside with twin ice swords clenched in both hands.

He’d been taught by the Witch that simultaneous activation of magic is difficult even for seasoned mages. Even with magic of the same attribute, you need the capacity to do something as impossible as holding a pen in each hand—writing text with the right hand while drawing an illustration with the left. If they’re different attributes, it’s practically a daredevil feat like installing extra brains, and Aldebaran had once seen the Witch handle five attributes at once. He honestly wondered whether the Witch’s head, a little smaller than most people’s, actually had five little brains crammed inside.

Setting aside such out-of-spec tales, even if it’s the same fire-attribute magic, simultaneously manifesting four kinds—wings, ice pillars, ice stakes, and twin swords—is more than enough of a stunt. On top of that, to make use of that outrageous pursuit technique, she’s putting out athletic performance beyond athletes at the Olympics, and he felt like he’d already used up today’s surprise points.

"So I’m welcoming you with a low panic quotient!"

Faced with the storm of shrapnel, Emilia chose to break through with courage and brute strength. But what if he’d prepared a threat that, courage aside, brute strength can’t break through?

"———"

With the next move prepared against her and fired up to close the distance, Emilia’s cheeks tightened. Before her eyes, what spread all at once with no room to escape was a cordon of grit—smaller even than stone shrapnel—whose damage people tend to overlook. It was like diving into a downpour; unless you had the kind of absurdity that could dodge rain in midair, taking zero hits was impossible. Of course, he hadn’t scattered sand just to block her vision—

"—It’s heavy!?"

Swinging her arms to brush off the clinging sand, Emilia let out a cry of surprise. The grains that touched her limbs and white clothes clumped together with the surrounding sand, using their weight and hardness to hamper her movement. It was the same debuff he’d sprung on Reinhard in the Sand Sea—Reinhard, who breaks the sound barrier, had torn it away by sheer momentum, but Emilia can’t use that method. Moreover—

"The wings—"

The primary target of the grit was to sabotage the ice wings supporting Emilia’s flight. Once the ice wings plunged into the dust cloud, the sand ate into them so they couldn’t perform as intended and catch the wind. Left like that, Emilia would lose her balance and, in one plunge, drop altitude and plummet straight for the ground—To prevent that, she immediately discarded the hampered wings and, reverting from an angel back to a girl who only looked like one, avoided disaster.

"—She purged them!"

But forcing her to go that far is Aldebaran’s true aim. Even if he makes her abandon her ice wings once, Emilia can immediately redeploy the same thing and, without losing her climb or forward momentum, restart. However, no matter how extraordinary someone’s physical abilities are, they can’t catch up to an improvised hang glider doing over a hundred kilometers an hour. Which is why Aldebaran piles on so Emilia can’t redeploy her wings.

With a thunderous roar, what juts from the cliff face are stone giant arms, reaching in from the side to grab Emilia as she flies through the canyon sky. If they kill her momentum, then even if Emilia gains a second pair of wings, she won’t be able to catch Aldebaran, whose speed won’t bleed off. And the arms standing in her way aren’t just one or two—the stone arms thrust out using the cliff as material number close to the hundreds.

"An homage to the Thousand-Armed Kannon… more like the backstage of a haunted house, really."

The image is like that haunted-house staple where hands all shoot out at once from behind shoji screens. Unlike those, which are just for scares, however, these giant arms are dead serious about grabbing Emilia. If even one of them catches her leg, this chase ends completely and Aldebaran’s escape succeeds—this is the make-or-break moment—

"Can you get past—" "—I’ll do my best!!"

The words he was about to say—Can you get past it?—were blotted out by her intensity. He hadn’t thought it was the sort of thing you could solve by just trying hard, but what’s scary about Emilia is that she looks like she’ll force it to work by just trying hard. And wingless as she is, she displays that scariness to the fullest—she twirls the ice sword in her hand, slices the fingers off the first giant arm, and uses the now-harmless thing as a foothold to leap high.

Her momentum isn’t dead. She also regains a lot of altitude. But even if the arms don’t quite reach a thousand, more than a hundred are still waiting in ambush—

"—Soldiers, lend me your strength!"

