A Regressor's Bucket List Chapter 122
Flash-
The vision filled with blackness cleared, and his five senses vaguely awakened.
A bustling, noisy sound intruded, and in his vision, where the darkness had lifted, a familiar face was present.
“Have you come to your senses?”
“…Louis Button?”
“It took you longer than I thought. I expected you to wake up soon.”
He rubbed his eyes and looked again, but it was the same.
Leonardo Louis Button.
A person who shouldn't be in this place.
At the appearance of this unfamiliar piece of the puzzle, the situation before he lost consciousness flashed before his eyes like a panorama, and he roughly grasped the current situation through his five senses.
‘…Did he see the Signal Card and come all the way here?’
He thought it had only been a moment, but it seemed quite some time had passed while he was unconscious.
Even knowing the location via the Signal Card, the distance from the entrance to this place wasn't one that could be traveled easily.
Thump- thump-
The much clearer beat of his heart and a foreign sensation near his heart.
‘…That was dangerous.’
The experience he just had was so perilous that the word ‘dangerous’ wasn't enough to describe it.
Just being near the Quark's Source Stone should have been dangerous, let alone swallowing it.
Pfft-
‘Unbelievable, really.’
It was a disaster born from a series of coincidences.
A terrible disaster that he could never have resolved on his own.
If that guy hadn't been there, his Regression, the Demon King Hunt project, everything would have ended right here.
No matter how brilliant his plans and goals were, it would all be for naught if he died.
‘…For now, it shouldn't be an immediate problem.’
The saving grace was that guy's intervention.
He didn't know how the Quark that had invaded his body was dealt with, but as long as that guy had handled it somehow, he could rest easy.
‘Then, next is…….’
As he retraced his thoughts to grasp the current situation, something caught his attention.
‘He waited?’
The moment he activated the Signal Card, Louis would have taken it as a sign that he had extracted the Quark's Source Stone and would execute the Indulgence. If he had arrived to find him unconscious, the right thing to do would have been to transport him immediately.
After all, this was a foreign space filled with heinous criminals and Mutants, not a place the Priests of The Order would want to linger in.
But Louis had clearly said so.
‘It took you longer than I thought. I expected you to wake up soon.’
That he had waited for him.
The static purple sky visible behind Louis proved it.
They had left the Madman's Mine, but they were still inside the Darkest Dungeon.
“Why are we here?”
Instead of answering my question, Louis shrugged and pointed behind him.
- Hmph. Get lost.
- …But.
- I don't care about the sentence or whatever, I'm not leaving. If you spout any more nonsense, I'll bite the back of your head off.
There, a few Priests Louis had brought with him were arguing with Tom.
It seemed to be a squabble between Tom, who refused to go outside, and the Priests who had found him after his sentence was over and were trying to take him out of the dungeon.
“I originally intended to transport you outside as well, but as you can see, he's being like that. As a member of The Order, I couldn't just pass by.”
After adding that explanation, Louis briefly pointed to my ear.
“……”
“And. You chose that, didn't you?”
As I raised my hand to touch my ear, I felt the cold sensation of metal and realized that what he called ‘that’ was the red cross-colored earring Artifact I had shared with Jerry.
“I don't know the exact details myself, but.”
“……”
“I figured there must be a reason. In various ways.”
“……”
…I thought he wouldn't know.
It seemed he had figured some things out.
That I didn't just come here because of the verdict, but that Tom Hardist over there was my objective.
And that it was related to this earring I chose from the Seventh Door.
‘…….’
However, there was something a bit strange.
If he had realized that my choice of the earring was a move made with the bigger picture in mind, he should have been asking questions at this point, not glossing over it.
For some reason, he was letting it slide as if it were to be expected.
Not hiding the blatant nuance that he knew something was strange but wouldn't ask about it.
‘…Come to think of it.’
The atmosphere had changed somehow.
It wasn't a change in Leonardo Louis Button himself, but rather his attitude towards me.
The unique tension I used to feel whenever I met him seemed to be gone.
To dismiss it as just a feeling was difficult, as the fact that he didn't press me about the ‘Red Cross Ring’ was proof in itself.
In that sense, I stared at him in silence for a moment, but.
“…Do you have anything else to ask?”
“……”
He didn't answer this time either.
“…No.”
It was an incomprehensible change, but not an important issue right now.
In the first place, it would be strange for me to question him, ‘Why aren't you asking more?’ and regardless of the reason, Louis was someone I needed to keep in the position of an ally.
If anything, it was a good thing for me, so there was no reason to feel uncomfortable.
The fact that there was a side to this I didn't know was a bit bothersome, but that was something I could find out over time.
