Chapter 397: The Demon God Worshipper Cult
Bishop Shomain barely survived Harp's Breath, slipping clear of it with Blink. Harp had aimed the attack squarely at him, and it had been a truly hair-raising moment — but he had not become a bishop on luck alone. He had read the unnatural shift in the air and already had a spell prepared.
Had he died as well, the Demon God Worshippers' morale would have collapsed outright. In truth, the scene already differed little from a house of mourning choked with wailing... and yet.
Bishop Shomain sank into thought. With their forces already cut in half, facing Shin Yujun was all but impossible.
"We retreat."
"What? Bishop, what are you—"
"We have to preserve as much of our strength as we can. Fighting like idiots here only makes things easier for him. And didn't you hear the orders that came down? They told us to avoid engaging him if we could help it."
"...Understood."
His personal paladin bowed his head low and passed the order to retreat along to every believer. And so the Demon God Worshippers were forced to withdraw without so much as a proper word exchanged with the Guardians of Balance.
The Guardians' players could only stare, dumbfounded, at the Worshippers' backs as they receded like an ebbing tide after a single Breath. They were stuck, unable to move either way — their leader, Jacob, was all but a hostage.
"Jacob. Was it the Demon God who destroyed the planet you came from?"
"No."
"Then what?"
"A Demon Dragon. It had lived for nearly ten thousand years, then went berserk and turned the whole continent into a wasteland."
"A Demon Dragon? Different from an ordinary dragon?"
"It is a dragon. Just a fouler-tempered, far more destructive one than the rest."
"Your world ended because of a single dragon?"
"Not a mere dragon. He was no ordinary dragon. His very existence was a calamity, and even a light breath from him could erase a mountain. A dragon of an entirely different order."
It did not sound like a lie. There was no reason to lie, and no need, so Yujun believed him.
The Demon God, and a Demon Dragon. He had never seen either with his own eyes, and if he had to guess, the Demon God was surely the stronger of the two — but nothing was certain. Who was to say a dragon at its peak might not rival a god?
Yujun summoned Paranet and Tapagol.
"You two go make trouble for the Demon God Worshippers."
"Shall we simply kill them all, Master?"
"There's a bishop mixed in among them, so it may be rough. But the two of you can come back from the dead, so don't hold anything back. Be as much of a nuisance as you can."
"Understood!"
"Leave it to us."
The pair shoved to get ahead of each other, as if they were competing. When Tapagol's short legs began costing him speed against Paranet, he went so far as to use Gigantification. His feet struck the earth — boom, boom, boom — and every impact sent a tremendous shock rolling through the area. The vibration was violent enough to jolt the bodies of the players near the temple.
"Wh-what is that?"
"Too big to be a giant, or even a titan."
"It's obviously a golem."
"Doesn't look like one made of dirt and rock, though. To be running around at that weight..."
"Isn't that bigger than the Elizabeth Tower?"
Tapagol's appearance was more than enough to shock the British. It overflowed the measure. All the while, Yujun's sword was still leveled at Jacob's neck.
"Why did you form the Guardians of Balance?"
"Planning to take everything, I see."
"I'm not asking you for items."
"I'd have felt easier if you'd simply asked for items."
"Then hand them over. The items."
"..."
"And is there anyone here carrying a Synchronization Marble? If there is, I'll let you go right now."
He studied the faces of the Guardians of Balance. Not a single one of them seemed to know what a Synchronization Marble even was.
Figures. A Synchronization Marble is something tied to me.
If they had existed in other dimensions as well, that would have been a real problem. Unless the marbles were infinite in number, he might have had to cross over and hunt for them there.
I'm only at 120 percent... There ought to be enough out there to reach at least 150.
Getting that far would take fifteen of them at minimum, and the prospect was utterly bleak. A Synchronization Marble was something even a Great Merchant struggled to obtain. The fact that he still had not heard from the Great Merchants in Heaven told him this was not an item one could force into being simply by seeking it.
"Jacob. You don't have one either?"
"No. I've no idea what it even is — so could you let me go now? The Demon God Worshippers have left."
"No. That doesn't matter."
Who knew when a chance like this would come again? They were British, and they had come from another dimension. If he obligingly sent them on their way now, only for the Demon God Worshippers to wipe them out, every scrap of information locked in their heads would fly straight off to heaven.
Not to America.
After that, Yujun pressed them with question after question about the planet they had come from, and Jacob — who very much wanted to live — spilled it all without resistance. The planet was destroyed anyway. There was no reason to lie.
What did grate, though, was that thousands of people were being held in place by a single player whose identity they did not even know. Jacob, of all people, was the leader who commanded them: the head of an organization, his life threatened by an enemy, answering every question on the spot. A pathetic display. To the players of the Guardians of Balance, it was a sight that made the brow crease.
"Can't we just kill him? He's only one guy."
"The leader's in danger."
"He'll survive on his own. Since when have we fought while fretting over Jacob's life?"
"Fair point..."
They were clenched together only because they had just set foot on strange ground. In truth, they had almost no unity to speak of. They were nothing more than the players who had survived to the end, gathered up and brought across; not all of them even shared the same will. The Guardians of Balance were built so that the cracks could only widen with time. New players might yet join, drawn by the formidable power the group itself possessed — but that was still premature talk.
