The sun had cracked.
This is not metaphor or figurative speech.
One day, when I lifted my head and looked up at the sky, a black, ominous fissure had split—crack—right through the center of the dazzling sphere that should have been illuminating all things.
As though someone had brought a giant axe down upon the heart of the heavens.
At first, we believed it was merely a temporary eclipse or some bizarre celestial phenomenon.
The priests of the temple reassured the people, and I, too, as the proxy of the God of Light, stood upon the dais and soothed them with a benevolent smile.
The light would be eternal, and the mercy of God would not leave us.
But my faith—no, our arrogance—was shattered before even a single season had fully turned.
The crack in the sun grew blacker and deeper with each passing day.
The light began to fade.
Even at midday, the world was dim, as though shrouded in ashen mist, and a chill that seeped into the bones began to lick across the earth.
The first to face despair were the farmlands, the lifeblood of the earth.
The wheat fields, robbed of light and warmth, withered black without ever bearing grain.
The fruits in orchards awaiting harvest hardened like stones and fell to the ground, and no more fish could be caught from the frozen rivers and seas.
“Saintess! Please, please have mercy…! My child has not eaten anything for three days!”
“Just a handful of wheat, no, even one rotten potato will do, please!”
Outside the iron gates of the grand cathedral, hundreds of paupers gathered every day, weeping tears of blood as they cried out.
Across the entire continent, the harvest of agricultural and marine products had plummeted to half of what it had once been.
The granaries revealed their bottoms, and the calamity known as hunger spread like a plague.
The world was growing colder by the day, and starving as well.
Yet the true disaster was not hunger alone.
As the light weakened, the things that had been hiding in the darkness began to raise their heads.
Beyond the great wall that protected mankind’s survival, in the harshest outlands of the continent, horrific monsters and beasts were endlessly pounding against the wall to fill their starving bellies.
“The eastern side of the wall has fallen! Hordes of demonic beasts are overrunning the territory!”
“What are the knights doing? Raise your swords at once!”
The blood of soldiers guarding the borders soaked the cold snowfields, but the number of demonic beasts showed no sign of dwindling.
Moreover, even within the wall, in the middle of the cities and villages mankind had believed safe, bizarre happenings began to occur.
As the nights grew longer and fear and despair took root in people’s hearts, evil spirits and vengeful ghosts that fed on those negative emotions began to run rampant.
A neighbor who had exchanged perfectly normal greetings the night before would be found hanging by the neck come morning, and blood would gush from the wells.
The world itself seemed to be plunging straight down toward destruction.
Then, in the face of this enormous calamity, did mankind and the other intelligent races join hands to overcome the crisis together?
No.
Despair merely paralyzed reason, and hunger only awakened savagery.
The two great empires currently dividing the continent between them.
The three kingdoms beneath them, watching hungrily for a chance at supremacy.
And the seven small nations struggling desperately to survive by any means.
These twelve nations raised blades of hatred against one another to seize the diminished food supplies and the paltry territories where warmth still remained.
“The barbaric imperial bastards of the north have plundered our food wagons! Raise the army!”
“The western kingdom has crossed the border! Cut off their heads and melt the frozen earth with their blood!”
Troops who should have been fighting monsters were mobilized to cut down the necks of other humans instead.
Foolish monarchs, unable to face the approaching extinction, sounded the horns of conscription to steal the bread someone else would eat tomorrow.
And what of the conflict between races?
The elves, having lost the blessing of the forest, hurled curses, saying that humanity’s endless greed had enraged Mother Nature and split the sun.
The dwarves, losing the warmth of the underground, sealed their mines and cut off trade with the surface.
Mankind and the other races distrusted and loathed one another, becoming utterly isolated.
“Ah…”
I knelt before the altar enshrining the God of Light, in the deepest part of the empty grand cathedral.
The hem of the dazzling white dress that symbolized the Saintess brushed against the cold marble floor, but what wrapped around my body was only a terrible chill that burrowed into my bones.
Above my head, the sunlight filtering through the stained glass was no longer holy.
The light pouring from the cracked sun was murky, cold, and grotesque.
Beneath that ominous light, even faith was crumbling.
“Saintess… I can no longer endure this.”
Yesterday, one of the high-ranking cardinals who had served at my side all his life had confessed to me with a pallid face.
“Look at the sky. The eye of God has split. God has abandoned us! The light is dying, so how can we pray for mercy that does not exist?”
He flung his holy rosary to the floor and left the grand cathedral.
I could not condemn him.
After witnessing with our own eyes, every day, the horrors of believers starving to death, freezing to death, and being torn apart by evil spirits, the parroted consolation that “there must be a divine will” had become nothing but deception and mockery.
The God of Light was being erased from people’s hearts.
What remained was only a desperate selfishness and fear to survive this very night.
I clasped my trembling hands together and looked up at the enormous cross-shaped holy relic upon the altar.
“O God…”
A cracked voice flowed from between my parched lips.
“O merciful and great Lord of Light. Have You truly abandoned us?”
There was no answer.
The only thing wandering through the cathedral was the wail-like sound of the north wind beating against the gaps in the windows.
“Is it not written in the scriptures? When the world is engulfed by deep darkness and despair covers the earth, the ‘Hero of Salvation,’ chosen by God’s providence, shall descend and cut through the darkness with a radiant holy sword, restoring the light of the sun.”
