Chapter 574
Chapter 574
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Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 574
Chapter Title: Betrayal (3)
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1.
The failure of the desperate spear throw that risked his life.
Caught in the aftermath of the launch, Siwoo was slammed into the center of a massive crater.
His consciousness, which had drifted far away, slowly returned.
Blurred vision, a hazy sense of pressure, and the sticky metallic tang filling his mouth from the shock-burst innards.
The sharp pain that stabbed into his side a half-beat late paradoxically signaled that the battle was far from over.
"Cough...! Ugh...!"
The gamble had failed, but it seemed he'd at least bought himself a moment's respite.
He turned his head, spat out saliva thick with blood, and checked the wound.
The moment the spear had been about to bury itself in his abdomen, he'd twisted his body with every ounce of strength, dodging a direct hit.
On top of that, he'd burned through all his mana with an elemental ritual to boost his armor's defenses.
Thanks to that instinctive improvisation—which he could never pull off twice—he'd managed to shake off the Red Branch.
And yet, he was in this state.
Whipped by the compressed distortion field and shockwave, his black armor—which had briefly gained the hardness to deflect an anti-tank round—shattered into pieces.
The feedback from the ritual's collapse scorched his Stigma like fire.
The mana circuits in his side, where they'd directly brushed the distortion field, had necrotized.
Blood bubbled endlessly from the sharp, ragged tear.
The wound was deep.
He'd roughly bound it with a ribbon, temporarily stemming the bleeding and keeping his guts from spilling out.
Unlike the previous 'trials,' the pain showed no sign of dulling—vivid and unrelenting.
Probably because his brain was pumping out adrenaline and endorphins.
In the midst of this inappropriately serene calm, absurd thoughts bubbled up, like What should I have for dinner tonight?
"Ugh..."
He forcibly reined in his wandering mind.
Somehow hauling his body upright—heavy as wet cotton—his cooled head began coldly dissecting the situation.
The key was cataloging the facts.
And defining their causes.
Fact one.
The spear now stuck obliquely at his side was none other than the Red Branch he'd been wielding.
In other words, the Black Knight had reclaimed his own spear—the one he'd used for the throw.
Cause one.
What had happened during the last trial wasn't a glitch.
There was some method to recover the rampaging Red Branch.
Fact two.
Siwoo's body was a wreck right now.
He might have lain there unconscious and defenseless for who knew how long.
It was a state where even a simple spell could have finished him off, yet the Black Knight hadn't bothered.
Cause two.
He couldn't.
The instant the Red Branch slammed into the ground alongside Siwoo, the unleashed distortion field had obliterated every spell in one go.
The rituals the Black Knight had woven to tamper with the trial weren't stable to begin with.
They demanded precise, vast computations—flexibly adapting to every tiny shift, like performing open-heart surgery without anesthesia.
"......"
He looked up.
Gripping his focus before it could blur from the slightest lapse.
The Black Knight, clutching the Red Branch.
As expected, he stood frozen like some broken machine, gazing down at Siwoo.
Siwoo wanted to charge, to do something, but his body wouldn't obey.
Sensation had already fled his limbs, and honestly, just staying upright was his limit.
If he sank back down now, he'd probably never rise again.
The vague certainty terrified him, so he held his stance, melting away the accumulated damage in his body.
About thirty seconds.
Just as his chilled fingertips began to twitch once more...
-Dong!
For Siwoo, it was deeply ominous news.
The ritual that had been morphing every instant, alive and breathing.
The one the Black Knight had poured computations into to control the 'trial'—it had stabilized.
While Siwoo mended his damage, it had optimized and shifted to a steady state.
Stabilizing magic on this scale should have taken days, yet this computation speed defied logic.
The penalty that had hobbled the Black Knight was now utterly gone.
"Pierce."
Yanking free the Red Branch, he recovered the mana that had repeatedly bottomed out from amplification.
Reconstructing his armor, he launched himself vigorously at the Black Knight.
He could still fight.
His own waist might be injured, but the Black Knight had wrecked one arm pulling that gamble.
The close-quarters balance, which had tilted by a hair, now gaped wide.
Aware of it, the Black Knight didn't intercept in place—he fled.
As he pursued, slicing through the wind, Siwoo dug into the question that kept surfacing.
How had the Black Knight recovered the rampaging Red Branch?
Of course, Siwoo had a spell called Coordinate Transfer.
A partial extraction from the space-transfer ritual he'd been developing to escape Gehenna's dimensions.
But recovering a rampaging Red Branch with Coordinate Transfer was next to impossible.
Hadn't he pored over the calculations and simulations countless times outside the trial?
No matter the Black Knight's freakish computational power, the conclusion never changed.
Which meant he was overlooking something.
The Black Knight knew a way to wield the Red Branch that Siwoo didn't.
In this do-or-die moment, his thoughts unspooled like an old film reel.
Suddenly, words from the Yesod Countess—exchanged long ago—surfaced.
'This... it's already beyond the realm of artifacts or relics. Incredible.'
'Ordinary relics are just tools in the end. But this is different. It tries to corrupt its surroundings in all sorts of ways without any commands. You could believe it's a witch cursed into spear form.'