"This is pathetic. Seriously, what are we doing?"
"Let's just kill him."
A few of the more hot-tempered players began preparing magic. There were spells every bit as covert as assassination, and they cast only those, so Yujun would not notice. Dozens of non-attribute spells came flying in from behind him. A shield that had appeared at some point stopped them cold. The blasts were deafening, but the shield did not break. It held firm.
"...W-wait. Did I see that wrong?"
"One shield stopped our magic?"
"Forget that — was he a mage? Doesn't look like he used an item."
"A magic swordsman, then."
It was a difficult road, but a magic swordsman who reached the peak was repaid for every hardship along the way. One did not even have to use a sword. Anyone skilled in magic who also wielded a melee weapon was called a magic swordsman.
"Weren't the players around here supposed to be weak?"
"From what we looked into, yes..."
"Is he the same sort as Jacob?"
"Not the same. Jacob lost."
"Calling it a loss is a stretch. He just got ambushed."
"He failed to answer the ambush, so he lost. That's what it means."
"Does it?"
The first attempt had ended in failure, but true to veterans of reversal after reversal, they did not know the meaning of giving up. Now they began pouring magic at Yujun in the open. Their leader stood directly in front of him, and still they did not hesitate.
Survive on your own. That was their motto, and they granted no special consideration even to the man who led them. Jacob expected none. If anything, he was grateful, and he watched only for a chance to slip free of that keen-edged sword.
But even as spell after spell came screaming in, Yujun's blade did not so much as twitch. A tremendous explosion shook the whole temple district, and Yujun simply stood where he was and endured. Just in case, he had layered ten shields atop one another. Maintaining ten extraordinarily sturdy shields at once devoured an enormous amount of mana — roughly as much as the rate at which his mana refilled. In short, it was not straining him in the slightest.
Whether the Guardians of Balance knew that or not, they kept dumping magic on him. In reality, only the mana of the players casting the spells was being spent. They had judged that, many against one, Yujun's mana would run dry first. Holding a shield alone consumed a considerable amount, and repairing one on top of that burned mana at an exponential rate. Their judgment was common sense. Yujun was not a man who could be measured by common sense.
The bombardment went on for nearly three minutes. As the players' mana neared the bottom, the smoke finally cleared, and the Yujun it revealed looked utterly at ease. There was not so much as an ordinary crack in the shield, and the sword was still leveled at Jacob's neck.
"Insane."
"No... is that even possible?"
Nearly a thousand mages, each with real skill, had concentrated their fire on him, and nothing had changed? No matter how vast one's mana, this was too much. Mages who understood the limits of a shield all too well found it even harder to accept.
"Does he have a mana fuel tank or something?"
"A tank? You'd have to drain every drop of mana on the continent for something like this to be possible."
"Ha... honestly."
Yujun looked at Jacob with eyes that held no feeling at all. Jacob flinched.
"Looks like your men's attack is finished. I can take that to mean it's my turn now, yes?"
"...I'll apologize in their place. I'm sorry. We've got too many hotheads... A few of them were actual hooligans."
"I'll leave it at this, out of respect for your dignity. In exchange..."
Through Sword Unity, Yujun materialized forty swords in the empty air. Brimming with mana, they hung there a moment, then flew toward the players of the Guardians of Balance. Startled, the players threw up shields, and the swords tore through them like paper. The blades that punched through, however, did not strike the players themselves. They only skimmed past, ruining equipment.
The control was exquisite. All forty swords moved with a vitality, as if each one were alive. They closed in as though to take heads, then wheeled away in open mockery, again and again. It was toying with them, plain and simple. After playing with them like that for a while, Yujun abruptly drew the swords back. They shot into the sky, then flew all at once toward where he stood — a sight spectacular enough to call fighter jets in an aerobatic display to mind.
It was acrobatics put on for show, blatant as could be. And yet those swords, flying in such orderly ranks, had only moments ago come within a breath of taking their lives. Not a single person present could laugh it off.
Yujun released Sword Unity and left without another word.
"..."
"..."
Even after he was gone, the players of the Guardians of Balance were silent for a long while. A heavy air seemed to press down over the whole area.
"...Who the hell is he?"
"Shin Yujun, they say. Supposedly the strongest player on this continent."
"Even so..."
"He's famous. I knew the face and the name, but seeing him in person, he's even more untouchable."
"If he's that famous, why didn't we know about him?"
"Right?"
"Want me to tell you something wild? I'm not sure it's true, but they say that man has only been a player for a year."
"Has to be a lie. That doesn't make any sense."
"Everyone on this continent seems to think so. It's been less than half a year since he first showed himself at a low level, and they say there's actual footage of it."
"..."
"Shut up. Don't rattle me with nonsense like that."
Jacob, who had been listening, hardened his face and spoke low, and the player who had offered the information scratched his head.
"R-right? I figured I might have looked into it wrong, so I was going to check again."
A man who had thoroughly ground the pride of the once-supremely confident Guardians of Balance into the dirt. In their minds, the existence known as Shin Yujun was carved in deep.