novelraw Chapter 172: A King Accepts His Role as Villain.
Chapter 172: A King Accepts His Role as Villain.
Drakovitch met her gaze, his expression hardening into that of a King who had accepted his role as a villain.
"You fight and die to reach Valhalla, to finally see the parents you never knew. That is your wish. My wish is to stay here, to live for my people and my blood. Even if my wish causes the world to grieve, I will not stop. Your Valhalla is a dream of the dead, Gin. Mine is the reality of the living."
Gin lay in the mud, her spirit finally breaking under the weight of his words. A wave of bitter self pity washed over her. She didn’t blame the King anymore; she blamed herself. She felt unworthy of the very heaven she had fought for.
In her mind, she was weak—not just because her body was failing, but because she had tried to use her own femininity to seduce and deceive him earlier, and even that had failed to bring him down.
"I am not worthy. A true warrior of the sky would have struck you down. I used tricks... I used deceit... and I still couldn’t reach the gates. I am a failure to my blood."
As she spoke, a jagged memory flickered through her mind—the day her transmutation powers first manifested. She had only wanted to protect her village, but her own grounded family had looked at her with terror, not pride.
"Witch!"
They had hissed, recoiling from the strange, shifting metal she called forth. They saw her gift as a stain on their warrior heritage, a devious power that relied on trickery rather than the honest strength of a Giant. To spite them, and to embrace the darkness they forced upon her, she had named her skill Witchblade.
She looked up at Drakovitch, her eyes no longer filled with hatred, but with a hollow, final plea. She accepted that she would never see her parents, but she could at least die with the dignity of a soldier.
"If I cannot have my victory then give me my end. Give me a glorious death, King. Do not let me rot in this mud as a cripple. Let the last thing I feel be the strike of a legend."
Drakovitch looked down at her for a long moment, the golden light of the storm reflecting in his eyes. He saw the sincerity in her despair. Slowly, he nodded, honoring the request of a fallen foe.
"You fought with everything you had, Gin."
His voice a low rumble against the crashing thunder. He looked at her broken form and felt a flicker of genuine regret.
"I wish you had stayed being one of my mother at my grand nursery," he added quietly. "Perhaps there, you could have found a way to be useful, or simply enjoyed a glorious life here on the ground."
Drakovitch raised the Mantis Blade, the bone-white energy sharpening into a final, lethal point.
But then, in her peripheral view, Gin saw a flash that outshone the lightning. It was Shuna. The girl was glowing with a terrifying, ancient golden light, her body beginning to expand as she tapped into her true form—a transformation that would cost Shuna her very life.
The sight of her kin’s ultimate sacrifice reignited a dead coal in Gin’s chest. Her despair vanished, replaced by a frantic, jagged will to fight.
Just as Drakovitch’s bone Mantis Blade whistled down toward her neck, Gin lunged upward with the only part of her that could still move. She snapped her unwounded jaw shut, biting down hard onto the edge of the energy blade.
As her teeth met the King’s power, a violent reaction occurred. The "Witch" within her screamed as she forced a final, desperate transmutation. Starting from her jaw, her entire broken body began to calcify and shift, her skin turning into indestructible, black dragon bone.
Meanwhile, the battlefield had become a scene of absolute carnage. The True Giant, towering over the courtyard, began to move with a terrifying, heavy grace. She used her massive form to trample through the formations of the seven Houses, grinding pride into the dirt beneath her feet.
"Today, the ground you love so much will become your shroud!"
Above, her "Screaming Thundersky" reached a crescendo, the very air vibrating with a sound that paralyzed the heart. In that moment, the legendary discipline of the seven Houses, honed over centuries of warfare snapped.
Terror had replaced their formations. The courtyard became a chaotic sea of retreating steel and panicked cries.
"Fall back! Fall back to the inner sanctum!"
"This fight is not ours!"
Among the panicked ranks, a desperate hope was whispered from mouth to mouth:
"If only the Verdantwings were here! They could maneuver through that storm... they could strike from the blind spots!"
The Verdantwings were the masters of aerial agility and wind stepping, the only ones capable of dancing between the lightning bolts. But the sky remained empty of their emerald crest.
Nearby, tucked away from the carnage, a pile of masonry and fallen pillars sat silent. Deep within the hollow of those stones, crouched and trembling, was the House Leader of the Verdantwings.
He pressed his back against the cold rock. He could hear the screams of his allies and the thunderous footsteps of the Giant, but he did not move.
"How long is this going to take? Come on... just end this already, you damn Gigante."
He squeezed his eyes shut as another explosion of blue lightning rocked the courtyard. A dark, treacherous realization flickered in his gaze.
"I didn’t help you get in here just to make things worse for me. The deal was supposed to be quick. You were supposed to take what you wanted and leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces!"
As the words left his mouth, it was as if the True Giant had heard him. A massive jolt of lightning arced from the clouds, and the Giant seized that raw energy. She drove her fist downward, using the lightning magic to enhance her speed until her descent was nothing but a blue-white blur of kinetic destruction.
Her target was Percieval.