The Scheme Revealed and the Ascendant (3)

Crack-boom!

The red-haired assassin Aila spun hard at the sudden explosion erupting behind her.

Up to that point, she had been holding the stairwell to the lower levels with Horus, who was somehow wielding rune magic so absurd it bordered on nonsense, all while smashing away the stairs beneath them to keep the enemy from advancing.

The bloodthirsty fiends that still came down through the shattered steps were turned into charred meat by the crimson flames, and those who lunged through the broken passageways got knives through the forehead before they could take another step.

Still, even that much resistance had only bought time.

When the blood fiends who controlled blood arts appeared, Aila had been forced into a series of acrobatic movements just to stay alive, and even then only barely...

Then it appeared.

A monster with a human head and limbs that were not human at all, sprouting long, thin tentacles in every direction the moment it showed itself.

Aila frowned at it with a puzzled look, then named the thing on instinct as soon as she saw it.

“Zanzas?”

That was the name of the man who had supposedly led the First Expedition.

At that, the thing jerked its head around in shock.

Its body still faced forward, but only its head had turned.

There was tremendous bewilderment in the hollow human eyes staring back.

“Zanzas... That’s my name...?”

But a moment later, the creature’s eye sockets darkened as if ink were spreading through them.

In the blink of an eye, it bared its black eyes and screamed, “Hungry! You! You too! You too, you too! I’ll eat everything!”

The slender, long tentacles that had hung slack a moment ago went rigid again like fishing lines pulled taut.

The next instant, Aila slashed at the tentacle wrapped around her thigh with the dagger in each hand.

No, she tried to.

Clang!

Though they bent and fluttered softly in the air, the tentacles could not, for reasons that defied reason, be cut by daggers wrapped in dense aura.

“Tch?!”

Fibrous tentacles surged in like they meant to slice her legs off.

Aila bit back a scream and wrapped herself in aura, only for the tendrils to whip around both wrists instead with the shriek of taut wire.

Blood welled and ran down her bound arms and legs.

Just as she no longer knew what to do,

“Duck!”

Raul’s voice rang out.

Aila obeyed without hesitation.

Then white flames flashed over her red hair.

Whoooosh-!

The heavy divinity poured over her, and the fibrous tentacles coiled around Aila began to melt away.

At the same time, as Aila swayed from the sudden dizziness, a strong arm caught her and pulled her in against a hard chest to steady her.

Raul looked down at her with eyes gone pure white and said, “Good work.”

“Ahj—”

Aila started to answer, but she never finished. Her body suddenly went limp.

Raul reflexively checked her over, wondering if she had taken a fatal wound somewhere he’d missed.

There were no injuries.

But something about her was strange.

Where’s her aura?

It was as if she had never been able to use aura in the first place. Not a trace of it remained anywhere in her small body.

“Hot, too hot!”

Only then did the Ascendant Raul had blasted with white flame cry out in delayed agony.

When Raul looked up, he saw the Ascendant holding up the blood fiends from the area on a mass of grotesquely lengthened fibers, skewering them like meat on a spit.

Yet not a shred of energy could be felt from the bodies of those blood fiends, as if they had never possessed any of the power a blood fiend should have had.

Only then did Raul understand what was happening.

“You ate them. Demons, aura, even blood fiend blood...”

The Ascendant, bearing the contradictory powers of divinity and demonic energy, grinned at Raul’s flat question.

“Tasty. And now you smell tasty too.”

It was the kind of smile that split to the ears, not unlike the clown demon Malphas.

Blood and bits of flesh that looked freshly devoured dripped from the creature’s torn maw.

But ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Raul remained calm despite the nightmare before him.

“Horus!”

He lowered Aila to the floor and launched himself straight at the monster.

“Protect her!”

With that single shout that sounded more like a battle cry than a command, Raul’s holy sword fired out a fan-shaped blaze directly ahead.

In an instant, the Ascendant, cloaked in hundreds of fibrous strands like a cape, sprang upward with its three-meter frame like a coil snapping free.

Thunk!

As the monster clung to the ceiling to evade the white flames, Raul swung a vertical sword strike at it as though he had been waiting for exactly this.

Thud.

The sound of flesh being torn rang out darkly.

And yet,

“I told you, it looks tasty!”

Clang!

The Ascendant clamped its teeth down on the Sun King’s holy sword, which had sunk deep into its flesh.

At the same time, an enormous quantity of divinity was sucked straight through its mouth.

The thing trembled all over like a madman high on poison.

But this counterattack was exactly what Raul had expected.

“Horus!”

At that moment, dozens of scarlet rune characters ignited across the crimson patterns embroidered on the Sun King’s sword.

Crackle-tat-tat-tat!

In an instant, the sharp crack of sparks erupted and crimson flame surged up in a literal torrent.

Keaaaaaaaaaagh!

The Ascendant, once again robbed of human language and reduced to a monster’s scream, wrenched its jaws open and tried to flee with its body already melting apart, but

“Going somewhere?”

