"Nelly, bad morning." Showa woke me up kind of anxiously.
"That's a new one. What ever happened to good morning?" I asked.
"It'd be good if the situation wasn't so messed up, but alas it is." She shook her head, "As you know, the Book of Fortune is in the hands of Meil and Lee."
"Yes, we gave it to them for safe keeping." I nodded, "What about it?"
Without missing a beat, large thuds kept slamming at the front door of the house, notifying me that something was indeed amiss.
"Open up, you two!" Olya's voice could be heard muffled through the poor wooden door, "Gimme back my Book, dammit!"
"He's not letting any of us leave the house until we hand that Book of his back." Little Shou sighed.
"Right, so miss Fairy, if you would be so kind as to just hand it to him..." Shell asked.
"Why would I? That'd only ruin everything for us." I tilted my head.
"Well, y'know." Sharp shrugged, "We can't play ball inside the house. It's rude."
"Another weird culture thing? Oh wait, that one actually makes sense even for us." I figured, "In any case, we don't even have the Book with us."
"Yeah, try telling that to him." Showa sighed, "These three said he's been running around all night looking for it, so right now he's down to listen to anything but reason."
Mn, I see. In other words, the sleep deprived senior citizen is throwing a hissy fit because he's cranky. And to think Meil was afraid of this guy, hyping him up to be this bad man that wanted to kill us without remorse last night. Seriously, lemme get this over with.
"Open the-!" He went to slam his fist at the door, but stopped mere centimeters from my face, "A-Ah, Nelly! Ha-ha, you're awake! Ehe~, did you sleep well?"
"Out like a light, for the entire night." I smirked, leaning casually against the doorframe, "So, what's got you so annoyed?"
"I need that Book back, please." He skipped straight to negotiations, "I assume it's with that bast-err, Meil right now, so could I bother you to fetch it for me?"
"Meil told me not to do just that, so sorry."
"Oh come on, he's still on the island, isn't he?" Olya rolled his Eyes, "Look, I'm telling you to fetch it for me cause I know he doesn't think too highly of me. For real, this whole thing could've been over by now if you just stopped constantly prolonging it."
He says that, but he couldn't even find their hideout spot even after searching for them the entire night. There's no way that old man wouldn't have tried taking it from them if he knew where they were, so there's gotta be more to it. He has a reason for why he wants me and Meil to be in the same place at the same time. My guess is he wants to use this situation to try his hand at convincing Meil to write the wish in again.
"Actually, Meil and Lee left the island to go find Lem." I explained, "Who knows where they are right now, but fact of the matter is—Fortune isn't here anymore."
"Your lying is atrocious." He grumped, "Besides, you do realize I'm immortal, right? Even if they did try to run away to the opposite side of the world, it'd only be a matter of time before I get my way."
"And if Meil figures out he's Ouroboras?" I threatened.
"He doesn't, I checked already with Misfortune."
"But I can always tell him."
"You won't. In your Eyes if you did, he'd never return your feelings. Cheh, not that he'd do that anyways." He mocked, "Look, how many times do I have to go through this spiel for you to understand I'm not the bad guy here? Shiet, there is no bad guy, just a lonely old man who wants to see his friends again!"
"Oh no, I'm convinced." I reassured him, "It's Meil who thinks you're the enemy... Hey?"
"What?"
"Purely asking out of curiosity—If your true goal is to revive Schnell and Shaid, why did you kill Shaid when I revived him the other day?"
"Sigh, didn't I explain that already?" He asked, "He's so out of the loop on the current situation that he just wouldn't be capable of understanding any part of my plan."
"What do you mean?"
"Think about it like this—Your best friend is using forbidden arts to try and get your guys' third best friend to rise from Hell. If the process alone doesn't kill us or worse, then we'd forever get trapped with a target strapped to our backs by the Gods. They're already super against bringing people back from Heaven 2.0, but they at least let those guys earn their right to come back. Hell on the other hand, is just a place you're not supposed to come back from."
Right, so you're saying that even if you do succeed, you're forever gonna get tormented by the Gods? Certainly, I could see why someone like Shaid would try to talk Olya out of this fate. If my entire family was constantly getting harassed by the Gods because dad revived, I'd be pretty unhappy with that.
"So wait, you wanna keep the method of reviving Schnell and all the consequences it entails a secret to Shaid until it's all said and done?" I asked to make sure, "Doesn't sound all that honest to me."
"It's not honest, it's necessary." He said, "Because if people never kept secrets from each other, we'd all be miserable."
"And you're one of those people?"
"I'm not part of you guys, haven't been for the past 800 or so years." He chuckled self-deprecatingly, "I'm the Seventh World Wonder, and those don't pertain to any rules, set by humans and Gods alike."
"Is that so..." I nodded before closing the door in his face, "Then I guess you're gonna have to convince Meil."
"You damned...!"
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"Hey! Ngh!" I squirmed about, "The hell, man!? Look, you can put me down now!"
