Chapter 448
Chapter 448
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 448
Chapter Title: Mental Armament (3)
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The moment the aura of death vanished, the Forcemeter returned Zulu and Gangnan to their original spacetime.
Gangnan stared blankly at the ice field, now devoid of darkness.
Only Gauld was still there, his shoulders heaving as he gasped for breath.
'Foolish human.'
Even she, his constant companion, couldn't have predicted such a surge in Gauld's power.
It wasn't from any special training or newfound enlightenment.
It was Miro, whom he was about to meet after twenty years.
The closer he drew to her time and space, the greater his capacity for pain grew, expanding exponentially.
That was precisely what worried Gangnan.
Even if Gauld had surpassed the limits of pain through a self-redeeming mutation, a living being's endurance was not infinite.
Just like that day fifteen years ago, when Gauld first fell into the Great Scorching Hell.
"What in the world are you trying to do...!"
"It's not over yet."
The moment Gangnan approached, Gauld spoke.
As if it had been waiting, darkness surged from beneath the ice field once more, reforming Hel's shape.
'An intangible entity.'
In the world Gauld came from, ghosts were a prime example.
Beings that straddled the line between the mental and the material. In their mental state, they were immune to physical influence and could exert none themselves.
But in their material state, they could exert physical force and be subjected to it in turn.
Hel, too, had escaped the crisis by shifting from a material to a mental state just before Gauld's Air Pressing could crush its body.
It was a tricky ability for a human to face, but for Hel, the ruler of Niflheim, it was a blow to its pride.
Hwoooooo!
Hel's hollow pupils spun like vortexes, pulling Gauld into the depths of the abyss.
The world was plunged into darkness once more, and the life-or-death struggle between the one who could not die and the one who would not die began.
Air magic at 500,000 times the normal sense of pain had already transcended the realm of the atmospheric element.
The air bullets from his Air Gun fired at an incredible speed.
Despite it being rapid fire, holes simultaneously riddled Hel's torso as if it had been hit by a shotgun blast.
The tattered Hel surged toward Gauld.
"Human! I will scatter your ashes upon the despicable corpse of Miro!"
"Krrruuugh!"
Hel's taunt backfired.
Hundreds of wrinkles creased Gauld's contorted face, and hot steam hissed from between his clenched teeth.
Gauld's ultimate perseverance, the Great Scorching Hell, unfolded.
In a space as dark as the night sky, flames of decay surged, and the souls of the dead, the screams of ghouls, and extremes of cold and heat began to mix in a chaotic mess.
Even Hel, the ruler of the dead, could only fall silent before the powerful perseverance Gauld emanated.
'Does such a human exist?'
Hel immediately corrected its thought.
'No, is he truly human?'
Pain at 500,000 times the normal level.
No one could imagine the hell Gauld was experiencing.
No one could even begin to fathom it.
But for Gauld, that was his only reality.
'Miro...'
No matter how excruciating the pain, he would not die.
'Miro.'
The reason didn't matter.
On that day twenty years ago, the day he had to watch helplessly as Miro was dragged away, Gauld had given up on being any kind of existence.
Countless shocks had tangled his memories, but amidst the confusion, the one thing he never forgot for even a moment was Miro's voice.
-Because you're weak.
The Twenty judged her. The whole world pleaded desperately. And Miro walked into Istas of her own accord.
But the only fact Gauld knew, the truth, was Miro's voice when he met her on the eve of the Judgment of the Twenty.
-When you can't do anything for me!
Tears of blood streamed from beneath Gauld's upturned, bloodshot eyes.
'Miro!'
One million times the pain—Air Pressing.
Hel was crushed with a *pop*, then reformed in mid-air.
If its shift to a mental state had been even a moment later, it would have been annihilated.
A look of confusion flickered across Hel's face, which looked as if its soul was about to escape.
It wished Gauld would die.
It was the first time since its existence began that it had so desperately wished for someone's death.
'Am I afraid?'
The ruler of the dead feels no fear of death. Therefore, what Hel felt was the terror of endless acceleration.
Gauld's limitless perseverance was like being on a rail that seemed to accelerate forever, without end.
"Kieeeeeeeeh!"
As Hel unleashed its full power, all manner of dead souls appeared, trailing tails of black smoke as they drifted through the air.
Spotting the dead souls surging toward the ground, Gangnan and Zulu scattered in different directions.
They could have defended with the Forcemeter, but due to the nature of the spacetime bird, displacing something for three seconds required exerting an omniscience equivalent to nearly four years in real-time.
Even for Zulu, a master of summoning magic, the spell consumed over thirty percent of his mental energy, and he could currently only use it once.
Using it now was not a wise decision if they were to save it for a critical moment.
"Kugh!"
Gangnan raised her arms and curled into a ball as the dead souls' attacks tore through the space like a vortex.
Each time their claws raked across her, black scars were etched into her skin.
Her body, trained for a lifetime, attempted to counterattack, but her strikes passed harmlessly through the bodies of the dead souls that had returned to their mental state.
'Offense and defense must be simultaneous. Is the only chance when the enemy attacks?'
Having grasped a strategy, Gangnan took a Ram Muay stance.
Between her arms, held up like the number 11, her sharp gaze pierced the enemy.
Hooooooo!
The moment the dead souls attacked, her body moved.
Each time her attacks, which traveled the shortest distance in a straight line, landed, the black smoke of the dead souls shattered into pieces.
