novelraw Chapter 333: Episode 333
Chapter 333: Episode 333
Capping off a relentless chain of seventh-order spells with Doomsday—whether human or fiend, there was no logical way any living creature could survive such a catastrophic barrage.
And yet.
Damn it! Yusin bit his lip, tasting iron.
A violent red glint pierced the distant sky. The crimson flash flickered erratically, darting left and right before stretching into a long, comet-like tail, descending at the speed of light. It slammed into the earth like a god’s spike being driven into the bedrock.
"Ha!"
"Ugh!"
The impact threw the hunters off balance, eliciting grunts of pain. The very ground they stood on cracked open into a massive geometric square, furious crimson light bleeding upward through the jagged fissures.
"Everyone, dodge!"
The earth collapsed, giving way to a geyser of red aura that erupted upward like volcanic magma.
Just as Yusin spread his Wing Golem’s wings to take flight, a voice whispered.
"The Master of the Magic Tower is quite different, I’ll admit."
Her red hair fluttering like spun blood, Hong Yul’s hijacked body materialized directly behind him. A fist utterly saturated with apocalyptic red aura surged toward him, tracing a horrifying, inescapable trajectory.
"But you’re still weak."
The exact millisecond Nemesis threw her punch, Hong Yeon appeared like a tempest, swinging her blade to intercept. Blinding sparks flew as a massive concussive shockwave exploded outward.
"I will win no matter what!" Hong Yeon roared, her golden eyes burning with fierce resolve.
"I don’t think you can," Nemesis scoffed. "There’s no universe where I get pushed back when we’re wielding the exact same power."
Without another word, Hong Yeon swung her sword again. Nemesis met her head-on, launching a flurry of strikes with her arms and legs so blindingly fast they left smeared afterimages in the air. As their battle raged, shattering the terrain and tearing the atmosphere apart with ambient shockwaves, Yusin landed hard on the earth, desperate to catch his breath.
The reckless, consecutive casting of seventh-order spells had taken its toll. His Blue Robe had peeled away, forcibly deactivating his Meister state.
Still no reaction. Yusin observed Nemesis’s flawless condition and made a grim pivot in his strategy.
Ea. There’s no other way now. Summon the Otherworldly Garden in front of me.
Ea immediately read his thoughts.
-But Master, you have never once succeeded with Chaos-order magic.
Yusin smirked through the pain. It’ll be different this time. Probably.
Reluctantly, Ea pulled forward the dimensional space created by the eighth-order Otherworldly Garden. A small, surreal patch of white sandy beach materialized in the air in front of Yusin.
"Phew." Yusin let out a slow, steadying breath. With practiced precision, he drew overlapping magic circles both inside and outside the pocket dimension, seamlessly manipulating their matrices. In response, a colossal hand forged purely of mana manifested, firmly gripping the alternate reality.
Through countless agonizing hours of research, Yusin had pinpointed the two core elements capable of permanently defeating Nemesis: Chaos, and Titan.
Chaos was the solitary force in existence that could completely obliterate her, while Titan was a state of being that would render his body immune to her possession.
He needed Chaos first. To master such reality-bending magic, even an unparalleled genius like Yusin would normally need at least two years of isolated study. But time was a luxury he didn’t possess.
Now, this insane gamble was the only play he had left on the board.
Even if it’s just an attempt...!
Firmly trapped in the grip of his mana, the Otherworldly Garden forcibly compressed. It rapidly shrank down into a dense, volatile sphere, emitting a foul hissing sound as a substance resembling temporal rust began to ooze from its boundaries.
To wield Chaos, one had to sacrifice a "world". That world had to be violently collapsed, reverting its fundamental physics back to a Big Bang state—the primordial void before creation itself. To achieve this, Yusin was preparing to detonate the Magic Tower’s 8th-floor Otherworldly Garden entirely.
It meant intentionally destroying an ancient floor passed down through the historic legacy of the Magic Tower. He’d have no face left to show his predecessors, but he was out of options. Yusin constricted the alternate dimension with every last drop of his willpower.
I’ll compress it to the absolute limit!
If he could successfully harness the Chaos born from the death of an alternate dimension, he could erase Nemesis from existence entirely—even without being a Guardian.
Nemesis’s sharp instincts caught on to Yusin’s suspicious buildup of energy, but Hong Yeon gritted her teeth, relentlessly holding the monster back.
"How utterly annoying."
