A Simple Transaction reaction (932 words)
Every story spoken has been spoken before.
The boy from Earth stumbles into another realm. A world of wonder and magic, suffering beneath the Tyrant's cruel yoke. The boy becomes a man, the man becomes a hero, the hero defeats the Tyrant, and all live happily ever after. So destiny has decreed.
So originally destiny had decried the story of our protagonist to be your typical isekai story.
I wonder why destiny had to use such a convoluted method to deal with the Tyrant? The fates needed someone as a counterforce to their own hero so using someone from outside their world as Overlord, so that person would be as ignorant as possible of the world as possible, made sense, the Geas of Indenture is just one of the many curses the accursed is trying to mitigate and Control used the spell which brought Seram to his world to get rid of the Heroine (Though there is still the question of why he was brought to that world and why a spell with that effect even existed in the first place). But what could be this world destiny reason to rely on a hero from earth to deal with the Tyrant?
And there really seems to be to many isekai in this verse for it to be all a coincidence... We know from the build vote from when Nameless was deciding the nature of his Vault that true universes seems to spontaneously generate human inhabitants even when no such thing was intended making human beings some kind of cosmic constant. Could the massive number of isekai in the rihakuverse be the result of a similar phenomena, and if so why?
But the Tyrant is not so easily overcome.
He is wise to destiny's tricks, greater than destiny's stewards. He sets the world spinning to the direction of a new master. Destiny falters; only causality remains. And mere causality does not suffice a hero from coddled Earth to stand against the Tyrant.
Apparently this world destiny's stewards were pretty weak, certainly a lot weaker than the Fates, given that they could be defeated by the Tyrant. And reality ensue as a result: generally, all else being equal, there is no reason for someone from Earth to have an easier time dealing with the problems of another world than that world own inhabitants, quite the opposite in fact!
The hero fails, time and again. The people of the world suffer for his impudence. He loses an arm, an eye, half a lung, all the natural vigor of his youth. The companions with which he journeyed become a procession of the dead. His quest, prophesied as the dalliance of a season, becomes a grim slog of years.
That must have sucked... To be promised a simple one season adventure in a new world to defeat the Big Bad and save the world and then having to deal with realities of guerrilla warfare against an implacable enemy instead, slowly losing pieces of your very body along with the loyal companions you made along the road...
There is no certainty of victory; barely any chance of it. But the hero's heart is full of hate, and it is much too late to stop.
He learns from his enemy. Mirrors the monster's unmerciful cunning, turns to those forbidden arts his long-dead mentors warned him against. Finds in them, at last, an arena in which his talent exceeds his adversary's.
Yeah, if your opponent is willing to use a superior weapon and you're not, it's going to be pretty difficult to win without starting from a commanding position or having destiny on your side. Fortuitous that the hero would actually be more proficient than the Tyrant in the forbidden arts, though...
Years more of preparation, to realize the power that talent portends. Time bought dearly with the blood of his allies, a patchwork insurgency of the desperate and condemned. In sparse moments, the hero and his surviving companions carve out a life for themselves, stealing what joy they can. The long, bitter path of his journey trudges towards culmination.
There's an important lesson here, I think. Even in this desperate situation the hero never completely abandoned everything in the name of felling the Tyrant, managing to find some form of happiness even in such a dark situation. That doesn't really sound like someone that would abandon everything purely for the sake of Vengeance, but well... That boat already sailed.
One final sally against the Tyrant. As before, their powers are unevenly matched. But for the first time, that imbalance is in the hero's favor.
And yet even that is not enough. The gap in power does not suffice to overcome the gulf of skill still between them. There is no more time. There are no more chances.
That must that have hurt. To have come this far, sacrificing so much to surpass the Tyrant, and still having it not be enough because he's just that more skilled than you are...
The killing stroke descends. The hero's final companion throws herself into its path. The hero becomes a widower.
In the Tyrant's implacable guard, a momentary opening appears.
Burning selfhood like tallow, the widower mounts one final onslaught. In his eyes there is no more victory, no dreams more of failure or success. Only the enemy which must be destroyed, no matter the cost.
Victory at last... But at what cost? Even the narrative has stopped referring to our protagonist as the hero, now he is only a widower...
The widower prevails. The Tyrant is no more. The peoples of the world celebrate their liberation. Joy and adulation rain upon their silent champion, who stares ahead unblinking.
