Then You'll Die
Then I would die.
There was no need for words.
I had deliberately left his strike unanswered to face the Sword God head-on, and I hadn't interfered with his transfer to the next kingdom, either.
Thrung.
And the same went for the Sword God.
The spear twisted.
At the same instant, the sword moved.
The divinity dwelling in the White Savior roared out, and a storm reminiscent of a dragon's roar tore across the battlefield.
"Whoa, what the hell…"
Thirty of those storms, no less.
The gale swept Uriel—cursing and stumbling in disbelief—clean off her feet, then hurled the knights and residents standing at a distance far beyond the blast radius.
I had evacuated them in advance, but many were still well within the attack's range.
As the storm swallowed the entire area, the Sword God drew a violet line across the world.
Skagagagagak…!
The storm was sheared apart.
The severed storm burst apart like a shockwave, but the Sword God's purple eyes flared, and the shockwave simply ceased to exist.
Absorption?
"Not bad."
Chwek. The Sword God shifted his stance, and the very air of the area changed.
And I didn't mean that as a mere feeling.
There's something in that sword.
Like Vlack's Dark Field, it was a technique that laid a debuff over the entire surroundings.
The only difference was that the Sword God's debuff far surpassed Vlack's.
Hwoong!
A slow sword strike aimed at my neck.
Slow—yet still more than fast enough to take my head off.
That sword art, which ignored all principles, landed squarely on my throat, and—
Kaaang—!
"…!"
Blinding white divinity flared, forcing the Sword God's blade back.
Watching his sword tremble faintly, the Sword God's eyes wavered.
Peeik!
Even wrapped in two layers of divinity, my neck had been cut—barely, shallowly, but cut.
This wasn't like the Mock Siege, where abilities were reduced across the board. He had wounded me at full strength.
Through my divinity, no less.
Kwarururuk…!!
Eye of the Spear.
The storm of an authority created by Rushala, the Angel of the Azure Sky.
Everything was drawn into the spear.
The surrounding air, dust, objects, mana—all of it converged on a single point.
Even the violet demonic power coiling around the Sword God was no exception.
Faced with a maelstrom incomparably fiercer than the Spear's Roar, the Sword God tightened his grip on his sword.
In his current state, swinging it at all was a struggle.
Even if he managed it, the odds were high he'd simply be dragged into that storm.
The Sword God let out a breath.
"Impressive."
"…?"
"I'm not talking to you."
His opponent was a match for the Eight Blades.
"To think you'd fight without sacrificing a single thing."
He murmured those words, disregarded the storm entirely, and poured everything into his sword.
The storm raged harder, as if mocking him for it, but even as he was battered by its wake, his focus never broke.
Blood soaked his hand into the blade, and his violet eyes began to radiate something they hadn't before.
Tididik…
Cracks began to spread across the sword.
At a glance, it looked like nothing more than a blade about to shatter.
Padeudeudeuk…
But I noticed something wrong and leveled my spear.
…That's.
The cracking sword exploded into fragments.
"Berd. Unleash."
PUWAAAAAAAK!!!
Thick magi—demonic energy—howled up and swallowed the castle whole.
"What is that!"
"A new ability from the Sword God?! The entire castle was covered in a purple night sky in an instant!"
The casters and commentators were doing their best to broadcast through the chaos.
In a normal siege war, several war declarations would break out early on, and the casters would cover the major matchups one by one.
But this siege was different.
The moment it began, the Empire had declared war across the entire continent.
With overwhelming numbers and military might, the Empire had begun storming castle after castle.
Even that alone defied belief—but the real problem was that Leo and the Sword God, neither of whom had ever once participated in a siege, had joined it.
The Sword God had literally torn the Angel Guild's castle in half, and Leo had erased Black Moon from the map with a Spirit Descent that channeled not one but two elements simultaneously.
With the situation spiraling this far out of control, even the seasoned, capable commentary team was beginning to panic—when a single screen caught their eye.
Lily and the Sword God.
The clash between the two names that had been on everyone's lips lately had finally gone live.
"While battles rage across every corner of the continent, the Sword God and Lily! The fight between these two has entered a brief lull!"
"It's a clash between the two strongest players in the game, so even those of us broadcasting through the screen are having trouble keeping up. Still, from what we've seen so far, Lily seems to hold a slight edge…"
"No."