For now, the pressing issue at hand that needed to be dealt with before leaving this place was the priority.
Seuk-
So, I got up from my spot and called out to Tom, who, after a long argument, was about to bite the back of one of The Order's members' heads.
“Hey.”
“……?”
“Smoke break?”
* * *
“Those priests from The Order are the same now as they were back then. They think the laws they set are everything.”
“……”
“Anyway, thanks. My patience was already at its limit-.”
“You really have no intention of leaving?”
At first, he seemed grateful that I had gotten him away from the priests of The Order(?) who had gathered to persuade him.
But as soon as we moved away and he lit a cigarette, my question made his face scrunch up again.
“…Are you going to say the same thing too?”
Pfft-
“Well. That's why I came here in the first place.”
“……!”
At this first open admission, his eyes widened.
“…I think this is the first I'm hearing of this. You came to get me?”
“It was for this and other things. Who would come to a place like this for just one reason?”
“……”
Heeup.
“Why.”
Perhaps my words sounded different from the priests' simple ‘your sentence is over, so let's go’.
After a moment of silence, he took a drag from his cigarette and, instead of refusing, threw a question back at me.
“…I asked why. The reason you're trying to get me out of this place.”
In response to his question, I organized my thoughts for a moment and threw out a suitable opening.
“The Beastkin Nation has fallen.”
“…I know that too.”
His reply was calm, yet tinged with a certain resentment.
“The once-united Beastkin race was torn into dozens of factions.”
At my added words, he let out his characteristic *grrr-* growl.
“…I told you I already know this. What are you trying to say?”
“Then,”
“……”
“do you also know that there are Beastkin being treated as slaves?”
Flinch-
The enraged man's shoulders flinched for a moment.
Then, he answered pitifully.
“…I suspected as much. Without a nation to protect the young ones, such things could happen. But that's not something I can do anything about personally-.”
I shook my head at him as he stated his assumption.
Dori-dori-
“95%.”
“……?”
“There's no precise data, so it's not certain, but according to a reliable source I know, 95% of the existing Beastkin are slaves. And that's a conservative estimate.”
“……!!!”
A silent scream.
His eyes filled with horror.
“What does that…….”
The fundamental reason he insisted on staying in this Darkest Dungeon was penance.
Because he believed he was responsible for the Beastkin losing their original nation and ending up in their current state.
Because he thought that even if he left this place, the Beastkin who remembered those times would never accept him.
Unless the Beastkin themselves sought him out and asked for his help, he felt he had no right to show his face in the outside world.
It was just familiar; it wasn't as if he preferred this Darkest Dungeon to the outside world.
“It's just as I said. After the Beastkin Nation was dismantled. The Beastkin have effectively become the representative race for slaves.”
But the reason he could remain here was that he didn't know the outside truth—that even if the Beastkin could no longer boast their former lofty prestige, they were being treated as slaves as an entire race.
As his face now proved, he had probably never even imagined that the dissolution of the Beastkin Nation would lead to all of them becoming slaves.
…Of course, his thinking wasn't entirely baseless.
In the era before he entered the Darkest Dungeon, the treatment of the Beastkin was certainly not the same as it is now.
As I'd said before, the basic physical abilities of the Beastkin were by no means inferior to other races.
Even if they became unprotected refugees without a nation, he wouldn't have thought they would be treated as the weak.
However.
The way of the world is that things don't always go as planned.
“…Impossible. No matter what, the Beastkin aren't a race so weak as to be reduced to human slaves…….”
“The world has changed a lot. Just like Mana Restrainers were created, Growth Inhibitors have also been developed.”
“……”
“Growth Inhibitors that permanently suppress the growth of Beastkin have been developed. More than half of the existing Beastkin have bodies that can never reach adulthood.”
A twisted expression, as if he couldn't possibly accept it.
I didn't know what exactly he was imagining, but it was the most horrifying expression I had ever seen on his face.
“Most of the traditional special skills passed down in each tribe have been lost, and the strongest warriors representing the race have been reduced to Isaac's test subjects.”
“……”
“They're gone now. The Beastkin you remember.”
A moment of silence flowed.
After that.
Kugugugung-
An immeasurable rage shook the ground.
The ground he stood on cracked in five directions, and the rustling leaves were torn from their branches and sent flying.
A huge fluctuation of mana.
That blatant anger swirled around him, with nowhere to go.
It was understandable.
The reason he had confined himself in the Darkest Dungeon all this time, the reason he could endure at the edge of despair.
This story shook that very foundation to its core.
I barely withstood the wave of mana and looked at the man filled with rage.
And said.
“…So stop being pathetic and let's go.”
Siiik-
“Because we need you to resurrect the Beastkin Nation.”