Raul grabbed the creature’s head and held it in place.

“It hurts! Hot! Aah, it buruuurns!”

At last, with even its muzzle melting away, the Ascendant began vomiting out the same words over and over like a madman trapped in a loop.

Standing at the center of the swirling blaze, Raul turned the head he had seized toward himself and fixed the creature with an icy stare as he spoke.

“Listen. You poor thing born from perverse madness. Listen. You undead thing risen from death. Listen. You thing that opened its eyes in filth after feeding on pus made of pain and torment.”

It was a prayer.

A prayer offered not to cleansing fire or forgiving mercy, but to the god of the cold and merciless hammer.

The Judge’s Prayer.

Within Raul’s eyes, once both white and black, brilliant gold light surged to the surface.

『Behold.』

「The scales tilted before your eyes」

「The malignancy boiled up from the mire」

「Behold yourself clearly, you filthy, hideous thing.」

Words stitched in light appeared behind Raul as he stood wrapped in golden providence.

Then Raul, his own eyes shining gold, declared, “Forgiveness for me is pure steel. The only repose left for you lies wholly within death.”

At the same time, a golden flash took shape above his head.

『I shall wash you clean with my noble glory.』

“I shall wash you clean with my noble glory.”

The moment his voice and miracle became one, white radiance burst up from Raul’s body while golden light rained down from the words suspended in the air.

The Ascendant, already half-melted by the crimson fire, had its entire body coiled in spirals by the two colors of divinity.

“No matter that you possess powers akin to the Demon King... You won’t be able to digest three different kinds of divinity at once.”

That was the limit of a Divine Devourer.

Raul murmured it softly, then kept his gaze fixed on the Ascendant’s head in his grip. At last, he saw the creature’s body, submerged beneath light, crumble into specks of dust and scatter away.

Relieved by the sight, Raul still could not calm the violent pounding in his chest.

Who would have thought I’d have to use the Demon King’s countermeasure in only the second chapter...

The Demon King.

The final enemy faced by the five-star class Mimir’s Holy Knight in the story’s endgame, and the monster that devoured divinity and godhood without discrimination, was called the Divine Devourer.

He spent several minutes catching his breath.

While the body of the so-called Ascendant, with its crablike shell and insect limbs, was still turning to light halfway through,

the head of the gold-plated adventurer Zanzas suddenly opened its mouth wide.

“Run! Leave me here and go! Now! Damn it!”

“...What?”

Raul frowned at the abrupt outburst, but Zanzas did not stop.

“Aden said the first child would be born soon. You have to live, don’t you?”

Raul, who had been about to ask what game he was playing with a tightened brow, stopped cold at what came next.

“I’ll stay behind. Luka. You all live, you hear me? You have to tell them about these utterly monstrous things!”

Aden. And Luka.

They were the names of the companions in the adventuring band led by the man before him, Zanzas.

Raul studied the eyes of Zanzas, who stared unfocused into empty space.

What those eyes, frosted white, were looking at was not the present.

It was a memory somewhere in the shattered remnants of a mind destroyed by a god’s authority.

The middle-aged adventurer Zanzas cried out again, looking at his own past.

“Don’t be ridiculous! Take responsibility and save her! Save my wife!”

“You filthy demon contractors! I swear I’ll kill every last one of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you!”

“Instructor... I want to change this empire rotten from its roots with my own hands.”

What, exactly, was he seeing?

Tears streamed down from Zanzas’s whitened eyes as he spat out those broken, sorrowful words in a voice that kept splitting apart.

Then, at some point, the middle-aged adventurer’s wrinkled face broke into a bright smile like a boy’s and he said,

“Father. I want to be a knight like you someday, someone who helps others in a cool, proper way. Someday, I really do...”

Before he was a monster, he had been a blood fiend.

Before he had been a blood fiend, he had been an adventurer.

And before he was an adventurer, he had been a boy who dreamed of becoming a knight.

That was how his dying words ended.

He was smiling.

Even as his filthy flesh became light and scattered, leaving only the head behind, lonely and forsaken on the ground...

He was smiling.

“...”

Seeing as his so-called friend, the Master of the Backstreets, had been a demon collaborator, the gold-plated adventurer Zanzas probably had not been a clean man either.

And yet he had been a man who could face death with composure and sacrifice himself for his comrades.

At the very least, he had been a decent guild leader, and before that, perhaps just an ordinary father of this era who had lost his family to demon contractors.

He had been a common imperial subject,

and as a child, at least, he had probably been a boy who dreamed with a pure heart of becoming a knight who helped others.

So was he truly evil?

Was he not simply some gray-zone man, not clean, but not fully blackened either?

Why, exactly, had the light bothered to show Raul Zanzas’s final cry?

Stuck to an answerless question, Raul stood rooted to the spot like stone.

He stared quietly at the place where Zanzas had been, the man who had vanished in light with a smile.

He stared for a very long time.

