novelraw Chapter 174: Why Do You Weep?
Chapter 174: Why Do You Weep?
Reality slammed back into place.
With it came the burning air and the stink of a Demon’s Corruption.
Ignotus blinked a few times, seemingly in disbelief.
With Eris, he had truly done the impossible.
They were back.
The spade-eyed Demon was frozen before him, its face twisted between triumph and surprise. Its illusions, though dead, still flickered around it like scraps of broken glass.
"...You—how are you—?"
Ignotus smiled and slowly lifted his head.
"You claimed death for me?"
He chuckled while standing up.
"Hah... on whose authority is that claim?"
Once straight, he drew his sword.
"Who do you think you are, Demon? I’m Ignotus, son of Genus, Priest of Calamity. You’ve done yourself a great disservice by underestimating me and not killing me any quicker."
His practiced stance settled.
"Synaxis..."
His now red eyes locked on his enemy.
"Zero."
A black-inked spider with a cross in its abdomen crawled into reality on the back of his right hand, etching itself on his Hands of Lethe as well.
It was an insignia that spoke of a simple thing:
Saving someone beyond salvation through death.
That wasn’t all that changed. Ignotus’s eyes had actual blood streaming downward.
His skin drained pale enough to glow, and his already snow-white hair brightened again, drinking every stray beam of light around them until the clearing somehow looked dimmer.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick—
His now completely black [Fortune’s Wheel] spun violently inside his left eye, having been fully reset thanks to his Synaxis.
DING!
—
{Nullity!}
—
That wasn’t all that had reset to its optimal condition.
Every Rune in his body had done so, allowing him to use [Living Ligature] once more. Gray Arcane tendrils spiraled over his limbs, pulsing with a heartbeat, his Element manifest.
Ignotus looked down at himself and grinned.
’Eris... we’re back.’
Her warm voice brushed the edge of his mind.
’Thank you for telling me that secret.’
Ignotus shook his head.
’There’s no need for that. I owed you that much.’
The Demon finally snapped out of its shock.
"HOW DID YOU—"
Ignotus cut it off with a bored wave of his sword.
"Your little game has ended."
He stepped forward.
"You will break."
The Demon reacted instantly, raising both its arms.
In response, three globs of Corruption shot up high in the sky a few miles away.
That was its clones and that half-dead Demon, no doubt, all that Corruption instantly reaching its body and healing it.
Its Corruption reserves seemed to have gotten refilled, but only a little.
The Demon was in trouble, and it knew that very well, rushing to attack.
Its arms ballooned into a titanic size, ready to clap Ignotus into paste.
But—
Click.
They popped without any resistance.
"KKRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEK!"
The Demon shrieked as its illusion collapsed, its arms snapping back to their real, much smaller form.
Ignotus couldn’t have gotten a better Element.
Right now, and until the Element passed, he was this Demon’s worst enemy.
His [Living Ligature] could reset his Divine Relics’ cooldowns for as long as he had Divinity. That meant that his Hands of Lethe, once only able to steal an illusion or two from the Demon, could now utterly destroy it and everything it tried to do.
"Now let’s see..."
Two colossal hands materialized in the sky and slammed downward.
The Demon panicked and slapped the air, opening a swirling tear.
From it, a massive black snake surged, biting at the falling arms.
Click.
Just as the snake devoured one hand, it blinked out of existence.
Ignotus had stored it in his Hands of Lethe and then flicked it back at the Demon.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!"
The Demon howled, facing two of its own illusions. It was crushed to the ground by the colossal hand and then swallowed whole by the snake.
But of course, while Ignotus reset his Hands of Lethe, he saw the Demon pierce through the illusion, alive.
However, it was injured all over; its body was barely standing.
The two stared at each other, their positions switched around.
Before Ignotus could make a move, it quickly scrambled away, absolutely terrified for its life, forcing more illusions into existence as it did.
Click, click, click, click, click...
Yet none of them even managed to exist for more than a moment.
Ignotus stored none of them, focusing only on unraveling its attacks.
Though he didn’t realize it yet, he was making the Divine Relic more in line with himself, changing its very makeup to fit him.
Perhaps that was the result of his Dealer Soul Glyph and Synaxis combining to create a much bigger effect. An effect that was once out of the Soul Glyph’s scope.
Seeing that, the Demon finally stopped trying to run and turned around.
It appeared both stunned and terrified.
Yet it hadn’t given up yet.
"KRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIK!"
The Demon’s screech took on a hysterical edge as it realized, perhaps for the first time in its wretched existence, that it wasn’t the predator anymore.
It was a trapped prey, and Ignotus was the hunter.
A hunter that had to die for it to ever live again.
The Demon’s eyes turned a blinding, incandescent white.
It reached upward with both hands, its fingers clawing at the sky.
"DISAPPEAR BENEATH THE HEAVENS!"
Above, the sun seemed to shudder.
The Demon wasn’t just using its Corrupted illusions; it was weaving a spell so grand that it tethered itself to the very star above them, making use of its fear like any Demon would.
The natural sunlight began to warp, focusing into a single, needle-thin point directly above the clearing before it expanded into a gargantuan pillar of pure solar might.
Reinforced by the Demon’s remaining life force to make the "lie" of the heat feel like the truth of an exploding star, the very air ignited, and what little remained of the trees around them spontaneously combusted.
Ignotus didn’t dodge out of the blast’s way, and Eris didn’t panic.
She simply watched as Ignotus raised his left hand, palm flat against the descending apocalypse.
CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!
The ground beneath his boots shattered instantly.
A crater blossomed outward, dirt and stone turning to glass under the sheer intensity of the pressure.
Ignotus was driven downward, his knees bending as he was forced inches into the cooling slag of the earth. His snow-white hair whipped violently, and the blood streaming from his eyes began to hiss as it evaporated.
He grit his teeth, the sound of grinding bone echoing in his own ears.
Inside his left eye, the black [Fortune’s Wheel] throbbed and pulsed with a rhythmic light that matched the beat of his heart. The gray Arcane tendrils of [Living Ligature] wrapped tighter around his arm, bracing his muscles against the weight of this fake sun.
So very slowly, he managed to look up through the white-hot veil, his gaze piercing the heart of the attack.
"Is that all?"
Ignotus began to close his raised hand.
His fingers curled inward, one by one, until...
Click.
He slammed his fist shut.
—
{Nullity!}
—
The world went silent.
Like all that came before it, the roaring pillar of solar fire simply ceased to be.
One moment, a forest-ending beam of light was crushing Ignotus into the dirt; the next, there was only the smell of fire and the sight of a man standing in a smoking hole.
The transition was so sudden that it almost seemed dizzying to the eyes.
Ignotus stood straight, exhaling a long plume of steam. His left eye, once vibrant with the spinning wheel of Fate, suddenly went dim.
He could feel the Rune falling into a slumber. The cost of erasing that level of attack was steep; the cooldown would be longer than usual. He saw no doubt about that.
But as he looked at the Demon, he saw its jaw hanging slack, its spirit utterly broken by the sight of its ultimate "truth" being completely erased.
The Demon didn’t know Ignotus was spent.
It only knew that the sun itself had failed to stop him.
Donning a blank face, Ignotus calmly stepped forward.
Their eyes met for one last time.
"Why, human..."
Red tears continued to streak down Ignotus’s pale cheeks.
"...why do you weep?"
A few drops hit the floor.
"There are two reasons..."
Ignotus looked down at the Demon.
"I weep because I can only kill you once."
He lifted his sword and cut the Demon cleanly in half.
"And because it’s you who let me do something that I should’ve done long ago."
Its body hit the ground before the echo of the swing faded.