Chapter 274
Chapter 274
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 274
Chapter Title: One Empire, Three Legends (33)
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Scraaaape-!
The sword swings. Carrying a golden light that illuminates the dim winter sky. Shattering scattering petals as it heads toward the enemy's throat. Soon, black claws meet it head-on. A clash of power against power. That immense repulsion travels through arm, shoulder. Toes, and cracks the sturdy flagstone like a spiderweb.
Boom!
In that split-second instant, using the repulsion as propulsion, the Professor succeeds in shoving the sword away with the power of his lower body and thrusts a lightning-fast fist toward the open chest. The Professor thought that even this wouldn't inflict a fatal wound on his opponent.
‘The opponent is the First Prince. The empire's rightful heir.’
The First Prince. Gai Nax Agdan. Among his worshippers, he was already being called the image of a tyrant king.
True to his reputation, his massive curved sword rampaged like the very symbol of domination, and without the aid of the lion-head helmet knights, he was handling the Professor—who had subdued several Master Knights—with ease.
That golden light aura. The golden energy exploding outward from the imperial palace where the Emperor resided, woven into the weft and warp of his golden armor. That was the biggest problem.
‘If we're just talking raw power... I'm outmatched.’
The will of this vast empire in its entirety. Even a portion of it made Gai Nax's armor akin to a walking fortress.
A war of attrition or a short decisive battle. Neither seemed advantageous. His joints and cartilage, enduring the horrific strain of high-speed movement and stops, felt like they were grinding away, his knees burning like fire, and his entire body creaked under the assault of that battering ram of an aura-wreathed blade.
‘If it hits me properly, I won't be sliced—I’ll be crushed.’
A colossal wall, truly. And the feeling now, facing it—
“...Heh, heh heh heh.”
Strangely, inexplicably good.
The ecstasy of battle. A pleasure distinct from the adrenaline rush. Some kind of liberation? Elation?
Combat is the art of the instant. Squeezing every possibility from your body before an enemy trying to kill you, while guiding instinctual movements with cold reason.
Spirit and flesh. The moment those opposing concepts clash most fiercely.
Perhaps that's why.
Memories not in my own memory. Memories of the monster slumbering in reality, memories of moments I had lost, seeping out bit by bit.
Ruuuuumble—
Thud!
The scream of a spire crumbling at its o aura-shredded tip. Barricades toppling under cannon fire, swarms of grotesque mutants pouring out.
“Gaaah!”
“F-For the true empire!”
Knights dying in pursuit of ideals and oaths. Dome soldiers, rallied under the banner of justice, torn apart by mutants at the end of their resolve.
And.
“As an individual, one no different from the empire itself, I praise your desperate struggle, saint.”
Gai Nax, holding a sword brimming with massive aura piercing the night sky. An enemy power before him transcending the irrational into the incomprehensible. Overlapping with it, a certain death. The war engine, Orpheus.
Memories, emotions. The two intertwine beyond words, forming some decisive something that seeps into his mind.
‘Not some lowly mental corruption.’
He had overcome that stage long ago. What this was... recovery? Absorption? That was the closest term.
[Recovery?]
‘Yes, recovery. Life and death. Reason and emotion converging into a single point, birthing a monster. The memories of Professor Park as a Type-3 mutant. The black box stored in that brain of my outer body, reduced to a vegetable.’
Memories and emotions tangled into one, impossible to describe, hardened like diamond.
The emotion seeping from it was akin to the liberation of one who had found answers after long torment.
Crunch!
The broken leg of a monster pinned under a collapsed spire kicks away debris and rises.
[Pro.... hear.... me! Ottoman.... damn it, magic interference spells.... everywhere! -It's not the Flower Consort! No princess.... met the consort....! Civilian! Aldrich himself—]
[Front.... guard knights.... not a single step....! Further verification impossible now!]
“...I gave you the easier side, and you finished quickly.”
Ottoman's voice amid the static of mana interference. The mage team sent the other way had succeeded, and it wasn't a witch.
The risen Professor faces Gai Nax slowly advancing, curved sword rippling with golden aura. The golden energy enveloping his body undulated before him, as if one with him, leading the way.
This weary body, regeneration depleted, still couldn't find an answer to that strength. Facing it brought a sense of relief.
Yes, this sensation. This memory. The memory of a mutant reveling in facing an insurmountable foe, an impossible situation.
No, perhaps not because it was a mutant. Maybe it was simply the warped mindset of a single human from the start.
The boy soldier who tossed and turned at night pondering why wars existed, why he had to kill—grew into a wasteland survivor, thief, bandit. Now, if asked the reason for war, he could explain with a small bitter smile; he understood all too well.
The world held too many things beyond his reach, and as those slipped away one by one, he grew accustomed. He distinguished what his hands could touch from what they couldn't. He learned to look away from what lay beyond. He survived as a single wasteland dweller.
