Chapter 26: Chapter 24: Hidden from View
"Y'know, I've been thinking...why don't we just watch videos that show the end of Ellize's route? Then we'd know everything. Boy, am I ever smart," I suggested after we'd finished discussing our anti-teleportation plan.
It was still subject to change, but we'd decided to go with the magic vacuum strategy for now. Still, I was convinced we'd be better armed to handle the situation if we watched Ellize's route until the end instead of speaking in hypothetical terms. Wouldn't it be easier to plan for the future if we actually knew the future?
Niito (me) sneered at my genius idea. "Do you really think I wouldn't have already done that if it was possible? How much dumber can you get?"
"Hey! You wanna fight?!" I snapped.
"Just look at this," he said, opening the usual video platform we used in a new window.
He typed "Ellize," and a video titled "[SHOCKING]Ellize Route Let's Play LAST PART" appeared at the top of the list.
That was exactly the kinda video I was talking about! Watching that would help us know what to expect.
Niito (me) clicked on the link.
Obviously, an ad started playing before we could start watching. Boring. After the ad ended, the loading mark kept going round and round. The video wouldn't load no matter how long we waited. The comments were in the same state—I couldn't read any of them.
"That site's always been super laggy. Just check another video platform."
"A sound argument," he agreed, opening another site and trying to load a similar video.
Just like on the previous website, the video didn't start, and we couldn't read the comments either. He pulled out his smartphone, but the exact same thing happened. No matter what he tried, the videos wouldn't load.
That wasn't the most disturbing part—even the websites where people usually posted spoilers wouldn't work. Most pages were completely empty, and we couldn't even get the bulletin boards to open.
However, when it came to threads that discussed events I was already aware of—the dance party, for instance—the comments showed up without any issues.
"The whole internet's like this. I've tried everything, but I just can't access any spoilers. Even when I play the game myself, it'll automatically shut itself down when I reach a certain point. I only recently became able to access information about the dance party as well," he explained.
"What the hell?!"
"You're back to speaking like a dude," he pointed out. "Anyway, the point is that we can't look up the future. My best guess is that it's because nothing is set in stone yet... Probably."
"But we could watch Eterna's route, right?"
Niito (me) had just told me we couldn't look up the future, but last time we hadn't had any problems watching videos of Eterna's route. The ending hadn't been very positive—to say the least—but it still counted in a way, didn't it?
"Eterna's route'll never come to pass in your world. That's probably why we can watch it. While it is a potential future, it hasn't been chosen in the world where you're Ellize. We're most likely looking at a parallel universe that, uh...developed differently. Since Eterna's route wasn't chosen, it only exists as a scenario that could have been. That one's already set in stone, but you're still in the middle of creating Ellize's path. It doesn't have a set ending yet, so we can't see it. Got it?"
"Sorry, but no. Huh?"
Niito (me) sighed. "All right, just get one thing through your head—Ellize's route is a work in progress." He paused before adding, "Aren't you a little slow on the uptake, though? Maybe it's because our soul got split into two..."
He played a video showing the dance party. Obviously, everything was shown through Verner's eyes. The player got to pick who to dance with, and they selected Ellize's name.
The dance scene was a CG, which was quickly followed by the meteor shower scene. While I had no way of knowing what he'd been thinking while the event had happened, the player got to read Verner's thoughts.
Verner: (Shooting stars... They're beautiful. I can't help but think the timing is a little too perfect, though... Wait! Could Lady Ellize have something to do with it...?)
Ellize: Oh my. Did you see through me? I did use a tiny bit of magic but please keep it a secret, all right?
Ellize: It might only be a party trick, but the night sky is beautiful with all these stars decorating it. Wouldn't you agree, Verner?
Verner: (Lady Ellize looked up at the night sky. I could see her profile, lit up by the starlight. She looked right out of a fairytale, almost ethereal. She's truly...)
Verner: Yes... Truly...beautiful.
Verner: (I couldn't stop my heart from losing itself in her beauty.)
YIIIIIIIIIKES!!! WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THIS?! URGH! DO YOU WANT ME TO DIE OF EMBARRASSMENT?! My mental state takes 9999 damage! It's super effective! STAHP! My sanity meter'll never recover!
Niito (me) looked at me rolling on the futon and cringing with a grin on his face.
"Look at you, acting like a proper waifu!" He laughed. "This is a riot! Little Verner's gonna be all over you, y'know?"
"Shut uuuuuuuuuup!!!"
No way. There was just no way! I couldn't accept that Verner had been thinking...THAT...while we'd talked.
