Chapter 174: ~Chapter 62~ Part 2

"So, in short," I mused aloud while standing under the eaves of the traditional Japanese shrine, my arms crossed and my brows refusing to unfurrow, "You originally weren't a sword, but since you were about to die due to an accident, a legendary sword-smith and a legendary priest, both of whom you just happened to know and who just happened to be in the area at the time, put you in the sword. Did I get that right?"

The young girl sitting on her knees in front of me immediately nodded with a bright expression. She was thankfully wearing clothes by now, which included a loose, bright red skirt, a white upper garment with red trimming around the baggy sleeves, and her long hair was tied back, using a pair of borderline comically large red ribbons, into a pair of tidy twin-tails flowing down her back. It didn't need a genius to deduce that she was supposed to be wearing a shrine maiden outfit, just with a couple of added frills (though, at the very least, it wasn't one of those miniskirt versions popular in certain genres). Also, if everything else didn't make it blindingly obvious yet, the hairdo made it one hundred and one percent clear that she sure as hell wasn't a placeholder, either the run-of-the-mill or the unique variety.

While I pondered on this, she unexpectedly leaned forward into a deferential bow and told me, "In my previous life, I used to be called Azusa Ichiko. I would be honored if Tsukuyomi-okami-sama would call me by my given name."

I was about to roll my eyes, but then I stopped midway. Wait, which one was her first name again…? Ugh, Japanese name ordering always gave me a headache, especially at times like this, where I was pretty sure neither of us was speaking English, and the enchantment just auto-translated our thoughts on the spot. Where the occasional gratuitous Japanese came from, I had absolutely no idea. Maybe the enchantment was a weaboo? Bad jokes aside, we were at addressing her by her name, weren't we? Well, I had a 50/50 chance to get it right, so I figured might as well give it a shot.

"So… Ichiko?" I guessed, and the way her lips twisted in delight when she looked back up at me told me I got the coin-toss right, so I allowed myself a relieved smirk in return before adding, in my flattest voice, "Also, I'm not a 'Tsukuyomi-okami-sama'."

That comment immediately made her smile wither as she sat up straight and let out a disappointed sigh.

"Truly? I was sure I would get it right this time…" Her words were followed by a defeated shrug, and then she told me, "Tsukuyomi-sama was always a mysterious one, so I believed that if there was a great god hiding amongst the masses, it would be him, and… Ue-sama? Why are you holding your head like that? Are you hurt?"

"No, this is called a facepalm," I told her through clenched teeth. "Also, I think I already told you that I'm not a great god. Could you please stop casually calling me one?"

"But, my ue-sama…"

"Yeah, and that too," I cut in again while redoubling my facepalming efforts. "I'm not that either, whatever that means."

"Then how shall I address you?"

Her completely earnest question only made my headache worse, so I might have responded a smidgen impatiently.

"You already know my name. Just call me Leonard or something."

"I understand, Leonard-ue!"

Her reply came packaged with a beaming smile that would have been right at home on Angie's face, but I couldn't muster anything more than a deadpan reaction.

"My name has no '-ue' in it."

"Then… Leonard-dono?"

"Just Leonard will do."

"I wouldn't dare to be so disrespectful to a great—" She might have noticed the glare I was sending her way, for at this point she immediately let out an unsubtle cough and said, "I mean, my benefactor."

"I don't mind at all." With that, I cut the name-discussion short and aimed to move things along by asking, "You said you wanted to talk to me before I leave, didn't you?"

"Ah, right! I beg your pardon for taking up your precious time." After apologizing, she bowed her head one more time and proclaimed, "Please wield me!"

"Denied," I replied right away, followed by the tactical nuke equivalent of a forehead flick that sent her reeling back.

"Ow-ow-ow!" She held her forehead with both hands a directed a wounded, teary-eyed stare at me. "Why did you hit me?"

"Because we were already over this," I told her in the company of a groan.

"But… you're not supposed to hit girls!" she protested in a whining voice that only made shake my head.

"You're a sword," I corrected her, before adding, "Also, while you look like a girl right now, it's just a proxy body created by the enchantment housing you. There's nothing stopping you from becoming that giant flamey thing again, is there?"

"I wouldn't do that!" the little girl in front of me protested with a puffed-out cheek, and if she wasn't kneeling, I was pretty sure she would've stomped her feet. "I only looked like that because I was overwhelmed by the corruption!"

"Then why didn't you get rid of it yourself? I think I just demonstrated that it wasn't that hard," I countered, though after but a moment, I realized that I was probably a little unfair. After all, she didn't exactly have access to the same tools I did.