Nemesis detonated a massive wave of red aura, violently blasting away Hong Yeon, whose blade had been locked in a dead heat with her own.
Erasing the distance to Yusin in a blink, she pulled her arm back to deliver a lethal punch.
A massive barricade slammed down, blocking her path. It was the Official Rank 1 hunter, Raider, stepping to the frontline with his shield device raised. "Aegis deployed."
Mana pulsed outward from the shield’s core, hard-light projecting into the formidable shape of an alien fortress gate.
A cross of searing divine power conjured by Lucia crashed down from the heavens, mercilessly pinning Nemesis in place.
Thick mana tentacles expelled by Sham erupted from the earth, wrapping tightly around the immobilized fiend. Following that, a torrential rain of magic bullets from the sniper unit peppered the area in a relentless barrage.
Yet, Nemesis ignored every single strike. Flexing her red aura with terrifying brute force, she simply brushed the divine cross and spectral tentacles away like cobwebs, extending her arm toward the tank.
A hyper-concentrated red shockwave struck dead-center against Raider’s fortress gate.
"Guh!" Raider violently coughed up blood. The SS-rank artifact, Aegis, was spiderwebbing with cracks in real-time.
"Stand back," a voice ordered.
At that moment, a horrifying gray sun rose ominously into the sky.
As Spirit King Marie swept both her arms downward, a suffocating aggregation of Soul Aura plummeted, completely engulfing Nemesis. Amidst the thunderous roar of the impact, Lucia and Sham scrambled backward to clear the blast radius.
"Please, just stay down!" one of them pleaded.
But making an absolute mockery of that desperate plea, the sinister glow of the red aura continued to sway smoothly within the epicenter of the explosion. Even the corrosive Soul Aura hadn’t been enough to burn away Nemesis’s fathomless mana reserves.
Ascending into the sky, Pharaoh Han Yoonjeong spread her arms wide. Colossal volumes of golden sand poured directly out of the ambient atmosphere, burying Nemesis where she knelt. The sand instantaneously expanded, violently shifting to form a massive pyramid thousands of feet wide.
The apex of the pyramid bulged unnaturally as if something was swimming up through the dense grains. A second later, Nemesis’s head violently breached the surface.
"How dare you worms—!"
Enraged, the monster didn’t even get the chance to finish her threat.
A second, inverted pyramid, identical in massive scale to the first, plummeted straight out of the sky.
The two colossal structures collided perfectly at their apexes, fusing into the shape of a gargantuan hourglass. The sand within both pyramids began circulating at blinding speeds, generating a violent tidal current that maintained a crushing gravitational equilibrium.
It was a living, grinding quicksand trap designed to negate sheer brute strength. Having successfully bound her nightmare of a target, Han Yoonjeong pushed her mana core to its absolute zenith. The residual sand hovering in the air rapidly transmuted into a lethal array of weapons, plunging mercilessly into the vortex to stab and slash at the trapped fiend.
"W-We got her!"
"As expected of the Pharaoh!"
Icy sweat poured down Han Yoonjeong’s pale face. She had blown past her physical limits long ago, but entirely prepared to face fatal mana exhaustion, she stubbornly multiplied the swarming sand weapons by five.
"What do you expect to achieve with a toy like this?"
A massive crater was blown outward from the upper pyramid, revealing Nemesis’s glowing fist, though the churning sand immediately rushed in to swallow it back up.
Consecutive, deafening explosions blew structural holes through the hourglass, forcibly disrupting the delicate balance of the high-speed currents. The pyramid’s integrity immediately began to fail. A heartbeat later, Nemesis detonated her red aura in a blinding flash, collapsing the monolithic trap entirely as she broke free.
"Damn it!" Han Yoonjeong spat. "She’s heading that way! Protect Yusin!"
The remaining hunters raised their weapons, charging Nemesis in a desperate final stand. However, the steel they swung shattered like spun sugar the second it grazed her crimson aura. A single physical collision with the monster reduced an armored hunter into a pulverized lump of gore.
She was a walking apocalypse. She couldn’t be stopped.
The only person on the battlefield capable of even somewhat holding her back intercepted the charge. The sheer kinetic force of Hong Yeon’s swing was so heavy that even Nemesis was forced to cross both arms to block it.
"You persistent pest!" Nemesis hissed.
"I said you’re not going anywhere!" Hong Yeon screamed back.
The two violently traded blows. The very atmosphere howled in protest, and the earth split beneath their boots, forming gaping crevasses. The surviving hunters frantically scrambled to retreat from the epicenter.