Image here:
Niito (me) stopped paying attention to me—I was still trying to recover from the blow I'd just taken—and settled into his chair before opening another page. It was part of a guide that displayed the characters' stat sheets. It also listed all their skills—Verner, Eterna, what's-his-face, Fiora, Marie, Aina, and Four-eyed Pervert. The whole gang.
"So, which one should we get to fight the witch?" he asked.
"Huh?"
"What do you mean, 'Huh?' Did you forget our entire conversation already? We need someone other than Ellize to fight the witch first so she uses up as much MP as possible. That's the only way to stop her from teleporting away. Which means...we need to figure out who should do that. If we just send some random character in without giving it any thought, we'll just end up with more dead bodies," he explained. "What, did you really think you could go back without a plan?"
I was sitting on the futon in the traditional way, with my legs tucked beneath me, as I listened to him.
To be fully honest, I was pretty damn worried at the idea of letting anyof them fight the witch.
That wasn't to say they had no hope of winning. In the original game, Ellize never took part in that battle, but Verner's party had managed to take the witch down all the same. On top of that, I wouldn't be asking them to kill the witch. They'd just need to tire her out—a fairly simple mission.
However, there was still a good chance one of them would die during the fight. In most routes, Alexia was the final boss. She couldn't be underestimated.
"How about sending a large force of knights?" I suggested.
"You'd just be announcing to the witch that you know exactly where she is. She'll flee. The witch is scared shitless of you. Did you forget? If she thinks there's a chance you might attack her, she'll run away immediately."
"Isn't the witch being a little too wimpy?"
"You're just too damn strong. Your stats are a joke. I couldn't stop laughing when I played you during the fight against Farah. Anyone would run away."
Was Alexia even still the final boss? I was starting to doubt it. What kind of final boss acts like a wuss? If even sending a bunch of knights freaks her out, what am I supposed to do, huh?"The witch is so scared of you that she almost disappeared from the game too," Niito (me) added.
"What do you mean?"
"You know how Alexia is supposed to return to her senses from time to time and appear in certain places so you can get her route? Well, she doesn't do that anymore."
I was dumbfounded.
Girl, you're that scared?!
As Niito (me) had just pointed out, the witch was supposed to come out of the basement a few times over the course of the game. There'd be no way to romance her if she didn't.
The only way to get on Alexia's route was to one, make sure not to miss said rare chances—you needed to use them to raise her affection level—and two, make sure her affection level remained the highest until the moment when the routes split into different storylines.
The biggest obstacle to successfully hopping onto the Alexia route was Eterna. Even if you didn't do anything to raise Eterna's affection, her base parameter was still higher than the maximum you could get with Alexia by answering her perfectly every time you saw her. That meant you had to actively lower Eterna's affection level by being cold to her.
My poor darling...
Anyway, I'd seen quite a few players turn Verner into a monster who gifted Eterna fossilized dragon shit on her birthday to achieve this.
Then wouldn't it be easier to do Alexia's route on your first run, you ask? After all, Eterna's route only existed from the second run onward, so she wouldn't be an obstacle the first time around. Well, the thing was...you only unlocked Alexia's route from the second run onward as well.
You could technically talk to Alexia during your first run, but you couldn't get on her route even if you satisfied the conditions. Instead, her dialogue slightly changed right before you fought her, so you'd think, Maybe I could've saved Alexia if I'd done better.
Now that I was Ellize, though, Alexia had stopped coming out of the basement. That, in turn, had erased her route from the game.
"Speaking of which, could you tell me what happens after I rush in and make the witch flee? In the other routes, I mean. I know about Eterna's," I asked.
"The witch goes into hiding somewhere else and starts gathering monsters again. She sends one of them to kill Eterna's parents. Eterna gets mad, awakens her powers as the saint, and uses her new abilities to track down the witch. She kills her and ends up becoming the final boss herself, just like in the version of the game you know."
"Can't my poor little Eterna stop suffering? The whole world's against her."
"The worst part is that the witch's hiding place isn't revealed in the game, so be careful not to let her slip away."
Misfortune still followed Eterna, no matter what.
I should take Eterna's parents under my protection, and... Actually, making sure to kill the witch while she's still in the academy would be the best option. But I'll still try to pay a little more attention to Eterna's parents and make sure they're okay.
"One last thing—you'll need to be wary of the witch's dark powers. They'll come out after she dies. If you mess up and let the powers escape, everything will come to naught."
"There are two ways to permanently seal them off in the game. The first is to have someone other than the saint deal the finishing blow," I stated.
"Yeah. That only happens in the bad ending, but it should work. Only you or Verner can accomplish that, but...the one who does will die."
