Chapter 42: 41. Finding Me Like Fate
1.
Late at night.
Thud thud thud thud!
A loud commotion rang out from beyond the door to Dolores’s office.
"Teacher!"
Ruby rushed in, panting, her face tense with urgency.
The child, who rarely ever ran, clung to the doorknob as her pale face heaved for breath.
"Ruby? What happened?"
"Out in the garden...!"
Ruby pointed out the window with a trembling hand.
"The bell Lionel made is ringing on its own... A spirit... no, no."
"..."
"Strange energy keeps gathering around the bell..."
Dolores narrowed her eyes.
She knew Lionel had been making something for Her Highness the princess, but...
"Stay in your room, Ruby."
If it was something the child could not handle, she had to stop it.
Rustle.
Dolores drew her clothes closed and immediately rose from her seat.
Then, at a brisk pace... she headed for the garden.
By the time Dolores reached the garden, Lionel had accepted Earth Mother Gaia’s request and was about to begin work right away.
"...Huh?"
Plop.
He simply collapsed onto the lawn.
...My legs gave out.
After spending all day stepping on that creaking platform, it was only natural.
His mind and willpower had not shut down yet, perhaps because of the excitement or adrenaline.
His thoughts were still racing. But his body had gone on strike.
"Damn it."
To recover, Lionel sprawled flat on the grass.
Whooo...
The night air cooled his heated body.
Lying there, he blankly stared up at the full moon.
That was when Dolores arrived beside his head.
There were the broken remnants of something beside him, while the child stared vacantly at the full moon. Whatever had happened, at least... he did not appear to be hurt.
Boop.
"Oh."
Dolores’s face abruptly filled Lionel’s vision.
"Ruby was terribly frightened... She kept insisting that I go check on Lionel right away."
"Ruby really is loyal, after all."
She had acted all aloof, but apparently she had gotten scared and run off to fetch Dolores.
"Whew..."
Dolores slowly exhaled.
"So Lionel was just lying here comfortably?"
Her hair drifted down, and he could feel her warm breath from inches away.
Yet rather than being startled, Lionel somehow felt his heart settle almost instantly.
Seeing Dolores seemed to ease the mind and body he had worked to the bone all day.
Here we go again.
Lionel thought this was learned behavior—more precisely, learned helplessness.
Back when he had been crafting Frostless Spring, Dolores would come over and embrace him at just the right time whenever he was exhausted from staying up all night.
That meant the day’s work was over. He would be forcibly carried back to the estate in her arms—his face buried in that naturally cool bed.
After that went on for quite some time, his body began reacting before his mind did.
No matter how alert he was, whenever he saw Dolores’s face while worn out—
I’m supposed to sleep.
His body simply felt it like a conditioned reflex.
Just as he thought that might be a little dangerous—
"Are you sleepy, Lionel?"
Dolores smiled faintly to herself.
For some strange reason, this child always relaxed and drifted off to sleep whenever he saw her face.
Well, perhaps... she had made him that way.
"I think I might be..."
"Then let’s go to bed."
Dolores held Lionel snugly in her arms, then carefully set the broken bell’s remains down on the ground.
"I’ll tell a servant to move it to the workshop."
"Okay..."
In the end, he was carried straight back to the estate.
I usually fall asleep right away, but I can hold out a little today...
As Lionel lay quietly buried in the cool bed and was carried along, he wondered how far they had walked.
Then the estate’s doors came into view.
"...You worked hard again today."
Murmuring something under her breath, Dolores offered him the day’s usual greeting.
A greeting for the day, given to the sleeping Lionel.
Softly...
Something moist settled onto Lionel’s forehead.
Dolores gently kissed his forehead.
Kiss.
But Lionel’s eyes were still half open.
"Hm? Lionel, you were still awake?"
"Yes..."
Dolores’s eyes widened when their gazes met, but...
As though it did not matter, she smiled and opened the estate doors.
"You’re always asleep, so I could never ask you before. What did you make today?"
The child in her arms answered in a drowsy voice.
"I was going to make a divine artifact..."
"A divine artifact..."
"Yes..."
She soon shook her head and let out a quiet laugh.
"That’s so incredible, I don’t even know what to say..."
The value of divine artifacts within the Tower was beyond imagination.
There were only a handful of races capable of making them in the first place.
At present, it was uncertain whether there was even a single being capable of creating what was called a divine artifact.
And he said he would make one.
Holding the child, Dolores slowly climbed the stairs.
Then those fragments from before must have been...
Something like a carrier pigeon that can communicate with a god.
She did not know the details, but she knew that whether inside or outside the Tower, one needed some sort of medium to commune with a god.
Then a sudden curiosity welled up within her.
"What kind of god is it?"
The child in her arms gently gripped her forearm, answering obediently in a voice steeped in sleep.
"...Gaia..."
Flinch.
Dolores stopped walking.
She had never imagined that name would come from the child’s lips.
Snooze...
Before he could notice the change in Dolores, the child in her arms had already fallen asleep.
Dolores stared down at the sleeping Lionel’s face for a long while.
"...Mother?"