—"Support Hong Yeon!" someone yelled over the comms.
—"We push her back, one more time!"
While the desperate vanguard bought him precious seconds with their lives, Yusin tuned out the chaos, raising his magical focus to its absolute breaking point.
Almost there.
By ruthlessly compressing the alternate dimension to its physical extreme and forcing a collapse, a microscopic Big Bang was slowly beginning to ignite in his grasp. Once the critical mass was reached, all he had to do was expand the resulting Chaos and drive it straight into Nemesis’s core. That would kill her.
"Gah!"
But the situation on the ground was rapidly deteriorating. Taking a brutal kick to the ribs, Hong Yeon was sent tumbling across the jagged dirt. Free from her primary obstacle, Nemesis pivoted, breaking into a lethal sprint straight for Yusin as he gathered his spell.
A hand clamped around her ankle like a steel vice. Nemesis snapped her gaze downward. Sprawled out on the ruined ground, battered and bleeding, Hong Yeon was anchoring Nemesis’s leg to the earth.
"You’re not... going anywhere!" she gritted out.
"Why you little—!"
Slashing upward with her free hand, Hong Yeon forced Nemesis to raise an arm to block the sweeping blade.
"Hyaaah!"
Soaring through the sky above them, Sham crossed both of her arms. A monstrous, chitinous pincer erupted from her back, slamming downward like a guillotine aimed right at Nemesis.
But in the exact same fraction of a second, Nemesis’s red aura spiked, blowing a massive, bloody hole straight through Sham’s chest. Coughing up a spray of crimson, the hunter plummeted limply to the ground.
"You bastard!" Completely depleted of her magical reserves, Han Yoonjeong charged in on foot, wielding a physical spear of condensed sand to thrust at her enemy.
Nemesis dodged the lethal tip with a casual tilt of her head, lazily swatting her hand outward as if shooing away a fly. A hyper-compressed flash of crimson light flared in the air.
Han Yoonjeong’s spear-wielding arm cleanly detached from her shoulder.
"Aaaargh!" the Pharaoh shrieked, collapsing into a bloody roll across the dirt.
Refusing to let the momentum die, Lucia’s chariot and Wang Ya’s massive summon elephant thundered into the fray, charging the beast from both flanks.
"I said enough of this!"
It was a massacre that could only be described as hopelessly, beautifully desperate. The hunters, their mana cores utterly dry, were literally buying time with their flesh and bone. If Nemesis struck one down, another stepped over the body to take their place. If she killed that one, two more threw themselves onto her blades, willingly offering up their lives to buy Yusin a single extra second.
And leading them, above all else, was the vanguard.
"Haaaaaaaah!" Rising up again and again like a bloodied revenant, Hong Yeon swung her sword with the unhinged ferocity of a possessed demon.
As Nemesis’s fist and the descending steel clashed midway, the sword device, having finally reached its absolute structural limit, shattered into a thousand glittering shards. It didn’t matter what kind of miracle metal forged the weapon. Prolonged exposure to the corrosive red aura inevitably spelled its destruction.
Confident in her imminent victory, Nemesis smiled and threw the lethal counter-punch.
An attack clipped her from below. Nemesis’s sneer distorted in shock as knuckles connected cleanly with her jaw. Having abandoned her broken weapon and planted her feet, Hong Yeon was now throwing hands.
If I don’t have a sword, I’ll beat you to death with my bare hands!
Nemesis hastily raised her guard to absorb the incoming strike. It was unimaginably heavy. Even through a successful block, the sheer kinetic shockwave made her balance falter, forcing her planted foot to lift a precious inch off the ground.
"Hyaaaaaah!" Letting out a guttural sound somewhere between a feral roar and a warrior’s battle cry, Hong Yeon unleashed a relentless, punishing barrage of martial arts. Nemesis was forced to frantically defend herself, hastily extending her arms to deflect the blurring fists and snapping her knees up to check the savage kicks.
Nemesis was utterly bewildered. Stripped of her sword, the human’s offense had somehow grown infinitely more ferocious.
However, the sheer volume of chaotic red aura Nemesis commanded remained overwhelmingly superior. Applying a sudden, explosive burst of power to her planted foot, she stepped into a devastating counter-punch.
As the lethal fist blurred forward, tearing the atmosphere and physically distorting the space around it, Hong Yeon snapped her head back, slipping the blow by a hair’s breadth. Instead of retreating, she completely erased the gap between them, pressing herself chest-to-chest with the monster.