Niito (me) had finally brought up the crux of the issue. If we let the curse of the witch reach Eterna, everything would be ruined. She'd turn into the final boss...and follow her tragic fate.
"By the way, did anyone ever figure out what that laugh meant? The one from the bad ending," I asked.
"No. It's still a complete mystery. I think it was just there for show, but...who knows? The official website doesn't mention it at all."
The bad ending—in which Verner killed the witch and broke the cycle before dying—actually ended on an unsettling note. After Verner died and his party members had shed their tears, the ending credits rolled...until they were suddenly interrupted. The screen would turn black, a strange laugh with a lot of voice effects applied to it would echo, and a cacophony would follow—sounds of an explosion, buildings crashing, people screaming, and all that. Finally, you ended up on the title screen again.
No one knew whose laugh it was, nor what the short scene was supposed to mean.
"The second option is...the witch's suicide," Niito (me) said.
"Yeah, Eterna did that..."
As I'd mentioned time and time again, the witch couldn't normally kill herself. Her dark powers kept her from doing so.
However, Eterna had succeeded. She'd done it after having been possessed by the curse for a very short time—which I assumed meant it hadn't fully merged with her—and after a long, strenuous fight with Verner that had exhausted most of her powers. As a result, Eterna couldn't pass on the curse to a new saint. She'd broken the cycle.
This ending was one of the only ways to keep the heroine you'd picked alive until the very end. Usually, your waifu would die before the end, but thanks to Eterna's suicide, you could obtain a happy ending with a handful of the girls.
That was out of the question for me, though. My goal was a true happy ending. I absolutely refused to let Eterna take her own life!
"Monsters are able to kill the saint, so how about we get a monster to finish the witch?" Niito (me) proposed.
"I don't think that would work," I shot him down. "The monsters are on the witch's side. On top of that, some of them are quite tough and have an affinity for dark magic. If they ended up surviving the witch's curse, they might evolve into something unthinkable. I'm fairly sure they'd still be weaker than me, but still..."
Monsters were completely under the witch's control. They wouldn't attack her, that was crazy.
"Speaking of which, didn't Dias ask you to save Alexia? What are you gonna do about that?" he asked.
"What do you want me to do? You know it's not that easy... It wouldn't be completely impossible if I was able to follow Alexia's route, but..."
"After Alexia's dark powers went into Eterna's body, Verner used mouth-to-mouth to give his own dark powers to Alexia, right?"
"Exactly. Verner's powers came from Alexia's soul, after all—the part she cut off along with what remained of her conscience. Alexia was able to revive thanks to that, and she went back to being herself... Sadly, Eterna dies on that route too. What's worse, she has to watch Verner and Alexia flirting before she passes on..." I lamented with a sigh.
"She's really suffered way too much..."
The witch route was the one that had left me with the worst aftertaste. Alexia got to leave her traumatic experience as the witch behind and live as a human again, but just thinking about how Eterna must've felt broke my heart.
Why are you pretending like nothing's your fault and flirting with Verner, huh?! I know nothing's actually your fault...but still!If you looked at things from Eterna's perspective, the villainous MILF—who'd destroyed a good chunk of the world—suddenly pushed all the burdens onto her lap before stealing her boyfriend. On top of that, she had to take the other woman's position as humanity's common enemy while Alexia got her happily-ever-after ending.
Eterna, feel free to cry, my dear.
Anyway, that was why I wasn't fond of Alexia's route. I had completed it once for the sake of CG collection, though.
"Then I guess there's no choice..."
"I'll have to be the one to kill the witch," I added.
"Are you sure you're okay with that? You've been reincarnated into a healthy body. Don't you want to live?"
"I've never been the type who clings to his life. Plus, continuing to live as the perfect saint would be tiring. It's better for me to exit stage left before blowing my cover. My body doesn't have very long to live anyway. Plus, that world and the people in it..." The faces of Layla, Verner, and the others I'd met during the past decade started popping into my mind. I smiled. "I've started to like them a lot, you know? If my death can help them obtain happiness then... I don't mind. I won't have any regrets."
I was a hopeless case, but even trash like me felt inspired to do something good before the end. I wanted them to have a bright future. And I owed them an apology for messing with their destinies, didn't I?
I was supposed to have died already, so I'd give them whatever I had left. My batteries were almost dead, anyway. There was no point holding on to life now. If anything, I'd gotten more than I had bargained for. I'd only been supposed to live for one more year, but I'd gotten over twelve. What was there to regret?
Right after I'd asserted my intention to kill the witch myself, my vision started going white.
I guess that's it for today. Time to go back to my perfect saint persona, then. I'll do my best till the end.
(2.9k word count)
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone