After blocking the incoming debris by forming a thin film of water, I pressed down firmly on the Administrator with my foot.
"Th-this wasn't me......."
"I know."
"You know?!"
I stepped on the thing as it brightened up and spoke, shutting its mouth, then scanned the collapsing city.
This was the phenomenon of the Other Side resonating with the protagonist as it pleased and bucking wildly.
A phenomenon created by the protagonist, trembling with anxiety, who had not yet properly grasped what his own ability was.
The protagonist's supernatural ability, which affected both the Other Side and reality, really was a cheat.
"He isn't here. Did you fix the coordinates properly?"
"It's definitely...... here, probably?"
The protagonist had rolled in on his own two feet, and this Other Side Administrator had failed to catch that one thing and come scrambling to find me. I glared straight at it.
I distinctly remember warning it not to touch him, and it was clear the thing had failed to hold back, touched him, and created this disaster.
"You're not lying?"
Having tasted some water play in the meantime, the thing, now in the form of a sturdy adult, grinned and awkwardly worked up the corners of its mouth.
What to do; I spit even on smiling faces.
"I came without even cleaning up after myself, so if it's going to be like this......."
"No, I'm wronged too! I did as I was told, held back from eating what I wanted, and ran straight over, and if this is the reward then I can't work! And he scares me too!"
"Your excuses have improved. You haven't been off watching something strange, have you?"
"......Caught, huh?"
"Let's not talk. Wait a moment. If he's nearby, he'll be detected."
I did not particularly want to use detection.
The strain on my body was part of it, but I was also sick to death of the memory of wandering this place only days ago while coughing up blood. And seeing the Other Side Administrator's mug made me all the more worked up, as a bonus.
Through the gaps of the small debris, I felt heavy currents of water.
Sewers, water mains, reservoir treatment facilities and whatnot; I discarded the modern city's infrastructure for now.
I also excluded the fake living creatures the Other Side had made.
The protagonist at this point would still be soft, so if I assumed something like wildly swinging blood pressure―
A gap between buildings one block from the intersection.
"Oh, found you."
The instant I felt relief that he was not as far off as I expected, I sensed a suspicious movement.
This was an instinct close to a sixth sense.
By the original course of things, does the protagonist not swallow this Other Side and escape outside?
"Close it."
"Huh?"
"The Other Side. Cut it off from reality."
"Are you insane? If you do that, you too......."
"Shut up. Hurry."
I thought he was soft, but for a protagonist he has some tricks.
They do say what one does unconsciously is the most frightening.
"That little shit is bolting!"
I grabbed the hesitating Other Side Administrator by the collar and warned it once more. If we lose him, you die and I die, understand?
Even weighing the side effects of severing an Other Side once it had been connected to reality, and the hardship of getting back again.
Losing the protagonist was the greatest loss.
Leaving the Other Side Administrator to handle it, I rushed at the gap between buildings where the protagonist was hiding.
Small black glittering effects were scattered through the bare alley. It was that afterimage peculiar to the protagonist's ability, the one I had scoffed at, asking how something black could shine.
"Ha, ha?"
This is maddening.
"Ha, I closed it......, did something go wrong?"
My reason was not sitting straight enough right then to satisfy the curiosity of the Administrator, which had chased after me belatedly.
Let us think.
The protagonist is still in a state where he cannot use his ability at will. He has only just become aware of it, and it is the point at which his own mistake has driven his life into the abyss.
However cheat-tier the protagonist's ability was, an ability manifesting unconsciously tends to become simple.
"He hasn't escaped yet."
"What hasn't?"
"Search. Wherever he bolts, it's still the Other Side."
The highest authority here was the Administrator in front of me, and if we had cut the Other Side off from reality in time, escape was impossible even for the protagonist.
No, I pray that it is so.
***
Ah, this makes me want to curse.
I searched every one of the five places the Administrator had connected.
The Other Side, severed from reality, presented those five places tangled together as they pleased, and combing that vast area was quite beyond even me.
It really was beyond me.
I stanched the nosebleed dripping down and blinked to hold my blurred vision straight.
At the bottom of a sheer gorge dozens of meters deep.
Even craning my neck, all I could see was a corner of the far-off sky twisted like a snake; it was a narrow path with no gap to slip out through.
I spat out the metallic blood pooled in my mouth and grabbed the hair of the half-dead Other Side Administrator beside me.
"Is that the end of it?"
"......I, I last spotted him...... over that way."
The place the bastard pointed to was the small footpath of the gorge whose end could not be seen, somewhere in the darkness along it.
"Perfect for burying a person."
"Right?!"
"Right. Where shall I bury you?"
"......"
"I'm dying of exhaustion and you open the door like this?"
"No! That couldn't be helped. Everything was smashed. It's a miracle there was a door at all!"
That is true.
The protagonist did not even bolt quietly; he scattered his ability everywhere he went, and that vast Other Side was all blown away.
A natural-born little shit.
It is so unfair I cannot stand it.
I really hated geniuses.
I took a deep breath and opened my senses. Perhaps I had mastered this by now, because apart from a few side effects I could switch it on and off with ease. Considering how many drops of blood I had shed getting there, of course I could.
The deep darkness where no light reached looked like a bottomless pit, but.
At no great distance I could feel faint breathing, a hot heartbeat, and a chill that set my whole body tingling.
'Ha, is it because he is the bastard who will kill me in the future......? Frightening, truly frightening.'
