It was quiet.
The wind whispered softly, and the grass tickled against her body.
When Frieren opened her eyes, the blurred world sharpened, and Ainz stood before her.
Above him, higher still, the sky visible over his shoulder had not fallen.
"My defeat."
Her long silver hair spilled over the grass.
That pale nape, white enough that it looked as though it could snap if gripped too hard, shamelessly declared it.
That she had lost.
He did not like the way she said it so calmly, eyes wide open.
In a voice steeped in malice, he said, "You deceived me, Frieren."
"I didn't lie. The magic just failed, that's all."
After stopping time to keep Frieren from moving, he had realized it.
*Frieren's magic never activated.*
No, to be more precise, it would be more accurate to say he had suspected from the beginning that the magic would fail.
"Actually, the magic I fired at the start only worked because I got lucky."
It was something he would have noticed if he had looked just a little more closely.
"I never intended to kill you in the first place. I just knew that unless I came at you with everything I had, it wouldn't work."
The situation of Flamme's death and Frieren's evasive manner had simply aligned too well.
"That is what deception means."
"Even if it had been a lie, you still would have acted like this. You're not the kind of person who lets a possibility like that slip by."
"Do not speak as though you know me well."
"You're right, I don't know you that well. We're both bad at getting along with people, and we were never that close."
Even so.
"I trust my master's judgment."
Frieren trusted Flamme, the one who had pulled her out from among the demons that destroyed the elf village.
And so she, too, trusted the Ainz whom Flamme had trusted.
*It shouldn't be something to take so lightly.*
Ainz could not understand how she could remain so composed on nothing but faith.
What would she have done if she had really died? He could not comprehend Frieren's way of thinking.
"Ainz, you knew from the beginning, didn't you? She wouldn't be happy if you brought the dead back to life."
"..."
"Isn't that why you protected me? Not for Master's sake, but for your own simple self-satisfaction."
A childish wish for them to stay together forever.
When even that much was denied, his teeth ground together.
"What is wrong with that?"
What could possibly be wrong with wishing for an eternal paradise from which no one would ever have to escape, if one desired it?
His voice trembled.
To Frieren, it looked as though even Ainz himself was not fully convinced.
And Frieren's firm voice drove the final nail in.
"At the very least, Flamme wouldn't be happy about it."
He knew that well.
From the beginning, Flamme had been pessimistic about bringing someone back to life.
An ideal world that, by its nature, would have been built atop a mountain of corpses.
No one at his side would have pointed it out or denied it, but Frieren alone stated her thoughts plainly.
"If that's not true, then just kill me as I am. You can just bring me back afterward anyway."
Frieren took Ainz's hand and placed it over her chest.
Between the slight, rounded swell, he heard a small heartbeat.
A real one, not something touched through Heart Grasp.
The power of instant death that could make it vanish in an instant with a simple squeeze.
That was an authority that handled death at will.
If one could kill and revive someone simply because one wanted them, then it would all become hollow.
Was Frieren such a pitiful existence?
Her heart was pounding, insisting that she was alive, and yet would he simply break that because it displeased him?
He listened to that heartbeat only for a moment before pulling his hand away at once.
"I said I won. In that case, there is no need to kill you."
As Ainz straightened himself, Frieren rose behind him.
"Well, that's true. In the end, I couldn't imagine any version of myself defeating you."
Frieren turned her head toward the barrier.
"You can go in. If I lost, the barrier was set to automatically allow you inside."
* *
"Frieren, you've taken quite a proper shape now."
A familiar voice called to her.
Behind Frieren, who had been blankly meditating atop a cliff, appeared Flamme, aged by time.
"It's been a long time, Master."
"Yes, it has been a long time."
Master and disciple spoke.
"Ainz is looking for you. He'll be back soon. Are you planning not to see him at all until you die?"
"If I see him, I don't think I'll be able to control my emotions."
"What do you mean?"
"Growing old happens in the blink of an eye, and when you look back, so much has changed. I'm no exception."
When one stands at the end of death, fear comes in the end.
That was true of any human worn down by time.
"If I saw Ainz, I felt I might not be able to carry out what I said fifty years ago."
At those words, Frieren looked at her with a trace of doubt.
"Master, I'm not sure that'll really succeed."
"It will. He's that kind of person."
He was not friendly toward the living, his thoughts were always dry, he lied from time to time, and the sudden jokes he made were not even funny, but he loved his comrades more than anyone.