I was just about to grudgingly correct myself, but she let her hands down from her forehead and sent me a pitiful look while grumbling something along the lines of, "I never knew it could be done. I was always bad when it came to formations and arrays; my mother always said I just wasn't smart enough for it." She paused here, and I almost managed to get a word in when her eyes suddenly lit up as she looked up at me again. "I get it! You must be Toko-yo-no-Omoikane-no-kami-sama! I should've realized right away when you said you could manipulate arrays at will!"

She was giving me a bright, almost triumphant look, so I promptly swallowed back whatever verbal olive branch I originally wanted to offer her and instead proceeded to flick her forehead one more time.

"Ow-owwww! It was the same spot again! It hurts!" I allowed her to roll on the ground a few times, hoping she would learn her lesson, and then used my Phantom Limb to interface with the internal enchantment that materialized everything around us and simply 'turned off' the injury I caused to her.

It was actually way easier than one would think. I mean, removing an injury out of existence like it never happened sounds like it's some kind of amazing magical feat, but due to this enchantment only creating a surface-level illusion, without bothering to simulate pesky things like internal organs or skeletons, let alone cells or atoms, I literally just disabled the pain like you would change a variable in a spreadsheet. Of course, the comparison wasn't entirely on the nose, as even with the 'simple' materialization, the underlying enchantment was way more complex and occasionally counter-intuitive than any other enchantment I've ever seen.

To put it into perspective, simple enchantments were like looking at a page full of programming script; complex, but once you understood the language and the internal logic of it all, it was fairly intuitive. Complex enchantments, like the one on the dragon-slaying spear, were more like someone who either didn't know how to code, or knew how to do it but couldn't be bothered to do it well, slapped something together that technically worked as intended, but had a lot of superfluous lines and spaghetti-code. This one right here was something that was made by someone who not only had the know-how but also spent the time to debug their script and sprinkle in a lot of annotations to explain what the heck each of the myriad of interlocking bits were supposed to be doing. It was mind-numbingly complex all the same, but still the second-best thing after a straight-up graphic user interface… though I didn't even know if one could be made for the thing I was inside of at the moment, as it seemed to be using colors and flavors instead of numbers, but I digress.

Anyhow, once she stopped flailing, the obnoxiously cutesy girl finally sprung to her feet again and showed a look so pitiful I was momentarily tempted to pat her on the head, but then I remembered that she was pretty annoying, so I stayed my hand.

She was about to say something, which would have no doubt led to further hijinks, but then we were interrupted by the world around us quaking, and by that, I don't mean the ground trembling like when she used to be bigger and slightly more unreasonable (with 'slightly' being the keyword here), but the artificial space itself. That was ever so slightly alarming, so I raised a finger to make her stay silent and quickly checked the enchantment, but at a cursory glance, I couldn't see anything unusual. I was just about to write it up to some freak happenstance, but then the space around us quaked and twisted once again, this time even harder, momentarily stretching and deforming everything in sight.

"Okay, I don't know what that was, but I didn't like it one bit," I muttered, but since even a second glance didn't show any anomalies, I looked my host in the eye and told her, "I'll go out for a moment and see what's going on. I'll be back soon."

I didn't wait for her answer, and more or less 'faded' out of the area by detaching myself from the artificial world… only to come back about ten seconds later, much to her apparent shock.

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"Did… ue-sama find the problem?"

"In a manner of speaking," I answered with some hesitancy. I graciously ignored the way she addressed me again and stated, "I have some bad news, so you might want to sit down first."

I didn't mean that literally, yet she immediately sat onto her knees again and turned a pair of attentive, if currently somewhat distressed, eyes at me. I waited for yet another small space-quake to pass, and only then did I give my explanation.

"So, in a nutshell, the issue is that you're currently breaking apart the enchantment that's housing you."

"I am?" she blurted out, incredulity written all over her face, and I nodded in the affirmative.

"Yeah. Not on purpose, I believe, but… how should I say this… Have you ever seen a blobfish?" She tilted her head to the side and gave me an odd look that was only missing a small question mark floating over her. If she did this just a few minutes ago, I might have flexed my newfound comprehension about our surroundings to conjure up one myself, but it really wasn't the time for horsing around, so instead I collected my thoughts and tried my best to explain what was going on. "You see, a couple of thousand meters under the sea, there is a ton of water pressure weighing down on everything, including the fish living there, so they have adapted to it and look perfectly normal at that depth. However, take one of these blobfish up to the surface, and without the external pressure keeping them in check, they swell several times in size and become this amorphous blob. Are you following me so far?"

