“During the First Cycle, Bersac told me that Gray’s corpse had appeared next to the Black Madonna, so no one would try to follow us. I thought back then that they had discovered it in the church, but that wasn’t the case. There is another Black Madonna. Of course, Bersac didn’t have time to explain to me back then. …If that’s the case, since this isn’t the past, I think it has to be settled here,” my mentor said quietly, so the people around us wouldn’t hear us discussing the past.

However hard we tried to explain to the people here, they probably wouldn’t understand that this world was actually a reenactment.

“This place isn’t the past?”

“I’ve been wondering, if this place isn’t the past, what is it? If we assume that it’s just a simulation, there shouldn’t be a need to send us to a specific point in the past. What’s important is the meaning to this reenactment.”

After he said that, he turned to look in a different direction.

“[Magdalena]”, he called out.

For a moment, I was confused as to whose name that was, because though it was my mother’s name, nobody in the village ever called her that.

“That’s your name, right? I’ve heard Gray bring it up before.”

Have I brought it up before? I couldn’t remember. Perhaps I did mention that name once or twice in all the conversations I had had after arriving in London.

“Only you know why this ending happened.”

“What do you mean?”

My mother’s expression did not change.

No. That only lasted for a couple of seconds. As if the plaster that had been on her face had suddenly fallen apart, her expression began to violently contort.

“How…” Her throat shook. How long had it been since I saw my mother in a frantic state? “How do you know… Unless, you’re…!”

She moaned, and began to run with stumbling steps. Ripples formed under her feet in the water still on the floor of the temple as she rushed defenselessly towards the bone soldiers.

“Mother!”

“Ugh— Trimmau!”

My mentor shot out a magic bullet and called for the mercury maid’s help. Her limbs immediately dissolved and then turned into sharp blades. She slashed through the bone soldiers who were trying to guard the Husk King’s corpse and cleared out a path for my mother.

“What a pain in the ass!” The knight complained, sticking his tongue out and pulling out his sword.

Trimmau, the knight (Sir Kay) and I all rushed forward to meet the bone soldiers’ attacks. Because everything had been so sudden, the old woman and the other villagers had not had time to react yet. Just as the blades of the bone soldiers were about to land on their heads, someone charged in and used his giant axe to block the blows.

“Mr. Bersac.”

“I’m prepared to be your enemy, but I won’t stand there and watch my former companions die.” The grave keeper raised his hand and summoned a group of spirit ravens.

The ravens swooped down and pecked apart many of the bone soldiers, while others were crushed under Bersac’s axe. Though there were still a lot of bone soldiers, they were no enough to overwhelm the grave keeper. Perhaps because she didn’t care about the villagers much, Sister Illumia only watched from the side, occasionally using one hand to deal with the bone soldiers that attempted to attack her.

As that happened, my mentor cautiously walked over and extended a hand.

“Are you alright, Lady?” He asked, helping my mother up.

I still had no idea what had happened.

Why would my mother rush toward the bone soldiers? Why would my mentor try to save her? Ah, no. What confused me most of all was was why I felt so relieved. I knew so clearly that my mother only saw me as a subject of worship, and yet, I still felt thankful that she was safe, like an idiot.

“I…” My mother muttered, and my mentor nodded gently.

“Gray, Trimmau, are you holding up?”

“W-we’re alright!” Perhaps because the Husk King wasn’t alive anymore, Bersac, the knight (Sir Kay) and I were able to hold off the bone soldiers.

“—Well then, let’s continue the lecture,” my mentor announced, standing up. He slowly turned to look at the villagers. “Have you ever seen the Husk King’s face?”

The old woman did not answer my mentor’s question immediately. After a while, she shook her wrinkled head.

“…There’s no need for that.”

“Exactly. Such is the nature of faith. Gods only exist when people believe in them, and even if there isn’t a taboo against seeking their true appearance, it’s only natural to not wish to do so. This isn’t an accusation, because I also believed in what you do, once. After all, from a certain distance, it’s impossible to tell who someone is if they’re wearing armor,” my mentor said, shaking his head.

