His ears felt muffled, as if he had sunk deep underwater.
The shrieking cries of the howling abomination reached him from far away.
Though this was already the second time he was experiencing it, it was so vivid that it would not have felt strange to call it reality rather than a memory.
‘...So this is how it was.’
At the time, he had been feeling these emotions, this pain.
He had thought he had not forgotten, but that was not true.
Regarda had forgotten.
The pain and despair of losing Ariel.
The rage at himself for failing to protect her.
He had thought he had never forgotten them, but now that he had returned, how was it?
He had been in far greater despair than he remembered, and he had been far angrier.
Even so, nothing changed.
In the end, he had been defeated once again, and now he merely lay before the Dragon Temple with his body covered in wounds, waiting for death.
Still, perhaps because his mind knew this was a scene from within his memories,
he was able to examine the situation a little more coolly than he had back then.
For example, the magical sight of the abomination that had been greedily devouring his body evaporating in an instant.
Or the figure of a being that appeared like a ghost through the gap it left behind.
“Regarda Ovier.”
The empty expression of the person slowly approaching him.
The gloomy tone of voice.
“I finally found you.”
With that as the last thing he heard, the world went out for a while.
Had he died then, or had he merely lost consciousness?
Even that, he could not know.
* * *
“Are you coming to your senses?”
After a brief blackout, the scene within his memory began to continue again.
Some time had passed.
“......Kreutzwald.”
“Oh, so you know me.”
Kreutzwald looked genuinely surprised.
Of course, in the original memory, there had been no such thing as Regarda recognizing Kreutzwald at a glance.
So this was some kind of false reality based on his memories.
Kreutzwald was smiling benevolently, exactly as he had in his memory.
Not with the hollow, sinister expression he had seen just before.
“You must be disoriented, and your memories a little confused. I barely managed to save you just before you died.”
“......”
“To put it plainly, you are a kind of undead, but since this is necromancy I developed myself, it is of an entirely different order. Can you not feel it as well? The power newly lodged within your body.”
At those words, he raised his arm and looked his body over this way and that. It was Regarda’s own familiar body.
In truth, he had lived a thousand years in this body Kreutzwald had made for him, so it was far more familiar to him than his original flesh.
“Heh-heh... Yes. You must be terribly confused.”
When he said nothing, Kreutzwald smiled and rose from his seat.
What had his original self said?
How had he reacted?
There was no way he could remember even that.
So he opened his mouth not as his past self, but as the Regarda of now.
“Why did you save me?”
Back then, he probably had not asked such a question.
He would simply have been grateful that he had been granted one more chance, trusted Kreutzwald, and thought he would protect Ariel no matter what happened.
That was how he would have thought and acted.
At Regarda’s question, Kreutzwald’s smile deepened further.
“Why did I save you...... That is quite a profound question.”
He surely did not say it because the question was truly profound.
It was a roundabout way of asking why he would question something so obvious.
“When someone is dying before your eyes, is there any reason not to save them?”
“You don’t say ‘I finally found you’ to someone like that.”
“I am a necromancer. I will admit that I was pleased to have the chance to use a new form of necromancy. For that, I apologize.”
“You also knew my name.”
“It is not a name known among ordinary people. But I know it. The Dragon Knight, Regarda Ovier.”
Every explanation was plausible.
He did not hesitate in his answers, either, so he did not seem to be lying.
The emotion leaking from him was also exceedingly calm.
Even though Regarda had lived a thousand years and had now returned to the scene of a memory from a thousand years ago, it was natural enough that he almost could not notice anything strange.
Perhaps he could have simply accepted it and moved on.
If he had not heard the truth about Kreutzwald from the mage, that was.
“All right, all right. To be more honest, Regarda, it is true that I was searching for you. Because there is something you must do.”
This was a false reality reconstructed from past memories.
Or perhaps a different parallel world.
“You are to go to Arileia. I have prepared everything.”
Even so, in the end, the story flowed in the same direction.
“Was protecting the dragon not your mission, and your very creed?”
Back then, too, Kreutzwald had told him to go to Arileia, and Regarda, who had thought only of protecting the sealed Ariel, had followed him without complaint.
But not now.
This place was not reality.
He now knew that Ariel could not awaken again, no matter what methods were used.
“......That is true.”
Another dragon he had to protect existed in reality.
By the name of Freya.
“I have prepared everything in Arileia.”
So he was no longer shaken by Kreutzwald’s words.
He forcibly dragged up an exceedingly old memory.
And with difficulty, he recalled it.
“A resting place where a dragon may dwell. A race that will exist solely for that purpose. If I go to Arileia......”
“Abelard Pavlenko.”
A name he had forgotten for a very long time.
The person who had overseen every magical facility in Arileia, and the mage who had turned the nearby sea into cursed waters.
The reason he could recall the name Abelard Pavlenko, and the memories of that time, was probably because this place was part of his memories.
That was why, as though provoking him, he cut off Kreutzwald’s words and spoke that name.
“Seek out the Archmage Abelard Pavlenko. Then everything will be resolved.”
“......”
