Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Compared to that first conversation, where every detail had been sharp and distinct, the Orc King’s memories afterward were more like a documentary with sweeping visuals and hollow content. They saw the Orc Legion, all corded muscle and massive backs. They saw the Night Elves, assassins lurking in the dark. They saw battles where giant axes and dark magic crossed in flashes of light and shadow. Tio and Kandaru stood on high ground, coldly watching a battle that raged for three days and three nights and left countless dead and wounded. And all of it was nothing more than a performance staged for others to see.

They saw thousands of Dark Elves raise their bows at the same time. Poisoned feathered arrows condensed with dark magic flew as one, like a Dark Moon piercing through the light. The Orc King, who had once conquered the world, let out a furious roar as ten thousand arrows drove through his body and nailed him to the stone wall. The Dark Elf Queen’s powerful magic followed close behind, turning him into silent white bones in an instant. The Black Knight descended without warning, mounted on a Bone Nightmare wreathed in blue-black flames, his heavy sword raised as he slaughtered the traitors. In the end, he drove his blade through Tio’s chest, and blood soaked the noble nine white roses.

The final result was this: Kandaru, King of the Orcs, was sealed upon the battlefield piled high with bones, while Tio, the Dark Queen, was stripped of her royal authority and priestly position for offending the God of Darkness. She was permanently exiled to a tower in the Undead City, where she waited as the Warden of the Royal Capital. The great Undead City was gradually sealed away over several centuries of waiting. Only on the ancient battlefield outside the city, where bones lay heaped upon bones, did Kandaru’s eyes continue to record a hundred desolate years in solitude.

Though it sounded as long and distant as an epic, for Ruiyin and Lars, only a short while had passed. Ruiyin rubbed her forehead, a little dizzy from watching what felt like a 3D movie, and said, “I do understand that part of history a little better now, but… where is the path we’re supposed to find? There wasn’t a single clue!”

They had now returned to the ancient battlefield outside the Royal Capital. The Orc King’s body remained high on the stone wall, looking down on them from above.

“I think there must be something hidden in this memory.” Lars paced in place, thinking hard. After a long while, he made up his mind and said, “No. I have to watch it again!”

…Watch it again?

Ruiyin stared in confusion as Lars ran over to the wall with thudding steps, felt around on it for a while, then pressed somewhere. The darkness around them suddenly brightened, and in the blink of an eye, they were back on the wind-lashed rocky summit, where the Orc King and the Dark Queen were jabbering away as if no one else existed.

…So after all that, this Memory Crystal actually had an advanced replay function! And the replay button was on the stone wall in the ending sequence!!!

Ruiyin watched Lars with a numb expression. His deadly serious face abruptly drained her of the will to complain about this setup. Lars rubbed his chin and carefully watched the documentary from the beginning, trying to find any detail he had overlooked. When it ended, he squatted on the ground and thought bitterly for a moment, then ran over and pressed replay again.

“…” What a terrifying scholar’s spirit!

Tio and Kandaru kept spouting nonsense, while magic and giant axes kept whooshing overhead. Ruiyin dragged Lars’s coat over, spread it on the ground, and closed her eyes to rest. The young man, meanwhile, remained squatting there, completely focused as he scrutinized every detail.

At last, when the Bull Demon King was nailed to the stone wall yet again, Ruiyin could not help speaking up. “There isn’t anything strange, is there? This memory is only telling a story. Where did any passage appear?”

“No…” Lars murmured. “It’s still very wrong! Strange. What exactly is wrong…”

He raised his head and looked at Kandar’s body. Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and he shouted, “It’s the arrows!”

“What?”

“This isn’t the same as what we saw when we arrived at the Royal Capital!” Lars turned back, shouting in excitement. He rewound the scene to the moment when the Dark Elves fired ten thousand arrows at Kandaru. Pointing at the huge screen, he said, “Look! That’s a Cursed Poison Arrow volley!”

Then he fast-forwarded to the final scene and pointed again. “Look! Kandaru is still pinned to the wall by arrows. But when we arrived at the Royal Capital, what was stuck in him was clearly the Orcs’ giant axes!”

His gaze swept across the ground, and his eyes lit up again. “In other words, this memory hasn’t reached its end. The reason the remaining content wasn’t recorded is because, even now, it hasn’t happened yet! Two hundred years later, three outsiders broke into the Royal Capital. They entered the Orc King’s memory, and then changed the past inside that memory!”

