Chapter 5 (Final Chapter)

The battle was finished. Ainz, Marsh, and CZ sat on a scattering of fallen logs outside the cave, catching their breath. Demiurge and Albedo went off to scout the area. Their victory was resounding. After all, CZ had shot the monster right between the eyes. Its carcass lay in the background.

Upon collapsing onto the log, Ainz felt a deep throb of pain in his forearm. He looked down at it, splattered in blood. It was all his own blood… right? He ripped up his sleeve. The cut was small and shallow, but a trickle of blood ran down his arm. He hadn't even remembered being hit. It was healing quickly, the flesh knitting back together.

Ainz broke from his thoughts as she saw CZ and Marsh sitting on a nearby log. Very close together.

-00-

"Are you okay?" Marsh asked CZ "You're not injured?" He sat next to her on the log.

"All systems are active," said CZ, drinking from a metal flask.

"What are you drinking?" asked Marsh.

"Beverage. Good for joints."

"Oh… uh, I know this is kind of rude, but would you mind if I had some? I haven't drunk anything since yesterday." Marsh coughed involuntarily.

CZ turned her eye on his and the target inside swivelled in and out. "You would not like it."

Marsh ran a hand through his hair. "Honestly, Ojou-san, I think I'd take just about anything right now."

CZ handed the flask over wordlessly.

"Thank you," said Marsh. He went to drink it, but his eyes quickly widened as shoved the flask back into CZ's hands and fell to his hands and knees. Marsh retched it onto the grass, coughing deeply. More coughing. "What…" He turned his head to stare up at CZ.

"Engine oil," said CZ, "Good for joints."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

The corner of CZ's mouth quirked up. "I said you would not like it."

"That's not the same— Oh." Marsh stopped speaking to take the second flask CZ held out.

"This is water."

"Thank you." The cold water running down his throat seemed to freeze his entire body. It was getting dark. Neither Ainz-sama or CZ seemed to be feeling the cold at all. Marsh shivered and put his arms around himself, hunching on the log. CZ's eye target swiveled again, as if assessing him.

Without a word, CZ took her scarf and wound it around his neck. It was a strong heavy warmth. "Warm," said CZ.

"Ojou-san… Thank you."

"My name is CZ-two-one-two-eight Delta. Most beings call me CZ."

"Then, thank you. CZ."

-00-

Ainz had the NPCs gathered before him. He held his staff. "There's something you all should know." He'd thought to keep this secret forever. He's changed his name to Ainz to try to find the members of his old guild, if any where still out there. Even if that was wishful thinking, he just hoped to find someone from his previous world. Anyone. And to make the name of Ainz Ooal Gown known throughout the land was the best way to achieve that goal. His guild had been infamous in Yggdrasil. But he needed... more. He wanted his existence to feel less like a broadcasting antenna. And more... well, more like a person. Every time someone called him "Ainz-sama", he felt a little piece of his previous self slipping away. If he'd been undead, it probably wouldn't have mattered to him. And that scared him - that he'd come so close to losing his basic morality and humanity.

Ainz shivered at what he might have become.

What mattered was what he did now. "I would like to tell you all my real name."

Puzzled looks and frowns.

"Do you mean your True Name, Ainz-sama?" said Aura.

True Name? Like in the hocus-pocus possess-your-body way? Suzuki Satoru wasn't his True Name... right? At least he hoped not. Anyway, he was sure no one in the room would try to possess him.

"No, my birth name. From where I lived before."

Shalltear was tearing up. "Ainz-sama, we are not worthy of such knowledge."

Ainz held up his hands. "Please, it's not a big deal. I will still be called Ainz Ooal Gown to the outside world. But within Nazarick, please call me Suzuki Satoru." Then, as an afterthought, "Satoru is my given name."

The looks of shock were not abating. Hopefully, he hadn't gone too far.