.
.
.
.
But. One fragment remained. In the process where Orpheus's light dismantled and reassembled that life piece by piece. At the deepest bottom of his innermost self, a small stubbornness even the Professor himself was unaware of lingered.
It was a childish whine.
‘There are no unsolvable problems. There mustn't be.’
At the end of all those questions, a foolishness refusing to accept no answer. Failure to find it meant his vision was too narrow, his ability insufficient.
Believing a correct answer exists somewhere, he laments his lack, berates his mistakes, rises again and again.
People rage at war's outbreak but don't blame themselves. It's the story of those far off, fingers on missile buttons.
Even if volcanoes erupt or earthquakes strike, people don't self-reproach gazing at splitting earth and surging lava.
But the man called Professor Park was broken in that regard. From the moment he saw his father vomiting blood and dying amid chemical smoke. From the moment he mindlessly followed orders in terror, reaping the consequences through others.
He became a man who, for every event in the world entering his eyes, recalled what he couldn't intervene in, remembered, pondered endlessly.
His intellect was the product of that twisted subconscious, endless self-recrimination and endurance.
Kwaaaang!
The golden greatsword lighting the night like day clashes with the monster's claws. The ground splits at the crossing of forces, the black arm begins crumbling under the power dividing worlds.
Scraaaape!
Simultaneously, those claws dig into the manifested aura, inward. Burning the crystal-like golden aura, inching toward the blade.
“...Such insolence piercing the heavens! Do you, a mere commoner, truly believe your personal resolve equals the empire's entire will! Do you sincerely think an individual can break this vast Eternal Empire!”
-Kuwaaaak!
The golden waves rippling around are sucked into Gai Nax's sword, forming not mere aura but a vivid blade shape.
A curved sword nearing greatsword size. Its guard adorned with mane-like golden fur, the hilt embossed with a lifelike lion's head ready to spring alive. A golden sword.
“Very well, honoring that banner, I shall punish your folly with the great sword that opened the empire's skies!”
Lion Sword, Lagrand.
The legendary greatsword said to have sworn its fate with the founding Emperor, Lionel Agdan, who conquered dozens of splintered nations at war's end.
Gai Nax's aura shaping it plummets toward the ignorant fool's head, splitting the heavens.
Amid teeth-grinding snarls and roars squeezing every muscle in explosive fury. The monster's black fist charges to meet the golden greatsword.
Hyde gazes at the small, insignificant lump rising from the depths of that consciousness. Deep, dark, solid waters.
[...Not bad.]
Hard, filthy, distorted lump. Unimpressive at first glance, but Hyde, born from human depths, reads the meaning in its form.
As kind a heart, so easily empathizes with others' tragedies. The guy grumbling about an uncomfortable bed turned to smoke atop firewood that evening. Etched into his chest. Amid heated gun barrels and sprawled underbrush. Facing lifeless eyes, he internalized it too. What went wrong, what to change. Regret, think, act.
Even stepping on a blade of grass, he notes the fallen stems. Subtle pressure differences forming footprints. His combat boot. Grass type, crushed plant scent. All intervention possibilities flash and fade, he cautiously steps.
In ceaseless torment, he became a genius of strategy and tactics, and at its end, that soft kind heart, battered, covered in hideous scars and crumbling wounds, hardened.
Can't call him positive. No, rather a self clustered with negative emotions.
Loathing inaction. Uncompromising stubbornness, a near-mad refusal to look away from anything.
If a Type-3 mutant manifests trauma, his inner self is best described as human resolve carved from the sharp edges of his shattered ego.
That life's final moment. Consciousness melting at the boundary of life and death recalled.
『Against all those impossibilities. If I can become a being that reaches even with fingertips. At least, if granted the qualification to wander seeking answers.』
Craaack.
『I. Will reach for that answer.』
Craaackle—
『And grasp it. Thus, I will live.』
Thus, he advances joyfully toward the colossal wall. Grateful it's here before him, not distant beyond reach. He charges.
...Paf!
In that instant, the essence mirroring that scar-covered flesh shatters. And within, something radiant. The essence of life seeps into the dim night sky of his inner world.
If memories are stars, it resembled a galaxy.
At the tip of the pitch-black monster's claw, a white flame like that galaxy flickers, pushing back the golden aura. Not rigid aura form proclaiming will, but endlessly wavering, distorting, blazing flame.
Aura. A power from an independent world built within, asserting itself against another world.
Only fragments of another complete world—another aura—could repel it.
Grrrrrind! Scraaape, kakakaka!
The prince, Gai Nax, had to deny the reality before his eyes.
The power amalgamating the will of all imperial subjects, shaped as the founding Emperor's greatsword that rent the empire's skies, Lion Sword.
