Chapter 366: The King Who Kills Others, The God Who Kills Himself - 20
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 366: The King Who Kills Others, The God Who Kills Himself - 20
Hundreds of vehicles tore across the arid wasteland, kicking up a thick cloud of dust. Trailing noise and grit, they raced toward their target: the Golden Palace.
After several transformations, the Golden Palace now resembled a true royal court. A fortress, encircled by thick walls, stood alone in the empty land. Not a single crack marred its high ramparts, and above its pointed spires, birds with steel wings circled.
The seemingly impregnable fortress… was moving. Unbelievably, it moved with a speed that could rival even the nimble Dholes.
“Faster! Push it harder!”
Hector yelled, cranking up the power.
Their goal was to create a diversion, but at this rate, they would struggle to even get close. They needed a different approach.
Glancing at the Dholes following him, the Dominarch pushed his speed even higher. He shot ahead, leaving even his own subordinates in the dust, and maneuvered his Juggernaut to deploy a cannon.
“Golden Lord! If you truly intend to abandon the Fallen Dominion!”
Hector, who used his Unique Magic instead of gunpowder, could unleash greater power with a longer barrel. As a result, the Dominarch’s cannon was the size of his Juggernaut. A barrel easily over ten meters long took aim at the Golden Lord.
“Then you’ll have to go over my dead body!”
Thump. The sound was more like the beat of a drum than an explosion. Hector's shell flew true, straight for the Golden Palace, but it never made impact. The moment it touched the fortress, the shell was absorbed as if sinking into water.
The attack came to nothing, but one thing was certain: he had drawn plenty of attention.
As if in answer, something burst forth from the Golden Palace, shattering one of its windows. It was a cannon dozens of times larger and longer than Hector's, as if to demonstrate the sheer difference in their power.
A weapon like that shouldn't exist. A barrel of that length should have bent under its own weight. But the Golden Lord could alchemize even a cannon that was only theoretically possible.
Which meant it could fire. Hector yelled an urgent command.
“Everyone, take cover!”
Just before the shell fired, Hector wrenched the controls hard to the side. He hadn't dodged what he saw; he had acted purely on a dark premonition, moving a split second early.
He proved his survival thus far had been no mere fluke. The moment a shockwave erupted from the cannon's muzzle, a faint line seemed to flash across the distance, and the ground where Hector had just been shattered like glass.
It was too large to be called a shell. An iron sphere, a meter in diameter, arrived faster than the sound of its own blast, shattering the solid earth and triggering a localized earthquake.
The aftershock alone was enough to make the Juggernauts stagger. A direct hit would have meant instant death for anyone.
The Dholes, trailing far behind Hector, were rocked by the shockwave. Several lost their footing, skidding and tumbling across the ground. Witnessing the Golden Lord's terrifying power, they screamed.
“This wasn't part of the deal!”
“This is insane! Let's get out of here!”
Terrified, the Dholes broke formation and fled. The hundreds of riders who had been charging the Golden Palace scattered in every direction.
It was the movement of a disorganized mob, but that was actually for the best.
Get too close to the Golden Lord, and your vehicle—along with your very existence—would be alchemized into something else. By scattering at a distance, they also scattered the Golden Lord's focus. The cannon's muzzle lost its target and began to waver.
But only for a moment. The muzzle flared open like the bell of a horn. Visible inside was a black sphere, similar to the one he had used on the city.
A scattershot. He intended to wipe out the Dholes with a rain of steel.
“Hraaaaaaagh!”
Hector summoned every ounce of strength he possessed.
His power was Suppression—the power to hammer steel. His Unique Magic shoved a pitch-black sphere back into the cannon's barrel. The projectile, about to be expelled, was forced to reverse course by Hector's power.
‘I never believed the Golden Lord cared for the Fallen Dominion. The place he truly loved was the Golden Empire. And yet, having served at his side, I… I suppose I believed they might be one and the same. I had no reason to, but I did.’
But Hector's power had its limits. The force he could apply was only enough to hammer and shape metal.
Compared to him, the Golden Lord's power was nearly infinite.
Hector, trying to force the shell back, and the Golden Lord, trying to fire it. For a moment, their powers clashed in a stalemate, but the balance soon shattered. The shell, which had been on the verge of receding into the muzzle, was flung out again. The pitch-black projectile shot into the air, looking as if it would detonate at any second and unleash a storm of shrapnel.
“Hngh, uuuuugh!”
Hector desperately suppressed the projectile, which was moments from detonating. Thwarted just before it could explode, the shell lost much of its force.
An explosion, but it was far weaker than the last. The steel fragments scattered over a much smaller area than the blast that had blanketed the city. Even the slowest of the Dholes had time to see it coming and get out of the way.
—But all Hector had managed to stop was a single shell.
He had used all his strength, his wits, and his luck just to stop one of the Golden Lord's attacks.
Above and below the first cannon, new ones burst through the wall. A staggering nine in total. The terrifying muzzles took aim at Hector and the Dholes behind him.
