Song of Wind and Lightning
Steel screamed as it carved through flesh. Rimer did not stop at a single stroke. Poised in midair, he poured out a torrent of slashes that diced Manghongwi's body into ribbons.
The instant the black hands binding Raon's wrists and ankles dissolved, he stamped the Supreme Harmony Footwork and swept the falling Yua and Julius into his arms.
"Haa..."
He checked the two children and let out a breath of relief. They're all right. Aside from having been knocked unconscious, Yua and Julius were unharmed.
A low hum of heat rolled off him. The fire of the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames scoured away every last trace of the death energy Manghongwi had used to put the children to sleep.
"Hup!"
Rimer touched down and slung his sword across his shoulder. The grin stretching his mouth said he was thoroughly drunk on his own heroics.
"Squad Leader..."
"Ah-ah!"
Raon started to speak, but Rimer thrust a hand forward and shook his head.
The smile at the corner of Rimer's mouth deepened. His soaring pride looked ready to punch through the clouds and scrape the heavens themselves.
"Leader of the Light Wind Squad? Then that elf is Zieghart's Sword of Light Wind?"
"I-incredible. I didn't even know he was here!"
"What a terrifyingly fast blade. Now I see why they call him that."
"To tear Manghongwi apart like that..."
"I heard he'd taken a serious wound, but he's still going strong."
"As expected of Zieghart..."
The swordsmen and mages who had been crushed beneath Manghongwi's deathly presence let out awed breaths, marveling at Rimer's swordsmanship.
"Ahem! It wasn't all that much."
Rimer cleared his throat and lifted his chin. Arrogance sat on his face like a crown.
"Huu..."
Raon let out an irritated breath and walked toward him. I'm grateful he saved us, but before that... Why had he shown up now?
Watching the man preen like that brought six days of grinding hell roaring back, and Raon's insides began to boil.
"Why did you arrive now, of all times?"
"What, you think you're the protagonist? What the hell were you doing that you only crawled in now!"
"Looks like you were off taking a nap somewhere."
"Late."
After Raon, Marta, Burren, and Runaan all glared at Rimer, their faces twisting.
"The timing really was too perfect."
"That's exactly the moment a hero shows up."
"Did he fall asleep in a tree because he didn't feel like fighting, then roll off?"
The swordsmen of the Light Wind Squad had suffered more than enough to fire off suspicious looks of their own first.
"Uh...?"
Rimer clearly had not expected this reaction. His mouth fell open.
"I-I'm the squad leader, and I did save you..."
"If you're the squad leader, then act like one from the start. You didn't come straight here after finishing your seclusion, did you?"
"W-well, that's true, but..."
At Raon's question, Rimer gave an awkward nod.
"Then what exactly were you doing this whole ti—"
"It's not over yet."
Wrath's warning slid through his mind. I felt it too.
Raon nodded and looked up. The robe that Rimer's sword had just reduced to powder was gathering itself in midair.
Which meant the thing was still alive.
"Burren! Dorian!"
Raon hurled Yua and Julius toward the two standing behind him.
"Hiek!"
"Wha—?"
Startled as they were, both of them caught the children gently.
"Get the kids out of here! Everyone below Master, get off this ground!"
"All of a sudden... hiek!"
"Th-that's..."
Those who had been about to ask why saw Manghongwi's robe regenerating in the air, and their jaws went slack.
"It wasn't dead yet!"
"Everyone, get off this land!"
Milland and Morell barked retreat orders at the swordsmen and mages they had brought with them.
"Your Highness! Fall back with the knights!"
"You cannot handle this!"
Borini Kitten and Trevin likewise pulled every knight and swordsman they had brought to the rear.
"Huh?"
Rimer tilted his head as he watched Manghongwi begin to reclaim his shape.
"I knew he could revive, but I've never seen an ability like that."
He clicked his tongue, admitting this was the first time he had known Manghongwi possessed instant regeneration.
"It's probably because of that bead."
Raon pointed to the black orb gleaming from within Manghongwi's robe.
"He's been using it the entire time to amplify the death energy."
From the moment Manghongwi had first appeared, he had summoned those black hands and worked his magic through that pitch-dark bead. Even now, his body was coalescing around it. The hypothesis was more than plausible.
"Then..."
"Yes. We hit it."
The instant Raon finished speaking, he kicked off the ground. Rimer leapt with him as if they had agreed on it in advance, ganggi flaring along his blade.
Just as Raon brought the Requiem Sword, wreathed in the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames, down to cut Manghongwi apart, a jet-black surge burst from the robe and formed a rounded barrier.
A membrane dyed a chilling black caught both blades of ganggi and still held a strength that did not shatter at once.
