Chapter 273: The Original World
Stardus was currently having a very bad experience.
“…..Ewww.”
Where did this go wrong?
…When she’d finished the long, long battle, she’d thought it would be over. She just wondered what the problem was. Letting her guard down at the end, against the Moonlight Lord? No. It wasn’t something that could be avoided by dodging. It was an attack that even her psychic senses couldn’t predict.
And this was the result.
She was struck by a spur-of-the-moment attack that sent her tumbling through a gate.
And so she was now, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, holding on to her frantically throbbing head, doing her best to keep her body from being thrown around. It felt like she was in a whirlpool.
Soon
“Whew!”
Finally, she could feel the ground.
“Ha, ha…..Ha ha.”
After a long moment of collecting herself Stardus opened her eyes and looked ahead.
What she saw was
“…?”
A world of ruins, where everything had fallen apart.
“What… is this…?”
Stardus muttered, her voice trembling in spite of herself.
An endless ghost town under a red sky.
Sure, they’d been fighting in Seoul earlier, where the city had been nearly half destroyed by the beast, but certainly not to this extent. Here, dust flew as if the nearby buildings had collapsed long ago.
Such an ominous feeling.
“Ha…!”
She took to the skies, dragging her tired body along, and flew for a while, searching for people or cities.
After some time had passed, and she had circled for quite a while, she had to admit…
…nowhere, no sign of life. A world of ruined cities.
She felt it in her gut.
‘Is this a different world…?’
She thought to herself.
Judging from the words of the Moonlight Lord… about manipulating dimensions… Perhaps this is a world somewhere in another dimension that has been destroyed.
She shook her head at the ominous thought.
No, no. It could be a hallucination. No such nonsense could have happened…
“….”
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sign on the sidewalk.
“…New Seoul?”
The word “Neo Seoul” was written on a green-colored sign, as if it were a sign on the road.
…Hearing those words for the first time in her life, she sensed something was wrong.
This is definitely not the world she knew.
***
How long had she been wandering the world under such a red sky?
She was able to glean some information from the few remaining buildings.
There was the problem that things like computers were already vandalized and there was no electricity, so the best she could rely on were torn newspapers and books… but that didn’t mean she didn’t learn anything.
“….”
First of all, the time in this world is a few years from now.
In other words, it’s quite some time in the future.
…Does that mean she traveled to the future?
Is the future going to be this horrible?
…No, she didn’t think so.
“….”
Inside a half-collapsed building, in the ruins of what was once, presumably, a library she sifted through the charred wreckage and found a few other bits of information.
That this place was called New Seoul, not Seoul, as the sign outside said.
And that this New Seoul was completed when.
“…After the Storm of the Moonlight Maiden destroyed Seoul, the capital was rebuilt by Lee Seola, the chairwoman of Yuseong Corporation.”
…. What the hell does that mean?
Under a red sky, scarlet light streamed through the windows of collapsed buildings like a sunset.
With a chilly breeze coming in through the cracks, she stood and looked down at the paper, pondered for a moment, and then muttered.
“Surely Seoul, then me…Egostic would have stopped it…”
Yes.
Moonlight Maiden, the dark-haired girl who wore a white shrine maiden’s robe, the one she had taken with him.
It was true that she had attacked Seoul with a pink storm that she, Shadow Walker, and Icicle had been unable to stop…but apparently, it was at that point that Egostic appeared and convinced the Moonlight Maiden to go with him, and the city was safe.
…She also remembered him stroking her hair and telling her she did a good job.
In any case, she remembers the Moonlight Maiden attack as vividly as if it had happened yesterday.
That’s why she couldn’t understand what was written in this book.
Seoul had apparently survived the attack unscathed, but now it was destroyed. What does that mean?
…Holding on to this nonsensical information doesn’t tell her anything more so she decided to go to another area and investigate further.
With that thought, she took to the skies once more, scouring the ruins for anything she could find.
Soon enough, she was able to get quite a bit of information, specifically information about a past that was clearly not her world.
[[BREAKING]The S-class villain responsible for the collapse of four cities, St. Petrius, aka Death Knight, has finally been captured. VK corporation is currently under investigation for its alleged involvement.
…Death Knight, an A-ranked villain who had no record of fighting anyone but her, was somehow listed as an S-ranked villain who had killed hundreds of people…
[North Atlantic Villain Organization Latis launches worldwide invasion… South Korea loses 15% of its territory. ‘We did a good job,’ he says]
Latis, led by S-class villain Atlas, who apparently would not have attacked South Korea, did.
