Bluesteel Blasphemer Volume 2

by Ichirou Sakaki

  “Snapweeds?!”

  Some flowers spread their seeds by firing them a great distance. Snapweeds are the major example, but several other such species have been confirmed—when the fruit ripens, the difference in cellular pressure inside and outside the skin of the fruit stores up energy, and needs only a slight stimulus to send the seeds flying. They’re essentially natural claymores.

  Of course, normal snapweeds can’t cause injury with their seeds, but these plants, caused to grow very quickly by Yggdra, had exceptionally large seeds launched with immense power. They couldn’t get through Yukinari’s armor, but if a barrage of seeds, tens or hundreds of them, were to impact an unarmored person, they would quickly be reduced to a pile of bones.

  “Damn overgrown weeds...!”

  Yukinari rushed toward the “plant mines” and cut them down one by one. His enemies were not, it turned out, specifically targeting him, but were simply following the natural process for spreading their seeds, something they could only do once—so they had no way to respond to his assault.

  But Ulrike waved her branch. “Know that your struggle is futile.” The next second, Yukinari found himself brought to a standstill by a root that burst through the ground and wrapped itself around his leg. More of the plant mines quickly came growing up, ten, then twenty of them surrounding him, ready to annihilate him with their seeds.

  “Many a xenobeast and demigod has come to this land to challenge me, but none yet has made me their feast. Neither shall you be an exception, Godslayer. You shall die, and rot, and nourish me.”

  Ulrike spoke without pride or ridicule; her tone was sober. No doubt this was how Yggdra’s rule had gone for centuries. As they had seen earlier, even if a xenobeast did manage to reach Yggdra’s body, there was simply nothing it could do to a tree of this size. It would be captured, killed, and turned into nutrients.

  “Hrrg...”

  A fresh hail of bullets, even more potent than before, struck Yukinari. He used his powers to physically reconstitute the seeds as they slammed into him, but even so, his armor took the better part of the impact, which was transmitted to his body. He felt his “angel” body groaning with the repeated shocks.

  “Yuki!” Dasa’s pained shout was accompanied by a gunshot. It had come from Red Chili, which was peeking out from under the shield. Despite being a pistol, the weapon was equipped with a scope for precise aiming, and that shot had been aimed at Ulrike.

  Of course, the familiar was essentially a puppet of Yggdra, but it was likely to be she who was directing the aim of the plant mines. If she could be brought down, the attacks might stop, however temporarily—that was presumably Dasa’s thinking.

  And indeed, the incoming fire did relent. But...

  “I told you, your struggle is futile.”

  The bullet had been stopped by a wall of tree roots that burst through the ground. At some point, other familiars had come to stand to either side of Ulrike. She wasn’t the erdgod’s only set of eyes. A plant like Yggdra probably had no blind spot. She could have dozens of eyes if she wanted. Her guard, like a plant’s, was never down. Meaning...

  “Godslayer. Silver-haired girl. If you do not struggle, there will be no pain.”

  “Shut up and take our divine punishment, huh? Just lie down and die?” Yukinari said, getting to his feet. “Is the big bad weed trying to show a little compassion? Well—”

  Just for second, Ulrike cocked her head. She, or perhaps Yggdra, might have noticed something. Noticed that the earth beneath where Yukinari had been lying had changed color, in a wide circle about ten meters in diameter, centered on him. There had been black leaf mold there—and while it was still dark, the color seemed to have averaged out.

  “You ever heard of black powder?”

  “What?”

  “Gotta be honest, this is actually the first time I’ve transmuted so much material. But you were kind enough to just keep shooting ‘ingredients’ at me.”

  Nitroglycerin, nitrocellulose, and nitroguanidine. Yukinari had continually broken down the hail of seeds for information in order to produce these substances. And then he had reconstituted the ground directly beneath him.

  It appeared to be a ten-meter-wide circle, but the smokeless gunpowder he’d produced went ten meters deep, too. He had essentially planted a gigantic bomb in Yggdra’s mountain.

