The Tower of Chastity
I wandered aimlessly through a world that had already gone to ruin.
Nothing I had ever tried to hold onto remained; it all turned to ash in my hands.
Only a river stained with blood and corpses seemed to welcome the man.
At the end of a dead end, he had believed he would be repaid with salvation.
What waited for him at the end of life was nothing but a hell buried in embers.
The man despaired before that merciless fate and wept, and wept, and wept without end.
Knelt in misery upon the barren earth where nothing was left, he could not even dare to lift his head, pouring out only tears and guilt.
How foolish. Truly, how foolish.
Once, he had even been called a hero.
More than he deserved, he had been hailed as a savior.
Everyone had called him a Hero.
And yet it had all been a vain gesture.
Now, all that remained was a reputation that would turn to ash and scatter if he tried to hold it in his hands.
Only after being driven to the edge of the cliff did the man realize he was nothing more than an ordinary human being.
He was not special. No—he understood that under the heavens, everything was equal.
And like any other human, once an ordinary person was forced to face hell before his eyes, he would desperately seek out God.
Ah—
O supreme being who looks down upon us from the heavens above.
Please, I beg you, grant this ruined world one more chance…
At the end of that desperate prayer, the hero’s pleading was answered.
And the man left behind paid the price.
“Disgusting.”
Alice opened her eyes and said that with a grimace.
Had she been dreaming something vile for a moment? With the force crushing her neck gone, she came to quickly enough, but unease still clung to her face.
Alice swallowed a few times as if irritated, then carefully touched the side of her throat.
Her skin was white as cloud, and aside from the red handprints left by Aaron’s rough grip, there was no visible injury.
The confusion that had clouded her in the dream cooled the instant her fingers met that cold skin.
So far removed from what was considered “normal” that she was, Alice regained her composure almost immediately.
“…So it wasn’t a dream.”
She had been in a situation where she might have died, but all Alice could think was, I’m still alive. Her way of thinking had already been twisted far beyond repair.
Of course, there was also something interesting in front of her, enough to distract her from the fact that she had been strangled unconscious.
As she idly rubbed at her throat, Alice’s eyes caught a striking scene.
“Ghk… you bastard, let go! You… can’t… do this?”
“……”
Aaron was on one knee on the floor, clutching at his own throat.
And in front of him stood a boy, one hand locked around Aaron’s neck, pinning him utterly in place.
At a glance, it was obvious who held the advantage.
Considering the difference in their builds, the scene was deeply unnatural, but this was Atlren, where even a baby could beat an old man senseless, so Alice did not find it strange at all.
“Aaaagh!”
Aaron bared his teeth and strained with a savage roar, as if he meant to snap the boy’s slender wrist, crushing down on it with all his strength.
But the boy did not budge.
“Useless.”
He looked to be only sixteen or so. His sharp eyes did not suit his youthful age, and the scar that cut diagonally across his pale skin from cheek to the base of his neck only made his expression look sharper, more irritable.
With jet-black hair and a blank expression on top of that, he looked less cold than utterly devoid of feeling.
“Fuck…”
After struggling for a long time and getting nowhere, Aaron finally lowered his gaze to the floor and muttered the curse under his breath.
For a so-called Hero, it was a disgraceful sight, and he could not even lift his head from the humiliation.
Even at a glance, he was being manhandled by a runt a head or two smaller than him; from Aaron’s perspective, the situation was beyond shameful.
Grinding his teeth, Aaron raised his head and his eyes flashed as they searched the boy’s face.
It was as though he had abandoned even the beliefs he normally clung to—the belief that anyone who fought with their head instead of their fists was nothing but a weakling lacking in strength.
The double ring threaded like a net, with a single arrow carved inside it, was a pattern no believer of the Order could fail to recognize.
The unmistakable seal of an Apostle.
The long scar running across his face was probably the mark of a blade that had cut deeply.
Aaron’s eyes followed the boy’s uniform and face with obsessive care, then came to rest on the scar. As if something had suddenly occurred to him, he gaped in disbelief.
“Nngh…”
What surfaced in Aaron’s mind next was the failed campaign to subjugate the King of Slashes four years ago. Back then, to counter Chrysaor—whose power could sever everything in all directions—they had briefly brought in an ill-mannered little brat who was disgustingly young.
—Hey, brat. I don’t go easy on kids just because they’re young. You’ll get in the way, so stay in a corner and keep your head down.
—No thanks. You smell like shit, old man, so don’t come near me.
—Hahaha! Did everyone hear what Ian just said?
—What a bold little punk! That’s how a man should be!
—Exactly. Go wash yourself once in a while, Aaron!
A capable man. A stubborn man. A handsome man. Aaron, who lived to admire his own greatness, hated that type with a passion, and the Apostle of the Rigid Body fit every one of those conditions perfectly.
Even his son did.
As the memory returned, Aaron’s ferociously twisted face trembled.
Back then, Ian had denounced Aaron in the camp where the entire subjugation force had gathered. The bright, piercing voice of a child had carried especially far through the silent encampment, and Aaron had been forced to endure being treated like filth by the surrounding Heroes for quite some time.
