Vol 3 Chapter 9 (2/2)

They wanted me to manage the world…

Don’t make me laugh.

“And someone like you…! Someone like you, who’s only all smug because you used a nasty trick, what the h.e.l.l do you think you can do?! You think you can kill people?! You think you can bring an entire country to its knees?! You think you can control the world?!”

“Is that all you wanted to say?”

Tamamo-no-Mae almost looked like she had pity in her eyes as she spoke in a kind voice.

“In that case, please die, Ms. Hypocrite-Who-Tries-So-Hard. You certainly said plenty of nice-sounding things here, but if you are looking for praise, then you should seek it from the G.o.ds in heaven above after your soul pa.s.ses there.”

It was right after that.

I felt like I had been enveloped in an explosion, and my entire body shook from the impact.

Ahh, did the Killing Stone Golem finally crush my body?

Sorry, mom… I couldn’t keep myself alive…

That thought pa.s.sed through my mind… but if I really had died, why hadn’t my consciousness faded out by now?

I opened both my eyes.

–

“Hey there. Nice work.”

–

I saw Yagami Tsurugi, squatting and looking down at me with a laid-back look in her eyes.

“……?”

I didn’t understand what was going on, and could only stare back at her in utter confusion.

I was no longer in the back garden.

Instead, I was in a room that was already deeply etched into my memory.

I remembered the pattern on the flower pot in the corner.

The flickering flames of the hanging lanterns.

The charms lined up on the floor.

And the single futon laid out in the middle of the room… with my mother inside. My mother, who was approaching her death.

Yes, I remembered clearly now. This was the time of my mother’s death.

This was her deathbed, and after her body failed her, she died soon afterwards.

I remember standing to her side and sobbing.

This was a painful memory. No matter how many times I thought back to it, I ground my teeth at my own helplessness, at how I couldn’t do a single thing.

And now, I found myself right in the middle of that memory.

My cheeks were wet with my tears.

I was now in my younger body, wearing my priestess clothes, and I stared out in blank confusion.

And right next to me was someone who definitely should not have been here: Yagami Tsurugi.

She was in the same lab coat I often saw her in at school and looked like she didn’t really want to be here. She yawned.

“Hey, ‘sup? You okay? Alive and kicking?”

Tsurugi waved her hands in front of my eyes and called out.

I gulped and finally managed to squeeze some words out from my mouth.

“T-Tsurugi?”

“Yup. Can’t you recognize the cute Tsurugi-chan when you see her? Hmm, I guess you’re a bit curious what’s going on… let’s see… ugh, this is hard. Umm… geez, I’m pretty bad when it comes to teaching other people stuff.”

Then why the h.e.l.l are you a high school teacher?

–

“We do not have enough time to linger here idly.”

–

As Tsurugi began to groan with a difficult expression on her face, my mother somehow rose from her futon.

She was supposed to be in critical condition here… she was going to die soon.

“M-Mom?!”

“Yes. I am here.”

My mother nodded, her expression pained, before looking at me.

“Sasami, listen carefully. I cannot stay like this for long. Tamamo-no-Mae, One who Dances on the Scales, is a powerful G.o.d. She has also been preparing for this opportunity to exhibit her powers for a long time.”

“O-Okay…?”

I still was completely confused, so I couldn’t do anything but nod blankly.

My mother impatiently looked at me and spoke strictly.

“Hold yourself together, Sasami. In spiritual battles, it is always the one with a clouded mind that suffers defeat.”

That was certainly true.

That’s exactly why someone like me who was easily troubled and led astray was so useless.

“Listen to me. I will now use Tamamo-no-Mae’s powers for myself in order to return to the past. You cannot hope to resist her powers, but there is a silver lining here in that you are no longer alone. We will combine our powers and stand up against this taboo alteration of the past.”

“This woman… she was the one who poked a hole through your belly and shoved drugs in there, wasn’t she?”

Tsurugi was rudely pointing at my mother.

“When she did that, she also inserted her own vessel in there when you weren’t looking. So after she got beat to pieces by Tama and fell back into the Underworld, she used that vessel as a lifeline to come back to this world.”

Her vessel… so it was like how Tsurugi left the divine blade Ame-no-Murak.u.mo back in the human world so she could follow it back from the Underworld.

“I also cannot overly rely on my own abilities. There was always the possibility that I would fall back into the Underworld, and so I enacted that plan as a safety measure. Otherwise, I would not have recklessly caused injury to my daughter.”

I see. If she only had to drug me, she wouldn’t have needed to punch a hole into my stomach.

