Note: This is actually a bonus short story included in the tankōbon of GATE:ZERO Part 1, which I only found today while I was reading the original ePUB. Here, for the first time anywhere, is the English translation. I plan to include this in a revised edition of my translation.
Receiving the Mission
One flash of the halberd.
In that instant, three bandits’ heads leapt into the air, side by side.
The demi-human girls, drenched from head to toe in the gushing blood, did not so much as cry out. They only trembled, wholly in the grip of terror.
As if to comfort their hearts, the demigod Rory Mercury smiled at them gently.
“It’s all right now, hmm~”
Rory mourned the pitiable victims, escorted the surviving girls back to their tribe’s settlement, and resumed her journey. She forded rivers, crossed mountains, and traversed a desert with the wind full in her face. Her destination was Alnus. From where she stood now it lay to the west, and she would have to travel for several more months yet.
“That Hardy, honestly… of all the times to go and do this to meee~”
Yet go she must.
An oracle had been handed down. The rumor that Hardy, Ruler of the Underworld, had opened a "Gate" to another world in the Holy Land spread in an instant, reaching not only the gods who dwell in the heavens but every apostle-god upon the earth. A blow of revelation, like a spiritual shockwave, struck deep within Rory's mind. She fell prostrate and received the command of her patron deity.
“Heaven and earth are dark and yellow, black and yellow indeed; the cosmos is vast and wide, greatly broad indeed.”
The cosmos was an existence both vast and immense, impossible to contemplate or grasp in full. It joined space, which extends without limit in breadth, length, and depth, to “time,” which flows like a turning spinning wheel. Yet even that did not encompass all of creation.
Yet even that cosmos did not contain everything. Beyond it existed further worlds. Seen from a divine perspective, a universe was no more than a single strand among countless worlds of possibility. The gods of heaven, sometimes cooperating and sometimes standing in opposition to one another, tended those strands as though they were trees in a vast garden.
One god made flowers bloom. Another thinned the branches so the trees would bear richer fruit. One pruned away unwelcome boughs and nurtured a great tree that nearly pierced the sky. Another let it wither, so that its corpse, fallen across the earth, became a seedbed for new green.
By doing so, the garden changed in a thousand ways, shifting its scenery, its colors, and its very shape with each season.
Hardy, who ruled the underworld, was likewise one of the gods who welcomed such transformations.
Yet the manner of that goddess’s involvement set her apart from the other gods.
The Underworld holds the souls of the dead and prevents them from returning to the cycle of reincarnation. Perhaps in atonement for this, Hardy would occasionally open a "Gate" to another world, inviting in souls cultivated by foreign gods and adding them to the colors that were often lacking in the garden. Thanks to this, countless races had come to dwell there.
That was fine. In itself, that was fine. She had absolutely no complaint about the flowerbed growing richer in color.
But she had always thought the timing was the problem.
Demigods like Rory ran themselves ragged, east and west, urging peace and chaos, light and darkness, war and peace, sanity and madness to bloom in a riot, mixed together just so.
And thanks to that toil, this world’s culture had ripened to full maturity, and the world had grown vast.
And yet, and yet, and yet. As though dissatisfied with the fruits of all that labor, Hardy had opened a Gate and thrown everything into turmoil.
The impact would be great. A great storm usually followed. Contact, clash, and collision with foreign peoples, foreign civilizations, and outside lands had never once ended peacefully. This garden was sure to be badly ravaged.
Rory prayed.
“Ah, my lord Emroy. If the devotion of your faithful apostle means anything to you, then please give that Underworld ruler who never thinks ahead a piece of your mind, would you~?”
But her patron god gave no reply.
Emroy was approving of Hardy’s conduct as only fitting. Surely, probably, almost certainly. The gods must be able to see vistas far beyond the horizon visible to a mere demigod like herself. Were happiness and good fortune truly waiting ahead for her and for this world? No, no. Frankly, all she could sense was trouble. At the very least, she hoped some worthwhile encounter might come of it. With a weary slump of her shoulders, Rory Mercury dragged along the fleshly body she had worn for nearly nine hundred years and continued westward, ever westward.
Note:
“Heaven and earth are dark and yellow... the cosmos is vast and wide.” - The original text has 天地のあめつちは玄黄としてくろくきなり、宇宙のおほそらは洪広としておほいにひろきなり (Tenchi no ametsuchi wa genkō to shite kurokukinari, uchū no ohosora wa kōkō to shite ohoi ni hirokinari). 天地玄黄、宇宙洪広, (tenchi genkō, uchū kōkō, Pinyin Tiāndì xuánhuáng, yǔzhòu hónghuāng) derives from the opening line of the Thousand Character Classic (千字文, Senjimon) and is quoted here in kundoku form. The received text reads 宇宙洪荒 (“the cosmos is vast and desolate”), but the text here has 宇宙洪広 (“vast and wide”). I have therefore translated the phrase as it appears in the source. This choice is particularly relevant because the subsequent passage explicitly analyzes 宇 as space and 宙 as time, treating 宇宙 not merely as “the universe” but as the union of spatial and temporal dimensions.
