There was something Philly once said to me.
─In the future where Aten is with you, I still don’t feel any ominous premonition.
Philly feels something ominous whenever Aster is at Aten’s side. That’s her foresight at work.
In the game, Aten, who would be on the very front line with Aster, meets her end first together with her companions, so you have to say that foresight is accurate.
That’s why Philly tried to keep Aten at my side.
Because she didn’t get that ominous feeling then.
But as time went on, those same words came to have a different meaning.
Forget ominous feelings or whatever.
In the first place, isn’t it that Philly simply can’t foresee me?
‘Right. That’s why the giants called me.’
They knew.
They knew the fate of humanity, doomed to destruction.
They knew that as long as humans within this world kept repeating the same actions, the same result would happen.
So they called me.
To change fate, a piece that doesn’t exist on this board had to be added.
Irregular, bug, error, glitch—call it whatever you want.
Like how, on a chessboard, you wouldn’t know how an elephant piece is supposed to move.
What was needed was something that didn’t follow this world’s rules.
“Your so-called fate isn’t much of a big deal either.”
“Ghhh......!”
My sword was stabbed into the Moirai’s abdomen. The Moirai tried to push it out.
As we struggled for strength, I spoke.
“You’re not even on the level of our Empire’s Empress.”
“Y-you arrogant worm!”
THOOOM!
“Ugh!”
A sudden flood of pressure slammed into me and pushed me back. The same happened to Selena.
The Moirai had unleashed their aura.
Truly, they were gods. Even gods who had nothing to do with combat had strength on a different level.
The Moirai shouted.
“Do you think the tide will change just because we can’t read you alone?! You insignificant speck of life dares!”
“Take a look at yourselves.”
I spoke with a laugh.
The one on the left, who’d been holding Selena, had lost complete control over the right side of her body, which hung twisted, and the ones in the center and on the right were each wounded and bleeding in their own places.
The Moirai are goddesses of fate.
If they can’t control fate, then gods who have nothing to do with combat are this weak.
“Is your death also a trivial thing that doesn’t affect the grand flow?”
“How dare you! Do you think you’ve already won just because you’ve inflicted wounds of this level?!”
The three Moirai raised their arms. Though the one on the left looked a bit ridiculous, her body ruined as it was.
DRRRRRRR!!
Still, judging from that power, it wasn’t something to laugh at. The looms filling the surroundings roared as they began to move.
Along with that, countless threads surged upward. Every last one of them was filled with aura.
“Selena!”
I saw that and called out to Selena, and she immediately went into my shadow.
Selena had no way to block that.
“Die!”
And countless threads poured toward me from all directions.
An overwhelming scale that filled up all the space I could use to dodge.
Weaving, Black Heaven
Gram
I created Gram and swung it horizontally.
If there was no gap, I just had to make one. Even if those threads were filled with aura, they couldn’t stop Gram. Besides, the weapons I created now basically shared the mana of the Nine Worlds.
“......Huh?”
But by the time I’d cut through the thread-filled scenery, the Moirai were gone.
The three goddesses had suddenly vanished, nowhere to be seen.
Yet the looms continued to turn, and threads gathered again, as if they would soon attack me once more.
‘I see. The attack was to block my vision.’
The Moirai had never thought that thread attack would work on me in the first place. They’d just needed a screen to hide their bodies.
‘......I can’t sense them.’
The three goddesses couldn’t be caught by my intuition.
“Selena, follow the flow of mana and—”
I got that far, and when Selena stepped out from the shadow—
Sssshhhk-shhhk!!
“Ugh!”
Bundles of threads surged in, as if they’d been waiting. Selena hurried back into the shadow.
‘Of course. The threads here right now aren’t aiming at me, they’re aiming at Selena.’
The moment Selena came out of the shadow, they would immediately launch an attack.
I didn’t know if Selena following the flow of mana would really let her find the goddesses, but just keeping her trapped inside the shadow would be enough for them.
‘Besides, there’s a time limit.’
Selena could stay inside the shadow for about ten minutes. Because her breathing would stop.
I had no idea if a person could really stay without breathing for ten whole minutes.
‘Selena’s throat was being gripped just a moment ago, she swallowed a mana crystal, and she used her techniques. It won’t be easy to regulate her breathing.’
In other words, the actual time would probably be much shorter than ten minutes.
I had to finish this quickly.
“.......”
The sound of the looms turning. Bundles of thread rustling as they filled the air.
The Moirai had to be somewhere here, but they couldn’t be sensed.
Then, for a moment—
Sss─
“!”
I felt a chill at the nape of my neck and almost reflexively swung my sword.
KANG!
It felt like I’d clashed against nothing more than the Moirai’s fingernails.
But the face I’d briefly glimpsed vanished the instant my view shifted.
Cackle, cackle, cackle, laughter rang out with no visible forms. The three goddesses giggled and shrieked, noisily shaking the air.
I rolled my eyes quickly.
‘It’s not just the Moirai themselves. It’s the same with these looms.’
Until this weaving factory and its looms appeared, I hadn’t been able to sense any of them. They must have been here from the beginning, hidden by magic, but my intuition couldn’t detect them at all.
