Chapter 23: CH 23

“There you are.”

High up on the astrological platform, the gray-haired professor who’d been closing his eyes suddenly opened them.

His eyes shone with the brightest gold, but at that moment they glowed even brighter, as if a cluster of solar fire had ignited and burst into a new conflagration.

It wasn’t a color that human eyes should have.

Suddenly a deep laugh echoed in the air, a sound that didn’t belong to any type of being known on Earth.

Or maybe it wasn’t a sound at all. It was a transmission of information completed in the mind.

The astrological platform remained empty.

“Don’t you ever get bored with omniscience, my dear Gege?”

“Don’t call me such a thing.” Tawil was obviously disgusted by this nickname, and there was a rare flicker of emotion on his face. “Nyarlathotep, if not for me, you’d be fighting Nodens in the Dreamlands right now.”

As everyone knew, Nodens, the Lord of the Abyss, was the sworn enemy of Nyarlathotep.

And Nyarlathotep, the representation of “chaos”, was one of the three pillar gods along with Yog-Sothoth. They were of equal rank.

He stood apart from the other gods. Nyarlathotep was skilled at deceiving and bewitching humans. He enjoyed watching them struggle in pain and despair. It was said that he’d manipulated mankind into creating nuclear weapons and made great achievements in the two World Wars.

He was also known as the “Faceless God”, with thousands of different avatars.

There was no way an ordinary person could tell which was the real Nyarlathotep. He could exist anywhere on Earth.

“How boring.” The voice stretched out the syllables. “You know it already, don’t you? The purpose of my visit.”

The Outer Gods didn’t feel kinship the way human beings did. Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth were both offspring of Azathoth, but there was absolutely no brotherhood and still less any social relationship between them.

“You’re destined to be disappointed,” Tawil said coldly. “It’s the second variable.”

“What?!”

For a moment, the shadows along the viewing platform suddenly revealed a thousand abhorrent and horrible appendages, each with the power to destroy the Earth. They crossed the realm of reality and almost covered the roof of the observatory.

But those phantoms disappeared the next instant, as if they’d never existed.

It was indeed a rare surprise for Nyarla.

According to human relationships, the other Outer God was his brother—Yog-Sothoth, omniscient and omnipotent, the All-in-One, the Lord of Time and Space—and he was also the master of the fundamental laws of the universe.

This meant there was nothing in the entire universe he didn’t know. If he wanted to, he could view the eleventh dimension at any place or point in time, and he commanded all information. Whether it was a seed germinating on Earth or the silent collapse of a galaxy on the other end of the universe, nothing could escape the observation of this all-powerful, all-knowing Lord.

“Control your emotions. If Nodens targets you because your power leaked, I’ll be quite amused.” Tawil narrowed his eyes. Suddenly the corners of his mouth curled up. “Oh—let’s see. Was it you who summoned the avatar of Ithaqua?”

The eyes of the Lord of Time and Space paled, as if they were reflecting the changes in space-time through the ages. He chose a point on the time axis and began to silently observe.

In London, a boy with long platinum hair had rushed into the air and was circling a blizzard, and his blue eyes flickered between heaven and earth.

“What?” Nyarla suddenly had a bad feeling.

Sure enough, the next sentence revealed: “The Death-Walker appeared in London. The Spire investigation team has taken over. It seems they’re eager to summon Cthugha to deal with it.” Tawil’s tone was meaningful. “Instead of interrogating me, you should think about how to deal with your deadly enemies.”

Cthugha was yet another sworn enemy of Nyarlathotep. Nyarla’s avatars on Earth didn’t possess the entirety of his power. If his enemies were summoned it was possible they could cause him a lot of trouble.

As was widely known, Nyarlathotep was excessively fond of chaos. His enemies and rivals were spread out over countless races.

… And sadly, this time he hadn’t accounted for a certain variable that was out of control.

Tawil smiled with pleasure, and a billion glowing shadows appeared behind him, faintly radiating.

Anywhere he existed, the limitations of space-time didn’t apply. He could sit right there and wait, and he’d enjoy a good show put on by Nyarlathotep.

—

“The gods cannot be defeated.”

Most of MU’s biology class could be summed up in this one sentence.

Every time Professor Darwin talked about alien creatures and gods, he emphasized these words again and again in the same even tone.

How insignificant were humans? A human Monarch-level Awakened was only able to stand up to a lower-level creature on even ground. When facing an upper-level monster, they’d be in a desperate situation.

If that was true of upper-level creatures, forget about Great Old Ones or ancient gods.

At the beginning of class, a lot of students, Zong Yan included, didn’t really comprehend the significance of this statement. Because they’d never truly faced monsters or evil gods.

But now Zong Yan understood.

He dashed through the air only to find himself falling like a sculpture made of ice. Thousands of atmospheres of pressure buffeted his body. The wind that originally obeyed his commands became the power of the other side.