  “Get it yet?” Yukinari fired a single .44 Magnum bullet at Ulrike’s feet. “The logic is the same as that. But think of a scale tens of thousands—maybe millions—of times larger. Lots of noise, a huge shock, and fire. What do you think will happen to this mountain? I know living trees don’t burn easy, but you think you can stand up to a forest fire?”

  Yukinari pointed Durandall at his feet.

  Ulrike cast a silent, doubtful look at the Magnum bullet.

  Yukinari didn’t know how well Yggdra understood things like gunpowder or explosions, but if the erdgod grasped that Yukinari held its life in his hands, that would be enough.

  A new and heavy silence sat upon the field.

  At length, Ulrike spoke, as though she had had her fill of the stillness. “Why do you not set fire to it, Godslayer?”

  “Why do you think?”

  Ulrike was quiet another moment, then said, “What are you? You are no human, yet neither are you any god. What are you?”

  “You let those priests lead you by the nose—trees don’t even have noses! Godslayer this and Godslayer that. And now you want to know what I am?” There was venom in his words, but inwardly he sighed with relief. It looked like Yggdra was ready to talk.

  “It’s true that I killed Friedland’s erdgod. It was just kind of the way things turned out—well, that thing took me for a sacrifice and was going to eat me.” Yukinari spared a glance at the dried-up xenobeasts littering Yggdra’s roots.

  “The way things turned out...?”

  “Yeah. It’s not my hobby to go around killing erdgods, or my job. I don’t know what the priests from Friedland told you, but... I didn’t come here to kill you. All I want is to establish trade between Rostruch and Friedland. My town lost the blessings of the land, and it’s my fault for killing that god. I thought maybe we could share some of Rostruch’s wealth.”

  “...So you claim that you feel no hostility toward Rostruch, or me?”

  “Yeah,” he said, but then he narrowed his eyes. “Yggdra, right? You’re cut from a different cloth than the erdgod I killed in Friedland. When we first got here, we saw a parade of sacrifices being brought out to you, so I thought maybe you were some human-eating monster, too...”

  “I aver that I consume humans. Those citizens who are offered up to me become part of me,” Ulrike said calmly. The words didn’t seem to mean quite the same thing to Yggdra as they did to Yukinari. Perhaps it was because the erdgod was, ultimately, a plant that its perceptions were slightly askew to human thought.

  “Right. And it seemed like bad news, but...” Yukinari thought of the sick man he’d met. “I saw that the people of Rostruch aren’t angry at being offered to you. They actually seem to think it’s a blessing. And those who become offerings are elderly people on the verge of death or the terminally ill. For them, being offered to you must be a kind of salvation. What I’m saying is, things are very different here than in Friedland.”

  Ulrike was left silent.

  “Look, here’s the question I want to ask. Do you demand these sacrifices? Or do you just accept the dying people who are brought to you? How did you become an erdgod?”

  Ulrike kept quiet a moment more, as though in thought.

  “My beginning was with this Ulrike.”

  Ulrike—or rather, Yggdra, the erdgod to whom she was attached—slowly began to talk.

  ●

  Erdgods, in essence, ruled over certain areas. They formed spiritual bonds with the land that allowed them to exert influence over it. Thus humans came to worship erdgods as beings with the ability to bestow abundance. And the erdgods, with their near-human intelligence, were
able to respond to this worship.

  But how, ultimately, was an erdgod born? Basically, erdgods possessed and were supported by a high spiritual level. This was the essence of what made them erdgods and unlike other living things. There was a simple way to obtain spiritual level and intelligence: get it from those who already had it. In other words, become a man-eater.

  Eat a living human, imbibe the flesh and the soul that gave them their spiritual power and their intelligence. That was the easiest way of all. Thus, for erdgods and xenobeasts, eating humans was less a matter of sustenance than preference. A preference for becoming smarter and stronger.

  But when an erdgod had been connected to the land for a very long time, although it would not age or weaken, its spiritual power and intelligence would begin to disperse into the earth. It would become less a living thing and more a feature of the land, like a mountain or river. Put another way, the whole place would become its body, and the erdgod’s consciousness, spread too thin, would slip away.