She instantly followed up with a brutal uppercut to the jaw. The impact rang out like a sledgehammer driving into an iron spike.
Somehow withstanding the bone-rattling blow, Nemesis lashed out with a blind hook from her opposite arm. But Hong Yeon was faster. Torquing her hips, she whipped a high Brazilian kick squarely into the side of Nemesis’s skull, shattering her equilibrium all over again.
"How dare you!"
Nemesis and Hong Yeon ramped the tempo of the brawl higher and higher. Their limbs blurred into invisibility, clashing with the force of artillery shells and shedding violent showers of sparks.
By now, both women had entirely abandoned the concept of defense.
It was a pure, unadulterated slugfest. They rained down catastrophic attacks on one another, willingly using their own bodies as meat-shields to absorb their opponent’s blows just to land their next strike.
Hong Yeon was actually beginning to pull ahead.
As Hong Yeon’s strike-speed miraculously increased even further, Nemesis felt a cold spike of genuine appall.
Even in the crucible of this very moment, the human was evolving. She was reading Nemesis’s immortal fighting style and absorbing its mechanics like a sponge.
"Guardiannnnnnn!" Nemesis shrieked.
Hong Yeon’s fist hammered down, brutally snapping Nemesis’s jaw to the side. At some unrecorded point during the melee, a pure white aura, entirely distinct from the suffocating red energy, had ignited, fiercely flickering around Hong Yeon’s battered body.
It was the exact same awakened state Yusin had witnessed during the grueling 8th-floor trial.
Blinded by rage, Nemesis clamped her hands down on Hong Yeon’s shoulders to pin her in place, rearing her glowing fist back for an execution blow. But instead of trying to pry herself free, Hong Yeon boldly charged forward, violently closing the gap until she was tucked too tightly against Nemesis’s chest for the punch to land.
And then.
A skull-cracking headbutt. Launching herself upward, Hong Yeon ruthlessly slammed her forehead directly into her opponent’s face.
For a breathless fraction of a second, the light in Nemesis’s eyes wavered. The sinister orange hue flickered, bleeding into a familiar gold before snapping aggressively back to orange.
Catching that microscopic shift from his peripheral vision, Yusin spoke into his comms.
—"Yeon, listen to me carefully."
As Yusin’s urgent instructions filtered through her earpiece, Hong Yeon’s pupils sharply dilated.
"Despicable pests!"
Furious, Nemesis raised both of her arms to the sky.
A colossal density of red aura gathered in the air above her, rapidly mutating into the flickering, chaotic eye of a typhoon. In response, Hong Yeon planted her feet and mimed the exact physical motion of gripping a longsword with her bare, bleeding hands.
To the awe of everyone watching, the ambient red aura coalesced in her grip, instantly elongating into the razor-sharp silhouette of a blade. Before Nemesis’s apocalyptic technique could reach completion, Hong Yeon bit down on her lip and swung her conceptual sword.
It left absolutely no sound. No trace.
The sole strike of its kind in the entire world cleanly cleaved the heavens and the earth in two.
Nemesis’s towering typhoon was perfectly, effortlessly bisected.
"Kugh!" Nemesis grunted, snapping both arms up into a frantic defensive guard, but a deep, spurting gash opened across her forearm anyway.
Almost simultaneously, Hong Yeon burst through the parting red smoke, fiercely thrusting her fist forward.
"You arrogant brat!"
She had been waiting for exactly this over-extension. Grinning, Nemesis detonated the compressed aura cloaking her arm and launched a lethal counter-punch at absolute maximum speed.
A strike exponentially faster than Hong Yeon’s.
At that exact millisecond, Hong Yeon aborted her thrust. Retracting her fist, she ducked, leaving nothing but a lingering afterimage as her body dropped to a terrifyingly low angle.
Nemesis’s lethal arm cut through empty air with a deafening whoosh!
Nemesis was dumbstruck.
It was the perfect, fatal opening.
Thrusting her upper body straight up from the drop, Hong Yeon clenched her teeth and unleashed a devastating uppercut.
The swirling red aura cloaking her fist slammed flush against Nemesis’s jaw. Vomiting a massive mouthful of black blood, the immortal fiend crashed into the earth, violently ragdolling across the dirt.
Having squeezed out the very last microscopic drop of her physical and magical strength, Hong Yeon collapsed face-first into the dirt the exact moment her punch followed through, violently gasping for air.
