Chapter 217
Chapter 217
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 217
Chapter Title: Herald of Destruction 2
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Azadin fired an arrow at Aldis and moved on pure instinct.
His body reacted before his mind could catch up.
My light, my star, my everything.
Even knowing full well that what stood before him now wasn’t truly Aldis—just the vanguard of a death god possessing her body, sifting through the memories etched into her flesh to comprehend this world...
She was still breathtakingly beautiful.
Yet Azadin unleashed his attacks upon her without mercy.
Her movements were laughably sluggish compared to the real Aldis.
The arrow struck her chest, and the sword swung by Azadin—the Azure Executioner—severed her arm.
Spinning around her, Azadin swept his leg out, slicing through both her shins below the knees. Yet she did not fall.
A wound from the Azure Executioner should have torn open wide, unleashing a torrent of blood, but not a single drop spilled from Aldis.
Instead, black mist poured from the wounds, linking her severed limbs and holding her body together.
“Ahahaha! Azadin, Azadin.”
The thing possessing Aldis’s corpse wagged a finger at him.
“Don’t rush me, dear. I still need time myself. I’m in the middle of understanding the memories and knowledge imprinted in this body. Just wait a little longer, won’t you?”
It spoke in Aldis’s voice, but it was unmistakably a death god. A death god from beyond had seized Aldis’s body, using her flesh to grasp the nature of this realm.
The incarnation of a death god. It had descended into the present world in Aldis’s form.
“Right. You still need time, do you?”
Azadin retreated and climbed atop the quartz Royal Throne.
He had infused it with the grimoire Arael had given him—the one compiled from copies of the New King Formation Scriptures—to sever the Royal Throne’s link to the Nether’s power.
But then an unexpected interruption came. An arrow flew at Azadin—not from the death god’s incarnation, but from Hatir, who had picked up an arrow from the floor and loosed it at him.
For the chieftain of the Herald Tribe, it was a pathetically weak shot. Likely because Hatir’s body hadn’t fully recovered.
‘Attacking me in this situation? Have you lost your mind?’
Azadin snatched the feeble arrow out of the air, intending to say as much.
“Ugh.”
But Azadin’s own body was far from normal.
His hand slipped as he grabbed the arrow, sending him tumbling backward onto his rear. Fortunately, the arrow had lost most of its force in his grasp and failed to pierce his armor.
A true arrow from the Herald Tribe should have been devastating—even Azadin in his current state couldn’t have caught it barehanded without it shredding leather armor like wet paper. The fact that it was blocked spoke volumes about how dire things were for both Hatir and him.
“What do you think you’re doing, Hatir?!”
“We must make the Hubrisites and their king deal with this death god. If you want to live, then leave, Azadin! Don’t use that suspicious grimoire of Arael’s!”
Hatir yearned for more Nether death gods to appear on this land and slaughter the Hubrisites.
He had cut down those from the Nether at Ararat, but that had only been to save himself—not to hinder the death gods.
This man truly wished to unleash the death gods, artificially ushering in the age of Jupiter and letting the Hubris people perish.
“You idiot! Isn’t that exactly why your tribe’s in this mess—with an idiot like you as chieftain?!”
“Idiot?”
Hatir recoiled in shock at Azadin’s words.
*********
The Herald Tribe, the Aragsa, were a people with an ironclad sense of hierarchy.
Hatir the chieftain and Azadin despised each other and treated one another as enemies, but by rights, the vast gap in their ranks meant Azadin shouldn’t have even been fit to tread in Hatir’s shadow.
Moreover, Acre was in fact one of Hatir’s descendants.
Hatir had taken many Aragsa women over the years to mingle their blood with that of the gods and sire children—Acre was one such offspring, making Azadin, Acre’s son, a distant descendant in Hatir’s eyes.
With such a stark divide in status—and Azadin being a legitimate descendant to boot—his insults and condemnations toward Hatir were enough to make the man’s blood boil.
On top of that, accusations of incompetence and idiocy struck at the rawest nerve for the merit-obsessed Aragsa.
Azadin had endured mockery from the tribe not just for being the son of the traitor Acre, but above all for being the weakest among them—a true incompetent.
One could see their mindset in how they respected Arael, another child of Acre, and Hatir was no exception.
Competence and incompetence were what the Aragsa fixated on, yet here was Azadin—the tribe’s most powerless and lowborn member—calling Hatir incompetent and an idiot to his face.
“That’s right! We were trained as Heralds, but you were born the emperor’s son and chieftain from the start! You were never tested, never properly trained! You’re no Herald! That’s why you make these strategically and tactically foolish choices!”
Azadin had seen through the fact that Hatir lacked training as a Herald in tactics.
Swordsmanship, martial arts, archery, and magic were the pursuits of nobles and royalty—what they deemed refined accomplishments. Tactical ability—the capacity to adapt to situations and execute operations as an agent—was, strictly speaking, a skill for those who served.
Crown princes learned swordplay and sorcery; they had no need to hone operational prowess.
“You bastard...”
