Chapter 115: A Clash on a Higher Plane

"Ignatius—"

The young girl in the crystal sarcophagus whispered the name, which felt somewhat foreign to her. Truth be told, she held no ill will toward this traveler who had returned from the darkness; she even felt a glimmer of admiration. Yet, the disparity in their respective positions meant that everything had to conclude in such a lamentable fashion.

"A pity."

Sighing softly, the girl who had called herself Gasu in front of Amy rose from the sarcophagus. Her jet-black pupils reflected her own image within the crystal. Her long, black hair cascaded down like a waterfall, reaching her ankles, while a dress of excessively delicate Gothic design draped naturally over her frame. Her flawless, doll-like features, combined with her petite stature, gave her beauty an ethereal, dreamlike quality of unreality.

However, she herself was completely oblivious to this.

Her gaze merely swept past; compared to her own appearance, she was far more concerned with the heavy haze shrouding Hermetica. To a mortal, it might have appeared as nothing more than a slightly overcast sky, but to her, it was ironclad proof that someone had exercised their authority.

Are they planning to do something while I am in my dormant period?

Her eyes narrowed slightly. Reincarnation was an irreversible process; for those old acquaintances of hers, calculating exactly when she would slip into slumber was no difficult task. What truly surprised her were the dense, tangled threads of law weaving across the sky.

Concealment—that was their intended purpose.

However, because of Ignatius’s ascension, the disturbance Hermetica caused was beyond imagination. Even with such a veil in place, the restless threads of law had jolted her awake, and then... she watched as the traveler’s soul ascended to the heavens, burning away into nothingness amidst light and heat.

That was all.

She could do nothing.

Just as it was nine hundred and twenty years ago, when Augustus raised his throne to the heavens, she—or rather, they—recalled that long-buried fear, dominated by humiliation and helplessness.

And anger—

Fate is omnipresent; before Him, who is omniscient and omnipotent, nothing exists by chance.

Time was even more pressing than anticipated. As early as twelve hundred years ago, the supreme ruler of myriad worlds had cast his gaze here, and five years ago... any lingering sense of complacency among the people had been ruthlessly crushed.

Because the door had been opened.

The gate leading to the inner side of the world had been opened by someone.

Identity unknown, purpose unknown... for a trivial, infinitesimal moment, the discord caused by prying at the fabric of the laws vanished without a trace. This uninvited guest, like a drop of water into the ocean or a grain of sand into a river, had blended in, becoming an unstable bomb hidden within the world.

In itself, a threat of this magnitude was not enough to evoke despair, but the implications it reflected were enough to make everyone restless.

Because... this place was no longer safe.

Though they could still console themselves with notions of coincidence or accident, no one who had fought their way to where they were now would be so naive. Indeed, it might have been a coincidence or an accident, but since the door had been opened once, it would, in the foreseeable future, be opened a second, a third, and—countless times more.

Sooner or later, the dark, chaotic void would no longer be a hindrance to Him.

Yet—

The young girl pursed her cherry-red lips. Her dark, fathomless eyes, deep as a nebula, stared at the haze covering Hermetica. Her hair, as thick as the night, stirred without a breeze. Her delicate, soft features tightened naturally. After only a moment, the young girl with the childlike appearance exuded an awe-inspiring and inviolable majesty with every movement.

This cannot be an excuse to provoke me!

Al-Hazred, you have overreached—Hermetica is my territory!

Twitching her brows slightly, like a young tiger whose claws had just sharpened and who now faced a provocation within its own domain, a flare of anger rose inexplicably in Gasu's heart.

And so, the invisible strings of law were gently plucked.

Without any visible clash, a thunderbolt suddenly cracked across the clear sky!

Then, the clouds dispersed, and the sun broke through.

But this did not improve the mood of the young girl who had just ended her slumber. Because... as the heavy haze over Hermetica dissipated, the dire situation currently plaguing the city was finally laid bare before her.

She wanted to curse.

—If she could.

Just as she had foreseen, the Dice House’s operation had failed. Ignatius had breached the barrier between the Lower District and the Fog District, allowing the Mist of the Nameless to invade. The various monsters long dormant in the Mist District, sensing the natural call of the chaotic world to their existence, had swarmed into the Lower District one after another, committing countless atrocities under the cover of the mist. The entire Lower District was in total disarray.

