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“Indeed. You have visited it yourself, so you must already possess knowledge of its existence.”
She was undoubtedly referring to the very Tower that had inflicted Ignas’s Curse upon us. No wonder the entire setup felt so bizarre from the start. Under normal parameters, clearing a Nightmare-difficulty instance should have bestowed a massive stat commendation as a reward; instead, we had been forcefully saddled with a cascade of highly debilitating penalties.
“I resolved to erect a Tower modeled precisely after the architecture that seals away the divine power of the Heroes. I intended to weave a perpetual curse upon the countless Heroes who failed to rescue me. Only when every last one of them has vanished from this realm will the Evil Gods finally bring absolute annihilation to this detestable world.”
As Ignas spoke, her cadence was heavily saturated with profound remorse. While she had certainly caused us an immense amount of grief, looking at her deeply sorrowful face made it impossible not to reconsider the tragic context of her lore.
Ignas fixed her gaze upon us. Her long eyelashes trembled subtly, and her fading voice drifted down between us like falling flower petals.
“I am deeply sorry.”
“…….”
“The target of my unbridled fury should never have been you. Blinded by my own burning resentment, I committed an act that should never have been brought to fruition.”
Ignas’s pale white hands vibrated with a continuous tremor. The remorseful mermaid appeared more fragile and diminutive than any entity I had ever encountered in this world. Biting her lower lip tightly as if fighting to suppress a wave of overwhelming emotion, her shoulders shook intermittently. Was she weeping? Or was she desperately holding back her tears?
“What was it that made you desire to offer this apology now?”
I carefully advanced the dialogue tree. Out of the mountain of unresolved questions lingering in my mind, this was the absolute core of my curiosity. Why had Ignas manifested before us once again? And what could have possibly altered her internal parameters to make her want to undo everything?
Her tranquil voice rippled outward through the open space like waves disrupting a still pond.
“The Evil God…… never brought ruin upon Dolwing.”
Slowly, Ignas lowered her eyes to look at the unified gemstone cupped within my hands. She let out a soft, defeated sigh.
“The entity you previously encountered was merely a fragment of my residual malice. A frozen snapshot of my consciousness from the ancient past, frozen at the exact moment I forged my covenant with the Evil God. At that point in time, I was entirely consumed by fury, desiring nothing short of absolute destruction.”
“…….”
“To anchor that specific malice to this realm, the Evil God forcefully fractured my very soul. Because my rage was so incredibly vast, it provided more than enough volatile energy for the Evil God to manipulate the Pearl through my hatred. Left behind with my fury forcefully stripped away, I was forced to observe this world with a cleared vision. And only then did I begin to perceive things in a slightly different light.”
“What kind of things do you mean?”
“……I ultimately realized that, in the grand scheme of things, I had simply allowed myself to be utilized as a convenient pawn yet again.”
A sudden breeze drifted from nowhere, rustling through Ignas’s disheveled hair. Making absolutely no effort to smooth her tangled tresses, her eyes had now entirely lost their luminous luster, leaving her with the vacant expression of someone who had completely surrendered to despair.
“Because I lacked the strength to defend my kin and safeguard our ancestral treasure, I was ruthlessly exploited by Dolwing to satisfy his desires. And the grand solution I arrived at to escape that agonizing subjugation was merely to alter the identity of my master—shifting my allegiance from Dolwing to the Evil God.”
“…….”
“Once the blinding fury that cloaked my vision finally dissipated, the absolute truth became clear. Because I possessed an inability to accept my own underlying weakness, I merely attempted to erase the memory of my fragility by projecting an explosive rage onto external targets.”
Ignas’s voice was thoroughly steeped in bittersweet regret, carrying an intense undercurrent of self-deprecation. She completely averted her gaze from us, behaving exactly like a person who felt she no longer possessed the right to look her victims in the eye.
The mermaid standing before us looked incredibly small. She seemed so thoroughly exhausted that it wouldn’t have been surprising if her character model simply fractured into pixels at any second. The sheer density of the trials she had endured must have subjected her to unimaginable psychological torment.
