The Sanctuary of Sorrow
The Sanctuary of Sorrow
Aslan gripped the haft of his two-handed axe—right at the throat where the haft met the blade.
The Banshee was hurtling toward him at full speed, fast enough that drawing the axe and swinging would come too late.
Considerable velocity. He'd be struck before he could bring the weapon to bear. For an ordinary warrior, that would be the end of it.
Aslan was no ordinary warrior.
Shadow Flip.
The moment he spoke the words in his mind, the shadow pooled at his feet vanished. Ereta flinched at the cleanly erased silhouette. Angie raised her six-foot staff.
Shaaak!
Shadow Flip was a two-strike sequence that bypassed perception—no visible starting point, only the result.
Even without the weapon drawn. Even from a stance that made swinging impossible.
Like a shadow flickering thickly under the descending sun, two attacks lanced out in the space of a heartbeat.
That was Shadow Flip.
The technique erupted from Aslan's hands.
The problem was that physical attacks did very little against a Banshee.
Aslan had already settled into a follow-through posture, as though the axe had been swung. The Daughter of Sorrow's scattered form billowed and re-coalesced. Their eyes met.
Didn't work after all.
He saw no fear in those eyes, no hint of crisis. Only a chilling, murderous intent.
Aslan clicked his tongue. Light flared from the tattoo crawling up his shoulder.
One of the few things effective against Banshees was elemental damage. Conveniently, Aslan had stored Metal Heating—a spell that could infuse a weapon with an element—inside his tattoo.
The problem was that Metal Heating was not especially powerful when used for elemental infusion.
And the Daughter of Sorrow was a Named Banshee, possessed of even greater physical resistance than ordinary specimens. Aslan could not be certain whether Metal Heating alone would suffice.
But other options...
He glanced sideways. Ereta entered his field of vision, and a thought blazed through his mind.
[Effect of !!UNKNOWN!!?]
[Can sever the connection between god and priest.]
[Remains active as long as the user possesses fighting spirit.]
[▀▄▀▄▀ ▄▀█▄▀ δ▄▀ █▀▄ █▀▄ ▀▄▀█▄]
A technique capable of severing the link between god and priest had surfaced in his memory without warning.
Its name was unreadable. Its effects were dubious. He could not say who had granted it, or how he had acquired it—its very origin was a void.
But it had undeniably severed Ereta's connection to her god.
Aslan fixated on that fact.
The bond between god and priest was not something that could be physically broken. If it were, he would never have endured such hardship.
The nameless technique clearly operated on something beyond the physical.
Aslan's eyes moved rapidly, registering the incoming Banshee as he retrieved the axe he had swept aside and reset his grip.
With the axe held properly, he focused on the sensation he had felt when he made Ereta human again—that elusive current within himself, an energy he could not identify.
Something existing beyond mana.
He seized the sensation and drew it out the instant he felt it. Years of pulling intangible forces through his mana channels made his response immediate.
Whoomph!
The axe blade ignited white. Not with heat—with light.
Now came the moment of proof.
Aslan raised the blazing axe. At that exact instant, the faltering priest's head snapped up.
"Guh... GrraaaAAAAHHH!"
He charged, shrieking.
The sudden rush tore open the wound in his flank. Blood and viscera pattered down like heavy rain. Angie spat a curse at the sight.
"The fuck—!"
Aslan saw the priest closing in late and frowned, lowering the axe he had lifted. He would swing wide horizontally, sweeping aside or cutting through both priest and Banshee in one stroke.
Behind him, Ereta stood ready with a short blade in each hand. Angie swung her six-foot staff into position.
But the Banshee moved first. The female-shaped specter twisted in midair, swam a spiraling arc—
Thwack!
Boom.
—and drove her hand into the chest of the priest charging toward Aslan.
The hand, stained a sickly dark green, punched clean through his breastplate and out his back.
The priest's heart, shoved free by her claws, tumbled from his chest and hit the floor with a wet slap.
The heart rolled across the ground, throbbing, weeping blood of the same hue. Where the blood pooled, the floor corroded. The priest's eyes flew wide. He whimpered.
"Khh... ghhh..."
He was dying, blood gurgling from his mouth, the stench of searing corruption rising with every convulsion.
"...What the..."
The Named Banshee. The dungeon boss. The former priestess who had served the God of Sorrow and Death—the Daughter of Sorrow.
She stood motionless after driving her hand through the priest's heart.
Angie's attack, which she had been too late to pull, clipped the Banshee's head—and still the creature did not so much as twitch.
Aslan frowned, unable to parse the situation. Angie awkwardly withdrew her staff.
The Banshee was staring at Aslan with a face that barely looked human—hideously decayed, warped with agony. From her arm, the dead priest dangled like a skewered doll, legs swinging limply.
This was a scene you would never encounter in the game. Aslan's eyes tracked, trying to make sense of it. The Daughter of Sorrow extended a hand.
With a half-severed index finger, she pointed at the axe.
More precisely, at the axe still blazing white in Aslan's grip.
"Uh... what?"
At his question, the Banshee silently withdrew the pointing finger and aimed it at her own head.
She drew the extended finger down across her brow, a slicing motion.
As if—
"You want me... to kill you?"
"That's what it looks like..."
The Banshee smiled as if the words were the correct answer.
With that hideous face, she pushed up rotting cheek muscles and stretched her torn lips into a grin.
It was the kind of sight that sent ice racing down the spine. But even as Aslan openly grimaced, the Banshee merely lowered her head in silence.
There was no threat in her. Just this inexplicable behavior. Aslan stepped toward the monster.
Angie's voice cracked with alarm as she watched him approach the creature unguarded.
"H-hey, Aslan? What are you doing?"
"Yeah. It's suspicious. But honestly, this works out."