It did not last long, of course — but in that sliver of time Manghongwi regenerated his body and slipped backward.
Raon twisted in midair, stepped on Rimer's shoulder, and drove at Manghongwi.
He smashed the Heavenly Sky Sword, sheathed in ganggi, into the bead the creature held. It did not split. It did not even scratch.
"Get lost!"
Black radiance poured from Manghongwi's grip. The moment Raon saw that light, his heart felt as if it had dropped through the floor.
He hastily increased his body's weight, dropped to the earth, and stamped the third step of the Supreme Harmony Footwork to fall back.
The ground he had been standing on exploded, leaving a ghastly hole whose bottom could not be seen.
"You couldn't even cut that? What a waste of my shoulder!"
"It's harder than I expected."
Raon shook his head at Rimer, who was clicking his tongue as if Raon were pathetic. Still, this isn't bad.
He had just shown that ganggi could not cut the bead. The creature would let its guard down. If he seized the opening and used that power, he could smash it well enough.
"You maggots!"
Manghongwi trembled from head to toe hard enough that his mask nearly came off. Raon could almost see the face behind it.
"I'll erase you. Not a single scrap left."
"Like you, a moment ago?"
Rimer pointed at Manghongwi and smiled faintly.
"Shut up!"
Manghongwi thrust the black bead forward. A colossal wave rolled across the land of death, and the undead monsters they had barely managed to kill surged up again, burning with a far more vicious deathly presence.
Each one was wrapped in an aura stronger than a Hagwi-rank Death Knight. Even powerhouses like Milland and Borini Kitten would not find them easy to put down.
"Forget those things. We only have to deal with him."
Rimer smiled as if it were no great difficulty.
"Right."
Raon nodded and stepped into the Supreme Harmony Footwork.
Rimer glued himself to Raon's side at once, raising wind and lightning. The lightning moved so naturally that, whatever else he had been doing, the training at least had been real.
They were closing on Manghongwi when the earth beneath the creature's feet began to collapse and split, as if an earthquake had struck.
The black ground twisted, and a dragon's head wreathed in blue fire burst forth.
A pair of wings vast as mountain ranges followed, then a body to match. Last of all, a tail sharp as a spear — long enough to scrape the sky — smashed down upon the heaving earth.
"That's..."
There was only one dragon that flew stripped of hide, a skeleton sheathed in killing frost. Among undead monsters, it was spoken of as the strongest: a Bone Dragon.
Manghongwi mounted the roaring Bone Dragon's back and thrust the bead forward.
"Your chance is over. You will never reach me again."
With that, he rose into the air with the Bone Dragon.
"Raon!"
"I know."
Raon kicked off the ground with enough force that the muscles in his thighs threatened to tear.
Black hands surged up from below to stop him. He cut them apart with the Snow Wind Sword Art and stretched the Heavenly Sky Sword toward the sky. The sword I need right now...
The Bone Dragon had already begun its ascent. Any other technique, and Manghongwi would simply block it. Pulling the creature down was what mattered most.
Form 2: Heavy Heavenly Cannon
A sphere of ganggi bloomed from the tip of the Heavenly Sky Sword, and a vast gravitational pull erupted from it. The rising Bone Dragon's body began to be dragged downward. It works, just as I thought.
Heavy Heavenly Cannon was a technique that generated attraction — it could haul an enemy in. The pull, grown even stronger since he had reached Upper Master, arrested the Bone Dragon's flight.
"What is this!"
"Our vice-leader's got some real skill, huh?"
As Manghongwi's jaw trembled in shock, Rimer rose above his head and smiled a cold little smile.
"His personality's filthy, but the skill is the real thing!"
Rimer clenched his teeth and brought down a sword steeped in wind and thunder.
Manghongwi hastily threw up a barrier of black spheres, but he could not withstand the enormous force in Rimer's strike. The Bone Dragon's balance collapsed. Now.
Raon did not miss the instant the Bone Dragon's body tilted. He detonated the Heavy Heavenly Cannon he had condensed at the sword's tip.
A flash leapt from the point of the Heavenly Sky Sword, shattered the black membrane Manghongwi had formed, and tore through the Bone Dragon's left shoulder and wing.
Pinned from above by Rimer and crushed from below by Raon, the Bone Dragon slammed into the earth on its back.
The body was so vast that a colossal storm of dust erupted from the ground.
Raon was charging in to finish it when a blue light surged out of the dust. Don't tell me...
An immense cold. The Bone Dragon's frost breath.
True to its nature as an undead, it felt no pain. Even with its body broken, it was counterattacking at once.