For some reason, I found myself feeling genuinely bad for Ignas. Even if she was nothing more than a digital construct synthesized inside a video game.
“Ignas-nim.”
I called out her name. I could immediately feel Sephiroth cutting a sharp, sideways glance toward me. Ah, for fck’s sake.* This absolute jerk was definitely going to weaponize this to tease me for a solid week. No… probably even longer than that.
But I had zero intention of suppressing the words I wanted to say just because of Sephiroth’s impending mockery. Since this world-building went to such extreme lengths to encourage immersion, I was fully prepared to personally indulge the narrative. If a tragic NPC with a heartbreaking backstory was standing right in front of me, visibly trembling like a genuinely traumatized human being, what was the harm in offering a single word of comfort? Even if she was just a cyber-entity synthesized from raw zeros and ones.
“You aren’t weak.”
“……What are you implying?”
“The circumstances were simply completely stacked against you. The adversaries who ambushed your kingdom were exceptionally malicious, and they were entirely fixated on exploiting your existence. You simply fell victim to a terrible stroke of misfortune. Suffering a defeat in a battle doesn’t inherently dictate that you are a weak person.”
“No. I am……”
“The same logic applies to your choice to accept the Evil God’s power. I mean, sure, I personally had to suffer through an immense amount of grueling manual labor because of that specific decision. But looking at the core motivation, you were simply trying to utilize the overwhelming authority of a higher entity to enact justified vengeance upon Dolwing, weren’t you?”
“But the objective reality remains that Dolwing continues to draw breath, and the Evil God merely intended to conclude our covenant by doing nothing more than demolishing Dolwing’s physical estate. Every single one of my actions was completely devoid of meaning.”
“Hey now. That’s absolutely not true.”
“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing right now?”
Sephiroth chimed in from the side, his voice dripping with pure, unadulterated bewilderment, but I completely blocked him out. I seriously shouldn’t have brought this guy along. Here I was, trying my hardest to craft a genuinely touching narrative moment, and he was just trying to shatter the emotional atmosphere by picking a fight.
“Precisely because Ignas-nim exerted such an incredible amount of effort to push the boundaries, haven’t we managed to advance all the way to this specific stage? Whether it’s Dolwing or the Evil God, we are going to completely smash them to pieces.”
“……The two of you will?”
“Yes. You’ve observed our past and future trajectories through your Pearl, so you must already be aware, right? This guy right here has actually clapped Dolwing’s cheeks once before in a previous timeline. From what I hear, the mechanical feedback of the kill felt spectacular. If he can take down that giant slime once, what’s stopping him from doing it a second time?”
“Blee. Seriously, what are you even doing right now?”
“We might have taken a slightly convoluted detour to get here, but regardless of the path, Ignas-nim’s choices absolutely carried meaning. We’re going to hunt down Dolwing very soon, and based on how the game progression is structured, the Evil God is a mandatory boss we have to clear anyway. So there’s absolutely no reason for you to beat yourself up like this.”
“You are……”
Ignas’s voice scattered into a soft, airy breath. She fixed a deeply wavering, emotional gaze directly onto me. Meanwhile, Sephiroth repeatedly jabbed his elbow straight into my ribs.
“I can recommend a really solid acting academy for you.”
“I told you I don’t need one.”
“No, seriously, you have immense talent for theatrics.”
“Quit bothering me, I’m being serious.”
“O Traveler who has traversed the boundaries of time.”
“Ah, yes ma’am.”
Right in the middle of my frantic bickering with Sephiroth, Ignas’s voice cleanly pierced through the noise. I instinctively corrected my posture into a rigid, polite stance and nodded, causing the corners of Ignas’s eyes to crinkle into a gentle, soft smile.
“My current manifestation will soon cease to exist.”
“……Excuse me?”
What kind of sudden, out-of-nowhere bombshell confession was this? Unable to mask my profound panic, I stared blankly at her, prompting Ignas to bashfully tap her tail against the stone floor.
No, wait, is discovering your impending digital erasure supposed to be a bashful moment?!
“I desperately desired to reclaim the scattered fragments of my malice that had crystallized into that distorted reality, but it proved entirely impossible through standard methodologies. However, I ultimately devised a solution.”
