As Zeta gave her answer, a heavy atmosphere instantly settled over the room. Everyone could feel that something was wrong.
"Do you know what you've done?"
A low voice came from beneath the black coat, and the atmosphere in the room grew even more stifling as a terrifying pressure bore down on everyone.
As the one bearing the brunt of it, Zeta's body began to tremble slightly.
"I do."
Taking a deep breath, Zeta slowly opened her eyes. Her voice still shook, but there was no fear of what awaited her now, only the resolve to bear the full weight of it.
"This subordinate knows full well what a grave mistake I have committed. Driven by my own selfish desires, I colluded with outsiders and nearly caused a catastrophic disaster. I failed Your Majesty's expectations and teachings and have no face to stand before you. This subordinate is willing to die to atone."
She had finally said it.
She had no intention of begging for mercy. Zeta knew exactly what kind of mistake she had made.
When she learned that the Black Death Emperor Front was connected to the Cult of Diablos, she had countless chances to kill both the Black Death Emperor Front and the people the Cult of Diablos had sent, seize the Black Death Emperor Front's entire legacy for herself, and stop the Cult of Diablos from growing stronger.
But at the time, she had just gone through Shadow Garden's dissolution ceremony. Although her belief that her master should rule this world had never wavered, a trace of confusion still crept into her heart, and she began to doubt her own worth in Cid's eyes.
Were her thoughts about her master really what he wanted?
Had she ever truly understood her master? Were all her feelings toward Cid nothing more than self-indulgent wishful thinking on her part?
Was she... unnecessary?
It was in that state that she received word that the Black Death Emperor Front, which she had been watching, was suspected of having ties to the Cult of Diablos.
Even though Shadow Garden had suffered its greatest blow since its founding, they had never stopped targeting the Cult of Diablos.
Nearly every member of Shadow Garden had a blood-deep grudge against the Cult of Diablos. Even setting that aside, the two sides could never coexist. If it came down to interests alone, only one of them could survive.
The rotten Cult of Diablos would destroy any force that might threaten its rule.
And for the sake of developing their new home, for the sake of not ending up strapped to one of the Cult's experiment tables, Shadow Garden had no choice but to plunder the Cult of Diablos's resources.
They could have cast aside their hatred of the Cult of Diablos and lived in the world as ordinary powerful individuals. The strength and talent they had gained from Demon Possession would have made them the center of attention, and the bonds forged through surviving life and death together would have made them an extraordinarily powerful force.
They could have done that.
But they chose not to.
If the knife never pierces your own flesh, you'll never know how much it hurts.
And every single person in Shadow Garden had been stabbed by that same knife.
So what if the pillar that held up their world, the one true god they worshipped, had abandoned them? They would still fight the Cult of Diablos exactly as they always had. As long as the Cult suffered losses, Shadow Garden counted it as a win.
So, going by Shadow Garden's operating policy at the time, she should have immediately gathered people and wiped out the Black Death Emperor Front, stopping whatever the Cult of Diablos was trying to achieve.
There had been no need to lure the enemy out. No matter how you looked at it, any Round Table seat the Cult of Diablos sent out could not possibly have been a high-ranking one.
And killing a few low-ranking seats would not have dealt much damage to the Cult of Diablos. It would have been far more worthwhile to sabotage their plan and prevent them from drawing new resources from the other two worlds.
That was what she had originally intended...
Until one of the intelligence agents she had sent to keep watch handed her a photograph.
A photograph of a man in priestly robes.
The man she would never forget.
The man who had killed her parents and her younger brother.
Petos.
She knew she should have destroyed the Cult of Diablos's scheme immediately instead of thinking about drawing the snake out of its hole.
If the one who had come had not been Petos, if Shadow-sama had not yet said he would leave Shadow Garden at that time, then she absolutely would have suppressed her hatred.
But the confusion in her heart then, combined with the rage of having her entire family slaughtered, led her to secretly bury that intelligence and, together with her own faction, set in motion a plan to lure the enemy out.
That was the true sin.
At that moment, whether she had intended to help the Cult of Diablos no longer mattered, because under her plan, the Cult of Diablos had in fact received her help.
And that was the truth.
Without her help and silent consent, Petos could never have created a monster like the Beast God.
If she had acted immediately and destroyed the Black Death Emperor Front and taken its assets for herself, the weapon Nalakuvera would have fallen into her hands, and the deification ritual would have lost the conditions needed to begin.
Instead, things had ended up like this. Nalakuvera had been completely destroyed, Mitsugoshi Company had been forced to shoulder enormous risks, and a misjudgment in the timing of her trump card had allowed the deification ritual to activate successfully, resulting in the birth of the Beast God.