-00-

Satoru couldn't help but feel like CZ and the human were becoming inappropriately close. Over the next few months, he kept seeing them together. First in the library, hunched over a book about plants, the human pointing things out and explaining animatedly. Next in the garden, when they were crouched on the ground together looking at a vibrant red flower with curling petals. Marsh was taking notes in a book. (Satoru investigated the flower later, but there wasn't anything special about it. It just had distinctive roots). They began to dig it up to replant it into a pot. They were just… gardening together. It was perplexing.

Later still, Satoru found an ear-muffed Marsh helping CZ in her workshop, bringing her wrenches and mechanical parts while she used a welding iron to form some mechanical structure. It made a loud rrnnnngggg!

"Marshall, I need the astro-flex emitter," said CZ, eyes locked on her welding. He handed it over.

Satoru spoke before he realised it would reveal his eavesdropping. "Marshall?"

Marsh jumped almost a mile into the air and took off his earmuffs. CZ flipped up her welding helmet.

"Good morning, Ainz-sama," said Marsh.

"You didn't tell me your name was Marshall."

Marsh shifted on his feet. "Ah… Marsh is my nickname."

Satoru's eyes narrowed. "I see." He couldn't shake the feeling the human was hiding something. He didn't have to wait long to find the answer. It came a week later in the form of a man with a scowl.

-00-

"Marshall!" yelled Satoru. Marsh was sitting on a plush couch in the library reading a book. At the call of his name, he jumped up.

"Yes?"

"There is a man looking for you in the forest. Albedo said he had a deep scowl."

Marsh put a hand over his mouth. "Oh no, he found me…"

"A friend of yours?"

"Something like that. Can I see him?"

Satoru sighed. "We'll bring him in."

A few minutes later, Albedo was sending a man who looked to be in his twenties sprawling to the floor of the library. "Argh! What are you?"

Albedo ignored him. "Who are you and what do you want with the human?" snarled Albedo.

The newcomer pushed himself to his feet, scowling, and dusted himself off. Then he saw Marsh.

"Hey Ryder," said Marsh, waving sheepishly.

"Your Highness!"

-00-

"Hang on," said Satoru, "Your what-now?"

Marsh scratched his head sheepishly. "Guess the cat's out of the bag. My name is Prince Marshall of Escatora."

"You did not think…" Satoru curls his hands into fists. "To tell me this?"

"Would you have, if you were me?"

Satoru shrugged. "Fair point. However, this…" He rubbed his forehead, "This really complicates things."

"How so?"

"Nazarick is invading Escatora. Tomorrow. We're going to transform it into the Sorcerer Kingdom."

-00-

Ryder didn't like them. That much was obvious. At the declaration from Ainz, he drew his sword. Big mistake. Albedo looked like she was about to murder him on the spot. She quite possibly would have if Satoru hadn't held out his arm.

"Ryder!" barked Marshall, "Sheath your sword." He did so, reluctantly. "I'd like a moment alone with my knight, if you don't mind." Marsh grabbed Ryder's wrist and dragged him behind the nearest bookshelf. "Are you an idiot? Do not, under any circumstances, draw on that creature," Marsh whispered fiercely.

"He is planning to invade Escatora."

"Yes, and we will let him, because if we don't, we will die. They will decimate us. They cannot be defeated. There are other creatures in this place. Not only are they soul-crushingly terrifying, they also hate humans. I'd rather not antagonise a whole kingdom of monsters who hate me."

"I do not hate you."

Marsh jumped (he was doing that a lot lately). CZ had appeared around the bookshelf.

"CZ… I didn't mean you."

"We may be going to war," said CZ.

"We will not—" Marsh shot a look at his knight. "—Be going to war. CZ, I will not fight you. I refuse."

-00-

Satoru's new plan was simple. He would send Marshall, Ryder, and CZ back to Escatora. They would convince Marshall's parents to cede to Nazarick. (CZ would, if necessary, show a display of force to convince them). Nazarick would then annex Escatora and remake it into the Sorcerer Kingdom.

No bloodshed needed. If all went according to plan, no one would have to get hurt.

If only things went according to plan.

-00-

Three days later, Marshall sent word that Escatora had yielded both their country and their castle to Nazarick, and that Ainz-sama was welcome to visit them whenever it suited him.

