It Was Nothing Short of a Bombardment
It lacked nothing to be called a bombardment. Meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis—the whole catalog of natural disasters. A cataclysm that stood shoulder to shoulder with any force of nature, the sort that defied belief that a lone individual could have caused it. At the heart of a great metropolis swept clean and scorched into oblivion, a man stood completely naked, not a thread on his body. His icy gaze flashed as he leaped high into the night sky.
"......"
With Eun Ma-hyun’s leap, the utterly collapsed city beneath his feet returned to its original state. There was no visible process of restoration. It was as if every ounce of effort he had poured out until now had been rendered meaningless, every trace of his actions erased as though they had never occurred. The sight looked less like recovery and more like a rewriting of history. Only possible within a dream—Sloth arbitrarily twisting the world to her whims. Gazing at that majestic spectacle, Eun Ma-hyun swept his hand outward once more.
Destroy.
He repeated the cycle without end: breaking, shattering, destroying, smashing, then breaking again. He would continue until his opponent’s mana ran completely dry. Until they lost every last ounce of fuel needed to maintain the Inner World. Until the very moment his own concept severed their world.
If only I had my sword…
The process would have been far easier. But there was no time to lament what was gone. Right now he simply swung again. The formless blade wrapped in his grip, coiled with mana, thrust forward with all his strength.
Heaven Breaker.
The night sky shattered like fragments of glass. Unlike the usual crimson hue of most Inner Worlds, Sloth’s sky was indistinguishable from reality. Smashing through it, Eun Ma-hyun used the explosive force to leap even higher from mid-air, soaring all the way to the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere.
On a fluffy cloud—the sort anyone imagines lying on as a child—Sloth sprawled out lazily and called out in a carefree voice.
"Hey, how long are you going to keep that up? It’s so pointless."
"You’re not seriously thinking that if you reach the end of the sky you’ll escape the Inner World, are you? That would be ridiculous."
He had briefly considered it, but he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of hearing it. He had zero interest in casual conversation with an enemy.
Pride will be here soon.
Time was definitely not on his side. Honestly, he had already wasted far too much of it. Lasting even a moment against an Absolute Being could be considered a success. If Tenma was subdued by Thanatos, he would be next. The knowledge that Pride could appear at any second from anywhere kept his mind in a state of constant urgency.
Bang!
His body was sliced apart at the cellular level. Even though every nerve had been completely stripped away, the familiar pain still registered in full. His brain refused to adapt to the agony and would not permit his mind to break from it. The torture Pride had personally inflicted had carved a horrific trauma deep into Eun Ma-hyun’s psyche without him even realizing it.
Better to die than experience that pain again. With that thought burning in his mind, he raced across the sky, stepping on the tiny water droplets that formed the clouds. Crimson blood dripped steadily from his arms, falling toward the ground below. It was the backlash from a swordsman forced to fight bare-handed against an 8-star dark mage’s Inner World.
"No matter how hard you run, you’ll only end up back where you started," Sloth drawled. She had rolled over right beside him on the cloud, tumbling playfully as if to taunt him.
The moment Eun Ma-hyun blinked, the scenery warped. The cloud-filled sky vanished, replaced in an instant by the heart of the ruined metropolis.
"Sky or ground, it doesn’t really matter, but this view is way nicer than nothing but clouds, don’t you think?" Sloth said, rolling across the dirt with a mischievous grin. "You’re lucky. Even a superhuman would’ve been in serious pain falling from that height."
Eun Ma-hyun stared at her with frigid eyes, yet her face showed not the slightest trace of fear. She already knew the truth: she didn’t need to suppress him directly. All she had to do was buy time and victory was hers. That was why she could maintain such a consistently playful attitude even while facing an 8-star superhuman on equal footing. It also meant she still had a considerable amount of leeway left.
Slash!
Sloth’s head rolled as she tumbled across the ground. But that alone wasn’t enough to vent his rage. The severed head was minced into hundreds of tiny pieces. Brain matter and blood exploded in every direction.
No wonder Lust struggled against her.
Another layer of the dream peeled away, and a new Sloth appeared. She sent Eun Ma-hyun an admiring look from behind her eyepatch.
His mind had been ravaged by Pride’s torture. His body had only just been restored and still needed time to readapt. He was forced to fight bare-handed without his primary weapon. On top of the severe time limit, the debuffs weighing Eun Ma-hyun down were staggering. Yet despite every handicap, he displayed such overwhelming martial prowess that it made observers doubt their own eyes.
Given even a little more time, he might have smashed straight through this Inner World by force alone. Of course, if Sloth hadn’t been in a position where her only job was to stall for time, she would not have simply taken the beating. She would have fought back properly.
Well, anyway. Time’s up.
A sudden, skin-crawling shiver ran down the spines of both Sloth and Eun Ma-hyun. An overwhelming presence surged from quite a distance away. Thanatos’s strike had brutally crushed Tenma’s final desperate struggle, shaking the earth violently.
With that, the outcome on that side was decided. Pride would soon head this way. It was all over. Even Eun Ma-hyun’s desperate, frenzied attempt to shatter Sloth’s Inner World had come to an end.