“Wait, I’m getting a little dizzy…” Ruiyin struggled to sort through the logic. “You mean the scene we saw when we came here was actually created by us? Which means that now, we need to…”
She looked up at the Bull Demon King, then said, still a little incredulous, “…We need to pull the arrows out of that guy, then nail him back up there with axes?”

“Exactly!” Lars clapped his hands in excitement. “Ruiyin, you’re so smart!”

“…”

She genuinely wanted to write a eulogy for the Orc King.

He looked the same alive as he did dead. He had been innocently dragged into Tio’s mess, caught in the fallout of Mordova’s rage, tricked into being nailed to a wall for two hundred years as a surveillance camera, and in the end, he still had to be desecrated and abused by a pair of weaklings like them… The tragic life of this king was so miserable that even someone like Ruiyin could hardly bear to look.

“…Do we have to? Putting aside whether it’ll even work, have you considered that this might be one of Tio’s schemes? What if we accidentally wake him up?”

“I’m not sure,” Lars said. “But… I want to try. As for waking him, don’t worry. A seal that can bind an Orc King like this must be extremely powerful black magic. To undo it, you would need not only immense magical power, but also a sacrifice of terrible cost.”

A perfectly convincing explanation from a top student. And yet… why did it feel like they were overlooking something?

A faint unease still lingered in Ruiyin’s heart, but Lars had already sprung into action. He walked beneath Kandaru’s ankle, rubbed his palms together, let out a forceful “heave,” and began climbing up the Orc King’s leg bones. The rugged path, all pronounced joints and rough lines, was very suitable for climbing, and before long Lars had reached the third rib. He carefully pulled out a pitch-black arrow, then drove the Orc hand axe he had prepared on his back hard into its place.

“It’s not hard at all!” Lars sat on the rib and waved cheerfully down at Ruiyin. “This is fun! Ruiyin, want to come up too?”

“…No need. For a sin like this, one person committing it is enough.”

She would definitely light a candle for the Orc King. As far as tragic supporting characters went, this one had to be the first to suffer this badly!

Lars was agile and full of stamina, darting up and down like a monkey. Before long, the Orc King’s body was covered in battle axes stuck in at every angle, a sight too miserable to behold. Ruiyin took two steps back and looked him over, and only then realized that this Orc King really did match the way he had looked when they saw him outside the gates of the Royal Capital.

Lars wedged the final axe into place, then climbed back down along the leg bones. He looked up at the motionless stone wall in puzzlement and said, somewhat disappointed, “Why hasn’t a passage appeared? Looks like I really was wrong. Sorry, I thought…”

“It’s not over yet,” Ruiyin said softly.

“He still isn’t the same as when we saw him before. Don’t you remember?” Ruiyin looked at Lars and said, “There were also those two Memory Crystals in his eyes.”

Lars froze for a moment, then instinctively looked at the flat red crystal in Ruiyin’s hand. “You mean… b-but we only have one! The other one is with Tio!”

“Let’s try it,” Ruiyin said.

She climbed back up along the route Lars had just taken. Of course, along the way, Lars tried countless times to take over for her bear-like clumsiness, but every attempt was suppressed by her vicious glare. In the end, she finally managed to climb onto the Orc King’s shoulder, panting and covered in scrapes.

She rose onto her tiptoes, took a deep breath, and carefully inserted the crystal in her hand into one of the bull’s eye sockets.

In that instant, countless images suddenly flooded into her mind. She saw dense, overgrown jungles and vast grasslands stretching endlessly to the horizon. She saw deep, dark limestone caves, and shifting curtains of colored light above a polar ice field. She saw countless Orcs raising huge axes before her, shouting themselves hoarse, their battle cries shaking the heavens… It was as if some invisible giant had taken her hand and dragged her through a journey at breakneck speed. She was forced to watch and listen, yet could not react at all.

What do you desire most?

I want conquest. I want battle. I want every inch of this world planted with the Orc King’s war banner… I want a longer life!

Heh heh. Very well. I am willing to swear to Dark God Seres: when the Dark Moon descends upon the mortal world once more two hundred years from now, the immortality you dream of will become reality.

“Ngh…” Dizzy, Ruiyin braced one hand against the skull beside her. In her daze, it seemed as if a thunderous roar erupted by her ear.

“Traitor!”

The roar shook her eardrums numb. By the time she regained awareness, she could vaguely hear wind whistling past her ears. When she opened her eyes, all she saw was the scenery rapidly sliding upward.

