chapter01 · 006-ep6
Episode 6: When I Become the King, My Mouth Starts Talking on Its Own
At nine the next morning, I stood alone in front of the Kanayama dungeon.
I'd already messaged Fujidou that I was diving now. Entry and exit records get kept no matter what, and going quietly would absolutely come back to bite me later.
Gear same as yesterday: the cheapest-looking iron sword they had.
People were lined up at the door today too, families included. A kid of about elementary school age got to tap the card for a parent and was losing his mind over it.
Peaceful. Peaceful is nice, but: people.
Even inside on Floor 1, explorers everywhere. Voices, footsteps, and through the walls, shouts like "It went that way!"
Bellow five lines deadpan in a crowd this lively and I'm just a public menace.
So I puttered around a while.
At a fork I slipped into a side passage and walked toward where the voices thinned. I found a small dead-end pocket forty minutes after entering.
One entrance, about half a classroom across. Nobody in it.
Straining my ears, I could just barely hear someone laughing far off. But at this distance, my voice shouldn't reach.
I set the sword down and breathed deep. One more full look around — still nobody; ceiling and walls all the same faintly glowing rock.
I'd rehearsed this plenty in the futon, so I knew how to throw the switch. Eyes closed, back to my second-year middle-school classroom. The window seat where I filled notebooks with nothing but the King's lore day after day, spine snapping straight for real every time I said that name. That voltage.
"—Before the kalpa's dawn I came, and past its end I remain."
A room of stone — the voice rang like crazy. But I didn't stop: all five lines, carried to the end, not one stumble.
A screen floated up.
True Name: Chaos Telos Kurnugias
Job: Abyss King Who Rules the End
STR: 8 (+Unmeasurable / Release Rate ???)
It's here!
And the instant I thought it, my body went light. ...Wait, is everything around me slow? The whole world's gone slow-motion or something.
I gave a pebble at my feet a light kick. Just that, and it flew to the wall and bounced back with a high clang.
Whoa. What IS this.
Tried swinging the borrowed sword, too. Yesterday it was heavy even two-handed; now it waggles around one-handed like a ruler.
So this is what "Release Rate ???" gets you. I know it's not the full thing, but I can't tell if we're talking a tenth or a hundredth. And it makes THIS much difference?
Then something flickered at the edge of my vision. My own bangs. Grown out a little.
This morning they hit my eyebrows; now they're over my eyes. And the tips were blacker than my original black hair. Black to a faintly unsettling degree.
I checked my face in the flat of the blade, and even my eye color had changed. Right eye black, left eye a pale white.
Exactly the design art from †The Book of the King†. Long jet-black hair, right eye black, left eye white. The face this-era me spent hours and hours drawing. No halo, no coat, no wings, granted — but I was unmistakably drifting toward it.
(No, wait.)
What happens if I do the introduction in front of people?
A high schooler with grown-out hair and one white eye, deadpanning five lines that start with "Before the kalpa's dawn I came, and past its end I remain"? If I saw that in passing, I'd 100% get my phone out.
A hood. I need a hood. Buying one today, on the way home. Absolutely.
But more urgently — I've only got ten minutes.
First things first: try running.
Step one, and the exit of the rock room was right in my face. Step two, I was out in the passage. I couldn't hold the curve of the corner and drifted wide; I caught the wall with a hand and hauled myself back, rough rock scraping across my palm.
Whoa. My own feet nearly left me behind.
Halved my stride. Even then, the scenery streamed backward faster than a bike going downhill.
Before any voices closed in, I ducked down another side passage.
Oh — there one is.
A single goblin with its back to the wall, gnawing on something. Squelchy, wet little sounds. A summer-garbage-corner smell jabbed at the back of my nose.
It noticed me.
Whatever it was chewing got tossed, and the wooden club went up. Shrilling at full volume, it leaped.
Yesterday, I couldn't dodge this. Today?
The raised club looked absurdly slow over my head. I could see the splinters on it; I could even see the order the force loaded into those skinny arms.
One step, in under it.
Before it could fall, I was already inside its guard.
Too close! Overdid it. The goblin's chest was right at my nose — no room to swing the sword.
Okay, then — this.
I pushed its chest with my shoulder. Less a push than a touch. The green body floated up weightlessly and drifted back two steps' worth. Perfect range.
Into the body as it dropped, I swung the sword flat.
Resistance: almost insultingly little. The hide that was so hard yesterday cut like paper.
At the far end of my follow-through, the club clattered to the floor a beat late, one dry note ringing down the passage.
