Chapter 193: The Crimson Night [21]
The War for The North [80]
Chapter 193: The Crimson Night [21]
I was laughing. Even I couldn’t fully understand why I was laughing, or how this sick laughter was being torn from my lungs.
My ears were filled with a deafening ring caused by the pressure of consecutive waves of exploding chaos and holy mana.
I could barely perceive the sounds around me, muffled as if I were underwater.
My vision had blurred from the ashes flying into my eyes.
Right in the middle of my chest, where my heart should have been, there was an unbelievable pain that surpassed the limits of human comprehension, splitting the soul in two.
I couldn’t move a single muscle or limb in my body. I couldn’t channel my mana, nor the destructive forces inside me crying out to be released.
But despite all this helplessness, despite this divine fire scorching my flesh, I couldn’t stop the laughter spilling from my lips.
Gripping the holy sword plunged right into my chest with both hands, making my flesh sizzle and burn, Solariel was screaming, spitting right into my face.
His flawless, divine face, which looked as though it were carved by a sculptor, was now completely distorted.
The disgusting, pitch black stains of my curse had seeped into his arrogant, glowing golden eyes.
He had gone completely mad from rage, helplessness, and the shattering of his pride.
The more I looked at him, witnessing his desperate flailing and the fear on his face, my laughter instinctively grew louder, rising to the sky as if tearing my throat apart.
Around me was a group of Primordial Angels who had somehow managed to survive the massive explosion and the massacre.
Those magnificent, untouchable beings were now covered in blood and mud.
They were holding on to the massive chains made of pure light wrapped around my body at the cost of their lives, putting forth a superhuman effort to keep me pinned down.
Due to the force of the blast, they were all heavily or moderately wounded; some had their wings torn off from the roots, while others had their golden armor melted and fused to their flesh. They were gasping for air, with nothing but the absolute fear of death in their eyes.
"Just die! DIE ALREADY YOU FREAK!" screamed one of the Primordial Angels. His voice sounded less like a divine being and more like the desperate wail of a cornered wild animal.
Another one, hands mangled from holding the chain, called out to Solariel in a panic: "Solariel! There is nothing left for us to achieve here! We can’t stop him! We need to retreat before we suffer any more casualties!"
But Solariel was completely blinded by rage. Stubbornly, grinding his teeth, he continued to press the sword deeper into my heart.
Whether it was because he realized that if he didn’t stop me in time, I would one day become a true, absolute threat to him and his precious false god Yavres, or whether it was just pure rage born from his tainted pride, who knows. It seemed he was obsessed with killing me more than anything else, even his own life.
That desperate, hateful expression on his face... It was so beautiful, so priceless, that for a moment I wanted to sever his head from his body and preserve that look of terror in eternal ice forever, like a trophy.
My consciousness was fading from the holy fire flooding my heart. The cold, familiar breath of death was on the back of my neck. Right before my eyes closed, I parted my lips.
"Keep going..."
I couldn’t finish my sentence. A thick wing violently shoved into my mouth, shattering my jaw and tearing my palate, piercing right through my brain and coming out the back of my head.
"SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!" he was screaming.
The angels were quite literally on the verge of madness.
An enemy they couldn’t kill, couldn’t stop, one who only grew more savage the more they tore at his flesh.
Fighting an anomaly that defied logic, possessed boundless mana, and whose every attack was equal to the destruction of a city, was too much even for those who hadn’t seen defeat in thousands of years. Their wills were breaking, their holy minds crumbling under the crushing weight of my chaos.
But I didn’t shut up. I had no intention of being quiet.
Right on my forehead, my skin split open, forming a new mouth full of small, razor sharp teeth. And that mouth continued to speak, accompanied by a maniacal laugh.
"Keep going, little lights! Keep entertaining me!"
"Suffer more! Fear me more! Satisfy me with your despair!"
Another wing strike, glowing with light and fury, stabbed into my brain and cut off the small mouth’s voice once again. My body was completely at its limit.
Dying once more was inevitable. The holy sword was burning away all the darkness inside.
Even if I didn’t die, my Dragon Heart, already damaged by Solariel’s relentless strikes, couldn’t keep me going much longer.
In the final second, my gaze shifted to the Primordial Angel holding the chains, who looked like he was about to piss himself from fear.
His face was drenched in sweat and blood.
Our eyes met. At that moment, my heart violently exploded. The massive chains of light wrapping my body dug even deeper into my flesh from the force of the blast.
I managed to see that expression on his face at the very last moment. The sheer horror when he felt his holiness being defiled by darkness... Right now, he was officially, quite literally fucked.
Immediately, thick black blood like mud came pouring out of the Primordial Angel’s golden eyes and mouth.
His knees could no longer support him, and he collapsed onto the stone floor. He couldn’t breathe. With his gold armored hands, he dug his nails into his own throat and began to savagely scratch at his skin, tearing his own throat apart. He was drowning in his own blood, in my curse.
For me, however, death was nothing but a brief pause.
I didn’t wait a single second.
I instantly sprang back to life with Rebirth Flame.
The moment I got on my feet, I raised the pitch black sword that materialized in my hand, burning with the flames of chaos, ready to completely finish off the Primordial Angel agonizing and choking on the ground.
Just as the sword was about to come down, another Primordial Angel threw himself in the way, acting as a human shield. He tried to defend his comrade with a massive, blinding holy shield raised in front of him.
But the devastating attack he expected never hit the shield.
