Seated with his back to the door, a dark figure leafed through the book in his hands until the door behind him opened without a sound.
"Lost again, Eta?"
"I wouldn't say that. There are just some things I wanted to ask Master about."
"A dull habit. Wise men who think too much often end up taking the inferior path."
Cid turned his chair around. Dressed in formal attire, he carried an elegant air, his gaze indifferent as he looked at the purple-haired Elf before him.
"Mm. You're right, Master. I also feel like this is a little unnecessary."
Eta sat down naturally on the sofa, yet her whole body seemed drained of motivation. She struggled to lift her head, her hollow eyes staring straight at Cid.
"I know very well that only a few people will accept my ideals. But I still want to walk my own path. So I came to ask you, Master. If Alpha and the others try to stop me, am I allowed to fight back?"
"That isn't a question you should be asking me. I won't help you, and I won't help Alpha and the others. I'll just sit here and watch."
"So you won't intervene, Master?"
"Hmm... If you all end up having a conflict, I think waiting a while should be enough."
"I understand. I'll give up."
Eta sighed. She knew Cid had already given her his answer. If things went too far, Master would step in to stop her.
And "too far" probably included, but was not limited to, killing someone, leaving them in a vegetative state, crippling them, and so on. How was she supposed to play under rules like that?
At that thought, Eta decided that once she went back, she would obediently go through the motions and waste her days. Those conditions had boxed her in completely. In that case, she had no choice but to give up on her desires. A genius did not waste effort on pointless things.
"It doesn't have to go that far. Talk it over properly with Alpha and the others. Maybe you'll come to understand each other."
"...No matter how I think about it, that's impossible. Alpha and the others believe life is precious, while I believe knowledge stands above life. Unless you say something, Master, they won't change their minds."
Eta shook her head. She knew perfectly well that the root of her conflict with Alpha and the others was a difference in values. If one hears the truth in the morning, one may die content in the evening.
"Do you truly think life is precious, If so."
Closing the book, Cid revealed a mysterious smile.
"For a single individual, life is certainly precious. But to a group, and to nature, life is also terribly insignificant.
In ancient times, humanity was still ignorant and unenlightened. They attributed all kinds of natural phenomena to the creations of Gods who did not exist. Under those circumstances, in order to please the Gods, a very cruel religious ritual emerged: blood sacrifice.
Tell me, Eta. Do you think the people used in blood sacrifices willingly chose to become sacrifices?"
Cid did not know about anyone else, but when he was little, every time he watched an anime protagonist defeat the final boss with some passionate speech about friendship, bonds, and the like, an interesting question always came to mind. Why couldn't the villain defeat the hero first, and then have the Eminence in Shadow appear to defeat the villain?
Later, after he grew up and understood that if the villain beat the protagonist, the story would not be able to continue, he was actually a little disappointed. But his goal was never to become a villain. It was to become the Eminence in Shadow, so he did not care too much.
Still, the hero's speeches were worth studying. As the Eminence in Shadow, being persuaded into joining the righteous side by a speech would be far too humiliating. So, in order to use those verbal tactics in reverse, Cid carefully studied history and philosophy. In the end, he reached a conclusion: the existence of morality and law did not mean one had to obey them.
"Human nature is hypocritical. That is why life is both precious and cheap. Your own life is precious. Other people's lives are cheap. If someone thinks another person's life is more important than their own, that is only because things like emotion, blood ties, or morality have been placed as stakes upon that other person's life.
So making people understand one another, and making life no longer precious, is actually quite simple. I have three methods..."
Cid raised one finger. A sharp glint flashed through his eyes as he spoke with interest.
"The first is hatred. Humans are emotional creatures. If the same knife is driven into two people, those two people will certainly come to understand each other.
Let me give you an example. If the members of the Cult of Diablos who turned you into victims of Demon Possession, framed you, drove you into exile, and used you for human experiments appeared before you, would their lives be precious?
A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. That is human nature. A small minority may remain rational, but most people will not. And right now, truth lies in the hands of the majority."
