I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell - Chapter 363

WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Editor: LiteraryGirl

Chapter 363

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The Missing XV

The meteors did not drift down at a relaxed tempo. Though honestly, given the giant eyes staring down from each of them, it was hard to say they should be called “meteors” at all.

Shrrrraaaaa!

The sky, already cramped by the millions of streaks making up the Meteor Shower, grew even more crowded as tentacles began to sprout from the surface of each meteor.

“Eeeek! M-m-monsters!” Dok-seo shrieked.

I couldn’t blame her. First, there were huge, bloodshot eyeballs glaring right at us, and now, several layers of thrashing tentacles had joined the show—hardly a pleasing sight.

Swaaaaah!

The meteors flared their tentacles like wings and dove in sync. Neighboring stones tangled together, weaving whole swarms in mid-air.

Ha-yul cast out her Puppet Strings. [I’ll block them. Wait, no— Abort—]

She had taken one stylish step forward, only to retreat again two seconds later and announce her surrender. The chunk she had sliced away from one meteor re-formed into “baby meteors,” each with freshly opened eyes and wings.

“Teacher! They’re not just rocks!” Yo-hwa shouted as the Meteor Shower closed in on us as if by divine punishment. “They’re more like clumps of magic! I’m seeing every buff and debuff you can name: Sever, Pierce, Replicate, Repeat, Brainwash, Sleep—”

“Ji-won, conserve your Aura.” I gave the order at once, causing Ji-won’s emotionless eyes to flick toward me. “If they share the traits of the Meteor Shower we know, they’ll try to knock us out or meddle with our heads. Aura has to serve as our last-ditch mental shield until the very end.”

“Understood.”

I turned back to the rest of the team. “All units, gather up around Dok-seo! Dok-seo, you’re on!”

Tears brimming, Dok-seo flung her arms wide and let out a keening cry. Three… two… one second before the grand-spell Meteor made of millions of boulders washed over us—

“Absolute Defence!”

Well, she could have activated the power without screaming its name, but Dok-seo would sooner die than betray her own aesthetics.

Maybe that stubbornness paid off. The subsequent effect was phenomenal.

Wham! Thud! KWA-RA-RA-RA-RUMBLE!

The meteors shattered, ricocheted, and splintered against the barrier the Miko of the Infinite Metagame had raised until dust swallowed everything in sight.

Not a single strand of hair on us had been touched.

[Wow,] Ha-yul blurted out in awe. Even if they didn’t speak up, Ji-won, Cheon Yo-hwa, and the others were all clearly impressed as well. To them, Dok-seo was merely a “mercenary we hired not long ago” and “hardly reliable.”

Only I knew her true worth.

“Dok-seo, how long can you hold?” I asked.

“N-no idea. Ugh. It’s eating a lot of stamina, but Ah-ryeon keeps spamming heals, so I guess I’m fine… Uh, at least ten minutes! Fifteen if we’re lucky!”

I narrowed my eyes.

‘In the original tutorial dungeon, Absolute Defence barely lasted a minute. She’s managing this because she’s fully Awakened as the Miko of the Outer Gods.’

Rumble! Boom!

Meteors kept raining on the translucent shield without pause. I watched as some stones didn’t shatter but instead stuck to the barrier.

‘The others might be relieved, but this is bad. We just traded away one of our joker cards.’

After a closer look, every tentacle from the meteors was a mass of fingers. Those fingers crawled forward and etched their nails into the shield.

“Kyaaaaa!”

[Too noisy,] Ha-yul scolded both the tentacles and Dok-seo.

“N-noisy?” the latter stammered. “This barrier is basically an extension of my own skin! It feels freaky as hell. I’m gonna hurl…”

“Ji-won, support her.”

“Okay.” Ji-won spread Aura over the barrier at my command, and color rushed back into Dok-seo’s face.

“Huh? Oh, that’s better.”

“Mr. Matiz’s prediction was right—it’s psychic interference. If I’d burned Aura first, we’d have been battling at a huge loss now.”

Ji-won launched into her usual praise of me, but I had no room to reply. The scratching—what Ha-yul and Dok-seo called “noise”—was, to me, both nails on glass and a warped lullaby:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

How I wonder what you are.

It wasn’t only noise. It was music only I could hear.

Up above the world so high,

Like a diamond in the sky.

Nails scraped the shield in a clumsy yet recognizable rhythm and pitch, mimicking the famous lullaby.

I turned away to ask, “Yo-hwa, do you hear any singing?”

“Huh? Singing? No, nothing at all, Teacher.”

The others were the same. It seemed I alone could catch the “song.”

‘Come to think of it, I was the only one who heard Dang Seo-rin’s voice too. I’m the only person who can understand this Meteor Shower’s hymn.’

Old habit drove my mind to analyze the phenomenon, even in the middle of battle.

‘Every country has its own verse for that lullaby.’

The fourth verse in English describes the star as “never shutting its eye.” In Japanese, the star “blinks and blinks” like an eyelid. Chinese lyrics compare it to “countless tiny eyes.” Combine all that, and blinking eyes falling from the sky didn’t seem odd at all.

‘And what does a mother or teacher do while singing a lullaby? She strokes the child to sleep.’

So fingers sprouting wasn’t strange either.

‘If I expand this line of thought a little more, I might figure out how to break this meteor strike—’

“Teacher!”

Yo-hwa’s call snapped me out of it. Barely seven seconds had passed, yet on a battlefield, seven seconds was an eternity.