Answering Emilia’s call, the ice soldiers with their accursed faces appear once more. Amid the rain of falling ice slabs, the ice soldiers who should have been smashed without recourse now bravely stand their ground atop the earthen giant arms swarming toward Emilia: some stop them with their bodies; some punch them to deflect their course; some are overpowered, strike a pose, and are destroyed—showing a variety of performances. In particular, what irked Aldebaran were the ones that took Emilia’s hand, whisked her out of the giant hands’ clutches, and then, as if throwing her, boosted her forward.

Seven ice Subaru Natsukis, all told, fulfill their roles and shatter, are born again to support Emilia, only to be crushed and revive yet again; without breaking the rule of a maximum of seven, they keep protecting and helping her against the hundreds of looming rocky demonic hands.

—Magic, the Witch said, is something that gives shape to feelings and wishes.

Coming from that Witch, I thought it sounded awfully romantic, but if you consider turning wind into blades because you want to cut your opponent to ribbons, or birthing crimson flames so you can burn everything away in your anger, you could still call that the embodiment of feelings and wishes.

In that case, what wish is being given form in the sight before Aldebaran’s eyes now, where ice soldiers in the shape of Subaru Natsuki lend Emilia a hand? Nausea roils in the pit of his stomach. Not in a figurative sense, but precisely, in the literal sense.

Aldebaran hooked that welling negative emotion into his next attack. It was—

"—Sorry for the second helping, but my trump card’s back."

As Aldebaran said that, a gigantic, mighty boulder—large enough to span the width of the ravine in Agzadd Canyon—came plummeting straight down over Emilia and the others’ heads. An inescapable crushing by sheer mass—the return of the trap he’d sprung in the Royal Capital.

△▼△▼△▼△

What he wanted—no, what he needed—was a single victory in his entire life.

It would not be an exaggeration to say Aldebaran’s life existed for that victory alone. Since his birth, everything given to him, poured into him, and bestowed upon him had been guideposts prepared so he could obtain, seize, and win that victory. He believed he fully understood its meaning and its weight—or so he thought.

Yet when the moment came for that meaning to be tested, the resolve he was supposed to possess, the plans he was supposed to have laid, and even the soul he was sure he had honed—all of it came to nothing.

“—No one can beat you—I made you.”

Those words from the Witch were the compass of Aldebaran’s life. So long as he could believe them, no obstacle that stood in his way could stop him. And the idea that he might one day be unable to believe in the Witch—he would never say this to her, never let her hear it—but he thought such a thing impossible. And so, just as the Witch had said, he convinced himself he would lose to no one.

—When that faith was shattered, Aldebaran surely died once.

As for “death,” he had felt it so often that counting would be ridiculous. He thought it ridiculous to count, but he’d been told to, so he did; yet even recording the actual number did nothing to lessen how absurd it was. But the death in the truest sense, he believes he tasted that day, at that moment.

It was the Witch’s dearest wish, and to that end she had gone so far as to construct Aldebaran himself, preparing for him a once-in-a-lifetime battle he absolutely could not lose. And yet—

“—At the very place you could not afford to lose, you lost.”

At the familiar meadow, at the white tea-table savoring the aroma of tea, seeing the Witch there, Aldebaran was crushed by despair at the depth of his sin. The Witch—whose beauty could be expressed in just two colors, black and white, the very pinnacle of beauty—bore not a single mark upon that infuriatingly beautiful form; that was proof this was a world of dreams.

Because in reality, the Witch had shielded Aldebaran, who had failed to win the battle he had to win, lost all her limbs, and been reduced to a wretched figure with nothing left but to await death. Staring blankly at that figure, Aldebaran found himself dimly thinking a terribly obvious thought—that red blood flowed in this Witch as well.

The heat of that blood, its smell, its feel—there was no way any of it was a lie. If so, then this world that has erased it all and painted over the reality that should be with make-believe is a lump of lies so blatant it’s easy to see.

“I’m not very fond of the term ‘fiction.’ I know strictly speaking there’s a different word, but it unavoidably reminds me of someone I dislike.”

Whether that was the Witch’s idea of a joke, or she simply wanted to say something out of place from the bottom of her heart, Aldebaran never did understand her true feelings. He only thought he was hated. Or perhaps she was disappointed and had completely written him off. However—

“It doesn’t look like there’s any way to get your arm back.”

