Master of Combat
Master of Combat
'What... is this?'
The axe-head blazed white. Aslan had never seen anything like it—not its light, not its shape, not even its name.
Something had been wrong from the moment the system window first displayed broken text.
In twelve years of wandering, had the system window ever shown an error? Not once. Not a single time.
Even back when this world was just a game, he'd never heard of a bug that corrupted the text itself.
'It's not hot. What kind of effect is this?'
He ran his other hand along the blade. This light wasn't flame or heat—a faint, cool sensation clung to the axe instead.
He couldn't even guess what he'd cleared or what he'd received. The scrambled letters made it impossible.
Aslan stared at the axe, confusion written plainly across his face. A few heartbeats later, he realized he could feel heat—not from the weapon, but from right beside him. He turned his head.
"...What?"
A blast of scorching wind hit him. Through the hair whipping across his vision came the thick stench of brimstone and fire.
Beyond the fluttering strands, he saw something he had not expected.
Arm, legs, head, waist—Ereta, hacked into pieces barely distinguishable from ground meat, was regenerating.
It was a deeply alarming sight.
Aslan had killed Ereta himself. Fearing some residual regeneration—that she might somehow cheat death—he had used Shadow Flip to its absolute limit to butcher her. After cutting her apart, he had even taken her head. No amount of regenerative power could survive that. Not for a high priest of the Fire-weaving Spider. Especially for a high priest of the Cosmic Inevitability, whose power was weaker than other divinities, and who had never shed her human form as the Saintess of Slaughter.
There was no way she could have survived.
Yet here she was, defying all logic and certainty, pulling herself back together.
Through the gaps in her regenerating flesh, laced with the stench of fire, Aslan saw a shape.
Ereta's shadow—the chopped, scattered fragments of her shadow—was seething into an unrecognizable form.
He guessed the truth and spat it out.
"Fire-weaving Spider...!"
A high priest was a god's hands and feet, little different from an avatar. The stronger the divine power they received, the stronger their bond to their deity. And a god that was less-than-fully-transcendent could, in turn, grow attached to its high priest.
Ereta, the Saintess of Slaughter, was unmistakably the Spider's favored one.
Watching her regenerate—not just radiating intense heat but weeping actual flames—Aslan cursed under his breath and pushed himself upright.
"Even if it costs you your divine rank... you're still going to do this?!"
The world was sealed. The God of Sorrow and Death, one of the Ancient Gods, had closed it shut with her final struggle. Now the gods could project only enough power into the world to create their priests—unless they wrung out their own divinity and forced it through.
That was exactly what the Fire-weaving Spider was doing to bring Ereta back.
Self-mutilation with its own godhead—a reversal of all sense, tearing off pieces of itself to feed its avatar.
The outcome was obvious. The Spider would regain Ereta, and its divinity would degrade. Its power would weaken. The other gods would try to devour it or exploit the opening, and the entire Cult of the Cosmic Inevitability might lose significant influence.
Despite all that, the Spider was doing it.
Amid his shock, Aslan searched for a counter.
"You insane bastard—you'd go this far?!"
His first instinct was to grip the axe tighter. He could smash the corpse further to halt the regeneration, but his body was at its limit—exhausted past endurance, bleeding out by the second. His depleted mana made sealing the wounds with wild magic impossible. Even if he could overcome all that and batter the corpse, it wouldn't solve the root problem. The divinity already poured into Ereta would simply rebuild her faster than he could destroy her.
Aslan raised his arm to shield himself from the undulating tongues of flame and bit down hard.
'What tools do I have? Something to stop this...!'
Metal Heating and the axe. Destruction, but no fundamental answer. Yet destruction was all he had.
He had just lifted the axe in both hands, resolving to do what he could, when it appeared.
[Effect of !!飮쒖닔!!?]
[Can sever the bond between god and priest.]
[Will not extinguish so long as the user's fighting spirit endures.]