“…….”
“By staking the structural integrity of my own Heart and offering my entire existence as the ultimate catalyst, I have resolved to transform myself into the very Battleground traversed by the Heroes.”
“Ah.”
Come to think of it, the specific nomenclature of the event map was explicitly designated as Ignas’s Battleground. And the event tokens we had been farming were literally named Ignas’s Wrath.
“With every consecutive engagement the Heroes execute within that staging area, the localized fragments of my fury will be slowly chipped away by their hands, gradually dispersing into nothingness. While it remains entirely impossible to instantly purge a baseline malice that has festered across countless centuries, as the wheel of time continues to turn, a day will inevitably manifest where I am completely liberated from the shackles of this hatred.”
“……And that’s the underlying reason you voluntarily chose to become a PvP map?”
“Indeed. And within the parameters of that conflict, I harbored a deep desire that everyone would unite to safeguard a fragile entity mirroring my own vulnerability.”
Wow. So that was the underlying logic behind the system mechanics where the team instantly suffers a defeat conditions if their lowest-combat-rated member dies, and why the system bestows massive progression bonuses for carrying lower-level players. The scattered jigsaw pieces explaining the entire design philosophy of the event map were rapidly locking into place inside my brain.
“You should have just played well from the very start. Throwing a pity party at the literal finish line is a bit pathetic.”
“Can you please phrase your words slightly more nicely for once?”
I resolved to entirely ignore Sephiroth, who was continuously doing his absolute best to murder the emotional atmosphere. Fortunately, since he hadn’t raised his voice enough to register within her audio parameters, Ignas’s expression remained perfectly serene and warm.
“The artifact currently resting within your palms is my true Heart. That vessel will serve as the absolute key to unlocking the path ahead of you.”
“A key……”
“I beg of you…… correct the trajectory of my catastrophic failures.”
The dialogue line carried the unmistakable weight of a final, binding testament. The exact millisecond the script concluded, Ignas’s avatar began to turn semi-transparent. Her outer parameters slowly began fracturing into raw pixel data, before scattering into the air like fine, pale dust caught in a heavy wind.
“Wa-Wait a single minute!”
I frantically called out to her, but the dissolving particle effects showed no signs of stopping.
“Do you happen to possess any knowledge regarding a Priest named Delwing?”
“Delwing.”
A faint, ethereal smile graced the half-dissolved geometry of Ignas’s lips. Her voice, now sounding like heavily distorted audio from a broken pixel file, echoed with an incredibly soft, gentle resonance.
“He is a thoroughly pitiful soul. Please…… extend my warmest regards to him.”
No, wait, how am I supposed to deliver your regards when you’re literally dissolving into thin air right in front of me……?
I parted my lips to argue the logistics, but Ignas’s scripted animation cut off my input completely.
“And finally…… receive this as my parting gift to you.”
Before I could type or say a single word, a vibrant system notification popped up directly in the center of my field of vision.
[System] Ignas’s Blessing acquired.
[Lore Description]: The Mermaid Princess, Ignas, has finally laid down the absolute weight of the fury that tormented her consciousness across an eternity. By sacrificing her entire existence as a catalyst, she has exerted every ounce of her remaining power to realign the distorted trajectories of fate. From this moment onward, her residual wrath will be fragmented and sublimated through the hands of countless Heroes. This artifact serves as a token of her deep apology, dedicated to the individual who provided the final, decisive emotional push that allowed her to embrace this resolution.
[Permanent Passive Buffs]:
Talk about an absolute jackpot of stat modifiers! That 15% cooldown reduction alone is going to break your PvP scaling wide open. Now that Ignas has faded into pixels and left you with [Ignas’s Heart], do you head straight back to Dolwing to advance the main quest line, or do you take a brief moment to gloat to Sephiroth about how your “theatrics” just secured a legendary tier buff?
The excitement doesn't stop here! If you enjoyed this, you’ll adore Don’t Lay a Hand on Any Magical Girl Except Me!. Start reading now!
Read : Don’t Lay a Hand on Any Magical Girl Except Me!
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