Steam burst from every corner of the laboratory like high-pressure vapor escaping from a cauldron, obscuring my vision.
‘The Stasis School…… Immobilization, Slow. They’re time-related status effects, if I remember correctly.’
I reviewed what I knew about them in my head while carefully scanning my surroundings. Even through my obscured vision, I could make out their positions from the vivid blue veins pulsing beneath their skin.
There was only one problem.
‘At least five of them…… One hit, and I’m finished.’
No matter how I looked at it, that was the situation. Even one of them was troublesome, and I had come here alone. There was no companion to cover me against attacks from my blind spots.
And yet, I somehow felt confident that I could manage this.
“Kill him! Crush him! Do not let him interfere with our great evolution!!”
At Simon’s furious scream, the musclebound aberrations moved all at once.
The one that had already located me thrust its arm toward me with brute force, but I twisted my neck aside and narrowly avoided it.
The next attack came with the sound of air being torn apart—a fist descending from above. No matter how I considered it, taking that hit would kill me.
Another aberration immediately joined the attack from the side.
‘If they surround me from every direction here, I have no way out!’
If they were mindless creatures, I could have forced them into a line and prevented them from reaching me all at once. Unfortunately, they would not move the way I wanted them to.
Their movements suggested that some intelligence remained, so all I could do was evade.
But I had to break through this situation somehow. If this continued, I would be the one driven into a corner.
‘How? They still have their reason, do they not?’
A thought suddenly occurred to me.
These things were not mindless undead that had lost all reason. They were gradually pressuring me with something resembling tactics, forming an encirclement around me.
The instant even one of their attacks grazed me, I would be afflicted with Stasis or Slow and reduced to minced meat.
The thought made cold sweat seem to trickle down my spine. I somehow continued to evade them, but there was inevitably a limit.
At that moment, my thoughts accelerated as though time itself had stopped.
‘Wait. Why am I trying to act like a game character that I’m controlling?’
A sudden sense of incongruity flashed through my mind.
I was not a game character.
No, to be precise, I was a character, yet at the same time, I was not.
I did not belong to any of the classes defined within the game.
I was ‘The Absolved’, something that had existed only in the setting.
‘……The Absolved is one who violates the rules.’
In Salus, the City of Law, regulations possessed physical force. They controlled the flow of ink engraved into the blood and could determine whether someone lived or died.
And The Absolved was an existence capable of twisting the scope of every law that existed in Salus.
“The idea that I can only use a skill from Gray Judgment after learning it…… is nothing more than a rule imposed by this world, is it not?”
Then what I had to do was clear.
There had never been any need to force myself to recall something I had not learned.
I simply had to reject the disorderly disturbance running rampant through this space.
As I watched an aberration leap into the air to smash my head apart, I quietly tightened my grip on the transformed gavel of judgment.
William’s legacy coursed through my palm, vibrating fiercely as though responding to my will.
‘This…… is not a weapon.’
It was a tool used to seal a verdict.
Then, if I were presiding over a courtroom, there was only one thing I would say in a situation like this.
“……Be quiet.”
With words so quiet that they could hardly be heard unless one stood nearby, I brought the gavel down against the floor with all my strength.
“This is my courtroom! All of you, be silent!!”
A thunderous roar erupted from deep within my chest.
“Silence(Silnce)!!”
At that moment, the sound reverberated powerfully throughout the laboratory.
[Eligibility Confirmation: You are ‘The Absolved’. You ignore the ‘Law of Acquisition’.]
[Confirmed Judgment: Silence of Court(Silence of Court)]
[Effect: All disturbances (actions and skills) caused by those who do not acknowledge your authority are forcibly nullified, and the user gains immunity. (Targets affected by the same effect are subject to a reapplication interval.)]
The System window appeared, and the instant the gavel struck the floor with a tremendous crash, a golden wave spread outward like a horizon, nullifying the very space around me.
The charging aberrations abruptly fell silent.
Their enormous bodies stopped awkwardly in midair, like puppets suspended by strings.
“……That actually worked?”
“Urgh, what is this……!!”
Despite what I said, goosebumps rose across my entire body.
I had never expected something I had only imagined in my head to actually work.
Even Simon’s scream was swallowed by the golden wave and became inaudible. His mouth merely opened and closed as he stared at me in horror.
More importantly, what I had used was not simply some skill I had created myself.
It was the sort of technique only a high-ranking Adjudicator should have been capable of using.
In Gray Judgment, it would have been a top-tier solo technique powerful enough to trivialize an encounter.
Strictly speaking, however, this belonged to a very different category.
It felt like a crowd-control skill designed exclusively for me.
‘But in Gray Judgment, targets develop temporary resistance to the same crowd-control skill.’
In other words, this opening was my chance.
There might not be another.
The moment I finished that thought, I acted without hesitation and brought the gavel down on the immobilized aberrations.
I moved with short, efficient motions, disposing of them one by one.
Diving between the frozen aberrations, I aimed at the head of the closest one and swung the gavel in a golden arc.
CRUNCH―!
With a dull impact, the aberration’s head burst apart. The blue liquid coursing through its body sprayed everywhere, but fortunately, it had no effect on me.
[Skill: Due to the effect of Silence of Court, you are temporarily protected against all attacks!]
“Oh.”
So this was what the user-immunity state meant.
It seemed useful for dealing with enemies that self-destructed.
“You are…… still moving?!”
Professor Simon stood behind me, his expression twisting when he saw me drenched in the Stasis Solution.
Of course it did.
The stasis he advocated did not actually seem related to the laws of thermodynamics, but it belonged to a category capable of temporarily halting biological functions or slowing them down.