After the parade the widower buries his wife and their unborn child. It is eleven years to the day since he arrived in this world.
To the people of this world this is a moment of celebration of triumph, the Tyrant vanquished at last, the horrors he inflected on the populace finally coming to an end! For our protagonist? Not so much. Eleven years he has spent in this world. Eleven years of horrors, of perilous battles, of lost. Eleven years of sacrifice. And in the end, though victory was achieved, it costed him everything.
Crippled by the effulgence of that final strike, the widower is a pale shadow of his prior self. But in the eyes of the people, he is still the hero that was; their protector, their shining knight, their salvation, howsoever delayed though it may have been. And, with the passing of seasons, a glimmer of hope arises in the hero's heart. That, though the cost was ruinous, more than he could bear, there was good in the world still waiting to be fostered.
Freedom, Justice, Truth. In time, democracy. A society with the power and wherewithal to be organized around its highest ideals, rather than brute necessity. It is what they would have wanted - and if he no longer wields a hero's strength, still he has a hero's influence.
And the narrative is back to calling him the hero and he's absolutely worthy of the tittle given what he is trying to do here. Too often in stories heroes limit themselves to fighting for a return to the status quo rather than using their power constructively, to improve the world. And, though our protagonist might have lost almost all of the magical might he once commanded, soft power is still power.
Sadly he seems to have misjudged just how much soft power he actually commanded and how reticent the powerful of this world would be to allow someone else to force them to change the way they did things so soon after the fall of the Tyrant...
But the world did not sit idly while he mourned. The kings and dukes who fought aside the hero have filled the vacuum of power left by the Tyrant. And they are content with the system at hand. Theirs is a society of nearly faultless structure, stably and evenly arranged. Their yoke is light, the people are fed. Is that not justice? There is no place here for the instruments of modernity, much less its frivolous ideals.
The hero is not dissuaded. Too many have died for him to surrender this dream. In that resolve the nobility see the beginnings of a Tyrant by a different name. They act. Treachery achieves what all the overlord's power could not: the hero undone at last. Discarded by those who had no more use for him.
Despite this being a rather predictable result in a medieval-like society it's still kind of sad that they would think that our protagonist was anything at all like the Tyrant for the reforms he's trying to implement given the nature of those reforms...
In the hero's final moments, despair and hate raging equally across his heart, comes a being with the form of a man, offering vengeance in the form of a bargain.
The being is power beyond measure, beyond the hero's wildest reckonings, the solemn steady heartbeat of all creation, the sword by which all stories would end.
And what is possibly the most powerful being in the entire cosmos come to him in his last moments to offer him a second chance.
"Are you the-"
The man cuts him off with an upraised hand. "No, I'm not the Devil, nor am I associated with any that claim to be him. There will be no souls, no contracts, no signing in blood. My offer is that of a simple transaction. I am bound by countless Curses, leaving me greatly diminished, a thin figment of what I once was. Take up a portion of my burdens, and in exchange receive a fraction of my power."
Wow. The Accursed is actually using a script. He really can't be bothered anymore, uh?
Power enough to escape this world, or remake it. This he understands without speaking. Even knowing this, he can not help but dislike the being. If this Accursed one had deigned to act sooner, could his wife and son have been saved?
The problem of Theodicy in a nutshell: if the Accursed is so powerful why does he let bad things happen? In the case of the Accursed there's a pretty easy solution, though: because his curses don't allow him to. Of course, the Brand probably eliminate any interest the hero might have had in coming up with excuses to justify the Accursed's inaction.
But it had not, and mere dislike means nothing.
What else is there to say?
"I accept."
Given that the alternative is death, taking the Accursed's deal is even more of a slam dunk than usual, here.
Mournfully the being closes its eyes. "So be it."
I wonder why the Accursed is mournful here? It's not like the hero had any alternative to saying yes...
"If you wish only to survive," it continued, "I will grant you a modest portion of my burdens, and power enough to be free of this realm and its shackles. But if you seek vengeance against the powers truly responsible for your suffering here, then you must take on a far more onerous burden. In exchange, you will receive the power of unbounded progression, growth without limit or surcease."
I really wished we had picked Freedom here, but if we are going to be an avenger we should fully commit to it and make whatever choices maximizes our chances of one day achieving our vengeance. In other words, vote Scepter.
