The Great Mage Returns After 4000 Years

Translator: Alpha0210

Demigod.

Half-god, a god's half-blood, or a god's child......

It was a word with many meanings, but if it had come from Lukas's mouth, there was no question what it referred to.

"What?"

The question slipped out reflexively. Not because he'd misheard, of course, but Lukas continued in that characteristically calm tone of his.

"I said Demigods. They call themselves half-gods, but they aren't beings to be dismissed so simply. They possess power no different from a god's. Monsters who can start a war alone, and end it alone...... Even if those hailed as heroes joined forces, victory against them could never be guaranteed. They..."

At some point, Residue had let most of Lukas's composed explanation wash over him.

He knew perfectly well what the Demigods were. Perhaps even better than Lukas did... because once, he had trained to make their Divine Power his primary weapon... well, not trained, exactly, but he had given it serious thought in his own way.

What mattered most was that their name had come up now, of all times.

"......"

No, wait.

'Don't tell me this is......'

He looked at Lukas's face.

A boyish face. A face whose every emotion could be read at a glance. A face that simply didn't suit someone who'd been through hell and back... the face of a young man.

He recalled Iris's face.

She, too, had never been skilled at hiding what she felt. Her mask had been so thin that a single reckless move from Residue could startle her into casting it off entirely.

"...Hah."

And after letting out one more witless sound, this time he looked up at the sky.

Surely not. Could this place be......

*

The questions and answers went on for quite a while. Probably well over thirty minutes.

Residue asked about this world's state of affairs, its culture, its geography, and slowly pieced the answers together in his head. The more he did, the more it felt as though something vague and uncertain was gradually taking on a distinct shape.

At first he denied it, then he half believed it, and by the time the conversation wound down, he had arrived at a sour conclusion.

This place was... the past.

But it was not Residue's past.

This was Lukas Trowman's Home Universe, at a point before he became an Absolute... in other words, roughly 4,000 years before he left this universe.

Measured by this universe's time, of course.

'Why?'

Residue should have gone to 'The Outside', so why had he ended up in this universe's past?

The first thought that came to him was that this place might, in fact, be 'The Outside'. Everything he was seeing now could be a production staged by Destruction. He couldn't imagine what reason would justify this much effort, but put another way, if such a reason existed, then creating a single world might well be possible. No. It would certainly be possible. It was strange to think of things called 'Destruction' engaging in creation, but still.

...But for this guess to hold, there was something that absolutely had to be uncovered.

The purpose behind staging this farce.

Destruction's purpose... Lukas's purpose... should have been to kill Residue.

He had already declared as much before. That he regarded Residue as his greatest enemy. That he would wage war carrying exactly that resolve.

"That's about all I have to say......"

In the meantime, the Lukas before him spoke again.

"Judging by your face, still nothing's coming back to you."

"......"

Residue looked at him again.

Then what was this Lukas?

Was 'Destruction' playing a part? Did it recognize itself as a false existence? Did the real Lukas, the one Residue knew, know about this? How much of it, from beginning to end, was intended, and what did he even want?

At the same time, his thoughts stretched toward another possibility.

...If this place wasn't a stage prepared by Destruction, but truly the past.

Then was he standing, right now, before the Lukas Trowman of the past?

"......"

The weight of that fact was anything but light, and for a moment, Residue's head swam.

"Are you all right?"

Perhaps he had noticed the color draining from Residue's face. Lukas asked.

He wasn't particularly all right, but he answered reflexively.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"...Come to think of it, I haven't mentioned the most important thing."

"What?"

"Introductions. Though you did seem to know me already......"

Lukas looked as though he had something more to say, but closed his mouth again. It seemed he had swallowed whatever words had just risen to mind.

And then he began to say something that was, most likely, different from what he had been thinking.

"I'm Lukas. A mage. Right now I'm traveling the continent with my companions, focused on a single goal. To uncover the true nature and purpose of these Demigods I mentioned, and if they're mocking the world out of clear malice, to stop them."

"How righteous."

When Residue muttered that, Lukas let out a sigh.

"...Not really."

"......"

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Stop playing dumb. I've said everything I had to say. I answered your questions as faithfully as I could. At this point, wouldn't it be common courtesy to at least give me your name?"

"You've been going on about courtesy for a while now."

When it hardly suits you. He swallowed that last part.

The Lukas Residue knew had never been particularly courteous either, but, well. Who could say. Maybe he'd been different back in this era.

"Residue."

"Residue... Is that an alias?"

"It's my true name. Though, well, I did come up with it myself."

"You named yourself? Why?"

"Circumstances called for it. It's a dull, tedious story. To put it briefly, who I was, what kind of being I wanted to become, what exactly I wanted to do. There came a moment when I had to decide those things for myself. The name was a byproduct of that."

"......"

Seeing the puzzled look on Lukas's face, Residue felt an odd dryness in his mouth. Maybe it wasn't something this version of him could be expected to understand.

"But you. What you really want to ask isn't my name or anything like that, is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"There's something you're far more curious about, isn't there?"

Residue said, briefly running a hand over his own face.

"You and me. We're wearing faces this alike. It was probably the thing that shocked you most when you saw me, yet you haven't said a word about it. Are you avoiding it on purpose?"

