Executioner
Executioner
No human can defeat a priest.
Not even a master.
Still less one dying old man.
In Eternal Dominion, an old man whose stats averaged 1 or 2 could not possibly hold back two Warrior Monks specialized in frontal assault.
He could not even buy time.
Not normally.
A deep rumble shook the air.
A fist drove forward. Before it landed, a calloused hand rose to meet it. The instant that hand settled over the fist, the body behind it went slack.
The arm sheathed in black skin moved, and the force followed the yielding frame. He twisted his torso, turned his hips, and let the power flow past. He did not resist or submit. He adapted.
A thunderous impact followed.
As if scattering before the wind, the Warrior Monk was driven into the ground along the gentle motion of Itar's arm.
Through the erupting dirt, Itar caught the stunned expression of the mantis shrimp Warrior Monk, who had been standing back with his arms crossed.
"...What the—"
As the dust settled, the pistol shrimp Warrior Monk heaved his massive frame up from the crater. His face was slick with confusion and humiliation as he turned toward Itar.
Toward the old man who simply stood there in his stance, watching, as though a follow-up attack had never crossed his mind. Or as though, against a novice, such things were unnecessary.
The pity and respect that had been on his face moments before were gone. The Warrior Monk's long shrimp whiskers quivered with rage.
"Were you going easy on me... Itar!"
Itar did not answer. He only shifted his stance, letting both arms hang loose. As if not a trace of strength remained in them.
The Warrior Monk ground his teeth inside his shrimp-like face and lunged.
The form he took was a downward blow. A full-body hammer fist. An attack no human could withstand.
As the fist rose high, his pincers struck together. A sharp snap followed, like fingers clicking.
—!
Then came an indescribable roar of force as the fist accelerated. Flat on the ground, Richard watched the strike come down, glowing red.
An attack his master's frail, dying body could never survive.
Clutching his throat where blood welled up, Richard tried to scream at him to run.
To say his master did not need to die here.
But the words would not come, and his desperation went unheard.
The moment the Warrior Monk's fist slammed toward Itar's stomach—
A soft inhalation. Itar moved. He stepped back as if the blow had barely grazed him, as if he had simply slipped aside, his long sleeve whipping through the air as he let the force stream away.
A cataclysmic crash split the air.
The full-weight attack met nothing, and the Warrior Monk was hurled into the ground.
Itar stepped forward through the rising dust cloud.
Behind him, the other Warrior Monk swung his fists. He raised both and drove them forward in rapid succession.
"Graaaah!"
A roar mixing fury and shame.
High-speed blows that left only red afterimages. A rapid chain more than enough to pulp a human being.
Strikes so fast that neither Itar nor the Warrior Monk throwing them could truly see them. Against that onslaught, Itar extended both arms.
What followed defied the perception of every witness present.
A relentless percussion of destruction. Clouds of earth erupting. The sound alone made it seem as if Itar were being pounded into paste. But within that dust, Itar moved without pause, a dark silhouette in constant motion.
He caught attacks with his outstretched arms and let them slide past. He knocked fists off course with the back of his hand. He deflected rising blows with his knee. Through every gap, he drove his own fist into the Warrior Monk's face.
"Guh, urk, graaaaaah!"
The Warrior Monk's strikes grew heavier. Faster. He was losing control of his own trajectories.
This was no longer martial art. It was raw violence—overwhelming, brute force—and the Warrior Monk was terrified.
"Loim, Loim! Calm down! Loim!"
The mantis shrimp Warrior Monk shouted and rushed forward, but the pistol shrimp one—Loim—showed no sign of stopping.
The barrage only intensified. Because inside it, Itar was still standing.
"Why won't you die! Die! Die already!"
A monster capable of shattering an army by himself—Warrior Monk Loim—was afraid of one old man. He had abandoned all thought of making an offering. He simply attacked, blindly.
The more Loim raged like a storm, the more Itar's movements became utterly still. Like a mountain range enduring a typhoon, he adapted.
Using only his two arms, his shoulders, his elbows, his knees, he became as immovable as stone.
"Urgh, argh, Demis! Help me! Help!"
"Damn it, don't hit the head! We need it for the offering!"
The once-respectful Loim and the flippant Demis joined forces, and the assault intensified further.
Demis's fists did not carry the overwhelming power of Loim's.
But they were far faster.
Overwhelming speed in place of overwhelming force.
Combined with his dark red carapace, the motion of his fists could only be called a gale.
Caught between gale and typhoon, Itar met them with the stillness of the storm's eye.
This was why Loim and Demis were here.
The Executioner had assumed their overwhelming firepower and lethality would easily subdue even a master of unarmed combat like Itar.
That assumption had been wrong.
The roar of destruction was absolute. The earth cratered, and dust rose as violent as a bomb blast.
Through the thick haze, only three shapes could be seen moving.