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"I honestly have no idea what part of your tiny little bratty brain felt it was appropriate or smart to slam the door at the indestructible old man's face, but here we are." Olya simply walked on as he held me under his arm like a sack of flour, tightly tied up to the point where I could barely move a muscle.
Right, I guess I should explain what happened. Honestly though, even I'm pretty dazed just from how fast everything happened. Essentially, the plan was to slam the door, lock it and run to ask Showa and her brothers to stall the old man while I run out and go get Meil and Lee. After that, we'd run to the dock and find ourselves a boat to go find Lem and by then dad would've hopefully shown his face here. That was the plan, but the old man really wasn't following the script at all.
"I didn't think you'd actually bust down the door like a maniac and just snatch me away like that..." I sulked.
"...Right, so I guess you're the type to not learn from their mistakes." He clicked his tongue, "I literally did the exact same thing back when I first kidnapped you! Shiet, just be glad I didn't knock you out cold for the next week like I did last time."
"I was out for a week!?"
Well, in any case this doesn't really mean anything. Olya still doesn't know where Meil and subsequently the Book of Fortune is, and I certainly don't plan on snitching. He can keep wasting his breath to lug me around the island all he wants, but Meil entrusted me to keep their location a secret until dad and the others got here.
"You're going the wrong way." I jeered, "That's not even close to where they are."
"Mhm, got it. So I should in fact continue walking this way." He nodded.
Damn, that didn't work. He's way too perceptive, but I guess that's to be expected of someone as longlived as him. Still, with each step he makes, my heart drops further and further down. He's making all the right turns one after another, as if he already knows where those two are exactly. Showa said he spent the entire night looking around the island for them, so what if he actually found them last night and didn't tell me? And that's when it hit me, the line he stated previously...
"Yep." He tossed me in front of Meil's and Lee's tent, his Eyes glowing a glaring White as he did, "If people never kept secrets from each other, we'd all be miserable."
"Meil, Lee!" I immediately shouted to warn them, "Run!"
"Too bad, they're not getting away this time...!" Olya made his way to the tent before launching the leafy curtains aside to reveal...!
Huh? They're not here?
"Dammit!" He smashed the tent into a billion pieces, stomping and stomping his anger out tirelessly, "Shiet, I forgot the bastard can just keep evading me with the Gray Iro!"
"Guess I'm not the only one who doesn't learn from her mistakes." I thought to rile him up with a sigh of relief.
"Hmph, wrong again. Cause I always have a plan B." He turned to fiddle with my ankle monitor.
"Oi, get your hands off that thing!" I kicked him in the face, "You wanna cut my foot off!?"
"...The ankle monitor has razor sharp blades installed on the inside that are programmed to close more and more depending on their distance from the center of the island." He briefly paused before holding my foot steady and continuing to tinker with it, "That being the case, it's not hard coded for the coordinates to be in the center of the island. I made sure to make it easy as shiet to change that point, its radius and deadzone."
"Wait, you're not actually gonna...?" I started panicking for real.
"So, say for example I set the deadzone to zero." He pressed something on it that immediately made the blades clamp up on my skin.
"Ow!"
"...And made the radius smaller by 5..." He pressed another button as the blades started to seriously dig into my foot.
"No, no, no!" I saw blood coming down my ankle, "Please, wait-!"
"Does it hurt?" He looked up to ask, "Here, bite onto this stick here. It's a cool stick, it'll keep you distracted from the pain."
Placing the dirty stick he found on the ground between my teeth, he clamped my jaw down and instructed me to bite down as hard as I could. The brief relief from the pain did in fact happen, but it didn't last for long. Soon I got used to the distraction and had to increase the dose. Biting down harder and harder, it became an endless downward spiral wherein as a result my teeth just started hurting as well. It was a sharp pain and a dull pain mixed into one. Still, I can live with this!
"Feel better?" He asked with a smile, "Good, that means we can move on to the last variable—If I changed the location to say... Your home in Cardina, you'd definitely fall out of range, right?"
"Mnf! Mgh!"
"Damn, that stick really is cool, isn't it?" He asked as he tweaked the ankle monitor, hovering over the button I assume would be responsible for cleanly cutting my foot off completely, "It makes for an incredible pain relief gag, but after this you can even use it as a peg leg. Cheh, crazy."
"That is enough." Meil's voice showed up behind him.
"Oh, there you are, Deram." Olya propped himself back up slowly before turning to face him with a bone-chilling smile, "Didn't take you to be the procrastinator type. Cheh, then again, you waited until we three fucked up the Universe Cycle 10 times over before you showed up to the Lair."
"Though I am unsure of what you mean, I will admit that my tardiness was a complete mistake on my end." He turned to me, the Book of Fortune's blank pages staring me down from his hands, "Nelly, I am deeply sorry for having you suffer this much. I will make things right now, and then we can put everything behind us."