Aisha was staring at the Sword God, wrapped in violet darkness on the screen.
What I faced directly was only a 'fragment' of him, but…
The way he looked now.
It matched, exactly, the figure that had once utterly crushed her.
And now he had grown incomparably stronger than back then.
"The Sword God in that state is invincible. He absolutely cannot lose. No matter how strong Lily is, I don't think she can win."
Conviction.
With eyes brimming with certainty, Aisha fixed her gaze on the screen.
Under the sheer intensity of her stare, Rakl and Kim Yong-woo couldn't bring themselves to argue.
No—they couldn't argue.
It was true that Lily had the upper hand so far. But the Sword God was, by every measure, the number one player in DeoEn.
From the moment the ranking system launched, the Sword God had held first place, and he held it still.
No matter how formidable a new challenger Lily might be, the prestige of a reigning strongest was not something easily overturned.
"…But! We should still look forward to Lily's performance! Judging by everything we've seen so far, there's more than enough possibility there!"
"That's fair. But ultimately, victory will—"
That was as far as Aisha got before she could say —likely belong to the Sword God.
The staff filming the broadcast were just about to pull her aside and ask her to be a little more careful with her words.
After all, even if they'd brought her in as a special commentator who knew the Sword God better than anyone, leaning that hard toward one side wouldn't look good.
PAAAAAANG!!!
But they had no choice but to stop talking.
In the depths of the heavy darkness, Lily—wings of light flaring wide—soared upward with a snow-white hammer raised high.
Magi. Demonic energy.
Like divinity, it was one of the most vicious breeds of power in existence, and its defining trait was that it imbued every spell with a transcendent multiplier.
Say, for example, you cast Fireball.
Ordinary mana would summon a plain ball of flame.
Somewhat superior mana would summon a fireball the size of a boulder.
A dragon's mana could summon one the size of a hill—and divinity, a fireball several times larger than a dragon itself.
And magi?
For a mere Fireball?
A Fireball built from magi summoned a meteor.
A colossal inferno capable of wiping an entire kingdom off the map.
That was why I hated the demons as much as I hated the celestials.
It was true of the celestials too, but once a demon showed up, the world was left in ruins.
Devastated so thoroughly that nothing could ever grow back.
"Magi…"
I frowned as I felt the thick demonic energy blanketing the area.
It wasn't from a true demon, of course.
And it most certainly wasn't from a mid-tier demon or above.
I looked at the shattered sword, barely holding together in a half-translucent form.
It's that sword.
The Sword God was using a blade imbued with the power of a 'demon'.
There was nothing strange about that.
In the past, whenever demons revealed themselves, they would scatter their magi carelessly like seed, and countless races—humans included—would scavenge the leftovers and put them to use.
The noble daughter known as the Bluebird had done the same, and so had the countless 'Fallen' who came after her.
But they had never been able to use power beyond their limit.
The moment they did, they would either rampage out of control or be devoured by the magi outright, losing their sanity and turning into monsters.
Some had their bodies and souls melted away entirely.
Yet the Sword God, drawing on power far beyond any human limit, showed no such symptoms at all.
"Hoo… This feeling is as strange as ever."
His mind looked perfectly sound, too.
His soul is intact as well… This is too much to be the system's protection.
Gabriel's divinity was refined to a state wholly different from ordinary divinity—but the Sword God's magi was magi, pure and undiluted.
An ordinary human soul could never withstand that power.
PAAAANG!
"…!"
I spread my wings of light and shot skyward.
The thick magi covering the castle coiled around me, but it didn't matter.
Scattered dregs like this couldn't hold back my divinity once my wings were open.
Shifting the White Savior from spear to hammer, I thought:
The Sword God was, without question, human.
When I had looked into his soul, there had been no trace of demon blood, nothing special he'd been born with.
Which left only one possibility.
He received outside help.
Help from someone versed enough in magi to teach him how to control it.
"…I'll know once I check, I suppose."
The divinity-wreathed hammer came down on the Sword God—and struck him dead center.
Kagagagak…!!
"Hoo…"
He blocked it.
And that was with me putting real force behind it.
The Sword God, having caught my hammer in a swirl of burning magi, drove his back foot hard into the ground and glared up at me.
"Come at me with everything. Lily Elbrit."
"Do you really want that?"
Hwuk.
KWADUDUDUDUDEUK!!!
"Then you'll die."