… Mmh? What?

To my surprise, I found myself only a small distance away from the capital’s protective walls, even though they were still beyond the horizon just moments before.
Or rather, they had been until my stream of thoughts was cut off all of a sudden.
Right before that, as the reality of their deaths was starting to set in, a piercing headache had struck me and put me out of commission for a while. I even remembered convulsing like an idiot. To be fair, my brain had been functioning at a highly unhealthy rate right before, so some kind of backlash was to be expected.

What happened after that…?

Even now, pain was throbbing at my skull and applying an unpleasant pressure. It felt like my head was on the brink of bursting, and the dizziness I was going through made it difficult to merely stay standing. Between this and the physical exhaustion I was feeling, I couldn’t exactly picture myself crossing that much distance in this state.
Moreover, with Hiphus barely shifted in the sky, no more than a couple of hours could have passed unless a day and night had gone unnoticed.
Well, given the pain I felt in my ankles, I had likely propelled myself in the air with magic and botched the landing more than a few times.
Yes… That does ring a bell.
I somewhat remembered crashing into the ground pretty heavily after failing to get rid of all the kinetic energy, and staying motionless for a minute or two until the pain subsided. It was a wonder how I had managed to get there without fracturing any bone.

So… I left them, just like that?
For the most part, the thought of letting the people I had failed to protect rot away in the open air was insufferable. Now, in this state, I wouldn’t have been able to bury them anyway. What I could do, however, was see for myself how far death had spread. This was certainly the reason why I had decided to go on my way to the capital.
Turning back now when I was so close seemed stupid. Or at least that was what I told myself so that I wouldn’t have to lay my eyes on the dead bodies of people I knew.

Frankly, there remained a glimmer of hope for the capital’s inhabitants. Just like all propagation-types of damage, this highly-lethal scattering of mana could be modeled as a bubble with the black sphere as its center and that grew over time. As it reached people farther and farther away, its surface had increased and the total amount of mana gradually had become distributed over a larger area. What this meant was that the amount of mana per unit of surface area most likely diminished with the square of the distance from the sphere’s epicenter, making it follow an inverse square law.
In concrete terms, I would expect the inhabitants of the capital who were thousands of times farther from the spell than us at the time to have been exposed to millions of times less mana.
While there was room for hope, I didn’t want to be blinded by optimism. A million times less was entirely relative and didn’t mean much without knowing precisely the degree at which mana rejection was lethal. 

***

After staggering along the way for a few minutes, I finally found myself at the queue of carriages waiting in front of the large gate to enter the capital. I was wishing to be reprimanded for cutting the line, but no one told me anything. Silence and stillness reigned here. I didn’t even need to check inside the carriages, as the collapsed bull-looking mounts told me everything I needed to know.
… It was too much after all, even here.

Sure enough, the man in armor who was supposed to guard the gate and let people enter the capital was lying on the ground, too. For a brief moment, I thought he might have been only unconscious because his face was not displaying the same kind of horrified expression as back there. His lack of a pulse, however, told me he had still passed away.

Whether it was some sort of coping mechanism that helped me retain my sanity or simply the fact that I was getting used to it, my heart seemed incapable of sinking further. Even though that almost confirmed everyone had perished beyond the walls.
Either way, that is much appreciated.
At this point, my last vestige of hope clung to the eventuality that the thick walls may have possibly mitigated the intensity of the mana wave in some way or another. Considering the superfluid-like properties mana had, however, I doubted they would have. Maybe a barrier made of flesh or plants would have been more effective in stopping the mana thanks to their natural repulsive properties.

… What do I do now?
I had knocked a couple of times on the huge door, but I obviously didn’t get any answer.
Under normal circumstances, I was pretty certain that forcing the way into the capital would swiftly lead to imprisonment for anyone who wasn’t part of the royal family.
Locking eyes with anyone on the other side as I broke in would get awkward quickly.

Surprisingly enough, the door wasn’t locked and opened without a problem, although it had required quite a bit of force.
And, as I expected, no one rebuked me for entering by myself.
The scene was surreal. This main entrance, which led either to the noble and commoner districts and would usually be full of laughter and banter, was devoid of any warmth. Right now, everyone in view was collapsed on the ground in complete silence.

***

“Ah.”

When my head was in turmoil, I would usually close my eyes, power a bit of mana through my body, and admire the view of that familiar constellation for a few minutes. This was my routine to fight the occasional surges of emotions I had from time to time. Needless to say, I really needed that at this moment.
And yet, nothing was there.
It’s gone…
Everything was black when I closed my eyes.

