Chapter 862 - 46: This Kind of Power!
Facing the onrushing grafted Monster, before that colossal, twisted silhouette like some hundred-armed Giant—
The mysterious jet-black armor simply stood there in silence.
No one could even tell whether it was just an empty suit of armor, or if someone was actually wearing it inside and controlling it... At least outside this battlefield, for those observers who had pulled back a distance, this was still a somewhat difficult fact to determine.
The only thing they could be certain of was that the Power this armor displayed was simply godlike, simply demonic.
Because in the battle just now, this armor had all but swept across the battlefield like dry rot through timber, casually waving its blade to hack the army brought by the grafted Monster Grek into scattered fragments, and ruthlessly trampling the enraged Grek himself—one careless stomp dropping him beneath the strata, and even when he clawed his way back up he was coughing blood nonstop.
He had clearly suffered grievous wounds.
This was also why Grek, feeling doubly humiliated, at this moment was hysterically furious and mad.
As the legitimate descendant of the Golden Race, yet fallen to the point of playing with "grafting" such tricks, taking the limbs of powerful humans and other powerful creatures, attaching them to his own body in order to gain greater Power—this was, from the start, a perverse and ridiculous act.
And the reason he had sunk to such a state was that he could no longer bear the shame and pressure of those past days, and so had become twisted, even insane.
Plainly, as the descendant of King Elden Gefurei, plainly with the Golden Race still being the earliest to appear among the Demigods, why then was he the disgrace among them!! Clearly he took pride in his noble birth, styled himself "monarch of all things Golden," so why in the Shattering War had he been ravaged in turn by one after another!!
—Blocked in his path by General Shuixing Ratane, not daring to make a sound...
—After losing, putting on women’s clothes in shame, slipping out of the Royal City hidden among a crowd of women...
—And because from childhood he had looked down on the Valkyrie Marlienia, he was likewise struck down harshly, in the end only spared after he knelt on the ground to lick the Valkyrie’s feet...
All these, such an enormous psychological gap and humiliation, would be enough to twist an ordinary person, let alone one who had once thought himself bearing the Celestial Mandate, thought himself a supreme Golden Demigod. Naturally, this had driven Grek completely mad, and cruel.
He staked his life on seizing others’ limbs to obtain still greater Power, staked his life on harping on his birth and status. He staked his life on doing all this for one desire: to change it all! He wanted to tell everyone that what he had lost, he would surely take back!
So it was now as well: he grafted on the head of a Flying Dragon, believing his Power even greater, and just at this time he happened to hear that of late, many powerful Warriors were gathering in the south of Nimgruf, and thought that perhaps this would also be an excellent opportunity for his hunt—
As long as he launched a surprise assault here, slaughtered this group of Warriors, then grafted their limbs onto himself, his Power would surely progress yet another step.
He had never imagined that, with his careful scheme and his own eager personal campaign, impatient to stage some cruel massacre to let the world witness that he had gained the Dragon’s Power, to bask in the world’s awe and praise, to use this to wash away his shameful history...
Then upon coming here, he smashed headlong into a steel wall.
This was yet another massive blow and psychological drop.
When Grek, spitting blood, crawled up again from the depths of the earth, he went completely hysterical: why is it like this again! Why is it always like this!! He who ought to have ruled all things, become the Golden Monarch—why did he always meet with such setbacks and blows!
"Kneel before me! I am—the Golden Monarch aaaaaahhh!!"
He roared as he swung the Golden Giant Axe, the Flying Dragon’s head grafted to his arm gaping its bloody maw wide, spewing Flames that could instantly melt rock and metal, charging savagely toward the enemy before him!
This colossal body, this grafted Monster that seemed like some fusion of spider and centipede, was simply akin to a primordial savage beast; its mere charge tore up the earth before it!
It shredded the ground, and shredded the air!
The Monster moved at explosive supersonic speed, his mind, gone utterly mad, left with only one intensely blazing thought—
Kill him!
Kill him!!
Kill everyone here! Hack off all their limbs, so that no one would ever again know of his disgrace today!!
At the same time, the mysterious armor opposite finally moved as well; the armor suddenly stomped forward a step, and gripped the Samurai blade at its waist.
—Then, slashed.
Just as before, this was the Iaijutsu Slash that had easily annihilated an army of thousands—a clearly dimension-cleaving edge... Only, what it unleashed was not an arcing slash, but a circular mirror-like twisted space conjured at range, directly enveloping the charging grafted Monster within.
Space seemed torn open; the scene warped bizarrely, countless mirror-bright arcs of light flashing incessantly within, crisscrossing in all directions.
"Aaaaaaahhh—!!"
In an instant, blood and flesh flew; the grafted Monster let out a wail, innumerable twisted grafted limbs flying up into the sky, along with putrid, reeking black blood and rotted tissue. But after all, he had now witnessed this once and was on his guard; the Power of the Great Rune burned fiercely, resisting this space-rending might!
To block a slash capable of tearing space with his body alone was still unrealistic.
Even as countless limbs were chopped to pieces, Grek still dragged that body stitched from innumerable limbs, swinging the giant axe and Dragon-head arm, roaring in pain and madness as he continued his charge!
The mysterious armor opposite was unmoved; again it used instant step to advance, as though stepping through space and distance themselves, like a bolt of lightning splitting the sky, once more bringing down that space-rending blade.
