Chapter 930: Anathema (4)
CRACK!
The ring of light surrounding Lennok and Anathema shattered, sending the two plummeting from the altar.
Lennok shook off Anathema’s hand, which had been clutching his neck, with a shockwave, then summoned lightning to blast him into the ground of the ritual site.
[Whitefall]
BOOOOOM!!!
A pillar of pure white lightning struck the center of the ritual site with a deafening roar, incinerating the grotesque flesh-monsters rampaging everywhere.
[SQUELCH!!!]
[SCREEECH, CHIRP!!]
The flesh-monsters shrieked in agony, and Anathema’s form, blasted into the shattered altar, coughed up blood.
The intense lightning flash made all the participants, who were struggling against the invading monsters in the ritual site, turn their heads.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s Adamant Thunder’s lightning spell. Something went wrong with the ritual.”
“Anathema!”
WHOOSH……!!!
Lennok emerged from the smoky clearing below the altar and asked.
“Where is Slain?”
The red-eyed man was nowhere to be seen, replaced by hundreds of flesh-monsters.
Everyone observing the ritual was focused on killing and clearing out the flesh-monsters.
Had the situation changed immediately after Lennok was enveloped in the ring of light with Anathema?
“Something happened to the other participants on the outskirts of the satellite city, so he had to leave in a hurry.”
“……”
“More importantly, I think you need to explain this situation.”
STAB!
Habaek, who had crushed a flesh-monster’s head with his scabbard, twitched his brow and spoke.
“Why did you attack Anathema? What happened during the ritual?”
“He tried to kill me, feigning an ability transfer.”
Lennok replied with an expressionless face.
“He colluded with the Cult, set up the whole scheme, and became an Apostle.”
“……”
At Lennok’s explanation, declaring Anathema had become the Cult’s dog, everyone fell silent, exchanging glances.
Lennok ignored the surrounding atmosphere and quickly explained.
“First, I seized the Eight Trigrams Formation to prevent Anathema from awakening his innate ability. I’ve neutralized him for now, so—”
“Adamant Thunder. I think you’re mistaken.”
But Rage curtly cut off Lennok’s words, denying them.
“Armas is a nobleman with powers and abilities almost antithetical to the Cult. He’s not the kind of guy to stoop to human sacrifice…!”
SWISH!
Rage’s form accelerated explosively, blasting away the swarming monsters.
As her entire body rotated with a fiery red glow, she became a whirlwind of flames, engulfing the ritual site.
WHOOSH!!!
A physical ability user whose weapon was acceleration.
He had guessed it when she wore that motorcycle helmet, but she must be a type with an extreme advantage in speed.
Rage, who had torn and incinerated the flesh and bones of the monsters with a sweep of her hand, landed with immense speed on the shattered altar.
CRASH!!!
“He stood against Kaiser, but he wasn’t someone who’d kill without reason.”
Rage, supporting Anathema who was embedded in the shattered altar, spoke in a cold voice.
Contrary to her friendly demeanor just moments before, her attitude was now utterly icy.
“Aren’t you the one falsely accusing Armas to protect Kaiser’s granddaughter?”
“I don’t see what protecting Jenisia Bajour has to do with pointing out Anathema’s betrayal.”
KIIING……!!
Lennok asked, looking at the Eight Trigrams Formation fiercely rotating above his head.
“Anathema himself would know best whose hand he took, and what kind of being he has become, wouldn’t he?”
“What?”
Lennok looked at Anathema, who lay slumped below the altar, and touched his wrist.
“He must already know that fact cannot be hidden.”
“……”
The Cult’s former priestess, Seina Naydree.
A comrade who stayed with Lennok until the very end in Yorta’s Mugan, leaving her will before departing.
He still couldn’t empathize with her fanaticism. Nor did he fully understand her decision.
But the authority of the Priestess, which she had sacrificed and left for Lennok, remained by his side, emitting a pale light.
WOOONG!!
Even the wavering hesitation she felt in her last moments, wondering if Lennok might be alright, was still so vivid.
The same turmoil Seina felt then, and the resolve of a sacrifice made with great difficulty, were contained here.
Because he possessed the Priestess’s authority, which touched the Cult’s central belief system, Lennok could perceive the existence of an Apostle even without being a Cult member.
Anathema must have felt that, which was why he couldn’t deny Lennok’s words at all and had fallen.
“Do you believe that a resolution and heart once embraced will never change?”
“……”
“Can you truly be certain that the comrade you face again after decades is the same being he was then?”