And if her master had not arrived in the end, Petos would already have taken control of the Beast God, a monster ranked among the top fifteen in this world, and brought it back to his territory. The Cult of Diablos would have grown vastly stronger.
She had taken such enormous risks and caused such terrible losses, all just to kill one Petos.
She truly had committed a grave sin.
The sin of betraying everyone in Shadow Garden.
And to bear that sin, she had already prepared herself to die in atonement.
Father, Mother, Brother, Lilim. I've avenged you.
A faint smile of relief appeared on Zeta's face as slime extended from her hand and condensed into a golden wheel.
She raised the golden wheel to her own neck.
Two silent streams of tears slid down her cheeks and fell to the floor.
At this point, all Zeta felt was regret. Regret for letting hatred blind her into making such a mistake, and guilt for betraying everyone in Shadow Garden.
But if Zeta were sent back to that moment, even she did not know whether she would make the same choice again.
Even now, she still could not tell whether she had truly been blinded by hatred back then, or whether she had simply needed something to focus on so her confused heart would stop wandering.
It was just a little regrettable.
She had promised her Master that she would offer this world to him, and that he would be the one to bring peace to it.
The sharp edge of the golden wheel sliced open the skin of Zeta's pale neck, and thin streams of crimson blood trickled from the wound.
I'm sorry, Master. I must have disappointed you terribly.
As if something had suddenly occurred to her, in the final moment of her life, Zeta instinctively raised her head and looked up at Cid before her, her eyes full of reluctance and regret.
The jet-black blade in his hand was raised high. Zeta could not make out his expression beneath the mask, but everything Cid had taught her had already shown her the path that black blade would take.
That makes sense. With sins like mine, there was never any way I'd be allowed to die by my own hand and keep my name intact.
With that thought, Zeta closed her eyes and stopped trying to kill herself.
"Clang."
A tremendous force slammed into her hand, making it tremble violently. The golden wheel was knocked from her grasp and sent flying into the wall, where it lodged itself.
"Sigh..."
When Zeta opened her eyes, she saw Cid still holding his sword in the follow-through of that strike. Beneath the black mask, his eyes looked at her calmly, and then he let out a deep sigh.
"Only this once. There won't be a next time."
Cid's indifferent voice delivered the final judgment on Zeta's punishment. Then he turned and started walking away.
Zeta stared in disbelief at the golden wheel embedded in the wall, then looked toward Cid's back. The icy blue pupils in her eyes trembled slightly, and her voice shook as she spoke.
"Master..."
...
Zeta, that's enough. You already pulled the whole dying-to-force-my-hand act. Like hell I was actually going to let you die.
Behind the mask, hearing Zeta's voice from behind him, Cid's expression was far from pleasant.
He had never imagined that, just to avoid paying back the money, Zeta would actually dig up his black history and throw it in his face. He had even thought Zeta was one of the more honest ones among the Seven Shadows.
[This subordinate knows full well what a grave mistake I have committed. Driven by my own selfish desires, I colluded with outsiders and nearly caused a catastrophic disaster. I failed Your Majesty's expectations and teachings and have no face to stand before you. This subordinate is willing to die to atone.]
Now replace "this subordinate" with "me," then translate it.
[Maybe you should think about what you did first. You worked with an outsider, Yukime, to set up a scheme, used counterfeit bills to swindle away all the liquid funds of our Mitsugoshi Company, and betrayed the friendship between you and the Seven Shadows that went back to childhood. And you still have the nerve to lecture us? We'd already be generous enough if we didn't settle the score with you.]
There was nothing else he could do. Zeta had already gone this far, so what was he supposed to do now? For the sake of the childhood bond the two of them shared, he let her off.
It definitely was not because Zeta had exposed his black history and made him feel guilty. Definitely not!!!
All right, he was a little guilty.
Back then, when he found out Mitsugoshi Company had fallen into a trap laid by other companies, he set out to save it and joined forces with Yukime, the owner of another company, swindling all the cash away from every company involved.
Then everything blew up in his face, the cash vanished without a trace, and not only did he fail to save Mitsugoshi Company, he ended up replacing the other companies as the mastermind behind the trap targeting Mitsugoshi Company. There was no clearing his name after that, although it was pretty cool in its own way.
At the time, he had searched all over the world for that huge sum of money that had mysteriously disappeared along with the pen. It was only after learning that Mitsugoshi Company had managed to pull through on its own without his help, and to keep the Seven Shadows from coming after him to settle accounts, that he finally gave up searching for the missing cash and ran off to another country.