Such an attack must not be repelled by that hideous creature.
The empire's power stretching beyond every corner of this continent, even to unknown lands untouched by gods or devils—defeat for it was inconceivable.
The empire does not lose, so this is Prince Gai Nax's personal defeat, meaning he and the empire are not one. That he lacks perfect qualification as Emperor.
The prince, unable to accept the scene, pours more power into the cracking blade alongside its form.
“I am the empire's rightful heir, the future Emperor! I am the empire itself! Defeating me is impossible!!”
The world defined in his inner self. Behind the prince equating self and empire, an aura halo blooms, emanating the momentum of the entire empire rising with bared blades.
And compared to that vast energy, an infinitely small one.
“The answer prepared for that ‘impossibility’ is me, you bastard!!!”
The white flame burrows in.
-Craaack.
.
.
.
.
Kwaaaaaaaaaang!
Finally. Piercing the golden aura, the Professor's fist slams into the prince's lion-faced visor.
****
The prince's body flies like a marionette with cut strings across the fissured ground warped by the earth-shaking clash.
“P-Protect His Highness the Prince!”
“His Highness is gravely wounded! Protect the First Prince from these traitorous scum!”
Clang!
Gai Nax's flying body smashes through the doors of the Empress Palace he had been guarding, embedding itself. The lion-head knights, plunged into chaos by the prince's inconceivable defeat, abandon the settling battlefield and swarm here.
They shout of protecting the prince, but their bodies head not toward the fallen prince, but toward me, on the verge of collapse.
For them, it's unacceptable, must not be accepted. The Emperor's power, essence of the empire itself. Joining battle while he wields it is distrust, disloyalty to the empire; they hadn't even considered intervening.
Yet the prince lost. For knights of the empire, it's as if their foundation is scorned.
“Damn it... At least give a breather after boss down. These mannerless pricks.”
Facing their ferocious momentum, the Professor eyes his body: a mix of the game's muscular humanoid form and the reality's monster-like flesh.
[How is it? Facing your... true essence relic? Impressions of that near-perfect inner crystal? Like the ultimate ‘battle-compressed Professor’.]
‘Shocking. Sugarcoating it, I'm just a guy screaming [I won't accept it! Won't accept iiiit!!] and charging in. Damn. Thought I was the cool, sharp rational type.’
[Oh dear. Must've rolled your heart too harshly. Worn down so much no trace left.]
Crackle.
The shattered, cracked body fails to regenerate, crumbling. Regeneration at limit. Claw tips blunt and broken, arms and legs near powerless, incoming knights all elite among Master Knights, but.
Fwoosh.
Confirming the power called destruction's essence flicker at those blunt fingertips, the Professor flashes a confident smile, gathers his last strength, and kicks off the ground.
Not toward the charging lion-head knights, but the opposite. Toward the fallen First Prince.
Crunch!
Clamping the downed Gai Nax's head under his arm, without hesitation, he presses the flickering aura flame to the prince's head.
“Don't come closer! One more step, and with this flame that burned your great golden aura, I'll roast His Highness's head crispy!”
Fwoooosh!
‘...Urk.’
Squeezing out a shout with body drained felt like vomiting guts, but seeing the knights freeze mid-charge lifted his spirits instantly.
[Ugh. Just yelled ‘The answer to impossible problems is me!’ Now ending with hostage drama.]
‘No reason to overcomplicate simple problems. Simple is best. Fought to near-death and won, so spoils are fair game? This is an all-purpose shield.’
[Calling a downed man full spoils. Like an ancient Aztec warrior.]
Drag drag drag—
Thus, as the knights stare vacantly at the Empress Palace entrance like petrified statues.
The Professor drags the downed Gai Nax by the head clamped under his arm like a corpse, stepping into the Empress Palace.
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Tick. Tick. Tick.....
Ding—
[Player log. Check. ‘Professor’. Accessing core data.]
[Player log. Check. ‘Professor’. Accessing core data.]
[Access denied. Access denied. Access restricted.]
Click. Clack. Tap tap. Clack.
[...Check. Admin ID confirmed. Biometrics.... confirmed. Master ‘Giedroy?’ Access granted.]
[Critical error gi^%#&‘/// Judgment? On hold]
[Log check. Confirmed.]
[§///*^^32?- d(#@^%)?-8]
[Line 3. Bifurcation. Line 5. Line 12. Line 25. Line 9. Case end. Line 142. Line 78. Line 14. Case end. Line....]
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“The answer to the incomprehensible... Yes. You've finally arrived. The third one.”
An old computer and cutting-edge AI data center. CRT monitor and reality hologram jumbled together in a room.
A white-bearded old man stares piercingly at the large, worn screen.
His filthy white beard sways near the keyboard.
The old man's gaunt fingers dance over the yellowed plastic keyboard.
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