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Chapter 402: Reset, and Rediscovery.

“For things to happen, a trigger of some sort must have existed. That can be called a diverging point of a certain scenario, since without it, the things that followed wouldn’t exist.”

“Haa…”

“For example. If you had not met Suu-kun, and Duke Ortlinde through her, you wouldn’t have met Yumina-kun through that same duke. Is that not so?”

“Well, yes.”

I only got to know Yumina due to the duke’s identity as the king’s younger brother, after all.

“And without your trip from the town of Leaflet to the capital, you would not have met Suu- kun. And to stretch it a bit, the same goes for Yae-kun. If even a single cog had been misplaced in that sequence, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

No, well, if you say that, then without that mistake by Kami-sama, I would still be living a mundane live as a high schooler back in Japan, wouldn’t I? Eh, don’t tell me…

“Do you mean… That it can change history?”

“Right. It’s something similar. However, this ‘power’ we’re dealing with doesn’t do something like turning back time. It takes a part of the scenario surrounding the current target, and overwrites it to ‘become nothing’. It’s a bit inaccurate, but calling it a ‘reset’ should be easier to understand for you. Of course, it’s not strong enough to affect the cognition of us divines, though.”

Kousuke ojii glanced towards Anubis. Anubis is behaving normally. He probably doesn’t have any idea that something just happened.

So rather than the time rolling back, it’s more like I began anew in a new timeframe, is it…?

Like the reset button in a game. When something bad happens, you reset. You reset as many times as it takes to fix the situation. So that’s the white [Crown], Albus’ power…

“No, if it’s just resetting back into a parallel world with a different divergent point, then the white [Crown] would only move itself, or its master, to that spot, and that’ll be the end of it. Nobody else would be affected. Instead of that, it looks at ‘something that has happened’ in ‘this world’, and takes ‘the possibility that it didn’t happen’ in another parallel world, and stick that onto the current event. Like sewing a patch onto a pair of pants to cover a hole, or grafting a new branch onto a tree with one of its branch snapped off. And with that, the hole in the pants, as well as the broken branch of the tree would technically ‘become nonexistent’. Of course, anything that follows would change as well.”

The power of the black [Crown], Noir, is to pull in and manifest the thing that it desires from a parallel world.

And the power of the white [Crown], Albus, would be to take a phenomenon from a parallel world, cut it off, and apply it like a patch to this world… Would overwriting be a better word?

——That reminds me, that time I went to see the pumpkin pants prince, the blue [Crown], Blau, said something like that.

“The white Crown [Albus] is a special Crown. It is the pair to the black Crown [Noir], and the end. The fool that would return everything to null.”

True, this is a power that would return everything to null… Or, to be exact, return everything to a state where it “doesn’t exist”.

The powers of the [Black] and [White] are indeed similar. The [Black] that pulls in various “possibilities” to itself, and the [White] that returns various “possibilities” to null.

“This is only a conjecture, but that white [Crown] probably caused this ‘reset’ because it didn’t want you to remove the G-cube from it, Touya-kun. It shouldn’t have that much power since it was in sleep mode, so the bare minimum… It probably ‘reset’ to the point that caused its discovery in the first place. It didn’t work on us gods, though.”

As I listened to Kousuke ojii’s words, I immediately called the Belfast king.

“Oh, Touya-dono. What is it?”

In Belfast, the one-horned shark in Lake Palette had already been subjugated. And just as Kousuke ojii had said, they didn’t find anything in the lake.

When I asked for more details, there was one point which was different from what Duke Ortlinde had told me back then.

The horn of the one-horned shark didn’t break. It was because the horn broke off and sank into the lake, that one of the knights dived down and discovered Albus. So that’s the point which the white [Crown] overwrote.

“Go and dive into the lake. You should find the white [Crown] there. I think it probably won’t try to ‘reset’ itself as long as you don’t try to take its G-cube out. Well, there’s also a good possibility that it doesn’t have enough power to carry out a ‘reset’ anymore, though.”

Following Kousuke ojii’s advice, I used [Gate] to move to Lake Palette.

There’s nobody around the place; it seems like the people from Belfast had already finished taking the one-horned shark away.

I tried searching through the lake with search magic, but no reactions came up. I wonder why?

The white [Crown] should definitely be sleeping at the bottom, though.

“[Prison].”

A translucent bluish-white cube appeared around me. The setting is obviously to not let water in while letting oxygen pass through.

