In history and mythology, some mortals dreamed of immortality, but all immortals longed for mortality, and there was a reason for that. For five repeated nine months, I also had the experience of clinging to my memories and then suffering from the solitude that followed. Kyle’s nine months were probably repeated not only five times.
“I told you, you wouldn’t want to know.”
Kyle laughed lightly. It was eventually swallowed up by the loud popping of the mana explosion and the awful silence between.
“I heard you say you can ‘fix’ Keran Illestia. After that, it seems that there has been a pretty big change. What did you do to him?”
“I fixed it, the ‘bug’.”
After saying that, Kyle climbed a short rope ladder placed on the outer wall of the cockpit and reached out his hand. Dalton’s tomboy, who had a lot of tree-climbing experience, could have easily climbed the rope ladder without any help, but it seemed like Kyle wanted me to hold his hand, so I obliged.
We walked around the upper deck for a while. Then past the stars, the moon, and the clouds, a seemingly black flame filled my vision. It wasn’t a mana explosion—shooting them over people’s heads was to make them visible from a distance, and anyone with common sense wouldn’t use a color that would blend into the night sky…
“’Witch’s Path’?”
I stopped in my tracks, dumbfounded, and Kyle looked back at me with one foot in the air, then shrugged nonchalantly.
“In theory. I call it ‘Terminal’ though.”
***
The Witch’s Path—or, to borrow Kyle’s expression, the terminal—didn’t feel as terrifying as it looked from the outside. It was dark enough that you couldn’t tell which way your toes were pointing, and it seemed odd and looked like it would go on for what seemed like forever.
Everywhere I looked, there were whitish, glowing things, like fragments of letters, that felt like stars. I felt like I had stepped into the starry sky.
But part of me was also counting my steps steadily, and when I reached 100 steps, I made sure that my nose was not crooked. Kyle laughed in tears when he saw me subtly rubbing the bridge of my nose.
“Innocent Ari, that’s just something we made up to prevent characters like us from easily accessing the system.” He said.
“I can’t believe everything you say.”
Embarrassed, I replied a bit grumpily.
“It’s only been ten minutes since I found out I was a character in someone’s creation.”
As we walked through the infinitely expanding space, Kyle repeatedly explained the concepts of “game,” “system,” and “bug” to me. By the end, I had a bit better grasp on them than someone who was hearing them for the first time.
However, understanding them in my head and accepting them in my heart are two completely different matters, and I soon became very upset…
According to his story, in the ‘game’ that depicted Rosemary Blossom’s school life, I was neither the protagonist nor a supporting character. It seemed that I wasn’t even a minor character. I was originally a character who was part of the background or mentioned in passing. I was the ‘childhood friend’ mentioned when someone pointed at Kyle and said, ‘His childhood friend went to school here.’
I wanted to be Ariel Dalton, not Kyle Villard’s childhood friend. However, how insignificant Ariel Dalton, who is not Kyle Villard’s childhood friend, was to the ‘Game’ or ‘System’, to the extent that there was a mould for casting a background character like me—characters that have brown hair and blue eyes.
‘The kids who came out of the same mould shared some of their appearance, personalities, and past settings, so you could easily identify some of them.’
Names came to mind as soon as I heard that. Anais O’Brien, Mikaela Maynard, and now Maeve Proctor, who became Maeve Kirkpatrick. They all climbed a Holly tree at the age of five and fell. They all had brown hair and blue eyes.
I pursed my lips, trying to think of something to say. It was because of the absurdity and, at the same time, the terrifying assertion that some of my memories might be nothing more than a setting created by an absolute being—that was certainly impossible to accept without objection.
I quickly realized that struggling would only lead me deeper into the mire. Another idea came to mind. I wonder if my mould sisters also have Alyssa, Rohan, and a Lilu, and if so, which one of them is real. If there were multiple Lilu’s, she wouldn’t be the cutest cat in the world.
What is true, and what is real? Whatever, however, and wherever I started, as I began digging, it all turned out to be a deserted place. As I became engrossed in digging, Kyle glanced at me, seemingly unconcerned about my state of being absorbed in the task. He started idle conversations as if contemplating his existence was not particularly important to him.
Perhaps he had long been immune to despair like this. Time was overflowing anyway. A long time that I didn’t want to know about.
