Vince went pale beside me, his hand clamping onto my shoulder to both steady himself and shake me. "S-Sam... You killed him!"
"No, I didnât! And you all shouldnât hold back either!" I snarled, shouting to ensure my voice was heard over the commotion from the seismic activity Iâd just caused. "If you hesitate for even a second against him, youâll die. Fight with the pure, unbridled intention to kill!"
...As if to prove my words, countless sharp arcs of black energy erupted skyward from beneath the ginormous stone baseball bat.
Swish, Fwooâ!! Swooshâ!!
I had never heard a mountain being chopped and diced before, either. But again, I guessed it would sound very similar to the noise that followed.
A high-pitched yet gravelly keening resounded as those arcs sliced through reinforced stone like a new knife through silk.
The massive bat shattered into a torrential rain of dismantled rock fragments that sprayed across the battlefield.
Michael was standing there, perfectly calm amidst the downpour of falling rubble.
His black armor wascompletelyuntouched.
His cursed sword was angled downward, oozing a creepy dark energy that gave me literal, bone-deep chills.
His polished visor was reflecting nothing but our terror-filled faces.
I heard someone gulp anxiously. Then I realized it was me.
This was the protagonist of this world we were facing â the center of the story, the one the universe revolved around.
...And he was truly going all out.
He was... death incarnate.
For a heartbeat, the battlefield froze in a tableau of impending bloodbath.
That silence, however, was soon broken when I heard someone laughing a wild laugh.
Let me clarify. I donât mean a nervous or afraid laugh.
I actually mean a wild, crazy, feral laugh. It was the sound of someone who had found a challenge worth dying for.
It... was Ray.
"Fine then!" he bellowed, pulling his arms back to immediately detonate a chain of explosions and launching himself forward like a living missile.
The air turned to searing plasma in his wake as he shot toward Michael.
Juliana hesitated for a microsecond to calculate her moves, then followed after him, moving at a speed totally incomprehensible to the human eye.You are reading on novelping(.)com, the official source.
Vince pursued immediately after, while Kang took the opening to trigger his partial transformation to the maximum. He looked like he was preparing himself to pitch out of here with Alexia as soon as a window for escape opened.
Only I didnât follow them.
Because I felt a shift behind me. Call it a premonition.
I turned just in time to see theGod Who Eats Isdescending from the fractured sky, his abominable body slowly lowering toward the canyon floor with a grace that was both divine and deeply disturbing.
He landed a few steps away from the fallen white mask and slowly raised a crooked staff held by one of his six arms.
The wind picked up in a confined gale before him to levitate theDivine Maskoff the dirt and tow it back toward its master.
I had to stop him.
So I moved quickly.
...Or at least, Itriedto.
But before I could take a single step in that direction, my wrist was grabbed. I stumbled back as slender yet surprisingly strong fingers closed around my sleeve.
"Samâ!" Lilyâs voice reached me, so full of desperation that it made me pause despite the adrenaline. "Donât! That thing... itâs at least aGreaterBeast! Maybe even anAncient! But those items! Look at them! Those items he has are all aboveSupremeorMythicalgrade! You wonât survive, please!"
It was one of those moments for me where time slows down when you have to make a split-second decision in the middle of a chaotic situation.
She wasnât wrong. Not... mostly.
TheGod Who Eats Iswould definitely be an upperGreater-rank Spirit Beast if we strictly had to put him within the classification system for monsters.
But I personally preferred to think of him as anA-rank Hunter. Yeah, Iâd rather put him in the classification system for humans.
Still, even that didnât fully justify the sheer lethality of that fallen deity. Every single one of his weapons was a Divine Armament or Charm. Yes, the same as my sword,Aurieth.
Meaning all those weapons grew in power alongside his soul.
Now I know what youâre thinking.If thatâs the case, Samael, then why are those weapons so goddamn strong if his soul is supposedly onlyA-rank?
Usually, your logic would be correct. How was anA-rank creatureâs soul handling so manySupremeandMythical-grade artifacts?
For instance, I was aB-ranker. Since my Divine Sword was linked to me, it should have been as strong as aRare-grade.
By that same logic, theGodâs weapons should have only beenEpicorLegendary.
But they werenât.
Thatâs because... his soul was, in fact, comparable to that of anSSS-rank Hunter (or anUnholySpirit Beast.)Find the original chapter at novelŃing.com.
It was just his physical body that wasnât performing up to his full Soul Rank. Think of it as a hardware issue.
Iâll explain why that was the case later.
For now, I was grinding my teeth.
Lily continued in the meanwhile, "Letâs just leave that creature and push Michael back toward the caldera! Weâll retreat for now! Then we canâ"
And I stopped listening to her.
Her plan was unrealistic, born from nothing but panic and distress. By now, she ought to have realized it...
Realized that the prophecy of my death was very clearly headed toward its fulfillment.
Because what would we do after pushing Michael back to the caldera, even if we could? Weâd still have to fight him. And retreating even from there was not an option. We werenât going to survive another encounter with Vaeghar in our state.
So if we left now, weâd have to come back. And by then, theGodwould be wearing his Mask again and lurking in our wait.
Weâd be right back where we started, none the wiser, getting hunted like cattle all over again.
Oh, and did I mention that the only way to save Michael was to kill theGodpuppeteering him?
All our options were spent. We were at the end of the road.
From here on out, our only choice was to move forward.
...To fight.
I tore my gaze from theGodand looked at Lily. She was still babbling while holding onto my hand.
Behind her, the clash between Michael and the others had already devolved into chaos of explosions, clangor of steel, and flashes of energy blasts.
Ahead of me, the mask hovered inches from theGodâs reaching hand.
Someonehadto stop him.
Someonehadto kill him.
A split second.
That was all it took for me to decide.
Ihadto be that someone.
I shrugged off Lilyâs hold, ignoring the betrayal and apprehension in her haunting violet eyes, and bent my knees until I was all but crouching.
Then, a slanted pillar of stone sprang out from the ground under my boots like a hydraulic piston to hurl me forward with the speed of a heavy bolt shot from a ballista.
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