And like that, I started going into the lake.

As expected of the royal capital Alephis, which is also called the “Lakeside Capital”, the transparency of Lake Palette’s waters is very high. I can see things a long distance away even underwater.

“I can see a long way but… This is way too big… Where do I even start. I should’ve asked His Majesty the location where the horn fell before the reset occurred. Ah, right.”

I used summoning magic and called Sango and Kokuyou over from Brunhild. The turtle and snake divine beasts floated in the air like usual.

“Can you ask the fishes in this lake to look for a white golem… Or something like that at the bottom of this lake?”

“By your will.”

“Leave it to us~”

Sango and Kokuyou got out of the [Prison], and after they seemingly shouted something in the water, an uncountable number of fish suddenly assembled before them. Uoh. As expected of the kings of the scaled species. Amazing.

When Sango and Kokuyou shouted something again, the fishes immediately scattered. It’s definitely not because I thought something like “they look delicious”, right…

When we waited for a while, a few of the fishes came back and stopped in front of Sango and Kokuyou.

“It sounds like they found something. This way.”

That was pretty fast. I started walking along the bottom of the lake in the direction Kokuyou pointed towards, while being guided by the fishes.

Eventually, I saw something jutting out of the ground in front of me.

I can’t really tell what that is from here yet. It looks somewhat like an algae-covered rock. It is a weirdly-shaped rock, though.

However, when I touched it with my hand, some of the moss and dirt covering it fell off, revealing a white body suspended in the water.

As I quickly wiped the rest of the moss and dirt off, it became apparent that this thing that was jutting out of the bottom of the lake is indeed the white [Crown], Albus.

If it’s in this kind of state, then it’s no wonder why my search magic can’t find it. The knight who found it before the reset happened probably did it by accidentally touching it or something, too.

Still, it looks to be in pretty good conditions considering the amount of time it must’ve been left here for that much dirt to cover it. Is it because Lake Palette’s waters are rather clean?

Lake Palette isn’t a closed-off lake with no rivers connecting to it like Hokkaido’s Lake Mashu. The fact that its waters are so clear despite that probably has something to do with spirits.

For now, I pulled Albus up with [Levitation], and returned to Brunhild together with Sango and Kokuyou using [Gate].

“Without a doubt, this is the white [Crown]… To think it was in this world all along…”

Looking at Albus, who had been brought to Babylon’s [Laboratory], Dr. Elka made a gulping sound and muttered.

“Fumu. True, it’s a golem that looks very similar to Norn-kun’s Noir. Well, let’s open it up first.”

I immediately held Professor Babylon by her nape as she excitedly tried to reach out towards Albus, like a kid who just got a new toy.

“Gue!”

“Wait just a minute. Like I’ll let another ‘reset’ happen. Before you do anything, first, listen to something from me.”

“’Reset’?”

Both the professor and Dr. Elka showed confused faces, but once I talked to them about the things I had experienced, the two of them sank into thought.

“The ability to overwrite phenomena… Huh. It is indeed similar to Noir’s ability. Although, this one seems like it’ll become something horrifying if it’s misused, though.”

“Something horrifying?”

“Get it? Although it might be accompanied by several conditions for its usage, being able to turn ‘something that existed’ into ‘something that didn’t exist’… It’s an ability that can cancel whatever attack it faces, and might even be able to make it so that the entire battle didn’t happen in the first place. If something like that was used on a person or a nation…”

“It might even be able to do something like making it so ‘that person was never born’, or ‘that nation was never founded’…”

I shuddered when I heard Dr. Elka’s words. It’s like that one thing where someone’s parents never married in a time travel series, isn’t it.

If the meeting between the father and the mother was overwritten such that it “never existed”, the child would obviously not be born.

“Having said that, it’s too powerful an effect. I don’t think it would be able to overwrite things that far off in the past on top of that.”

“I concur. Plus, since this Albus is also one of the [Crown] golems, its ability must come with some sort of compensation. As it doesn’t have a master, I think it shouldn’t be able to wield its power to ‘reset’ anymore. —Come to think of it, I wonder what the compensation for [White] is. In Noir’s case, it was the ‘time spent living’ of its master…”

The compensation for the white [Crown] is most likely not anything mild as well. Isn’t it something that can be life-threatening once used? If it’s the opposite of Noir, then it would be the “time” its master “would live”… So, the master’s “lifespan”?