In other words, it should have worked on me as well.
Yet apparently, it did not.
“One!”
I paid no attention to his expression.
I simply did what I had to do.
Turning toward my next target, I brought the gavel down from the top of its head with all my strength, as though crushing a lump of meat.
A grotesque sound came from the mixture of blood and flesh, and when Simon saw his test subjects being smashed apart in an instant, he howled savagely.
“Th-This…… is impossible! The creatures I created cannot possibly be defeated so easily by a single swing of that gavel! That cannot be possible! Those things tore dozens of Executors apart!!”
“This much surprises you?”
After the second, I swung the gavel at the third.
But the moment cracks appeared in the golden chains binding the remaining aberrations, time began to move for them once again.
‘Tch…… As expected, they build up resistance quickly.’
《RAAAAAARGH――!!》
Freed from their immobilization, the aberrations let out ferocious roars and fixed their glowing blue eyes on me.
Then they came after me with a speed that could not even be compared to before.
“Your logic is extraordinary! You even possess knowledge unknown to me! I will capture you somehow and make all of it mine!!”
Simon’s eyes rolled wildly as he shouted in madness.
“How frightening.”
“As long as your genes remain, that is enough! Arms, legs! None of it matters! Seize him and tear him apaaaaart!!”
Simon moved as though he were about to pull something from inside his coat.
The people from the University used chemicals at every opportunity, so coming here alone had been a mistake.
‘Red…… A Berserk Reagent, a Hardening Agent, and a Firebomb.’
It seemed he intended to use ‘that combination’ I knew.
Players could use it, so there was no reason a boss could not.
But he could only resort to such a bold measure because he had a shield that would ‘definitely’ protect him.
He immediately threw the red reagent at the aberrations, then shifted into position to throw the Hardening Agent and Firebomb at me.
As the aberrations absorbed the crimson reagent into their bodies, their muscles contorted, and both their bodies and glowing eyes gradually turned red.
“Fire, I just have to put out the fire!”
At the same time, the aberrations closed in with a barrage of heavy punches.
Simon had probably calculated the timing of my evasion and intended to exploit the resulting opening.
……An ordinary person would not even have been able to evade attacks like these.
But that did not particularly apply to me.
“I use Brand of Sentence Enforcement.”
[Searching for a target for Brand of Sentence Enforcement….]
[The target of the Brand has been selected!]
[Target: ‘Professor of the University’s Stasis School’ Simon Iceberg]
[The target of Brand of Sentence Enforcement has all stats reduced by 30%.]
[All actions of the target of Brand of Sentence Enforcement are temporarily halted.]
I snapped my fingers and focused my gaze on him.
His movements stopped instantly.
Resistance did not mean immunity to status effects.
Every crowd-control skill had a different effect.
If Silence of Court was ‘Nullification’, then this was ‘Immobilization’.
In other words, even if someone possessed resistance to status effects, that did not mean they could withstand an entirely different effect.
“What! What did you do to me!!”
The moment Simon stopped moving, I darted past the aberrations and charged toward him with the gavel leading the way.
Simon’s face twisted in shock, and the instant his body began moving again, he stumbled backward.
“D-Do not come any closer to me! You belong over there, frozen in stasis!! Why is everything reversed now?!!!”
His expression looked like cracked porcelain, warped by fractures.
He had already lost his composure and was on the verge of collapse.
I heard a fist cutting through the wind as it approached from behind.
I quietly lowered my body to avoid it and spoke to Simon.
“You must think this is unjust. After all, you probably believed that you truly devoted yourself to Salus.”
Reality was another matter entirely.
There had been lore about something like that.
The University had begun various experiments to confront the mysteries of the Outer Gods, only to provoke them and make the situation even worse…… or something along those lines.
‘Human experimentation, cautious probing to see how far they could test the Outer Gods’ patience, and eventually even things created on a grand scale specifically to oppose the Outer Gods.’
Their claim that it was all for Salus might well have been true.
But acknowledging that would be no different from overlooking everything that had happened here.
I knew I could not judge this place entirely by modern standards.
After all, this was a world from a game that had become reality.
But even so.
‘……If this world is doomed unless someone is sacrificed, then let it be doomed.’
That was what I thought.
A world that could survive only by forcing children to be sacrificed was already a doomed world.
Such a world did not even deserve to exist.
At least, that was how I saw it.
“Professor Simon, let me ask you one thing. Your experiments…… Did you truly have to use children?”
“Executor! Of course you would never understand! Even if the path we chose in our search for a way to save Salus seems wrong to you, our purpose was noble!”
Of course.
They undoubtedly wanted technological and scientific progress even while sacrificing others, and their desire to save Salus was probably sincere.
……Their methods were simply wrong.
“Professor Simon. Do you know? What you have done is utterly inhuman.”
“So you intend to lecture me? Tell me that I was wrong? Listen, Executor! Have you not condemned the masses in the name of the law?! What makes you any different from us? Tell me!!”
Simon screamed back at me in fury.
……He was right about that.
But there was one fundamental difference between him and me.
“You still do not understand, Professor Simon.”
That was right.
An Executor ultimately acted within the bounds of the law.
Even when the law itself made no sense, an Executor passed judgment according to established rules.
The University was different.
It carried out its experiments beneath the weight of lofty ideals, moving forward in pursuit of a better tomorrow.
That was the difference.
“What, what exactly is different about youuu?!”
Before Simon could even finish speaking, I smashed the gavel into his head and answered.
“The weight we carry is different.”
That was the difference between him and me.
It was clearly a matter of the rules accumulated under the name of cause and effect, as well as the moral responsibility attached to them.