My audience blinked at me a few times, and at the end of the day she timidly told me, "No offense ue-sama, but has anyone ever told you that your analogies are hard to understand?"

"Yes, but you're not allowed to do it."

"I-In that case… no?"

One sigh later I faced her again and explained, "You're the blobfish. In a manner of speaking, the sludge outside used to put pressure on you, so your soul or whatever you want to call it got compressed. The protective array on the outside also 'shrunk' to fit around you. However, now that the sludge is gone, your 'soul' suddenly began to expand to its original size, and the enchantment cannot keep up and it's getting pushed apart by you."

"That… that's really, really bad!"

"To put it mildly," I commented a little half-heartedly, but then was shocked when she grabbed onto the hem of my coat with a pleading expression.

"Ue-sama!"

"W-What?"

The girl kept clinging to me even as I tried to back away and gave me the puppiest puppy eyes ever.

"What's going to happen to me if it breaks?"

"I don't think it will break. I mean, it was designed to accommodate you, and it can—"

"But what if it does?!" she cut me off while turning the pleading look up to eleven. "I just got better! I don't want to die!"

As if to punctuate her words, there was another quake that shook the land and air around us, and I couldn't help but bury my face in my hand again.

"Listen, as I was trying to say, there's a good seventy percent chance that the enchantment will hold out just fine, and then the inner enchantment will stop glitching out as well."

"Would you bet your life on those odds?"

The biting question made me stop in my tracks right away, and after trying to come up with a fitting counter-argument, I ultimately had to go with, "Fine, you got me there, but what exactly do you want me to do about it?"

"I don't know! Ue-sama is the genius master of arrays! If anyone knows how to resolve this, it's you!"

I gave her a glare for several seconds just to see if she was taking the piss out of me, but she only gazed at me with sparkly, expectant eyes, so I was forced to just let out a low groan and tell her, "Listen, it's really not that simple. For a start, I can't even really touch the outer layer, let alone manipulate it."

"Is it truly so fragile right now?"

"Erm… Sure, let's go with that," I agreed with a tired shrug. "The point is, I can't make it expand faster, and as for reducing your size… I suppose we could do that by shoveling all the muck back to compress you again, but that would be both counter-intuitive and obviously take a while."

"No, not that!" she exclaimed while shaking her head so hard I was pretty sure she was— Oh, wait, she did get dizzy. How did she even do that? I was pretty sure her inner-ear canals weren't even simulated, but I was too lazy to check at the moment, so instead I grabbed her wobbling head like a coconut and held her steady.

"I wasn't serious. I couldn't do that even if I wanted to; we expelled it all into the outside, remember?"

"Did we? I didn't really understand what happened back then, but after ue-sama told me what to do, I was too relieved by the miasma disappearing, and then I was too busy tidying up this pocket-space for ue-sama's return, so I forgot to pay attention."

I once again couldn't help but frown in incredulity, but she seemed entirely genuine, so I decided to file her under the cutesy, clumsy moe-blob archetype and move on.

"So, as I was saying, we don't really have a lot of options here. Since I cannot tweak the outer shell, and I obviously cannot tweak you, I suppose the only other option would be to move you somewhere else before things irreversibly break down."

"That! I like that idea!" She exclaimed while pointing a finger at my face, which was made even sillier by the fact that I was still holding onto her head. Not that she seemed to mind, as she tried to repeatedly nod even though I kept her still. "Please do that, ue-sama!"

"That was just a hypothetical," I blurted out a tad helplessly in face of her relentless assault of confidence in me. "It's not like we have anything ready to house a soul just lying aro… und…"

"What? What?"

As my words trailed off, she began spamming beams of hope in my direction, and as much as I was trying to ignore them, they were somehow still getting to me. In the end, I closed my eyes (though it was only a token gesture, as it wasn't like I was seeing the enchantment-simulation through them in the first place), and after mulling over the feasibility of the sudden idea I've just got, I began to measure its pros and cons.

On one hand, it should theoretically work, and if my understanding was correct, it would have a fairly high chance of success. On the other, I wasn't even sure I could do it, as I have never tried something like this before, and even if it worked, there was no guarantee there wouldn't be any further complications. After pondering for a couple more seconds, I realized it was probably simpler if I just asked the girl clinging to me for her opinion, as it was ultimately up to her.

"So, Ichiko?" I began, and she immediately perked up. "I think I actually have a feasible plan to get you out of this sticky situation, but I'm not sure you are going to like it…"

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