Since When Were You Playing?
From the right, countless pellets burst into the air. Each one spun at vicious speed, slick with a thick, clinging will to kill.
Fwoosh!
Flame that had grown from the tree roots bent like a whip. It coiled itself into a ring and gathered the incoming pellets into its embrace.
"I'll give them right back."
The whip's recoil flung the pellets straight back the way they had come.
"Ghk—!"
The Fifth Apostle, who had unleashed them, recoiled in horror. Her eyes were wrapped in bandages and she could not see, yet she carried on as if she could, flailing in a panic.
"Ninth Apostle!"
The Seventh Apostle tore a page from his book and hurled it toward her. The Ninth Apostle reached for the page, and it split into hundreds.
Hundreds of pages wrapped the Fifth Apostle. The pellets slammed into that bunker of paper in a storm.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!
The air shuddered as if hundreds of grenades had gone off at once, and flame surged up into the sky.
"Uuu!"
The Fifth Apostle crawled across the ground and dragged herself out of the bunker. She was scorched, and nothing more. Not a single wound marked her.
"Not yet?!"
The Seventh Apostle shoved his glasses up and shouted, strained to the edge of his voice.
"Heehee! A little! Just a little more!"
The Eighth Apostle poured cold sweat. He clutched his right arm and groaned like a boy years too old for his eighth-grade delusions. Where the usual fantasy would have put a black-flame dragon, a grotesque monster writhed instead.
"Waaah."
"Sis. You okay?"
"Mm. Mm."
The Ninth Apostle gathered the Fifth into his arms and stroked her. Tears seeped out from under her bandages, and he stood on one leg, indulging his sister's fussing.
"How touching."
Shoom!
A red beam tore through the blast and came flying. From within her brother's arms, the Fifth Apostle thrust out a hand and blocked it.
CLANG!
Stopped dead against her palm, the beam sprayed in every direction. Split fine as a fountain, the rays raked through the forest and set it burning.
The girl clenched her fist. Her grip swallowed the beam, and it vanished.
"Hot, hot."
The Fifth Apostle shook out her hand. Against the blazing backdrop it was only red and swollen—otherwise perfectly fine.
She slipped free of the Ninth Apostle's arms. The childish clinging of a moment ago was gone. What returned was as emotionless as a machine.
"What are you even made of? You sure you're human?"
Pele pouted and stepped closer. She had thrown that beam to kill, and it had been blocked with ease.
"……I am human. Confirmed."
The Fifth Apostle's brow knotted hard. She seemed to hate the question with everything in her, as if she had heard it far too many times.
"Our sister. Is human. God, too much."
The Ninth Apostle clenched his fists and swung them through the air. Richer in feeling than his sister, perhaps—rage seethed in his eyes.
At the siblings' reaction, Pele raised her middle finger.
"So what, you sick fucks? People who slaughter human beings as casually as eating a meal aren't human either."
"Nooo! I am human!"
The Fifth Apostle shrieked. She hiked up her clothes and bared her stomach, and a hand punched into that small, neat belly with a wet thunk. The Seventh Apostle flinched violently at the sudden, senseless move.
"If you use that now, what exactly do you expect us to do?!"
Leaving her comrade's scream behind her, the Fifth Apostle hauled her own belly open.
Hsssssss!
With the sound of a kettle coming to a boil, steam burst out instead of blood. When the fog-like vapor cleared, what lay inside her was laid bare.
Wires, packed tight where organs should have been. And at the heart of that forest of cables, a blue heart, pulsing.
Pele felt a monstrous energy inside it.
"Weren't you a cyborg? Why do I keep getting more suspicious?"
Whether human science could even build such a thing was beside the point. Walking around while cradling a bomb of that scale was a nerve no ordinary guts could imagine.
Crrk. Crrk.
The Fifth Apostle drew the blue heart out. The wires dangling from it snapped like blood vessels.
Lightning spat from the severed cables. She shoved the wires back inside any which way and shut the lid.
The Fifth Apostle murmured, barely above a breath.
"Activate. Code BH."
Approved.
Hum!
A vicious blue radiance blazed from the heart. The glare was blinding, the light of a flashbang.
Tap.
"……?!"
"I was watching to see if you'd keep going. Why are you this wide open? Did you think I'd get cocky and just stand there sightseeing?"
The Fifth Apostle froze. Pele had appeared right in front of her nose.
"……Manners."
"Manners, my ass."
This is reality, you little shit.
"Then."
Realistically—
Self-destruct sequence initiated.
A grandfather clock chimed from the blue heart.
Tick.
"Oh, come on."
I didn't know about that part.
Pele unleashed her authority at once. Magma seethed beneath the Fifth Apostle's feet, and the earth, turned molten, opened its mouth.
For an instant the Fifth Apostle's feet walked on empty air. Then the earth swallowed her.
Pele turned her gaze aside.
"He should be coming……."
He's not?
She tossed the blue heart up and caught it, up and down. She was juggling an extremely dangerous bomb, and not a trace of caution could be found in her.
"Sister this, sister that. So why are you this quiet?"
The Ninth Apostle stared at Pele with dead eyes.
Sorrow, pain, rage, emptiness, futility—all of it was there.
Denial was not.
