The Sword of the War God
The Sword of the War God
The Sword of the War God saw it.
The blade that carried the divinity of the Ancient God. The power held within that sharp, pristine white.
What that sword could do, and what it could not.
It required no elaborate verification. Fallen though he was, the Sword of the War God had once been an Emperor.
An Emperor exalted above all others had to be capable of anything. Combat was simply one facet of that.
Through the eyes of such an Emperor, that sword was a threat.
An unnatural sharpness that sheared through armaments not forged of White Iron as if they were nothing, bisecting any existence, whatever it might be.
A force that already operated like a law where cutting power was concerned.
As that force slowly oriented toward him, the Sword of the War God rendered his judgment in an instant.
And shifted his target.
Better to break this mighty existence now than to waste time on a creature whose strength and skill were so far beneath his own.
No carelessness.
He had to kill Aslan here and now with everything he had.
So the target changed in an instant. The Sword of the War God rotated his body fully and ground the rear foot he had kept back into the earth. Coiled power. Twist the hips and launch an intercepting strike—he thought, as he began to throw the kick.
Crack!
Abruptly, the girl who had been at his back surged forward.
What she threw was a punch. A brute fist devoid of technique, not even grounded in the fundamentals. Yet it was fast.
A fist that had not even finished regenerating hammered precisely into the Myth Killer's head, canting his body sideways.
His body tilted. Before the flustered Myth Killer could right himself, Aslan moved.
He released the Victory he had gripped in his hand and curled his knuckles, tapping his fist against his palm.
Rasp.
The sound of scraping metal echoed bleakly.
Wooooooom!
Then a thunderous roar, like a turbine spinning up, filled the space around them.
Amid the superheated air, Aslan's fist launched forward in a black smear of afterimage.
—!
What fired out was a forefist. An iron fist that hammered the Sword of the War God dead-on. As the Sword of the War God hurtled backward, chest caved in, Aslan glanced briefly at his figure in flight, then slid his gaze aside.
[LEVEL UP]
There floated the message he had not quite wished for.
The experience gained from repeatedly grinding down soldiers had at last pushed him to Level 10.
Watching the Sword of the War God tumble across the landscape, Aslan's fingers flicked quickly.
Tap, press.
[Aslan]
[Strength 2] [Agility ■] [Health 2]
[Mana 10] [Fighting Spirit 10] [Luck 10]
[Angela Tail]
[Strength 10] [Agility 10] [Health 10]
[Mana ■] [Fighting Spirit ■] [Luck ■]
The allocation was simple: three points into Fighting Spirit, two into Strength, one into Agility.
A handful of strings of text surfaced. Nothing worth confirming—he already knew it well. Aslan closed the system window and looked at Angie, who was frowning at the dissonance settling through her own body.
"Angie."
"...Yeah."
A muted voice. The girl's expression still ached with grief over the countless dead. Aslan offered no word of comfort.
Right now, comfort was not the priority.
So he gave her only a directive.
"Whatever happens, don't stop your feet. Trust me."
It was nothing she hadn't heard before. The girl lifted her head with a somber look and met his eyes.
Those golden eyes, faintly glistening and layered with unreadable feeling.
They trembled, then vanished into a smile that crinkled the corners.
"When have I ever not," she said, voice forced steady.
Further words were useless. Aslan nodded and tightened his grip on Purity, flexing the Dragon-king's arm until it rang with a steely note.
Angie clenched her fist, which had barely finished regenerating, and killed the tension with a series of low cracks from her knuckles.
There was nothing else to prepare.
All that remained was the fight.
From the wreckage far off where he had been buried, the Sword of the War God erupted and accelerated.
—Craaaaaash!
The sound of acceleration. Slower to follow than his physical form. Invisible to Aslan's eyes.
But he could feel it. Aslan watched the countless trajectories overlaying his field of vision and tilted Purity, ready.
Shiiiing, clang!
Victory came slashing in. A diagonal descending cut. Heavy with the momentum of the charge. But Purity could catch it. The moment he received it, Aslan turned the edge and shoved back.
A shower of sparks erupted, and beyond them Victory was hauled downward. The Sword of the War God twisted his wrist around the Kal blade's hilt, pried the blade free by angling his arm, and swung.
It was a wide horizontal slash, describing a full circle as it closed in.
Against anyone else a blow that would be unblockable—but against Aslan, worthless.
He thrust Purity toward the trajectory flickering dimly across his sight and stopped it.
Claaaaaaaang!
'Knight Slayer.'
The moment the two blades met, the Kal sword-edge darkened, turning black. A strike that bypassed Purity and reached for the throat.
The counter was simple. If it wasn't an ambush, he wouldn't fall to it.
It was, after all, one of Aslan's own techniques.
Clang!
