The Sword of the War God
The Sword of the War God
Tiyamal's perception surpassed anything human.
No mortal could match him. Even Fay, with all her elven senses, fell short in pure detection.
At the core of that hyper-acute perception lay touch.
Sight contributed almost nothing.
Yet when a stimulus was violent enough, even Tiyamal's gaze was dragged along with everyone else's.
—KWA-AAAAANG!
A sudden detonation. The roar and the flame erupted just as the battle seemed to have reached a lull, seizing every eye atop the fortress.
"What the hell is that?"
"What just—"
Soldiers muttered in panic. Mages stammered questions; sergeants and officers stared at the explosion with stunned faces.
Something was happening.
Chaos bled across the battlefield, devouring everything it touched, and even the men on the walls could feel that something had gone terribly wrong.
Tiyamal was the first to register the anomaly.
As the colossal blast faded, a figure was rising in the faintly visible distance.
From that being radiated a violent power.
Tiyamal felt it on his skin and went cold.
It mirrored the overwhelming force he had faced once before—against Ash, the Curtain's Envoy. That same crushing presence. The sense that no matter how many arrows you loosed, this thing would not fall.
And it stood at the heart of the battlefield.
At the center of the roaring blast.
A Dragon-kin's hazy vision could not resolve the details, but Tiyamal felt the magnitude of it through his scales.
His expression hardened as the weight of that presence settled in.
"Uh, that sword..."
One of the soldiers let the words slip unbidden.
He was a sharpsighted archer of Baramunz, a bowman who had served long years among the Silence Tribe.
What those keen eyes now saw was a sword—the weapon clenched by that being of overwhelming presence, and it was unmistakable.
A god-blade like crystallized flame. A greatsword that seemed to burn with its own light. Three meters of steel that was the very symbol of the Sword of the War God.
Victory. The beloved blade of War and Knowledge.
Only one possibility could lay claim to that sword.
A peerless hero who had struck down the Sword of the War God.
Or the Sword of the War God itself.
And looking at that figure, Tiyamal knew no peerless hero stood there.
The blast had cleared, and what it revealed was unmistakable.
Indiscriminate slaughter.
Every arc of the swing sucked soldiers in and split them apart. Even from this distance, the crimson painted the ground with sickening clarity.
As if a deranged artist were daubing a canvas in red, the earth grew wet with blood.
Those who resisted were few. Men died at a terrifying pace, unable to last a single exchange. Barely ten warriors held on at all.
The Masters—Tiyamal's companions—were nowhere to be seen.
They were not the sort to hang back in a moment like this. Their absence told him everything he needed to know.
Tiyamal clenched his jaw, snatched a fistful of arrows from beside the ballista, and crammed them into his quiver.
"We've already won the damn battle—and now this thing shows up!"
His face twisted with fury and dread as he slid down from the wall. Angie called out to him as she crossed his path, asking what was wrong. Whatever she asked him, he had no composure left to answer.
He barely had an answer to give. Even Tiyamal understood little of what was happening.
The only certainty: at this rate, they would all be dead.
*
The Sword of the War God swung Victory.
Soldiers caught in the arc—or simply too close to it—ruptured and flew apart. As the rain of viscera and splintered bone fell, the Sword of the War God came up stained red and surged toward its next prey.
"Hrraaah!"
Frida moved to meet it.
The blow was such that even a Master would struggle to block it. A lifetime's compression of power. The rising diagonal axe-cut was designed to lock an opponent into a five-move chain the instant it connected.
Delivered at a speed no ordinary human could even react to. A strike propelled by mana tattoos. But the Sword of the War God deflected it as if swatting a fly.
CLASH—!
A ringing concussion. The dissonant shriek of the axe breaking apart under the impact. Frida gritted her teeth and rolled her mana-etched prosthetic eye across the Sword of the War God's form.
A twitch of the hip; the center of mass shifted. A kick. A sharp rising kick. Frida caught the movement early and twisted her body—
KWOOOOO!
The gap she left behind filled with the storm of that kick, and she couldn't even maneuver. She tumbled helplessly across the ground, and the Sword of the War God lunged after her.
The greatsword rose high. Just before it hammered down onto her, the Sword of the War God wrenched its waist around and swung backward instead.
CRUNCH!
A beast had thrown itself forward to protect its master. A bear infected by a werewolf.
A grotesque mutant. Frida's personal guardian.
The creature had been inscribed with mana tattoos and put through years of training to stay ever at her side. It had slain countless knights of the Kallus Empire, earning the name Knight-Slayer across the battlefields.
That beast was bisected in a single stroke.
Entrails and brain matter scattered. Behind the animal's face twisted in hideous agony, Frida seized the opening and swung her axe.
There was no time to grieve. That was what she told herself.
Her second effort. An upward slash with everything behind it. But it never landed. The Sword of the War God knocked aside her full strength with a casual backhand.