“Ruiyin!”

With a startled cry, Lars rushed over in terror, threw himself forward, and caught her falling body firmly in his arms.
“Ruiyin! Are you all right?” Lars roared. “I saw you suddenly stop moving, and then you fell from up there… What exactly…”

“I’m fine.” Ruiyin sat up with a hand pressed to her forehead, cutting him off. “Just now… I think I heard the Orc King’s thoughts.”

So that was it… What the Orc King wanted was the most impossible thing of all: immortality. And there had never been any agreement from the start. Tio had deceived him, and in the end, even at the cost of mutual destruction, she had sealed him outside the gates of the Royal Capital.

She glanced at the stone wall, which remained completely unmoved, and shrugged regretfully. “Looks like one crystal really doesn’t do anything after all.”

They had been in this illusion long enough. According to Tio, after three hours, they would automatically return to the tower. Ruiyin turned around, ready to find somewhere to sit down and properly sort through everything she had just seen. But the moment she looked back, she froze on the spot.

There was no movement from the stone wall.

What moved was everything behind them.

At some point, all the bones scattered across the vast battlefield had risen to their feet. The Orcs picked up their axes, the Dark Elves raised their bows, and the mages lifted their staffs. Every single blade and point was aimed at Lars and Ruiyin.

“…”

Without wasting a single word, Ruiyin and Lars exchanged a glance, spun around, and scrambled for their lives up the Orc King’s bones.

She had no idea what was going on, but from the look of things, they were definitely about to die!

Never mind how terrifyingly strong these corpses might be. Right now, Lars was injured, Ruiyin’s combat power was abysmal, and the two of them were up against an army of tens of thousands of bones, all trained in both magic and martial combat. Only an idiot would try to stand their ground!

Tio had once told them that if they encountered an emergency, the other Memory Crystal would teleport them back. Judging by the situation now, she had predicted this from the very beginning!

“Ruiyin, you go first!” Lars stood behind her with the rusted sword in hand, facing the bone army as he shouted with resolve.

“Go first, my ass!” Ruiyin snapped, smacking him hard on the head. “Did you not see how fast I climbed this pile of bones earlier? By the time I get up there, they’ll have killed you a few hundred times over! Stop dithering here and get your ass up there!”

Lars hesitated for only half a second. Then he gritted his teeth, turned, and rapidly climbed upward. Ruiyin followed behind him, armed with only two tiny daggers. She kept slicing away the skeletal hands reaching for her, but her movements, never especially nimble to begin with, grew even slower. Watching the distance between herself and Lars stretch farther and farther, she couldn’t help giving a bitter smile.

Sure enough, it still wasn’t enough… Even though she had trained nonstop ever since arriving in this world, as an ordinary useless nobody, she would never become a world-destroying protagonist like Lars.

“Hurry up!” she screamed at Lars, who kept looking back at her in worry. “Have you forgotten how hard I worked to make it this far?! I’m Ruiyin. How could I possibly die here? I’m fine, so hurry up, idiot!”

She had worked so hard just to survive until today. So even when faced with a dead end, she had to struggle and live.

A Cursed Arrow shot in from the distance and slammed into her back. Ruiyin’s vision went black, and the pain nearly made her fall. She barely managed to cling to the white bones and squinted upward. Lars had already climbed onto the Orc King’s shoulder. He quickly took the Memory Crystal from the eye socket and began chanting the teleportation spell.

“Good!” Ruiyin roared, ignoring the skeletal hands already grabbing her hair from behind. “Now get down here, and we can get out right away!”

But this time, the obedient little puppy who had always listened to her did not climb back down the way she told him to.

He raised his hand high, and the activated crystal flew down like an arrow, landing squarely in Ruiyin’s arms.

As that familiar sense of weightlessness seized her, the only thing Ruiyin saw was Lars standing on the Orc King’s shoulder, smiling at her. It was as if he had finally completed some great mission: relaxed yet resolute, burning yet sincere.

“From this day on, she will be my responsibility alone.”

“Even if I have no magic, no army, even if I am only an Apprentice Knight…”

“One day, I will truly become the strongest power capable of protecting her.”

Author’s Note:

Bull Demon King: That’s what you get for abusing my corpse! That’s what you get for flirting in front of me! Do you know the suffering of two hundred years without even being able to jerk off?! Do you?!