The situation in the Upper District was even worse. Although she had harbored doubts about Pandora's arrival, she had been unable to intervene due to her own identity. But she had never imagined that the situation would deteriorate to this extent—it was no exaggeration to say that the fall of Hermetica might be imminent; a Pandora with her restrictions lifted was simply not an opponent that the Glorified could match.

Perhaps it would not be long before the fire of Hermetica met its destined extinction.

This ancient city, which had been passed down for thousands of years, would ultimately sink into the darkness, just like the other cities that had already vanished into the long, endless night.

How melancholic...

Even so, Gasu did not intend to intervene. It was not just a matter of unwillingness; it was a matter of impossibility.

Unwillingness, because the extinction of the fire was the fate "She" had ordained—an unavoidable destiny for all living things. Sooner or later, through the convergence of karma, the fire would extinguish. Only by facing and overcoming this catastrophe themselves would the lives of humanity have meaning. Even though she held extraordinary feelings for this ancient city that had served as her cradle, she was already too deeply mired in the fate established by Hammurabi to interfere with the rise and fall of the mortal world, save for using the Dice House to slightly influence the path of the future.

And a figure of Pandora's caliber clearly exceeded the scope that the Dice House could guide.

So... just accept this fate?

In a rare moment of despondency, the young girl silently gnashed her teeth.

Unwilling, unwilling, unwilling—

To have someone knock on your door and still have to swallow your pride—she was unwilling!

Perhaps, just as that fellow who called himself Amy Ulysses had said, she was the child who hadn't grown up. But so what? Being willful was the prerogative of a child! Since her birth, the number of days she had been active or even awake could be counted on one's fingers; what was wrong with being a little willful now and then!

But willfulness required conditions and capital.

As the Overseer and Judge of the Code of Hammurabi, Gasu was limited in her ability to interfere with the mortal realm. She might be able to kill a figure of the Dark Lords' level once or twice if there were sufficient cause, but against Pandora... she truly found it difficult to act, and could not bring herself to strike.

In other words, even if she cast aside her pride and stepped onto the stage herself, she could not stop Hermetica from heading toward its destruction.

Perhaps, this is fate.

An irredeemable, unstoppable fate...

The young girl sighed softly. Perhaps their power could be considered great in this world, which was like a cage, but the concept of power itself was a false illusion, meaningless in isolation—in the eyes of an ant, a human might be a giant supporting the heavens, or some incomprehensible, indescribable entity that could not be fully grasped, or a natural phenomenon like a hurricane, a torrential rain, an earthquake, or a flood.

And humans, even human civilization, were so insignificant compared to the concept of a planet.

Yet, if one placed a planet within the vast, boundless universe, it was merely an insignificant speck of dust. The history that had occurred and the civilizations that had been produced on this tiny speck were utterly inconsequential.

But to treat the universe as the ultimate end of all things was perhaps taking too much for granted. No one could be certain if the universe, which humans regarded as the symbol of time, space, and everything, was merely a bubble appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye on the sea of endless dimensions.

Killing an ant, killing a human, killing a planet, killing a universe—

The concept of becoming stronger could be expanded infinitely, but no matter how strong one became, within the boundaryless realm of the infinite, there was no absolute strength in the true sense.

In other words, no matter how strong, there was always someone stronger, and no matter how weak, there was always someone weaker. Strength and weakness had no fixed boundaries; they were relative concepts that depended on each other.

Therefore, the magnitude of power was meaningless on a macroscopic scale. In many cases, it fell into only two categories: sufficient—and insufficient.

And now, what lay before the girl was undoubtedly the second, and final, case.

Her power was insufficient.

Feeling a subtle sense of frustration, Gasu bit her lip, a look of deep conflict appearing on her pretty, delicate face.

Stepping in directly was out of the question.

But if she did not act, no one in all of Hermetica could stop Pandora.

So... wait and see?

Truthfully, the extinguishing of the fire was not a bad thing for her. Although it was much earlier than expected, it was, in the end, a fate that humanity had to face. She had no reason to intervene—but that was the thinking of Gasu, the Witch who presided over Fate, not her own.

Occasionally, she also wanted to be willful, to be a brat through and through.

After all—

The Dark Millennium had not yet come to an end, and the scroll belonging to Chaos had not yet been unfurled. Everything still had room for maneuver.

The young girl with black hair and black eyes gazed into the distance. Her sight traversed layers of space-time and landed on the boy currently caught in the heat of battle. A corner of her mouth could not help but curl into an arc.

"I have decided on you—"

"Amy Ulysses."