To Richard, watching from beyond the dust, the scene was unreal.
Itar's form stood firm while the two Warrior Monks were repeatedly slammed into the earth.
At its center, Loim and Demis were gripped by fear and confusion.
Things were unfolding in a way the Executioner had never imagined.
The art that one human, one supreme martial artist, could display by burning the last of his life.
That art was plainly beyond anything they had foreseen.
With nothing more than shifting his knees a few inches, extending an arm, deflecting with his wrist, suppressing, striking, and hammering, Itar endured the downpour of violence.
No—he dominated it.
"Kh...!"
"Guh, krah...!"
He let Loim's concussive punch slide past and struck his eyes with the back of his hand. He deflected a fist thrown with clenched-shut eyes by pushing it aside with his leg and hammered Demis's throat. He knocked aside the rain of follow-up blows with his elbow.
Violence so intense that even Itar himself could not consciously perceive it—he deflected it purely through technique.
Through the overwhelming fundamentals he had built over seventy years. Through the martial art he had loved his entire life.
Itar blazed.
He was crumbling from within. His vision was dimming. His heart was stopping. And yet he kept surviving, moment after moment.
In that instant of burning his final life, Itar's martial art touched a certain realm.
The realm Aslan called the Special Feats.
Knight Slayer, Heart Piercing, Shadow Flip, Moon Splitting, Thunder Call.
Like the five divine techniques created by the King of Gods, the God of War and Knowledge—the human who had become the strongest god—Itar's Adaptation also brushed the divine.
Technique beyond perfection.
Through his accumulated fundamentals, a lifetime of experience, his own desperation, and the fire of his emotions, Itar's martial art transcended Itar himself.
"Master..."
Richard lost his words. He realized no phrase could do justice to what he was seeing.
Just as War and Knowledge had once touched the limits of the human body, Itar was overwhelming a priest of the gods with human skill.
A concussive boom.
He let the rising uppercut flow past. Behind him, the air shrieked like thunder as Itar drove both fists forward.
Strike after strike hammered into Loim's chest.
Blows that would not leave so much as a crack. Attacks of peerless technique but no strength.
Such strikes could not so much as graze him.
Loim knew that perfectly well.
He knew he could not be killed by attacks like these.
But knowing did nothing to stop the terror.
The sight of every attack being dodged, blocked, deflected, and countered without fail.
The sight of a figure standing firm at the center of a storm of blows that should have reduced any human to pulp, not a single inch displaced.
Loim felt fear.
The only blood on that body was the blood coughed from its mouth. That frail frame was untouched, without a single wound.
Loim, who had killed hundreds of humans in his lifetime, could not understand it.
Demis, on the other hand, felt profound fascination.
That human skill alone could reach such heights. That the horizon he had once aimed for was so close.
As the two of them accelerated their assault with opposite emotions, Itar moved.
A thunderous cascade of earth and stone erupted from the cratered ground.
In that gap, Itar's hand seized Loim's wrist and wrenched it wide.
Loim, who had been pouring his full body weight into a chain of attacks, could not overcome that sudden redirection. He staggered, tilting off balance.
Into Loim's exposed chest drove Demis's fist.
At the exact moment Demis threw his punch, Itar had pulled Loim directly into its path.
Loim's chest-plate shattered under the blow and he went flying. Demis, his face flooding with shock, unleashed twelve punches in a single breath.
Itar let all twelve slide past and planted his fist into Demis's face.
With a sound like three punches landing at once, Demis staggered backward, clutching his face. At last, the thick dust began to settle.
A figure slowly emerged from the brown haze. A human being.
Standing firm in the same stance he had taken when he first blocked the Warrior Monks. A dark-skinned martial artist.
Without a drop of blood on him. Eyes serenely open, wearing a gentle smile.
The master of unarmed combat.
The man people called the Weakest Master.
Itar.
Having driven back the Warrior Monks with his dying body, Itar gazed at his disciple with tranquil eyes.
As if to say, did you see?
As if to say, this is the path you must walk.
Through the martial art he had spent a lifetime building.
Then, behind that gaze, he went still.
For a moment, silence held.
"Master...?"
Itar did not answer.
He simply stood in his stance, wearing a benevolent smile.
It was not exhaustion or depleted strength.
He would never move again.
As all humans do, in the end.
Even when Loim hauled himself up, coughing, and Demis turned, still wincing and rubbing his face, Itar was looking at his disciple with that same kind expression.
As if all that remained was to be laid beneath the earth.
Even the Warrior Monks could not approach him.
They felt the reverence one feels before a towering mountain range, that quiet and absolute wholeness.
Even as the light slowly faded from Itar's eyes.
Even as death seeped in, in the moment his heart stopped, no one dared disturb that silent completeness.
That was how he died.
Neither kneeling in surrender nor shattering in resistance.
The way Itar would.