Chapter 230
Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 230
Chapter Title: Cleansing the Castle
Marbas resorted to every trick in the book, thrashing wildly to escape the sphere.
But the more he struggled, the more his body was ensnared by something unseen, pulled taut in every direction. It felt as if his very soul was being torn away.
The barrier of poison that had tightly enveloped his body was stripped away in an instant by the lightning that rained down before him.
The blue fire inflicted a pain he had never before experienced.
Perhaps it was a blessing that the thunderclaps exploding at close range had stolen his hearing. At least he no longer had to listen to that terrifying sound.
Ironically,
the ensuing pain also snapped him to his senses.
The pride of an elite demon known as Hell's Grand Chamberlain, the responsibility of an apostle, awakened him at this moment of life and death.
He tried to stand against that absolute power.
Even as a greater force sought to bind him, he tried to muster his magic and resist.
Loan was doing the same.
He, too, poured every ounce of mana he could command into the ‘Thunderclap’.
To ensure the fiend could not escape, and to call down the most powerful lightning possible.
To rip the creature apart, burn it, and use its mana as fuel, sustaining the merciless cycle of power to the very end.
He gave it his all, combining the mana scraped together by his four circles with the power from his necklace.
He didn't care that many enemies remained, that Kaide was still alive.
The absolute reason he could do this was simple.
Vangelis, the Commander of the Practical Division, was right behind him.
The commanders of the Union were people who far surpassed common sense.
A person wearing the meteoric iron badge on their chest had to be capable of such feats.
They had to make the impossible possible and give the Union members who looked up to them an unwavering, resolute faith.
Therefore,
Vangelis, who had been brainwashed by the enemy and had harmed his subordinates, had to overcome his own failure.
With overwhelming force.
“Kuaaargh!”
The Scribe, who had transformed from the body of a gaunt old man into a lion with a red mane.
Kaide, who had considered himself omnipotent after reaching the pinnacle of druidism and completing the ritual to accept the demon Baphula, was utterly helpless against Vangelis's assault.
The large wings on his back had long since been severed, rendered useless.
“Fangs of Death… Kuaaargh!”
“Nature's Rejection… Keuk!”
“Wrath of the Wilds… Aaack!”
Whenever he tried to use a skill, an attack would land a beat faster, rendering it all useless.
He constantly wondered how this man, who should have been his puppet, was attacking him with a clear mind.
Kaide frantically drew upon his seemingly inexhaustible well of mana.
But he couldn't dodge. When he blocked, his defenses were shattered, severed, and annihilated.
*KWAAAAANG?!*
If Loan was incinerating Marbas with countless bolts of lightning, Vangelis was a meteor.
He didn't seem to be moving like a person.
Everywhere he stomped on the dais, it exploded and shattered.
He was ferocious, as if trying to destroy everything in his path.
Vangelis's unique ultimate technique—enveloping all his hidden weapons in Aura Blades and using them to shroud himself as he charged—dyed the Grand Hall yellow.
And as he did, Kaide's body, once gaunt and briefly immense, was cut and torn until it was gaunt once more.
“Uwoooah!”
Despair filled his eyes as he looked around.
The prisoners who had been scrambling toward the dais were all on the floor, flailing helplessly.
It had started when Milos threw her unique weapon, her hunting weights, at the prisoners, tangling their legs together.
Mindlessly surging toward the dais on command, they had tripped over the fallen front ranks and tumbled to the floor in a chain reaction.
Once Yorgos and Milos had bound them together, they could only thrash about on the ground, posing no real threat.
They had effectively incapacitated their opponents.
Kaide turned his head again.
Marbas was now an unrecognizable mass of green floating matter, still being struck by lightning and burning.
Losing half his torso to one of Vangelis's attacks, Kaide turned his head away as if to ignore it.
There,
the Duchess, who was supposed to become his official wife and grant him the seat of ruler, had been taken down by a joint attack from the Union and Berthelot. She was unconscious and being carried away.
Kaide fell to his knees in despair.
“My… My home wasn't here, either.”
With those last words,
Kaide met a streak of light head-on and was annihilated.
A moment later,
Loan, having completely erased Marbas from the world, approached Vangelis.
Neither Loan nor Vangelis could find the words to speak.
After a moment of sizing each other up, Vangelis finally said what he had missed the chance to say earlier.
“Thank you.”
“Pardon?”
“You woke me. When Boris's name reached my mind, I snapped right out of it.”
“Ah…”
It felt incredibly awkward to be thanked by Vangelis.
He needlessly changed the subject.
“That technique from before. It was incredibly powerful. It looked like you were wielding an Aura Blade with your entire body.”
“Hm? Not my whole body, but a method of imbuing each of my hidden weapons with aura and linking them with mana. You can think of it as something similar to a mage's psychokinesis.”
Vangelis pulled dozens of hidden weapons from his coat at once, levitating them in the air.
The weapons were soon dyed a near-orange light, and as they hovered around Vangelis's arm, it looked as if his arm itself were a sword sheathed in a powerful Aura Blade.
This was what he had shrouded his entire body with to fight.
What he had just shown was only a fraction of his arsenal; it was a wonder where he had hidden so many weapons.
It was also an inspiration.
It seemed like something Loan could easily adapt for himself.
Just as they were having a somewhat peaceful conversation after dispatching their respective opponents,
“Commander! What are you doing! Get to work!”
Milos shouted from below.
As if she'd never had tears in her eyes, she stood with her hands on her hips, glaring fiercely at Vangelis.
The prisoners struggling on the floor were still aggressive and defiant.
Milos was in the middle of restraining them individually, while Yorgos and Sienna had left to mop up the remnants of Perver's forces.
