The Plot Revealed and the Ascendant (2)
The clown’s head fell with pitiful finality.
The deep flash Raul’s sword had carved through the air had also cut down the eyes and mouths that had grown from the demon’s limbs, and the “demon” itself collapsed in pieces, its body breaking apart as if it had been hacked to shreds.
At that instant, one of the clown’s falling “eyes” flared with a violet-black gleam.
The clown’s flesh and blood followed an intangible force, defying gravity as it surged back upward, inverted.
But Raul was not about to stand there and watch.
Snatching the paper the thing had been holding in midair, Raul reversed his Sunlight Divine Sword in his grip and kicked off hard from the sea of blood.
Whooom-!
Raul’s flash, tangled with the spray of blood that burst into the air, left behind a pink streak.
In an instant, it drove diagonally into the center of the hideous lump of flesh the “demon” had become.
“Krrrgh?!”
One of the mouths on the thing that had been groaning in agony twisted open.
“L-listen to me, Saint! I-I just wanted to show you something fun!”
“Bullshit.”
Of course, Raul’s sword went on without the slightest hesitation.
Fwoosh-!
White flames rose from the center of the lump of flesh, and the mouths on the thing all spat different words at once.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
“Kyaaaagh!”
“Stop! Stop, Saint!”
“You sick bastard, seriously!”
Then the eye steeped in especially dense demonic energy flared violet-black again.
At the same time, all the mouths vomited out the same voice.
“Slaves!”
At that moment, countless points of light burst open beneath the sea of blood.
Splash!
What erupted from the lake all at once were “blood fiends,” every one of them unfocused-eyed and foaming at the mouth.
The clown’s mouth, wrapped in white flame, twisted again just as Raul narrowed his brows.
“Do anything! You useless trash!”
Whether roused by that scream or not, the blood fiends began using one another as footholds, surging upward at grotesque speed.
Thud-!
At last, a blood fiend’s hand clamped around Raul’s ankle.
Slash-!
Of course, Raul’s sword, drawing a cross-shaped line the instant contact was made, severed the approaching wrist as well.
But in that same instant, the demon’s “hand,” eyes and mouth now growing from it one by one, broke free of the white flames and climbed the inverted cross hovering in the air.
Raul was naturally about to chase after it, but the blood fiend still clutching his ankle even after losing its wrist suddenly turned red and swelled like a balloon.
“Huh?”
Raul narrowed his eyes at the unfamiliar phenomenon and reflexively drew his divinity higher.
Then, starting with the blood fiend’s hand gripping his ankle, every fiend that had been piling upward in a tower burst apart, spraying dark red blood.
Fwrrrk?! Swoooosh!
Raul, wrapped head to toe in Holy Armor, fortunately took no damage, but the shockwave still sent him crashing to the ground.
Sweeping the violently spinning scene before him with his white pupils, Raul twisted his body in time and rolled with the fall.
He rolled several times, then used the momentum to spring back up.
Tch.
Spitting out the blood that had filled his mouth, Raul looked up.
The “clown demon” was there too, reduced to a single miserable hand fixed to the inverted cross in midair and glaring down at him.
When their gazes hooked, the thing bared its eyes and twisted the mouth growing beside them.
“You damn reincarnated Saint.”
“Says the guy who looks worse.”
“The demon kings of the abyss, the witch of chaos, and the spirit of the void will curse your soul too.”
“Like they weren’t doing that already?”
As Raul kept answering in a mocking tone, the clown ground its teeth with a creak, creak.
Raul, wearing a relaxed smile, asked, “Come on, don’t get so worked up. Say what you were going to say.”
He had assumed that if the thing wielded the authority of an evil god, it had to be at least a high demon.
But the moment swords met, Raul understood.
Someone with that pathetic combat ability using an authority like that could only mean one thing: the demon was specialized in exactly that line of work.
In other words, it might have been terrifying to all those vulnerable to curses, but to a bearer of a Halo, it was nothing.
The clown was that kind of demon.
“What about an ascension?” Raul asked with the easy expression of someone fully back in control.
Their compatibility was utterly disastrous.
For the clown, that is.
Just then, the creature ground its teeth again and twisted its mouth open.
“That duke bastard is already targeting you, Saint.”
“I know that already.”
“You won’t be able to stop that bastard’s ascension.”
“You really don’t understand plain speech, do you?”
Tsk.
Raul clicked his tongue and raised the Sun King’s Divine Sword at an angle.
“So tell me. What the hell is this so-called ascension?”
As his eyes gleamed white while he asked, the clown’s eyes and mouth warped violently.
“Why should I explain that to you, of all people?!”
It was the sort of voice that would have been wearing a sneer if the thing still had a clown’s face.
Raul’s answer came low and flat.
“Why?”