CLANG. Her stance shattered. As Frida staggered, a fist came for her. Dark-red perception accelerated; a fist-shaped crater appeared in her abdomen, and she was hurled backward.
"Khuuurk...!"
Blood erupted from her mouth. Ruptured organs hemorrhaged internally. Her body bounced and skidded across the ground before coming to a halt.
The light of her mana tattoos scattered. Her frame shuddered faintly, and the Sword of the War God resumed its killing.
FOO-WOOSH!
The wind screamed with each swing. Air displaced by monstrous strength burst outward; the warriors of Baramunz who had charged in to protect their liege were split apart and sent rolling across the dirt.
The ground grew sodden with the blood of scattered soldiers and fighters. The Sword of the War God accelerated without letting a single drop touch it, the blood simply flying away from its wake.
Through that spray and the crack of splitting air, Bahot Head moved to intercept the Sword of the War God before it could reach Frida.
A seasoned warrior and spearman, the Dragon-kin thrust his shield forward. A shield that would be shorn through in a single blow.
He planted himself in front of Frida with that shield, and the Sword of the War God immediately drove Victory straight through it, then twisted, destroying the shield entirely.
The shield burst apart like molten slag, ragged flaps of metal. Bahot Head crashed into Frida and rolled across the ground. The Dragon-kin barely arrested his tumble, scooped Frida up, and shouted frantically.
"Now!"
A shouted word. The Sword of the War God caught its meaning and reacted instantly. Two vectors of attack came flying in at once—sniping strikes.
Long-range: a short-spear-length arrow and a swarm of crossbow bolts.
Anton's shot, the man who should have self-destructed, and Tiyamal, who had joined the fight from the fortress walls, raining sniper fire.
The Sword of the War God angled its blade to flick aside Tiyamal's far more lethal shot. As the arrow spun harmlessly to the ground, the Sword of the War God kicked up a fallen axe, snatched it from the air, and paused.
'Shadow Flip.'
The shadow beneath its feet vanished. Two trajectories surged in the same instant. The moment the swung axe was pulverized and scattered, every incoming bolt was repulsed.
The ambush looked like a failure. But the outcome was not. The bolts hung briefly in the air, then flared violet.
"INCENDENT."
The old man's murmured word ignited a wave of repulsion.
Technique-fired bolts hammered the Sword of the War God from every direction, battering it. For the briefest span, the thing was pinned.
Inside the storm of repulsion howling from all sides, the Sword of the War God inclined its blade.
Muscles writhed beneath its carapace as the magic began to unravel. Anton grimaced.
The Sword of the War God could not be bound for long. It would break free before Tiyamal could even line up his next shot. Overwhelming physical might and divinity meant magic burned through its mana pool before the effects could properly take hold.
Fighting it directly offered almost no chance of victory.
That form, that explosive capability—judging solely by what was visible, the strength was fueled by burning through life itself.
So the correct choice was to not fight it.
Common sense dictated that they should flee over the bodies of soldiers and allies, wait for that life to consume itself. That was how Anton had always survived. For revenge, he had calculated only his own sustainability.
Even now, sustainability argued for running.
So he wavered.
Wouldn't it be better to slip away even now?
To flee and wait for that life to gutter out—that was the revenge with the higher probability of success. Even if his hypothesis was wrong, running was still the rational choice when he had no means of winning here.
But.
'...Can't do that.'
At the edge of Anton's vision lay Rumel. A woman unconscious, caught in the blast.
'I knew she wasn't my daughter.'
He had mistaken her for his daughter at first glance, yes. But that illusion hadn't lasted long.
Her eyes were the wrong color. Her hair, her build—everything was different.
And above all, his daughter had died before his eyes.
It was the usual senile delusion, nothing more. A common enough thing at his age.
If Rumel had told him plainly she wasn't his daughter, there wouldn't have been a problem anyway. If the goal was to take revenge on the Sword of the War God, Anton would have joined without hesitation. And he would have been kind to Rumel, who resembled his daughter, even if she was not.
But Rumel hadn't corrected him.
Whether out of kindness or foolishness, she had let his delusion stand.
Had there been any selfish motive in it, Anton might even have resented her. But the emotion Rumel carried was pure sympathy—plain and sharp.
If Anton retreated now, Rumel would die.
Many others would die as well.
Perhaps Anton himself might survive. And he would lose everything all over again.
And Anton knew.
Even if he pulled back now and swore revenge once more—
He would never succeed.
He had nothing left to lose, and nothing left to sustain the attempt.
He had cast off his humanity to prolong his life. Eighty percent of his body was no longer human at all. After repeated magical modifications, his ego had blurred; he frequently lost his reason.
Anton was ceasing to be Anton, piece by piece.
He understood.
If he could not defeat the Sword of the War God here and now, there would never be another chance at vengeance.