Then, with the smallest, driest murmur, he let one line fall from his lips.

“Please, have mercy on that poor soul...”

Having done at least the bare minimum of what he could, Raul finally turned away.

He went on without looking back.

There was no particular need to cry or laugh.

This world had been like this from the beginning.

It was simply the kind of age it was.

The sacred relic lay beneath the blood-red lake at the center of the underground altar.

“Guh.”

When Raul shattered the lakebed with his fist, the idols lined up beneath it came into view to greet him.

As expected, the dense miasma of demonic energy pouring up from below made the hair on his body stand on end.

He had no choice but to smash everything apart.

Even in that simple process of swinging his fist while neutralizing the demonic energy, red blood dripped steadily from his mouth, ears, and nose for reasons he could not have cared less to examine.

It was not especially strange.

He had invoked the miracles of another order without even opening his Halo.

Of course, miracles used without skill correction demanded an absurd amount of divinity.

As a result, Raul was currently in a state of severe divine exhaustion.

Even as little as gathering enough holiness to neutralize the demonic energy of the idols made his skin split open and bleed.

“Haaah...”

By the time he was gasping for breath, too drained to swing his fist properly, Raul finally found the wooden box buried in the thickest fog of demonic energy.

“This is...”

It was clearly the sacred relic.

Raul simply threw himself straight into the fog of demonic energy, which was hard enough to pierce properly even when he tried.

At once, the pain hit like salt being poured into skin already split and torn.

Only after opening the wooden box where the darkness was deepest did light erupt upward.

“Hah... Hoo.”

In an instant, the searing pain ebbed, and breathing became easier.

The base achievement quest common to all clergy-class jobs.

Among them, it was the achievement cleared by fully possessing a single sacred relic.

Raul gave a small smile at the message that appeared exactly as expected, and at the divinity filling him in a rush.

Now that he had some room to breathe in his divinity reserves, clearing away the stray demonic energy with no owner was no trouble at all.

“Hoo.”

After catching his breath, Raul gathered divinity into his fist.

He then brought it down on the rotten ground.

Crack!

The fog of demonic energy that had stained the area black spun into a spiral and was neutralized by light.

At last, it was really over.

“I’m done. Seriously.”

Raul groaned and loosened his arms.

He still had not recovered enough divinity to manifest the Prayer of Recovery, but he had at least regained enough ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to stop staggering and rest here for a while.

How the hell did it end up like this?

Honestly, Raul had intended to hide in the lowest floor, steal the sacred relic, and leave all the hard work to the Adventurer’s Union in Asmos.

Somehow, though, he and Aila had ended up fighting all the way into the enemy’s core.

“Ha.”

It was true that the world never went exactly the way people wanted it to, but this was a little much.

Raul felt unfairly wronged for no real reason.

Still, they had come away with the spoils, so that at least was something.

Raul looked down at the sacred relic in his hand.

It was a finely crafted pocket watch, smaller than his palm.

“The Pocket Watch of Dawn...”

As a lost sacred relic with no owner in this age, it was something Raul had never seen before.

Fortunately, Raul had the System.

When he pressed the detail button, a helpful explanation unfolded before him.

“It draws it in... So it’s basically like borrowing future divinity and using it now?”

And that maximum was twenty-four hours, meaning one day’s worth.

“Not bad.”

Raul’s current divinity rank was only C-rank.

No matter how good the engine was, it wouldn’t move without fuel.

Pulling in tomorrow’s divinity meant, in plain terms, that Raul’s own divinity capacity had doubled.

But for a saint, that still wasn’t the end of it.

Raul drew out the holy radiance of his hidden Halo and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠poured it into the relic in his hand.

A message appeared again almost immediately.

It had changed.

Everything else remained the same, but the one limit on how much divinity it could draw had increased more than tenfold.

Judging by the structure, he would probably still fall into a period of divinity failure for a while after borrowing that much, but with a limit of 250 hours, that hardly seemed like much of a drawback.

For a brief moment, Raul had become capable of handling more than ten times his usual divinity.

“That’s insane.”

The conditions were strict, but the value of this “divinity loan” was enormous.

“Maybe...”

If he used it well, he could pour as much fuel as he wanted into the train-engine-like machine that was his open Halo.

Raul tested it by looking at the hand holding the relic.

Ping!

A short message appeared before him: X hours.

“Five hours.”

Clack-clack-clack! Click.

At Raul’s mutter, the hour hand that had been fixed at 12:00 swung round and pointed to 5.

The minute and second hands spun counterclockwise, beginning to count down the five hours, and the relic truly began to spew out pure white divinity like a fountain.

“It really works.”

Raul burned the future divinity flowing into his body and manifested Mimir’s blessing.

Even the act of breathing became far easier in an instant.

At this rate, he could heal Aila, who was covered in injuries from head to toe.

“Ha.”

The process had been brutal, but in the end a faint smile settled on his lips.

“Yeah. This is why you run bosses.”

Raul snorted softly at the words that left his own mouth.