Cid raised a second finger, a faint smile appearing at the corner of his mouth.
"The second is interest. Although bloody and cruel rituals like blood sacrifice disappeared as the times changed, at its core, that was only because people realized that human lives could not be traded for what they wanted from the hands of 'God.' But what if they could?
If sacrificing the lives of a few death-row prisoners could double a nation's GDP, would that country's people and leaders agree? They would.
Remember this. Human nature is hypocritical. What people lack is only an excuse that lets them be openly hypocritical.
You do not even need to make a deal with a group. You can make one with an individual. As long as you have enough money, you can completely buy the life of someone who desperately needs money to save the person they love.
If someone tried to stop that transaction, Eta, do you believe the first person to object would actually be the very person about to trade away their own life?"
Cid raised a third finger, stood up, and opened the curtains, letting sunlight stream into the room. He looked at Eta with a bright smile.
"Of course, everything I just said is pure nonsense. I'm looking forward to the day someone uses those words as an excuse, only for me to cut off their head with one slash."
Morality was morality. Reality was reality. Morality stood half a step above reality, yet it was built upon reality.
Cid understood that very well. He was not a good person, nor was he a bad person. That was why he never demanded a moral bottom line from himself, but when he acted, he tried to do so according to the highest moral standards possible.
...
Controlling the mech, Eta threw a fierce punch. The massive fist merely swept through the air, yet it stirred up layers of wind blades. Delta, who had previously been able to clash head-on with the Grendel without hesitation, could now only dodge in a sorry state, not daring to meet the Grendel directly.
Inside the control room, Eta did not stop the runaway Magical Power in her body. Instead, she made it worse, accelerating the corruption of the Demon Possession and pouring her continuously rising Magical Power quality into the Grendel-kun. In just a few dozen seconds, the Grendel's attack power had surpassed Delta's.
But the price Eta paid for such an enormous increase was that her entire lower body had already turned into a mass of flesh. The Demon Possession would swallow her completely in a few minutes at most.
Eta paid no attention to her own body. After all, she had already prepared the Star of Life in advance. She simply controlled the Grendel and continued attacking. Her runaway Magical Power prevented her from using attacks herself, but it did not stop her from using the Grendel's body to control and launch attacks.
The Star of Life was a technology Eta had developed through researching Cid's body. In a certain sense, the technology was quite simple.
Put simply, it was an infinite resurrection armor. When a member of Shadow Garden died in an accident, Master's Magical Power interface would preserve the soul. Then, using genetic material prepared in advance, it would imitate the process of embryonic development, cloning a body while injecting the soul to revive the person. Because the soul was injected during the cloning process, there was no need to worry about the body and soul being incompatible, or about an incomplete soul born from the clone taking over the nest. At most, the body would be a little weak immediately after resurrection, and it would recover after some time.
It looked simple, but in reality, this was the Pandora's box Eta had left for Shadow Garden. It came from Master's third method: "When the boundary between life and death blurs, life becomes cheap..."
She could not change herself, and she did not want to change herself. In that case, she could only change the others. She would change all of Shadow Garden herself. Her standards were not high. Their morality only needed to reach the average level of most factions.
Once people grew used to something convenient, going back became very difficult.
As for the possibility of not using it? Leaving aside whether Shadow Garden would abandon a technology that could bring enormous benefits for the sake of morality, once this information leaked out, they would see whether anyone rebelled.
Shadow Garden could not refuse this technology. And once they used it, they would no longer have the right to criticize her. She would single-handedly corrupt the worldview of all Shadow Garden, making everyone as indifferent to the value of life as Cid and herself.
Even if they truly refused, at worst, she would simplify the resurrection and self-destruction technologies, then spread them throughout the world, dragging the entire world into a blood-burning self-destruction arms race.
She could not force the world to change with her own strength the way Master could. But she could become the center of the tide of the era and let every faction unwilling to change die. That was the wave of an era brought about by technological innovation.
And in the few days since leaving Alexandria and arriving on Itogami Island, Eta had basically done only two things: building the Grendel and experimenting with the Star of Life technology.