He swatted the throat-seeking blade away with the Dragon-king's arm, drew back the Purity he had extended to block, and swung. Trajectories of ink-light and white-light crossed. The red trajectory of Victory chased after them in time.
Clang, clack-clack-clack-clang!
The crimson light warded off the white, and as that arc was pulled downward, a thrust chased after it. The Kal's hilt caught the thrusting Purity, torqued it aside, and flipped into a rising slash.
The rising slash was halted with a cross-block from Purity, then twisted and levered aside. The distance shrank. The instant it closed, the ink-light lunged.
The black-stained hand of the Dragon-king. Unavoidable. Too close. Instead of dodging, the Sword of the War God chose to slip the range the moment before impact. He threw himself backward at the perfect instant.
Behind him the sound of Kal edges scraping against each other rang out, and the moment the Dragon-king's body cleared the trajectory—
Angie, waiting all the while, lunged in.
"Huuu-yaap, hah!"
She clasped both fists together above her head and hammered them down. What infused those fists was not technique but raw monstrous strength. The brute force of a god that rewrote the meaning of law. The blow buried itself in his skull.
Craaaaaash!
The Myth Killer's body was swatted into the ground and rebounded. Just as his consciousness threatened to white out and he dragged it back, Angie's kick followed on its heels.
Crack!
The Sword of the War God went flying. Aslan did not chase the Myth Killer as he tumbled across the dirt; he used Domination.
Dozens of black feathers lifted into the air, then lanced out along the line of his outstretched black hand. The trajectory resembled suppressive fire from a machine gun.
Through the hailstorm, the Sword of the War God rolled. Between dozens of feathers nailing themselves into the ground, his carapace was pierced in gap after gap. Blood ran, the earth darkened toward a deeper red, and the Sword of the War God pulled himself upright.
He swung Victory as he rose. As if sweeping clouds from the sky, it entangled every oncoming feather in a single stroke and masked his line of sight.
That was exactly where Aslan wanted him.
The moment his vision went blinded, Angie plunged through the gaps between the feathers.
The Sword of the War God faltered for an instant.
He had not anticipated the speed of her approach.
The force of her legs had risen to a level beyond comparison. The body accelerated on that leg strength.
The frame had grown larger than moments ago. The fists flew in. Before the Sword of the War God could react, the straight, honest fists landed in quick succession.
Bam!
An uppercut to the jaw.
Crack!
A blow across the cheek.
Thump!
A hook driven into the gut.
Crunch!
The crown of his skull smashed from above.
What battered the Sword of the War God was a clumsy chain of attacks that amounted to nothing more than raw force. Attacks that could not even make full use of her power, because no technique had yet been solidified behind them.
Yet they landed.
Because the power loaded into those fists was beyond ordinary.
With no way to respond, he was beaten down.
Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack!
She accelerated by degrees. Faster and faster, she battered his body and disengaged. It was as if hundreds of bugs were tearing into him at once. There was a savagery in that ceaseless chain.
The girl—no, the woman—bellowed something close to a roar and swung her fists blindly.
Within that downpour of punches, the Sword of the War God perceived two things.
The first was speed. The second was power.
But she had not simply grown stronger.
She seemed an entirely different person.
The reach of her fists had extended. The direction through which force traveled had changed.
Suddenly she was taller, sturdier, her body unmistakably that of a grown woman.
As if her very body had been replaced between one moment and the next.
That was as far as the Sword of the War God's judgment went inside the storm. Blind instinct bade him tear into her; he opened his mouth to bite—
"Huuu-yah!"
Angie twisted her body past the snapping jaws and drove a leaping knee-strike home. His head snapped all the way back and he flew.
In the moment of flight, the Sword of the War God concluded:
Not as if she had changed. She really had changed.
And as he guessed, Angie's body truly was different.
Reaching the superhuman threshold of 10 universally granted a unique special feat.
Health, Mana, Fighting Spirit, Luck—any attribute that touched the superhuman realm brought a new perk in that instant.
Only Strength and Agility were excluded.
The special feats for those two attributes could only be unlocked once both of them reached 10 simultaneously.
Its name was Perfect Body.
It meant that a body already beyond human limits through divinity, upon entering the superhuman realm, would reconstruct itself into a form befitting its power and qualifications.
It added further corrections to all kinds of physical perks—including Regeneration, the Health 10 feat—and stacked an additional 50% on top of the existing corrections from Strength and Agility.
Angie's body had now grown to a level where she could match a high priest in a contest of strength.
Simple but fearsomely effective. Once that trait, renowned for its power since the early access of Eternal Dominion, had settled into her flesh, Angie chased the Sword of the War God even harder.
She reached him the very moment the thrown Sword of the War God was cratering into the ground. Angie felt her body transforming second by second as she moved.
Faster. Stronger.
Larger. Tougher.
That alone changed everything she could do. At the end of her pursuit, Angie drove her fist forward.