Kwaaaang!
I had detonated a hydrogen bomb, but the Demon King was unharmed.
When he swung his black arms, tentacles came flying.
The tentacles tore my limbs away.
“Ghk!”
I opened my eyes amid the pain.
I looked at the arm where the ache was coming from.
It had grown back as far as the elbow.
It wouldn’t be long before my arm was fully restored.
“A dream, huh.”
It had to be a dream.
Because the Demon King hadn’t withstood the hydrogen bomb.
His humanlike body and the mountain of corpses had all been torn to shreds and blown away in the nuclear explosion.
Then I remembered purifying the contaminated black stone afterward.
“Ugh.”
Groaning, I pushed myself up.
I remembered up to the scene of the black stone being purified, but nothing after that.
It seemed I had passed out from the depleted energy and the pain.
When I checked my body, my side was already closing up, and the leg that had been blown away had regrown to the ankle.
Thanks to the purification magic wiping away the radiation, the healing magic had continued to maintain itself even while I was unconscious.
If not, I would already be dead.
The exposed bones of my leg were ghastly, but I could only be grateful that flesh was growing over them again.
The healing magic and shield magic were still being cast, but while I had been unconscious, my energy had recovered to some degree.
If only my body were intact, it would be enough to handle most battles.
Of course, fighting in a body like this would be difficult.
I planted my uninjured hand on the ground, sat down heavily, and looked around.
The sanctuary that had once stood in the middle of a dry lake, with a gray mountain rising from its center, no longer retained its former appearance.
The gray snow had been blown away, leaving only a half-collapsed mountain of desolate soil and stone.
The earth piled up from the crumbling mountain covered a considerable portion of the dry lake.
A massive crater had formed in the side of the collapsed mountain.
The place where the magical nuclear explosion I created had occurred.
I was sitting at its center.
Inside the crater, even the radiation monsters that had remained until the end were nowhere to be seen anymore.
Instead, before my eyes, there was only a single cracked black stone rolling on the ground.
That was the Demon King’s black stone.
As if it had truly been purified, no contaminated energy flowed from it any longer.
I cast telekinesis and drew the black stone toward me.
Tak.
The black stone came easily and was caught in my hand.
I examined the black stone in my grasp closely.
It was split deeply from side to side, barely holding together.
Nowhere in the black stone could I sense any trace of the Demon King, nor any contaminated energy.
All I could feel was a vast darkness energy unlike anything I had sensed from other monsters.
Only after checking it several times did I put the black stone into a box and finally feel at ease.
“I really killed the Demon King.”
[You’ve worked hard.]
Sof answered my words.
As it happened, Sof had awakened as well.
I turned the spear around in my hand and asked him,
“Sof… are you all right?”
This was not the first time Sof had lost consciousness.
But this time, I had no choice but to ask.
The spear in my hand now was different from before.
All the black stones embedded in it had lost their light, and the shaft was covered in countless cracks.
The spear that had not lost its splendor for ten thousand years had become an aged relic after the fierce battle with the Demon King.
[I am fine. As for the depleted black stones, we can fill it with new ones from the ruins.]
But Sof did not care about the spear’s appearance.
Since Sof said he was fine, I had nothing more to say.
Instead, I asked something else.
“Killing the Demon King… doesn’t mean it’s over, does it?”
At my question, spoken as I looked around the crater, Sof gave the answer I had expected.
[There remain the problems of Paradise and Taepyeong, and Earth’s destruction will continue, so it will not be over until we move the people to Trappist.]
It was the answer I expected, but not the answer I wanted.
I asked again.
“You know that isn’t what I mean.”
[…]
At the repeated question, Sof said nothing for a long while.
Then, after that, he spoke a single sentence.
[…You knew?]
Just as I had thought.
Sof already knew.
“Yes. I’d had doubts for some time, but while fighting the Demon King this time, I became certain. That killing the Demon King wasn’t the end.”
Of course, the prophecy, Sof’s memories, and all the preparations until now had been for the sake of killing the Demon King.
Even from that alone, killing the Demon King was the natural course of action, but to remove all the dangers from this star, one more thing was necessary.
I looked up at the sky.
It was not yet night, but a satellite was visible in the sky.
The half-destroyed, broken moon.
Looking at the satellite, I said to Sof,
“In the past, it wasn’t the Demon King who destroyed humanity on this star. It was the monsters that descended from that moon.”
There had been many sacrifices, but Sof and his companions had succeeded in sealing the Demon King.
What destroyed humanity was the monsters that descended from that moon after the Demon King was sealed.
“It’s surprising that monsters could have half-destroyed such a large satellite, but if that much of it remains, then there must still be monsters left there.”
The monsters could endure for thousands, tens of thousands of years without air or water.
Just as monsters that had been inside the ice for over ten thousand years on the ice star had burst out, there were surely monsters remaining on that half-destroyed satellite as well.
Hearing my words, Sof agreed.
[Correct. Back then, what descended to this planet was only a portion of the monsters on the moon, the monsters meant to break the Demon King’s seal. Many monsters still remain on that moon.]
Once again, an unpleasant guess had been confirmed as fact.
However, I had not gotten everything right.
[What destroyed that moon was my magic. It was a wide-area spell installed to stop the monsters. But that magic was never properly completed.]