Because time was short and she lacked experimental subjects, Eta had used herself for part of the experiments. She had to admit, cutting open her own soul was truly agonizing, but the results were just as satisfying. Even when the separated soul was several meters away, it could still feel sensation.
Afterward, when she transplanted the organ fused with her soul back into her own body, Eta observed no rejection reaction at all. Her soul also stopped hurting once the missing piece returned.
The soul leaving the body posed no issue either. With Master's Magical Power protecting it, there was no need to worry about the soul wearing away from the lack of a physical body.
In other words, Eta, who had already prepared her resurrection in advance, truly did not mind destroying her current body. After all, she could simply switch to another one.
In fact, if the emotion jar containing Master's memories could have been taken with her, and if she had not been reluctant to part with her own brain, Eta would have killed herself long ago and waited to be resurrected.
There was nothing especially wrong with a clone, but a clone could never be a perfect one-hundred-percent copy. There would always be a difference of one or two percent.
For ordinary people, that difference would not matter. But for some people, the quality of their organs really came down to luck. Take her, for example. Even if another Eta were cloned, the other version's brain might be highly developed, but it most likely would not match her current brain.
So for Eta, there were only two things she needed to protect: Master's memories and her own brain.
The chance that her newly born body would have a brain equal to or better than her current one was far too low. Eta had no interest in gambling on such a tiny possibility. She was very satisfied with the brain she had now. If she really had to change bodies, she would transplant her brain along with it.
As she thought this, Eta controlled the Grendel to raise its arm and block Delta's attack, then turned its body to the right.
"Smack!"
The thick, long dragon tail slammed heavily into Delta, smashing her into the ground with a single blow.
Pressing her advantage, Eta mercilessly hit a button. The pitch-black dragon head on the Grendel's chest opened its jaws, and purple flames surged out, sending a long pillar of fire crashing into the ground.
Had she won?
Looking at the black smoke before her, Eta narrowed her eyes as Magical Power gathered throughout the mecha once more.
"Looks like not yet..."
The black mist gradually dispersed, revealing a golden shield beneath it. The shield split apart from the center and transformed into two wings behind a bewildered Delta.
White light shone from beneath Delta's battle suit. Delta blinked, then took out the white "beast" crystal from earlier.
"Merits and faults are counted separately. Think of this as your reward, Delta. I've named it WarGreymon Form. Bye-bye. See you later."
That was Master's voice!
Expressionless, Eta watched the excited Delta wave her claws and charge toward her, then calmly turned the control stick.
It did not matter. So what if Master had given her a cheat? Eta was a life-burning player. She would just sacrifice her entire bod... Why could she not move?
She shook the control stick again and again, pouring powerful Magical Power into the mecha without pause, but the Dragon-Human Mecha still did not move an inch.
"This is... fear. The Grendel is afraid of Delta's steel claws? Are they specialized against dragons?"
This was the flaw of an unfinished product. The instincts in the raw materials had not been suppressed by Wisdom. Once they were countered, the whole thing shut down.
"Was this part of your plan too, Master?"
With that sigh of admiration, the entire mecha exploded in the next second.
"BOOM!"
"Guh!"
Amid the smoke and dust, Eta lay on the ground, most of her body already reduced to lumps of flesh, staring at the jar containing Cid's emotions as it rolled in front of her.
To be honest, she felt she still had a chance to turn the tables by fully supporting Sherry, but...
"Forget it. Master would look down on me."
Eta let go of the jar and sighed. After losing this badly, struggling on the brink of death would be too embarrassing.
"Boss's scent? Whoa! What is this thing!?"
"?"
Eta looked at the jar Delta had opened and the black emotions spewing out of it. Then she looked at Delta, and then at the runes lighting up on her wrist...
"Remember this! The one who beat me was Master, not you two idiots!"
Before she was swallowed and carried away by the black emotions, Eta struggled to poke her head out and shout that one last line.
...
Raising the pitch-black sword in his hand, Cid looked at the white figure before him, a being that had devoured Sherry and taken shape from a mass of dark things.