Nightfall - Hidden Route (8)
Back in his days as a Hero, Yujin had spent twenty years cutting down every last demon, the Four Heavenly Kings who commanded them, and the Demon King himself.
But succeeding in killing them never meant he was stronger than they were.
Among the Four Heavenly Kings, for example, the Tyrant King Kazan and the Titan King Atram possessed raw strength that put Yujin to shame. The Immortal King Dekels had lived so long he had accumulated near-infinite mana, and the Extinction King Kardenak was a master of the martial arts whose skill far outstripped the swordsmanship Yujin had honed over those two decades.
As for the Demon King—he was a near-perfect being who outclassed Yujin in every single respect.
And yet Yujin had won those fights. In the end, he had killed them all.
That was simply the nature of combat.
No matter how much greater your power, how superior your physique, how unmatched your technique—none of those things guaranteed victory. The only thing that decided a fight was whether, at the exact right moment, you could make perfect use of what you had.
And in that regard, Yujin stood above anyone else alive.
Because for twenty years of life-and-death bloodbaths, he had never once lost.
The viewers, watching the scene unfold before their eyes, found themselves blinking hard.
From the moment Yujin had declared he would finish this in one minute, everything had flipped.
On the surface, it looked no different from the fight before. The Ruler still spewed countless tentacles to attack him, and Yujin still swept his holy sword—wreathed in golden radiance—through them and cut them away. The tentacles regenerated as a matter of course, and the whole situation snapped right back to square one. Everything seemed to be looping exactly as it had, with nothing changed at all.
But there was one difference.
Where Yujin had been scrambling just to defend against the Ruler, he was no longer even bothering with defense. He was hunting it.
And that seemingly minor shift was the decisive factor tipping the scales of the match in his favor.
Until a moment ago, the gap in physical stats was so massive I couldn't press a real offense.
But the Yujin who now possessed overwhelming power—paid for by a body transforming into something inhuman—was different. He no longer needed to dodge those monstrous tentacle strikes. All he had to do was cut them clean through before they ever touched him.
Enraged by that display, the Ruler lashed dozens of tentacles out in every direction at once—but attacks like that no longer even reached him. Yujin's body had long since left human speed behind; by now he was nothing more than a streak of golden light.
That golden flash slipped lightly through the gaps between the tentacles as if mocking the Ruler's assault, then shattered them into hundreds of fragments.
Infinite regeneration or not, losing dozens of tentacles in a single breath made the Ruler howl. And in the moment it staggered, Yujin poured on the offense again—utterly one-sided.
What he was doing could no longer be called a battle.
It was violence. The merciless, crushing violence of the strong inflicted one-sidedly upon the weak.
At those comments from the chat, Yujin gave a small shake of his head and spoke.
"No. I've more or less figured out where the enemy's heart is. Finishing this in thirty seconds isn't that impossible."
"There were clues. Yuria already gave me the hint—the reason the Ruler can regenerate its tentacles infinitely is the magic power supplied by its heart."
Hearing that from Yuria, Yujin had thought it through.
If the heart was the source regenerating the tentacles, then wouldn't the regeneration speed differ between places close to the heart and places far from it?
That was why he had kept attacking even while knowing the tentacles would endlessly grow back—to watch the regeneration rate of tentacles on each part of the body, and from that deduce roughly where the heart had to be.
Of course, reading something like that in the middle of a ferocious fight was no easy task. But by leaning on the power of Combat Foresight, he had succeeded in pinning down the exact location.
From the Ruler's absolute center, two o'clock direction. Distance: about a hundred thirty meters to the right, seventy meters up.
With that, every decisive piece he needed for victory was in hand.
All that remained was to seize the win with his own two hands.
Time left: ten seconds.
He ran.
This time committing everything to evasion rather than attack, Yujin sprinted forward and at last arrived above the spot where he estimated the heart would be.
Five seconds.
The endless regeneration of the tentacles had been the problem—the Ruler's body itself was not particularly hard. If he poured the full strength of both arms into one blow, he ought to be able to carve straight through every outer layer and sever the heart in a single stroke.
He raised the holy sword to end it all—and his face went rigid.
…Damn it. Didn't see this coming.
The flesh surrounding the heart was hard enough to call to mind solid steel. As if, because it protected such a vital point, the Ruler had taken its own precautions.
Given enough time and repeated blows, he could crack that defense. But the time he had left was a mere five seconds—and he would get only a single chance to swing his sword. In that one stroke he had to punch through steel-hard plating, carve the whole section free, and crush the heart.
Is that even possible?
Ordinarily, no. Unleashing destruction that wide with a single blade was not something permitted to a human being.
But for Yujin—the Hero of another world—it was.
Surpassing human limits while still trapped in a human body was nothing to him.
Four seconds.
The decision took an instant.
Without warning, Yujin shifted the way he held his sword. Even he, who had swung without hesitation until now, had no choice but to deliver this particular strike with extreme care.
Until this moment he had been swinging on the foundation of experience built across twenty years of battlefields. What he was about to release was not a sword born of experience—it was the pure essence of a blade refined over centuries for the sole purpose of cutting down demons.
Demon-Slaying Sword.
A style forged from the foolish resolve of a mere human to purge every demon in the world and, in the end, save all of mankind. Its founder had died without seeing that wish fulfilled—but the art had passed through many successors until it reached Yujin, and when he finally cut down the Demon King, he had answered that long-held prayer in the founder's place.
Born to let a human body slaughter demons, the Demon-Slaying Sword was devastatingly powerful—and the backlash was just as extreme. With a body that held not even a scrap of mana, performing it should have been impossible.
But Yujin had Willpower.
With Willpower supporting him, enduring the backlash and at least approximating the technique ought to be possible.
Two seconds.
He did not entertain idiotic thoughts like Can I do this? or What if I fail?
Willpower was the power by which a user's belief warped reality itself and rewrote its laws. Miracles never came to those who did not believe in themselves.
In the next instant, Yujin's sword moved like an illusion.
Demon-Slaying Sword—its first form.
Demon-Slaying Sword — First Form
New Moon
The instant he swung, a faint hairline traced itself through empty air—so thin and dim it would have been invisible without absolute focus. The moment that line touched the Ruler, space itself was cut as if the idea of it had been a lie, and the Ruler's body split cleanly in two.
The Ruler howled at the agony of its own body being torn in half.
But those screams never reached Yujin's ears.
He could see it.
In the gap of the bisected torso, a small gem like a ruby glittered. That was the Ruler's heart—the wellspring of magic power that seemed to touch infinity, and the very root of its life.
Even when Yujin stepped forward and closed his hand around the heart, the Ruler made no move to stop him.
Everyone present already knew. The heart, too, had already been sliced open by Yujin's blade.
To break Arkham's nightmare. For the future of mankind. If he felt like it, he could have poured out any number of grand, polished answers. Instead, Yujin simply spoke what was in his heart, calm and plain.
"To live. Because I didn't want to die here."
The Ruler slowly closed its eyes.
Crack.
From the heart that had glittered like a jewel came the sound of something splitting.
As the Ruler's body collapsed without strength—
CRACK—!
—the heart in Yujin's hand shattered completely to pieces.
The long, long fight was over.