He was someone who believed there was no treasure greater than those around him, and so he was a complete being who desired nothing beyond that.
That was why Flamme said it.
"I have one request."
"What is it?"
"If I die, make a flower field bloom by my grave."
"Come to think of it, Master, you're the one who made the healing potion together with him."
"That's right. My favorite magic is the magic that makes a beautiful flower field."
A magic her parents had taught her when she was young.
It was what had first made Flamme love magic.
And when it was time for Ainz to return, before she left, Flamme added one final afterthought.
"Frieren, if you make a flower field bloom, could you make it bloom with this flower in abundance?"
She took a flower from her bosom and showed it to Frieren.
One that would someday fill an entire hill.
"Crimson, so crimson—"
* *
Nine's Ooal Gown.
Inside the barrier, flowers bloomed by Flamme's grave.
Crimson Ooal Gown flowers were in splendid full bloom.
Red flowers brushed against his feet.
Petals from the flowers fluttering in the wind fell and scattered.
At that sight, he stood still for a long while, only watching.
Then Frieren came up and stood beside him.
"Master always sounded brave, but she was really a coward and a mess of a person."
"Even so, she also had a remarkably thoughtful side. As people often say, she was an eccentric sort."
"Yeah. But I still didn't dislike her."
"The same goes for me."
He walked forward slowly and brushed his hand over the gravestone.
"It's small."
The woman who had always walked at the front had become a stone this small.
Looking at her grave like this made his heart feel strange.
"She should at least have said something. Those commonly called geniuses are always like that. They think and act however they please. Flamme was always that way."
"That must have been hard."
"You are not much different."
Even so, the ones who moved his heart were always those who pushed their way in like this, as they pleased.
Frieren crouched down to face the gravestone.
"Master said she avoided you on purpose because she was afraid that if she saw you, everything she'd thought until now would turn to foam, and when the time came for her to die, she might want to cling to you in the end. Isn't that stupid?"
"Yes. It truly is stupid."
Flamme, who had always been so confident, was also human—someone who worried, made mistakes, and suffered.
Even after rising to become the founder of human magic, her inner self had not changed at all from her childhood.
This flower field proved that it was no different from the past.
He took his hand off the gravestone.
"You're not bringing her back?"
"One cannot force someone back to life against their will."
Though I won the fight, the moment I lost the desire to revive her, it became my defeat.
Flamme must have known this would happen and entrusted this task to Frieren for that very reason.
What a truly cunning and irritating child she was.
"Ainz, there's something I didn't tell you. Master told me to pass something on to you. Well? Do you want to hear it?"
"She left words for me?"
"Yes. She told me to say it if you ever came here."
So it was something not even written in Flamme's will.
"What did she say?"
"She said she wanted you to see more varied things, to travel, and then tell her little adventure stories about the trivial things that happened."
"Flamme is no longer in this world."
Was she telling him to pour out his stories to the grave, since the one meant to hear them was dead?
"Heaven."
Frieren looked not at the ground, but up at the sky.
Warm sunlight fell over the flower field.
"She told me to say that she'll be waiting in heaven."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"I don't really know either. I think she meant the heaven the priests talk about."
There was a religion in this world that believed in the goddess.
Their view of faith was not so different from that of his original world.
"I see. Those who believe in gods often say that after death, the soul reaches heaven."
In a world made of steel and oil, they had not believed in anything like a god.
The earth and sky had been endlessly polluted, and if there truly had been some god who made that world, there was no way he could have looked kindly upon it.
It would have been fortunate enough if they had escaped divine punishment.
And yet, if one were to speak of a miracle, there was exactly one. Had he not already experienced it?
Coming to this world.
That was an act worthy of being called a miracle wrought by a god.
"Perhaps, unexpectedly, a being such as the goddess may truly exist."
He sat on a rock embedded in the ground and looked at the grave together with Frieren.
"Even so, heaven is a place the dead reach. Can someone like me, who does not die, ever go there?"
"If someday you decide you want to die, I'll kill you."
If someday he grew weary of life and wished to end eternity, then she, who likewise lived through eternity, would sing his funeral.
That was what Frieren said.
"How reassuring."
It was a brutal thing to say, but this was likely her own way of offering comfort.
Someday, Frieren might grow into a mage capable of killing me.
lovely