Chapter 372
Chapter 372
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 16
Chapter Title: The Saint and the Completer (28)
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Punch, slash, stab.
Block, deflect, charge.
The basics of combat.
The chaotic melee had become like water and oil poured together into a massive vat, with Mutes and humans intermingling. The clashes of armor and hides, blades and claws, followed the same broad pattern.
Kwaaaaaang!!!!
“Stay back! Away from the heroes’ battlefield!”
“Get caught in it and you die! Don’t get dragged into the heroes’ fight!”
“Remember your training! Drop your shields and retreat, or you die!”
But when those at the pinnacle of their kind unleashed them, they could no longer be dismissed as mere motions of the same type.
Fist and spear tip. What should have ended as point-to-point collisions erupted into massive shockwaves, carving out empty spaces amid the melee. The friction of deflected spear shafts and hides generated heat that vaporized the blood and flesh of those swept up.
Open spaces that the unqualified couldn’t even approach began forming one by one.
Like water droplets falling onto a pile of salt, the numbers on both sides dwindled in an instant.
****
Claaaang!
A shredded hand and a greatsword that had carved through bones met.
Spear blades pouring like machine-gun fire. Tails blurring in to slice the body. The moment any distance opened, cannon blasts shot forth relentlessly, and white thorny vines sprouted at horrific speeds from every wound.
Divinity. Aura. Muscle power. If my strength was a straightforward sprint toward the peak of raw power, Edeorna’s evolution branched toward technique, variety, and the essence of unpredictability.
Extend a hand, and five or more weapons meshed like gears to whittle away strength. Deadened blows became prey embraced in the enemy’s arms, repeatedly shredded.
Simplicity. My attacks, brutally honest compositions of just speed and power, inevitably incurred losses against such a technician.
Still, if there was one advantage to this simple strength.
Craaaack!
First. With attack methods converging to one, as long as an inescapable battlefield was secured, no probing was needed—full force from the start.
Kwaak!
“Got... you!”
“...Monster.”
Second... when combat power held the edge, it could crush the foe.
The opportunity seized at the cost of a shredded body.
Even as he offered his body fully, his left arm—drawn back like a spring—tore through the air as it launched. Simultaneously, Edeorna’s right arm, having released the spear, gathered mana once more to meet it.
The clash of black and white ended with black piercing white.
Creeeak—
A crunching sensation transmitted through his fingertips.
“...You took a hundred hits, so you can take one too.”
Thud!
Edeorna’s body flew, leaving a trail where everything in a straight line from the clearing to the walls exploded outward, embedding itself in the center of the wall.
A strike treating his body as the barrel, aura repelling divinity as propellant and gunpowder, unleashing divinity.
...Crackle,
No body could emerge unscathed after channeling such force—especially one mostly composed of infectious factors repelling divinity.
Cracks spread from his fingertips across his entire form in an instant, blood gushing like waterfalls from the fissures.
“Cough, cough! Just... like a railgun with its coolant yanked out...”
The Mute blood within his body had been expelled by the excessive divinity. The barrel-body shattered and split, unable to withstand the overload.
“...Even if this body reaches humanity’s peak... it can’t escape being a glass cannon... Cough, ack!”
Of course, he had chosen this knowingly.
Short decisive battle.
This era’s warfare was like fighting amid the bombing zones of enemy and ally alike.
Master Knights. Saints. Named Mutes. Heroes.
Their clashes inevitably wrought massive destruction, ripples indiscriminate in the oil-and-water melee.
Most soldiers bled from their ears. Eardrums ruptured by shockwaves.
The clearing created by Professor and Edeorna brimmed with compressed and burst corpses of Mutes and humans. Such circular clearings formed everywhere heroes and knights fought, large and small. Killing fields where a regular soldier’s misstep meant being swept away. Even knights and Nameds moved at those speeds.
Yet without infantry holding the line like that, heroes would be surrounded, futilely cut down by Mutes resurrecting endlessly behind those walls.
Mutes revived instantly behind the walls upon death.
Humans’ dead became permanent troop losses.
Hence, short decisive battle.
The seething divinity rebelled against aura and mana anyway, impossible to wield properly. Like in the desert, blast big once to seize momentum...
Or rather, reserving non-divinity resources for post-clean-hit combat. A perfected Edeorna, one absorbing even draconic traits, wouldn’t fall to a single blow.
But.
‘...Why? No tricks. Didn’t seem extremely weak to divinity either.’
The damage far exceeded expectations for the foe embedded in the wall.
No Dragon Heart, so breath overwhelmed by his divinity shot—fine. But the pinnacle combat form of iterated-evolution Mutation Blood. A body crafted specifically against him, his nemesis. Collapsing in one strike defied common sense.
Drip. Drip, drip...
The Tobrune wall, its Mute flesh blasted away by the divinity-laced fist’s aftershock, cracked wide around embedded Edeorna.
His own body wasn’t much better—split like magma-boiling crust, alternately spilling blood and aura—but hers...
‘...Limbs crushed. Edeorna’s true form, queen-like body, doesn’t regenerate easily. Really... subdued in one hit?’
Combat ineffective.
‘Trap possibility. End it here? Or retreat?’
His condition wasn’t great, but not combat-incapacitated.