The Bone Dragon's frost breath was incomparably more violent than the cold of the drake he had faced before. Even with seven-star water-attribute resistance, it was not something a bare body could endure.
"Even so..."
I'm going in.
Raon did not dodge the frost breath. He drove the Ring of Fire and the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames to their limits and hurled himself into the blizzard of rime.
He split the cold with a Red Flash honed to a razor's edge, drove the Requiem Sword into the Bone Dragon's maw, and invoked the Flame Dragon Form.
A breath of searing heat erupted from the crimson blade and bored into the Bone Dragon's interior.
The frost that had sheathed the creature was shoved back by the Flame Dragon Form's fire, and its bones began to crumple.
That cold was the Bone Dragon's very life. Once the heat melted it away, the creature could not possibly hold.
The Bone Dragon's jaw trembled as if in bitter resentment — then it collapsed.
"This side's finished."
Raon confirmed that the light had gone out of the Bone Dragon's eyes and lifted his head.
Rimer clung to the retreating Manghongwi, loosing one blast of wind-laden ganggi after another.
"You bastard!"
Manghongwi thrust the bead forward. His death energy swelled in an instant, and black spears beyond counting came pouring down.
The power in each spear was on the level of an Upper Master's ganggi.
"Waaaagh!"
Rimer let out a theatrical scream and spun his body, slipping past the spears of deathly presence.
But the spears Manghongwi had created were endless. If they fell like this, it would not be Rimer alone — the people behind him would die as well.
"Honestly."
Raon ground his molars and shot toward Manghongwi.
A white shadow erased the spears of death. A crimson blaze swallowed them whole.
He drew White Shadow Flash with the Heavenly Sky Sword and swept Flame Sea Flawless upward with the Requiem Sword. Before those waves of white and red, blooming with the austere grace of a dancer's turn, the spears of deathly presence vanished without leaving a trace.
Rimer did not miss the opening. He became the wind itself, surged in, and brought his sword down on Manghongwi.
But the blade never reached him. A crimson door burst from the ground without warning and caught the strike.
"This is..."
Rimer frowned at the door dyed in red.
"Did you think a Death Knight or a Bone Dragon was the pinnacle of what an Archlich can summon?"
Manghongwi's sneer rode the air as the chains on the door fell away. With a scream as if thousands of voices were shrieking at once, the blood-red door opened.
From a space packed with darkness, a knight appeared in crimson armor whose pauldrons were unusually massive.
A helm shaped like a dragon's head hid whatever lay within, but one thing was clear: it was not alive. Like a Death Knight, this thing too was undead.
The presence rolling off the crimson-armored knight surpassed even a Sanggwi-rank Death Knight. What bloomed in those scarlet eyes was not malice toward the living, but a will to fight.
"What the hell is this now?"
Rimer smacked his lips, unease flickering across his face, and hopped backward.
"Oh?"
As Raon frowned at the unknown monster, Wrath let out a small sound of interest. You know this thing?
"Of course This King knows it. The creature exists in the Demon Realm as well."
What?
"That is a Hell Pilgrim — what a corrupted Death Knight's soul becomes when it transcends its rank and reaches the Demon Realm."
Wrath added that the name meant pilgrim of the Demon Realm, and that Raon would do well to be quite careful.
Manghongwi raised a hand, and the Hell Pilgrim drew a longsword from its hip. The eerie rasp of steel leaving the scabbard made Raon's chest lurch.
"Go. Kill them all!"
At his cry, the Hell Pilgrim stepped forward.
Raon's vision seemed to flush red. In the same instant the Hell Pilgrim was in his face, bringing the longsword down.
Unlike a typical hellfire blade, an extremely thin black flame burned along the sword's body, and gooseflesh rose on Raon's skin. If I block this sloppily, I die.
He wrenched the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames up to full power and met the blow with Shattering Spear-Point, the hardest form in the Mad Fang Sword.
Crimson flame and black fire clashed and soared. The ganggi that erupted from the collision burst the earth and scattered countless sparks through the air.
The Hell Pilgrim let out a grotesque laugh, as if having its strike stopped were actually a pleasure, and brought the sword down again.
The blade came curving in from the right — fast, and so endlessly shifting that its flow was hard to read.
Only after driving the Ring of Fire to its limit and heightening every sense could Raon see the path the Hell Pilgrim's sword was drawing.
He used the Snow Wind Sword Art with the Heavenly Sky Sword to slip the strike aside, stepped his left foot forward, and thrust the Requiem Sword.
The Hell Pilgrim did not flinch in the slightest. It deflected the Requiem Sword with a pauldron and dropped an elbow like a hammer. Fast reactions.