"Damn it all."
The old man, voice steeped in self-derision, flipped his crossbow. The cylindrical magazine was exposed. He yanked a fresh magazine from inside his coat, slammed it home, and racked the bolt with a metallic clack. The weapon snapped shut, and Anton extended his hand.
He formed a hand seal. One hand was enough.
At once, he felt souls flooding in from his pet cat back in the fortress—his soul repository. All the stored life and souls he drew into his body. All those souls he converted to mana in the same breath. As mana detonated through his system, Anton thought it.
Right here, right now, he was the only one who could hold that thing still for even a moment.
Crrrrack. Craaack.
Fissures crawled across the repulsion magic, and the instant it shattered—
Anton leveled his crossbow.
"Body Activation."
At the murmured words, his form blurred.
KWA-AAAAANG!
Thunderous detonation. Both figures vanished. A red trajectory screamed forward. Anton watched the sword-strike coming to cleave him in half, dropped to one knee, and pulled the trigger.
The blade scraped past his earlobe and slammed into the earth. Dirt fountained, clods pattering down. From within that cloud, still on one knee, Anton emptied his crossbow into the Sword of the War God.
FWT-FWT-FWT-FWT-FWT-FWT!
A cascade of bolts. The hail of projectiles underwent countless transformations mid-flight and hammered into the Myth-Killer's form.
They detonated, ignited, expanded, scattered shrapnel. Every step of the process was silent-cast. Anton simply brute-forced the procedures with an overwhelming volume of mana.
The Sword of the War God bulled through every attack head-on. It swung Victory even as the hits tore into it; it scooped up fallen weapons and cut through them as it advanced.
Three exchanges in the space of a breath.
A downward slash—Anton dodged by triggering repulsion from a bolt he had already embedded in the ground. The following thrust he deflected with his left hand. The arm shattered from the force but was instantly regenerated and equalized. A clumsily knitted limb filled the space.
Then a cut aimed at his throat—he blocked it by expanding a bolt he fired at point-blank range into monstrous size.
As Anton pulled back, the Sword of the War God swung a morning star it had taken from a dead soldier.
The arc split into two the moment it moved. The shadow was gone. An unavoidable linked sequence surged toward him.
CRRRUNCH!
His crossbow and left leg shattered and flew apart simultaneously. Anton regenerated them in the same instant—and was cut down again.
His waist severed. His torso split. Anton was hurled away, tumbling across the ground while using Equalization once more.
Two legs regrew. He planted them into the dirt and snapped out the wrist-mounted hand-crossbows, firing both.
TWANG-TWANG-TWANG!
One at the charging Sword of the War God. The other at his own feet.
Mana flooded out, wordless. The bolts turned violet—
BOOM!
Anton's figure flickered out of existence again. Repulsion. It hurled him backward, and in that sliver of time he regenerated his severed ankle and wrist.
Equalization layered the regrown wrist into a deformity of eight fingers. He didn't care.
Fifty meters to the Sword of the War God. Far, for an improvised repulsion. Insanely short, given the speed that thing had already demonstrated.
But he didn't give up. Anton fired convulsively and cast magic with his malformed hands.
He cast the strongest magic currently available to him: a spell of the Manifestation School.
A knot of lightning tightened slowly, groaning with restrained thunder. The Sword of the War God accelerated harder, dropping its stance inhumanly low.
—!
At the climax, even sound disappeared. A thrust. Before the lunge fully discharged, Anton thrust his hand forward.
"Thunder Strike!"
KRRRRAKA-THOOOOM!
Lightning dragged down to the earth. Compressed noise became destruction and roared forward, shearing away chunks of the Myth-Killer's carapace. Blood sprayed.
Anton let out a hollow laugh at the sight.
The mightiest offensive magic of the high Manifestation School—and this was all it did.
Tiyamal's sniper fire came screaming in. Angie's magic, having finally caught up, joined it. Inaccurate ballista shots arced from the fortress walls. All of it was useless.
Because the moment the Sword of the War God scooped up a dead soldier's halberd, a martial display approaching the divine unfolded from its body.
'Moon-Splitting.'
KWA-WOOOONG!
Massive ice fragments burst apart. The sniper shots scattered wide. And beyond Anton's hollow laugh, the sword came for him.
CRRRACK!
A killing thrust. It sheared precisely through Anton's heart and spine at once.
Blood poured from his mouth. His body locked. His spine and heart had been struck together. He couldn't move. He had too little breath left to chant Equalization.
Only a single verse remained before death.
The blade twisted, aiming to split him lengthwise and destroy the brain. Anton felt the sequence of changes unfold inside his own belly and twisted his lips into something resembling a smile.
If he had only one verse, then by chance he had only one chant to make.
Victory ripped up along his spine. Just before it reached the cervical vertebrae, Anton's mouth opened.
"INCENDENT."