But this actually wasn’t my first time having that experience.
‘Heracles.’
I hadn’t sensed Heracles approaching me either.
I couldn’t forget the shock of when he first placed his hand on my shoulder.
The magic circle of Menosorpo, my intuition, the automatic defense of Black Heaven—
The shock of all of that failing to react in the slightest.
The situation now was similar to back then.
If I inferred from that point—
‘Maybe the higher a god’s rank is, the harder they are for me to sense.’
I hadn’t met many gods. Most of the time it was possessions, and even when it wasn’t, I’d never fought them properly.
My only few experiences were with Heracles and Hella, and as it turned out, Hella didn’t seem to be a god.
‘......No, wait. It’s not like I can never sense them.’
There had been a time when I sensed a god’s appearance beforehand.
Poseidon.
Before he appeared, I’d definitely known he was coming. At the time, I hadn’t known it would be Poseidon, but Elodie had sensed it as well.
‘That was because Poseidon had no intention of hiding his presence.’
In other words, conversely—
The Moirai weren’t just “undetectable.” They were actively avoiding being detected.
‘I’d wondered about it when I met Heracles too. Just how are they avoiding detection?’
A living being can’t make its energy truly drop to zero. You can hide it, but at most that’s like an herbivore concealing itself and fooling the senses of those who can’t detect anything more than a rabbit or a deer.
In other words, it’s not that they’ve made their energy zero.
If even so they can’t be sensed—
‘......Then there must be somewhere their energy exists.’
Somewhere I couldn’t sense.
Which meant, possibly—
“......I see.”
I raised my right hand.
A small magic circle appeared above it.
Menosorpo
Domain Expansion
Workshop
Wave
The magic circle, which had been only about the size of a small cylinder, rapidly expanded its range and began to spread across this entire underground space.
The looms and threads didn’t move in any special way. Maybe they thought my magic circle was nothing worth noting.
Like that, the Workshop swallowed up everything around it—
THUNK!
And when it had completely closed—
“......?!”
“Gasp!”
The three goddesses revealed themselves.
They were looking around.
No doubt about it.
Inside the Workshop, they couldn’t see me.
Just like everyone else I’d invited inside here.
To them as well, this place was pitch-black darkness.
“It really was like that.”
I spoke.
“You’ve been putting yourselves in another world. Quite the ability.”
It was similar to my Weaving.
No matter what you did, you could never detect anything I’d made with Weaving. Not unless you used Menosorpo or Black Heaven.
The Moirai could do something similar.
The ability to pull their own existence back half a step into a temporary world.
No—strictly speaking, it wasn’t a temporary world.
“These countless looms. I wondered where they suddenly popped out from.”
I raised a finger.
Sssshhhk!
Countless weapons in the Workshop obeyed my command, lifting themselves up from their display racks and standing upright.
“This weaving factory is your world.”
“Y-you wretch! How are you sensing us? What is this place?!”
“Just like you made your own world and went back and forth from it, I can do that too.”
The three goddesses’ eyes went wide in apparent shock at my words. It still seemed they couldn’t see me.
One of them spoke.
“Ridiculous nonsense! Constructing a world is the realm of grand magic! Don’t spout such pathetic lies!”
Right. Elodie had said the same.
─Yeah, this isn’t just a building. It’s not simple magic either. It’s like a concept has popped out into reality. This is the realm of grand magic.
─Oh, then am I a grand mage too?
─......It wouldn’t be wrong to say that.
She’d acknowledged it without even giving me a token scolding for the joke.
This was undeniably grand magic.
“This is my domain. Goddess of fate.”
I pointed a finger forward.
Accordingly—
Clack.
Every weapon inside here trained its tip straight ahead.
“And this is a Workshop.”
Sssshhhk-shhhk!!
KWA-KWA-KWA-BOOOOM!
Weapons poured forward like a rainstorm.
Those countless bundles of weapons flew at high speed and pierced through the looms.
A scene of total, utter destruction.
“Looms don’t suit this place.”
“Ah, aaaaaaahhhhh!!!”
The Moirai screamed in apparent agony.
Honestly, I had no idea why they were screaming so much just because some looms were being smashed.
Well, not that it was any of my business.
Same as always.
“How, how can this be?!”
“For a human to construct conceptual magic on this scale!”
The Moirai cried out in confusion.
I listened quietly—
‘......Wait?’
Something felt off, and I tilted my head.
“......You seriously don’t know this?”
“What do you mean by that?! How could a mere human—”
“I received this ability as a reward from the smartwatch.”
“......!”
This was a quest the smartwatch had given me. Its transcendence reward.
Because I’d stopped Indus’s plan and created the ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) possibility for Renzo to become a force for good.
I’d gone beyond the range of normal rewards and obtained a transcendence reward.
What I’d gotten then was “adding the Workshop as a target for Weaving.”
‘......Yeah, from the start, why would something this nasty be giving me rewards?’
The smartwatch.
The smartwatch’s alarms and quests that had gone quiet at some point.
That long blank stretch.
“......Don’t tell me.”
A hypothesis popped into my head, and I asked:
“Instead of being some kind of master of the quests, did you hack the smartwatch so it wouldn’t function properly?”
