Chapter 498: Let the World Forget Me

He unrolled the aged parchment. The handwriting scrawled across it was rough and unsteady. Selwyn had likely already lost the strength to hold his pen steady by the time he wrote this will.

"I don't know which name you're going by these days, so I'll simply call you old friend. I trust you'll allow me that much. After all, we share a friendship forged over one emptied coin purse, worth exactly thirteen silver coins..."

Ambrose read through the words calmly. The letter contained no account of some miserable death awaiting Ambrose, nor did it mention anything else of consequence, only an old man's reminiscence over the better part of a lifetime in his final hours.

From the boy who'd first learned magic, to the man who'd met the love of his life, to the moment he watched that love slip away from him forever.

Ambrose murmured, "The path every diviner ends up walking, one way or another."

Young and gifted, budding diviners rapidly found themselves showered with wealth and glory. After that, though, they would find that fate was a pit of quicksand, and would be forced to accept that no amount of effort would ever get them back out.

Ambrose, Selwyn, Mr. Misfortune—every diviner walked precisely the same road, in the end. Harvey was still young and hadn't reached that stage yet. But sooner or later, he too would go through more or less the same thing every diviner before him had.

Selwyn's life, though, had been less tumultuous than Ambrose's, because the path he'd walked with Fate was different from Ambrose's own. Selwyn focused on concealment, on hiding, evading, dodging misfortune before it could land.

Much like Ambrose's own dice of fate, invisible to everyone else and yet capable of locking a future firmly in place, after his beloved passed away, Selwyn had learned to erase everything connected to himself from the world entirely.

It went beyond simple forgetting. Even books that recorded anything about Selwyn would, under Fate's careful arrangement, go missing: accidentally stained beyond reading, burned to ash, whatever it took. Anything carrying information about him would simply vanish, and in time, be forgotten by everyone who'd ever known it.

The only reason Ambrose could still recall the name Selwyn at all was because he himself was a diviner. To everyone else in the world, Selwyn had long since ceased to exist.

And yet, even though the world had forgotten him, he himself had never once managed to slip free of his own fate.

Death followed him like a shadow all the same. In the end, it caught up with the old man who had spent half his life in hiding.

"I once thought I might come to hate you as an enemy, but after all these years, I've realized we diviners can't afford to hold grudges against one another. You and I are both prisoners walking the same treacherous road, forced ever onward toward the death fate has already written for us. I spent my entire life believing I could postpone that arrival—and in the end, I failed anyway.

"By the time you're reading this, fate will have already caught me, and you too will eventually fall into the Goddess of Fate's net. So long as a fate remains unrevealed, it can still change, which is why I won't tell you what I foresaw. Instead, I'm having my student carry this letter to you.

......

"My friend, if you've read this far, that means you've already made your peace and haven't chosen to run. You may well be the one diviner capable of transcending fate itself. I'm placing this last hope of mine in your hands."

By the time Ambrose reached the end of the letter, he found no trace of resentment in the words, nothing save a faint, quiet regret. Unlike Ambrose, who'd long since made peace with his fate, Selwyn had spent his whole life searching for some way to break free of it.

The irony was that Selwyn had chosen to fight fate by running from it, while Ambrose, who'd given up long ago, had made it a habit to rely on his own strength rather than lean on the power of fate at every turn.

But no matter the path, it seemed that their outcomes would be the same either way.

The moment Ambrose finished reading the letter, the words on the parchment began to writhe like tadpoles, twisting themselves into runes brimming with magical power. What had been an unremarkable letter transformed, in an instant, into a magical scroll.

"This is..."

Ambrose might well have been the single most knowledgeable diviner alive today when it came to the power of fate, and yet even he couldn't fully decipher the runes covering this scroll. All he knew for certain was that this scroll held Selwyn's very last reserves of power, the single greatest achievement of his entire life's research.

The young woman who had inherited Selwyn's name looked at the scroll in Ambrose's hands and said, calmly, "That's a spell my master created. He called it 'Let the World Forget Me.' It allows every single person in the world to forget someone completely, including everything connected to them."

Ambrose said to her, "Now I can see clearly why you weren't suited to studying under Selwyn. This scroll isn't nearly as simple as making the world forget one person."

"Then what is it?" she asked curiously.

"It erases a single concept from the souls of every sapient being alive. That concept could be a person, or it could be something else entirely."

"What would happen if everyone forgot how to breathe?" the young woman asked.

Ambrose glanced askance at her. He was glad the scroll was no longer in her possession.

Still, he explained. "Nothing much would happen, actually, because breathing is an instinct built into life itself. People would simply, gradually, forget that this particular action is called 'breathing.' Over time, all the medical research ever tied to the concept of breathing would slowly be lost to history, until the act itself got renamed and passed on again under some new label."

"That doesn't seem like it accomplishes much of anything, then."

Ambrose didn't bother explaining further. He simply tucked the scroll away with great care. "Since Selwyn's path clearly isn't for you, you should pick a new name. Keeping your current one means keeping everything your master's fate was tangled up in."

The young woman hesitated. "Master Megaman, I don't want my master to actually be forgotten by the world. I want at least one person to remember this name."

Ambrose fell silent. "Well, then, suit yourself. I was only giving you fair warning. Starting today, you'll be my student."

Selwyn glanced at him, startled. "Master, you'll really take me on, just like that?"

"I've got no reason to refuse. Diviners are far too rare in this world as it is."

"I thought..." Selwyn said, hesitant. "I thought you'd only take me on after charging some enormous tuition fee."

"Then you clearly don't know me well enough yet." Ambrose chuckled. "I could tell at a glance you're broke. Best get ready to work off your tuition instead."

"That's absolutely no problem at all. Please, Master, just tell me what you need done."

Selwyn had already known exactly what kind of person this Master Megaman was going to be.

Ambrose pointed toward a particular part of the island and said to her, "Go find your senior Harvey. He could use some help right about now. Oh, and by the way, you're my third student."

Selwyn gaped. "Third? You just said diviners are incredibly rare!"

No wonder her former master had entrusted his dying wishes to this new master of hers. He was practically the Goddess of Fate's own favored child.

Ambrose offered no explanation. Once he'd sent his newly acquired student off to work, he quietly pulled out the Necromantic Codex and wrote a single sentence into the group chat.

[Megaman Tiga: Friends, my death is drawing near. I'm afraid I won't be able to pay back what I owe.]

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