I pressed my forehead to the altar and shed tears of blood.
“Where, then, is that hero! Where are they, and what are they doing, to turn away from this frozen, starving world?”
The sun is dying.
The world is freezing, the harvests are rotting away, and selfish rulers are blocking the border checkpoints, holding blades to the throats of their own kin to squeeze out paltry gold coins and food.
Before this perfect overture to the end, where cold and famine, monsters and evil spirits gnaw away at the continent.
Magic was powerless, the swords of knights had gone cold, and faith had fallen to the ground.
“Please save us…”
I clawed at the floor and sobbed in anguish.
“Anyone will do, so please send down a vast, burning miracle that will smash this dreadful cold and hunger…!”
Silence.
Only the absolute silence of God pressed down upon the Saintess’s prayer.
However, the Saintess, lying prostrate on the cold marble floor of the grand cathedral and weeping tears of blood, could never have known.
That the “Hero of Salvation” she had so desperately cried out for.
Was neither a holy knight bearing a radiant holy sword, nor a great archmage wielding magic.
Before her prayer reached the God in the heavens.
Far away, on the nameless banks of the Rene River in the remote frontier of Pellua.
Not by faith, nor by magic.
A terribly secular and violent “steel monster,” swallowing coal, exploding mana steam, and belching boiling flames of several hundred degrees Celsius and black smoke into the sky, had just opened its massive eyes.
That one arrogant merchant who had stolen knowledge from another world had completed preparations to crush, with a brutish lump of iron, the paradigm of this freezing world and the trade routes that had closed.
That, before long, above the ashen sky of despair that had covered the world, black chimney smoke in the name of civilization and industry would surge fiercely upward.
The Saintess’s prayer had missed its mark.
But the sound of the miracle of revolution was only just beginning.
*
Chiiiiiiiik—! Craaaaaack!!
Exactly 0.1 seconds before the explosion.
It was the desperate instant when a two-inch-thick iron plate screamed as it tore apart, and mana steam of several hundred degrees Celsius was about to burst out like blades.
In my eyes, as I gripped the valve in the cockpit, the rupture flare of the boiler burned like hellfire.
I clenched my teeth and braced myself for the impact to come.
Even if the pendant had sent me back to Pellua, there was no way it could help me avoid the physical force of this enormous lump of iron exploding right in front of me.
But at that moment.
Wiiiiiiing—!
Inside my chest, the Carnoble family pendant, still burning hot from crossing dimensions, once again emitted a strange vibration.
The gear at the center of the pendant spun madly, creating a swirl of blue light, then opened its maw like a gigantic starving black hole.
“Uh…?”
An unbelievable sight unfolded.
The explosive mana steam at 150 atmospheres that had been about to tear through the boiler’s outer wall and burst out, and the iron fragments that were about to scatter in every direction, abruptly stopped in midair.
Then, as if a film were being played in reverse, all that tremendous heat energy and overloaded pressure began to be fiercely sucked into the swirl of blue light.
Shoooooooop—!
It happened in just a few seconds.
The house-sized boiler that had swollen as though about to burst collapsed like a deflated leather pouch, and even the acrid smoke and flesh-searing heat that had been about to fill the workshop evaporated as if they had never existed.
“……”
Silence.
In the temporary shipyard where the deafening roar had vanished, only the hollow crackle of lingering embers in the furnace drifted about.
With blank eyes, I looked back and forth between my hand gripping the valve and the crumpled boiler.
When I felt around my chest, the pendant had cooled as if it had never emitted any light, returning to the form of an ordinary metal keepsake.
“This thing… is seriously an absurdly broken item, isn’t it?”
A hollow laugh slipped out.
While closing the dimensional gate, the pendant had absorbed all the enormous physical destructive energy condensed there as its own power source!
If I could perfectly control the principles behind this artifact, it was an insane object that could gulp down even a Meteor launched by the continent’s strongest archmage in a single bite.
“Elpansooo!!”
At that moment, beyond the steam and cloud of dust, Aila came running with a scream and collapsed onto the deck in front of me.
With her face drenched in tears, she looked back and forth between the crushed boiler and me standing there unharmed, wearing a dumbfounded expression.
“W-what? Wasn’t that about to explode just now? Why did a blue light suddenly flash, and then… where did it all go? Are you okay?!”
“Yeah. Completely fine.”
I leisurely jumped down from the cockpit and lightly patted her startled shoulder.
“I told you, didn’t I? I had countermeasures. I made a special design so that the moment the pressure exceeded the critical point, the steam would be released all at once through an emergency vent. The trial run was absolutely perfect.”
Of course, it was a blatant lie.
There was no way Aila could understand the pendant’s interdimensional miracle.
“You… you crazy bastard! I really thought you were going to die!”
Aila kicked me in the shin with a face mixed with relief and anger, but while pretending it hurt, I cheered inwardly.
‘Perfect. I saw the cause of the explosion and the critical point data clearly with my own two eyes.’
This trial run’s failure was by no means meaningless.
The expansion rate when mana steam struck the iron plate, the timing at which the riveted seams split open, the limit point of the metal deforming due to heat.
All this failure data would combine with the “alloy formula” I had brought from the Taesan Special Steel Research Institute to complete a perfect blueprint capable of withstanding any load.