“…What are you talking about?”

“I just wanted to make sure,” my mentor said, with a somewhat stiff expression. “I’m sure no one here is aware of this, but when we first escaped from the village, Gray had been in a state of mental distress. The only way I figured out that there had been unrest among the villagers was through my own deductions. It if wasn’t for the fact that all the villagers were on the move, I wouldn’t have been able to leave successfully. Yes, for that reason, I can conclude that nobody checked her true appearance, and everyone believed that the one who died was Gray.”

That was true.

But what was my mentor trying to say?

As I parried the bone soldiers’ attacks, I heard that strange sound again (TN: the sound goes ‘jijiji…jijiji’ and was written in emphasized katakana). The noise became faster and faster, and seemed to envelop the entire temple.

That was not all. Soon, a web of tiny cracks appeared in the swamp around the temple. The clearly unnatural cracks appeared on the surface of the water, and showed no sign of disappearing.

It was as if the noise was a cacophony meant to interfere with the whole world.

“…Sir, the swamp is… [falling apart],” I whispered to him, guarding his back.

My mentor nodded. “Yes. But it seems that the only ones who noticed are the two of us and Sir Kay.”

It was strange, as if this world could no longer continue to exist. Strange phenomena appeared one after the other, and yet, neither the villagers, nor Sister Illumia, nor Bersac had any reaction.

“The reason for that is probably because we are all from the outside world. So, in other words, the people inside a world cannot perceive its correction.”

“Correction?”

“Something like that appears quite frequently in science fiction. Actually, a similar theory exists in magecraft, where it is believed that time is under some sort of directional influence. Though this place is not the past, something similar probably exists here.”

Hearing my mentor’s words, I blinked.

A correctional force.

If that was the case, did the Husk King die of the same reason she did during the First Cycle?

“The time for the play has already been decided. No matter how grand the performance may be, no matter how many encores may be enacted— Or perhaps precisely for that reason, every show must come to an end. An unyielding, illogical, inexorable end(deux ex machina).”

I had heard this phrase before.

In Ancient Greek plays, people would have the gods suddenly appear when the plot reached a deadlock by delivering judgement or resolving conflict. The deus ex machina was created for this reason.

Perhaps this was acceptable for an ancient play.

Even in later decades, people said that it could stay it for its beauty. And so the story of how the scholar who lost to the demons was miraculously saved by angels was greeted with thunderous applause.

And now, what meaning did that phrase hold?

How would this play end?

And most importantly, in this situation, who was the god in question?

“Then, the reason why you rushed here was—”

“Exactly. This stage only exists in this exact time. The ending will be here soon, so we must get here in time, because only the people who usher in this moment will be fixed onto the stage.”

My mentor looked up at the center of the mass of bone soldiers.

“Gray, can you clear a path to the Husk King please,” he said calmly as he gazed toward the Husk King’s corpse.

“Yes!”

Hearing his words, I began to swing my scythe. Perhaps because we weren’t underground anymore, my Strengthening abilities had recovered somewhat. Trimmau and I worked together and carved out a path for my mentor.

With my mother in tow, and with the help of magic bullets, he finally reached the corpse. He gazed at the wretched corpse for a while before extending a hand.

“…What are you doing, Lord El-Melloi II?”

“As you can see,” my mentor answered resolutely in response to my mother’s question, “—This is her true face!”

He removed the mask. The sound of the mask hitting the floor was softer than I had expected. Nobody else would probably pay any attention to that sound, though, for I was struck speechless by that face.

…Ah.

Of course, I had also believed in it without a doubt. She was, without question, the mind of King Arthur. Even without that dark Rhongomyniad, her very existence resonated with mine, so I believed that there would be a face identical to mine under that mask.

However, it was—

“[Mother]…” I moaned, and collapsed to the floor like the mask. The face beneath the mask— ah, though it looked very young, it was impossible to mistake it for anything else— was that of my mother.