"...Hm."

To this Lukas, it must have been a riddle. But the truth was nothing so grand.

They looked alike because, to begin with, they were the same body.

Of course, as things stood now, the two could hardly be taken for the exact same person. A person's impression comes not just from their features but from the expressions they habitually wear, the lines those expressions carve into the face, the small gestures, the mannerisms. All of it blends together naturally to form one's overall appearance.

Lukas was, as a rule, always expressionless. His posture was upright, his gaze sunken and subdued. His long hair was kept calm and neatly ordered, as if to speak for his character...... Residue, by contrast, almost always had a sardonic smile hanging at the corner of his mouth. His habitual slouch gave him a crooked, insolent air, and his hair, never tended, was scattered in a wild tangle.

The end result was that even if the two stood side by side, they had reached the point where they could somehow be told apart. Change had accumulated in each of them, as much as the years they had lived.

Even so, no one would ever think them completely unrelated. If Residue changed his expression right now and mimicked that smarmy look, a hundred out of a hundred people would mistake him for Lukas.

And there was no way this guy didn't know it.

'And yet he kept his mouth shut tight about it.'

Residue pressed him silently with his gaze alone, but Lukas took on the face of a man who couldn't easily answer. It wasn't that he was at a loss for words; it felt more like he was hesitating over whether he should say it aloud at all.

At length, Lukas spoke.

"You're right. That fact bothered me from the start. But you were also the one who made me accept it."

"Did I say something more?"

"That you're my older brother."

Residue froze.

"My older brother. That's what you said."

"......"

He knew about Lukas Trowman's origins, too.

He'd been born into a reasonably wealthy family, but was abandoned at an Orphanage over some family circumstance or other. The Orphanage's director, the darkness lurking within it, the twist that left a bad taste behind, and the members of Lukas's family who died along the way......

...Lukas had relived that past in the Dumpsite of the World of Void. It was the moment his faded memories turned vivid again. Naturally, Residue too remembered that past with relative clarity.

'If this really is the past......'

The Lukas of now.

This young Lukas would have erased his memories of the Orphanage himself.

Reminding him would be easy, but it didn't strike Residue as a particularly amusing thing to do.

"...I never once imagined I might have siblings. But seeing your face, I had no choice but to believe it. I felt a strange familiarity and a strange discomfort at the same time."

"......"

So this guy thought of him as his older brother, did he.

Residue couldn't find the situation purely entertaining.

Because Lukas actually had someone who deserved to be called his older brother.

Mark Trowman.

They were brothers by blood, and in the World of Void they had even finished their dramatic reunion. Come to think of it, Mark had become Destruction as well. Had he reunited with Lukas, who had likewise become Destruction?

It was half intuition, but Residue suspected not. Lukas was simply a special case; most beings couldn't hope to keep their sanity in 'The Outside'......

...Then, after all, wasn't it possible this place wasn't 'The Outside'? Residue had, at any rate, kept his sanity.

No. Was there a chance he had already gone mad and was seeing things?

"Heh heh......"

The thought that had suddenly occurred to him was likelier than he cared to admit, and a hollow laugh escaped him.

Thinking on it a little more, if this place wasn't 'The Outside', that wasn't a good situation for Residue either. There truly was no time left to waste. He would have to figure out the scheme behind all this in due course, but honestly, it would be better if this whole thing were a stage directed by Destruction.

In the middle of that thought, Residue abruptly muttered.

"Damn it."

"What?"

"Why am I suddenly thinking so much?"

He said it while watching Lukas's expression turn uncertain.

"It's not like me at all. Is it your fault?"

"I don't know what you're trying to say."

"Nonsense, as always. Just let it slide."

When thoughts pile up, the body grows sluggish.

Conversely, when there are no thoughts at all, the body turns comparatively light.

At some point Residue had come to approach life the latter way, yet strangely, ever since falling into this bizarre place, he felt he had been thinking far too much.

Was it because of the Missing Memory? Or because he still hadn't fully grasped the situation?

...To simplify his thoughts, he had to simplify the situation as well.

For that, he needed something to pin down, even by force. Treat everything in sight as uncertain, and the inferences would never end.

First. Whether this place was 'The Outside' or somewhere else. On that point, he would count it as unknown. There was no way of learning it unless Destruction came and taught him the truth in person.

And second. Until information came in that could change the situation, he would stop racking his brain. That amounted to declaring he wouldn't make plans, but he decided to take finding the 'Missing Memory', however vaguely, as his one and only goal. Somehow he had a hunch that the thread for untangling this jumbled mess would be found there.

Situation sorted.

"Right. Shall we go, then?"

"Go? Go where?"

"To get something to eat. I'm still nowhere near full. I've got no money, so you're treating."

"......"

Come to think of it, what had become of the Unified World?

The ones who would be waiting there on nothing but Residue's word; the ones bewildered by the sudden disappearance of the Ruler and the Four Knights. Their faces flitted through his mind. Sedi's and Luca's faces surfaced for a moment, too.

The last face to take shape was the Half King's, and strangely, the moment he pictured her, the worry that had just begun to raise its head vanished without a trace.

Well, she'd handle it.

It wasn't as if he could afford to worry about that side anyway.

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