Seianes thought his patience was very strong.
“Kehe-!”
“Look at you squirming just like an insect.”
However, when Abrisius’s neck was caught in someone’s hand, his patience quickly dissipated.
“I can’t just stand by and watch.”
He could no longer stand by and watch him develop a strange friendship with his demigod sibling that he didn’t know about, nor could he watch him suffer with his neck held by that crazed person called a high priestess.
Revealing his true form that he had hidden, he appeared on the platform with a group of lights.
As the humans who had been immersed in madness crying out for god wished, the great and cruel God of the Earth, Seianes, revealed himself before their eyes.
Leaving behind the humans frozen at the untimely descent of a god, he quietly looked down at Abrisius and the high priestess.
Though she trembled as she looked at him, those filthy hands managed to not let go of Abrisius.
“Get away from my child.”
The rumbling of the earth became his voice and spread throughout all of Atlante. The gazes of humans soaked in wonder and fear turned toward him. Abrisius was one of them too.
With a face full of questions, the child was looking up at him. Toward such a child, Seianes neither whispered sweetly nor embraced him.
With an incomparably arrogant face like a typical god, he looked down intently and opened his mouth.
“You will have to explain everything you’ve done step by step later.”
When he lightly raised his hand, large tree trunks crawled up from the dirt ground.
* * *
The earth that had been filled with sorrow burned darkly with anger.
People became anxious at the earth’s energy that changed as easily as flipping a palm, and the clumps of dirt that rose like large trunks wrapped around the masterminds of this incident.
“Aaaaaaaah!”
The high priests who had brought sacred objects from each temple struggled. But the more they struggled to escape, the more the dirt piles had no intention of letting them go.
“Aah, s-save me!”
“The way you struggle to live looks just like an insect.”
He mocked them by returning the exact same words they had said to his child. Seianes sneered at the end of the humans who had made a pathetic fuss about serving gods.
“N-no!”
Several brave priests stepped forward to save their high priests.
Those who served gods, to save their high priests from a god, brought weapons like long poles or spears and stabbed them toward the dirt clumps that bound them.
“Wh-why is this? Aaaah!”
However, the pole buried deep in the dirt, no matter how much force was applied, far from digging through the dirt, was rather swallowed into the dirt.
Eventually, the dirt that completely devoured the pole even dragged the priest who tried to run away leaving it behind into the dirt.
Death throes-like screams were buried in the dirt and disappeared. At the unbelievable sight, the shocked priests screamed and fled from the altar.
Seeing those who should have solved the problem instead running away, people fell into even greater fear.
“Aah…”
“It’s a calamity, another calamity has occurred! Why on earth…”
“What did we do wrong to deserve this… Is this… right?”
“Wh-what is this? What’s happening again?”
“Save me, I don’t want to die! I want to live!”
The consecutive supernatural phenomena were enough to plant confusion in them.
Among those who fell into panic, some even knelt on the spot in a completely desperate mood and showed themselves waiting for the end.
“This, this… is all because you blasphemed the god!”
The panicked high priestess shouted at Abrisius, but soon after, giant tree trunks rose like dragons from behind her.
“Kyaaa-!”
The tree trunks perfectly bound her limbs, and the woman’s expression, now unable to move, only grew pale.
“U-uaaah! It’s because of you!”
But even in that moment, she insisted on her pride and refused to admit her wrongs until the very end.
“…U-uaaaah-!”
Abrisius stood frozen in place, helplessly watching the scene before his eyes as the woman slowly died with her body constricted.
What called out to such an Abrisius was the being who had created this scene.
“Child.”
From above where Zeyaom’s high priestess was screaming, Seianes was looking down at Abrisius.
The voice he had met after so long, the voice he had missed so much that he rather avoided thinking about it, pierced his ears. Struggling to calm his pounding heart, Abrisius slowly raised his head toward Seianes.