Edeorna’s was near death. Limbs gone except draconic left arm. Half head blown off. Tail severed. Signature spear vanished without trace.
Even if insane regeneration fixed all unseen, losing hero-forged armament meant overwhelming combat loss for her.
War raged on amid his deliberation.
Wrong retreat: risk scaled by seconds she breathed, squaring ally deaths by her hand.
Wrong approach: just shredded immortal flesh if trapped.
.
.
.
.
At least until his charging body was impaled and ensnared by barbed wire-like thorns, he believed this judgment correct.
Edeorna existed solely to kill enemies, as known.
****
Crack—
Thorns grown from underground ripped out root and all. As his barely freed leg edged forward,
Pssh!
Kwaaak—
In that instant, vines multiplied severalfold, stitching foot and calf, binding Professor.
“Pathetic... tricks!”
The price for one step: the rest of his body ensnared by thousands more vines.
Edeorna approached her half-crushed nemesis, pleased at his spiderweb-struggling form.
Pathetic. Pathetic...
“Yes... compared to you, monster incarnate... mere parlor tricks. The power I’ve built. Hunted humans. All our efforts thus far.”
Edeorna spoke to her slowing nemesis as she closed in.
“My siblings and I. The child with wisdom beyond pursuit. The one with unbelievable martial flesh. The one lost to magic and mystery. All slain by your hand. Queen’s progeny, species’ essence, all defeated—our race’s defeat. To you, we must seem utterly pathetic.”
Rustle. Rustle...
Defeat. Thinking of Professor, it was the first word in Edeorna’s mind.
“I pondered. You who survive bones shattered, heart pierced, throat slit, head smashed. How to destroy the species’ nemesis daring to claim immortality. Dragging my wounded body to Mother’s side, I wrung every wisdom without rest.”
Palkatus’s main body was north too, allowing much talk. Abilities born to erase species’ existence. ‘Father’s’ human weaknesses. Subduing over killing. As she hunted for recovery, Palkatus left nest with siblings, saying he had somewhere to go.
He returned as terrified Nigmi and a fragment of his remains. Faint thoughts only.
That day, Edeorna chewed captured heroes’ corpses—no, lone kin remnant—and thought.
Defeat. Meeting him yielded only defeat.
Long ago, when that man crawled worm-like on Turan’s field. Deeming him mere wisdom in frail flesh, she spared him. Since, no day our species held advantage before him.
Recalling her choice birthed all this pain and defeat, Edeorna swallowed Palkatus’s remains.
Suddenly, Edeorna realized she didn’t want Professor dead.
Perhaps pooling hundreds of human heroes’ power, all her might, she could rival the god-like ‘Professor’ in Palkatus’s thoughts.
Perhaps slay him in bloodbath.
Then, victory seized, reduce him head to toe, blood-flesh pulp.
But then? Would human Professor agonize in death?
The pain embracing choking kin dying with one arm, routed miserably. Palkatus parting differently, saying ‘Sister needn’t ponder,’ returning as golden scales and flesh clumps.
If she herself died by someone’s hand, would it match that pain?
...Suddenly, Edeorna felt it unfair for the being who slew all her blood to end in mere death.
Unqueenly obsession, emotional judgment.
Emotion rooting in the queen’s clone, thinking solely for species survival.
“...I hate you. With hatred you can’t imagine.”
Edeorna wanted his killer to suffer as she had, clutching dead sibling, throat-tearing wails like Palkatus.
“I’ll give you pain.”
So, instead of leading overflowing-power body to battlefield, she went to Mother.
“Pain like mine.”
Before Mother, she dared raise her spear.
Slice—
She severed her mighty flesh, offering to queen.
If defeat predestined against human ‘Professor,’ someone hold him.
Others slay his blood.
Delightful fancy.
Kuuung—
Edeorna wrenched free from wall; unable to bear shock, it began crumbling.
White thorny vines gathered where torn limbs had been, but combat potential negligible.
No matter.
Original body grown solely to briefly bind absolute-power being. Baiting with planned defeat and her life, she splendidly ensnared nemesis.
Beyond collapsed wall rubble, twelve sisters with identical flesh approached.
Sisters reborn sharing power and all absorbed human heroes offered to Mother.
Inheriting those once-human heroes’ techniques and strength, armed with their weapons to butcher humans—her hope.
Drip—
Suddenly, within vine-trapping foe, the power that broke her erupted again. He’d see. She’d left gaps for viewing inside.
“Afraid? Of where they go, what they do?”
No answer; hateful white flames bloomed between vines.
“I was born with Mother’s flesh, yet can’t raise countless family like her.”
“...But made to hold one enemy.”
Her vine space shaved all within to leave only her, foe, vines. There, Edeorna gripped slender spear.
“You will be my final nemesis.”
Death numbed her, but she wanted to see that human’s face twist in pain.
To see, he must breathe, survive beast-rampage to escape this space.
‘Poured most life and remaining power. Should hold at least half-hour.’
He’d watch those sharing half-hour life butchered.
Battle’s end, he’d trek north alone. As she’d come here mulling siblings’ voids.
Death’s grimace twisted toward her, so Edeorna smiled white.
Craaaang—!
And,
Within the white thorn cage sphere.
Edeorna swung her own death at the nemesis trapped in the loser’s snare.
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