The Collapse of Chastity
There was no longer any reason to endure it. No need to.
Just as Ian reached that thought, the divinity forcibly pinned beneath the Spirit Cauldron below his heart began to spill out beyond his body.
Fwaaa—
It began faintly, no brighter than fireflies, then gradually transformed. The color deepened until it was distinct, vivid enough to cut cleanly through the dark. It was an exceedingly pure light.
A blue so clear it seemed to hold the transparency of the sea itself.
Some would have looked upon that light with longing, while others would have feared it.
That tendency was probably strongest among most Heroes. They envied the power of the Apostles, yet feared that same power might threaten them, and so they kept their distance.
An Apostle was a single existence capable of overwhelming a Hero, but there were very few of them. From the start, the aberrant being called an Apostle could not even exist without the Benevolent Mother Hero.
Historically, this was the first time in a century that the number of Apostles had exceeded two. The order called this era a golden age.
And so the Heroes could not simply reject the Apostles outright.
The Apostles were treasures the order cherished more dearly than life itself, unlike Heroes, who were treated like interchangeable parts—plentiful enough that replacing them made no difference.
Heroes were consumables. Apostles were intact weapons. The difference between them was not something that could ever be narrowed, and a Hero could never replace an Apostle’s place.
The value of an Apostle came from divinity, and divinity was, in the truest sense, an omnipotent power that moved the laws of the world.
Compared to the Heroes’ Holy Battle Qi and Divine Weapons, they were already far beyond ordinary humans, almost superhuman; but raw strength alone could never make one a hero in a war against a king who governed concepts.
Thus, Apostles existed as Apostles.
Once they liberated their divinity, they were no longer human—closer to transcendent beings.
Of course, even they, for all the domains they wielded, could not match the power of the great god beyond the heavens. But compared to lowly, fragile humans, they stood on a far higher plane.
Neither human nor god. That was why they were called demigods.
Swaaa—
At last, the blue light shone so brilliantly it swallowed the shadows, and the will of Ian’s mind and body aligned at once, letting body and spirit lock into perfect harmony.
Even as Ian released his divinity, however, there was hesitation within him about using that power. After all, he was the Apostle of the Rigid Body.
Among the seven Apostles, the meaning of Rigid Body was especially significant.
This was not divinity meant to be used in a place like this. It was power that ought to have been reserved for a more valuable battlefield.
Still, Ian did not show it. He did not want to refuse her request.
Before he was an Apostle, he was a son. He took this as his mother’s will, and so he simply obeyed as a child should.
Once he chose a path, he did not look back. What had to be done now was simple: minimize the damage to the tower and hold it together. That was the only thought in Ian’s head.
Rigid Body was the divinity of unchanging ideals, a substance with immutable properties. It was a concept that ignored deformation from outside force entirely and possessed the quality of preserving its original form.
Thud. Ian slammed a foot into the floor.
At the same time, he expended the divinity he had released and unfolded his domain. It covered Alice’s entire bedroom. His judgment was to define the structure of the isolated space with the divinity of Rigid Body and prevent its collapse.
The vast domain, enough to blanket the entire area of the large room, devoured the divinity he had recently accumulated with the flow of water.
The exhaustion that came from the reduction of divinity sustaining existence briefly gnawed through Ian’s body, but there was no more time to hesitate.
I can see the trajectory.
The moment the hammer made contact, he would invert the stress and bring Aaron down in a single blow, rendering him unable to fight. That was what Ian thought.
Whoosh…!
Right before his eyes, the trajectory of the hammer falling vertically was suddenly bent aside.
What— Ian swallowed his shock down hard.
No matter how much this world was one where miracles existed, there had to be some boundary of reality. If one considered the logic of it, this was an absurd phenomenon. That was the only conclusion Ian could reach.
That kind of mass, already accelerated like that, and he could just twist its path by brute force? All that was left was laughter.
On top of that, Aaron responded to Ian’s movements—movements sharpened by accelerated thought—using some utterly incomprehensible trick.
He had probably judged that by shifting the point of impact, he could nullify the response point of the stress. When Ian’s mind reached that conclusion, he let out a quiet, bitter sigh.
Misjudgment. The feat Aaron was showing had already gone beyond the realm of what a human could do.
He truly deserved to be called a Hero. He wasn’t going to be defeated so easily.
For a brief moment, the gazes of the flustered Ian and Aaron crossed. Aaron wore a ferocious grin, his expression brimming with swagger.
As if to say, Is this all you’ve got? His arrogant look said the technique he had already shown once before was nothing new, and that it was only natural Ian couldn’t beat him with something like this.
So Ian laughed internally, a hollow sound.
He admitted that he had underestimated his opponent too much. No matter how dull Aaron might be, Ian had to recognize the fact that Aaron was a Hero.
Ian had been slowly gathering divinity into the Spirit Cauldron in preparation for the upcoming campaign to slay the King of Calamity, but now, in this moment, he discarded even the slightest hesitation about preserving what little strength he had.
He poured every last drop of the divinity he had saved into the Spirit Cauldron, and the result manifested before Aaron’s eyes.
Fwaaaa—
In an instant, a blue radiance bright enough to blind filled the room. The sight was like divine punishment descending here and now to judge an unbeliever.
Even then, Ian did not handle his power carelessly. Because he always sought optimal efficiency, he compressed the light leaking out.
Vooooom!
He shrank the size of the domain protecting the bedroom down to little more than a local region.