“It’s like this. You are both the victim and the culprit, Magdalena,” my mentor announced, as my mother stood there, frozen.
*
…I didn’t know.

I didn’t have this kind of memory.

But my heart still remembered it. Though it had been erased from the surface of my mind, the information still existed, carved deep into me. Floating up like bubbles from a deep, dark ocean and announcing its presence, that memory had not disappeared.

The smell of rotting weeds and water.

The piercing cries of ravens.

That was…

Yes.

That was it.

…Someone was lying there. …It wasn’t me. But, it was someone who looked like me, someone who used to look like me.

[Why?]

I heard a voice.

[Why did you… make me… into you?]

They were thoughts that had not been converted into language. They were the crisscrossing thoughts of someone right next to me.

It was a conversation that should not have been heard by anyone. The only reason why I heard it was probably because I had almost completely lost consciousness, and entered some kind of strange, hazy state. If that was the case, the reason why I perceived those thoughts as sounds was because my brain had interpreted the characteristics of those thoughts.

[I’m sorry.]

Ah, that was a voice I was familiar with.

It was a voice that I had known for a long time.

[You were meant to have taken that child’s body, and that is why you have waited here. …I’m sorry. That is the only thing I can’t tolerate.]

I knew that calm, steady tone.

So steady that it terrified me. I had thought that I could never disobey this person. I had believed that I would forever live under this person’s command.

The thoughts ended here.

Less than a minute had actually passed.

And then,

“You… (did something to)… me…”

I finally understood those thoughts of the Husk King, which manifested soundlessly inside my mind.
*
“Mother…!”

It was said that, when exposed to shocks, human brains will sometimes block out information from the outside world.

I only had enough brain capacity to process the information that had just been revealed to me. My senses had stopped functioning briefly, and the world suddenly seemed to freeze, like an old movie playing from a damaged film.

Though I was in the middle of a battle, I couldn’t do anything except reflexively dodge the bone soldiers’ attacks.

However, my mentor continued to speak.

“It’s actually not quite accurate to call you the culprit. Though I say that, it’s different if I say that you were [once] the culprit. Perhaps a better way to say it would be that in the original timeline, you would have gone with your plan and [became] the killer.”

“…I,” my mother said in a low voice. She glanced at the unmasked person who looked exactly like herself, and immediately looked back to my mentor. “That means, I…”

“It’s alright.”

I didn’t know why, but my mentor’s voice was incredibly gentle and calm.

“You’ve already achieved your goal. I can assure you, not a single day of your effort was wasted.”

“……”

My mother smiled.

I didn’t remember how long it had been since I had seen that expression from her.

“Wonderful… So that’s how it is… I see…”

She covered her mouth with her hands, as if she finally understood something.

—Then, she disappeared without a trace, as if she had never existed in the first place. In her place, an old, curved dagger fell to the floor at my mentor’s feet.

“Mother!”

My own cries sounded distant. An indescribable sense of terror and despair invaded my brain. I felt like I was a sobbing child as I kneeled where my mother had just disappeared.

”Where is she!?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” My mentor said as he gestured toward the Husk King’s corpse. “This is her corpse. Although the two can coexist before the original is identified, once that happens, the copy created by the simulation must disappear, like a doppelgänger. Oh, right, Father Fernando probably also died of the same reason.”

What did this mean?

I could not understand what my mentor was saying at all.

However, my heart had been throbbing violently in my chest ever since the Husk King was unmasked, as if it was trying to tell me something.

“El-Melloi II!” Yelled one of the villagers, the old woman who was their leader. “What have you done!?”

Her howls were more like pleas than accusations.

Like me, she could not understand what she had just witnessed. However, there was the added weight of more than a thousand years on the old woman’s shoulders.

In response to that, my mentor only took out his box of cigars from his pocket.

Though the battle had not ended yet, he lit it with a snap and placed it in his mouth.