Satoru and Albedo gated to the hall of the castle. The hallway walls were almost blindingly white and gilded with gold. The letter had said the castle had been cleared of people for their arrival. The entire place was empty and silent. The door to the throne room was up ahead. As they walked toward it, sitting open, an uneasiness stirred in Satoru's stomach.

Something picked at his mind. It was too easy. Far too easy.

They entered the throne room. Albedo scrunched her nose. "We would be happy to have the colour scheme of this castle remastered for you, Satoru-sama." Everything was very white. "We could have—"

Albedo didn't get to finish as a great rumbling passed through the floor, and suddenly scores of armed men were stampeding through the door, fanning around them. Satoru's eyes widened, and he felt a weight lift off his chest as if he'd been subconsciously waiting for something to happen. The satisfaction of being right outweighed the fear of attack.

"I'll handle this," said Satoru, calmly drawing his sword. He wouldn't kill them but removing body parts wouldn't go amiss.

Suddenly, he realised their weapons were glowing green. It seemed familiar somehow. In a torrent of understanding and fear, Satoru remembered Demiurge pressing a dagger into his hand, glowing green. It stops resurrection.

Someone yelled, "In the name of Prince Marshall Escatoré, attack!"

-00-

There wasn't time to process Marshall's betrayal. There was a yell from behind, and a soldier who had been hiding behind the throne jumped out and ran toward them, straight toward Albedo, sword out and glowing green. If it hit Albedo, even a little…

"Watch out!" Without thinking, Satoru launched himself in front of Albedo just as the man came into range and ran the soldier through with his sword. He pulled it out, and the man fell dead to the ground.

Satoru felt nauseous when turning to the crowd of soldiers. "Marshall! What is the meaning of this?"

It wasn't Marshall that stepped out from the crowd, but Ryder. He raised his sword at Satoru. "You are a threat to our kingdom. I cannot allow you to live."

"This conversation bores me," said Albedo, and cast a spell that sent a shockwave through the crowd, knocking them all off their feet and out cold. Ryder flew off his feet and landed on his butt, sword flying away. Albedo approached him, eyes burning.

"Wait!" CZ ran into the room.

Albedo looked at her in annoyance. "CZ? What is it?"

"Please do not kill him."

"Why not?"

"It will make Marshall very sad."

"When did you start caring for traitors?" asked Albedo.

"Marshall did not betray us. He did." CZ pointed to the knight. "Marshall did not know."

"Either way," said Albedo, exasperated, "Why do you even care?"

"Because I am in love with him."

Albedo looked confused. "You are… what?"

"In love," said CZ, "With Marshall. He is a very kind and intelligent human. I love him very much. I know I am not supposed to be able to love, but I understand the basic procedure. Love is when you try not to make them cry. Killing this man would make Marshall cry. I am affirmative on this fact. Even if it seems impossible for my species to love, I know it's there. I can feel it."

Albedo hesitated, and that was when Marshall appeared at the door and began to make his way over the knocked-out corpses. "What on earth happened here? What's going on?"

"A threat to Nazarick is punishable by death," said Albedo, "Your man has committed a crime against us."

Marshall's eyes fell on his knight, who had stood up again. "You did this? How could you?"

"I couldn't just let this happen!" said Ryder. "They're monsters who will kill you without a second thought. Even that one!" He pointed at CZ.

"Silence!" said Marsh, before closing his eyes to sigh deeply. When he opened them again, they were full of resolve. He dropped to one knee before Satoru. "Please do not harm my knight, Ainz-sama. I have known him since birth, I cannot bear to see him die. He was only trying to protect me. Please allow his actions to fall on my head instead."

Satoru hesitated. He had already killed a man today.

"Ainz-sama, there is no reason to keep either of these traitors alive," said Albedo.

Satoru took a deep breath. he was going to do it again, something Albedo (in fact, all Nazarick) would no doubt misunderstand and shun him for. "Lock him in the dungeon at Nazarick. Marshall may go free. There will be no further uprising and there is no need for further violence. We're going home."