The frantic flesh-monsters reflected in Lennok’s eyes.
Monsters that had lost their intellect and devoured humans, and who themselves were once human victims.
He had already confirmed that Anathema himself was directly involved in all this tragedy.
“It’s not strange for something to break and twist. Even giving up and falling into ruin is natural for humans. At least…”
Lennok’s cold gaze fixed on Anathema, who lay unconscious.
“It seems undeniable that the nobleman of Ars Nova is not as noble as one might think.”
“Hey, that’s enough.”
FLICKER!
Rage spoke in a low, even voice.
“Why do you keep talking like you know everything? What do you know about what happened in the civil war?”
“……”
“Armas saved us countless times. Every time we almost died because of Gillian’s operations, he sacrificed his time in reality to save others.”
Rage’s gaze, now chilling, sharply fixed on Lennok through her helmet.
“Don’t you know that you’re suspected of being a collaborator more than Anathema, who has powers antithetical to the Cult?”
“……”
“Similar actions to the Second Apostle who wreaked havoc in the Machine City. There were even rumors that you fought Apostle-Slayer Cheonbeon because you were a Cult affiliate.”
“Ah, so that’s what it was.”
He wondered why she brought that up so suddenly earlier; had such suspicions already been circulating among the other participants?
Thinking that far, Lennok immediately gathered his magic and nodded.
“Good. I never intended to explain everything in detail anyway. Let’s deal with the urgent matter first, then talk.”
“Who said I’d let you do as you please?”
Lennok had no time to explain and prove how he knew Anathema was an Apostle.
He would simply deal with what needed to be done while facing the charging Rage.
An ability user whose strength was acceleration.
Considering her capricious personality until now, it was unnatural for her to wear a helmet in any situation.
That motorcycle helmet must be some kind of restraint or suppressor to control her power.
If he couldn’t react immediately after she took off her helmet, Lennok might suffer a fatal blow.
‘It would have been good if I could have seized all of Anathema’s innate abilities here and now…’
He had provoked Anathema, who had become an Apostle through the Priestess’s authority, to break the function of the Eight Trigrams Formation.
But even though the control had passed to Lennok, he was still insufficient in handling the ability.
At least Anathema himself would have to definitively abandon his ability, or be in a state equivalent to that, for it to become possible.
‘Subdue Rage and Habaek, then deal with Anathema.’
WOOONG!!!
Lennok’s senses, amplified by his magic, whirled intensely, taking in information pouring in from all directions.
‘I can handle the psychic’s intervention. The problem is over there.’
Since earlier, a man wearing a strange visor had been observing the ritual site from the ground.
Marcus Tranquiller. The leader of Mirror Diver, and the first being in Vulcan to cross the ‘event horizon,’ was it?
The problem was that Lennok had no idea what the event horizon meant.
It was different from opponents like Habaek or psychics whose abilities and countermeasures could be guessed.
WHOOSH!
At that moment, Rage’s form vanished from Lennok’s sight.
Light shockwaves and strong winds erupted from the strange statues surrounding the ritual site.
A technique of vaulting across the vast ritual site, adjusting the distance needed for acceleration and maximizing the impact force.
Speed was power. The flames that ignited, unable to overcome air friction, became propulsion adding to her acceleration.
Elizart’s Extreme Refinement: Double Activation
Propulsion
Velocity
FLICKER!
The moment the flames, starting from her toes, swirled once in front of Lennok.
Rage kicked Lennok in the stomach with supersonic speed.
[Annihilation Kick]
BOOOOOOM!!!
Dozens of layers of shockwaves exploded like ripples, and Lennok’s body jolted violently.
The mere aftershock crushed dozens of flesh-monsters swarming everywhere, making them spew bodily fluids.
[SQUISH!!]
“……!!”
An enormous impact, enough to fold Lennok’s body into a right angle.
But Lennok, even having taken Rage’s attack head-on, neither coughed blood nor passed out with his eyes rolling back.
“He blocked…?!”
The moment Rage, who hadn’t even imagined he would deliberately take her first strike head-on, was astonished.
Compressed flames erupted from Lennok’s fingertips, slamming Rage’s form into the ritual site ground.
[Forged Flame]
KABOOM!!!!
“Gah……!!”
Rage, who was scraped across the stone floor of the ritual site and pushed back, then realized what method Lennok had used and said in a dumbfounded voice.
“You abandoned the defense of other body parts and concentrated your magic on your stomach, you madman…!! You couldn’t have seen the trajectory, how did you?!”
“Even an accelerator can’t perfectly control that kind of speed.”