In the next instant, a thunderous crack boomed, and Raul’s entire body vanished.
“Wha—”
The demon stared in shock, trying to force out a voice, but at that moment a scarlet longsword punched through the back of its hand and buried itself deep in the inverted cross.
Rrrrrrrk-!
Behind the sound of something grinding to pieces, Raul appeared and finished his sentence.
“Because this is what’ll happen.”
Raul looked down at the demon’s violet eyeball with chilly detachment.
Pinning the demon in place, he drew out the scrap of paper he had just taken.
There, in the language of the demon realm, were unmistakable contradictory terms like “clergy steeped in demonic energy” and “a demon who accepted divinity.”
“I can read it. Demon script just has a lot of symbolic shorthand, that’s all. You can explain it and die without pain, or I can beat you until you feel like explaining.”
Raul had already confirmed it once before through the spider.
The white flames forged from the Halo’s sacred light brought extreme searing pain to demons.
He asked in an even tone, and suddenly endless laughter burst from the demon’s mouth.
“Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!”
The laughter did not stop even after Raul raised the holy flames higher.
Crackle, crackle!
And when sparks finally began to jump from the demon’s flesh, the thing bared a grin through eyes crazed with madness and a twisted mouth and said, at the same time,
“Too late, Saint.”
Its voice had changed completely, becoming that of a deep, middle-aged man, and it did not tremble at all despite the agony coursing through its entire hand.
Facing Raul’s narrowed gaze, it went on at its own pace.
“That duke idiot made something interesting and then left it sitting here, saying it was ‘dangerous.’”
“Interesting?”
Raul asked, wondering what else it had been hiding, and the demon answered, its violet iris and white sclera turning pitch black in an instant.
“The cradle of ascension.”
Fwaaaah!
At that moment, the entire sea of blood staining the depths below began to surge upward, inverted.
The whole cavern seemed to have gone weightless as red droplets floated through the air...
And below them, at the very center of the blood lake, it finally emerged.
It was a coffin.
A massive coffin, the imperial crest on it standing out more sharply than any ornate decoration.
“Look carefully, Saint. That is the duke’s secret plan, the blood of the clergy, and the power of I, Malpas, all fused into one to birth an entirely new existence unlike any that has ever been...”
Kwaaaaaaah──!?
At last, it shattered the massive coffin and burst out with a scream that made the ear canals ache, and the clown demon, Malpas, murmured darkly and with great weight:
“The first Ascendant.”
It had arms like the forelegs of a mantis.
It had the body of an insect and four pairs of legs.
It had a human head.
Raul knew that head.
“Zanzas?”
A gold plate adventurer and the leader of the first expedition.
And the adventurer who had become the “Blood Lord,” swept through the back alleys, and then vanished with countless human beings in tow.
It was Zanzas.
More precisely, it was a monster made by stitching together Zanzas’s body with countless demonic aberrations and an unidentified divinity.
Raul could see it.
He could see the malignant force raging through Zanzas’s body as it collided with the blazing divinity and tore one another apart.
But as if the chaos inside his body meant nothing at all,
the clown’s hand twisted its mouth and said,
“Kill the Saint. First Ascendant.”
At that moment, the scream of the thing born from the coffin ceased.
At the same time, thousands of blood-thin whirlwinds, like spinning saw blades, rushed straight toward Raul.
Raul’s eyes widened in the slow-motion world before him.
He raised both arms explosively to shield his head.
The light blooming from the crook of his elbows collided with the blood whirlwinds before it had even formed a proper shape.
Clack-clack-clack-clash!
The contact between blood and divinity exploded with a grinding metallic roar.
And through that violent sound of rupture, something flashing leapt toward Raul.
Raul threw his head back sharply and dodged it.
But the Ascendant, already landed before his eyes, thrust out its grotesquely bent foreleg like a giant scythe and launched another assault.
In an instant, eight streaks of light shot at Raul’s solar plexus, head, neck, elbow, collarbone, eye, lower dantian, and knee.
The speed was overwhelming, impossible to evade.
Looking at an owner of speed faster than himself, someone he had not seen in a long time, Raul moved his mouth as if he had been waiting for this.
“Al Largirdo!”
Crack-!
The eight streaks of light vanished through the rift of a distorted artifact in an instant.
Immediately after, a second distortion field appeared with the sound of shattering glass.
Eight streaks of light poured down in front of the Ascendant’s eyes...
Zing-! Clang-! Clash-clash!
Amid the deafening explosions that seemed ready to rip his ears apart, the Ascendant even blocked its own offensive.
But in that fleeting moment, white lightning was already swirling through Raul’s entire body.
The instant Raul’s white-lit eyes and the eyes of Zanzas, now the Ascendant, turned toward one another,
──────Tssht─!