Provoked by Azadin, the excited Hatir strained to draw his bow and cast a spell. Knowing full well it wouldn’t work on Azadin, he still unleashed the emperor’s magic to attack him.
Of course, Hatir wasn’t foolish enough to do it for no reason. The emperor’s lightning was so blinding that he mixed it in to steal Azadin’s vision, creating an opening to rain arrows upon him.
He was also curious if the emperor’s magic would fail this time.
The emperor’s voice, the artificial spirit, avoided direct intervention in events while projecting its presence across all Hubris.
For that voice to intervene directly and wield power must have dealt severe damage to its existence.
Would the emperor’s magic fail now?
But once again, the emperor’s voice shielded Azadin from the emperor’s magic.
Azadin, sightless as he was, was immune to blinding flashes to begin with. Amid the emperor’s thunderbolt and its dazzling lightning, he calmly evaded the attacks aimed at him.
“When you said you’d claim the throne, we all agreed because we wanted to rule the Hubrisites—not because we desired a ruined world where Hubrisites lie dead and death gods roam! That’s why the rebellion broke out, and our already dwindling Aragsa numbers shrank even further!”
“Then we just reduce the Hubrisites even more!”
“Kill that many, and you’ll have to till the fields and twist ropes in a hovel yourself? I’m sure Crown Prince Hatir would handle that splendidly.”
“......”
Hatir knew his own words were nonsense.
Every point Azadin raised struck him to the bone.
Hadn’t this catastrophe come from forgetting that his lofty position and constant grip on power meant he should have persuaded and convinced from the ground up—instead of arbitrarily pushing his plans?
“Admit it! The moment Arael rebelled, your plan failed! Without Aldis and Kazas, who loved and defended you despite everything, it would’ve ended as the delusions of a crown prince locked in his chambers...”
Azadin unleashed a torrent of verbal barbs at Hatir, then faltered. Mentioning Kazas and Aldis from his own lips stirred a bitter surge within him.
“Why did they...”
In Azadin’s eyes, Hatir was utterly unworthy of love.
He had been faithful only to his own goals—obsessions bordering on madness—showing no consideration for Kazas or Aldis, yet they had gladly thrown away their lives for him. They had even placed him above Azadin himself.
No matter how deeply Azadin loved them, to them, Hatir was the one they cherished more.
“Damn it!”
Azadin successfully assembled the bundle of New King Formation Scripture copies Arael had passed him—the new grimoire she had reconfigured.
“No!”
Hatir tried to stop him, but Azadin was already too far away, and he was out of arrows.
Brushing aside Hatir’s interference, Azadin succeeded in inserting the grimoire into the quartz Royal Throne.
The throne began to glow. From within its quartz crystals, once filled with murky black energy, pure white light burst forth, driving back the darkness.
“Aaahhh!”
Aldis, now the incarnation of the death god, writhed in agony.
That was not all. The death gods prowling around the palace howled in torment as well, sending vibrations through Azadin’s gut and threatening to burst his eardrums.
Unable to withstand the shock, Azadin dropped to one knee.
As Arael’s altered New King Formation Scriptures were reabsorbed into the quartz Royal Throne, its function began to recover.
But the King's Radiance was far too feeble. It was nowhere near enough to banish the summoned death gods and purify the world.
It was said that when the true king sat upon it, the King's Radiance would safeguard the world...
‘In my current state, sitting on the throne would be the end of me.’
The palace, already a wreck from the earthquake, shook and crumbled further. Cracks spiderwebbed across the ceiling, revealing the sky above.
Azadin’s body was a mess of blood loss, and shoving all the New King Formation Scripture copies into the Royal Throne had depleted the last of the white mana remaining inside him in the process—he was utterly exhausted.
Sit on the throne in this condition?
Even if it accepted him, that would be trouble—and if it rejected him, no less so. He had to escape, and fast...
It was then.
-Puk!
This time, an arrow pierced Azadin’s right arm.
More precisely, it was an arrow aimed at his heart that Azadin had instinctively blocked with his right arm.
Unlike the weak shot from Hatir earlier, this was a truly powerful arrow from a Herald.
“Argh!”
Sion Etar entered the palace with his subordinates.
“Azadin!”
Midiarm watched the scene unfold, bound in ropes and unable to move, led in by servants—only to spot Azadin drenched in blood.
How could he have lost so much blood? And both his left and right arms were mangled.
Without the magic Shati had bestowed upon him, without the King’s Healing Aldis had granted, he would have died long ago.
“I never imagined things would work out this well.”
“......”
Hatir frowned as he watched Sion Etar and his men enter.
When Hatir had been whole, Sion had been a loyal servant. A young member of the council, from one of the Five Great Families, but humble and refined—a likable fellow. And, of course, one of Hatir’s descendants.
But from the current Sion Etar emanated a ferocious killing intent.
“Arael? Have you dealt with her?”
Hatir struggled to maintain his dignity in addressing Sion.
His own condition was dire as well. Already bearing wounds that should have killed him from his fight with Azadin, he had depleted his mana and vital energy, leaving him a hollow shell—but he still demanded sternly.
“Haha.”
Sion Etar let out a hollow laugh.