Why Do You Get to Decide the Outcome?
"Why do you get to decide how this ends? Unbelievable."
The Blood Lord had predicted the outcome of the fight as if he had already taken the full measure of Yujun's strength, and proposed they make peace. It was baffling.
Is he reading the future?
That didn't seem to be it, no matter how he looked. The Blood Lord simply wanted to avoid a battle that would cost him dearly. Naturally, Yujun did not accept Marcus's offer. He drew his sword and kicked off the ground—an answer given in action.
Marcus clicked his tongue.
"Foolish human! Do you truly wish to see blood?!"
"Yeah. Just not mine."
Yujun had no intention of letting the fight drag on. Blood mist closed in around him, and even with a shield raised, his skin prickled.
The shield's fine... so it's passing straight through?
A cheat of an ability. Had his defense not stood as high as it did, his body would have melted long ago. As it was, his skin had only flushed a heated red.
What kind of body is that?
Marcus stared at Yujun, standing there as if nothing were wrong, and his face went blank with disbelief. Directly exposed to the blood mist, and still that whole—and the man wasn't even under his blood's dominion. Only now did he understand why Yujun had walked in so fearlessly.
He had something to lean on.
Marcus's expression tightened with urgency. A powerful area skill failing to land meant the man's defense, or his magic resistance, was considerable, and he was a poor match against that sort of opponent.
And none of my strongest vassals are anywhere near Sky Prison right now...
He hastily unleashed magic fused with his blood arts to bar the way. Shwaaaak! Chak! And still Yujun closed in, little by little. There was nothing his sword could not cut. Drawing even on the five blades floating in the air, he dismantled Marcus's blood magic completely.
Marcus could hardly believe it. Had anyone ever shut his magic down this easily? Even when the celestials from Heaven had subdued him, he had killed more than a hundred of them—and that only after a battle that ran past twenty hours. A little more time to recover, and he could have slaughtered every celestial on that field. But his magic would not take on this human. Blood magic that flashed in an inch from his brow was cut apart without any real effort, and whatever touched that sword was extinguished without fail.
Before he knew it, the two of them were close enough to see the fine down on each other's faces. Marcus's desperation reached its peak.
"Human! I shall yield two of my vassals to you! Among those I keep, there are even curs stronger than I. Accept my offer, and you will not regret it!"
"You've got vassals stronger than you?"
"Indeed."
"That does tempt me a little..."
"Oho—doesn't it?"
Marcus brightened visibly. Where had that first imposing air gone? He was smiling as brightly as an innocent. Yujun answered with a line meant to snuff it out.
"Don't need them, actually."
"...What?"
To end the fight in a single stroke, he activated Super Concentration.
Can't see the grain.
He could feel that the Blood Lord was no easy opponent. Most foes had a grain he could read. On the Blood Lord, it was hard to find—no, not hard. It wasn't there at all. The Eagle Eye Scouter might have shown him something if he put it on, but he had no need to find the grain. Killing the Blood Lord was not the goal. He had meant to, at first, but he had changed his mind partway through.
He called on Absolute Weapon, and drew up a massive surge of Chaos. Sword Unity on top of that. Stacking so many abilities at once would ordinarily scatter one's focus, but Yujun had Super Concentration active, and this much could hardly be called overreaching. He could not hold the state for long, of course. It didn't matter. He only had to finish before it broke.
He did not cast Space Domination. The Blood Lord's magic and his own Ancient Magic sat at roughly the same level, and mixing spells in carelessly would only buy the man time. His main strength wasn't magic anyway. It was the sword.
Shk. Thk. He carved Marcus apart with a blade steeped in Chaos. Marcus slipped free on evasion magic, but Yujun stuck to him and would not let up. Even that tremendous regeneration lost its former bite once Chaos kept seeping into the body.
"Guhk—!"
Yujun did not forget Painful Strike, working it in whenever a gap opened.
This one's holding up.
Feed most things this much Chaos and they would have dropped. The Blood Lord kept trying to flee to the end, blood pouring off him. His misfortune was simple: Yujun ran faster than Blink. No matter how much ground Marcus opened, Yujun clung to him like a ghost and fought in close. Even so, the Blood Lord endured with a persistence that was almost sickening.
So this is why the celestials couldn't kill him, and locked him away.
A worry crept in—what if the man simply dropped dead at some point? There was something he wanted to try on the Blood Lord. If he died, that would be a problem. Yujun went past simply hammering him, and began metering his strength so Marcus would not die. Impossible unless the gap in skill was vast—but Yujun's swordsmanship sat several stages above Marcus's power. That was why Marcus could not answer him, and was desperate merely to dodge.