Raul surrendered his body to the surging divinity, and he flew like a single, colossal bolt of lightning.
Kwa-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-!
The thunder that followed the light rang out loud enough to shake the entire underground world, and when the light that had blocked his vision finally faded...
Raul was standing with his back to the one born from the coffin.
Heavenly Punishment【Lv.1.3】.
The saint’s highest authority, the one that had once torn apart even a high demon clad in Flame Devil Armor in a single strike, would have defied the natural order again and erased whatever insolent thing stood on this land from the world entirely.
And yet,
“A-ah... Aaaah... It hurts, it huuurts!”
Suddenly, a scream came from behind Raul’s back.
When he turned his head in a hurry, the impossible scene came into view.
The Ascendant was still alive, its abdominal carapace evaporated to expose its writhing entrails, half its head obliterated to reveal the muddy mess of its organs beneath.
“It hurts! It hurts! I said it hurts! It huuurts!”
It even cried as it shouted its suffering at the top of its lungs.
It had not died.
Even after taking Heavenly Punishment, which literally erased all impurity, half its body was still intact.
“...What the hell is that?”
Raul’s own arms prickled with gooseflesh before he realized he had said it aloud.
A demon that could survive a miracle forged from the Halo’s holy brilliance, a supreme authority?
He could say it without hesitation.
Impossible.
That could only happen if it was coated in the authority of an evil god and not merely a demon, but the king, emperor, or god representing one of the demon factions.
And yet that thing was alive.
So this was ascension?
Raul, drained from unleashing such a great authority, still understood instinctively that this thing had to be killed here and now.
Then the clown’s hand moved closer to the Ascendant, which had split in half and was rolling on the ground in agony, and said,
“Get up! First Ascendant! I know very well you won’t die from a mere authority of divinity!”
“A-... Dad? Are you my dad? Dad! Dad, aaaah!”
The Ascendant crawled toward the clown’s hand, trembling all over as if seized by a fit.
Malpas, the clown demon, raised its voice in a triumphant tone.
“That’s right, I’m your father. You’re my first Ascendant, born from my blood, my authority, and my essence!”
“Dad. Dad!”
“So listen to me. Kill that bastard. Take your merciless claw-scythe and turn the Saint into chopped meat!”
Raul, too, was holding his breath and tightening his grip on the sword, when something changed.
“Dad!”
The Ascendant, with half its body collapsed, suddenly lifted the clown’s hand high with both arms.
Not knowing what it meant to do, Raul narrowed his brows. The Ascendant then spat out something hideously sticky.
“Dad, tasty!”
“What?!”
The Ascendant stuffed the clown’s hand into its wide-open mouth and bit down.
Crunch-?!
“Kraaah, kyaaaagh!”
The clown’s scream was fierce, but the more it screamed, the broader the grin the Ascendant wore as it chewed and swallowed it.
“Tasty!”
Raul could see the entrails spilling from the thing’s split abdomen writhing there in full view.
Then, from the melted cross-section of the Ascendant’s body, thick demonic energy gathered and fresh flesh began to grow.
“It absorbs demonic energy and repairs the body?”
Only then did Raul properly understand the Ascendant’s structure.
The half that had not been melted by the saint’s authority was, in fact, a body forged from divinity.
It was vulnerable to divinity and to demonic energy alike.
And yet at the same time, it could overcome both.
That was the true nature of the Ascendant.
“So that duke bastard planned to manifest in a body like that...”
It was certainly a dangerous scheme.
But the abyss duke was a problem for later.
Whoosh-!
For now, Raul once again drew up vast divinity, intent on completely subjugating the Ascendant before him, and leveled his sword at the thing.
The problem came in the next instant.
The Ascendant, having sealed the holes in its body with newly grown bundles of muscle fiber, though not yet skin, suddenly flinched as it looked at Raul.
Raul naturally expected it to charge him and tensed his whole body.
Instead, the thing blurted out,
“You scary. I hungry...”
Zanzas’s face shifted abruptly from the expression of a frightened child to a wide, beaming smile.
“Smells tasty... demonic energy! Eat!”
The thing shot off in a beam of light in the exact opposite direction from Raul.
“You crazy bastard!?”
Raul had not expected it to run, and he immediately gathered heavy divinity into both legs for pursuit.
At the same time, he turned his mind over, trying to grasp the thing’s purpose.
Most likely, it intended to devour the “demon contract holders” stationed throughout this ruin and finish repairing its body.
And once that thing, which had been like a newborn infant, kept growing and growing...
This could become something impossible to take back.
Raul slammed off the ground with enough force to create a giant meteor crater and chased after the Ascendant.
Fortunately, the giant thing’s body was easy to track.
It was whipping its own body, like bundles of muscle fibers, around like a whip.
And there, standing before it, was a blood-soaked Aila.