“If you wait and keep waiting, an opportunity will come someday. I will help make it so. Go to Arileia and wait quietly.”
In the actual past, he had gone to Arileia according to Kreutzwald’s words, and the person he had met there was Abelard Pavlenko.
And he had indeed waited.
It was not that he had simply waited while blindly trusting Kreutzwald’s words, but neither had he been without expectation.
If it was him, he would surely find a way.
Just as he had revived Regarda, he would surely restore Ariel as well.
It was true that Regarda had held on to that tiny sliver of hope.
“......”
“Is that what you want to say?”
But now he knew how empty a dream that had been.
He could also tell that Kreutzwald himself was a mass of contradictions, a man stained with lies.
No, was he even truly human?
If he were a proper human, then even at this very moment, he could not have been emitting the same emotions as before with not the slightest disturbance.
Unless, from the very beginning, he had been deliberately selecting only the appropriate emotions and drawing them out.
“Hmm... Strange. There is no way you and Abelard know each other.”
Kreutzwald rubbed his chin and looked around.
“Did Ariel tell you something? That obstinate dragon would never do such a thing.”
The speed at which he turned his head gradually grew faster.
“Then did I underestimate you? No, that is not it either.”
Then he stopped abruptly and smiled as if he had realized something.
He nodded.
“I see.”
Even through all that, the flow of his emotions remained terrifyingly steady.
“This is not reality.”
At the same time, Kreutzwald’s staff began to emit light.
Regarda also immediately reached out and gripped his spear, but Kreutzwald was one step faster.
“Speak. From what point in time are you, Regarda?”
Abyss-dark eyes gleaming before him rushed right up to Regarda’s nose.
Before he knew it, the sharpened tip of the staff was aimed at the crown of his head.
This, too, was a reaction he had never expected.
He had not even imagined that events would unfold this way.
Kreutzwald.
Just where, and how far ahead, had he seen?
“From what point in time, you say... Then let me ask you instead.”
So Regarda slowly, but surely, drew up his intent from deep within his chest.
“Just what future did you see?”
The dragon’s intent that burst forth like an explosion collided with Kreutzwald’s magic.
The impact created light and swallowed the world.
“......”
When he opened his eyes again, he was already standing in the middle of the 71st floor of the Abyss.
* * *
Even after the day Abelard first met Kreutzwald, time continued to flow swiftly.
In the meantime, Abelard married a daughter of the prestigious magical house of Pavlenko and became a member of the family.
For Abelard, who had already been peerless, it was like being given wings.
Whatever political reasons lay behind it did not matter.
What mattered was that the name of Pavlenko had been added to Abelard’s talent.
Abelard’s skill and fame.
The Pavlenko family’s power and influence had been joined together.
Abelard quite literally soared.
When he had first met Kreutzwald, he had been a mage who had reached the 5th Circle in the shortest time ever, but because he was from the underground city, he had been ignorant of the ways of the world, chasing empty dreams, and unable to settle in any one school, giving the impression that all he did was learn magic. But now, eight years later, he was the greatest mage of the current era, beyond anyone’s dispute.
And no wonder, for from the time he entered the path of magic to the time he reached the 7th Circle, only fourteen years had passed.
Even if one searched through the history of magic, this was an unprecedented great record, and on top of that, it was said that he already stood on the verge of the next realm.
In recognition of his achievements, his position as the next Master of the Magic Tower was all but confirmed.
He had not yet received everything through formal succession, but he had already obtained the authority to enter the top floor of the Magic Tower.
There was nothing that could stand in the way of Abelard, who had the support of most of Tetradia’s mages and the backing of the Pavlenko family.
Thus, exactly fourteen years after being hauled up from the underground city, he reached the top floor of the Magic Tower.
“How moving.”
The 150th floor of the Magic Tower.
With only slight exaggeration, each and every floor of the mages’ tower was so vast that it could be called a world unto itself, and so its summit could truly be described as touching the sky.
In that sense, he had kept the vow he had once made to Ren Hank.
“It’s so moving I might yawn.”
Yet Abelard’s expression, despite being the one who had achieved it, showed little change.
Was that not only natural?
There was no reason to be excited or delighted by an obvious result he had already known would come.
He had only held a small expectation that perhaps the top floor of the Magic Tower might be different in some way.
After seeing the previous Master of the Magic Tower, that expectation had been greatly diminished, but it had existed nonetheless.
And the sky as well.
Would the sky seen from the top of the Magic Tower be different?
Would it not be completely different from the sky he had looked up at from the gutter?
At that height, might even the sky be within his grasp?
But when he actually arrived and looked at it, the sky was simply the sky.
It was still the sky, and his hand could not reach it.
The clouds were right beside him, but if he looked up, there was still more sky above.
“......How dull.”
As he stared at the sky outside the window with empty eyes,
a voice he had once heard abruptly sounded from behind him.
“No.”
A gloomy and hollow voice he was hearing for the first time in eight years, a voice terribly forced and artificial.
“It will not be dull at all.”
It was the second meeting between Kreutzwald and Abelard.