-00-

When Satoru returned to the privacy of his bedroom, what had happened crashed down on him. He had killed a man. Someone who probably had a family. It didn't matter if it had been to save one of his floor guardians, all his brain was supplying at that moment was solid tons of guilt. It was a natural human reaction to what he'd done. He'd stabbed him through the chest. He remembered the man's lifeless face. His stomach turned, and he ran instinctively for the newly installed en suite bathroom. Satoru had only just collapsed to his knees on the tiles before he was chucking his guts up into the toilet, fingers clenching around the porcelain bowl.

He'd killed a person. Things like that didn't happen back in his old life. They just didn't. It wasn't even thinkable. And in YGGDRASIL, it was all a simulation. It wasn't real killing, real death. He threw up again and groaned into the toilet. Stupid emotion. Stupid guilt.

Maybe becoming humanoid had been a mistake.

-00-

The bed was soft under Satoru's head. He just needed to get through the night. After that, he could put all this behind him. His eyes closed.

-00-

Satoru awoke to incessant metallic beeping. Over and over. Beep beep beep beep beep beep.

What the-

There was a heavy weight on his head and on his cheekbones and temples. He opened his eyes groggily to find everything black. A line of red text was emblazoned across his vision.

Error. Simulation terminated. cannot be found.

His mind was sluggish. What- what was he seeing? Satoru reached to his face and tugged the headgear off his head. The room was an empty box of a room. This was his PC room. Back in...

Back in...

No. There was a buzzing in his veins, vibrations running through him not entirely from nerves. He reached up and grabbed the pin that connected the back of his neck to his PC cord. He pulled, and his blood quietened. The cord coiled on the floor, pin making a tink as it hit the floorboards. Satoru straightened his back in the chair, gripping the headgear hard in his lap. It was dawning on him.

Gone.

It was all gone. Yggdrasil was gone. The New World was gone. His mind rebelled violently. It was like getting a taste of limitless power, and suddenly having it stripped violently away. No, it wasn't like that. It was that. His body was sore from sitting in one position too long. His body never got sore in the New World. It was whiplash. So many emotions ripped through him all at one, and it took all his effort to bite his lip and not scream. Do. Not Scream.

He could fix this. Quickly, he reconnected the pin to his port, and shoved the PC back on his head. His desktop appeared in his vision. The Yggdrasil app was still there. He tapped it. A message appeared.

Yggdrasil is now offline. Thank you for playing.

Ishihara Ryoma

Lead Programmer

Satoru closed the box and tapped again. The box appeared again. Then a small circle began to spin in the corner of the screen, and the Yggdrasil app disappeared. And with it, disappeared the remnants of his hope.

A tinny bell chimed from his pocket. Divesting himself of the PC again, he pulled out his phone.

1 new reminder.

Event: Work begins in 1 hour.

Satoru's brain was silent.

Work.

Satoru envisioned his life ahead of him, sitting in a cubicle, the same as always. Tapping at a computer, the same as always. When he'd told the NPCs to call him Satoru... was this what he'd wanted to remember? Was this who he'd been trying to be? Nothing made sense.

Nothing made sense.

He curled into a ball and was silent. His breathing laboured. Then hot water streaked down his face.

-00-

He went to work, trying to convince himself it had all been a dream. Maybe that would dampen the pain. Opening a spreadsheet on the computer, he suddenly squeezed his eyes shut as an earsplitting wail echoed through his head. There were voices in his head now. Faint, frantic. Calling.

Was he going mad?

He could make out a word, shouted over and over.

Satoru-sama! Satoru-sama!

He wasn't sure who the voice belonged to, but he knew that no one in this world used -sama with his name.

Satoru-sama! Where are you?

The man in the cubicle next to him poked his head above the divider. Satoru became instantly aware he was hunched over himself over with his head in his hands.

He had to be going mad.

"Suzuki-san," said the man, "Are you all right? You sound like you're in pain."

He hadn't heard himself make a noise. What was he supposed to say- "Oh I'm fine, just hearing voices in my head. Just a normal day on the job"? He'd be institutionalised.

"Don't worry," said Satoru, straightening and taking a breath, " I'm fine."