Further away, Zulu had summoned a giant earthworm, an Odd Worm, and was sucking in the dead souls that were in their material state.
The mindless dead souls did not give up, but as their numbers dwindled, the view gradually began to clear.
"Where's Gauld?"
He was in the sky. And his face had become so grotesque it was hard to tell who the ruler of the dead was anymore.
Life and death, perseverance and despair, clashed in the heavens.
"Annoying...!"
Gauld's Great Scorching Hell expanded to an unprecedented scale, stretching beyond Hel's darkness.
Vacuum Press!
At that moment, Gauld's specialty move, one that had even compressed Ataraxia's Photon Cannon, was unleashed.
As the vast atmosphere compressed into a single point, Hel's entire body began to rapidly constrict.
'I can't escape?'
Despite having shifted to its mental state, Hel could not penetrate the power of the shrinking vacuum.
Perseverance.
Finally, Hel understood. It understood why it, the ruler of death, felt fear toward a mere human.
It was because Gauld was not afraid.
"Kieeeeeeeeeh!"
Hel continued to be compressed.
From a small sphere to an even smaller one, to a point, and finally, to nothingness...
The moment it was annihilated, Hel exploded, and the countless dead souls it contained scattered in all directions.
The roar they unleashed was powerful enough to spread throughout all of Niflheim, carrying an energy so potent it could kill any living creature that heard it.
Just as Gauld floated there, defenseless, Zulu and Gangnan arrived behind him and used the Forcemeter's ability to move all three of them to a different spacetime.
The roar spread out in ripples, compressing the air, and a perfect silence fell, like the eye of a typhoon.
Landing on the ice, Gauld lifted his head. And he heard the sound of the wind swirling in the transparent air.
-Even if you deny mortality, there is nothing you can hold onto forever. Go to Jebul. The despicable Miro is there. She will drive you to a true death.
It was the voice of the wind.
"..."
As everyone stood in silence, nearly a hundred Black Elixirs rained down from the empty air.
He didn't know how many Black Elixirs the Yamang had asked for, but they surely wouldn't have expected more than this.
No one in Purgatory could have gathered so many Black Elixirs.
Gauld did not smile.
At the end of the horrific pain, all that remained was the raw reality of being alive.
Some memories were erased, others remained, but what value did memories have if they couldn't be arranged chronologically?
Gauld threw all his memories into the trash bin of oblivion and turned away, once again clinging only to Miro.
This was how he had lived since that day twenty years ago.
"Pick them all up. We're going back."
Gauld turned with a cold demeanor and started walking.
Watching Gauld pass by, Gangnan bared her teeth.
It was a relief they had achieved their goal, but his reckless act of increasing his pain threshold could have jeopardized the entire project.
She couldn't stand by and watch any more of these brutish battles, devoid of any tactics or strategy.
"Wait. We can't go on like this...!"
As she turned with a fierce tone, Gauld's body staggered.
Gangnan, who had unconsciously taken a step forward, froze.
She couldn't hold him. No one could understand his pain.
He was a man who had walked alone like this for twenty years.
'Right. Whether we return alive or are buried here, we'll end it here.'
Gangnan made a vow. She would get Gauld there, no matter what it took.
* * *
Shirone integrated all the forces under the 2nd Rebel Command and immediately returned to the 1st Rebel Command.
Armin's group, having received permission to operate the munitions factory, was the first to return, followed by Gauld's party, who had delivered the Black Elixirs to the Yamang.
All three parties had perfectly completed their respective missions, but Shirone couldn't bring himself to smile.
Because upon his arrival, he had received shocking news.
The command center had already been annihilated.
The culprit who had massacred so many people was Babel, the metal angel whose seal Shirone had broken.
He couldn't bear to look Kanya and Lena in the face.
Clove and Gardlak, who died in the collapse of the 2nd Command, and now Kanya's father.
He felt as if all their deaths were his fault.
'But... I have to tell them.'
Shirone mustered his courage and headed to the room where the two were.
He had to confess, at least to them, that he was the one who had broken Babel's seal.
The sisters, who had managed a forced smile upon seeing Shirone, lost their expressions again at his subsequent confession.
Even after hearing the whole shocking truth, Kanya and Lena had no reaction.
Shirone couldn't tell if they were angry or if they didn't even have the energy to be angry anymore.
"I'm sorry. It's because of me. If only I hadn't broken Babel's seal... It's all my fault."
Lena couldn't hold it in any longer and burst into tears.
Honestly, she didn't know how to react.
Kanya's eyes flashed fiercely as she spoke.
"If Dad had been killed by a different angel, not Babel, would it not be your fault?"
Shirone couldn't answer.
"No, it's all your fault, Shirone. Every death that has happened in Heaven is your fault."
Kanya got off the bed and approached Shirone. Then, burying her face in his chest, she said,
"So, fight for us."
Shirone felt his chest grow damp.
"I... I couldn't do anything. Not even get revenge... I'm so powerless..."
In the end, Kanya too broke down sobbing.
Facing an enemy beyond imagination, what she had felt was that humans were nothing more than insignificant creatures.
But Shirone was different. And those who came with him were different too.
How could they be? How could they withstand such overwhelming immensity?
Shirone let out a long breath.
He had come to Heaven to meet Ikael, but that was no longer his only purpose.
"Let's go to Babel."