The Fake Hero Is Too Strong

Chapter 223

That’s right.

Before regression, I doubted Kaeld until the very end.

And the ‘me’ of that era also doubted Kaeld.

‘And just like how I failed before regression……’

I slowly closed my eyes.

“So the me from that era failed too. The world we saw earlier was shattered, after all.”

“……Yes. Unfortunately.”

Even with my eyes closed, I could feel my party members staring at me.

I slowly opened my eyes and spoke.

“Is the rest of the story the same as well.” “What do you mean?”

“Before regression, I definitely failed. But I went back seven years and took Kaeld down.”

“…….”

“The me who participated in that era’s project also failed once, but……”

“That’s correct. As expected, you are quick to pick up on things.”

On the screen that had been floating earlier, someone appeared.

A space of darkness.

A figure falling endlessly, like dropping into the deep sea.

His face, his hair, everything looked different from mine, but I was certain.

“That’s……”

“So that’s Mide.”

Neril said what I was about to say, her expression grave.

My party members widened their eyes and stared at the screen.

The fully awakened Eye of Omniscience can see ‘everything.’

Even the thoughts of those appearing on screen.

The Mide within the abyss was thinking.

‘Did I fail.’

He had failed.

Even though he had warned people again and again about Kaeld’s suspicious behavior, he still couldn’t accomplish anything in the end.

People across the entire ‘universe’ still believed Kaeld was their savior.

They were blindly fanatical over that black-hearted bastard.

What had he been lacking compared to Kaeld.

‘In terms of ability, I was superior.’

It wasn’t arrogance.

He was confident he surpassed Kaeld in every field.

Even those who trusted and followed Kaeld couldn’t deny at least that much.

‘Then what I lacked compared to him….’

Fame.

He lacked fame.

‘But why am I even having these thoughts right now?’

When the vessel that Kaeld had greedily stolen was finally shattered, the world must have been destroyed.

It happened then.

Thump.

He felt his body hit the ground.

At the same time, a light came on in the abyss that had been filled with darkness.

Everything brightened.

Complex equipment and documents.

Piles of papers and reports.

Numerous meeting rooms.

Chairs and tables lying around.

A coffee pot installed in hopes that it might help even a little during all-nighters, and so on.

This was the laboratory assigned to Mide as a ‘project participant.’

“Where is this?”

“Ugh. Mide?”

“No!”

Mide quickly turned around.

He wasn’t alone in this place.

His precious colleagues had also collapsed nearby.

Kaeld may have been the head of the ‘Humanity Salvation Project,’ but of course he didn’t lead the entire project alone.

There were countless outstanding experts in every field.

Among them, Mide had carefully selected the ones he felt were especially talented and compatible with him.

And through secret contact, he successfully scouted them into his own ‘laboratory.’

Of course, there were basic project research duties, but unofficially, he often held meetings with them to observe and discuss Kaeld’s suspicious behavior.

And now the employees who worked in that very ‘Mide Laboratory’ were lying on the floor.

Exactly 300 of them.

Mide shook each one awake.

“Everyone, get up.”

“Ah, Director? Where are we?”

“I remember the last moment… ah, my head hurts.”

“My whole body aches.”

“Didn’t we all die?”

“That damn bastard Kaeld.”

“I think I saw something swallowing us at the end. Was that a dream?”

“I don’t think so. I saw it too.”

“What kind of shape even was that. How can negative energy take that form?”

None of their chatter was something Mide could answer.

Then….

Bzzzt.

The huge screen in the center, set up for project monitoring, flickered on by itself.

Everyone in the lab stopped talking and stared at it.

After a noise effect like an old TV with bad reception disappeared.

Words appeared on the screen.

[email protected]@#$!gDㅃ[P[Q

Mide stared blankly up at the screen.

Tap.

Someone patted his back.

“Mide, what do you think that is?”

“Neril.”

Among the Mide Laboratory staff, she was one of the most senior.

When he first brought her into the lab, she had been so cold that he wondered if she would be able to adapt to anyone at all, though she was undeniably skilled.

