In a Different World with a Smartphone (LN) - Volume 30 - Chapter 3.1

Chapter III: Moving Ambitions

“It’s not impossible, I suppose,” Doc Babylon said as she smoked a new aroma pipe in Babylon’s laboratory. “Taking one’s personality and inserting it into a Gollem’s Q-Crystal isn’t hard in and of itself. The problem is whether or not you can handle it mentally.”

“Your original body is dead, and you now have to live in a mechanical construct. It’s a question of if you could retain your identity with that knowledge,” the Professor added.

“You end up living life as a fake. I think it would be much tougher if you were aware of that fact. The normal outcome would be that you would simply break, personally,” Doctor Elluka also chimed in.

Transferring your memories to a Gollem meant that you yourself still had those memories of that process, so you’d know exactly why you existed, but I wasn’t sure if it was something you could so easily separate in your mind. No matter how much you tried to argue against it, a fake was a fake. You were now an artificial existence, a puppet with copied memories implanted inside of you. Was that something a regular person could withstand?

“However, according to Albus, the original Chrom Ranchesse gradually lost his memories due to the price paid for the activation of the white crown’s crown skill, correct? In which case, being the only owner of his complete memories, Gould would be the closest to the man himself, no?”

I understood what the Professor was getting at, but it also felt like a little bit of a stretch. Gould and the Chrom Ranchesse that lived five thousand years ago were ultimately two different existences. Gould just happened to have his memories.

“He truly is the ghost of Chrom Ranchesse.”

“That’s a very fitting phrase.”

It was indeed. A different body that still retained your memories of when you were alive? That sounded similar enough to a ghost to me.

“So does Gold not have Chrom Ranchesse’s memories whatsoever?”

“None. That large volume of data that Steph deleted had to have been his memories.”

In other words, it was as Kuon had suggested. Steph really had prevented a calamity.

“So are Gold and Gould the same type of Gollem?”

“Not quite. It would be more accurate to say that they’re duplicates, I guess?” Doc Babylon responded, putting two images up on the monitor. “On the right is Gold and on the left is Gould from footage Gold captured in the Ark.”

Honestly, beyond the cape and eye colors, they really did look exactly the same.

“Then if we enlarge this...” she mumbled as she zoomed in on their necks—but nothing looked different to me. “Notice anything?”

“Uh...not really? They look the same to me...”

The outline of the plating, the coloring, the exact marks, all of it made them seem like the same type of unit.

“Wait...even the marks are the same?”

“You’ve got it. We’ve thoroughly examined each of them, and they have the exact same marks in more than one place. Even if they were from the same batch, they shouldn’t be this similar unless they were marks made deliberately. That’s why they’re more akin to duplicates.”

In other words, they were originally one unit, but then they made a duplicate using something like what we have in the workshop.

“Think about it for a second. At that time, the Phrase invaded, Chrom’s black and white crowns went haywire, and time and space got all messed up. The world’s barrier was restored, and the Phrase were chased into the dimensional gap, correct?”

I nodded while listening to the scientist’s explanation. But wait, why was she explaining this now?

“What if the gold crown was shot through time at the same time as the Phrase? Don’t forget that Steph originally saw Gold falling through a hole in space-time. And then, perhaps the black crown led to another gold crown being brought through from a different timeline.”

“Oh! Through Noir’s Parallel Shift?”

The black crown, Chronos Noir, had the ability to control time and also to interfere with parallel worlds. He could call forth all sorts of things from all sorts of different worlds and times.

If that power had taken effect...did that mean the exact same gold crown was simply pulled from a different timeline? No wonder they had identical marks. Even if they were from different timelines, they were still the same existence. The fact that they had the same marks had to mean they weren’t taken from too far apart in time, though it was hard to tell if it was from the past or future. In other words, the small marks on Gould and Gold’s plating were caused when they were shot through time.