It was so dark that he could barely be made out as a silhouette, which grated a little, but it was not as though I could not roll him up at all.
"Done running?"
At my words, the thoroughly curled-up boy's shoulders trembled.
His pitch-black hair, tangled into a mess, lifted slowly as he raised his head. The red eyes shining fiercely were almost breathtaking.
Even without being told outright everywhere that he had been sculpted with affection, one could tell well enough.
That bastard is the protagonist.
The most shining bastard in this crappy world.
"Ha, haha."
It was so absurd that I laughed.
The protagonist, terrified and glaring with nothing left but spite, was as clumsy as could be, and yet an instinctive revulsion crawled up over my feet.
Part of that was surely because he was my natural predator, but the truth was that I was small-minded.
Because I could not stand the boy who burrowed into the ground as though he alone bore all the world's sorrows, blaming everything, weeping that he was the victim without even knowing what he had done.
What of it. I disliked the protagonist of the original work from the start.
"Monster......."
"Me?"
"I'm not dying to something like you. You monstrous little shit!"
Now, now.
I dodged the fist of the boy as he charged at me without warning. Perhaps because he was a military academy cadet, he had learned the basics of hand-to-hand technique, and it was fairly sharp.
"Mm."
Do you know why I waited to meet you now?
I subdued his flailing arms and legs and pressed his face down against a nearby rock.
There is a plan I set up first of all after dropping into this place.
To meet the protagonist while he still knew nothing and cut the sprout off.
Living while waiting for a protagonist who would one day come at me to kill me was the shortest road to an unhappy life.
I already have to cure a terminal lifespan, so it is better to set aside at least the one worry about the protagonist.
Well, and clearing away a bastard I dislike while I am at it.
"L-let go of me!"
"Would you let go, if you were me?"
This little shit has a value system beyond rehabilitation.
How badly he drove this world into a mess with hypocrisy wrapped in justice, he alone does not know.
The characters who died because of the protagonist were hardly one or two.
Awfully fond of the misery genre, that one.
Fine, say a protagonist growing and getting knocked around in a boys' comic is good. Why make the people around him suffer like dogs?
"Thinking about it makes me angry."
I wanted to grab that bastard author by the collar and shake him, but since he handed me a situation to settle it directly, of course I should make use of it.
'How about just swapping the protagonist out for some other suitable bastard, Author?'
Thanks to the bastard rampaging around and smashing everything, there was no need to exert myself separately.
I only had to create a small trigger; and beside the gorge, of all things, was the sea.
"Do you happen to know how to swim?"
Rain fell.
Feeling the cold rain falling in drops, the boy rolled his eyes about uneasily.
It did not take long before the sound of an enormous volume of water pouring down from upstream rang through the ground.
"You little sh―......."
The seawater I had deliberately guided in mixed with the rain, clawed at the gorge, and rushed in.
Broken rock, earth, and swept-up dry branches tangled together.
It is not for me to say, having raised a flood to catch a single cadet, but I had not wanted to go this far either.
A stopped heart would have been enough to confirm death, yet I did not let go of him until the body heat I felt against my palm had gone cold.
I swept back my soaked hair.
For having cleared away one worry, my mood did not improve.
If anything, it left a bad taste that he had died so easily.......
"I almost got swept away too, you madman!"
"You were still here?"
At my words the Other Side Administrator ranted and raved, then knelt in the still-pooled seawater and wailed.
"My Other Side! My identity! My happy life! What are you going to do about all of it?"
I had saved it from being eaten, and now it was demanding my bundle as well. I stared at the Other Side Administrator.
I had achieved my objective, so would it not be better to just eat it and replenish my stamina?
...While I was pondering that, the quick-witted thing scurried over to the protagonist.
"This is all this bastard's fault!"
"Ha?"
"Can I eat him?"
"Do as you like."
It was outside my interest.
A dead protagonist, at any rate.
The Other Side Administrator's mouth opened out of all proportion to its body, and the instant its snout, packed dense with sharp teeth, was about to swallow the protagonist.
Something alien grated on my vision.
'Just now......, the lines did not match up.'
You know the sort of thing.
The unnatural boundary where a panel is split and line does not meet line.
He was definitely dead, so why.
Why do I have goosebumps?
"Hey, get away."
"Huh? But you said I could have him."
"F*ck, I said get away!"
After snatching the Other Side Administrator up and throwing it back, I urgently checked the protagonist's condition.
The sight of black light seeping into the protagonist's tattered body and restoring it to its original state was grotesque beyond compare.
It was like blacking out a badly drawn picture with ink and then carving the picture out again in the same place.
Something unknown was bringing the protagonist back to life.
"Ha, ha......? Like this?"
The water that had remained knee-deep scattered into the air, and the original parched gorge filled the scenery again. The cold rain that had been pouring stopped at some point, and bright sunlight shone.
As though to say that flailing like mine could be undone as easily as breathing.
"Isn't one terminal sentence enough to satisfy you?"
The life of the bastard that should have gone cold began to beat again.
Recovering his handsome original form, in perfectly sound condition.
As though asserting that the protagonist's place was not here, the bastard was already no longer present in this place.
"F*cking envious of that protagonist buff."
The bastard revived and left the Other Side.
With a power that never even appeared in the original work.
I swept back my hair and spat out the blood pooled in my mouth.
In the end, feeling hollow at a situation that had become no different from the original work was a bonus.