[怨좊?邑좎쓽 賃섏뿉 恁몄쓳壬섏뿬 淫깆옣壬⑸땲宥ｌ]
A warped, shattered system window flickered before Aslan's eyes, then vanished. The way it disappeared was like an overwrite—by the time he blinked, all he could see was the empty main quest log.
'Sever... the bond between god and priest?'
The timing was impossibly convenient. Even the effect was spelled out at precisely the right moment. His first thought was whether it was a hallucination—a trick. The fact that it came exactly when he needed it made him suspicious. That instinct had kept him alive for twelve years.
In the ever-intensifying gale of heat, Aslan glanced at the axe.
The white light running along its edge shone undimmed against the raging flames, as if telling him to trust it.
It was too convenient. But there was no other choice.
A gamble that might not be the answer, versus a lesser evil that guaranteed failure. The decision made itself.
Aslan clenched his jaw and exhaled hard. His lungs felt scorched by the furnace wind. Past his wide-open eyes, Ereta was nearly whole again.
Twelve years had never been gentle enough to let him weigh his options and pick carefully. To survive, he would do anything. Whatever it took, he was going home. That was his promise. Against that promise, gambling everything on a crisis like this meant nothing at all.
He tightened his grip on the axe and lunged forward.
Kwooooooh!
The raging wind howled like a monster's roar, and woven through it was a woman's voice mixed with something that sounded like a grotesque weeping. The weeping pulled Ereta's body upright inside the gale, which now burned bright enough to appear red.
Her body was almost fully restored—limbs knit, form whole. Even as flames licked across her, the flesh held.
She rose. Her body was pristine, but her consciousness was gone—her pupils were rolled back, showing only white.
And behind her, a strange shape revealed itself: something like a spider, yet unlike any spider, with dozens of legs, a mane of flame, and sixteen eyes.
The Fire-weaving Spider.
Aslan saw the god's form writhing between shadow and fire. Ignoring the sharp spike of a headache, he pressed forward.
"As...lan..."
Ereta's throat sealed itself. The flesh knit even as it blazed. Flames erupted from her wounds with a wet, percussive sound—and then her fist followed the fire, hurtling toward Aslan.
A cannonball strike aimed at his skull. He dropped low and let it pass overhead; the flames and knuckles whipped through the space where his head had been, scattering his hair wildly.
The Fire-weaving Spider borrowed Ereta's mouth and wrenched it wide to spew fire—and Aslan moved an elbow that barely worked anymore. Two hands on the axe, he swung upward in a diagonal slash.
Chwa-jaak!
Along the arc of the swing, his own wounds split open and blood surged, but the axe traced a flawless path. Even in a tattered, near-death state, his technique held without a tremor.
The diagonal line blazed white as it traveled from Ereta's flank to her shoulder.
Fwa-haak!
Blood and flame sprayed from the gash—and Ereta collapsed as though her strings had been cut. The wound itself was already cleanly healed.
But the shape floating behind her was not.
The Fire-weaving Spider's manifestation split along the slash line, spewing fire and blood and burning thread, thrashing in fury. Slowly, the shape separated from Ereta. Peeled away. The form that had been draped over her like a second skin was forced back, pulled toward somewhere else.
'It really severed the bond?'
Aslan watched the shape stripped from Ereta's fallen body convulse, its legs thrashing spastically. This wasn't a temporary interruption. It was a complete severance. The moment he realized it, the Spider's form let out an anguished wail.
Ki-e-e-e-e-e-e-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
It sounded like a child shrieking after having its favorite toy snatched away. Hearing it, Aslan knew for certain the connection was broken—a god wailing in grief over the loss of its prized plaything, the one it had poured its own divinity into reviving.
Ereta was now nothing more than a human.
Aslan's lips curled upward. The Spider's lingering form manipulated what divinity remained and lunged.
He didn't flinch, even as a titanic spider of living fire bore down on him.
"If she's something you treasure so much—"
He simply raised the axe. A beast charging in a straight line was easy prey.
"—I'll take her from you as many times as I please."