The goblin's body crumbled away along the line of the cut, trickling into nothing. Where it finished turning to sand, a single fang lay on the ground.
The thing that launched me yesterday — erased in one hit. My hands still held the lightness of that cut, and my heart was hammering loud enough to hear.
......Man. This is RIDICULOUSLY fun!
"—Felled, then."
Only after I said it did something feel off.
I'd meant to shout "I got it!"
The voice was low. And the words I'd aimed for had been swapped out for different ones somewhere in the back of my throat.
As a test, I tried talking again.
What I'd meant to say: hold on, I literally cannot talk normal like this.
"—Trifling."
Wait. Was that me just now?
"Insanely strong" was the plan, and out loud it became "Trifling."
A chill crawled up my back.
This-era me had set the King's speech patterns too. Naturally — of course he had. First-person pronoun, sentence endings, even the placement of the punctuation. And now all of it had descended on me wholesale.
This time, I made a conscious effort to speak like a normal person.
What I'd meant to say: no, hold on, this thing won't let me talk normal.
"—It cannot be helped."
Nobody asked about inevitability!
Again. I tried to say "this is insane."
"—Hmm."
Don't "Hmm" me!
However careful I was, the words auto-converted the instant they left my mouth. What am I, predictive text?
One mercy: inside my head, I could still think like myself.
(Calm down. Calm down, Ichinose Saku. It's only the mouth.)
"—Do not falter. I am I."
Quiet, you.
(Shut up.)
"—Silence, too, is a choice of the King."
This guy even makes shutting up sound cool.
Who the hell specced him like this?
...I did!
Then a new display appeared in front of me.
Lv: 1 → Lv: 2
- XP earned is halved (King's power in use)
Halved?
I reread it and pressed my forehead into the wall.
It wants me to kill things in base form? Seriously?
No, calm down. Half is still half. Better than none.
That's what I told myself, and as I pulled my face off the wall, one more screen floated up.
Condition fulfilled.
Unlocking skill.
【The Aloof King Stands Alone】
I knew it. No — "knew it" is underselling it. I wrote it.
A page of †The Book of the King† from around the autumn of eighth grade. Pretty sure I wrote it the day after a fight with my friends.
I opened the description.
【The Aloof King Stands Alone】
"The King needs no one at his back. Behind me there is, always and only, the End."
Effect: Release Rate of the King's power rises while acting alone
- Effect lost while acting alongside others
In the middle of that side passage, I couldn't move for a good while.
The only reason I'd written it: "a solitary king who leans on no one is cool." It was right after the fight, so there was probably some excuse-making mixed in.
And the me who wrote it is, at this very moment, hunting for a justification to dive where his friends can't see.
Hey. Past me. Could you see the future or something? ...No. I just haven't changed at all, have I.
Ten minutes passed like that, and the King's stats vanished.
Body and sword put their weight back on, and the world's speed returned. I felt my bangs: morning length again.
I sat down on the floor and looked up at the ceiling.
The promise stands: after the entrance ceremony, the five of us dive together.
When that happens, this skill stops working. And unless I can do the introduction deadpan in front of all four, I can't even become the King in the first place. Diving as five, I'm a STR-8 high schooler and nothing more.
What am I supposed to do with this?
...Well, there's still time before the ceremony. All I have to do is get everything usable into usable shape by then.
Thinking I'd buy a hooded jacket on the way home, I pulled in another breath.
"—Before the kalpa's dawn I came, and past its end I remain."
All five lines, to the very end.
That day, all told: three ten-minute Kings, forty-one goblins down on Floor 1. During the King stretches it was nothing but running — find one, cut it down.
In the third ten minutes, I found three bunched up in a dead end.
One noticed me and started shrieking. The other two turned our way with club and rusted dagger raised.
Three on one, alone, is normally where you back off. But my feet went forward on their own.
The lead one leapt. While it was still in the air, I swept its torso with the sword. Sand burst — and through that sand, the second one's club came in flat from the side. I just tilted my head, and the wind of it skimmed past my ear.
The return stroke took the second one.
The third had frozen with its dagger thrust out.
It's deciding — fight or run.
While it decided, I was already in front of it.
Left fist into its chest. Just the touch, and the small body rolled backward, turning to sand before it stopped rolling.
"—Did you think numbers would carry you to me?"
Out on its own again. Though the gist wasn't wrong.
As the King, goblins end at a touch — fist or sword, same deal. So the actual problem is finding them: how many I can kill comes down to how much ground I cover in ten minutes.
What a luxurious problem, seriously. This deep in, nobody sees a thing — tomorrow, I'll go as hard as I please.