The first slash flashed through the void like a gigantic laser beam; the Power of the Great Rune dimmed by a fraction in an instant.
The second slash wove an unbelievably swift phantom blade light, precisely tracing mirror-bright arcs across vital points—neck, heart, arms, groin, and more.
The third slash surpassed speed, finesse, and feints alike, falling as the final finishing blow, and even used the property of folding dimensional space to perfectly overlap with the previous two ultimate slashes.
Logically, it should have been three consecutive swings, no matter how insanely fast they were, there still ought to be a sequence in time. Yet whether from a bystander’s point of view, or from the result they wrought... it was as if reality flickered once, then ignored the very concept of time and space, overlapping two more flickers in perfect simultaneity—
An ultimately gorgeous slash: from the instant the narrow blade was drawn, to the curtain-fall that tore open the long sky. Clearly it was an Iaijutsu Slash so fast it dragged out afterimages, yet in everyone’s eyes the entire breathtaking process was etched in perfect clarity, the phantom edge like a strike that cut from one dimension into another.
Grek’s roar broke off abruptly, his expression frozen upon his twisted face.
Everything before his eyes went black in waves; Power seemed to be draining away at a terrifying speed, he could no longer feel his body... his wrists... or his feet...
The darkening scene reflected in his pupils was that Demon God-like armor coming to a halt before him, slowly reversing the blade, the rasp of steel against scabbard ringing out in the stillness, until the sword was completely sheathed and a clear, crisp sound rang out.
The next moment, the dragon-head arm that had ceased spitting Flame slammed down heavily onto the ground, splashing blood-filth and mud, and together with that massive Golden Battleaxe... Grek, in the midst of his charge, was like a marionette whose strings had suddenly been cut, collapsing all at once.
The colossal grafted Monster came apart like a tower of blocks, utterly disintegrating; severed limbs, mangled flesh, chunks of meat, all crashing down in a clattering heap.
"..."
"..."
In that instant, the battlefield fell into deathlike silence—
Those watching from afar stared in disbelief at the scene of a Demigod’s fall, a crushing sense of unreality washing over them, as if they were trapped in a dream.
Everyone in the Boundary Land knew Grek’s name; anyone with a shred of decency despised his deeds from the bottom of their heart, and mocked this old, ugly Demigod. Yet... he was still a Demigod! A Fragment King who wielded a Great Rune! That was solid, undeniable fact.
Even if everyone felt Grek was simply the shame of all Demigods, dragging down their average with his sole existence, he was still far from anything they could hope to oppose.
And yet now...
He actually died just like that?
This disgraceful Demigod had been casually cut down, and the sight made countless hearts shudder.
Though many among them were Fades, who had borne the Blessing of the Golden Tree, summoned back to the Boundary Land, even resurrected from death itself, and in that process had, willingly or not, awakened to their mission.
The Fragment Kings, corrupted by the Power of the Great Rune, struggled against one another, but no true victor emerged, none became the new King Elden. Yet they all clutched fragments of the Great Rune, preventing the Elden Ring from ever being fully restored—their very existence was an obstruction.
Thus—
The mission of the Fades was slaughter and plunder: to hunt down those failed Demigods, to walk toward triumph upon their corpses, and strive to crown themselves as king, completing the repair of the Magic Ring.
But that was merely easy to say. An age beyond counting had already passed; even the Shattering War itself was an event from untold years ago. Throughout, Fades had ceaselessly resurrected, or answered the summons, returning to this land of the Boundary. Yet not once had anyone succeeded in subjugating a single Demigod.
In such a long span of time, even Grek—the one who had inherited the thinnest divine blood and possessed the weakest Power—had never been felled by a Fade. On the contrary, he had tirelessly hunted Fades, grafting their limbs onto his own body.
Until today, when all of that was finally brought to an end.
In the suffocating stillness, where even the air itself seemed dead, the Demon God-like armor strode forward at an unhurried pace. The toppled, grafted Monster’s form was fading away, and a dark, lusterless fragment of a great sigil was hovering in the air.
A Magic Ring Fragment!
A Great Rune!
In that split second, countless hearts leapt, yet they immediately sobered—the being before them was absolutely not an opponent they could contend with.
...
"Resonance rate 102%, all systems operating nominal..."
"Leaving combat, disengaging ’Demon Tactics Mode’, calculating combat score..."
"’Yama Blade’ module undergoing recharge, current Energy surplus at 75%, wear condition within optimal range..."
...
The mysterious armor gazed quietly at the Great Rune before it.
To onlookers, it radiated the aura and style of an inscrutable master.
None of them knew that the wearer within actually felt somewhat lost, especially with those voices echoing from the depths of his mind, leaving him utterly at a loss. He didn’t understand why he had become like this, didn’t understand how he had just killed a Demigod.
He had taken this armor from the Eternal City in the Underworld, guided by some vague, hazy call.
Was it a Divine Artifact forged by the Eternal City’s inhabitants?
From the brief stream of information mapped into his mind, this chosen Fade could roughly grasp that the armor he wore was named "Vergil", and possessed Power as if bestowed by some great, unknowable existence, in no way inferior to that of any Demigod. Its only flaw was a forced restriction that prevented it from leaving the ground—no flying, no jumping...
But it was already unimaginably strong, a Power for which he could not conceive of any possible obstacle.
With Power like this, those flaws simply didn’t matter at all!