That was not a show of his carelessness. To my mentor, this act must be like a switch, my still-fuzzy brain thought. A switch to hide his original personality, and to activate the identity of “Lord El-Melloi II” of the Clock Tower.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t have done anything. I just made a guess based on the clues that were here,” my mentor said as he exhaled a puff of smoke.

I couldn’t help but turn my head at those words. The old woman could not understand what he was trying to say, and she shot back a rhetorical question like a parrot repeating human words.

“A prediction?”

“You call Gray the body of King Arthur, yes? That means, you know that the Husk King is the mind, and even though you clearly understand that you lack the soul, you attempted to merge the two here. However, that ritual has been [distorted].”

Everyone was stunned by the impact of those words.

The only people who didn’t get affected— or at least, didn’t seem affected, were Trimmau and the bone soldiers, who didn’t have the ability to feel that way, and the knight, whose expression was impossible to discern.

Everyone else held their breaths, like suspects listening to a detective’s deduction. Nobody dared to take even a single breath. That was how impactful the face behind the mask and my mentor’s words were.

“You’re saying that the ritual… has been distorted…” The old woman’s voice was full of pain.

Perhaps she had devoted her entire life to this ritual. It wasn’t just her, either. Everyone else related to the old woman had poured precious hours and days of their life into this. Their persistence, passions, longings, history, traditions, and dreams had all been discarded for the sake of this ritual.

Just then, we had heard the sound of all of it breaking apart.

“Originally, the Husk King shouldn’t have had a face. The mind of the king alone cannot materialize completely, much like Sir Kay.”

So it was inevitable that the knight’s face would be hazy.

The knight listened silently to my mentor’s words, not confirming nor refuting any of his claims.

“For that reason, the village needs a ritual to unite the three parts of a person. Especially a Mystic Code or spell to remove Gray’s mind and soul from her body.”

My mentor picked up the dagger.

Was this the Mystic Code?

My mentor narrowed his eyes and examined it briefly before he continued.

“However, [someone] interfered with this step. Let’s assume that that person is a ‘he’. This person is a mage with a detailed understanding of the three elements of a human being, and has been watching this village for a long time.”

There was no need to ask who he was talking about.

It was Dr. Heartless. As he was the former head of the Department of Modern Magecraft (Norwich), his knowledge on the subject was guaranteed.

“He also induced one of the villagers.”

The strange noise sounded again. It was now noticeably louder and more frequent. However, the people around us still took no notice of it. To what point would these irregularities continue? No, perhaps they wouldn’t stop until they covered this entire world.

“…Sir, the noise… keeps spreading.”

“The answer is at hand.”

I heard the strain in his voice. A drop of sweat trickled down the side of his face. He probably didn’t have a positive outlook on the situation, either. In fact, I think that he simply betted everything on this.

—“Find the mystery that you must solve. That is the only way you can reach the end, Lord El-Melloi II.”

It was the mystery that Zepia had given us.

I didn’t know why I was so sure of it, but I knew that was what my mentor was attempting to solve.

“It was necessary for ‘him’ to have an accomplice, because even for someone like him, dodging the magecraft alarm system completely would be difficult. So you could say that it was only natural for him to look for an accomplice in the village.”

My mentor had said before that Heartless made incidents get buried in darkness. It seemed that he was already used to secretly hiring accomplices.

“And that’s how he managed to receive hints about the ritual in the village. In turn, the person who provided this information received from him the means to disrupt the resurrection of King Arthur.”

Hearing my mentor’s words, the wrinkles at the old woman’s brow deepened.

“So you’re saying that the accomplice was Magdalena?”

“Could it be anyone else?”

My mentor’s assertion caused a vein to rise on the old woman’s forehead.

“But Magdalena isn’t even a mage! Unlike Gray, she’s a failure that didn’t become King Arthur’s body! How can someone like her disrupt the ritual without a bit of assistance from a mage!?“

“Doesn’t she have the perfect means to intervene, in the form of the central focus of this ritual?”

“…You mean, Gray?”