Seianes, whom he met again, was still beautiful enough to draw the admiration of those who saw him.
Even as he stared blankly at that appearance, on the other hand, one corner of his heart felt uneasy.
After leaving Seianes, Abrisius had thought he wouldn’t be able to meet him again. He had excluded that possibility from the beginning.
So seeing Seianes again, he felt more flustered than happy. His head was complicated about what words to say or what actions to take.
“Child. My Abrisius. You were here.”
After a long wait, Seianes, who had found Abrisius, spoke while managing his anger, sadness, and other emotions that couldn’t be expressed in words. Naturally, his expression wasn’t so pleasant.
His tone was gentle but his expression was cold, and that was something Abrisius had never once seen from Seianes until now.
“……”
“Why are you silent?”
Seianes tilted his head questioningly, looking at Abrisius who stared at him silently without speaking.
“U…uugh!”
At his feet still, Zeyaom’s high priestess was bound by vine trunks and slowly dying. Seianes, who watched that sight with an emotionless face, lightly moved his right hand.
With just that short and simple action, the trunk that was strangling her slowly sank into the ground.
“Ah! S-save… save me! Save me!”
She screamed in a final struggle, but the other high priests in similar situations were also bound by dirt clumps and slowly sinking beneath the earth. Those who remained had long since run away. The people who had been watching all this were too terrified to do anything.
“Aah! No, no! What sin did I commit! Why is the great World Tree doing this to me!”
Until the very end, she struggled desperately and reached out her hand endlessly, but there was no one to catch her. From her lower body to her upper body to her face, until the moment everything that constituted her was slowly dragged underground, she struggled and called out for the World Tree.
“Aah… please.”
Until the moment her hand, having lost its destination, floundered and disappeared into the ground, she couldn’t receive help from anyone and fell into eternal sleep underground along with the others.
“Heouk…”
Abrisius, who witnessed that breathtakingly vivid scene before his eyes, gasped in and out in shock.
He couldn’t believe the scene he had just seen.
Seianes had always been kind and gentle. Because he was always with Abrisius in the temple garden, this was the first time seeing him treat others this way.
“Now all the obstacles threatening you have disappeared.”
Saying so, Seianes looked at Cairens standing idly behind Abrisius. Cairens also couldn’t come to his senses at the cruel scene unfolding before his eyes. However, the moment their eyes met, perhaps judging that he was targeting Abrisius, he placed his hand on his shoulder with his small hand.
Of course, Abrisius, whose soul had left him in shock at Seianes’s sudden appearance, didn’t seem to notice that touch, but Seianes’s expression, witnessing that scene before his eyes, crumpled even more coldly.
Even if it was just an ordinary action to protect a friend, that hand touching his child’s shoulder was extremely irritating.
“Get away from my child. My sibling.”
Just before stepping foot on the Surface, Seianes lightly gestured as if lightly brushing Cairens away.
Without even being able to scream, Cairens disappeared from the spot like dust.
“C-Cairens?”
Abrisius, who saw Cairens disappear from behind without making a peep, shouted in shock. At his exit, even more absurd than the deaths of the other priests, Abrisius stared blankly at the spot where Cairens had disappeared with a dumbfounded expression.
‘He disappeared so absurdly like this? That’s too ridiculous. How could the protagonist…’
It was so absurd that he couldn’t even shed tears.
Now that Cairens had disappeared, what should he do? It made no sense for the protagonist to disappear like this in the first place. Seianes had just made his future lover disappear without a trace before his eyes.
‘Original work destroyed. Vanished fate. Then what now?’
Dark thoughts overwhelmed Abrisius.
Since Cairens had disappeared, the demigod hero who would save the gods of the Surface in the coming war between the Underground and the Surface also disappeared. If that happened, victory would naturally pass to Ircadeon, and Seianes would ultimately lose his authority as the God of the Earth.
In the end, Seianes had brought misfortune upon himself with his own hands.