Then she quietly murmured.
2.
After gently laying Lionel on the bed, Dolores carefully pulled the blanket over Ruby as well, who had fallen asleep after coming to fetch her.
Kiss. Kiss.
Only after alternating kisses on the two children’s foreheads did she rise from her seat.
She headed for her office, sat down, and quietly opened something she did not normally enjoy using.
It truly was not somewhere she liked. It was a place she had no desire to visit.
The Inner Tower community.
Still, whenever she urgently needed information, it was a channel she had no choice but to open.
It was a place where people chatted and exchanged idle talk, but...
On one side was an auction house where every kind of equipment was traded.
On another, so-called companies operating within the Tower had hung out their signs.
The most useful among them was—
Tap.
The Information Guild.
Personally chasing down information required extraordinary effort, but if she placed a request here... all she had to do was pay the price and wait.
And Dolores herself...
Was also a regular customer who frequented this place.
Bzzzt...
The instant she pressed the button, an employee who had been standing by responded immediately.
─────────────────
[Information Guild Team Leader]: Ranker. What information do you require?
─────────────────
Dolores had quite a lot she wanted to ask.
So much that even calling it a mountain would not suffice.
But first, she calmed herself and spoke evenly.
"Have there been any rumors lately regarding a divine artifact being crafted by the [Heir of Fire]?"
The reply did not take long.
[Information Guild Team Leader]: ...As it happens, we have just received a report.
Dolores narrowed her eyes.
[Information Guild Team Leader]: The [Heir of Fire] has chosen Gaia rather than the God of Fire.
[Information Guild Team Leader]: It is unprecedented in the history of the Sun Dwarves, so there is quite an uproar both inside and outside.
"..."
Dolores did not read any further.
She simply paid the fee and closed the window.
It was true...
Lionel had not misspoken in his sleep.
"Truly... that child..."
The face of Lionel, who had just fallen asleep, came to her mind.
Dolores quietly placed a hand over her forehead.
She was not someone who believed in fate.
Because fate had never—not once—been on Dolores’s side.
To her, fate was... the curse cast upon a family destined to die out before even a few years had passed.
That was all it had ever been.
Yet.
Not long ago, only very recently, she had begun taking an interest in fate.
She had begun to place her hopes in it.
The reason needed no asking.
"Lionel..."
Swoosh...
As Dolores placed her hand on her forehead, an intangible tail slowly rose behind her.
A scorpion’s tail.
Where did scorpions make their homes?
Parched ground... hot soil and sand.
...The earth.
Though barren, it was unquestionably land.
The Goddess of Earth...
She was one who never scorned even such harsh ground.
Dolores.
The ruler of the Tower’s fifth floor and...
An apostle of Gaia, the God of Earth.
Gaia’s daughter.
The god she had served for so long was none other than Gaia.
This was a ducal estate—a territory outside the Tower—but her true territory lay within it.
That was the fifth floor.
The fifth floor was prosperous because the earth watched over it under the rule of its apostle, Dolores.
The same was true at this very moment.
And Lionel had gone to her mother.
So you sought her out, Lionel...
Dolores’s eyes trembled faintly.
...But how?
There was no way he could have known.
Even if someone suspected it, apostles did not reveal themselves to the world as a rule.
Much less could that little child have had any means of realizing that she was Gaia’s apostle.
For that to be possible, one had to at least be a climber.
And yet, among countless gods, the child had chosen her mother of all beings.
Dolores fell silent for a moment.
Then a thought she had long folded away and abandoned rose to the surface.
When a god possessed a divine artifact, their divinity rose.
And that increased divinity naturally flowed to her, their apostle.
"I, too..."
The station of Gaia, the mother she served, had long remained at a point beyond which it could rise no further.
And so Dolores had given up long ago.
But if an apostle’s station rose...
If that thing she had never even expected truly rose...
"Perhaps..."
It might have even the tiniest effect on the curse.
Because it was a god’s power.
And that was not all.
As the stations of god and apostle rose, the land of the fifth floor would become even more fertile than it was now.
Dolores slowly closed her eyes.
For her entire life, the word fate had been synonymous with curse.
Yet now.
That loathsome, damned fate had come to her from a different direction.
"Lionel..."
Once again.
You came to me like fate.
Something warm slowly ran down beneath her closed eyelids.
Trickle.
She could not even bring herself to wipe it away.
How could this possibly be?
Dolores had been someone who had resigned herself to everything.
When I die.
She had thought the prosperity of the fifth floor would gradually lose its light.
She had thought the ducal house’s line would end, and that it would never, never again be able to place that Three-Lion Emblem in the Emperor’s hand.
Trickle...
She had thought she would never have reason to smile again.
She could not sleep peacefully for even one day, haunted by the thought of Ruby being left all alone.
Stream.
She had thought she would never again be able to dream of tomorrow.
But once the tears began, they refused to stop, and the child’s face kept flickering before her eyes.
"How can you..."
Stream...
"...bring me nothing but hope?"
The duke’s cheeks, always cold and chilled,
on this night alone,
remained hot and wet for a long time.
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