My Castle received a visitor. An ordinary person—no Hero, no monster.
"Sorry to intruuude…"
The young man who crept in saying this gave every impression of being an entirely ordinary person.
He wore an unremarkable, inexpensive shirt and trousers, with a cheap sword hanging at his hip.
Inside his head he was running a simulation: if asked "Who are you?", he would answer, "Me? I'm just Villager A." I already know, so I shall not ask.
Oh dear. This one…
I had wondered why he kept fidgeting—he is waiting to be asked who he is. How badly do you want to introduce yourself as Villager A, exactly?
Well then. Someone really ought to give it to him straight, hadn't they.
"So you always call yourself Villager A when someone asks who you are. But Villager A is the very first villager anybody makes, isn't it. Even as a way of calling yourself a nobody, that's presumptuous. Taking into account the personality you had before you reincarnated and so forth, Villager Y is about as high as you should be aiming."
Villager A gaped, then—apparently having processed my words—reddened by degrees as anger seeped through. Being treated as a nobody by someone else evidently grates.
Normally people gasp, "Amazing! Who on earth are you?" and he gets to be modest with a smug little face on: "Oh, me? I'm just Villager A." He is not used to abuse.
And on top of that, he is desperate to know who I am, yet he has resolved not to ask under any circumstances. Awfully proud, for a villager.
As I sat with my elbow on the right armrest and my cheek propped on my hand, Villager A abruptly stopped time.
Then he walked over to my side and drew the sword at his hip with a ring of metal.
I turned my eyes toward him, cheek still on my hand, and Villager A shrieked "Waaaaah!" and landed on his backside.
"Hey. The least you could do is answer me."
"Wh-wh-wh-why can you move?! I've stopped time right now!"
"You really will not answer a single thing I say, will you. Fine, I'll tell you. I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]. Which is why I know that you used the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], to obtain [Time Manipulation]—and why, however you manipulate time, I am absolutely guaranteed to be in a state superior to it."
Half by reflex, Villager A rewound time.
"Sorry to intruuude…"
"Hey. I know you rewound time, too."
…………
Villager A is the type who falls apart when it counts.
A worrier, with no capacity whatsoever for snap judgments.
The type who, asked an awkward question, is stuck for an answer, goes silent, and gets shouted at for it.
I waited him out patiently, and Villager A mumbled something.
"Um… may I go home?"
Anyone but me would not have caught a word of it and would have snapped at him to speak up.
"No. You tried to kill me, didn't you."
He absolutely tried to kill me. Cravenly, with time stopped, like cutting a sleeping man's throat.
"N-no…"
"Ho. The nerve, lying to me, who am omniscient. Did that 'No' just now not make it clear that I am not a kind person? And you lied to that person anyway. You did."
"…I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry," he says. What is he, a child?!
He is twenty-two years old. An adult long since, and equipped with neither common sense nor manners. A child-adult coasting along an extended moratorium.
"Wrong. It's 'I am terribly sorry for what I have done,' isn't it. And don't look away while you apologize. The only ways you get out of meeting my eyes are bending ninety degrees at the waist, or putting your forehead on the floor."
"…Yes. …You're right."
"Listen. Do you not understand that I am telling you to do it again?"
"I am… sorry for what I have done…"
"Haaah…"
He bent ninety degrees at the waist and bowed.
Which is to say, of the two examples I gave him, he went and picked the lighter one.
And he left out "terribly."
My sigh appeared to irritate him. Villager A stopped time again, drew his sword, and came running at me.
There was no technique to it, none at all. He raised the sword and brought it down. That was the whole of it.
By the time Villager A's swing came down, the sword had vanished out of his hand.
I held a hand out toward him, and Villager A's throat was throttled by the air as he rose off the ground.
He clawed at his neck, legs thrashing. He was trying his hardest to rewind time; I was nullifying it.
"If you want to go back to the past that badly, I'll turn your time back for you."
I rewound the time of Villager A's body.
He grew younger and younger—a child, an infant, and at last a fetus.
An umbilical cord extended from his navel, but there was nothing on the other end of it, so he struggled to breathe and shortly died.
"Right then. Shall we have Nation J, which coddled this one, disappear as well."
I dropped onto Nation J a monolith—a black mass twenty kilometers tall, cut to the shape of the country.
Naturally, dropping the monolith on Nation J had nothing whatsoever to do with Nation J having coddled Villager A.
I dropped it on Nation J because Nation J was Villager A's homeland—but even had it not been, Nation J would have got a monolith sooner or later.
Mind you, a nation that lavishes care on its lowest citizens was going to collapse before long anyway. Nation J was that sort of country.
Nations and companies are the same. The top drinks the sweet nectar, the bottom is tenderly nursed, and the workers in the middle are ground down and used up.
With a lemon, too, what matters is the juice-heavy flesh; treasuring only the spent pulp is putting the cart squarely before the horse.
Be that as it may: so long as one lives in this world, the world that contains me, national annihilation is unavoidable—Nation J or otherwise.