Chapter 128
Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 128
Chapter Title: Limbo (4)
As soon as Asma set foot in the hidden space where natural mana surged and twisted wildly, he released a black sphere from his fingertips, letting it drop to the floor as if easing the tension in them.
Before it could even make a crisp clack upon hitting the ground, the sphere melted into the floor like liquid and vanished without a trace.
Just like everyone else, Asma was fully subject to the constraints of this space. His mana was sealed away, and the natural mana had slipped beyond his control.
It was only natural. After all, he wasn't human.
But after spending ages preparing for this moment, he had at least one trump card ready to circumvent the bizarre side effects of this space.
And one of those was this black sphere.
Moments later, the sphere that had seeped into the floor began to vibrate quietly around that spot, unfurling a hemispherical barrier. The black barrier expanded rapidly, enveloping the surroundings.
The space where Asma stood was no exception.
Once the barrier fully took shape, Asma drew in a deep breath. His stifled breathing suddenly eased, flowing freely once more.
His distorted senses settled, and his sense of balance and imagery sharpened back to their original clarity.
And right then, a presence materialized before Asma's eyes.
From the moment Asma entered, dropped the sphere, and the barrier deployed... the entire sequence had unfolded in a fleeting instant too brief to even call a blink.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it had come the moment he arrived.
Short hair. A massive build.
Skin resembling human muscle structure, but faintly veined with purple along its contours.
A hulking silhouette so weighty that a single step seemed enough to make the space itself rumble.
It looked human-like, yet belonged to an entirely different race.
The Daon tribe.
Asma knew of it.
Or more precisely, he knew of the warden guarding this limbo—not the Daon tribe itself.
"You look like a pure martial brute at first glance."
Asma tossed out the casual greeting as if passing a stranger on the street, but the Daon tribe warden showed no interest in conversation.
He did have the look of someone naturally taciturn.
...Or maybe he didn't understand the imperial common tongue at all.
Asma fixed his gaze on the warden, gauging his reaction while probing his presence.
To the warden, Asma was an intruder, plain and simple.
What would happen here was obvious.
Soon, the purple hue of the warden's body began to shift.
His flesh flushed an intense crimson in an instant, like red-hot metal glowing in a forge.
Heat then began to rise from his entire form. At first, it spread like a gentle warmth through the still air, but it quickly warped into scorching waves that distorted the space itself, blanketing everything around them.
"Is this the Daon tribe trait of embodying attributes in the body?"
The warden responded to Asma's words with a short, curt question.
"You know me?"
"No."
Asma was currently in a human form polymorphed for easy travel.
Goat heads suddenly sprouted from both his shoulders.
They turned their heads toward the warden in unison, as if independent entities, their black eyes gleaming with eerie malice.
"Warmed up enough?"
Asma grinned as he spoke, though he was genuinely surprised.
This wasn't mere rising heat. The space itself was boiling and warping from the blaze.
The ground beneath his feet was already bubbling and softening into mush.
"..."
The stoic warden said nothing.
But in the next instant...
His form vanished from sight.
Asma sensed the scorching heat before his eyes could even register the movement.
The space boiled with heat first, and only then did Asma's head snap toward the source.
The warden was already right in front of him.
His crimson-forged muscles swelled for a split second, and a glowing red fist hurtled forward.
Asma made an instant judgment.
At this range, the goat-head magic manifesting from his shoulders couldn't block it.
His thoughts flashed like lightning, and another head burst from his solar plexus.
A long snout. Jagged teeth visible between torn lips. A head densely plated with scales, belonging to some being that was neither beast nor monster.
The moment that head clamped down on the warden's fist...
Boom!
A explosive crash rang out, shockwaves rippling outward.
Sssshhh—
Smoke billowed immediately from between the monster's scales.
Asma's human head—still attached to his neck, not the one from his chest—spoke up.
"...I don't like hot stuff. I prefer moist and fertile."
His voice hovered somewhere between amusement and murderous intent.
Even as he spoke, Asma was quite startled.
Despite his preparations against the heat, it had still caught him off guard.
As if to prove how extraordinary it was, massive flames roared up over the monster head that had bitten the warden's fist.
"Tch."
Asma clicked his tongue sharply and hurriedly pulled back.
A few shakes of the solar plexus head extinguished the flames clinging to its scales.
And the moment he retreated, the opposite fist came charging in as if lying in wait.
Asma had no choice but to fall back again.
Fast. Strong. Hot.
Simple, but the sheer destructive power of that simplicity exceeded Asma's expectations.
"Your raw power's about on par with Seiton."
"Seiton?"
"Yeah. A brute-force monster."
Asma had already grasped that this foe was no pushover.