Only after he figured enough time had passed and most of the Seven Shadows' anger had died down did he dare return to Mitsugoshi Company.
Just as he had expected, the Seven Shadows tacitly agreed not to bring it up, worried it would embarrass him, and acted as though the whole thing had never happened.
But he cared.
Back then, every time he turned around, he felt like the Seven Shadows were whispering about him behind his back and roasting him for it. Thanks to that, his chuunibyou hardly acted up at all during that period.
It was not until after the worlds fused, when he found a gold mine out in the wild and handed it over to Gamma, that he finally felt a lot of the weight on his shoulders ease up. He could even stand straighter again.
It was honestly hard to say whether, when he later went to the Seven Shadows and said he wanted to end the "Cult of Diablos and Shadow Garden" game, he truly felt it was time to become a real Eminence in Shadow, or whether that piece of black history simply made him so uncomfortable that he decided to disband it.
Since the Seven Shadows had not held it against him back then for nearly wrecking Mitsugoshi Company, there was no way he was going to hold it against Zeta for blowing up his little stash.
It was just a little stash, that was all.
Let me make this clear just once. Cid likes money. For money, he could throw away his dignity and kneel without hesitation like a dog.
But that is only because "Cid's" dignity was never worth anything to begin with. If some stranger ever dared to try and buy "Shadow" into kneeling like a dog, he would cut that person's head off with a single swing.
To put it bluntly, if he asked Gamma for a loan and it was only a small amount, Gamma would happily write him an IOU with no deadline and no interest.
If it were a larger amount, Gamma might hesitate for a moment, but Cid believed that as long as he put on a pitiful enough face, Gamma would still soften and lend it to him.
Of course, that was never going to happen. There were plenty of bad guys in the world. If he ever really needed money, he could just go hunt some monsters. When it came to his childhood friend, he still intended to keep at least a little self-respect, unless Gamma took the initiative to humiliate him with money.
He had been furious when the Beast God created by Zeta's mess blew up his little stash, but what he was angry about was simply the fact that all the treasures he had worked so hard to collect were gone. It was more the hollow disappointment of working so hard only to end up with nothing.
He had been angry at first, but later he thought it through and realized this could not really be blamed on Zeta. At most, Zeta was an accomplice whose plan had backfired, and his anger toward her gradually died down.
A fight was a fight, and messing around was one thing, but if you were really mad, beating the other person into the hospital was about enough. There was no way he would actually kill someone over money.
If he really cared that much about money, he would have fallen out with the Seven Shadows long ago.
His steps came to a halt. Looking at the Hundred-Form Monster sprawled on the ground, Cid's Magical Power gathered continuously onto the pitch-black blade in his hand, and a chilling killing intent flashed through his eyes.
Of course, his anger toward Zeta had gone down. But the Hundred-Form Monster, the one truly responsible for all of this, absolutely had to die. Did it really think everyone was Zeta?
"Save me, Zeta, save me! I can help you take control of the entire Black Death Emperor Front. I still have value..."
Sensing the killing intent coming from Cid, Gardos kept begging Zeta for help. But when Zeta heard his voice, she only stared at him with a look that seemed to wish she could kill him on the spot.
At that moment, Zeta's killing intent toward Gardos even surpassed what she felt for Petos standing nearby.
"..."
Cid paused for a moment, thought it over, then turned to look at Zeta.
"The Black Death Emperor Front he mentioned. Do you need it?"
The man was definitely going to die either way. If he was useful to Zeta, then he might as well be rented out first, earn back a little interest, and get killed later.
"Huh?"
Zeta was visibly stunned, then shook her head hard.
"Other than a few Beastmen who are still loyal to him and too delusional to face reality, all of whom have already been thrown into the dungeon, my people have completely taken over the Black Death Emperor Front."
Useless trash.
A look of disgust appeared on Cid's face as he raised his sword high.
The Hundred-Form Monster tried to say something else, but Cid had already decided it had no further value. With one Atomic Sword, he blasted the Hundred-Form Monster so thoroughly that not even a corpse remained.
Pouring Magical Power into his eyes, he saw the Hundred-Form Monster's soul drifting in the void. He grabbed it with one hand, opened the gate to the world of the Law of Life, and threw it inside.
For a weak soul, the world of the Law of Life was no different from the eighteenth level of hell. Once thrown in, all it could do was wait for its soul to be ground away in endless agony.
It might not die thanks to the divine radiance left over from once having been a god, but with a soul as pitifully weak as the Hundred-Form Monster's, it could forget about ever leaving and reincarnating in this lifetime.
And if its luck was even a little worse and it ran into some powerful being fighting its way back to life, it would most likely get swallowed in one bite.