Chương 207: The World of Ruins (1)

Something was wrong. Simon could tell the moment he found himself floating in front of the Crimson Throne again and the congratulatory message struggled to appear. It appeared that the end of the previous reign had left some lingering effects. This is… This is… This will be the Twenty-Fifth of your Hundred Reigns. You have earned the Title of Simon the Shepherd. The Shepherd: You convinced the Paladin to join your flock like a good little sheep.

You can now extend Anathemic Secrecy's stat falsification and divination immunity to allies in your Party. This will be the twenty-fifth reign? Simon wasn't sure what to make of the wording. Must I wait longer than usual? Either way, he could sense the Crimson Throne's satisfaction, and through it, that of his predecessors. He couldn't tell whether they rejoiced at watching the destruction of time or his Remembrance, and it infuriated Simon.

He could have grown up with friends who trusted him, enjoyed a family he could rely on, loved a princess, and become a true hero acclaimed in songs. In the end, his father had turned that past into ashes. He had lost his mother, sacrificed the woman he had originally been fated to love to a dryad, and slain all of his allies more than once. Time itself had been twisted, and Simon with it. But at least he had the power to make his own fate now. No one could dictate how he lived anymore.

Not fate, nor his father, not even the Oracle. Meeting that stubborn fool in the flesh had only further convinced Simon that peace with her would be near-impossible. Her long opposition to the Overlords had plainly radicalized her against them. Perhaps the only good thing he learned about her was that he could at least lure her out of Illusea under the right circumstances.

Belzemine's demise and the Paladin turning to the Overlord's side appeared to have infuriated her enough to force a confrontation, at least on friendly soil with a near overwhelming advantage. Whatever the case, Belzemine was clearly important to the elves and the Mana Goddess. He had to check on her as soon as he woke up, which should be anytime now. Anytime now… Simon waited a moment as he floated in front of the Crimson Throne.

He expected to be flung back to the past soon, yet seconds lengthened into minutes before he felt his soul being sucked into the darkness of time. What's going on? Simon wondered as he returned to his body, immediately feeling cold and numb, with his eyelids heavier than stone. This… this is different… For a start, he was sitting rather than laying in his bed, and his Overlord armor pressed against his skin. He inhaled air heavy with miasma and woke up in a damp, cold hall. His throne room.

Simon blinked as he awoke sitting on his Crimson Throne, facing an open sky shrouded in purple clouds. The walls had mostly collapsed, and the ceiling was entirely gone, half-crumbled towers looming in the distance. A chilling wind blew between stony cracks, and no guards were present to welcome him.

"What… what is this?" Simon rose up and looked around. The room was an empty ruin, and deathly silent. Not a single stone or statue remained intact wherever he looked, except for the Crimson Throne, which ruled pristine and eternal in its immortal malice.

"Is there anybody here?" No one answered, except the cold wind. Was he back in the void between time? The air was heavy with miasma, but not as intensely as the Abyss' depths. It felt closer to the Darkwood's edge than the heart of Hell itself. He could also hear the sound of waves on a shore of all things in the distance. Something is wrong. Simon focused on his Lord of the Demon Castle Perk and expanded his senses through Frightwall.

His mind and soul became one with mangled stone, flooded depths, and jagged ruins. How could this place have fallen to ruin? It recovered from an elven bombardment! His confusion turned to shock and astonishment when he saw the world through his walls. He looked in all directions, from south to north, and he could only see one thing. Water. Frightwall's lake moat had turned into a vast ocean of rancid, polluted greenish ooze stretched as far as the eye could see.

Waves washed on the shores that used to be towers and posterns, and nothing remained of Marthrone's houses and cathedrals. The horizon was shrouded in clouds the sun struggled to pierce through. What nonsense was this? Had Frightwall been transported elsewhere? Simon projected his senses into the underground tunnels to find them entirely flooded, with the Abyssal Gate still in its place and firmly closed. It didn't take him long to see glimpses of underwater ruins deep beneath the oily depths. Was that Marthrone?

Most importantly, the castle was entirely empty and devoid of life. No man nor demon haunted its walls.

"Keeper!" To Simon's relief, the specter obediently materialized at his side.

"What is thy Dark Majesty's bidding?"

"What happened?" Simon asked, doubt creeping in his voice.

"Where is everyone? My family, the staff… Marthrone? Where are they all?"

"I cannot say, Your Dark Majesty. I have not been summoned in four centuries." The words rang in Simon's befuddled mind like a curse. Four…

"What did you just say?"