As she'd said, the Red Branch wasn't like ordinary relics or artifacts that passively followed commands and processes.
It had devoured the souls of countless people.
It had even bloomed the 'Lotus' to fulfill the Coward Witch's wish.
It had driven his master—hailed as the strongest witch save Kether herself—to the brink of death.
Until now, Siwoo had only used it to control, compress, and unleash the distortion field and red barriers.
But surely other functions existed?
At its core, the Red Branch's nature was 'distortion.'
Yet mere magic interference was just a fragment.
Its essence: twisting reality and events themselves.
The Coward Witch had sought to warp life and death; the Red Knight had contorted space, expanding a narrow puddle tunnel to the size of a stadium and prying Siwoo from Eloa.
Compared to such feats, reverting a launched spear to its pre-throw state might be trivially simple.
Then.
Siwoo eyed the spear tip gleaming toward him.
The Black Knight had opened enough distance by now and bloomed a black flower to intercept his pesky pursuer.
The Black Knight outclassed Siwoo in Coordinate Transfer—and thus in mobility.
Once he'd gained that gap, chasing him was near impossible.
Same reason Siwoo had never beaten him after dodging a spear throw.
Plus, with his abdominal wound, the agile evasions from before were impossible now.
No room for another fifty-fifty gamble. Only frontal assault remained.
The distortion field around the Red Branch began to rampage.
The countdown ticked down fast.
The battle's curtain was falling.
Magic was a precise art.
Siwoo knew how elaborate the calculations underpinning even 'miraculous' spells truly were.
How much trial and error went into stabilizing them.
So this, too, was just another gamble.
An impromptu spell, no different from free jazz.
Would the new magic he'd just conceived activate first—or would the Red Branch finally pierce his heart?
Siwoo closed his eyes.
He sifted through every trait, possibility, and limit of the Red Branch he'd scrutinized countless times.
The vast sheafs of notes he'd scribbled flew past his mind's eye in a frenzy.
He had to remember.
Had to think.
Had to break his limits.
Coordinate Transfer, Dimension Transfer, Virgin's Loom, Elemental Reinforcement, Shadow's Law, King of All Diseases contract, Reverse Field Magic, Waves of the Magic Sea, Singing Magic, and the Red Branch's distortion.
Plenty of cards on the table.
The trick was forging the strongest hand from them.
In his overclocked, accelerated thoughts, a splitting headache ravaged his skull.
"Ah."
A faint sigh escaped as his eyes snapped open.
He'd found it.
The trump card to overturn this near-defeat.
Only time and certainty were in short supply.
Could he weave the spell before the flash of inspiration faded?
Even if flawless, would it function properly?
Even if it did, would the outcome match his prediction?
All unknowns.
A golden fractal bloomed behind Siwoo's back.
Its purpose: summoning.
The target: the Red Branch stored in the Jemernai mansion's lab in Gehenna.
A place he'd visited countless times, practically lived in—so its coordinates were etched deep.
"Pierce!"
Even so, this was a near-impossible spell.
Siwoo—who'd only ever used Coordinate Transfer—was suddenly dusting off his stalled Dimension Transfer research to summon the tricky relic into the trial space.
Yet a Red Branch already existed here.
Though mere imitation spun by the Dream Cradle, it was a spear capable of 'distortion.'
He'd use it as a bridge to patch the ritual's gaps.
The imperfect, cobbled-together spell exacted a brutal toll: immense mana and instant feedback.
In crisis terms, it felt like dangling from a motorcycle screaming over brutal terrain.
It drove home how insane a stunt this was—something he'd never attempt without being this cornered.
And then.
Just a faint sense of wrongness.
The surface of the spear in his grip crumbled away.
Shedding layer after layer, what emerged was...
A spear blade like a willow leaf, and a shaft glowing seamless red.
The 'real' Red Branch, answering the call as if it had been there from the start.
Could the 'Dream Cradle' truly replicate every ounce of the Red Branch's power—enough to call it a one-woman witch?
No.
What Siwoo and the Black Knight had wielded here was limited to what they could control: a facsimile.
Even if the shell matched, the distortion weighing on his hand alone set it leagues apart from the trial's pretender.
Far off, a red gleam flashed.
While Siwoo prepared his new spell, the spear had already launched.
Now, all that remained was hoping his hunch was right.
"Pierce!"
-Wooong!
Siwoo poured every drop of mana into the Red Branch.
It devoured it all greedily, unfurling a ferocious barrier in all directions—too savage for 'ferocious' alone.
In that frozen instant of perception—no blink—the inbound spear reached his forehead.
-Crush!
It punched through his helmet, grazed his skin... and crumbled to dust.
A replica's power could never surpass the genuine article.
In this space, the sole Red Branch was now the one in Siwoo's grasp.
"......!"
Far away, the Black Knight visibly recoiled in shock.
His combat style was a supercomputer: calculating every probability, sealing uncertain variables.
Which made 'realistically impossible' outliers all the harder to counter.
The Black Knight tried to pull back late from the unforeseen, but this time, Siwoo was faster.
His spear blade, one with his body, plunged deep into the Black Knight's heart and churned.