"I have stronger vassals, I tell you!"
Marcus cried out as if in agony, and Yujun frowned.
"Still talking nonsense."
If he could still say things like that, he hadn't been driven to death's door. To finish it cleanly, Yujun used Flash and stepped in front of him.
In that instant, Marcus played the hidden card he had been preparing in secret—a technique that burst his own body, packed with highly toxic blood, into an explosion. Tremendous power, but using it would leave Marcus himself incapacitated for some time. The drawback was plain, and still he wore a smile of triumph. A perfect chance. Perfect timing. He would have to devote himself to recovery for a while, but he was satisfied the self-destruction had landed true.
KRA-KOOM!
A tremendous explosion blanketed the ground around them.
What?
Marcus's eyes flew wide. The human who had closed in with Flash was gone. Vanishing again the instant after using Flash should have been impossible—a man erased without a trace. He had not been ground to powder in the blast. No player with defense that frail would have lasted this far. Far from frail, his defense was higher than that of any player Marcus had ever met. And if he could not be seen...
Marcus spun, hastily throwing up a shield.
KRAK!
Five layers of shield shattered the instant the sword touched them, and the blade drove into Marcus's right side.
"Hhk..."
It was the right of his chest, so the heart had not been pierced—but Blood Lord Marcus dropped to his knees all the same. Strength would not enter his body. He had taken in more Chaos than his flesh was permitted to bear. An immense quantity of it had been driven into him, and regeneration was no longer possible. It might not be permanent, but the state would likely hold for some time.
Marcus looked up, despair written across his face. Yujun stood in his sight, smiling, a single orb in his hand.
"Wh-what do you intend to do to me?"
"I'm not going to kill you."
A sense of ill omen struck the Blood Lord, and he tried to move however he could. His body would not budge, as if something had bound it. Space Domination had locked him down tight. Under ordinary circumstances the spell would never have worked on him, but the Blood Lord had already been steeped in more Chaos than he could withstand. He could not begin to answer Yujun's magic.
"In you go, for now."
The orb in his hand was, of course, the Absolute Sealing Orb. Just as with Balrog, Yujun meant to seal the Blood Lord inside it—and, once he had tamed him properly, to work him like a summon. That was part of why he had refused Marcus's offer out of hand. He wanted the man himself, not a handover of vassals. Command him freely, and the vassals would come along with him.
The question is whether I can tame him...
Used well, the Absolute Sealing Orb seemed as if it might make it possible. If not, he could always kill him later. The orb happened to have one seat empty. After he had killed someone whose name he could no longer even recall, a single slot had sat vacant, and the Blood Lord was precisely the powerful existence to fill it. He was moving the man in without so much as asking, but the Blood Lord might unexpectedly find the accommodations to his liking.
"Rest easy."
"W-wait...!"
As the Blood Lord cried out in a cracked voice, blinding light burst from the Absolute Sealing Orb. The radiance washed over Marcus's body, and the seal completed.
Fist closed around the orb, Yujun did not skip the line that ceremony required.
"..."
"..."
Peace arrived in an instant—a stillness tight enough to choke on. In truth, the explosions that had been roaring all this while had come from Yujun batting aside Marcus's magic. All that noise had been the two of them.
Yujun scratched his head, sheathed his sword, and turned away. His business in Sky Prison was done.
Kill the Blood Lord, and the experience would be considerable.
But that was something only people who couldn't see past their own noses would do. The Blood Lord's vassals—if they truly were stronger than he was, as he had claimed, or even merely his equal, it would be as good as gaining a formidable force. Assuming, of course, that he tamed the Blood Lord properly. Breaking a man that proud, one who had lived through ages, would be exceedingly difficult. Harder even than keeping Balrog from putting a knife in his back.
Somehow, he had subdued the Blood Lord before even receiving the Synchronization Marble he had been promised. He wasn't worried about missing the reward. He had subdued him, in the literal sense. Not killed him. If it came to it—if the guards refused to hand over the Synchronization Marble—he could simply summon the Blood Lord again.
He flew toward the guards, who stood well back. They flinched and tried to widen the distance, then let out breaths of relief once they saw that the Blood Lord had vanished completely. The warden of Sky Prison stepped forward.
"You slew the Blood Lord?"
"You can see for yourself."
"Then where is the corpse?"
"Gone without a trace."
"..."
Yujun did not tell the truth. There was nothing to gain from admitting the Blood Lord was alive, and sealed.
"I kept my end of it. Now it's yours. The Synchronization Marble first. Where's that guard?"