He had not failed to anticipate close-quarters brawling. He knocked the elbow aside with the back of his hand and drove a knee into the Hell Pilgrim's abdomen.
Because the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames was running, the Hell Pilgrim's breastplate crumpled like scrap iron — but the creature only let out a small groan, as if it had felt nothing more than a twinge of pain, and stepped back.
"Where do you think you're going."
Raon walked the Supreme Harmony Footwork as if sliding across ice. He surged behind the Hell Pilgrim and unfurled the Frost Lotus.
As the two blades poured down in succession, the Hell Pilgrim knocked the Heavenly Sky Sword aside and burned the frost blade away with hellfire.
Swift reactions, and the right answers to match. It felt less like fighting an undead and more like crossing blades with a knight or swordsman who had trained properly.
Now it was the Hell Pilgrim's turn. It bent its right knee, dropped its stance, and raised the sword high. High stance.
Of all sword postures, the high stance originally packed the greatest offensive power. Right now, switching to defense would have been wiser. But...
Defense did not suit someone who possessed the Ring of Fire. Trusting his own skill, he went forward.
The Hell Pilgrim's sword came down. It was slow, and yet a colossal weight pressed through his entire body, making the blow feel impossibly fast.
The principle of the Heavy Sword, refined to its extreme, was wound through that blade. That sword...
Raon bit his lip. I'll break it.
He had trained the Heavy Sword until he would not yield to any swordsman alive.
He drove his left foot into a rooted step and pulled the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames to its peak.
Rotational force drawn up from the ankle ran through his waist, his shoulder, his wrist, and he shoved the Heavenly Sky Sword forward. A scarlet sphere bloomed from the tip and spun with ferocious speed.
A sphere of flame condensed to its utmost limit met the Hell Pilgrim's strike head-on.
A storm of staggering heat surged upward. Webs of cracks scored the land of death, and the ground shuddered as if the axis of the world itself had twisted.
"Huu..."
As he dragged in a breath, a ghastly light wavered inside the black smoke. It was the creature. He snapped into a defensive stance at once.
A longsword burning black punched through the smoke, aimed at his heart.
He knocked it aside with the Requiem Sword, wind of the Snow Wind Sword Art riding the blade, and brought the Heavenly Sky Sword down, steeped in the killing intent of a maddened beast.
At point-blank range, Raon used both the Heavenly Sky Sword and the Requiem Sword to shove the Hell Pilgrim's blade back, and the corner of his mouth twisted. It's putting out some real force.
Having transcended both humans and Death Knights, its physical ability sat outside common sense. On top of that...
Looking into the Hell Pilgrim's sunken eyes, he had the sense it was still hiding its true skill.
"I'll drag that power out of you."
He was about to push the Hell Pilgrim back, heat on the Heavenly Sky Sword and frost on the Requiem Sword, when strength suddenly left his arms and legs.
A splitting dizziness struck, and the world seemed to spin and blur. Something warm ran from his nose. He glanced down and saw what looked like a nosebleed. There wasn't an impact this bad.
He had taken internal injuries, that much was true — but nowhere near enough to make his nose bleed and drain the strength from his limbs.
"How dim you are."
As he swallowed dryly in confusion, Wrath's voice arrived.
"Did This King not warn you? Stamina and aura can be restored. Mental strength cannot."
That's...
"On top of that, you used the Silver Aurora twice. Even with This King's aid, it was an act that gnawed at your soul. The aftershock has only now caught up to you."
Wrath added, in rare praise, that he had lasted a long time for a human. But I have to hold on right now—kh!
He tried to shove the Hell Pilgrim back, but the creature seemed to have noticed something was wrong. It began to press in with even greater force.
The Hell Pilgrim's sword was pushing aside the Heavenly Sky Sword and the Requiem Sword, starting to sear his shoulder, when a clear wind blew in from behind and soothed the heat.
Rimer's blade, appearing from nowhere, flicked the Hell Pilgrim's sword aside as if it weighed nothing.
The Hell Pilgrim ground its teeth in a short snarl and fell back.
"Hah..."
As Raon spat a ragged breath, Rimer approached.
"I didn't raise my disciple this weak."
Rimer shrugged as he looked at him.
"How long have you even been fighting, panting like a puppy already."
Six days, you bastard!
Raon bared his teeth and glared at Rimer. He wanted to snap that he had fought for six days without sleep, but no voice would come out.
"Well. Playing the master again after so long wouldn't be so bad."
Rimer smiled faintly and walked toward the Hell Pilgrim.
"You asked me about Sword Realm Manifestation, didn't you?"
"Squad Leader...?"
"Then see it with your own eyes and understand. What's changed."
His sword pierced the blackened sky. His left hand pointed at the earth.