Even if they were hastily made, they were created by the Golden Lord. They could snuff out hundreds of lives with ease. Hector calmly came to a conclusion.
‘Ah, I'm finished.’
It was hopeless. The best Hector could do was contend with a single, carelessly made cannon. If the Golden Lord himself was getting involved, Hector would be crushed like a toy.
‘I have to escape now. At least then I'll save my own skin. My life…’
Hector paused for a moment, lost in thought.
Alchemy and metallurgy were inextricably linked. Even if you changed a material's properties, some physical interference was needed to refine it into the desired shape. Not every alchemist was the Golden Lord, after all.
Hector was a craftsman who specialized in such work. He was born without legs, but because he walked on his arms, his upper body strength became second to none. Hector used his strength and skill to hammer and fold steel plates.
Even renowned alchemists sought Hector's help at crucial moments. He developed a sense of pride, and in his prime, he even looked down on alchemists.
Then one day, the Mouldarch, who had taken an interest in him, took him to the Golden Lord to cure his arrogance. And there, Hector saw a god.
The god of the Fallen Dominion, who single-handedly shaped the world.
‘…Be it the Sky God or Mother Earth, their names are spoken, but no one has ever seen them. But in the Fallen Dominion, a god truly exists. A god far greater, more powerful, and more human than any Sky God.’
After this revelation, Hector became a Primarch. Chosen to succeed the Mouldarch as one of the Golden Lord's Guardians, he pledged his lifelong loyalty. He worked alongside the Goldenarch, caring for the Golden Lord and guiding him to create what the nation needed. Coldly speaking, the Golden Lord was little more than a puppet for the two Primarchs… but Hector genuinely revered him.
In his final moments, instead of turning away, Hector disengaged the limiter on his Steel Heart. Instantly, the Juggernaut went into a self-destructive overdrive.
The engine screamed and vibrated. The wheels, their rotation speed skyrocketing, spun uselessly against the ground. Hector used his power of Suppression to slam the Juggernaut down, forcing its spinning wheels to bite into the earth and accelerate even faster.
“…Here I go.”
An overdrive mode the Golden Lord had created on a whim. There was no stopping it now. It would keep accelerating until it slammed into something, and his body was torn to shreds.
Hector turned himself into a living cannonball and charged the Golden Palace. Dozens of gun and cannon muzzles emerged to take aim at him, but Hector ignored them, gripping the shuddering controls even tighter.
It didn't matter if they fired. The moment his Juggernaut went into overdrive, he was already a dead man.
And whether he lived or died was irrelevant; his primary objective had already been achieved.
He had, without a doubt, drawn their attention.
Hector's charge posed no real threat to the Golden Lord, but it was loud and spectacular—enough to prevent the Golden Lord from paying much mind to an approaching mound of earth.
But not even the Golden Lord could have predicted that the mound would crack open, and a ship would burst forth from inside.
“The plan worked! Witherarch, charge!”
The Golden Ark surged forward, sliding across the undulating earth. On its deck, in place of a figurehead, stood the Regressor, Jizan in hand. She stood at the epicenter of the impending collision between the Ark and the Palace—the most dangerous spot in the world—and swung the massive weapon.
A tactic unprecedented in human history was unfolding: an ironclad ship ramming a castle.
“Terra Firma Arts, Mountain Cleave!”
Just before the two behemoths collided, the Regressor cleaved the Golden Palace's wall. No matter how sturdy the rampart, Jizan, bearing the weight of the very earth, ripped it asunder with sheer mass.
Jizan tore a fissure in the wall, and into that gap, the Golden Ark plunged.
Krrrrunch. Crack. The steel ship became a massive blade, gouging into the Golden Palace. Pulverized stone rained down, and steel buckled into grotesque folds. As the two overwhelming forces collided, the soldiers caught between them met a horrific end.
The steel behemoths tore at one another. Debris, disintegrated by Wither, sprayed into the air like a shower of blood. The two Juggernauts, neither having ever encountered a foe its own size, roared wildly at the appearance of a worthy rival.
The walls surrounding the Golden Palace were stronger than steel, but they too were a product of alchemy. Peru's Golden Ark was an icebreaker, melting and crushing every obstacle in its path. Slowly, the Golden Ark ate into the Golden Palace, burrowing deeper.
Amidst the chaos, the Regressor, who was precariously keeping her balance at the heart of the impact, glanced back at the Golden Ark and yelled.
“Yes! Witherarch, keep it up!”
As if in response, the Golden Ark pushed harder. It clawed at the ground, digging deeper as if trying to burrow its way inside the Golden Palace… until half its hull was embedded within.
“Father?”
“Yes?”
Hilde, who was driving my vehicle, pointed ahead and said.
“Is that… supposed to be happening? It looks like it's being eaten.”
“Well, putting a positive spin on it, it's burrowing in nicely.”
Putting it negatively… it was being swallowed whole.