I Will Kill You and Go Home
Home? The black mana of Death that I had only just awakened to sharpened every cell in my body and every minute sensation with brutal, excruciating clarity.
The ash-gray smoke rising thickly from my skin would corrode the Black Whale’s mana of Creation lingering in the void at the faintest brush of breath, burning it away without a trace. The grip of my left hand around the dagger had grown monstrously heavy, far beyond anything it had been before. In the half-dead agony of bones ground to powder and organs bursting, I had seized this authority of destruction through nothing but a savage survival instinct to return to the world where I once belonged.
The black energy now flowing through my veins had transcended mere power. It was forcibly rewriting the very laws of this space.
Perhaps it had sensed the absolute aura of Death erupting wildly from every inch of me. The Black Whale’s continent-sized crimson eyes, which until now had mindlessly hurled the power of Creation in every direction with only the faintest flicker of intellect, shook violently for the first time. The rigid black scales covering its colossal body trembled as though struck by an instinctive threat and emitted a grotesque shriek.
As if to prove its arrogance—that it alone ruled this world, that it was the absolute sky—the whale began to detonate the power of Creation it harbored with a ferocity unlike anything before. Each convulsion of its massive frame split the empty space wide open.
Kugugugugugugugu—!
The whale’s mana, which had weighed heavily upon the entire realm, swirled madly from every direction. In the lightless Void, thousands upon thousands of colossal stone boulders were created in real time and cascaded down upon my head like a mindless waterfall. This was no mere act of fashioning and throwing weapons. It was a reckless barrage of authority that forcibly twisted the density of space itself, transforming the very air beneath my feet into a crushing compressor meant to pulverize my limbs.
The ground flipped completely. The pressure crushed the breath in my throat and burst every capillary across my body at once.
“Where do you think you’re rampaging, you beast bastard!”
I clenched my teeth hard enough to shatter them and detonated the black mana of Death at my toes, rotting and shattering the walls of Creation’s compression that closed in from every side. Each wide swing of my dagger caused the thousands of rocky thorns the whale hurled at me to touch the ash-gray smoke surrounding my body, corrode without form, and explode into dust. Fragments of decaying mana scattered in all directions.
The Black Whale’s enormous frame charging from the front and my comparatively tiny form collided and crossed paths dozens, then hundreds of times in the air, locked in a savage, desperate battle.
Kwaaaang!Puh-uk!Kwajik!
From every direction came the sharp, unending crack of space shattering like enormous panes of glass. Each head-on collision between the whale’s absolute power of Creation and the cruel power of Death I radiated caused the entire primordial dark world to splinter from the depths, unable to withstand the immense force. It was a cataclysmic scene of destruction as the boundaries of space crumbled into nothingness.
Paaaht—!
The aftermath of our fierce clash hammered my entire body without mercy. No matter how quickly the power of Death restored my flesh, I could not deflect every omnidirectional explosion of authority from the whale—the master of this world—without allowing a single strike to land. A shockwave powerful enough to bleach my vision pierced straight through my chest. The instant the brutal mana storm swept over me, the cloak that had endured through the slaughter of countless monsters finally reached its limit. It tore apart in every direction.
Chijijik!Pung—!
The cloak ripped like rags and flew into the air. The last barrier protecting my body had vanished. At the same moment, the fragments of the Seven Lords of Sin that I had stubbornly collected as trophies after smashing their heads spilled out into the void.
Pride’s eye. Sloth’s index finger. Greed’s fang. Gluttony’s nose. Wrath’s half-torn tongue. And the hearts I had seized from Lust’s territory—both Envy’s, which Lust had ripped out and offered, and Lust’s own, which she had torn from her chest.
The raw essences of seven transcendent beings scattered in every direction through the collapsing space.
“…Tsk.”
I reached out toward the scattering fragments, then roughly withdrew my hand and clicked my tongue. The cold sensation of them brushing past my fingertips brought a crushing wave of emptiness, but if I did not crush the head of the frenzied Black Whale right in front of me, I would have no future at all. I would be trapped and annihilated in this collapsing realm long before I could gather those fragments again. I could search for them later—after this brutal fight was truly over—even if it meant groping across the ground on my hands and knees.
Right now, every sense and every stubborn survival instinct I possessed was focused solely on crushing the breath from the whale before my eyes. To survive, I had to wager everything I had in this single moment.
As my ash-gray mana of Death rotted its black flesh black in real time, the Black Whale shrieked in agony it had never known in its entire existence. Even while vomiting waterfalls of black blood in every direction, it squeezed the power of Creation past its limits and hurled it mindlessly toward me. Every twist of its colossal body warped the entire space we occupied like an earthquake, accelerating the great collapse. In the midst of a ceiling crashing down and a floor splitting apart, I stared directly into its enormous red eyes, kicked off the air with all my strength, and leaped.
The shattered fragments of space became my footholds.
“Don’t get cocky just because you refuse to die. All seven of those bastards groveled miserably at my feet too.”
Wooduk. Kwajik!
I drew every last drop of the evolved black mana of Death into my crumbling right arm. The sticky, heavy black current merged with the ash-gray smoke and coalesced upon the dagger’s blade into a house-sized spear of terrifying energy. This was my final strike, forged by wringing out even my soul.
Taat—!
I corroded and erased the whale’s barriers of Creation mana in a single breath and drove my body straight down toward its massive face.
Kwaaaaaaaaaaaang—!
The instant my strike of black Death slammed accurately into the whale’s skull, the entire space flipped white and a deafening roar erupted. Its boasted steel-like black scales crumbled like dead leaves and scattered. Through the gaps, dark-red blood gushed out like a waterfall, dyeing my face and body pitch black. The aura of Death that had flowed into its body began rotting and crushing the immense mana core of Creation in real time. Its organs were melting from the inside out in a horrific tragedy.
The Black Whale’s once-mighty roar had become a pitiful, miserable groan. Its colossal body that had covered an entire continent was now brutally shredded by my stubborn hunting technique. It lost all balance and began plummeting toward the bottom of the void. Its red eyes no longer held arrogance—only deep fear and the light of ruin. This was the fall of absolute authority.
Plop.
The Black Whale crashed pathetically onto the giant stone floor. It could no longer detonate its power of Creation. It simply trembled, spilling black blood in every direction. It was in a state of perfect, imminent death. The colossal monster that had been the sole ruler of this world and the unmoving sky had been reduced to nothing more than miserable prey, gasping helplessly at my feet, waiting for its final moment.
The surrounding Void could not endure the reckless clash of two beings and was being torn to shreds, racing toward the final curtain of total collapse.
I twisted the pitch-black dagger dripping with blood and walked slowly toward the whale’s massive, gasping form slumped on the ground. My internal organs were twisted, my breath caught in my throat, and every bone felt ready to snap, yet my eyes burned with a cruel tenacity more ferocious than ever—the determination to end this damned world once and for all.
With every step, the stone beneath my feet turned to powder and scattered.
“I will kill you and go home.”
Wooduk. Kwajik!
I wrung out the last of my mana to its absolute limit and raised the dagger toward the whale’s enormous nape. The preparations to sever the breath of that giant sky along with this collapsing world were now complete. The cold black current of my blade reflected coldly in the whale’s dimming eyes.