I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 470: The Fifth Heir

At the center of a vast, dark plain stood a towering obelisk. The ground stretched out impossibly smooth, as though it had been poured molten and left to cool in a single night, and fissures ran through the stone like veins of dried blood. From every cardinal direction, wide stairways climbed toward the spire, and each step burned with a torch of crimson fire.

Two devastatingly injured figures dragged themselves up the northern stair, one a man, the other a snake as long as a man stands tall. The man hauled himself forward on one good arm. The serpent left a dark, wet smear on every step it crossed. When they reached the foot of the obelisk, they bowed their heads low.

The torches guttered out all at once. A whirlpool of blood opened in the air before them, spreading wide into a portal, and through it the two passed into the Obelisk.

The moment they were inside, both dropped their heads to the ground. For the snake, the gesture came naturally. For the man, it did not.

“Lord Seventh! Please, forgive us… we… we had no idea such an existence was out there, and we lost the stage-four fetus.”

Cold darkness covered everything. Neither of them could have said what they were even looking at. Uio, whose senses reached as far and wide as open air, found no air here to reach through, and Ritto was more than blind. They had knelt in this place often enough to be used to it.

Even so, it was a bitter thing every single time.

Nothing answered. The darkness did not stir, and no voice came out of it. Still, the two stayed exactly where they were, heads pressed flat to the ground.

‘He’s not answering. He’s angry. If he isn’t answering, then he must be furious!’

Then a deep sigh escaped the dark.

“The fetus was something Lord Third entrusted to my hand… I am not at all happy to have lost it, Uio.”

Uio trembled against the cold stone.

“I always knew Ritto was reckless. But you…” The voice lingered on the word until it hurt. “You, I have known to be calculative and careful. This, I cannot forgive, Uio.”

The darkness paused, and the silence that poured into it pressed on the ears until they ached.

Then it came again, like armageddon.

“But I will grant you an explanation. Send the copy over.”

Uio loosed his shadows. A blackness studded with many eyes welled out of him and flowed into the greater dark around them, until it had vanished into it completely.

After that came another silence, a couple of long minutes of it.

And then the silence seemed to gasp… a little too joyfully, perhaps.

“Ah…. Infinity Overdrive? Another Heir?”

Uio was dying to lift his head and ask what an heir was, and an heir to what, exactly. But to so much as try would mean he set no value on his life at all.

“This is news… news… Your failure will not go unpunished. But a Heir has been impossible to find for ten thousand years now. Only one has ever existed.”

“Uhm… Master, what’s an Heir?”

Uio shuddered where he knelt and shot a look at his idiot partner, who had just blurted the question out without a shred of self-preservation.

The silence that followed was damning.

“Ignorant fool. The order of the worlds is unbreakable, and has held since the spirit river first began to flow. Only very rarely has that order ever been broken. The first time, it caused the spirit river to cease, and the precipice to open to a world separate from the human one, a world brimming with overwhelming energy. Because of that aberration, the great figures of humanity began to descend into the spirit world. What do you think caused such a cessation?”

Both of them stayed silent. Ritto turned it over and over and came up with nothing. Then Uio felt the whole weight of the darkness settle down onto him.

“I permit you to speak, Uio.”

His voice crawled out, reluctant.

“The… existence of an Heir?”

The darkness took it up from there.

“The first Heir, the very one who created us Sins, was born in that hour. Heirs are a strange kind of existence. Their whole purpose is to break order, and because of it they wield power that answers to no order at all. As our Supreme Lord does… and as this new one will.”

Uio spoke up again, hesitant.

“Uhm… Lord Seventh, you said… there hasn’t been one in ten thousand years. That means there were others, after the Supreme Lord. What became of them?”

The darkness chuckled, and the sound rolled out through the dark as if the whole space had shivered.

“You’ve a clever head on you. And still you can’t work it out?”

Sweat beaded and dripped off Uio onto the stone floor as he answered.

“He… ate them?”

“That is right, Uio. The Chaos of the Supreme Sin swelled enormously after it consumed four Heirs. Then they stopped appearing altogether, and our Lord has not been seen since. But once I carry this news to Lord Third, I am certain the Supreme Lord will show himself once more.”

At last the darkness gathered itself into a man, seven feet tall, his skin pale as bone, his long hair hanging loose and drifting like strips of tattered black cloth.

“At last, the Eternal Night shall reveal themselves. Our golden age comes around again.” He drew a slow breath. “Hmph. I can taste it… and it is all thanks to you two.”

Uio felt a small flicker of happiness. At the same time, he knew well enough that he had better not feel too much of it.

“But you will still be punished. Go to Ejen’s and Renji’s Sanctuary. They are to come out of their closed training. We ourselves will find the Fifth Heir.”

Spooked and pale, Uio ventured, carefully:

“Lord Seventh, perhaps… we might leave your precious Apostles out of this, and see to it ourselves?”

The darkness surged into sudden rage, and the man’s glare fixed on Uio.

At once, Uio pressed his brow to the stone and poured out apology after apology.

“Please, Lord Seventh, forgive my foolishness! I’ll go and wake the Apostles now!!”

The man drew back into the darkness.

“You two… be gone from my sight.”

“YES SIR!!!”

Uio seized his idiot partner by the throat and hauled him out of the dark as fast as his legs would carry him.