Yet he hadn't lost his composure, and there was a clear reason for that.
He had come here knowing full well what to expect—including the presence of this Daon tribe warden.
If he'd encountered this brute strength out of nowhere, he might have panicked. But not now.
A prepared battle always unfolds differently.
To the warden's eyes, Asma might have looked desperate, scrambling backward.
But that moment didn't last.
The warden's ferocious charge halted abruptly.
For the first time, emotion flickered across the Daon tribesman's impassive face.
It was a look of confusion.
Asma's lips curled into a sly grin at the sight.
The two goat heads protruding from his shoulders hadn't taken their eyes off the warden even once.
Their effect had kicked in.
Asma knew this Daon tribe's weakness.
Of course, his Lord had informed him of it.
Asma had lived for ages himself, but the Daon tribe had vanished even longer ago.
According to his Lord, their weakness was the mind.
And mental magic was one of Asma's specialties.
The warden, whose face had been like unyielding stone, grimaced and dropped to one knee. His hands clutched at his eyes.
The ordeal Asma had shoved into his psyche was despair... and temptation.
Both were utterly novel, fragile stimuli for a warden who had spent eons in emotionless monotony here.
Asma kept his distance even as he watched the warden writhe in agony.
He had no intention of killing him... not yet.
The warden was the sole remaining overseer of this place.
No one could predict what changes or unforeseen chaos might erupt if he vanished.
Instead, Asma turned his gaze from the warden and scanned the surroundings.
Enough time had passed while tangling with him briefly. The darkness barrier he'd first deployed was steadily expanding, neutralizing the space's suppression.
All that remained was freeing the prisoners.
Asma raised his hand, and a long, sleek spear materialized above his palm. The black metal hummed, exuding an ominous aura.
Without hesitation, he slammed it into the ground.
Rumble.
The earth shuddered violently. The spear plunged deep in one thrust, and cracks spiderwebbed out from the point of impact.
Then the ground began to split open, like a colossal maw yawning wide.
"Come forth, prisoners."
Wings unfurled from Asma's back, lifting his body into the air.
Asma's eyes gazed down below.
His voice echoed through the pitch-black void emerging from the cleaved earth.
"You need not follow me. Just remember that the apostle who will save you has arrived here. Move as you will. Wherever that path leads, I shall await you there."
The space quaked, and the floor fully fractured—but this was merely the first layer of limbo pried open.
Then the second, the third...
And who knew how many more layers might lie beneath.
'First things first, kill the warden.'
With the first layer forcibly unsealed, there was no longer any reason to keep him alive.
In that brief moment as Asma turned to locate the warden...
A powerful premonition struck him.
Something was approaching.
Not the presence of prisoners rising from the opened first layer.
An overwhelming force barreling straight at him from somewhere in this very space.
In that split second, Asma's mind raced.
This was less judgment and more pure instinct.
...Run? Pull back and replan? The primary goal's already achieved anyway...
He had no intention of abandoning a plan this meticulously crafted so easily—especially after grand proclamations like that.
Yet the mere fact that such thoughts arose instinctively, that his primal senses screamed it, was significant.
How utterly overwhelming the approaching presence's power must be...
Asma decided to trust his instincts.
Time to run.
***
Even accounting for the shockwaves from a fierce clash, the distance was considerable.
Which went to show just how vast this space was—its boundaries impossible to gauge.
I was hurrying toward it with the Tower of Wisdom in tow.
"How are you so unscathed?"
"Because I'm human."
"...I see. Nothing to say to that."
He sounded exasperated, yet he pressed on.
"Was the creator of this place human, I wonder?"
"Weren't you theorizing it was Sephirot?"
"Who knows if Sephirot was human? Heroes are human too, after all."
From the way he spoke, the Tower of Wisdom had clearly never laid eyes on Sephirot in person.
Doubting whether they were even human suggested he'd only heard legends.
As those thoughts crossed my mind, a massive black barrier came into view.
I knew what it was.
It bore a striking resemblance to the black barrier I'd seen when I created a clone and it was abducted by the forces of evil.
And it was enormous.
I knew something had gone down, but had it already expanded this much?
There'd been no contact via manaphone on the way here. They must still be at a standoff.
At that moment, the ground roared with a massive boom and shook.
Cracks spread in an instant, right up to my feet.
And along those cracks, the earth began to split open.
An ominous phenomenon.
Even the Tower of Wisdom stopped joking around.
"Something's gone wrong, it seems."
"..."
His voice grew grave.
"Which way?"
I could feel his aura sharpening toward battle.
I pointed toward the center of the black barrier, and in the next breath, the Tower of Wisdom vanished from sight.