Lennok laughed with a pale face.
“If you have to overlap your jumps to gauge the distance, wouldn’t it be difficult to hit anything without aiming for the center of my body in the first place?”
“You…!!”
Rage had run around the ritual site before attacking, not to increase acceleration by extending jump distance.
But to internalize the distance by running across the ritual site, and to increase the accuracy of her Annihilation Kick.
However, Rage herself, accelerating at such a speed, found it difficult to properly pinpoint Lennok’s form.
To avoid her accelerated first strike missing, she would try to hit the very center of the target with her [Annihilation Kick].
Therefore, Lennok, instinctively knowing that Rage would not aim elsewhere, channeled his magic into his abdomen and took the attack head-on.
This crude counter, possible because his maximum magic capacity had significantly increased due to the Lapis incident, replaced physical resistance with magic.
And Lennok had a reason for enduring so close to Rage’s face.
“My turn.”
“You…!!!”
CLICK!
Lennok pulled out his sniper rifle and aimed at Anathema’s slumped body on the altar.
He intended to pin Rage here and completely erase Anathema’s body.
He was about to envelop Rage’s presence in a cloud of magic to forcibly restrain her, and simultaneously fire a destructive spell-bullet towards the altar, when—
“She’s right.”
Anathema’s voice echoed from behind Rage.
A handsome young man covered in blue scales, wearing a black robe, stood behind her.
“She and I are bound by lives owed to each other on the battlefield. We were comrades, linked by an unbreakable bond.”
“Armas—”
STAB!
Blue-scaled fingers burst out from behind Rage’s neck.
He plunged his fingers without a moment’s hesitation into the carotid artery exposed through a gap in her helmet and spoke.
“So, this time, I’ll collect the life owed.”
“……”
Anathema, slumped on the altar, and another Anathema, piercing her neck from behind Rage.
Lennok hadn’t missed Anathema’s presence even with his magic perception.
Anathema’s body had, quite literally, been newly created right here.
And it was needless to say that the power source for this was human sacrifice.
“Ar…mas…”
Rage clutched Anathema’s arm in disbelief.
Her body, unable to even breathe with her carotid artery, esophagus, and the neck bones supporting her head broken, fumbled for words.
“I tried to save…”
“No one can save me, Rage.”
Anathema replied in a truly gentle voice.
“Because there was never any salvation in this world to begin with.”
“……”
“No matter how much I dedicated myself, how many lives I saved, I was nothing more than an outsider. Always an audience member outside the stage.”
While Lennok’s mouth hardened at the somehow familiar lament, Anathema spoke softly.
“Believing that someday a reward would come, someday causality would settle upon me. I followed the laws I learned my entire life, but…”
FWOOSH!
Anathema twisted the hand he had plunged into Rage’s neck and whispered.
“My salvation was not in this world, but out there.”
“Why, how…”
Rage collapsed, unable to finish her words.
Anathema looked down at Rage, who lay grasping her neck, and closed his eyes.
“Come, my God.”
GROOOOWL……!!
Anathema spread his arms wide and soared into the air, speaking to himself as he gazed at the endlessly dark night sky.
“Your incarnation is here…!!!”
FLASH!!!
Pale, fanatical light surged from all directions, enveloping his body, and finally settled completely.
Black fur sprouted, and horns grew on his body, which had been covered in blue scales.
His leg joints twisted backward like those of a beast, and his overall size and muscle mass explosively increased.
RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE!!!
Anathema’s form explosively ascended, instantly leaving the ritual site and standing towering in the sky above Etanoc.
Without rejecting the pale light swirling at his feet, he continued to fall into ruin, bound by fanaticism and dogma.
The moment the nobleman of Ars Nova fully accepted his fate as an Apostle and completed his physical manifestation.
CRACK!
Goat horns curved and jutted out from both sides.
A long, protruding goat muzzle, and dragon teeth within.
A grotesque skin covered in membrane-like wings, scales, and fur.
A monstrous abomination, like a fusion of a goat and a dragon, scattered immense malevolent thoughts as it looked down upon the ground.
“Ha…”
Anathema sighed softly, clasped his forehead, and tilted his head back.
“Guido Cult’s Sixth Apostle. Six Heavenly Tribulations Anathema.”
Anathema, whispering as if intoxicated, met Lennok’s eyes, who stood below the ritual site, and declared.
“I declare that I have been reborn here, blessed by the great Outer God.”
RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE!!
At those words, the ground of the satellite city Etanoc began to rotate and slowly lift into the air.