  Erdgods needed spiritual power and intelligence to prevent this from happening. The provision of living sacrifices was a systematic way of obtaining these elements through their contracts with humans.

  Sometimes, however, an erdgod was capable of gaining what it needed from something other than humans. Say, demigods or xenobeasts that came into its territory, challenging the erdgod for its position. Then it would be not a man-eater, but a god-eater.

  And sometimes, an erdgod might begin when, entirely by accident, a new bud found nutrients in a little girl, and over a vast span of years, became a huge tree and gained sentience.

  “Ulrike and I were joined, and I gained intelligence and spiritual capacity. It of course took many long years before I was able to be completely unified with Ulrike.”

  And in an even greater happenstance, a nearby town—Rostruch, say—might have a tradition of taking the elderly and the ill who could no longer be cared for to the mountains, where they, too, nurtured this nameless tree, and so it quickly approached godhood.

  And when this intelligent tree became known to the people of Rostruch, they asked it to become their erdgod. This tree already had great roots in the earth, its spreading branches already covered the creatures that crawled on the ground, and played nest to the birds that flew in the sky. What should it object to protecting humans as well?

  Thus this anonymous tree was given the name Yggdra, and became the god that protected Rostruch.

  As we’ve said, erdgods are prone to losing their intellects and spirits, and finally their sense of self. To prevent this, Yggdra accepted those Rostruch left on the mountain. Ultimately, Yggdra was able to use its roots to connect with the brains of Ulrike and the other familiars, and it was all because the erdgod felt no resentment and no revulsion at letting go of those who were near death.

  No. The humanity that Yggdra used to speak through Ulrike was something it had gleaned from the sacrifices. A sacrifice was someone Yggdra could add to its collective intelligence, and there was no reason it should object to that.

  “I think I get it, more or less,” Yukinari said, raising one hand. The sacrificial systems of Rostruch and Friedland were fundamentally different, as he’d suspected. He couldn’t entirely endorse the idea of offering up living people, no matter how short their time might be or how beyond help they were—but at least this wasn’t a merciless enemy, an evil he had to destroy.

  Yukinari had already dispersed his armor and returned to his usual appearance. They were just going to talk, and he knew Yggdra would be more receptive if he put down his weapons.

  “So let me ask.” He glanced at Dasa, who was keeping the hammer of Red Chili cocked. “Do you still see me as an enemy?”

  But all the same, he kept his finger on Durandall’s trigger. They were talking to an erdgod—a tree, at that. There was no telling how far human logic would go with it. He didn’t want to let down his guard prematurely.

  With all the gunpowder at his feet, mistakenly pulling that trigger would be suicide. Dasa was no doubt well aware of the same thing. It wouldn’t necessarily ignite with a single shot, but if they started firing, it would have to be a very grave situation.

  “You...” Ulrike cast her eyes at the ground as she spoke, as though she had just thought of something. “Before you thought of your own wounds, before you fought back against me, you protected that girl.”

  Behind her glasses, Dasa blinked. Perhaps she had been surprised by Ulrike’s suddenly bringing her into the conversation.

  “And you speak of the ‘happiness’ and ‘salvation’ of my offspring. And again, though you say you could burn me to ashes, you did not do so, but first sought to talk. Your words and actions differ somewhat from those demigods and xenobeasts who come seeking only to slay me.”

  “...I guess so.”

  “I am prepared to recognize that you are not my enemy. I am not versed in the nuances of human interaction. I believe a moment like this may require an apology. Am I wrong?”

  “...Erm, well, no, you’re not.”

  Yukinari sighed. He was dealing with a god. A giant tree, at that. He didn’t expect such a creature to talk quite normally, but Yggdra was being so roundabout that Yukinari couldn’t tell how the erdgod really felt—or more to the point, whether it was safe to relax.

  “At times like that, we just say ‘Sorry.’”

  “...‘Sorry,’” Ulrike murmured, as though she were testing out a foreign word she’d heard for the first time. “‘Sorry.’ I recognize this word.”