“That reminds me, if the event was ‘reset’, then why do you remember what happened, eh, Touya-kun?”

Giku. This girl, why’d she have to notice that…

I havn’t told anyone besides the fiancée group about my relationship with the gods. How should I get out of this…

“C, coincidence…?”

“Fuun…”

The professor looked at me with half-lidded eyes. She’s definitely super suspicious of me right now, isn’t she!

“Well, whatever. Still, what do we do with this guy?”

Un, we can just destroy it before it does anything troublesome, but I want to avoid that as much as possible.

I’m still not sure about it, but this white [Crown], Albus, was probably the one who mended the world barrier both 5000 years ago and 1000 years ago.

It must have erased the fact that “the barrier was broken” using its powers.

If it’s capable of using that power again, then it shouldn’t be impossible for it to mend the currently-broken world barrier of this world.

Right now, the world we’re in is defenseless. We don’t know if an invader from a different world like the Phrase would attack us in the future.

“Is it possible to restart it without touching the G-cube?”

“It probably set up a protection in order to prevent the data of its previous master from being wiped. As such, as long as we don’t try to register a new master to it, it shouldn’t be impossible to wake it up. However, that would mean we have to face an active golem without the master present to restrain it. If it goes on a rampage, without the master’s command authority…”

“We’d have to stop it with force… In the worst case, we’ll have to destroy it, huh.”

The “rampage” she talked about probably wasn’t referring to its reset ability going out of control, but a “rampage” in the base sense of the word.

There’s a chance it may recognize us as “enemies” due to some coincidences, and attack us. And there’s no master here to stop it.

“Well, I can seal it with my [Prison] in the worst case.”

“Un. That’s probably the safest option. Well, it’s not like it’ll definitely rampage once it wakes up.”

The professor nodded slightly.

“Alright, then let’s restart it.”

“No, let’s contact Norn before that and ask her to bring Noir here. It may become a restraint to Albus.”

Right. It’ll be a reunion between the [White] and [Black], after a thousand years, huh.

Since I can’t call Norn’s group to Babylon, and it might get dangerous, we switched locations to the large training field to the north of the castle.

While explaining the situation to Norn’s group who we called over, we proceeded with the operation to reactivate Albus.

“Man, just how did you go out and find a new [Crown] like that? I can’t understand it at all.”

“…… [White].”

Norn muttered under her breath while sounding exasperated, while Noir stood in front of the inactive Albus; it probably had something on its mind even if it has no related memories.

“[Open].”

Dr. Elka opened the chest compartment of Albus like what I did before the reset happened.

Inside, the G-cube slowly rotated in a transparent sphere while releasing green phosphorescence; the exact same sight that greeted me once before.

Without touching the G-cube, Dr. Elka took out a small stick-like part behind it. It somehow looks like a fuse.

“Sorry, but can you fill this with magic power for me? If we tried it, it would take too long, so.”

“In this? Eh, alright…”

I held the fuse I received from Dr. Elka between my thumb and index finger, and poured in magic power.

I had been pouring it in slowly at first, and after quite an amount went into it, a small light lit up in the middle of the fuse.

Since it looked like it’s full, I returned the fuse to Dr. Elka, who then placed it back into its position inside Albus.

And finally, she pressed a button-like place deep inside with something like a screwdriver. The rotational speed of the G-cube got faster for an instant, but it immediately returned to normal.

“And we’re good with this.”

Dr. Elka closed the chest portion of Albus, and poured in magic power again.

Once she did that, a low hum began coming out of Albus, and small clicking sounds could also be heard here and there.

“Crown Series, model number CS-01 [Illuminati Albus], reactivate.”

After a mechanical-sounding announcement came out from Albus, its visor suddenly opened, and it began surveying its surroundings with its camera eyes.

Albus raised its upper body, and slowly stood up. Its eyes turned to Noir, who’s standing in front of it.

It then tried to take a step towards Noir, but tripped on its own feet, and had its balance broken.

“Ah.”

The white [Crown] slipped and hit the floor face-first in front of our eyes.

“… Overturned. Incomplete restoration of functions. A shame.”

“—Right after reactivation. Acceptable behaviour.”

Albus let out a voice while still flat on the ground, and Noir replied to it.

“No need to comfort. My heart is hurt.”

“Understood.”

……Un, I don’t think it’ll suddenly attack us or anything. Somehow, it feels that way.

-Pixel