Chapter 47: Forcing His Hand
Fucking hell. That son of a bitch.
Lazaüs. That damned Lazaüs, again and always. Every time we thought we had him, he’d react another way, strike somewhere else, keep a move ahead that we never saw coming.
Were we even the only ones with the loop?
And me, what had I done while he razed the eastern front? Nothing. I’d stood planted on that wall watching, seeing nothing coming, understanding nothing until it was already over.
For all I’d trained until I coughed up my lungs, for all the skills I’d torn out of this world that no one else possessed, it counted for nothing in front of him. Nothing had changed. I was still just as weak.
I’ll kill you. Not now, not in this loop, maybe not for a very long time. But I’ll kill you.
My jaw had clenched without my noticing, hard enough to grind my teeth against each other. Something gave, and I felt a thread of blood slide from the corner of my lips.
A thumb wiped it away before I could move.
Alice. She’d run her finger along my mouth, almost tenderly, and I watched her carry that thumb, stained with my blood, up to her lips, her eyes shining, never once leaving mine.
"Easy, Kuro." She smiled. "We’ve got all the time in the world, remember."
I breathed in slowly, trying to bring down the pressure hammering at my temples.
"I know. I know, but..." My fists tightened despite myself. "I want to kill him. I really want to kill him, Lazaüs."
Gabriel had come closer, and when my gaze met his he gave that faint recoil, barely half a step, before catching himself.
"I don’t know what he did to you, in your present. But whatever you want — you wouldn’t last a few minutes against him."
"He’s right, man." Leon raised his hands, conciliatory. "Try to calm down. We’ll work out how to do this, all of us together."
I closed my eyes for the length of one long breath and forced my shoulders to loosen. In appearance, at least — enough not to weigh the others down more than necessary.
"All right." I opened my eyes again. "Then let’s think."
"Good." Evelyn, who had waited for me to come back down, stepped forward. "To start with, let’s work out exactly what decides where Lazaüs positions himself. Why he strikes where he strikes."
A silence, while each of us turned the question over.
It was Leon who broke it, his voice hesitant.
"I’m not sure... but every time he attacks, it’s somewhere weakened. When the giant breaks through the north wall, or there, when he appeared on the eastern front — that’s where we had the fewest forces. So..."
He let the sentence hang, and it was Yanshu who picked it up, more evenly.
"So he’d be the key piece, in this battle. He keeps an overview and he strikes where it hurts most, at the moment it hurts most."
"That’s exactly it. Well, I think..." Leon scratched the back of his neck, a little embarrassed at having drawn attention to himself.
Seorin, sitting cross-legged a little apart, lifted her head.
"It holds up. And when he came down on us at the northern front, while we were grinding the wave..." She paused. "I was actually starting to run out of steam, right then. That might have been a choice on his part, not chance."
"I saw Isaiah slowing down too," Alice confirmed, idly playing with a strand of her white hair. "If you ask me, he took advantage of the moment you’d overdone it to knock out a hero, quick and clean~"
I stayed with that idea a moment, and something fell back into place in my head.
So that was it. Isaiah, that monster of power, had been carried off by a single spell because he was spent at that exact instant. He hadn’t died of weakness — he’d died of exhaustion, and Lazaüs had waited for precisely that moment.
And in that loop, he hadn’t died because of the demons, or even really because of Lazaüs. He’d died because of us. We’d dragged him into our slaughter against the wave, never calling on the soldiers, never easing up — and he’d followed us, swept along by the euphoria, with no idea what was coming, without keeping a shred in reserve. He’d emptied himself to hold our pace, and it had killed him.
And me, all that time, I hadn’t even thought about it. With Apotheosis, the question had never come up: we’d fought a tide of demons for hours on end, and not for a second had I felt tired. I’d completely forgotten that the others were wearing down.
Once again, it reminded me how absurdly strong that skill was. It made no noise, it lit up no skies, and it had probably saved my life more often than everything else combined.
"All of that makes sense," Evelyn cut in, bringing everyone back to the present. "And if we know his logic in advance, then we can use it. We take him where we want him, instead of enduring him."
We all nodded, and that settled the question of how to proceed.
Gabriel chose that moment to speak up — and from the way he launched into it, I got the impression he’d been waiting for a gap since the start to place it.
"Otherwise... I might have had an idea." He cleared his throat. "Watching your spell, the one that combines wind, electricity and water. I don’t really know if it’s possible, but maybe you could create plasma."
Seorin went still for two seconds, her gaze somewhere far off, before something lit up behind her eyes.
"Yes... yes! That makes complete sense!" She sprang to her feet, joy flooding her face, crossed the distance in three strides and seized both his hands, all but bouncing on the spot. "You’re a genius, Gabriel! A genius!"
Gabriel froze, his face twisted with frank disgust at the contact.
Seorin noticed, dropped his hands at once, stepped back and cleared her throat, her cheeks pink.
"Sorry. That was the excitement."
"... It’s nothing."
I looked at the two of them, then back to Seorin, the idea starting to take shape in my head.
"So we could wait for Lazaüs where he shows up with the giant, like always," I said slowly, "and with the plasma, try to take them both out at once?"
"That’s it." She nodded, already back in her calculations.
"It’s worth a try." I let out a breath. "But in all honesty, I don’t think that at our level, even with all of us at it, we could beat Lazaüs."
No one contradicted me. Everyone knew it. Everyone had seen it, over the course of this battle repeated to the point of nausea.
"And to think you managed to escape that monster without the loops, in your present," Leon let out with a nervous laugh.
"We didn’t escape. He’s dead."
The silence that followed lasted longer than I’d have expected. Each of them seemed to be waiting for someone else to find something to say, and no one came.
That monster of power, the one crushing us here without ever breaking a sweat, had ended up falling after all. Beaten by their side, in a future none of them would ever know. I saw something pass across their faces — not joy, but a little balm on the heart in the middle of the hell this world was.
I let them savor it for two seconds, then went on.
"Anyway. We’ll have time for gossip later." I swept the group with my gaze. "Right now, we need an ace. Something to buy us time — the few minutes we’d need, if the plasma doesn’t kill Lazaüs."
Then Seorin stood up.
"If that happens, then I’ll handle it." Her voice was perfectly calm. "I’ll hold him as long as it takes. Don’t worry."
Gabriel turned toward her so fast his neck cracked.
"Do you know what you’re saying? You really think you can do it?!"
"Yes." She didn’t blink. "With my skill, I’ll hold him as long as it takes."
Around us, glances were exchanged, plainly torn between trusting her and telling her she was out of her mind. She’d offered nothing more, not a word about that skill, not the beginning of an explanation.
But I’d learned to know her a little, by now.
That woman was neither a liar nor a braggart — least of all at a moment like this. If she said she’d hold, then she’d hold.
So I settled it for everyone.
"We’ll do it that way." I met her gaze. "And either way, Alice and I, with Isaiah and Adam, we’ll back you up when the time comes if you need it."
She nodded, and with that the discussion came to a close. Everyone knew their part now — where to stand, what to hold, what to unleash when the moment came.
From the start, he’d been the one choosing where to strike, and when. He looked down at the board, picked the weakest square, and took it. Not this time. This time, the weakness would be one we’d built for him, on the ground we’d chosen, at the hour we’d decided.
This time, we’d force his hand.