The face of that abomination laughed wildly, and the wind and snow spiraling out of his mouth only needed a little more to swallow him whole.

The Child of the Wind rushed into the sky against the storm, only to be pelted mercilessly by hail.

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His platinum blond hair iced over in the air, almost freezing solid, and the blood beneath his skin began to freeze and slow.

Compared to the howling wind, both heaven and earth were silent. It was so dark that visibility was compressed to an unimaginable level.

It wasn’t just physical pressure but a psychological war.

Zong Yan wasn’t sure if it was because he’d joined with the mind of the Lord of the Universe that time, but he didn’t feel pain from the mental attacks, only the physical ones.

Thousands of lightning bolts fell from the sky. Zong Yan barely managed to drag his frigid body around the beams of electricity. Occasionally, raindrops were struck by electric sparks of lightning, and bursts of white-gold flashes followed his flight path.

He accidentally intersected one and his fingers were burned and blackened by the current, leaving a numbing pain.

One after another, investigators were arriving, and the magic patterns at their fingertips began to bloom. Red flames were born from the patterns suspended in the air, gathering into a fiery red river. Like a glorious crimson rainbow they rushed towards the creature in the sky.

“This is the incarnation of Ithaqua!! Request for urgent deployment of Monarchs! Please use transfer patterns!”

Because of the severity of the storm, all the communication devices were out of order. The investigators could only coordinate with each other via communication magic patterns.

“The members of the Spire investigation team are about to arrive. Damn it, those lunatics just said they aren’t coming. They want to summon the Living Flame from a distance, under a clear sky!”

The investigator felt like he was going crazy. “Are they out of their minds, invoking the Living Flame? If they summon Cthugha we’ll have two Great Old Ones and Great Britain will sink into the Atlantic tonight!!!”

“Hold on.” An investigator who was wearing blue pajamas suddenly stared in alarm and pointed at the sky. “Look there…. Is that a person?”

“There’s no way. That’s the center of the storm,” another investigator answered automatically, but the next moment he swallowed the words back into his mouth.

At the storm’s center, in the least punishing place, there were updrafts everywhere, lifting everything on the ground.

There really was a man up there, and the figure was dodging lightning bolts with a faint blue aura in his hands. He was battling against the storm without any sign of yielding, as if he was enacting some ferocious kind of dance.

“Look, over by the evil god. A person’s really up there!”

The crowd was stunned.

“Going head to head against the Death-Walker?! How’s that possible? Not even a Monarch could survive this storm.”

“Could it be an alien in human form?”

As people began to make guesses, this conjecture was shared by many investigators.

Ancient gods versus ancient gods, ancient gods versus Great Old Ones, Great Old Ones versus Outer Gods, Outer Gods versus Outer Gods—the relationship between gods wasn’t as friendly as human beings might think.

Various types of otherworldly beings would attack each other on sight. The number of dimensions might increase, but the fighting between creatures would never stop.

They gazed at the figure in awe and turned on their HD cameras.

This new alien was very likely to be a god-level being, and humans needed more information.

In fact, Zong Yan, who had no idea he was being watched by everyone, was suffering miserably.

The Death-Walker couldn’t be harmed by conventional physical means, so Zong Yan tried to use his ability to manipulate the wind against the cloudbank, hoping to disperse it.

But he forgot the most fatal point. Rather, he didn’t forget, there was just nothing he could do about it, because Zong Yan didn’t have any other persona cards that could deal with this Great Old One.

Ithaqua was known as the Wind-Walker, and his avatar the Death-Walker was called the “God of the Angry Storm”.

He literally ruled the weather and the wind and snow. Unfortunately, his power overlapped with Zong Yan’s Child of the Wind persona.

And while the other party was considered an A-rank monster, his main body was a genuine Great Old One. Ithaqua might be considered a junior brother among the Great Old Ones, but he could easily grind Zong Yan into the dust.

The wind no longer heeded him. Zong Yan had to concentrate just to survive in the storm. As for counterattacking, that was an impossible dream.

In just a few minutes, Zong Yan felt his limbs growing stiff. He was about to fall from the air. His sight began to blur and his hands and feet were as cold as the ice and snow in the far north.

Just then—

All of a sudden the Death-Walker paused in the air, then retreated.

The dark gray clouds dispersed like a tide rolling back, swallowed up by the sudden appearance of a hole in the night sky. They disappeared into thin air until no trace at all was left.

Zong Yan: ? ? ?

What’s this? How can you fight then run away?

TL Notes:

Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:

Gege – 哥哥 – gēgē – older brother. As mentioned previously, I tend to keep “Gege/Didi” when it appears in dialogue or refers to a specific person

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Cthugha – 克图格亚 – Kètúgéyà – A Great Old One resembling a giant ball of fire

junior brother – 弟弟 – dìdì – Alternatively: younger brothe

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