One foot planted. Broken leg bracing his weight. The axe chopped downward.
The onrushing flames struck the white-burning blade—and burst apart in a blaze of white heat.
Geu-i-gi-i-i-ik!
"Now choke on it and get out."
The moment the descending axe bit into it, the Spider screamed like a dying thing. Its form split left and right, white-hot with flame and divinity. The light enveloping Aslan's axe receded.
Fwoo-o-o-o-o-om!
The Spider's shape erupted.
In an instant, the oppressive, hideous presence of the Fire-weaving Spider vanished, wiped clean.
Gravely wounded in its divinity, the Fire-weaving Spider departed with its godhead damaged. Aslan stood alone between the unconscious Ereta and Angie.
Seeing that Ereta was truly unconscious, he exhaled in relief.
It was time to go back.
*
"...Think you can hold?"
"This lot's got a better chance than most. And the Margrave—how fares His Excellency?"
"A little tired, that's all."
Amid the scattered corpses of spider-monsters and the followers—humanoid aberrations whose forms were gradually intermixing with the spider traits—stood the Margrave's soldiers, the Margrave himself, and Harod.
Men who had different families, different homes, now leaned against each other closer than kin. Between the aligned shields of the soldiers in formation, several bodies lay dead, still at their posts.
In the center stood Harod, wielding a club carved from a spear-shaft and a shield riddled with holes. Several fingers were missing from the hand that held the shield, which he'd already lashed to his forearm. At least one hand remained intact—he was in better shape than most.
Over thirty men were dead or wounded. Those entirely unharmed, without a single injury, numbered less than ten. Even counting the Margrave himself, no one was free of wounds.
The Margrave of Saingirus walked among his exhausted, battered soldiers with a longsword in hand. His role was to cut down any monster that broke through the line.
They had won. The monsters and the followers had come in endless waves, and they'd had to fight without much advantage from terrain—but the soldiers' desperate effort, their superb training, and the personal martial prowess of the Margrave and Harod had carried the day.
Because the battle had been so grueling, the Margrave and his men could not relax their vigilance. If they dropped their guard now and another monster came through, defeat would be all that remained.
Everyone stood tense, gripping their weapons—and then the brush shook and someone burst through.
The nearest soldier panicked and drove his spear forward. The thrust was caught, casually.
"...That's dangerous, you know."
It was Aslan.
Slung over each shoulder, supported by his arms, were the unconscious forms of the two women. The spearpoint, stopped inches from his face, was drenched in monster ichor.
"Uh, ah..."
The soldier floundered. Not because his spear had been caught, nor from the embarrassment of attacking an ally—but because of the sight before him.
Aslan stepped past the stunned soldier and into the formation. The shield-bearers parted to make way. Harod, dragon-kin features doing nothing to hide his shock, stared wide-eyed.
Squelch.
Blood streamed with every step Aslan took. His footprints were impossibly red. There was not a patch of his body not coated in blood, and his teal eyes—normally cool, even cold—had turned dull and unfocused. He cut through the soldiers and stopped at the rear, where the wounded and the dead lay together.
"Great Flame above..."
Harod's horrified whisper.
"You..."
The Margrave's voice, startled but barely holding its composure.
Aslan let Ereta slide off his shoulder. She hit the ground with a thud.
"This one... was a high priest. Not anymore. Saintess of Slaughter Ereta. Don't kill her—keep her confined. She doesn't have anything beyond human strength now."
His voice was low. No one answered. Aslan swayed as though the strength had left his hands, still holding Angie, and slowly lowered her to the ground.
Crouched from setting Angie down, he did not rise again.
"Please... see to their treatment."
And then he collapsed. He fell forward, face hidden, but the blood slowly welling from his stomach was far from a normal amount.
A long trail of bloodstains marked the path from where he'd burst through the brush, between the soldiers, to where he now lay. Everyone stood gaping at that trail for five seconds. After a stretch of silence, not a single soldier needed to be told—every one of them moved.
Emergency treatment and evacuation.