"......"
Had he finally given up on everything? Eun Ma-hyun stood rooted in place, staring blankly at the sky. Like a condemned prisoner awaiting execution, he slowly lowered his head, bloodied arms hanging limply at his sides.
His shoulders twitched. Was he crying? As Sloth cautiously approached the naked, sobbing figure, she suddenly froze mid-step.
The mana is turning black?
Mana began spreading outward from Eun Ma-hyun. The cores inside his body continued operating normally, wasting his internal mana for no reason. That wasted mana started writhing and gathering around him, almost as if he had become a dark mage who wielded the power of the negative dimension.
Eun Ma-hyun is using dark magic?
Impossible. All investigations indicated he was a pure martial artist who had never studied anything outside of martial arts. The idea that he had learned dark magic—without even awakening an Ebon—was absurd. Yet the ominous feeling around him made Sloth’s instincts scream in warning.
"Kuh!"
A moment later, Eun Ma-hyun’s head twisted at a grotesque angle. Thick, ugly veins bulged across his face. The instant she saw it, Sloth’s breath caught in her throat.
"God… damn it…!"
I told you. I absolutely will not die here.
Eun Ma-hyun’s body had been dismantled at the tissue level by Pride. The one who restored it was Tenma, who stood at the pinnacle of puppetry. He had reassembled the body piece by piece like a puzzle and embedded the heart he had carried since the moment of recapture into its center. The power used in that process was Tenma’s Inner World—Heavenly Demon Cult. In other words, Eun Ma-hyun’s current body was nothing more than a biological puppet modified by Tenma.
At the sudden anomaly occurring inside his own body and the insidious voice that bored directly into his mind, Eun Ma-hyun finally understood the entire situation. A torrent of curses exploded from his mouth.
How dare you use me however you please! Preparing for every possible contingency, even assuming a situation in which he would die under Pride’s plan—you shoved my body into your spare plan without permission!
TENMAAAAAAA!
His rage showed no sign of stopping. The fury boiling inside him now was even greater than what he had felt while enduring Pride’s endless torture. I’ll kill you. You, I will definitely kill!
The Tugwi Guard’s tantrum is a bit concerning, but survival comes first.
As if to mock his anger, the outcome had already been decided. Eun Ma-hyun was indeed a powerhouse acknowledged by the Seven Deadly Sins, but he still fell one step short of Tenma.
If you’ve lost, get out of the way. We need to escape before Thanatos notices something is wrong.
Was the brief taste of freedom sweet? How refreshing had the outside air felt? Had the escape drama performed in the shadow of Pride’s influence after being freed from hostage status been enjoyable? But the game ended here. A sneer formed somewhere in the distance, directed at Eun Ma-hyun. From a dimension that did not exist in the present world—beyond the astral plane—a single soul was transmitted into the brain of the biological puppet that Eun Ma-hyun had become.
Inner World: Heavenly Demon Cult — Soul Devouring.
Eun Ma-hyun’s body swelled dramatically from within. One physical vessel now contained two souls. The world’s fundamental law that a single body may hold only one soul had been defied. The result was the vessel’s destruction.
"Hahahahahahaha!"
Eun Ma-hyun’s body exploded. What arrived in its place was the return of Tenma. A soul without a body would be dragged into the afterlife. The only one capable of remaining in the mortal realm in soul form was Tenma, who directly commanded the astral plane. This resurrection technique—separating one’s own ego into a soul state and transferring it into a biological puppet, much like creating a lich—had been a new dark magic developed after his absurd death at the hands of the first Masao family head. In the end, it accomplished something no one had anticipated: it succeeded in slipping past the gaze of an Absolute Being and escaping.
But it was only a momentary distraction. Thanatos would surely notice the anomaly in his death soon enough.
"Hup."
The situation, which had been utterly relaxed only moments ago, suddenly turned urgent. Staring at the eerie black silhouette that appeared where Eun Ma-hyun’s body had burst, rare tension filled Sloth’s purple eyes.
Inner World: Lucid Dream. Whatever happened before her eyes would be treated as nothing more than a dream. Eun Ma-hyun’s death would be undone. The newly appeared black figure would be dismissed as an illusion.
Inner World: Heavenly Demon Cult.
But Tenma would not permit it. He met Sloth’s Inner World with his own. The two superhumans’ domains collided, sending black sparks flying upward across the sky.
Black smoke billowed like a nightmare within the dream world. Tenma’s Inner World mercilessly pushed Sloth’s aside and radiated its overwhelming presence.
"Kyaaaaaaaak!"
In the end, Sloth’s Inner World shattered. Every layer of dreams she had stacked collapsed in a single instant.
"Hahahahahahaha!"
The final sound that reached her ears as she awakened to reality was Tenma’s mad laughter. Watching the black silhouette radiate enormous negative-dimensional mana before vanishing beyond the astral plane, Sloth—now fully awake from the dream—pounded her fists against the bed.
"Ugh! So annoying!"
Her pleasant dream had turned into a nightmare. Deciding she wouldn’t be getting any more sleep tonight, she continued thumping the mattress with her small, dainty fists for a long while afterward.