“But if they were wrapped up in the black and white crowns going haywire, would that not mean that Chrom’s memories weren’t implanted into them?”

“We were working under the assumption that Chrom only implanted his memories after he’d begun losing them as a means to preserve them, but isn’t it possible that he’d actually done it before that? Maybe as a backup in case he had to use the white crown’s crown skill.”

“I understand. You mean that he may have intended to use the memories within the gold crown as a substitute.”

“It’s a pretty crafty way of doing it, but not impossible.”

The Professor and Elluka agreed with Doc Babylon’s hypothesis.

Meanwhile, I’m starting to get lost.

“Here, let’s set up a timeline.”

“Big thanks.”

Was I just stupid?

Doctor Babylon began laying out an estimated timeline of Chrom Ranchesse’s movements.

Five thousand years ago, Chrom created the crown series of Gollems in the Reverse World. The red, blue, white, black, green, and purple crowns were made.

Chrom traveled from the Reverse World to the Upright World with the black and white crowns. Paying the price of the black crown’s crown skill, he de-aged from an old man to a young boy. He then traveled to the United Kingdom of Pillaisula.

Chrom learned magic, had a family, and then the Phrase invaded. He began researching how to return to his original world without paying the price; this led to the creation of the silver and gold crowns. He then transferred his memories into the gold crown to try to use them as a substitute for the crown’s crown skill(?).

The Dominant Phrase, Gila, attacked Chrom’s village. He lost his wife and daughter in the attack. The black and white crowns went haywire.

The barrier to the world was restored. The Phrase disappeared from the world. The murder of his family was reset. Two gold crowns ended up existing in this timeline due to the black crown. Each of them was shot forward five thousand years into the future.

Chrom began to lose his memory as a result of the white crown’s price. His contracts with the black and white crowns were reset.

Four thousand years following these events, the black and white crowns were activated by Arthur Ernes Belfast. A fierce war broke out between this world and the Phrase who managed to slip in through a gap in space-time. As a result, the black crown was thrown back into the Reverse World and the white crown entered another slumber under Lake Palette.

A thousand years later, the black crown was discovered by Doctor Elluka. The white crown was pulled up out of Lake Palette.

Steph discovered Gold. She initialized Chrom’s memory, deleting it from Gold. Gould activated still with Chrom’s memories intact. He began putting his plan into motion.

“I think that about sums it up.”

It did make much more sense when it was all lined up like this, but it did kind of make it feel like Chrom Ranchesse was the cause of everything... Well, if he hadn’t existed five thousand years ago, the world would’ve already been destroyed by the Phrase, so in a way, he was the world’s savior. Still, I was pretty sure the man himself didn’t save the world because he particularly wanted to. It didn’t help that the wicked devout and a fallen god had gotten involved and made everything worse.

“That’s your wheelhouse, isn’t it? Having gods as our opponent is a little much even for us.”

“You’re absolutely correct...”

Right, I’m the one who has to do something about this...

“So then, what did Chrom Ranchesse ultimately want to do?”

“Who knows? He was a prodigy who wasn’t content learning from only his own world, so he traveled to a different one entirely to study magic. Maybe he was just after the knowledge of the world?”

“Like trying to make the ultimate Gollem?”

“The ultimate Gollem, huh...?”

I couldn’t explain why, but that felt a little off to me.

In Chrom Ranchesse’s...Gould’s eyes, I felt as if I could see some deep, dark fire of passion. A ruthlessness that didn’t care about what victims he created. If any ordinary person heard me say that, they’d probably wonder what the hell I was going on about. It was a Gollem, but... Just jumping off of the previous conversation, it wasn’t a case of him knowing that he was a manufactured fake and feeling so much despair that he was taking the world along with him, right...?

Plus, he had the power of the fallen god inside of him as well. It might not just be Chrom Ranchesse’s memories affecting him, but the memories and emotions tied to the god of erosion as well. If that was the case, you definitely couldn’t call that Chrom anymore; it was a weird new combined something.