Even now, just thinking about it was enough to make him jolt awake in the middle of the night. That memory had become a horrific trauma for Aaron.
And now the brat who had inflicted that trauma on him had gotten behind him.
Despite the fact that Aaron was a Hero, even if he was one considered a little lacking in intelligence—so much so that other Heroes called him a moron behind his back—he was still a Hero.
On the battlefield he had been called the Great Wall, a veteran who had survived the bloodiest wars against the kings with all limbs intact.
He had not been careless. He had kept his senses spread around him at all times. And yet the fact that he had failed to feel Ian’s approach at all had put a deep crack in his meager pride.
If, at the moment of ambush, the thing pressing on his throat had not been a hand but a sharp blade, Aaron would have had no time to react at all and would have become nothing more than a crawling corpse.
That was an undeniable truth, and that truth only made Aaron feel more humiliated.
“Gh, ah… urk….”
It had already been five minutes since Ian began squeezing Aaron’s throat, preventing him from breathing, and Ian was starting to feel a little flustered.
Even after Aaron had turned red and then gone pale, he still had not fainted, and the hand locked around Ian’s wrist had not weakened in the slightest.
Unlike Apostles, Heroes clearly had ordinary human bodies.
And yet, even so, it seemed the endurance of a Hero—especially one known as the Great Wall—really was something else. Ian found himself honestly impressed.
Thanks to that, he managed to grasp the reason that had briefly severed his reason in anger and slowly force himself back to calm.
“I’ll ask you just one thing.”
“W-what… you fucking….”
“Why did you try to kill my mother?”
At the boy’s innocent question, Aaron let out a wheezing laugh through his bluish, bloodless face.
“You… your mo…ther… sucks, too, y’know.”
It was a low, filthy provocation he could hardly even put into words, but that was all it amounted to. Nothing changed about Aaron’s helplessness under Ian’s grip.
“How dare you!”
But to Ian, who had not yet shed the last traces of boyhood, it was a profane insult he could not bear.
The moment Ian, finally unable to contain himself, flared with anger and a faint trace of Divinity spilled out from him, a sneer appeared at the corner of Aaron’s mouth.
Thunk!
In an instant, the Great Wall Hero’s body grew heavy. No—his body had not merely become heavy.
The pressure on Ian’s wrist increased. It felt as though a mass dozens of times greater than before was crushing his hand down.
“Holy Battle Qi…!”
“You… were the one who… star…ted it….”
The moment Aaron, muttering those words, twisted his wrist—
Ian, finally unable to endure it any longer, let go of his hand altogether.
“Ghk… Great Wall…!”
And then, the instant Aaron broke free of the pressure and opened his mouth, a phlegmy rasp spilled out. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe, and with bloodshot eyes he stared fiercely ahead, grabbing at the air as if he could seize something there.
“…By my prayer, fall here now.”
It was a tool used in the name of God to destroy those who were not human, an implement permitted only to humankind.
Divine WeaponColossus.
The moment that mythical weapon of a different order of existence manifested in the Hero’s hands, Aaron seized its handle and swung it with all his might.
Just as he always had, he meant to crush the enemy before him so thoroughly that not even a corpse would remain.
Whoooosh!
Seeing the enormous hammer fall, Ian understood it instinctively: if he took a direct hit here, nothing would be left behind.
As the danger sharpened, the Apostle’s brain forced itself into a state of emergency awakening for survival.
The miracle permitted only to Apostles—accelerated thought—activated, and at the same time Ian felt the world around him slow down.
Sweat beaded across Ian’s forehead.
One mistake, and he could die. At least, that was how it felt to him.
Aside from the subjugation of the Demon King, when had he last felt this close to disaster?
There was only one time Ian had stood on the same battlefield as Aaron in the past and faced that Divine Weapon directly.
The weapon-summoning chant forged by the Supreme God and granted only to Heroes—Sacred Weapon Manifestation Verse.
The instant he lifted his head, what descended above him was overwhelming mass. To Ian’s eyes, the battlefield of the past overlapped with the present.
Aaron, gripping a hammer so massive it could hide his own body. Aaron’s monstrous strength as he swung it with effortless ease. The subordinates of the Demon King, reduced to pools of blood and oxidized into the wake of the hammer’s passing.
That same colossal hammer was now falling toward Ian’s head.
The hammer’s terrifying momentum was so intense that it felt as though a giant ship were dropping from the sky.
In the past, the army of the King of Slashes had been crushed beneath that weight and oxidized into a handful of bloody pulp. Ian’s brain still remembered that outrageous spectacle.
If something like that came crashing down here, the Tower would absolutely collapse. As someone who had once been a believer of the Order before becoming an Apostle, Ian had begun to wonder if the Hero in front of him had any sanity left at all.
He did not seem to be thinking of the safety of the priests working inside the tower, and he looked as though he had no intention of dealing with the aftermath either. So after a brief moment of hesitation, Ian cleanly erased his own doubt.
Aaron was the one who crossed the line first. That made this self-defense.