She searched through the rubble for more newspapers and books, trying to find any information she could.
Eventually, she realized how much time had passed.
“Ha, ha, ha…”
Finally, she followed her intuition and found what looked like a collapsed bookstore.
She dug through the rubble in the basement and pulled out some current events magazines, news, and other things that were in pretty good shape in the storage area.
“Ha…”
Sitting down on a nearby rock, she flipped through them with a sigh.
Soon enough, she was able to find quite a few differences between the years of this world and the original.
“….”
This world was a much crueler world than the one she was in.
It was a world where thousands of people died on average every month, where villains were much stronger, and where it was even stranger for a country to exist.
[S-class villain Rhino goes on another serial killing spree… Dozens of victims killed]
[[Page 1]S-class villain Weapon Master invades Seoul with mass murder robots. Association says ‘flee to a safe place immediately’…Criticized for lack of response. Death toll reaches hundreds within an hour… Citizens’ anxiety spikes as Weapon Master warns of further invasion.]
[The Demon King takes over 30 percent of New Seoul territory, how to stop them? Experts ‘researching, but no clear solution…’]
[S-class villain Scream Maker terrorizes for the fourth time this month… Opposition lawmaker says ‘thousands of our people have already been killed by this guy, and the president is playing golf and arguing’…]
The nameless villain, Rhino, killed dozens of people in a single attack.
The Demon King she fought was not supposed to conquer nearly half of the capital with his black tentacles, while Weapon Master and Scream Maker killed by Egostic survived and went on to kill thousands.
And that’s just the high-level villains whose victims have caused major terror.
All of the lesser villains she had taken down so easily had somehow managed to continue their terrorism in this world without being caught.
Either the villains in this world are stronger than the ones in Stardus’ world.
Or…
She of this world was much weaker than she was.
[A-list hero Stardus has the worst public favorability rating ever… 90% unfavorable. Incompetence is cited as the number one reason…”The hero who allowed her people to die.”]
“….”
Seeing a big red X slapped across her face in what looked like an editorial made her feel bitter. …How weak she is, how the world has come to this.
But more than that.
There was something else that bothered her the most, something she didn’t understand.
That was.
‘…Where’s Egostic?’
Yes.
Her arch-enemy, her A-list villain, the one who was supposed to have founded the terrorist organization Egostream, where the hell is he?
To answer that question, she searched everywhere, but she couldn’t find him anywhere. There are all sorts of other villains in this world, but he’s nowhere to be found.
She even looked for other villains to see if they had changed their names, but in the end, she couldn’t find him.
[South Korea’s immigration surge…Korea collapsed after the White Witch’s great escape, what’s next]
She even managed to find a grown-up version of the hacker girl from the original world, a few years after the current year in this world, but…Still no sign of him.
…What the hell happened?
Is it possible that in this world… Hmm. Maybe it was one of her allies? Haha, that can’t be right.
With that thought, she stepped outside.
“….Haha.”
The sky was still red, and the city was in ruins.
…Even so, it was difficult to gauge the time frame because there was no moon, but it was easy to realize that she hadn’t eaten since she came here, so her stamina was low.
…And although she hadn’t consciously thought about it until now…she wonders if there’s a way to get back to her original world.
Let’s find something first. If I get out of here, I might find a place that’s inhabited. The latest issue of the newspaper says that Busan has been named the new capital.
With that thought, she flew over the destroyed world once more, her body exhausted.
“….?”
And then, in what looked like a junkyard of crumbling buildings she spotted the first “person” she’d ever seen in this world, standing atop it with his back to her.
“Hey!”
She said, flying towards it, excited to see it.
Only when she got closer did she realize something was off.
“Huh?”
A woman with long blond hair, dressed in a turbid latex suit of red and blue colors, standing atop the tower of an abandoned building and a dangerous aura around her.
“…What.”
…the moment she turned at the sound of her own voice Stardus, Shin Haru nearly gasped.
…Certainly, more mature than she is now, though somehow tired and sharp.
“…Me?”
Stardus muttered, unable to help herself.
“…What is this?”
Hearing the woman’s voice, so muffled… but so unmistakably her own, threw Stardus into even more confusion.
It was the first time she had seen her from this world.