My disciple stared at me, worried. “The number of meteors isn’t dropping. If we just cower here and defend while she keeps summoning showers, we’ll lose eventually.”

I nodded. “Right. To break this grand spell, we have to destroy the celestial bodies that are singing out there.”

“Do we… have a way to do that?” Yo-hwa glanced outside as the Meteor Shower assaulted the shield even harder than before in screeching wails. “W-we’d have to step outside first…”

That was the problem.

‘The clock is ticking.’

Could we really obliterate all those orbiting planets in ten minutes? Borrowing Leviathan’s power might help, but the psychic assault from millions of stones would crush anyone who spent too much Aura.

‘Dok-seo can move the barrier, but not fast enough. If I dash out alone, I’ll have to deal with every trap Hecate laid out there.’

One false step and we’d—

Knock, knock.

A cheery, entirely unfitting knock sounded nearby. I turned on pure instinct—and froze.

“Hiya, sunbae.”

There stood the elder twin, Cheon Yo-hwa.

There she was outside the shield, standing in her black sailor uniform right in the middle of the lunar surface, smiling like nothing was wrong as meteors stabbed down all around her.

“I’m late, but I came to help. This thing’s in my way, though. Could you open up for just a—”

Before I could react, one of my comrades swung a kick and blew her head clean off.

Her sister Yo-hwa had done the deed.

“Phew. That scared me half to death!”

Everyone—except Ji-won—stared at Yo-hwa in horror. The one in question sighed lightly and frowned as if wondering why we were glaring. “Huh? What? My sister’s Corrupted. That makes her an enemy.”

“B-but she’s still your sister…” Dok-seo protested meekly, earning her a snort in response.

“She got here on foot with no Aura and while dodging meteors. Does that sound human? Obviously she’s a Hecate puppet.”

“I mean, usually you’d hesitate or cry, ‘Sis! Let her in!’ or something…”

“Eh?” Yo-hwa tilted her head. “My sister’s smart. Once she decided not to Fall, she must’ve accepted death. Why hesitate now? If anything, she’d prefer that I finished her myself.”

Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…

The headless elder twin’s shoulders shook with laughter. Her body flipped onto its back and scuttled away like a spider, giggling madly as it vanished.

Silence filled the shield while meteors continued to crash and shatter above us.

[Dad. What now?] Ha-yul plucked her Puppet Strings like cello wires to say, [Hecate’s penned us in with the shower and dumped every Anomaly she can outside. Can we really smash the planets?]

I bit my lip.

Th𝚒ʂ ₡h𝙖pţ𝙚r 𝙞𝐬 pⲟʂ𝘵𝙚𝙙 b𝓎 𝐾𝕀𝑡ℯ𝑛𝘰𝙫𝑒𝑙

‘If only I could hear the planets’ song. Maybe then, I could cancel it with counter-frequencies…’

I’d realized it too late. Had I recognized the silent chorus the moment we entered space, the tides of this battle would have swayed much more in our favor. With even the ground-side Cheon Yo-hwa turning coat, rushing out there would likely get me killed in seconds—

I blinked. “Wait. Where’s the Saintess?”

Right beside me, Ah-ryeon cocked her head. “H-huh?”

“The Saintess. Yo-hwa’s sister is down for the count, so why would the Saintess be untouched?”

Unlike the strategist sister, the Saintess had terrifying powers. Time Stop went without saying, of course, and her Telepathy alone could torment us endlessly. Had she joined Hecate, we wouldn’t be standing here, getting this chance to recuperate.

Enlightenment settled in quietly as I slowly parted my lips. “Ji-won.”

“Yes, Mr. Matiz.”

“New order. When I count one, two, three—remove all Aura restrictions.”

Ji-won studied me. “Confirming: Currently, Aura usage is locked to our strike team only. You want that lock completely released?”

“Exactly.”

“Hecate may hijack Aura. Her core, Dang Seo-rin, is a mage but hardly ignorant of its existence.”

“I know.”

Ji-won nodded, trusting me so deeply she’d follow even if I switched sides right now. “Understood. When should I free it?”

“Now. One, two… Three.”

In that instant, a miracle greater than magic unfolded.

“Eh?”

Someone gasped. Actually, all of us did, myself included.

The Meteor Shower shattered. The stones that had never once paused fell apart at once, without preamble, until shards of glass-like debris were left to drift through space. The miracle didn’t end there either. Far away, across the Void that had seemed impossible to reach—

Saturn cracked.

Jupiter split.

Mars broke.

The sun fractured.

Venus, Mercury, Earth—

A slash scored the universe.

Every celestial body arrayed in this sky collapsed in a single heartbeat, save for the pale surface beneath our feet: the moon.

Ji-won collapsed beside me, without a hint of warning.

“Wh-whoa?”

Yo-hwa hurried to catch her, but Ji-won’s eyes stayed shut. She was out cold.

Our strike team was just starting to panic when—

“Don’t worry about Ji-won.”

A calm voice and measured footfalls echoed out.

“I drained too much Aura, so she merely fainted.”

The speaker turned to me. Behind her swirled millions of shattered meteors and seven ruined planets.

The corpse of the universe cast its shadow squarely across her face.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Undertaker, ” she said. “You asked me not to Fall, but this raid needed my power. I’ll take responsibility later. For now, let us save Dang Seo-rin together.”

Awakener: Saintess

Corrupted Alias: The Executioner

Strongest member of the Regressor’s Alliance.

Has joined the party.

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