He did not understand the situation. He had no idea what lay behind it. He had never heard of a monster that wanted to die.
A monster could not even be called a living thing. A wraith was definitionally outside the category of life. This behavior contradicted every instinct such a being should possess.
Still, Aslan raised the axe and leveled it at the Banshee's head.
Under normal circumstances, this would have been a grueling fight. Not quite on Ereta's level, but the Daughter of Sorrow was still a dungeon boss intended to be confronted through a main quest later on.
Her near-immunity to physical damage without an element, her high mobility, her recklessly aggressive attack pattern—she was meant to be a serious threat.
If he could eliminate such an enemy now, and this easily, then there was no downside.
It was a net gain.
Whatever scheme might be lurking beneath the surface, Aslan judged that any plan subtle enough to require this level of manipulation still offered more benefit than risk.
Beneath that judgment lay another thought.
Since he could not grasp the situation, it was right to play along with the monster's intentions to some extent—if only to gain understanding.
He lowered the axe for a moment, repositioned the blade at the Banshee's head, and reset his grip.
The motion produced audible sound, but the Banshee neither lifted her head nor stirred. She remained still, head bowed in silence.
"...Shall I do it, Aslan?"
Ereta, who had been quiet until now, spoke up as she stepped closer. She had apparently thought he was hesitating.
Instead of answering, Aslan shook his head gently.
This was something he had to do himself—he was the one who possessed the technique that could sever the bond between god and priest. He debated whether this was truly the right course of action, then lifted the axe.
Crack!
He brought it down.
The descending blade, still blazing white, split the Banshee's skull. It sank deep between the cleaved halves of her head. And this time, the divided head did not rejoin. It crumbled into dust, the smiling expression still etched upon it.
This sensation...?!
From the head downward, she slowly dissolved into dust. Where her vanishing body had stood, there was something hazy.
Something formless, intangible.
A faint light invisible to the eye.
Aslan realized that this light felt strikingly similar to the unidentified technique he had applied to the axe blade.
The same sensation as when he had called upon that technique.
Something left behind after the severing of god and priest—something that could sever such a bond in turn.
The recognition struck like instinct.
...Divinity...?
Crack. Craaack.
The moment the realization settled, the divinity lingering where the axe blade was embedded began to fracture.
Fissures spread through it, and slowly, it revealed itself. The revelation came as light. Light was pouring out.
A self-detonation? Aslan considered the possibility, but this did not feel like that. The light carried no heat, not even the basic pressure that would affect a human body.
But it was unsettling. Angie stared at the disquieting radiance and spoke.
"Something weird is—"
And with that, the blazing outflow halted.
KABOOOOOM!
Then it burst forth like water, flooding the space in a deluge.
*
"...Ngh."
Angie opened her eyes. She saw nothing.
"What?"
Are my eyes closed? She blinked. The darkness shifted by the faintest degree.
When she closed her eyes, something like afterimages drifted through the murk. When she opened them, there was only blackness.
It was then she understood that what she was looking at was something truly, deeply black.
"Where... is this?"
She realized she had been lying down and belatedly pushed herself upright.
The sight that greeted her was something she had never seen before in her life.
An invisible black floor. A black sky. Black walls.
A bizarre space where every attempt to gauge distance died blindly, returning only the same verdict: this place could not be perceived.
Why am I here?
She looked around for a long time. Nothing changed. It was a uniform black expanse so absolute that turning around made her feel she would forget which direction she had been facing.
That light definitely burst out...
An unknown radiance had poured forth, and caught in it, she had lost consciousness in an instant.
She had followed that lost consciousness and arrived here. The girl—Angie—found it bewildering.
"Hey! Aslan! Crazy lady! Is anyone here?!"
Her shouts returned no answer. The sound did not even echo. She frowned—an expression close to tears—in this silent void where it seemed nothing existed at all.
"What the hell is going on."
Anxiety and fear gnawed upward. With no one watching, there was no point in bluster. Face crumpled, she kept looking around as she walked into the unknown.
She could not even trust her own footsteps. Her brutalized senses reported that she was walking, but the unchanging view made her stomach lurch.
"Ugh... I hate this kind of..."
A brief search yielded no change, and a single tear beaded at the corner of her eye—
Thunk!
"Ah!"
Something struck her on the head, and the tears stopped.
The impact was light, the object small. She heard a faint jangling, but it did not seem to be a weapon.
She lifted her head to look at the sky where the object must have fallen from, but found only black emptiness, so she dropped her gaze back down.
It was something rectangular.
Instinctively, she picked up the thing from the ground. It had the texture of leather. Beneath the uneven, bumpy surface, there was a seam.
A seam that compelled you to open it. She unfolded the rectangle—the kind of thing that Aslan, had he seen it, would have called a wallet.
Inside the opened wallet were several more rectangles and some paper.
"Huh...? Aslan?"
Among those squares of thin material, something caught her eye.
[Student ID]
[Lee Hyun-woo]
[30316]
"Wait... no, is that not him? Something's different..."
The person in that strange little rectangle resembled Aslan, but was subtly off.
His eyes were black. He looked brighter. Somewhere in him, he looked weaker.
"As...lan? Hey, answer me."
Angie tilted her head. She flipped the student ID over, shook it, tapped it. But the photo on the card only smiled. It did not move.
She stared at the picture of Aslan—smiling, unresponsive—and her face crumpled again.
"Are you trapped in there or something? Shit, I don't know magic that well..."
Just as she was attributing all of this to some magical phenomenon, light washed over her.
Along with a sense of presence, the light soaked her ankles—an artificial brightness unlike anything she had ever experienced in her life.
Beyond that artificial light, through fissures spreading across the black space, a cluster of towering buildings revealed themselves.
"...What is even happening."
Angie hesitated for a moment, then walked into the light.