"I said,'I have not been summoned in four centuries,"" the specter replied obediently, heedless of its statement's true weight. Four… four whole centuries?! There had to be a mistake. This couldn't be possible…

"Are you sure?!"

"I am certain, Your Dark Majesty. Although I have not been called since my last summons, I retain perfect awareness of the passage of time as per my purpose. Four hundred and four years have passed since my last summoning." Simon's blood turned to ice in his veins.

"For what purpose were you summoned?"

"I read the will of Your Dark Majesty's predecessor to the assembly of his family, as per my instructions. I successfully completed the task and then vanished in the absence of further orders." But Simon hadn't been present to edit his father's testament, then… then his family had probably started killing each other on the spot.

"Is… is that what caused this destruction?" Simon asked his servant with growing unease.

"Why hasn't Frightwall recovered?" Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"I cannot answer Your Dark Majesty's first query. As for the second, the castle and the Overlord are one. Your Dark Majesty's prolonged absence halted its natural reconstruction." Simon pondered those words for a moment as he looked around himself. As outlandish as it sounded, a short temporary absence couldn't explain the change in atmosphere, the capital's disappearance, or the state of decay the castle had fallen into. A lot of time had passed.

He had to face the obvious conclusion: the last reign's conclusion must have disturbed the time-loop's underlying mechanism in some way, and caused him to reappear much later than scheduled. Four hundred years. No matter how much Simon rehearsed the number in his head, he couldn't quite picture it. Four whole centuries… The longest of his reigns had been a little over two years long, and he spent most of that one sealed in stone.

The Zodiac Parade had long passed, alongside the Endymian civil war and the political landscape he was accustomed to. Was… was anyone he knew still alive? His family members had likely died of old age—save Elios Magnos—as well as almost all of his non-elf and non-demonic acquaintances. Gourmand had survived into the void between reigns too. This atmosphere would fit him. Dragons like Vouivre and Casval might still linger too, but they could have perished from something else in the meantime.

Simon wasn't sure the miasma-infested air, the toxic sea, and the fact that Marthrone had sunk beneath the waves alongside its countryside were signs that the world was in a healthy state right now. The idea that the Second Doom had caused geological changes that transformed Marthrone's lake into a sea was plausible, but the poisoned waters and sky were unnatural, as was the complete absence of life in the vicinity. The very air choked with miasma. I am four centuries after the Second Doom.

Had Endymion collapsed in on itself like the ancient civilizations that preceded it? Did anything remain of what House Magnos built? Is there anyone else left? There should be something left.

"Look around," Simon ordered the Keeper, "surely there must be a clue about what happened here." They found none. Simon spent the next few hours exploring the castle and its surroundings, even diving underwater for extended periods. He quickly confirmed the flooded ruins around the castle were indeed what remained of Marthrone after finding what remained of the city's cathedral below the waves, but time and the poisoned waters had long destroyed anything of value.

The toxic ocean was so vile he actually took some Corrosive damage while diving, and he failed to find any trace of aquatic wildlife whatsoever. Simon couldn't tell for certain what happened, but he could venture a guess: the Zodiac Parade had gone terribly, terribly wrong for Endymion and perhaps most of the world. Had Nodens driven all of civilization to suicide with his song as he hoped to, and left his empowered siblings to mop up what remained? Is there even anything beyond this castle's island?

What of Operation Deepground? His father had set plans in place to ensure at least some forces of the empire remained to reestablish control after the Parade ran its course. At least one of those bunker seeds should have bloomed into a new city-state or pocket of civilization. Would any of those vaults have remained after four hundred years?

Simon had little way of confirming that besides flying across the horizon, though he could at least check another key piece of information, even if he hoped to be met with silence for once…

"Holy stone, restore that which was lost!" Simon incantated without his armor on and clothed in false holiness.

"Regenerate!" A rain of mana showered him with its healing, confirming that there was still a demon out there willing to answer an Overlord's plea and sending a chill down his spine. Helel remained active somewhere beyond the ocean. It made sense, considering Simon alone had shown the ability to destroy a Zodiac Fiend, but the fact remained she had at least enough influence over the Light Megalith to answer in its place. Was she still improperly sealed? Or had she since escaped? Should he investigate?

Would it even matter? Simon was centuries too late to make any difference, and any useful information he had was long outdated. Helel might send someone here, since I prayed to her… a ship or intelligent creature might pass close enough… Simon had died too often to unforeseen events to jump straight into danger immediately. I should try to gather a little more information before settling on any course of action. He had nothing but time on his hands.