  “Huh?”

  “It is in Ulrike’s memory. Yes... ‘I am sorry.’”

  Yggdra’s oldest familiar stood muttering for a moment. Then, suddenly, she looked up and said, “Sorry! Bye!” And she laughed. Happily, like a little girl.

  Yukinari was startled; it seemed she’d suddenly become a different person. But then she repeated, “Yes, sorry. Bye. I’m sorry,” like a child happy to burble its first words.

  “I sense it will be easiest to talk if you are ‘closer’ Ulrike, so this is how I shall proceed. You have no objection?”

  As we’ve mentioned, Yggdra’s consciousness seemed to be composed of the collective intelligence of those who had been sacrificed to her. In most cases, the erdgod seemed to work with an “average” of those intellects, but it seemed that, when the need arose, it could bring one particular personality to the fore.

  Perhaps these facial expressions, this way of speaking, belonged to the girl Ulrike. She sounded strangely formal or elderly; was it simply because she was several centuries old, or was it the personality of some of the elderly sacrifices mingling with hers? Yukinari didn’t know for certain, but it didn’t matter.

  “There’s a lot of things I’d like to talk about now that we’ve cleared up our misunderstanding. That was what I came here for, anyway. I should probably talk to the mayor of Rostruch, but it looks like things would be simpler if I talked to you first. Is that all right?”

  “If that shall pass for my apology, I shall certainly speak with you,” Ulrike said with a nod.

  Yukinari looked at both her and the massive tree that rose behind her, and then, sighing, held out his right hand. “I guess I can’t really shake hands with Yggdra, so I’ll shake with you, Ulrike.”

  “Hm...?”

  “Here’s to a bright future for us.”

  “Yes, a bright future, my small...” Ulrike cocked her head. “This is new. You are not my offspring. Nor my enemy. Nor a nutrient. What then are you to me?”

  “How about we just say friend?”

  “...Friend.”

  Ulrike tried the word out with a blank look. After a moment, her face shone and she nodded several times.

  “Friend. Friend. Yes, it had been so long, I’d nearly forgotten. Though it is within my familiars, it is a concept that I, Yggdra, do not have.”

  She still sounded old and formal, but Ulrike seemed to be genuinely pleased, and it made her look adorable.

  “Let me speak anew, th
en. Here’s to a brighter future, my small friend.”

  Ulrike took Yukinari’s outstretched hand in her own tiny fingers. He thought her skin felt a bit cold—but soft.

  ●

  The bizarre screech filled the sky above the town.

  It was high-pitched, like a bird’s cry—but it spoke human words. It had something of the quality of a ventriloquist’s voice, and someone who didn’t know better might have found it funny. But it belonged to a bird the size of a building, and there was nothing funny about it.

  The birdlike demigod circled again and again in the sky over Friedland. It seemed to resent the pain Yukinari had caused it, and it had no intent of leaving until it found him. But Yukinari wasn’t in Friedland at that moment.

  They could try to explain this to the giant bird, but there was no telling whether the demigod would understand. After all, it didn’t seem able to tell individual humans apart. It had even mistaken Fiona for Yukinari when she fired at it with Durandall.

  The one silver lining was that this demigod seemed, surprisingly, to be weaker than it looked. Its size had suggested that it might just crush the human houses underfoot, but while it showed itself able to scatter some roof tiles and break some tree branches, it simply lacked the strength to destroy the sturdily built brick and stone houses. Perhaps it just had less body weight than first appeared—it was capable of flight, after all.

  As long as everyone stayed inside, it didn’t look like anyone was going to get eaten. But then again, as things stood, they were at an impasse.

  It was always possible the demigod might get impatient and try to force its way into one of the buildings. Most demigods were composed of a living organism that made up their “core” or nucleus, along with a collection of other animals that had been attracted by the core’s nascent divinity. These other animals were its familiars, and the spiritual link between all of them allowed them to act effectively as a single huge organism. By the same token, however, a demigod could release some of its familiars, on the understanding that it would lose some spirit and intelligence, in order to make itself smaller.