I had no choice but to lower my head and look at the spear.
“…You broke that satellite with magic?”
[Unlike the Demon King, that moon was affected by magic. Even so, it was the final counterattack, one that gathered all the power of myself and the Magic Kingdom.]
At Sof’s words, my mouth fell open on its own.
Just because magic worked on it, he had half-destroyed a satellite that large…
It seemed I had been underestimating magic far too much.
[As Shamara prophesied, destroying the moon failed, and I suffered a fatal wound as well, but at least we bought time for the people to escape.]
Only now did I understand.
Even after realizing that the monsters on the moon had to be dealt with, I had had no idea how to kill them.
Though only half of it remained, the remaining satellite was still the size of a small continent.
Even if I brought a whole pile of hydrogen bombs and detonated them, it was a size that offered no answer.
That was why I had asked Sof.
Since there was Shamara’s prophecy, I wondered if there might be some method, and as expected, there was.
“In the end, Shamara’s remaining prophecy is about completing that magic to destroy the moon, isn’t it?”
[…That’s right. That is the last task left to me.]
Sof’s answer sank deeply.
There was something heavy and muffled in his words, but I let it pass without a thought.
Because there was too much I had to do right away.
Casting gravity magic, I said to Sof,
“You must have known this before. You hid it well.”
As I flew up into the sky, Sof’s answer reached me.
[I am not a prophet. Even after regaining my memories, I could not know how much I should say. All I could do was say as little as possible.]
It sounded like an excuse, but it was not wrong.
Instead of pressing him again, I halted my body high in the sky.
Seen from above, I could clearly feel how ruined the sanctuary had become.
“It will be difficult to restore the sanctuary, or the terraforming ruins here.”
[If these ruins had remained intact, we could have quickly turned it back into a blue star. Still, now that the Demon King is gone, the existing ruins should be enough for it to slowly return to a blue star.]
“Would the Demon King’s black stone not help?”
The energy contained in the Demon King’s black stone was on a different level from other black stones. Hundreds, thousands of times more darkness energy was gathered within it.
[If the ruins are modified to use black stones, they will no longer be able to draw energy from the star. Since they can draw enough energy from this star, there is no need to change them into something that uses a limited black stone.]
“Even if this star doesn’t need it, another star might…”
Stars without darkness energy flashed through my mind.
Paradise, and…
“Once this is over, I’ll have to check.”
Thinking about it, this might be the most important thing of all.
I resolved once more never to forget it.
I slung the spear over my back and struck the empty air downward with my uninjured hand.
Boom!
The air burst, and my body shot in the opposite direction.
I still could not use my body properly, but moving with magic was possible.
Gravity magic, air magic, even flight magic.
Mobilizing every spell for flying through the sky, I streaked across the heavens like an arrow.
My destination was the Magic Tower in the central mountain range of the continent.
I had to fly across half the continent.
Unfortunately, I could not use the Magic Tower on the outskirts of the sanctuary.
That Magic Tower had withstood an atomic bomb and the first hydrogen bomb, but it had not endured the remaining explosions.
Just as the dry lake had been utterly blown away, the Magic Tower had been smashed to pieces down to its underground levels.
My injuries had not fully healed, but I had to hurry.
Now that the Demon King was dead, the monsters on the broken moon would begin moving again.
I had to prepare before those monsters moved.
As I hurried on, Sof said,
[There is enough time. After we sealed the Demon King, the monsters on the moon did not move until we returned to the kingdom. Even I wondered if Shamara’s prophecy might have been wrong.]
If Sof’s words were correct, there was still time left.
To charge into the moon, I needed more preparation.
If I had that much time, I could even make a trip to Earth.
And as I crossed the sky, the half-destroyed moon above me shone down upon the ground with a gloomy light.
For an instant, an eerie ripple seemed to sweep past from the direction of the moon. Was it my imagination, or did a chill run down my spine?
***
Contrary to Sof’s expectations, there was not enough time.
The half-destroyed moon orbiting Trappist’s fourth planet.
The moon, which had once poured out monsters before being half-destroyed by human magic, had quietly circled above the planet for a very long time afterward.
After the moon was half-destroyed and humanity vanished, it had fallen silent.
Not long ago, one control entity and one human had appeared above the moon, but the human disappeared at once, and the control entity flew past the moon toward the sun.
The moon had become quiet after that, but now a living creature set foot upon it once more.
A monster descended onto the broken lunar surface, its tentacles thrashing.
More than half of its tentacles had been cut away, and even its magic black stone had been torn out, but this monster was a control entity that commanded other monsters.
A monster that had been on the planet, then had been flung here along with a human through the spatial movement ruins.
The human had returned to the planet through spatial movement ability, and the monster had been flung toward the sun, but in the end, it had failed to escape the planet’s gravity.
The control entity had made a wide orbit around the planet and returned once more to the broken satellite.
The monster drove its remaining tentacles into the ground.
The tentacles dug through the earth like drills.
Holes began to form in the soundless satellite.
It did not know that the Demon King was dead, but the control entity did not care.
Because the human had returned.
The human who had cornered it, a control entity.
The control entity intended to awaken the other monsters sleeping deep beneath the ground.
Drrrrrk!
Soil surged up, and rocks were flung away.
The hole grew deeper and deeper.
Moon (2)