Ank

“I’m gonna cry…”, I whispered. As the strongest possible summon I came across up to that point vanished before my very eyes, I stood on all fours at the edge of the abyss.

“Brother…”, I felt a gentle hand patting my back. And, turning my gaze up, I saw it.

“Is this…?!”, I jumped up, euphoric.

“There’s no way I’d waste so many [God]-made weapons and would fail to snatch at least one piece of the big prize, right?” Hunah showed me a proud smile, as she held up a huge bone chip. It was a Deon’s fragment.

“Sister, thank you!”, I hugged my twin sister tightly. Then, without wasting any more time, I touched the piece, and conjured: “[Dissection]”, with 100% chance of success with that [Spell], there was nothing to worry about, and just like that, I learned: [Summon: Deon].

“Hu... Not- Not bad, shadowlings”, I heard the 1st Guild Master confidently complimenting us from behind; turning to him, however, I saw an unrecognizably wounded man.

Only the pants of his set of magical clothing-armor haven’t been burned down, his ribs were exposed, his left arm twisted and bent in unnatural ways, one of his eye-socks was completely empty, and black rods perforated his muscles here and there. Honestly, it was amazing he was alive, much more that he could keep his appearances.

“Shit, that must hurt… Here”, Hunah threw him a healing potion.

“Thanks, but if I felt the pain, I wouldn’t be conscious right now, neither would I be able to use my fighting style: my older sister buffs me with a pain nullifying [spell] everyday”, he nodded at my twin sister and drank the potion.

“You still alive, and the death [God] hasn’t come for us yet, so… did we win?”, I asked.

“Y- Yeah”, the 1st Guild Master muttered, as his skin regrew over his ribs, and his arm’s bones, slowly, came back to their place. Once his face was well enough reconstructed, Kon smiled, adding: “I haven’t had a fight like this in centuries!”

“The two of us have been in too many fights like this in the past few years, though”, I smiled back.

“And the box?”, In the blink of an eye, without anyone noticing her approach, Taffy appeared right beside us. She tried to put on her usual smile, but since the beginning of this box-recovery quest, she had been struggling with something, and her expression just didn’t seem right.

“It should be in the teleportation circle, in the middle of the palace”, Kon said. Looking around, and at the quickly shrinking world, walls of magic approaching from all sides, consuming everything in that pocket dimension, he added: “We better get to it quickly, else we will be consumed by this world for our magic.”

“Hu, I thought we’d be immediately kicked out of this place once the death [God] was defeated”, I shrugged.

“That’d be the case if we had been forcefully brought here, but we came through a portal I made by my own will, so the world will consume our magic to try to survive… but the three of us combined couldn’t possibly keep this huge space for a single second”, Kon explained, and we moved after the box.

The palace had been reduced to little more than a pile of rubble, but with Kon’s clones and my summons, we managed to quickly dig through the ruins and find the great metal box: the gray shinning cube was still intact, not even with a scratch on its surface, its ominous seals and chains thankfully still in place.

“There it is, Taffy: your… thing”, I presented the box to the woman. But her smile didn’t look even a bit more honest, as she nodded to me.

Taffy stepped forward, stared at the huge three meters tall, one and a half meters wide metallic gray box for a second, and gently touched it. And the entire object vanished in black mist.

“What?!”, the three of us, younger adventurers, jumped back, surprised.

“Oh, my! It seems this wasn’t the real one”, she replied, almost apologetically.

So, this is why she has been acting weird… She knew all along this wasn’t the real box. Then, Why did she allow us to chase after it anyway?

…It’s just like back in the jungle, isn’t it? She wanted us to get all the possible [EXP], and the tinniest help from her could vastly diminish the amount of [Experience Points] we’d receive.

But, why do all of this? This metal box, isn’t it important to her? It’s the first time she asked us to do anything, that she seemed so passionate about something other than Hunah and I, then, why is she prioritizing our growth? …What if she doesn’t have her mind made up yet? She does seem to really want the box, but she also seems to want us to get stronger, and these conflicting interests really are what is tearing her apart?

Well, whatever, it’s not like Hunah and I had never thought Taffy was weird before. But she greatly helped us to kill the [Gods], and continues to allow us to do so, I don’t care if she’s using us, or just having fun, or whatever.

“Then, have they fooled us from the beginning? Was there no box at all?”, Kon asked.

“No, there was definitely a box, and they stole it”, I replied. Taffy wouldn’t act so agitated if the 1st Guild Master assumption was correct.

“After you destroyed the ship, and right before we entered the portal. We lost the track of the real box at some point in between these two events, right?”, Hunah remembered us of when Taffy stared weirdly longing at the horizon before we entered that pocket dimension.

“What? How?! These [Eyes of Sin] of mine have clearly seen the 3rd Guild Master escape to this place with the box!”, Kon protested… And I couldn’t tell if he used a real [skill] or was just being himself.

“And all of us were fooled by it. An illusion”, My twin sister answered.

“So, they must have substituted the real box with the fake one before Kon got to them… Wait, haven’t you told us that it was strange for a [Proto-God] to appear so close to the surface before? And the ship was moving weirdly before we caught up to it”, I asked the 1st Guild Master, and he seemed thrown back for a moment.

“That’s right. So, they have the ability to control at least the weakest of those [Proto-Gods], maybe through some kind of ocean [God]. And after they failed to slow us down, they must have used one of them to take the box away, while the rest remained behind as distraction…”, Kon crossed his arms and frowned. “As expected, the warriors of light knew exactly how to fool us, their shadowy pursuers.”

“So? What do we do now? At this moment, they must have reached the coast already”, I pointed out.

“Nalatza Empire’s territory. Adventurers are very not welcomed there”, Hunah complimented.

The three of us looked at Tafy, but the woman seemed even more confused, divided than us, almost oblivious to what was happening then.

Finally, however, us, twins, sighed, and said in unison:

“Let’s go finish this quest. We can’t let Taffy here in the lurch!”

Smiling at us, Kon replied:

“Then, here we go! To the Nalatza Empire!”, And, with a flourish of his hands, the portal to the real-world re-opened.