“So, was that why I got really really fat…?”

“Hm. Did you get fat?”

There was quite a bit of hope in my voice as I asked that question, and my mother fell into thought.

“Hm, that would be your mother’s fault, yes. I will provide a more detailed explanation later, but it is difficult to regulate things in your world from the Underworld. I had envisioned that my vessel would appear as more of a boil or a pimple…”

Boils and pimples are really ugly too, mom…

And seriously, I was so panicked from being so fat that I almost brought Tama’s arm down on myself to gouge out a part of my body.

“Ahh, thank goodness. It was mom’s fault… I thought I would stay like that forever… I even used the power of the Supreme G.o.d but couldn’t lose any weight at all, so I was going crazy.”

“Of course it would be a nuisance if my vessel were to be destroyed, so I implemented certain safety precautions there as well.”

Given her power, it wouldn’t be hard for my mother to erect a barrier around her vessel.

I might possess the power of the Supreme G.o.d, but my spiritual powers were still underdeveloped, so if my mother put two or three layers of protection onto something, it would take me quite a bit of time to break through.

“Also, please do not use the power of the Supreme G.o.d for something like ‘losing weight.’ The only reason my vessel swelled past what should have been just a boil is because you are too lazy. If you showed more restraint and resisted your own material desires more effectively this would have never happened.”

Ah, she’s angry at me.

But for some reason, hearing mom scold me like this… it made me really happy.

“At any rate, I followed the vessel which had been implanted into your body up from the underworld… but on the way, this one here interfered.”

My mother unhappily pointed at Tsurugi.

Tsurugi also seemed a bit astonished.

“You think I’d just let you run away from the Underworld over and over? I was also down there and was trying to get back when I had a run-in with this woman. Because of that, I could only get a random part of my powers back to the human world and I lost most of my memories too.”

Ahh, so that’s why Tsurugi was bugging out.

“But well, now we’re all here in this mess. So before we start killing each other again, let’s agree to a truce and join forces to deal with this Tamamo-no-Mae and her alteration of history.”

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

“Well, I’m pretty d.a.m.n exhausted though, and same with Juju here, so I don’t think we can do anything outrageous right now.”

“We cannot allow her to take over the world. Changing the past is an abominable act in the first place. Well, I suppose I do not have to tell you that.”

My mother looked at me and quietly mumbled.

“Your words to Tamamo-no-Mae were quite stirring. I am proud of you. I cannot say that I forgive you for what you have done to me, but if you are acting with your own sense of conviction, then I do not consider you a traitor.”

“Mom…”

I felt tears begin to leak out of my eyes, and I frantically tried to wipe them away.

I thought I would never be able to face my mother again.

Of course, she didn’t say she forgave me… but I felt a slight bit of weight ease off my shoulders.

“Well, looks like this is a good time for a parent-teacher conference.”

Tsurugi chuckled.

“So, it looks like mom here has her reasons, and so does Sasami. You two should have a long talk later and start trying to figure each other out. From there you should be able to come to your own understandings about each other. Get along, mother and daughter… watching family hurt family gets pretty boring.”

Tsurugi seemed a bit sad as she muttered that. But then she summed up the situation for us.

“Anyways, Tamamo-no-Mae uses regret, or any desires to change the past as a trigger for her powers. If we want to break her powers, we have to get rid of all those triggers.”

Tsurugi spoke seriously and ominously.

“However, to Tamamo-no-Mae’s surprise… well, to everyone’s surprise, we have the minds of three people mixed together in this bodily vessel now: Tsukuyomi Sasami, Tsukuyomi Juju, and myself, Yagami Tsurugi. Because of that, her powers have misfired a bit, and we can use that gap to go in and interfere.”

There was me, the original owner of this body.

There was my mother, who planted a vessel into my body in order to come back to the human world.

And there was Tsurugi, who was mixed up in everything after encountering my mother in the Underworld.

If we could eliminate our regret, or at least soothe it, then we could resist Tamamo-no-Mae’s power.

“I’m gonna use Tamamo-no-Mae’s power now, and we’ll slowly go backwards in time. If we try to interfere in past events we’ll end up altering the past, but if we just watch there shouldn’t be a problem.”

Tsurugi smiled teasingly.

“We can’t start over from a save point but we can at least look through all the game history logs and figure out what we can do from here on out. You two should aim for a happy end. Life isn’t as much of a s.h.i.+t game as you might think.”

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

(1) This thing actually exists, in the Tochigi prefecture at a hot spring resort.

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