He was not fine.

Suzuki Satoru was many things, but fine was not one them.

-00-

In his dreams that night, he heard the voices again.

There's no further word on Satoru-sama's disappearance. Do you think he's abandoned us, like the other Supreme Beings?

Everything was dark around him. Like he was floating in space, but with ground beneath him. With everything that had happened, he was losing the ability to become surprised. He just rolled with it.

He's been acting rather strange. Do you think there was something wrong? Something amiss in his homeland, perhaps?

A bright pinprick of light shone in the distance. Satoru began to walk toward it as curiosity filled him.

You think he's returned to his homeland?

The light became bigger. Satoru concentrated hard on the voices as he walked, drinking them in. He wouldn't dare to hope. Not yet.

We can't know for sure, but it's highly unlikely he's simply run away.

Why would he do this? I thought he said he wouldn't leave us like this? The voice was getting angry. Why would he go back on his word?

The light looked big enough to crawl through now, and he winced at the pain in the voice. It was Shalltear.

We mustn't allow ourselves to lose hope. It was Sebas. It's possible this is temporary.

He'd reached the source of the light. An archway, through which was shimmering gold. The voices reverberated around inside his head.

Do you think Satoru-sama will be able to find his way back? said Shalltear.

Another voice boomed, not like the voices of the NPCs, but louder, from everywhere in the darkness all at once. "Dimension Traveller, you walk the Abyss. Should you choose to take this path, the road back will be forever closed. Turn your back, and you will return to the dimension of your birth. Choose."

He hadn't been given a chance the first time, but now... The road ahead was fraught with danger and decisions and crippling fear. The road back lead to normality, to safety.

The road ahead led home.

Choose.

Satoru lifted his chin and stepped through the archway.

-00-

He awoke to blinding gold. He was lying on gold. He was surrounded by it, piles upon piles of gold coins as far as the eye could see. Gold was melting around him.

It was the treasury. He was back.

-00-

After discovering the guardians had gathered in a room on one of the lowest floors, Satoru gated there. As he popped into existence in the room, a crowd of eyes turned to him abruptly. They were all frozen. After a second of frozen shock, everyone yelled all at once.

-00-

He tried, and failed, to answer a roaring torrent of questions. "I will explain everything in time," Satoru was trying to say, but that didn't deter them.

He'd hardly had time to think on everything before. But he was thinking on it now. That voice in the darkness... Somehow his soul had been split between two dimensions. By making himself human in this one, he'd opened a connection to the other half of his soul, the totally human half stuck on Earth. The one in the New World was something other. And then, when he'd acted human, again and again, it had been dragging his soul pieces closer and closer together. Until finally, his consciousness had been forcibly flung back to it's origin. He knew inside that if he'd never transformed himself into a humanoid, he would never have felt emotion strong enough to hear the NPC's voices from another dimension. He would never have been able to love something so much that he walked the literal Abyss to get back to it. To them.

So, though acting human had made him weak, made him susceptible to slipping back, it was also what made it possible for him to return to Nazarick. Humanity and compassion had allowed him to cross worlds.

He caught a glimpse of CZ and Marshall at the back of the crowd, hand in hand.

"Satoru-sama, why - why did you come back?" asked Mare.

"Because," said Satoru, "well, I couldn't leave all of you alone, could I?"

He remembered the voice. Should you choose to take this path, the road back will be forever closed. There was no part of his soul on Earth now. He'd brought that part here with him. Surrounded by a sea of jubilant eyes, warmth glowed in his chest. A soul complete. A soul restored.

Perhaps being human wasn't so bad after all.

End.

-00-

A/N:

Hi everyone!

This fic was marked as discontinued for a while because I was having a lot of trouble with my plot plan. However, it kept gnawing away at me to finish. It took a while, but I finally sorted it out. I was straying from my original artistic vision for this fic, which in this case was worsening the situation. I've reworked this many times, but this final chapter was my final idea for what I wanted for this fic.

I hope everyone enjoyed this.

As always, thank you all for your patience and support.

Comments are extremely appreciated!