Whether he had always been like this, or whether it had been planned, she could not tell.
Pele threw the heart behind her. Plop. It sank into the magma and vanished.
"Little boy."
The Seventh Apostle flinched. He was trembling.
"……As expected. A god is more than we can match."
The Seventh Apostle shook his head.
Pele stamped her foot. The earth answered.
BOOM!
A spiderweb of cracks raced across the ground. Magma welled through the fissures, stretching on line after line, until at last its reach climbed into the sky.
"From the very beginning, then?"
From the moment she had stepped out of the endless forest, she had been caught in yet another trap.
She had sworn she would not let her guard down…….
She had.
"Tricking me? That's impressive. I knew, and I still walked right into it."
"Thank you for the compliment."
The Seventh Apostle wiped the fresh blood from the corner of his mouth. The illusion he had built was breaking apart, piece by piece, and he took the backlash entirely into his own body.
Divine power judged him. It was not a force a mere human could endure.
"Koff."
The Seventh Apostle forced a dying ember to burn. Even as the magma killed him in real time, his eyes shone without a single cloud.
Pele was impressed.
The belief he carried was garbage fit only to be thrown away. But the will behind it, and the strength of mind—those were worth praising.
It was not the sort of will one could hold merely by being insane.
She could have shattered the illusion in an instant. She granted him one last margin of time instead. It was the least mercy a god could show.
"Speak."
"Yes?"
"I'll at least hear your last words."
The Seventh Apostle blinked, as if the answer had caught him entirely off guard.
"That is…… you aren't going to break it? I staked my life preparing for this……."
"Would you rather I broke it?"
"No. I would ask that you leave it as it is."
With a bitter smile, the Seventh Apostle bowed his head to Pele.
"My thanks for your mercy, O great madam."
"Manners, for all the good they do you. Hurry up and talk."
Pele jerked her chin.
The Seventh Apostle cleared his throat.
"Hm. Where shall I begin……."
With a faraway look in his eyes, he gazed off into the distance.
"It was when I was a child. I was so bright they called me a genius……."
"Hold it."
Rrrumble.
"Guhk!"
Gush!
The Seventh Apostle vomited blood. From all seven orifices, black blood poured without pause.
Pele clicked her tongue.
"I told you to give your last words. I didn't tell you to recite some useless past."
And—
"I already know your past well enough. Quit the tricks and just say your last words."
"Koff! Koff!"
The Seventh Apostle clutched his face and gasped. The blood would not stop, as if he meant to empty every drop from his body.
Splash.
Slowly, he rose from the pool made of his own blood.
"……I…… don't…… know……."
He flicked a tongue that would no longer serve him. Death was closing in, and still he tried to force out even one more word.
Pele's eyes narrowed.
"So that's it."
"You."
"You never meant to die, did you?"
A grin.
The Seventh Apostle's lips stirred.
"Correct."
CRASH!
"Heeheeheehee!!! This body makes its entrance!!!"
Behind the Seventh Apostle the illusion shattered, and the Eighth Apostle revealed himself.
He appeared with a massive bundle of tentacles hung beneath his waist, and he looked as though he had abandoned being human altogether.
"Seventh."
"Good work."
"Acknowledged."
The Fifth Apostle and the Ninth Apostle stepped in front of the Seventh to shield him. Their forms, too, were not what the illusion had shown.
Airplane wings had sprouted from the Fifth Apostle's back, and her body had turned to metal. On one of the Ninth Apostle's legs sat a mechanical prosthetic.
"Now."
"Our."
"Turn."
"God."
"Kill."
"We will."
The two siblings burned bright with zeal.
Pele looked at them and wore a faint smile.
"So you really mean it?"
Crack!
She drew a spear from her grip and swung it once.
Fwoosh.
A line of magma was drawn across the ground before the apostles.
"Come on over."
Pele said it with her arms folded, sounding thoroughly bored.
"I'll face you properly."
But her eyes were nothing like her manner.
They were full of the will to tear all of them apart and kill them on the spot.
Was it because they were looking straight into a god's true wrath?
The three who had stepped forward so boldly faltered.
The Seventh Apostle had staked his life to buy them time, and they had prepared for everything. Whether any of it would work on a god, however, was something they would have to reconsider.
Even so.
The apostles drowned their fear in madness.
"Heeheehee! So what!"
"Bluster."
"Period."
"Till just now."
"Got played."
"Did."
"Some hack."
Koff.
The Seventh Apostle plastered pages all over his body and jabbed a finger at the god.
"She is our greatest obstacle."
We'll simply have to overcome her, won't we?
He howled as if wringing out the last of his strength.
"For the future!"
The line collapsed.
"You're fast. That's fine."
I'll erase every last one of you. No exceptions.
The god revealed her true power.
⊳ Pele vs Fifth Apostle, Ninth Apostle, Seventh Apostle, Eighth Apostle
⊳ Hwang Seokgu, Captain Kid vs Twelfth Apostle
⊳ Roadman, San-gun vs Tenth Apostle
⊳ Great Shrine Maiden of the Two Gods, the Oni vs Sixth Apostle, Fourth Apostle
⊳ Hong Yumin vs Heavenly Road
⊳ Dan Miryu, Sword — en route
⊳ First Apostle — unconfirmed