Retire 484

484 Savior (2)

There was a certain emotion in my father’s explanation.

At times, he grew heated; at times, weary; at times, he burst out laughing as if telling some absurd story.

Yet his point was always clear, and he never strayed from the subject.

“I simply can’t believe it.”

Was Han Taekyung saying he couldn’t believe my father’s words now? I glanced at him with suspicion. If that were the case, instead of grumbling about work assignments earlier, he should’ve stormed out of the room right away.

“Sniff.”

Han Taekyung wiped at imaginary tears with his fingers, but his face was perfectly dry.

“That cute little brat grew up to become such a rotten adult…”

……

Maybe I should have just let him go when he said he didn’t want to know. But that would have been annoying in its own way. Not that he wasn’t annoying now.

Perhaps he was trying to lighten the mood for my father’s sake. Hard to believe Han Taekyung could be so considerate, but perhaps, just as he says, his salary isn’t entirely meaningless.

“Isn’t this a sign of the apocalypse?”

Or maybe he was just saying whatever came to mind.

Honestly, I suspected the latter.

Han Taekyung just wanted to get under my skin. If it were Gamble, I could understand, but coming from Han Taekyung, it was shameless.

Still, I couldn’t help but think, “What’s the point in saying anything?” That was just how Han Taekyung was, after all…

And, much as I disliked it, having someone who could joke like that was oddly comforting. When you listen to lighthearted banter, it makes all these worries seem trivial.

It’s the end of the world that will never come anyway. So why not laugh it off? Han Taekyung’s impudence aside.

…In truth, I’d only ever said I’d come from the future, never explained the exact circumstances. I’d only mentioned that all the dungeons in the world had erupted. Even that, Han Taekyung hadn’t heard yet.

Even I couldn’t bring myself to tell someone, to their face, that they’d died. My father, sure, he’d have figured it out, but Kim Chaemin and Gamble were different.

“Don’t jinx it. What’s so bad about Mr. Woo?”

“Are you serious?”

“Well, I mean…”

Kim Chaemin suddenly lost his confidence.

“…If I do well from now on, that’s what counts. Irok’s doing well at school, right?”

“I did fine in school too.”

Kim Chaemin looked at me as if he couldn’t believe it. I had no idea what kind of image I had in his mind anymore.

“Ahem, anyway! Ah, Mr. Han, you’ve completely derailed the conversation.”

“What did I do?”

“The Master’s point… it actually makes a lot of sense. I was wondering about that part myself. When you think about it that way, everything fits.”

“You were suspicious too?”

“Not suspicious, exactly…”

Kim Chaemin frowned deeply, muttering in a low voice.

“I never understood why they attacked my domain.”

“…Your grandfather’s rose?”

“Yes. It’s strange. My grandfather considered that rose a failure. He never understood how it bloomed. That’s why he kept researching it and avoided mentioning it in public.”

That attitude had been passed down to his son and granddaughter as well. The pride of three generations of grand magicians, who were as much researchers as mages, would never allow it.

An experiment that can’t be replicated isn’t a success.

“Maybe he mentioned it once or twice somewhere. But how would they know about it?”

Kim Chaemin made no effort to hide his displeasure.

“They entered my domain with a purpose…”

“But if, say, you managed to complete it, and it was fatal to Ark—or, rather, to the fairy of Mont-Saint-Michel—and actually harmed them…”

“They’d want to destroy it at any cost.”

“In the timeline where the Master killed all of Ark… in other words, the so-called victorious timeline.”

Kim Chaemin looked at Hope. When their eyes met, Hope flinched.

“The fairy of Mont-Saint-Michel.”

“The king?”

“I don’t like calling it a king. Anyway, that thing. Didn’t you say it came back from the past, too? What was the term for that again?”

“Prophet…?”

“Right, that.”

Kim Chaemin turned to my father.

“Master, you think that thing came back from that timeline?”

“Yes. The future where I won. The time when the extinction of the monsters was certain.”

“But! The king returned before we escaped to this world, didn’t it…?”

“Exactly. That’s what I mean. When there was no hope left, it reset everything to the beginning. So, who is the one in Mont-Saint-Michel now? Is it a pure soul from before coming to Earth? Or is it one that’s already returned to the past once?”

Whether that could be called “pure” was debatable, but my father’s point was clear.

Hope opened and closed his mouth.

“…Yeah. I think that makes more sense, too.”

Even Hope nodded at my father’s words.

“But then, wouldn’t I have been found out long ago? Sandra, my mom, my dad…”

“No.”

“Huh?”

“No. On the contrary.”

I thought it over calmly.

Yes. If I followed my father’s logic, everything more or less made sense.

The reason Ark was so obsessively focused on my father.

