The Winged Saintess - Part 3

With those words, Ji-ho lunged straight at Lucretia — but even an attack launched from point-blank range crashed uselessly against the wall of defensive power she had raised before her.

"A bitch, am I? That's rather harsh."

Lucretia turned his blow aside as if it were nothing, her voice unhurried, almost amused.

"Because you're too... vicious!"

Ji-ho shot back without yielding an inch of her composure, and the sword in his hands became a blur far faster than the stroke that had cut down ten of those eleven boys and girls only moments before.

His blade hammered against her defenses in a thunderous, relentless rhythm. The Archangel's Sword moved at a speed that even his wives — Rachel and Ruina — could not follow, a speed that escaped the eyes of Gabriel and the other Archangels besides. It was swiftness worthy of the name, and Lucretia's naked sight should never have been able to keep pace with it.

And yet she did. She met every incoming edge as though she could see the path of each cut before it was made, concentrating her defensive power with surgical precision on the exact points his blade would land, turning aside strike after strike in an unbroken chain. No matter how furiously he poured the assault on, the sword did not look as though it would ever touch her.

In her ordinary state, Lucretia would have been reduced to blind, one-sided defense, unable to track him at all, and she would have been forced to waste her strength throwing a barrier around her entire body. She still wore such a barrier now — but only as insurance. The true work was being done at the precise points of contact, where her power caught his attacks and snuffed them out completely. She simply stood there. To Ji-ho, it felt like crossing blades with a swordsman whose guard was an iron wall.

A man might have despaired, watching every cut die against that defense. Ji-ho did not.

"So there ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠is a limit after all."

He confirmed it, and a satisfied smile touched his mouth. However terrifying the divinity she displayed, Lucretia was still a human being borrowing a goddess's power. She was strong — strong enough that, having faced her, he could not imagine anyone but Demon King Kim Jae-hyun possessing force on this scale — but the very fact that she had to stop his attacks one by one was the shape of her ceiling.

The reservoir of energy around her was so vast that the drain barely showed. That did not make it infinite. She was human, and the quantity of Holy Power a human could hold had a bottom. It had shown itself already: when she turned his companions against one another, her authority had strained at its edges, and her failure ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to send his wives and Gabriel to Jae-hyun — thanks to his interference — had been another crack in the same wall.

Still carving the air with both hands, Ji-ho invoked a Ninth-Circle spell. He did not cast it once. He stacked it through the overlapping arrays of Reiterate, layering the mana formation until ten Ninth-Circle invocations erupted as one.

The beams did not bloom from his hands. They formed in a cage around her — above, below, to the right, to the left, the lower right and lower left, the upper right and upper left, and two more that swept vertically down her front and her back — ten colossal lances of light, all screaming in at once.

And through it all he never stopped swinging the sword. Lucretia, still turning those cuts aside, blinked.

A sliver of an instant. The world around her dropped into something like slow motion; even the incoming shafts of light seemed, for a heartbeat, to crawl beneath the speed of her perception. She who had unfurled the Wings of the Goddess did not merely wield a goddess's authority. She possessed a goddess's senses as well.

That was when the holy helm on Ji-ho's head answered.

His figure vanished from her perception. Not only his body — his presence, his breath, the faint pressure of a living will — all of it was gone, as though he had been cut out of the world.

Lucretia did not so much as flinch at the disappearance of the man standing in front of her.

The ten lances of light Ji-ho had conjured slammed toward her as one, seeking to punch straight through her body, and died against the barriers she raised, bursting in a chain of concussive blooms. In the same breath she felt the Archangel's Sword hammering those same barriers in a furious succession of blows — and every last cut died there, stopped cold.

She could not see him. She could not feel him. And still she knew, with perfect accuracy, where each attack would land, and poured her defensive power into exactly those points, and turned the entire assault aside without a single gap.

"Damn it. She's got foresight too."

Ji-ho's voice drifted down from an empty stretch of sky where no figure stood and no presence could be felt.

"The Holy Helm's power is quite something. To hide your form and your very existence from the world itself..."

Lucretia weighed Hildegrim's gift with genuine respect.

"But it doesn't seem to mean much against me."

She said it with a smile, and she was right: even Hildegrim was of little use here. Just as Ji-ho had guessed, she possessed the power of foresight. More precisely, with the Wings of the Goddess spread, she could read fragments of the next few seconds — up to five — enough to see how she would be attacked and how her enemy would move, and to calculate her answer before the blow ever fell.

Lucretia was no mage. Her mind had never been honed to the level of an archmage, nor was she a creature built for battle. But the woman who had called forth those wings ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠could set even that calculation, even that response, to run on the goddess's authority as if it were an automatic mode. His form could vanish. His existence could be wiped from her senses. It no longer mattered. She already knew how he would come at her.