But she had changed a lot. Mostly in a good way.

Enough that he thought he could leave the lab in her hands when he was absent.

Then a voice called out from the opposite side.

“We are receiving a signal from a source we can’t identify.”

“That’s obvious. I’m asking what the signal means.”

“We will have to research it from now on. Since I’m the most talented one here, I will analyze it, so Neril, you can massage my shoulders or something.”

“Well, you are old enough to start getting frozen shoulder.”

“As someone who got frozen shoulder earlier than me, would you like to give me some advice?”

Mide pressed his hand to his forehead.

“This is not the time for you two to be arguing. Neril, and……”

He sighed.

“Bion.”

“…….”

I was trying to just watch quietly, but I couldn’t anymore.

“Wait!”

“Yes, go ahead. The scenes after this are just endless repetitive research anyway.”

“No, why is Neril there? And why are you there too.”

It wasn’t just the two of them.

Xenia spoke with a trembling voice.

“Look over there. I’m there too!”

“That’s right. Ms. Xenia joined not by scouting but by applying as a new hire, if I recall. I remember you mainly handled the lab’s food expenses.”

“Uh… I feel like you just insulted me really badly.”

“It applies to the others as well. If you look carefully, many familiar faces appear.”

Just as Bion said.

On the screen were Adwin and Offense.

Serein and Lisel as well.

And there was ‘Bion,’ laughing and crying with them.

I spoke with a trembling voice.

“Are you saying you were my party member too?”

“In that era, we were simply co-workers. Technically, there was a hierarchy, but you weren’t the type to care much about that.”

“…….”

“And it’s not just you all. Look a little closer.”

We all swallowed hard and focused on the screen.

Sure enough, more familiar faces appeared.

“Wh-what. That big guy. And the woman next to him.”

“He was called Grade, right? And she was called Lisel?”

“If I didn’t mishear just now, that guy just called her Lepia……”

“Sir Leon is there too.”

That’s right.

The ones working in the so-called Mide Laboratory were all heroes I had met in the past!

As I struggled to process this, Serein spoke.

“Wait a second. That guy over there, his name tag says ‘Impelium’? He looks a lot different, though.”

“And that woman next to him must be Serad.”

On the screen, Impelium was giving a serious report to me.

Serad was gently patting his back.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it and addressed Bion.

“Forget the screen. Explain with your mouth. Have the Eye of Omniscience show only what’s necessary later.”

“Very well.”

Clack.

Bion closed the screen and spoke.

“Did you see the timestamp on the screen just now? That era is 230,000 years before the First Demon King destroyed the world.”

“……?”

“In other words, you were sent back 230,000 years. Together with your research lab. And with the colleagues who worked with you.”

“230,000 years? How is something like that even possible?”

“We couldn’t determine who had sent us back 230,000 years. At least not at that point.”

I thought for a moment and asked.

“If you couldn’t figure it out at that point… does that mean you learned it later?”

“Yes. But it will be easier for you to understand if I explain in chronological order, so I will start with the assumptions we made at that time.”

“Alright.”

“You mentioned earlier that maybe a ‘law’ intervened.”

“A law?”

“This universe runs on countless laws.”

From something simple like the law that anything with mass pulls on each other.

To something complex like the invisible movements of the microscopic world.

Everything, she said, moves according to fixed laws.

I couldn’t understand a single thing she was saying.

“At that time, you put it this way. That maybe the laws were lonely.”

“……?”

“There wasn’t a single living being that understood how the universe worked. But only humanity could explore, discover, and study these laws, one by one.”

“…….”

“So the laws loved humanity… something like that is what you joked about. Of course, to us researchers, it just sounded like a light joke.”

But it turned out there was no explanation better than that ‘light joke’.

Bion continued.

“Anyway, we resumed our research, and we were able to make a guess at what the so-called ‘laws’ wanted from us.”

“And what was that.”

“The continuity of humanity.”

“…….”

“If we follow your joke, then the laws couldn’t just stand by and watch humanity self-destruct. So they turned back the clock 230,000 years and told us to start over from there.”