“Still...I never would’ve thought that idiot Maestro would go so far as to become a wicked devout...”

“No wonder we thought the Kyklops felt similar to his work. Everything suddenly makes so much more sense.”

That plague-mask wicked devout...Scarlet. Gould called him Maestro. That was the name of one of the five great gollemancers, an absolute genius Gollem engineer. Doctor Elluka—also known as the Restoration Queen—the wandering Professor, the Seekers who were an organization of Gollem engineers, and the late witch-king were deemed the five great gollemancers known throughout the world.

“The Maestro was quite the unreasonable man. Since he was always looking down on others to some degree, he barely interacted with people. We just barely managed to be deemed worth talking to for him even at our level,” the Professor explained.

What? Didn’t that mean he wouldn’t talk to most people?

What did he do when he needed to go shopping? No, wait, he could just use his Gollems...

“I hated him because of how rude he was,” Doctor Elluka said. “He was the kind of person to scoff at any work you showed him. He probably sold his soul to the wicked god just to get the gold crown.”

“I didn’t dislike him as much as you, but I did think he felt a bit unstable.”

“To be fair, you even managed to get along with the witch-king, Professor... You really need to find better friends, you know?” Doc Babylon remarked.

“Hoh hoh hoh! I never thought the day would come when I’d have both of you saying that to me.”

This Maestro might have been a genius, but from what I was hearing, he wasn’t the nicest guy to be around. Honestly, I thought magitech engineers all tended to be the same way in some form or another, especially looking at the three in front of me...

Perhaps some things are better left unsaid.

“Maybe they all escaped to Maestro’s laboratory.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“The Triharan Holy Empire, in a forest at the foot of Mount Paparika. It’s filled with monsters, and isn’t really a place that’s very habitable for humans,” the Professor said.

“Why would he make his lab there?”

“Because he hates people. He once said that he’s much calmer in places where people don’t gather.”

Damn, he was thorough. What happened to make him so averse to human contact? Was he betrayed by someone he greatly trusted? Whatever the case, we had to make that our next destination.

“I know he hates humans, but that didn’t mean he had to stop being one...” Doc Babylon muttered.

“Can one really not return to being human after becoming a wicked devout?”

“Definitely not. The wicked devout are, by all rights, already dead. Their existence is simply held together by the power of their wicked vessel. The moment that’s destroyed, both their body and soul are destroyed with it.”

They were basically all Undead... It was impossible to turn them back.

“Well, I pretty much quit being human myself, so I can’t really say anything. Changing topics, we’ve confirmed that any important devices or recorded information in the Ark were destroyed in the blast. All we managed to retrieve was the remains of the ship itself and some Kyklops frames. That, and...”

An image appeared on the monitor showing two Kyklops traveling through the sea holding what looked like a torpedo in one hand each. One was metallic orange, the other metallic green... Those were definitely the wicked devout with the iron and feather masks. So they got away after all.

“This was the last bit of footage sent by one of the probes that we had stationed around the Ark. Naturally, it was caught in the blast as well.”

“What way were they headed?”

“Toward Isengard, but I couldn’t tell you if that was their destination or not.”

Isengard was as chaotic a place as ever, which made it the perfect location for people with a bad history to hide. Did they maybe have bases outside of the Maestro’s lab? I doubted they just lived a nomadic life until they got their hands on the Ark.

Just in case, I tried using [Search], but I couldn’t find the wicked devout, Gould, or even the Kyklops with it. Why were they always so good at hiding? If I had the power to spread my divinity over the whole world, I could find them easily, but unfortunately, I wasn’t quite there yet.

Speaking of divinity...

I left the repairs of the Frame Gears to the scientists and opened a [Gate] to Mismede so I could ask Kraft, the god of crafting, about the sacred treasure.

As per usual, he was leisurely carving wood. Though I wouldn’t call the speed at which he finished them leisurely.