The Witch’s gaze went to Aldebaran’s left arm, taken by the shadow from the shoulder. There was no pain. That too was proof that this was the Witch’s castle of dreams—return to reality, and pain beyond imagining would sear his brain. And it would be a real pain that death could not undo, a pain that would never disappear.

“You’ve lost an arm and lost the battle you had to win. It seems my plan is going to end in failure. I can already picture my friends giving me an earful. —In the end, it will be left to those who seek to carry on Flugel’s will. How vexing.”

It was unbearable how his defeat would strip everything away from the Witch. Seeking no one’s understanding, leaving behind her fellow Witches and even the companions who had traveled with her, the wish she had tried to fulfill even so—Aldebaran had ruined it. And the most pitiful thing was that, even knowing that, the resolve and heat he’d had before the defeat still would not return to Aldebaran’s hollowed-out soul.

Losing the battle he could not lose broke Aldebaran’s heart. The one and only first battle of his life in which defeat could not be permitted shattered his heart to pieces. And by bearing witness to the inevitable death of the one closest to him—the Witch—it would leave Aldebaran with a wound that, in the truest sense, would make recovery impossible.

"—No one can beat you—I made you."

So when he heard those words again, Aldebaran couldn't grasp what they meant.

"At this point, we can't afford to care about how it looks. Let's change the victory conditions. Leave her to them... we'll prevent secondary damage."

the Witch is clever, and selfish. Leaving Aldebaran, who was left with so much confusion and so consumed by self-blaming guilt that his mind wouldn't work, she went ahead and reached a conclusion on her own, trying to push the discussion forward without even letting him object. The victory conditions had been changed, the new goal presented was to prevent secondary damage—yet he couldn't believe they could even achieve that. Because Aldebaran had already failed. And yet—,

"—No one can beat you—I made you."

Aldebaran didn't know what it was that made the Witch say that. Without saying much to the dazed Aldebaran, the Witch stood, slowly walked up, and faced him straight on. The face of the Witch—the one he had seen more and longer than any other in his life—held an expression he had never seen before.

"—The stars were at fault."

He understood that it meant Aldebaran wasn't to blame.

Before he could reach a conclusion about the emotions surging up inside him, the castle of dreams came to an abrupt end. Like ending a paper-theater show by ripping the stage itself in two, and beyond it emerged a merciless reality. In an instant, pain and a sense of loss took over his brain, and noise and fresh blood gnawed at his understanding. Heaven and earth blackened so much that even his sense of time vanished, and Aldebaran's wail was painted over by the screams of a world falling apart, not even reaching himself.

And yet, in that world where everything had been wrecked, amid a din so loud he couldn't even hear his own voice, he heard it clearly—hoarse, frail, and all but out of breath. The Witch's final incantation he didn't want to miss—,

"—Ol Shama"

×　　×　　×

The next time Aldebaran's consciousness returned was after everything had ended—or rather, after it had begun again, and that beginning had ended, and begun and ended again. After repeating that over and over, it seemed, he found himself in a world where no trace of the Witch remained.

Whether it was because the initial conditions were different, or because it had been done by the overwhelmingly powerful the Witch, he was only briefly stupefied by the magic's effect being different from when he used it himself—,

"—You—where did you come from? What are you?"

The question came in the voice of someone he didn't know at all. A man dressed in rags no better than Aldebaran's own looked at Aldebaran with eyes that mixed fear and caution.

He understood the words. He had little experience dealing with people, but in a way that wasn't a problem either. What mattered was where this was, and when it was.

"Ginunhive... Gladiator Island. The Witch? That's from hundreds of years ago, right?"

At the man's words, suspicious as though he'd been asked something strange, Aldebaran let out a breath. Seeing that, the man's expression shifted from puzzlement to alarm. Because that exhalation turned into sobs, and Aldebaran collapsed, tears pouring down in torrents.

'—No one can beat you—I made you.'

The words of the Witch he'd left behind hundreds of years ago cling to his soul and won't let go. For the sin of having made her a liar, Aldebaran wanted to die.

He couldn't die.