Chapter 493: The thirteenth constellation
At that instant, the hologram of the System became frantic, displaying cascading error messages. The golden chains surrounding Norah began to shine with an unbearable brilliance, pumping directly into the woman’s vitality to maintain control.
Norah spat a jet of silver blood onto Diavolo’s face. Her mother-of-pearl eyes regained a fraction of a second of lucidity.
"Kill me..." she murmured. "Please... Diavolo... before I..."
But before she could finish, an impulse from the System ran through her. She struck Diavolo with a palm strike charged with the Wind element. The impact was so great that the scientist was thrown to the other end of the clearing, his ribs caved in, his lung perforated.
"Shit!!!"
He collapsed at the foot of the Yggdrasil, panting, watching Norah fall back to the ground, surrounded by an impenetrable dome of roots and elemental mana. She was entering stasis, the System protecting her from anyone’s influence.
Diavolo looked at his trembling hands, covered in his own blood and that of his wife. Incomprehension had given way to a cold hatred.
"I promise you... entities of the sky... that I will dismantle your system piece by piece. Even if my name is cursed for eternity."
...
His breathing was now only a wet rattle, each inspiration forcing air through his lung perforated by the previous wind attack. Despite the pain that threatened to consume his consciousness, he refused to sink. He placed his trembling hand on the ground.
In a final surge of will, Diavolo tried to seize control of Norah. He propelled himself forward, his fingers seeking to grasp his wife’s ankle to bring her back to reality.
But Norah did not move. With a simple leg movement, she crushed Diavolo’s hand against a root, a gravitational pressure so strong that the metacarpal bones cracked in a series of dry detonations.
"Diavolo... why do you persist?" she murmured, her voice an echo distorted by the System.
As she spoke, tears of blood began to flow from her mother-of-pearl eyes, tracing vermilion furrows on her alabaster cheeks. It was not a manifestation of sadness, but the physical sign of the rupture between her human soul and the code of the "Spirit Queen System" that was appropriating her vital functions.
She joined her hands above her head, and the air crystallized instantly in a cracking of frost. Norah invoked about twenty ice spears, each two meters long and of a deadly transparency. The tips, sharpened at the molecular level, shone under the pearly light of the clearing.
Diavolo, his face against the ground, saw the projectiles materialize. He expected the end. But at the last moment, a scarlet error message flashed in the esoteric field of vision of his "Spirit Eye".
Suddenly, by a maneuver of a cruelty, Norah turned her attacks against herself. The twenty ice spears, instead of rushing toward him, spun around and plunged toward the woman’s torso.
Diavolo widened his eyes, time seeming to freeze under the effect of adrenaline. Then his last ones pierced.
The sound was atrocious: a tearing of flesh followed by the crash of the ice breaking the bones of the rib cage. The spears pierced Norah’s body, exiting through her back while carrying away shreds of flesh and shards of vertebrae.
Norah spat a spray of silver blood, her eyes gradually losing their shine. Diavolo saw life leave her eyes, the pearly glow extinguishing to leave a grayish void.
"NO!" Diavolo screamed, finding a strength he no longer had.
He straightened up on his knees, ignoring the agony of his own body. His hands, though broken, began to move with a frenetic speed. He quickly performed dozens of mudras.
"Mystic Arts!" he exclaimed, his voice vibrating with a desperate authority. "Wound Transfer!"
It was a forbidden technique. He knew that with Norah’s wounds, it would be fatal to him. No human body, even mutated, could withstand the impact of twenty simultaneous perforations of vital organs. But for Diavolo Star Giovanna, the scientist who had lost everything in the ashes of the old world, the logic of survival was now inferior to the love he carried for his wife.
The golden aura bathed Norah’s body, flowing from Diavolo’s hands toward the gaping wounds of his wife. The ice spears vaporized into an iridescent mist while Norah’s flesh closed, the bones knitting back together through forced temporal inversion.
Then, the backlash struck Diavolo head-on.
Twenty invisible and lightning impacts hit his torso. His sternum exploded, his lungs were shredded from the inside, and his heart was crossed by shockwaves of absolute cold. Diavolo spat blood in an uninterrupted cascade and fell to the ground, his spine no longer able to support him.
It was only then that Norah, freed from the System’s grip, fell to the ground beside him. She held his body while crying, her hands stained with the blood of the man she had just indirectly killed.
"I’m sorry... Diavolo..." she sobbed. "As inferior creatures, we never had a choice. They... they look at us like insects."
Diavolo, whose vision was blurring, saw one last time the hologram of the System fading away. The one controlling her, Taurus or another entity of the Constellations, knew perfectly well that he would probably sacrifice himself for her. That was why this last attack was not directed at him, but at her. They had not sought to kill him physically, but their true objective remained a mystery.
Diavolo spat a last mouthful of blackened blood.
"Shit... I was fooled..." he murmured with a mocking smile.
And there, his body weakened. The heat left his limbs. The golden light of Yggdrasil faded to become a distant memory. Everything became black.
...
The silence was absolute, a stasis where time and space no longer had a hold.
"Where am I?" thought Diavolo, although he no longer had a throat to formulate the words.
The environment was completely black, a darkness so dense that it seemed to weigh on his soul. Except for a crackling fire in the distance, whose flames seemed to devour the shadows rather than illuminate them. Diavolo felt himself floating toward this source of abnormal heat.
"Am I alive?" he asked internally.
"No, you are dead. You just sacrificed yourself for a woman. Did you really think it would be profitable?" replied an annoyed voice, whose timbre was both deep and loaded with contempt.
Diavolo mentally turned toward the source of the voice. A silhouette stood near the gray fire. He could not see its features, only a presence that exuded an authority far superior to that of Taurus.
"Who are you?"
The silhouette straightened up.
"I am the one who has protected you since your birth, even if you have spent your time doing unprofitable things like dying for your wife," replied the entity. "I am the Thirteenth Constellation: Antichrist."