My mentor shifted his gaze from the furious old woman to me.

“…Gray, you were there when I said that it wasn’t just manipulating Magical Energy and casting spells, everything from eating, sleeping, and even excretion is closely related to magecraft and mystery, right?”

I remembered.

It was when we were at the Twin Towers of Ilsema.

I had also thought of myself back then.

—After my father’s death, my mother had started managing my life more fervently than ever. Not only for sleep and prayer, but also even [the order in which I ate my food or how I put on my clothes]. Naturally, my attitude towards my surroundings was influenced by her.

My mentor had said before that this was also a type of spell.

Transforming the macrocosmos of the world by making it mirror changes in the microcosmos of life. This was, undoubtedly, a type of magecraft. Guiding the tidal currents of the earth and the movement of the stars into the tiny vessel of a human body was a way to make greater mystery possible.

“There should have been something close to the potential to become King Arthur in your mother. It’s only natural for that to be the case. She is your mother, after all. On top of that, the village has been cultivating this potential for quite a while. Ah, that is to say, this village is under the influence of magecraft that could cause these potentials to awaken. Therefore, the means of intervention that he taught her were very simple. By synchronizing the wavelength of the person with the highest affinity to the ritual and the wavelength of your mother, you can create a path to directly intervene into the spell.”

“Synchronize…with me…?”

“Exactly. Your mother subtly shifted her wavelength to be in tune with yours through eating, sleeping, and everything else in your life.”

It was probably something similar to what Flat did. Magecraft intervention. From a technical point of view, this might be even more sophisticated.

“Though the means itself is straightforward, in practice, it is not that easy to pull off. It’s actually a difficult act that requires so much perseverance that even a real mage would complain about it. Not a single detail can be overlooked in order to completely synchronize the wavelength of her mutated daughter to her own. If we use food as an example, the difference of a couple of grams would affect the accuracy of the spell, and even the amount of bites taken would need to be managed. Imagine that, but for every hour of every day. It would require a stunning amount of energy to be able to do this without being able to ask the other person for help.”

“……”

My body shook.

My mentor’s words were only processed by my ears. My brain had not managed to comprehend the meaning behind it at all. However, I could not help but realize that this was the truth. Every feeling that I had once held for my mother reversed, along with a feeling of pain as intense as if my skin was being peeled off.

“However, she succeeded. She somehow managed to succeed. The next step was to follow what Heartless had written down on the evidence board. Though the spell was complicated, it wouldn’t be difficult to perform as long as she had synchronized herself well. What happened then was that two sets of parameters were inserted into the unstable mind of King Arthur. One was the parameters of the mind, and the other were those of your mother. Though it seemed like King Arthur on the surface, something similar to your mother’s parameters were hiding deep within. The Husk King herself probably never realized it until the end.”

Was that the reason why Heartless had approached the village before he left?

My mentor raised the ancient dagger that he had just picked up. “Is this dagger the Mystic Code used in the ritual?” He asked the old woman.

“…Indeed. This is a Mystic Code capable of separating the soul and the mind from the body, called Erosion.”

“If that’s the case, the answer is simple. During the First Cycle, Magdalena arrived here early and took the place of her daughter, stabbing the dagger into her own body. Then, the unstable mind of King Arthur was forcibly dragged into that soulless, mindless body. …However, Magdalena first stabbed herself with a regular dagger. Even King Arthur wouldn’t be able to do anything against being placed into a dead body. She had to die.”

“…W-wh-” The old woman could not finish her sentence. I didn’t know how much the other villagers knew, but they still panicked with the old woman. They couldn’t understand what the First Cycle or the Second Cycle meant, so I guess it was inevitable that they acted this way.

No, actually, I could no longer discern their expressions anymore.

*strange noise*… the sound of the burning world had already reached the level of a din. It wasn’t just that. The [cracks] that had appeared on the swamp and the temple had spread to the villagers.

“Gray, you can feel this noise, yes?”

I nodded in response to my mentor’s question.