“Anais O’Brien is blonde.”
“She dyes her hair.”
“Wow, at this point, shouldn’t her hair roots have to work hard to grow blonde?”
“You say the same thing as Kelly.”
Anyway, Kyle Villard was a master at making Ariel Dalton laugh. I felt quite pleased when he told me that, if I looked closely, I also looked like Anais, because Anais O’Brien was one of the prettiest people I’d ever seen. I remembered her immaculate beauty, and then I pictured seeing my face in the mirror in the morning. Come to think of it, Anais also seemed to have round eyes like mine.
“The ‘Queen of the Banquet’ crown, why did you give it to Blossom? I mean, it doesn’t have to be to anyone in particular, but to Blossom…”
I felt that I could take some teasing from Kyle now, so I asked, and as expected, the corners of his mouth twitched.
“Did you expect?”
“No!”
It didn’t look like he would stop with a little teasing, so I immediately withdrew. But maybe it was too late for that, and Kyle, drunk with excitement and the sudden outpouring of attention, began to imitate my behaviour at the queen parade. My short judgment was deplorable.
“The ‘Queen’s Crown’ is the best item you can get in the first semester. No matter who I gave it to, she would have taken it away… by any means.”
“Well, she can use almost any means.”
Just before I could grab him by the hair again, he raised an eyebrow and said, “That’s right. You already have something far more important anyway.”
I had a hunch that the ‘important thing’ that Kyle was mentioning was Grandpa Damien’s pocket watch. A beautiful, heavy chunk of brass that at some point occupied the deepest place in my bag. I liked Grandpa Damien as much as Kyle, but I couldn’t fathom why Kyle was carrying around a broken watch just because it was his grandfather’s keepsake.
At first, I thought he had left it by mistake. But when he didn’t come back to find it for several days, I was convinced it wasn’t a mistake. Kyle really cared about it—more than his life—so if I lost it, he sure wouldn’t be able to stand still.
Come to think of it, how Grandpa Damien’s pocket watch came to be in my possession was also a mystery. When questioned, he muttered something else.
“If Rosemary Blossom ever threatens you, hand it over.”
And with that, our scurrying feet stopped. We found what we were looking for. Kyle had told me that the Witch’s Path, or terminal, leads to one place no matter which way you turn, so we’ve been walking casually so far.
Honestly, I had my doubts about his words. However, Kyle Villard, who claimed to know everything, might exaggerate, but he never lies about these things.
It was a huge, spinning wheel. It was so huge that each spoke of the wheel seemed to be as tall as me. Despite no one turning its handle, the water wheel absorbed scattered fragments of letters and spun itself on its own.
The thread wound around the spool was thicker than a human finger, and it shone in a variety of colors depending on the viewing angle. A tremendous amount of mana bounced in all directions according to the rotation of the spinning wheel.
No matter how you look at it, it was not an ordinary spinning wheel. I wasn’t even sure if I could call it a ‘spinning wheel’ in the first place.
Despite the intimidation it exuded, I found it easy to say its name.
“A… spinning… wheel of fate.”
“Or ‘scripter’. It is sometimes also referred to as ‘the world’s reason’, ever since Kaitlyn the Great went here.”
“How did Kaitlyn the Great end up here?”
“I don’t know, perhaps she wanted to be a witch?”
Kyle said, fumbling with the tightly spread, iridescent web.
“It was funny how Illestia’s theology, which seems the most absurd, is the closest to the truth.”
I couldn’t fully agree with him. In Illestia’s theology, the wheel of fate was the left index finger of the god Stia, and it changed freely according to her will. However, this seemed to be a completely different object. It felt more like a tool that simply outputs what it inputs than a part of an intelligent body that moves by its own intention.
In any case, Kyle had a point. Each person’s fate would be inscribed in the threads spun by the spinning wheel of fate. I tried to find Ariel Dalton’s thread among the sprawling threads. But they were all so dazzlingly shiny, that I kept mixing up the threads in my grasp with the ones I’d picked up earlier.
Suddenly, I noticed that one of the threads had knots tied here and there. When I pointed at it, Kyle raised an eyebrow in a rather unsatisfying manner.
“It’s Keran Illestia’s thread. Remember? I said I could ‘fix’ him.”
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