Simon spent a week in Frightwall's ruins, during which he made a few troubling discoveries. The first was that the castle was indeed in the middle of a near-empty ocean. He had gone on reconnaissance flights only to find toxic water in any and all directions. If there was any land nearby, it was more than a day's dracozombie flight away, if not more. This suggested at least a good chunk of what used to be the eastern continent had sunk beneath the waves.

No ship had passed by, nor any intelligent creature of any kind. Second, and perhaps most worrying of all, his Demonbinding spell no longer worked. He had attempted to summon fiends to assist in the castle's repairs only for the spell to repeatedly fizzle out. It was as if Hell had become empty, its gates rattling in the wind. Third, the miasmic weather was the norm rather than the exception.

Poisonous rain and dark clouds dominated the sky, and the rare clear days showed a dim sun or a barely visible moon shining on a violet horizon. Abraxas was nowhere to be seen, which suggested the Third Doom had yet to start. Fourth, Duchar was dead. Simon had half-expected the old Honorius to have endured as some form of undead to this day, yet he sensed no Devil Brand connection. This saddened him, since he had hoped the Honorius family would have somehow survived in spite of everything. And fifth…

while he managed to summon Carbuncle and Culebre's dark eidolon forms, their normal versions did not show up at all. This either meant that their material plane's avatars had long been destroyed… or that they had faded from public consciousness. There were some positives. Frightwall had healed itself as the Keeper promised, and the castle's miasma sustained Simon in the absence of food.

His immunity to the Poison and Disease ailments allowed him to drink the surrounding water at the cost of stomach aches, so he wasn't at risk of dying of thirst anytime soon. He could theoretically spend years here in solitude if he was so inclined. The isolation also gave him plenty of time to reverse-engineer the Nova spell with a miasmic version using the Darkness element, which he called Darkflare.

Early testing showed that it created powerful explosions of miasma mighty enough to blast fortifications with shadowy blasts. It would be a powerful weapon against whatever lurked out there. However, it was becoming increasingly clear to Simon that he had to take a gamble and leave.

Staying alone on an isolated island with only the Keeper for company was a surefire way of going mad—even if it knew how to play a surprisingly large amount of games—and there was literally nothing else to do here besides exploring Frightwall's underground tunnels; an exploration made all the more tedious by their flooded state. Besides, Simon would rather do that with a team at his back than on his own. But where should he go? Where would he find lands that remained above the waters, if any?

Assuming central Endymion remained in its current place, then Simon could think of a few possibilities. Should he move towards Valendre in the northwest, to check on the Abyssal Gate there and see if anything remained of the Church of the Light? Or go east to the Berwick Islands, in case Elios Magnos remained active and would be willing to listen to his descendant? That would be a very, very risky move, yet perhaps one worth a try should he fail to find any trace of civilization.

The old lich was the one entity Simon was convinced could survive the world's end. Finally, he could travel west towards Magvolia. Asterion had likely escaped his seal and received the Minotaur constellation's blessing four centuries prior, which meant he must have gained insight into the reigns. He could enlighten Simon on both the time-loop and what happened in the last four centuries. And even if Magvolia was gone…

even if it was gone, maybe something remained of the Goetia Research Facility or Operation Deepground's vaults. Simon could hopefully find a lead on what happened to Lauriane and his family since. Anything that could help him ensure this horrible future didn't come to pass. West it is. Simon summoned his dracozombie mount, climbed on its back, and then gave orders to the Keeper.

"Keep this place clean in my absence. I'll be back." Four hundred years might have passed, but Simon would be sure to remind the world its Overlord was back. What followed was a days-long trip. Simon's dracozombie knew neither fatigue nor bodily needs, but it wasn't as fast as a full-speed airship either. They crossed hundreds of miles in hours, then over a thousand in a day and a night. Simon didn't see a single island. This bothered him.

The eastern continent had many mountains or plateaus far higher than Marthrone. Some of them should surely remain standing, yet Simon couldn't find any. It was as if a powerful destructive force had intentionally sunk everything above sea level except for Frightwall itself. I should have reached Navarre's coasts by now, and yet nothing… Simon looked around to find no sign of land. Had the continents drifted apart or— Wait.

Simon leaned over his dracozombie's neck as he finally spotted something in the water; a dark shadow beneath the surface, vast and terrible. A shape that moved closer to his position hundreds of feet below him. It suddenly hit Simon that the reason why the ocean might have been devoid of life wasn't that sealife had failed to adapt to their new poisonous environment, but that something had killed everything in the water. Something big, ravenous, and relentless. And it had come for Simon.