Which part of her he would aim for, and with what force — every scrap of it was being read by her power.

"This precognition is going to be a pain."

Still hidden, still pressing her, Ji-ho sounded inconvenienced and nothing more. There was no tension in his voice at all.

"You're remarkably composed."

Lucretia tipped her head, puzzled by the ease in his tone. However fast and however hard he struck, every blow died against her defense; even attacks launched from invisibility were rendered meaningless by her foresight. If he could still sound like that, he was counting on something.

"Yeah. Because I'm about to end this."

It might have been bluster. She allowed for that — and refused to relax, gathering her power to its peak just in case. The window her foresight could pierce was five seconds and no more. Let more time than that slip past, and even she who bore the Wings of the Goddess would be reading blind. The future was not a fixed road. Foresight only showed her the results that would branch from what was happening now.

"Then I suppose I should change my approach as well."

She kept her defenses up, but she decided that simply standing there and going easy on him ended here. Jae-hyun might be disappointed — yet an enemy who fell in front of her would give him no sport at all, only a hollow letdown. Better that he be moderately disappointed now than crushed with it later.

A colossal tide of Holy Power gathered in Lucretia's hands, and Ji-ho's companions did not even think of intervening. His wives and Gabriel, especially, were still bound by Lucretia's power, unable to move at all. Had they been free, a concerted assault might have meant something. As things stood, they would only have gotten in the way.

Blinding light flared across Lucretia's entire body as she focused that vast Holy Power, and her already lustrous, snow-white skin shone brighter still.

There. That position.

She read the attack that would come at her a few seconds from now, concentrated her power, and hurled her own strike toward the place where Ji-ho would be as he swung his sword. In her foresight, the hit landed cleanly. She saw him take the wound.

The attack she loosed was a huge, thick lance of light, and it roared toward him with such overwhelming force that the blows he had sent at her crumbled and vanished before it like mist. Compared to his, the raw power of hers was in another league entirely.

Watching that massive beam scream toward him, Ji-ho had, even in that moment, an utterly ridiculous thought.

What is this, a Kamehameha from Dragon Ball?

It was pure white rather than blue — though a faint azure sheen ran through it, enough that it could pass for blue if you squinted. It really did look like one.

He drew up the power of the holy shield.

"Hyaaah!"

Ji-ho roared with the effort, pouring everything into the guard, and Lucretia's devastating strike collided with that defense.

The explosion swallowed the sky. When the smoke finally peeled away, Ji-ho stood revealed — and though he wore the Holy Armor, Achilles, blood was running from wounds opened all across his body. Hildegrim's concealment had broken. He was visible again.

"Hah... hah..."

Lucretia, by contrast, did not have a scratch on her. She looked at him as though she could not make sense of what she was seeing.

"What exactly were you trying to do? I thought you were going to unleash some tremendous attack — and that was all it amounted to?"

"Heh... seeing you this close, I have to say — no matter how I look at you, you're just too beautiful. And far too sexy."

Even as the blood ran down him, Ji-ho let his voice go lazy and appreciative, drinking in Lucretia's figure. His gaze was nakedly carnal as it traced the swell of her breasts barely held by that tank top, the hidden cleft of her sex beneath those denim hot pants, then wandered along the pale length of her thighs and the taut plane of her stomach around her navel. It was the kind of leisure only a man who believed he had already won would dare display.

She could not understand what he thought he had to stand on — and then her foresight showed her, and she understood all at once.

"Y-you!"

Lucretia stared at him, her face gone wide with shock, and Ji-ho's mouth curled into a crooked grin.

"That's right. You finally noticed what I landed on you."

"Kh—!"

She wrenched Holy Power up in a desperate rush, trying to wrap her body in it — and too late. Slash wounds tore open across her skin as if invisible blades had been waiting just beneath the surface, and blood fountained from every cut.

"AAAAAGH!"

The Saintess who bore the Wings of the Goddess screamed, a raw and agonized sound, as bright red blood sprayed from her body.

It worked.

Ji-ho confirmed that his plan had succeeded and watched her bleed with a pleasant smile. His will was bound into those wounds. Even a Saintess wearing the Wings of the Goddess would not knit them shut in a single breath.

Then the smile vanished from his face as if it had been wiped away, and his expression went hard. First, because the wounds that had opened on Lucretia's body vanished so quickly it was as though they had never been. And second, because of the new presence that had appeared behind him.

A little girl who looked no older than eight stepped out of the air at his back — golden hair like captured sunlight, eyes of vivid blue, and a face so lovely and radiant it almost hurt to look at.