The contracted domain floated in the shape of a square frame between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Ian flicked it lightly into the air, almost dismissively, and the domain filled the gap between the falling hammer and Ian, fixing the hammer’s slowly advancing inertia in place.
Aaron could no longer stop the hammer, nor swing it with full force, nor even alter its direction any longer.
Less than three seconds had passed since the start of this entire sequence. That was how long it took from Aaron using Holy Battle Qi to breaking free from Ian’s grasp and manifesting the Divine Weapon Colossus to swing it.
There was no escaping the result already decided. He brought the hammer down, and what waited at the end of that motion was his own defeat.
Realizing this, Aaron’s face twisted.
The moment he drove the hammer down, the result had already been determined.
KWAaaaang!
With a tremendous explosion, Aaron was sent flying straight through the outer wall. Because Ian had unfolded his domain and inverted all the stress, the shock of the hammer laden with Aaron’s monstrous strength struck Aaron himself instead.
Aaron received the calamity he had brought on himself in full. If he was lucky, he might survive with only his skull split open.
“Tch… this is bad.”
A headache rose as the divinity he had gathered ran dry, and Ian dropped to one knee. A tired breath escaped his lips.
For an Apostle who had liberated his divinity, the damage was fortunately not severe. No—rather, it was more accurate to say it was not yet severe. There had been no casualties, and Ian could say with some confidence that this had been a fairly peaceful battle.
There was only one price they had paid for all this chaos.
KUGUGUGUGA-KANG!
The collapse of the Tower of Chastity, which had stood for centuries alongside the history of the order.
…In truth, for a price, it was a little expensive.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
What a miserable day.
Watching the floor crumble before her eyes, Alice suddenly found herself thinking that.
“Mother…”
Seated on the edge of the bed, Alice remained silent. She gave not even a glance toward the voice calling to her.
She treated Ian like a person who wasn’t there at all, as if he were invisible.
To her, the child was not love but shame, and so the child remained a wound that had never healed.
Ian smiled as if he understood Alice. His mother was that kind of person.
From the start, he had not acted in hopes of praise. There was no reason to be disappointed, then. In a way, that smile was a bitter one.
It would be a lie to say he had no expectations at all.
Still, Ian did not whine. He knew very well that the only way to be hated a little less was to avoid doing the things his mother would dislike.
Even the simple fact of being able to speak with his mother made Ian happy. She had looked at him as a whole person for the first time since he was eight.
The memory of when he was eight still remained vivid.
On his mother’s birthday, Ian had been bleeding in her room. It was because she had struck his forehead with the vase he had given her as a present, splitting his skin open.
Fortunately, it had not left an external scar, but it was the moment the violence of a parent carved an indelible scar into a child’s heart.
Even with his eyes closed, he could still remember it. He remembered the way his mother, more startled than he was when he began to cry, had rushed over in a panic and carefully held him, shedding tears of her own.
She had clutched Ian’s head to her chest and apologized without end, calling herself a piece of trash, half losing her mind as she wept and cursed herself for so long that she eventually collapsed from exhaustion.
To anyone else, she would have looked like nothing but a lunatic, but Ian, who knew the circumstances, understood her.
His mother was a kind person. Though her heart had grown sick and rotten, the child could still see that her essence was good.
That was why Ian liked his mother. A mother who hated her child while still being conscious of that hate was still better than a father who was completely indifferent.
Cold sweat beading on his skin, Ian, still supporting himself with one hand on the floor, opened his mouth carefully.
“I can hold out with what divinity I’ve got left, but it won’t be long before it gives way. I didn’t have much stored up in the first place.”
Alice still did not spare Ian even a glance. No—her face was so impassive that one could almost wonder whether she was listening at all.
“If there hadn’t been any variables, this would’ve ended cleanly, but I guess even I make mistakes. It wasn’t just the upper level that was destroyed—the shock reached the middle floors too. The moment the trait of Rigid Body is released, it’ll collapse. So…”
Ian’s voice cut off.
…May I carry you out, Mother?
He could not finish the rest. Was it really that hard to say? As the tower shuddered more violently, Ian only moved his lips, hesitating to complete the sentence.
In truth, if he said it, Alice would probably agree in silence.
Somehow, perhaps even then, she might open her mouth. Alice had no intention of dying quietly either.
And yet Ian was afraid.
It felt as though he understood his mother’s heart better than she did herself. He knew too well how deeply she despised her children, and because of that, he could not bring himself to offer even such a trivial suggestion without hesitation.
Then something happened. In the end, the divinity ran out, and the force suppressing the tower’s collapse cut off.
Helplessly, Ian had no choice but to close his mouth and move.
From the faint look of relief on his face, one could not entirely shake the suspicion that perhaps this catastrophe had all been Ian’s elaborate design from the start.
“...Tch.”
But this time too, the situation slipped beyond Ian’s intentions.
He sensed an alien aura in the distance. It was by no means ordinary. It was a fierce presence, unrestrained and surging forth as if proclaiming its territory.
It was the aura of a true strong one, utterly unlike some half-wit like Aaron, who had only barely squeezed out a thread of divinity to force his way into retreat.
Ian ground his lower lip in irritation.
He could guess who the owner of that aura was, so he turned his steps away from Alice and pressed a hand to the floor. It was to delay the tower’s collapse even a little longer.
This was not a place for him to rush in recklessly.
Saving the princess in peril was always the Hero’s job—the one who had saved the kingdom.
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