The reason Kim Chaemin’s domain was attacked.

If Kim Chaemin’s theory was correct, then even his pointless death in the timeline I remembered became suspicious.

It made me reconsider the children who died in Myeongdong. Maybe, just maybe.

If it occurred to me, my father must have thought of it too. Kim Chaemin was smart enough to have reached the same conclusion from this conversation.

If all the kids at Yangseong High and the demonstration school had survived, even without me, Park Seohyun might have discovered her own talent and decided to teach magic to her friend. Choi Jinwoo might have blossomed and joined my father in a dungeon.

The rose Kim Chaemin completed, inherited from his grandfather, could have done more than just purify contaminated land—it might have affected dungeon raids as well. Choi Jinwoo, who could have become a grand mage, might have used his magic to find dungeon cores.

Perhaps.

It was all a matter of “what if.”

The only one who could confirm the truth was the monster waiting at the end.

That explained why Ark paid so much attention to the Myeongdong dungeon. It was the easiest way to eliminate an obstacle.

So they took action, one by one. To change the future where they lost.

“…What, why did you stop talking?”

“No. I just think you might have been an unexpected variable.”

“Me?”

“From the moment you came out of the dungeon, you never intended to go back. Or at least, not once you were able to move freely.”

“…Yeah. Because my mom was here.”

“If your father had been winning, you wouldn’t have needed to get involved. However Ark was dealt with, if they hadn’t blown up the dungeons like this, it might have all passed quietly.”

“Alex. How did you end up joining Ark?”

“Huh? Uh, Noah…”

Hope’s eyes widened.

“I thought I’d been found out, that they knew I’d betrayed them…!”

“No, no. If they’d known, they’d have killed you immediately, instead of keeping you near Michel.”

The fairy of Mont-Saint-Michel must have tried many things to overturn a game where defeat was certain.

“I don’t think they could be sure. You didn’t exist at all at first.”

“Mr. Woo, too?”

“Yes. We’re trying to change the future, but… so are they. The more things change, the more unexpected variables appear for them, too. I think Hope was one of those. They were probably still deciding whether to keep him around or if he’d betray them.”

Of course, there was a hole in all this.

If we couldn’t explain it, the whole story would become a ridiculous joke.

And naturally, everyone was aware of that. My father included.

“But there’s a problem with all this.”

“I know. That’s why I hesitated to bring it up.”

My father grumbled, but agreed with me.

“Still, I figured it was better to say it out loud, to get everyone’s opinions, and to be prepared in case something happens later.”

He’d been so confident and decisive when he first started, but now he’d lost his nerve again. He was pouting like a child.

Why was he looking at me for approval again?

It was better to mention things like this, just as he said. Was he expecting me to scold him, or did he want me to…?

I really couldn’t figure him out. Is this what happens as you get older? I’d better be careful not to end up like that.

“As far as I know, you can only come back once.”

Hope spoke up.

“What if that’s not true?”

“I don’t know… But even so, it’s not as if all the other problems would magically disappear.”

“The fact that so many monsters returned means they all failed. Whether it was conquering this world, or killing the Master.”

Kim Chaemin picked up the thread.

“But that thing hasn’t given up.”

“Was Noah always under its command from the start?”

“There’s no point in worrying about that.”

“Maybe, but… It can’t not know that other monsters returned after it. So it must know it failed, and yet it keeps going…”

“…It must have some kind of plan.”

My head spun. Partly because the situation was complicated, but also because the idea of time repeating itself was still hard to accept and harder to understand.

But we had to find answers amid all that confusion.

“Maybe.”

Kim Chaemin swallowed.

“If there’s any way… to get information, somehow?”

“Inside the dungeon?”

“They say it went back to before escaping to Earth. Maybe it set something up before boarding the dungeon. Some way to check if monsters returned, or if things changed… Something Michel couldn’t do alone.”

……

My eyes drifted to the runes on the desk where Kim Chaemin sat, the ones being analyzed by Gamble, Park Seohyun, and Choi Jinwoo back in Korea.

Noah Michel was more knowledgeable about runes than anyone else. If those runes came from the “library”…

If the patterns on the fairy’s wings really were runes…

“…If all these assumptions are true, I understand why they called you the Savior.”

“Hm? Why? It’s too grand a word to give your worst enemy.”

“No. More precisely, it’s ‘candidate.’ Not the Savior, but a Savior candidate.”

That is to say…

“It’s not about praising you, or thinking you’re great.”

They erased the achievements of the man called Hong Seokyoung, who had driven them to extinction.

That was what they wanted to boast about.

“They’re mocking you.”

They took the human hero who once saved humanity, and made him no longer a hero. At best, they demoted him to “candidate.”

It was a term of derision.