However.
"It’s over."
A twisted, triumphant smile hung on the bloody lips of the fallen Nemesis.
Sensing an abrupt, chilling shift in the surrounding mana, Hong Yeon desperately whipped her head around. "Dodge, Yusin!" she screamed.
Before anyone even registered the movement, an eclipse-like shadow was already casting over Yusin’s head.
Nemesis’s original, discarded corpse, a vessel completely devoid of all biological signs of life, had silently stood up. And it was swinging its arm straight for his neck.
Yusin managed to deploy his hard-light barrier by a literal hair’s breadth, deflecting the lethal blow. But the sudden kinetic shock sent a tremor right through his wavering concentration.
He urgently snapped his gaze downward. The delicate, impossibly complex magic that had been hovering on the very verge of producing raw Chaos was unraveling, scattering into the wind with a sickening sizzle.
"...Ah."
"Hahahahaha!" Basking in the glory of her ultimate, undeniable victory, Nemesis casually snapped her fingers.
The spatial boundaries of the surrounding world shattered into a million glittering glass shards. Through the broken veil, the horde of Ultio-type monsters that had been eagerly waiting outside began to stride forward, their grotesque silhouettes blotting out the horizon.
The surviving hunters, who had previously focused all their dying energy on Nemesis, slowly turned their backs to her, gripping their cracked weapons in a silent promise to fight to the bitter end.
"There isn’t a single shred of hope left in this world," Nemesis mocked. "Every last one of you will be erased here."
Heaving for breath, his vision swimming, Yusin pushed himself up. But his legs immediately gave out. He stumbled, dropping heavily to one knee as hot blood poured from his lips.
"Yusin!" Hong Yeon screamed, urgently rushing over to place her battered body squarely between him and the encroaching horrors.
Nemesis, who had fully intended to rip Yusin’s head off first, clicked her tongue in sheer annoyance. "Tsk."
"That’s enough! You’ve done more than enough!" Hong Yeon pleaded, tears cutting tracks through the soot on her face. "Fall back and rest...!"
"There’s still..." Yusin coughed, his voice a ragged rasp. "A final resort left."
Teleporting Specter directly into his grip, Yusin planted the staff into the scorched earth. Using it as a makeshift cane to prop up his violently trembling knees, he painstakingly forced himself to stand. Pushing through the agonizing pain, he gathered a meager spark of mana at his fingertips and began to trace a complex magic circle directly onto Specter’s surface.
"Yeon... listen carefully."
Because she had absolutely no idea when or from which angle Nemesis would launch the fatal strike, Hong Yeon didn’t dare look back. She kept her eyes locked dead ahead, her broken body serving as his final shield.
She couldn’t see his expression or tell how much agony he was in.
"I’m going to become a Titan to fight," he declared.
"N-no!" Hong Yeon cried out, her voice thick with tears. "Absolutely not! Please, anything but that!"
Moving his fingers in swift strokes, Yusin finished tracing the Human Body Procedure: Titan magic circle onto Specter. Gripping the staff with both hands, he lifted it, preparing to plunge it into his own chest.
"I have to do this."
"Please! Yusin!" Hong Yeon pleaded, on the verge of sobbing.
Nemesis wore a relaxed expression once more, as if enjoying a brief intermission. Still, she kept her stance low, ready to spring into action at any given moment. Since she couldn’t break through Hong Yeon by brute force anyway, she seemed content to sit back and watch the situation unfold.
Yusin spoke as he brought Specter down toward his chest.
"I’m sorry."
"Noooooo!"
Before anyone realized, the staff was resting in Nemesis’s outstretched hand.
"I thought I was going to die of old age waiting."
However, the voice didn’t possess Nemesis’s distorted, monstrous modulation—it was crystal clear.
"What is this?!"
Her voice changed once again, unmistakably Nemesis this time. She thrashed violently, trying to move, but her body remained completely paralyzed.
Too engrossed in the battle, Nemesis hadn’t realized her irises had locked into a brilliant, unyielding gold.
"H-how? I took complete control of this body! This should be impossible...!"
"What’s impossible about it, you stupid bitch?"
Her voice shifting back to its normal human cadence, she lowered her arm and pressed Specter firmly against her own chest.
"You did well, Yusin. And..."
Hong Yul flashed a serene smile.
"Yeon."
The Titan magic circle engraved on Specter bled seamlessly onto her body.