I handed Kraft the sacred treasure, and he closely examined it.

“I see now. It’s had its divinity stolen from it, has it? Now that I look at it, the core has certainly been greatly depleted of your power,” he said with a wry smile. “The weapon itself seems fine. If the only problem is that it’s lost its divinity, then just recharge it with more.”

Hearing those words filled me with relief. If it turned out I had to make it from scratch again...I don’t know what I would’ve done with myself.

“Still, can’t say it’s very good that something with the god of erosion’s power managed to steal your divinity. He can use the power of erosion however much he likes now, and if he can do that, we might have another wicked god on our hands.”

“Yup...”

The previous wicked god was created from a servile god, though he ended up being consumed and fused with his own creation. Unlike the servile god, however, the god of erosion was a full-fledged god, even if there was a little “ex-” in front of that. Use a power like that and it would definitely be possible to make another wicked god.

“A wicked god can’t be made that easily, though. Even if you did manage it, you’d need massive amounts of negative energy to let it grow. You know, like deep grudges, hatred, grief, agony... Stuff like that. That’s why people who worship wicked gods go around spreading calamity. That was the case before too, no?”

Was Gould actually trying to revive the wicked god? No, perhaps he wanted to make a whole new wicked god altogether... If that was the reason he was spreading chaos over the lands again, then we absolutely could not ignore him.

We’ll definitely beat him to a pulp.

“The reason we weren’t allowed to touch the wicked devout was because they were wards of the wicked god, but what about a Gollem that happened to acquire the power of a fallen god? There’s no problem with us destroying that, right?”

“Wicked gods are born on the surface, that’s why it is the surface humans that must do something about it. Of course, it’s a little much to ask them to take it all on themselves, so we gods are allowed to support them. However, a fallen god is an escapee from the Divine Realm. As such, the responsibility lies on us. Even when the servile god escaped to the surface, the goddess of love came down to take him back, didn’t she? It’s the same idea.”

Right, it had slipped my mind, but that was the whole reason Karen came down here to begin with. Nowadays, though, she only really came to have fun...

Anyway, basically, that meant that we gods could take erosion-god-related enemies down.

“In our minds, wicked gods we leave, fallen gods we annihilate. We’d have settled the matter with the servile god ourselves as well if it hadn’t fused with the wicked god.”

Huh? Did that mean if a new wicked god was born and fused with Gould, we’d be in massive trouble? We wouldn’t be able to lay a finger on him if that happened... But if it was okay for the divine to attack the fallen god, then maybe we could have Moroha or Uncle Takeru take it down before that happened?

“It is possible, but...are you sure you want to take that option? You’re basically saying that you can’t handle the problems in the world that you oversee. Is that not a bit pitiful for a ward of someone like God Almighty? I can already see those handful of gods who disapprove of you growing more disgruntled.”

“Ah...”

People bad-mouthing someone who only got in because of their connections with the CEO and doing nothing of value was pretty natural...

That was close. Sure, it would make things easier, but I can’t rely on another god to solve my problems.

I had no choice but to rely on the kids to deal with the wicked devout, but I had to be the one to figure out how to deal with the fallen god.

“Do remember that this fallen god is but a fragment. As a ward of someone of such high status, I find it very unlikely that you would lose. You just have to be careful to not get everyone in the surroundings too wrapped up in the battle.”

He was right. Sure, it’d be great if we took down Gould, but managing it by destroying half the world first could only be called a pyrrhic victory. Even if I could win, what was important was how I won. I had to make sure to avoid as many casualties as possible. There were already tens of thousands of victims of the conflict, so I had to keep it from getting any worse.

At the very least, now that the Ark was destroyed, it shouldn’t be so easy for them to launch surprise attacks. I’d like to think they’d lost their ability to mass-produce the Kyklops as well, but it was a little naive to think the Ark was the only factory they had...

Were they making more of them at the Maestro’s lab?

We’d better find it as soon as possible.