Noticing the strange, deadly silence and the sheer wrongness behind him, the angel holding the shield slowly turned his head back, only to be met with a horrifying sight.
Instead of dealing with his stupid shield, I had already slipped through the shadows, stepped right behind him, and cleanly severed the cursed Primordial Angel’s head from his body.
Now, holding the severed head by its golden hair, I was dangling it in my hand like a worthless toy. The frozen look of fear on the angel’s face was magnificent.
I didn’t give him a chance to mourn his friend or process the grief.
I ruthlessly tossed the severed head right into the lap of the shield bearing angel with incredible speed.
Seeing the bloody head land in his lap, the angel was torn by a fatal hesitation, stuck instinctively between catching it and recoiling in disgust. That one second loss of focus was all it took to spell his doom.
I lunged forward, tensing my muscles, ready to plunge my sword right into the bewildered angel’s heart. Right at that moment, Solariel intervened with a massive roar.
The blade of light in his hand was cutting through the air, coming straight at me to cleave my body in two.
However... He was too slow. His movements had grown sluggish, his immense divine speed completely gone.
There was no trace left of the state he was in when we first started fighting.
I parried his strike with my own black sword with a resounding clash. As we both shuddered from the impact of the collision, I opened my jaws wide like a dragon and spewed the dense, pure chaos built up in my lungs directly into his face.
When the black flames licked Solariel’s face, the angel stumbled back in agony.
Without wasting a breath, I charged right at the Archangel, whose vision was blurred and who was forced onto the defensive to protect himself from the flames of chaos.
The moment I stomped my foot hard on the ground, massive blocks of ice shot up from the earth like spears, and simultaneously, I drove my own sword deep into his body.
As my sword pierced through his flesh, I ruthlessly twisted the blade inside and practically tore him open.
Amidst the blood spurting from his chest and the indescribable pain he felt, Solariel grabbed my face with his massive hands.
He wanted to crush my head using his holy mana. As he squeezed my skull, I instantly turned my body into black smoke to escape him.
In my smoke form, I drifted backward and put a few meters of distance between us.
But I didn’t halt my assault. Before I even solidified, the sky turned black, and a barrage of massive, black lightning bolts began raining down on Solariel and the other angels.
A never ending barrage of magic... A storm of destruction that turned the surroundings into hell.
While the lightning kept them pinned down, I formed a small, pitch black black hole in the palm of my hand.
The tiny singularity began to swallow all the light, sound, and mana around it. I only needed a few seconds for it to grow and reach its insatiable destructive potential. And the lightning bought me more than enough time.
The moment I was sure it was powerful and dense enough, I threw the black hole directly into the center of where they stood and detonated it.
A terrifying wave of destruction shook the Capital to its foundations once again. Buildings turned to dust, the earth split open. Space and time practically warped at that very spot.
Before the deafening noise and destruction of the explosion could fully settle, I dashed swiftly straight into the massive dust cloud it left behind.
Solariel and the last surviving Primordial Angels had barely managed to put up a holy barrier, now riddled with cracks, to protect themselves from the blast of chaos.
They could barely stand, their strength on the absolute verge of depletion. Their efforts were so pathetic that this futile resistance only entertained me further.
I gripped my sword with both hands. I smiled, a mad crimson gleam in my eyes.
"Absolute Severance!"
That divine barrier they were barely keeping up tore and shattered like a piece of paper, offering zero resistance.
Feeling the cold approach of death as the barrier broke, Solariel did the one thing an archangel should never do.
To save his own life, out of sheer panic and terror, he grabbed the wounded Primordial Angel standing right next to him, Ortera, and dragged him in front of himself, using him as a living meat shield right in the path of the absolute severance.
When the massive chaos of smoke and light created by the blast and the attack slowly faded, the scene revealed was an absolute tragedy.
The Primordial Angel Ortera had been smoothly bisected from the waist down.
His lower half had slumped to the ground, while his upper half was still gripped in Solariel’s hands. But he was still alive. The damned resilience of the angels hadn’t let him die right away.
Ortera slowly turned his head and looked at Solariel, the leader who had thrown him to his death.
There was no obedience or faith left in those holy eyes; only pure betrayal, disappointment, and deep fear. The archangel he had worshipped and fought for over centuries had sacrificed him without even blinking.
Solariel met the accusing gaze of his agonizing subordinate held in his hands. There was not a single shred of remorse on his face. On the contrary, there was only a cold and calculating resolve.
"You served me well, Ortera..." Solariel whispered. His voice was flat and devoid of echo. "...Everything is for our god. For Yavres."
Then, he plunged his hands into Ortera’s shattered chest. He savagely ripped his own comrade’s heart right out of its place.
As he ruthlessly crushed the heart in the palm of his hand, he let the pure, divine blood flowing from it drip straight into his own mouth.
He was mending his own depleted mana and wounds with the life energy of his comrade. Like a cannibal, he was consuming his own flesh and blood.
Watching this disgusting and twisted sight from afar, an instant look of deep rage, disgust, and hatred appeared in the eyes of the few remaining lower tier angels who had survived the blast.
But I wasn’t the reason for this hatred, for this revulsion. They weren’t even looking at me.
All that pure hatred was directed at Solariel, who had used his own brother as a shield to survive and then ripped out and ate his heart.
Those noble warriors of the sky had seen with their own eyes what a vile monster their leader had turned into. And at that moment, the unshakable faith within the holy army gave way to an irreversible fracture.
