Infinite Dendrogram - Volume 21 - Chapter 5.5

Interlude: Records and Memories

Sorcerer Ray Starling

Riser won the eighth day of The Tournaments.

He’d been a high-ranking duelist for a long time, so you could say that this was an expected result.

Fujinon had tried to show the new magic she’d learned based on Almagest, but it wasn’t enough to win. She’d also noticed us in the box and saw that Io was cheering for Riser, which put her in a pretty bad mood.

Who could blame her? Her friend was happy that she lost.

“That’s pretty awful, don’t you think?” she asked me.

“Ha ha ha...well, Io’s the honest and simple type, so...”

Fujinon sighed. “By the way...”

“What?”

“Who did you bet on today? And how much?”

“Two hundred million on Riser.”

Yet again, I ended up footing the bill for the consolation party.

After that was over, I went to the library in our HQ.

It was originally an archive that had held ledgers and the like, but now it was a place to store the books my clan members brought. It contained the back issues of DIN that Marie mentioned, the useful info B3 got from The Lunar Society’s database, and the kind of books enjoyed by Fujinon’s trio, among others.

Despite what the word “library” might suggest, it wasn’t a place where books and documents were laid out on shelves. Instead, it had Inventories similar to bookshelves which could be accessed by anyone who was registered. They even had a search function, which made this process very convenient.

There was actually one Inventory that only Fujinon’s trio and Marie were permitted to access, and when I asked what it contained, their answers were ambiguous at best, which left me pretty damn curious.

That aside...with the library working the way it did, I found the newspaper issues about King of Plagues in no time. I took them out and silently began reading them right there in the library. Nemesis had fallen asleep right after we ate, so I was all alone.

“I see,” I muttered to myself as I read. I could understand why Marie was comparing this to the Gloria incident.

That fiendish dragon had destroyed the Lunnings Duchy and Claymill here in Altar, while King of Plagues had destroyed the entire small nation of Mahem. Additionally, he had repelled many Masters who went to beat him—Superiors included.

He and the dragon were both walking disasters, which was another way they were similar.

Yeah...after destroying that country, King of Plagues began heading to Altar as his next target.

The person who’d stopped this march was none other than Marie—the Superior Killer. King of Plagues had been rightfully sent to the gaol and given a sentence so long that he’d probably never be released.

I’d heard this part several times before—these were the results, so to speak, that I already had a good grasp of.

“But...” There were many things that neither the articles nor the hearsay allowed me to really understand. And perhaps because this Candy person was always the epicenter of a superwide biohazard zone, there wasn’t much about his appearance. There wasn’t even a photo.

Most importantly...

“Hm...” I sighed thoughtfully as I searched the bookshelves for any related material.

“Oh? You’re furthering your education so late at night. How dedicated.” As I was doing that, Marie came and called out to me.

“Marie...oh, I was just curious about what we were talking about this afternoon.”

“Afternoon...the King of Plagues thing? Anything in particular you wanna know?”

Given that question, I took a moment to think and decided to just ask her outright. She was involved in it, so maybe she would have the answers I wanted.

“I wanna know what King of Plagues’s motivation was and the method you used to win.” The articles didn’t have anything about the why or the how of the incident. Maybe the former was only inside King of Plagues’s head, but even the latter was just summarized as “the Superior killer beat King of Plagues.”

His motivation was what I felt I had to find out, while the circumstances of his defeat was just something I wanted to know. Regardless, neither of those things was clear to me whatsoever. Marie nodded in understanding and began to speak.

“They say that the motivation was just Resources—XP. Killing tians for XP is more efficient than killing Masters or monsters, so people think that this indiscriminate massacre was just a powerleveling strat. Even if it isn’t possible for most people to pull off, it’s obviously not a good idea to put that out there regardless. That’s why the articles didn’t mention it.”

I was speechless. Could someone really kill that many people and animals—a whole country’s worth—just for that?

As that thought crossed my mind, another question surfaced.

Did those lives mean so little to King of Plagues that he could crush them for some levels? Or did the goal of leveling up mean so much to him that all those lives were nothing in comparison?

Whichever it was...

“You look like you just can’t wrap your head around it, but of course you can’t, right? One look at what King of Plagues did will tell you that he’s the total opposite of you.”

“You might be right.” Whether King of Plagues was a ludo or a worlder, he wasn’t like me at all.

There might’ve been Masters out there who could do the same things for completely different reasons than King of Plagues had, but I was pretty confident I wasn’t one of them.

“Well, I’m the one who beat him, and not even I talked to him, so his motivations are still technically unknown,” Marie said.

“Seriously?”

“I don’t think I would’ve had a chance against him if I took my time and had a nice little chat.” That sentence alone made it clear that it had been a difficult battle for her. “So, the other thing was the method, right? Should I elaborate on that?”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all. I have time. And it might be good for you to know.”

“I’m listening, then.”

Marie replied by making the okay sign with her fingers...

“What I’m about to say is sort of a mix of what I learned in my investigations after the events and my own experiences, but...”

...and began to speak.

She would tell me of her deadly battle against the menacing King of Plagues—the origin story of the “Superior Killer” nickname.