Vangelis scratched his head and said to Loan,
“Can you do for them what you did for me?”
“Ah… I didn't just wake you with a word. I took a bug out of their ears.”
“A bug?”
Vangelis didn't know the true nature of what had been in his ear.
Loan thought it would be better to show him directly.
As he and Vangelis came down from the dais, Milos pointed to two men at the front who were resisting violently.
“Rigas and Odi were hit just like you, Commander.”
They were members of the Practical Division.
Loan immediately used Convection to hold Rigas's head still, then brought his palm to the man's ear.
A moment later, a black bug was pulled from Rigas's ear and writhed in midair.
“Ugh… What is that?”
While Milos recoiled in disgust, Loan floated it in front of Vangelis's eyes.
“They put these in everyone's ears. It's a bug that spreads the power of dark mana inside the brain. It makes you believe the Scribe's words and obey his commands.”
“And I had one of those in me?”
Vangelis casually touched his left ear, then scraped away a patch of dried blood from inside it.
“I suppose so… No wonder it feels like I've completely lost hearing in my left ear. Still, it's strange. I would have noticed if something this big had gotten in.”
“When the Scribe called for you, he said you would be ‘ripe.’ It probably meant the bug had grown enough for the dark mana to have spread. It must have been too small to notice at first.”
“This is all rather embarrassing.”
Vangelis placed the bug into a small, thumb-sized box and continued.
“So if we pull these bugs out, everyone will return to normal?”
“I can't make any guarantees. But we have to start there.”
It would be faster if everyone could help, but right now, Loan was the only one who could remove the bugs.
Loan painstakingly removed the bug from each person, one by one. Those who were treated thrashed wildly for a time before slowly quieting down as if falling asleep.
After a long while,
only the Duchess and the young Duke remained.
Berthelot and Sienna had isolated the two in a lounge area attached to the Grand Hall.
Tied to a chair, Duchess Versa was hurling curses at Berthelot while simultaneously begging him to spare her young son, who was asleep on a sofa. She rocked back and forth violently.
Seeing Berthelot's troubled expression, Loan approached the Duchess.
His heart was heavy.
Thoughts of her and her young son stirred up long-forgotten memories of his own.
But the Duchess couldn't possibly know Loan's circumstances or feelings.
She merely saw Loan's uniform and began to screech again.
“The Union? The Union conspires with that filthy traitor to steal my position? You disgusting rats! You common thief! I'll rip you all to shreds!”
She screamed, her eyes bloodshot. Then,
her face suddenly fell, and she whispered to Loan through her tears.
“Please… please… just spare my child. Surely the Union wouldn't kill a child? No, you wouldn't just stand by and watch that happen, would you? Right? Sir! Sir!”
Loan gazed at her face.
On the Duchess's unhinged face, a mess stained with tears, grime, and blood, the face of the mother he couldn't remember began to superimpose itself.
But it remained blurry.
Loan shook his head slightly and brought his hand to her ear.
A moment later, a black bug was pulled from her ear.
Loan used Convection to regulate the mana drawn in by her breaths, slowly guiding her frantic breathing back to a steady rhythm.
Gradually calming, she kept her eyes fixed on her child until the very end, before finally falling asleep.
Loan then removed the bug from the sleeping child's ear.
Perhaps it hurt, because the child began to wail hysterically.
Between sobs, he managed to get a few words out.
“It huuurts! I hate you! I hate you!”
The child, spitting out the most frightening words he knew, soon fell asleep just like his mother.
Loan said to Berthelot,
“We'll have to watch them for a while. We don't know yet if they'll recover on their own like Commander Vangelis, or if they'll need a purification ritual.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Berthelot grasped Loan's hands and nodded repeatedly.
Just because the Grand Hall was secured didn't mean everything was over.
While Berthelot watched over the Duchess and her son, the Union swept through the vast Versa Castle, mopping up the remnants of Perver's forces.
Fortunately, thanks to the cooperation of un-brainwashed members of the Versa household who had been hiding throughout the castle,
they were able to narrow their search without getting lost.
By morning, they had managed to corner most of Perver's faction in one place.
After isolating them, Vangelis opened the castle gates.
The people who had crossed the bridge and were waiting at the entrance greeted the Union members warmly.
It was the diversion team they had parted with late last night.
“To retake it in a single day… That's incredible.”
Stefan, a Seeker from the Stability Division, explained the situation to Vangelis.
“Their response started to dwindle around dawn. We figured things must have gotten more urgent inside than out here. We tracked some of their forces that had been outside as they tried to re-enter, and that led us here. It was so quiet we were starting to worry something had happened.”
Loan explained the situation on Vangelis's behalf, instantly relieving the man's anxiety.
He then added,
“So there are still many people who haven't woken up yet. Some of our own members, too. I was thinking perhaps the Stability Division's purification could help.”
“If Commander Vangelis has woken up, it might be possible. Let's take a look.”
While Stefan headed for the Grand Hall, guided by Milos,
Loan walked out to the middle of the bridge alone.
The glitter of the morning sun on the water was quite beautiful.
No one would ever guess that the water held a virulent poison.
But he couldn't just sift through a vast body of water, like a lake, to eliminate the poison.
The only method he could think of was to heat the lake until it completely vaporized, gather the vapor in one place, condense it, and then incinerate it with lightning. But a spell that powerful and vast was still beyond Loan's capabilities.
Loan decided to seal this place until his mind grew sharper and he could find another way to solve the problem.
Fortunately, it was winter.
Presently,
cold energy poured from the hand he stretched out below the bridge, and the moat began to freeze.