Did I fry my mana veins or something…?
But I quickly realized that couldn’t be it, as my active reinforcement spell was active throughout my entire body. In fact, the whole time, it had been the only thing making me able to move in that state.
The flow of mana in my veins was essentially flawless, which was strange by itself. Something felt wrong, but it was in fact the opposite: something wrong that I was accustomed to was absent.
… Where’s the mana leak?
It was gone, too.

If my hazy memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, I had connected a few dots back when my brain was essentially dying. Most notably, I had come to the conclusion that this peculiar spell that was about to wreak havoc was the same as the unfathomable spell I had theorized in the past after thinking of the reason for my constant emission of mana. If I was correct, then canceling that ambitious spell had been enough to eliminate that mana leak.
What about Phaethon, though?
I couldn’t be certain but, considering the leak and that image had disappeared simultaneously, they might have been part of the same spell. Perhaps just trying to make out something in the dark two years ago had been the trigger for casting this partially active spell the day I used magic for the first time.

Still, if that constellation was really related, what an ironic fate it was. Maybe it was something like a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, just like in Greek mythology, I had struck down Phaethon before it could scorch the world by accident. Would that make me Zeus, then?
What a curse.
I didn’t want to be someone whose actions could unwittingly cause world-scale disasters that could be interpreted as divine retribution by people. And yet, I felt like it would definitely be the case were there any survivors.

To be frank, I was the one who needed to be punished by the gods. Because I couldn’t bring myself to punish myself.
Maybe getting purged by the God of Life was another reason as to why I was currently floating at the center of the giant fountain that paid respect to him in the main plaza. He was a symbol of purity, and yet I was desecrating him by staining the clear water with my blood.

Well, dirtying the water to deserve a god’s wrath wasn’t the sole reason as to why I was laying still in that fountain.
Since I was extenuated, my body was essentially running solely on mana via my strengthening spell. So, the original idea had been to gradually get rid of the mana by diffusing it out of reach in the air until my mana pool reached a low level, which would have deactivated the spell automatically.
Just by crouching down, I would have been incapable of reemerging, and I would have drowned pathetically in the middle of the commoner district, surrounded by all the people I killed.
Such an end would have been befitting for a soul as tainted as mine.
I already knew that I didn’t have the courage to jump from a building or stab myself with a knife, so I was under the impression that a slower, indirect and symbolic process like this one would do the trick. And yet, I had stopped the stream of mana midway through.
That was part of the reason why I wanted to gaze upon the calming view of that constellation for a bit. I was essentially trying to suppress my survival instincts that were screaming at me not to waste any more of my mana.

If I don’t do it now, I never will.
Seriously, though. If even committing a genocide didn’t justify killing myself, what would? Objectively, I knew dying right now would be for the best. Both because of what I did, and for what I might do again in the future. Even when I thought I was about to die in the explosion earlier, my main regret was to not have ended my life even sooner.

Well, besides the primal fear of dying, there were a few more legitimate reasons that made me hesitant about doing it right here, right now. For one thing, I wanted to know how many people were still alive. Or rather, I needed to know. Also, wouldn’t it be a bit too easy to escape with death without any confrontation? Part of me thought that the potential survivors would find some closure if I was publicly executed.
Maybe I could atone, too.

“...up!”

Mmh? Did I imagine it?
It was faint, but it sounded like someone had shouted something from some distance. I was partly submerged by water, though, so I couldn’t be sure. That was an additional reason not to die just yet, and I was ashamed of feeling relieved by that.

I pulled myself out of the fountain with a resolve as shaky as my limbs, and slowly walked in the direction it had come, dragging my feet along the way.
I only needed to go around one building nearby to catch a glimpse of a brown-haired girl on her knees and looking around.

An actual survivor…!

“Come on, wake up!” she yelled.

She looked to be in her late teens, and was tapping the cheeks of an even younger girl with urgency. That “sleeping” girl might have been her relative. Unfortunately, the probability that she would wake up seemed abysmally low. I had already checked more than a hundred people in this area and confirmed their death, so that survivor was definitely an outlier.

I approached her hesitantly, and she didn’t seem to hear my steps. To be fair, I wasn’t wearing my shoes, which I had taken off who-knows-when.

“H-hey,” I eventually muttered in a hoarse voice.

The girl, clearly startled, remained silent and gave me a questioning look.
… Uh? Déjà vu?
I couldn’t explain it but, although I met her for the first time, her face seemed sort of familiar to me.
She stayed motionless, probably waiting for me to finish my sentence. I had called out to her without thinking it through, though, so she would have had to wait a long time.

“... What’s happening here?” she eventually asked, her gaze not wavering one bit.

I couldn’t tell by her expression whether it was hostility or mere wariness, but her tone seemed to imply that I might be responsible. Which I was.

She’s not beating around the bush. That will make things easier.

“This is all my fault,” I said.