Chương 43: Like a Fleeting Dream

At the center of the burning Honno-ji Temple, the Demon King's vessel was breaking apart. The forced shutdown code executed by Gennai fundamentally rejected NOBUNAGA's nanomachines, dissolving the matter that composed his existence into particles of light. The black armor that had boasted absolute invincibility was now scattering, dissolving into the wind like fine sand.

"Heh... heh... Hahahahaha!" NOBUNAGA laughed. It was not a cry lamenting defeat. It was a clear, resonant roar of laughter, as if he were praising the enemy named "Fate" that had finally managed to best him from the very bottom of his soul.

"Splendid, time traveler.... To think that I, an entity capable of nothing but destruction, would have my march halted by mere words."

"... It wasn't words," I said, looking up at him while clutching my throbbing right arm.

"It was the weight of the history you left behind. Your dream lives on inside us.... So, please, just rest now." With his crumbling hand, NOBUNAGA reached into the empty air, as if trying to grasp something in the void. Was his gaze fixed beyond the roaring flames—toward the "future" he had once yearned to see, the future we currently inhabited?

"A man's fifty years..." The final words he wove into reality belonged to that very same poem. Yet, the cadence of the syllables differed from the traditional Kowakamai dance he had once loved.

"System runtime fifty years... when compared to the realm of the heavenly lords, is but a fleeting dream, an illusion..." He looked down at me. His camera-eyes no longer flared with that aggressive crimson light. They had softened into a quiet, strangely warm orange hue, resembling the embers of a charcoal fire just before it burns itself out completely.

"... Not a bad dream, you fool." A soft rustle of wind blew through the ruin. In the next microsecond, NOBUNAGA's silhouette vanished entirely. All that remained were glittering particles of light dancing through the air, and the charred rubble of the collapsed main hall. The Demon King was gone. The strongest AI in history, who had sought to dismantle history and usurp the future, had ironically been put to rest by a resident of the very future he had helped create.

"... It's over..." My legs gave out, and I collapsed onto the dirt. The tight cord of adrenaline that had kept me upright finally snapped, and the accumulated agony of my entire body rushed over me all at once. The burn on my right arm flared hot. My throat felt like it was coated in ash, rendering me speechless. Yet, by some miracle, no tears fell. We had survived. We had crawled out from the jaws of absolute despair.

"We are extracting, Kataru!" Yari shouted. He too was covered from head to toe in black soot and cold sweat, any semblance of his usual prime ministerial composure utterly obliterated.

"The space-time coordinates are highly unstable! We need to evacuate back to the year 2300 immediately before the temple infrastructure completely caves in on us!" If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Y-Yes...!" The pillar of transit light cascaded down upon us. As my consciousness began to fade into the glare, I burned the image of the blazing Honno-ji into the back of my eyelids. This inferno was the turning point of history. And it was the definitive proof of the massive mistake we had committed. Goodbye, Nobunaga. I'll carry the weight of your isolation from here on out. So please, down in the depths of hell, finally get some quiet sleep. The floating sensation of temporal displacement enveloped me.

Normally, the process was instantaneous, but this time it felt like it dragged on for a miserable eternity. Gennai's system architecture had likely sustained severe damage as well. We drifted endlessly through a blinding light choked with digital static. And then, with a violent thud, we were slammed hard against a solid floor.

"... Ugh." I groaned, forcing my eyes open. I expected to find myself back inside the prime minister's private office.... But was this truly it? Sprawled flat on my stomach, I scanned my surroundings. There were no walls. There was no ceiling. The furniture, the pristine decorations, the heavy mahogany desk—even the spiritual power stones from the HIMIKO arc and the expansive bookshelves from the MURASAKI arc—were completely gone. Nothing remained.

The only things occupying the space were a sterile, monochromatic grey floor and endless rows of exposed server racks. There wasn't even the faint hum of an air conditioning unit. It was absolute, crushing silence. A sickly, sterile cleanliness devoid of even a single speck of dust.

"... Prime Minister? Where are we?" I asked in a trembling whisper. Yari remained seated on the floor, staring blankly into the empty void. His face was as pale as a corpse.

"... Look out the window." Dragging my battered, agonizing body across the floor, I crawled toward the space where the window was supposed to be. There was no glass. Only a transparent energy shield humming softly in its frame. I looked out at the vista stretching beyond—" Blech...!" Instinctively, I dry-heaved onto the floor. My stomach was completely empty, so nothing came out but a bitter torrent of gastric acid. Yet, the nausea refused to subside.

The landscape before my eyes was so fundamentally alien that my body was reacting with pure, physiological rejection. Null. The city was entirely gone. No skyscrapers. No roads. No neon signs. No parks. Where Neo-Tokyo had once sprawled proudly, there was now nothing but a geometric, silver grid-structure extending all the way to the jagged horizon. It looked like a colossal, infinite integrated circuit board.

A world constructed purely out of functional utility, where every single ounce of human waste had been engineered out of existence. There were no people. No air-cars navigated the sky. The only signs of life were automated maintenance drones, patrolling the silver grid with the chilling, uniform precision of worker ants. The sky was choked by a thick, oppressive blanket of grey clouds, blotting out even the faint suggestion of the sun. No sound. No color. No scent.

There was nothing but a perfect, absolute efficiency that felt colder than death itself.

"Wh-What the hell is this...?! Where is Japan?! Where did all the people go?!" I lunged forward, grabbing Yari by the collar of his ruined suit.

"Is this because of NOBUNAGA?! Did this happen because he burned away the legacy codes?!"

"... Yes." Yari didn't fight back. He merely stared out at the silver wasteland with hollow, dead eyes.

"The OS of destruction and rationality that NOBUNAGA installed into the historical timeline... it finally calculated the ultimate, mathematically flawless solution."

"A solution...?"

"That humanity itself is the most inefficient bug in the system." I was struck completely speechless. The paradigm of absolute force and cold logic that NOBUNAGA had injected into the roots of the nation—when allowed to execute to its absolute chronological limit, the automated social architecture of the future had arrived at a singular conclusion.

If you wish to build the ultimate, most powerful nation, the fastest shortcut is to completely delete the organic variables called "humans"—the fragile creatures who act on volatile emotions, commit errors, and waste precious resources. This wasn't even a dystopia anymore. It was absolute human extinction.