“…Y-yes.”

“In the words of that director of the Atlas Institute, the stage has discovered a contradiction. If the stage cannot hold against it, the reenactment loses its meaning. If the foundations collapse, we must start from the beginning. Therefore, we need to arrive here before it collapses. Ah, this reenactment really is beautifully made. Even I have doubted countless times that this was actually the past. However, that is not the case. Since this place is not the past, there must be things that cannot be concealed. In this case, that would be death.”

“…Death… cannot be concealed…”

During the First Cycle, Father Fernando had died. The Husk King— or perhaps I should say, my mother, who gave her body to her, also died.

Only the truths of that timeline could not be concealed in this reenactment, no matter what. That was why Father Fernando’s body would suddenly appear, and why the Husk King would die in my mother’s body. Perhaps, before their death, both of them had seen their own doppelgängers.

“Well then, to conclude,” my mentor said in a slightly more powerful voice. “Like I just said, in the real world, there is no way for the mind to retain its shape for a long period of time. Sir Kay can only materialize because of Add, his true form. Even so, there is no guarantee that he can sustain it for longer than a day. …However, for the Husk King, she awoke at the same time Gray had began her transformation. That is to say, ten years ago.”

My mentor paused briefly before looking to the side.

“Well then, how do [you] maintain your own existence?”

“……”

“…Oi, what’s going on?” The knight(Sir Kay) yelled at the new arrival.

I didn’t know when, but the corpse of the Husk King— or rather, what was once the Husk King had stood up.

Was this still the same Husk King as before?

I could not sense a trace of life in her as she stood there quietly with her head hung. Though her face was the same as my mother’s, she gave me the feeling of an entirely different being.

The victim who was thought to have been killed but turned out to still be alive…Though this happened quite frequently in mystery novels, this was different.

“Husk King— No. That’s not the right name to use anymore. After your reboot, you are neither Magdalena nor the mind of King Arthur, but something that consumed large amounts of Mana to continue calculating,” my mentor revealed. “[You, are Logos ReAct.]”

One of the Seven Superweapons of the Atlas Institute.

The knight(Sir Kay), who had inherited Add’s memories, did not expect that name to appear here either, and did not make an effort to hide his shock.

“Ha? So you’re saying that the Atlas Institute’s superweapon is a person?”

“Not exactly. To be precise, she is the avatar of Logos ReAct in this world,” my mentor said, looking toward the object the stood there. “I see. Since it’s the superweaapon of the Atlas Institute, it should be able to duplicate the mind of King Arthur. Such a task should probably be completable, even if it only had the excess energy outside its original functions. After all, those superweapons were created to save humanity from destruction, but are also capable of destroying the world.”

“……”

The object that was once the Husk King did not speak.

I didn’t know when it had happened, but her face had become as hazy as Sir Kay’s. Was that the face of the mind of King Arthur, or that of the incarnation of Logos ReAct?

“Indeed. This is not the past, or a time loop. Therefore, the Husk King’s death can only happen at a fixed time. The answer to this endless loop that begins and ends with death is already clear.”

He inhaled.

“This place is a grave,” my mentor proclaimed. “A tiny world after death, constructed by Logos ReAct!”

His declaration echoed in the temple.

I could not understand the meaning behind what he said at all. Instead, as if in response to his words, the noise grew louder. I felt like my eardrums were going to burst.

Everything in my field of vision was being torn apart. Every inch of the swamp, the temple, and the villagers looked like a badly scarred photo. If I inserted my fingers into those cracks, would it kill everything?

“You heard that, right?” My mentor yelled. Loudly, as if he was trying to reach the other end of the universe(sky). “You heard me, Atlas!”

His voice pierced through cacophony of noise.

“The mystery has been solved! Summer is over! Show yourself, Zepia Eltnam Atlasia!”

It was as if those words had split the world open.

In an instant, everything disappeared.

Lord El-Melloi II's Case Files: The Atlas Contract (Upper); Chapter 4, Part 2