“Why 230,000 years specifically?”

“We assumed the laws saw that ‘starting from that point’ was the only way to prevent humanity’s extinction.”

She spoke softly.

“In any case, we couldn’t interpret the sentence shown earlier at all, so we decided to focus on researching the remaining 40 billion negative energy left in the lab.”

40 billion negative energy?

“The vessel, the storage tank that was supposed to hold 80 billion negative energy for the Humanity Salvation Project, was our lab’s creation. Well… the completed version was taken by Kaeld, and what remained in the lab was just the prototype.”

“……But why 40 billion? Wasn’t the population back then supposed to be 80 billion?”

“It seems 40 billion were used when we were sent back. And the remaining 40 billion were left to us as energy to build the ‘new world’.”

“By the laws?”

“Yes. That’s what we assumed at the time.”

Bion’s tone had been slightly strange for a while.

She was clearly speaking from the perspective of “us in that era.”

Back then, we thought this, we assumed that.

‘Meaning the truth was a little different from those assumptions.’

Bion paused, took a sip of the tea she had prepared.

By now, we were listening as if we were being told some entertaining old story.

So we reached out for the sandwiches she had made.

A moment later, Bion continued.

“With the 40 billion negative energy, we created countless things for the sake of the world. For example, an ability that could steal a look at the ‘secrets’ needed to manage the world more easily.”

“You mean the Eye of Omniscience.”

“Yes. And also the ability to check the list of sins people committed.”

“……That’s my blood-script.”

“It was how we estimated how much negative energy was being accumulated.”

We were fully immersed in Bion’s story.

Serein seemed to decide she would just enjoy it now, her eyes gleaming as she asked:

“Anything else? This is really fun.”

“Well, methods to separate souls, or creating an afterlife for the dead.”

“You created the afterlife?”

“Yes. It was Adwin’s idea. While striking some bizarre pose. Even though he was already an adult long before that.”

“Adwin has a dark future ahead of him……”

“We also created energies like mana and holy power and spread them throughout the world. Hoping they would help humanity, even a little.”

Lisel asked:

“What else did you make?”

“Spirits were made by us too. That one, needless to say, was…”

“My idea, of course!”

“No. Mine.”

“…….”

“But since you made me late-night snacks whenever I was deep in research, I suppose you do deserve a small share.”

“That doesn’t feel like much comfort.”

That’s how ‘we’ tended to this world.

In ways that would help humanity even a little.

We made sure the sun rose and set at the right times.

That seeds would grow into crops.

That livestock would fatten, that seasons would change, that the winds would blow.

“Basically, we replicated the ‘previous world’ almost exactly. The only major change was making sure that the mass extinctions that occurred several times in the previous world would not happen to humanity.”

“Why? With that kind of godlike power, you could have just gifted them a perfect paradise.”

“A big factor was that our energy source, the 40 billion negative energy, was not infinite. And also… because of Mide’s principle.”

She glanced at me with a small smile.

‘Don’t interfere too much. Don’t expect too much. Just make sure they don’t go extinct.’

“…….”

“That was your policy.”

“You really are exactly the same back then and now.”

“Unchanging devotion is your strength.”

Sip.

She drank her tea again.

Neril crossed her arms.

“From the sound of it, these weren’t things you could accomplish in a day or two.”

“Of course not. These were achievements spanning roughly 230,000 years.”

“And you survived all that time without going insane?”

“We found that strange as well, but we assumed the laws had done something to stabilize our minds when sending us back 230,000 years.”

Well, without that, it wouldn’t make sense.

Bion added jokingly:

“Rather than asking how we stayed sane, shouldn’t you be asking how we survived ‘that long’ in the first place?”

“If you consider we had 40 billion negative energy, that’s not so surprising. Even I have lived over 200 years on vitality alone.”

“Which means you were about 230,200 years old.”

“I doubt we got along very well.”

“In any case, while we created many things, most were just side branches. The real core of our work was something else.”

I knew what she was going to say before she even said it.

“The Hero System.”

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