Chapter 269
The moment their lance charges collided in midair, a tremendous shockwave exploded outward, blowing away the surrounding mist. Only then could Leon see the wraith knight clearly.
Malice and battle lust seeped from every crack of his worn, broken armor. Behind the blue, flame-like glow in his eyes, the barely-contained fighting spirit and hunger for duels flickered like a lantern that drew in moths. However, the most dangerous thing of all was the tip of that lance.
Leon let out a groan from the collision. With a smooth twist of his blade, he shifted his sword a half-beat early, yet the lance of storm still shattered the lance of starlight to pieces.
In terms of thrusting technique, the knight was several steps above Leon. That one exchange made the difference painfully clear.
There was no need to ask which weapon was better suited to thrusting—a longsword or a lance. A master of the lance charge, who lived only to pierce through his enemy, stood at the very pinnacle of the thrust.
Fortunately, the Lance of Vortex dispersed the moment it broke through his technique, as though it had exhausted all its power.
The only reason he couldn’t reach me was that the sheer output of Alkaid was greater. I lost in skill.
If the wraith knight’s output had matched or exceeded his, that clash could easily have left Leon gravely injured. It had only been a probing first strike, yet he’d been far too careless.
Challenging a spear master to a straight-on thrusting duel? If he wanted to win by brute force density, he had no choice—but it would have been far more effective to slip a half step aside and cut, redirecting the strike. Realizing that, Leon found himself doubting his own judgment.
“Why did I go for a thrust?” he muttered in confusion, unable to understand his own choice.
Hadn’t he just sworn to avoid relying on brute-force output? And here he was, repeating the same mistake. Just as he tried to think it through, the wraith knight let out a hideous roar and charged.
The first attack was always the most dangerous. The moment Leon read the trajectory, he swung in from the side and smashed the lance away, sending the point stabbing into empty air, then moved to counter.
In aerial combat, speed mattered more than raw power. Not absolute speed, but relative. Being just a quarter beat faster than the enemy was enough.
The wraith knight was no ordinary opponent. The instant he pulled his lance back from the missed thrust, he caught Leon’s side slash, twisted once to knock it away, and retreated.
The Bone Wyvern beneath him was faster than Leon had expected. It could dart back and forth over ten meters in the blink of an eye. The wraith knight closed in again and unleashed a barrage of thrusts.
He’s coming for the glabella, uvula, heart, philtrum, abdomen, right clavicle, and left chest.
Leon read every single target point without a hair’s breadth of error and met them head-on with a series of clashes. Where the knight’s lance-play carried the ingrained habits of the lance charge—always driving forward, then drawing back—Leon’s Icarus Wing, wings of Aura shaped from pure psychokinetic force, remained free.
The instant he thought it, his flight vector shifted. No matter how quick the Bone Wyvern was, it fell a step behind. Thanks to that, Leon was able to press the offensive despite it being lance versus sword.
The wraith knight was gradually pushed back, and the force behind his lance waned. A thrust, in the end, existed to advance. Once a lance started giving ground, its thrusts lost their menace.
I’m cutting him down.
Seizing the initiative, Leon immediately invoked a secret technique. Light gathered on the blade, tracing an arc that could cleave even the clouds in two. With the intention to bisect the wyvern beneath the knight, he raised the Holy Sword, shining like the noonday sun.
“Grand Chariot.”
The wraith knight’s output and durability weren’t extraordinary in themselves. It was just that his spear technique was on a level Leon had never experienced before, and it was only his mounted style—whirling about on a wyvern-like monster—that made his movements so unusual. Force him into a frontal clash and overpower him head-on with a vertical slash with Dubhe, and the fight would end quickly.
Then, the knight’s lance traced a subtle circle. He had unleashed Headwind, a technique of the Lance of Vortex.
It was so faint and quiet that even Leon, facing him directly, almost failed to notice it. Its purpose became clear a moment later as a vortex erupted behind Leon’s back just as he began to bring Dubhe down in a vertical cut.
“What?!” Leon blurted out, surprised but still reacting instantly.
He canceled Dubhe on the spot and drove Icarus Wing to maximum output, shooting nearly a kilometer straight up to escape the vortex blooming behind him. The whirlpool of wind tore apart the space where Leon had been just a heartbeat earlier, ripping the air to shreds. It was vicious and brutal. Even with his cloak’s protection, taking that hit head-on would have left him seriously injured.
“Dammit... It grazed me.”
What ran down his spine wasn’t sweat—it was blood. Even though he’d escaped at full speed, the aftershock had still managed to flay the skin along his back.
And that was just the residual shock that seeped through his cloak. It was barely more than a scraped bruise, not even worth calling a real injury, but it was enough to snap his mind back into focus, and for that, he was almost grateful.
El-Cid chuckled. —You back, buddy?
“You knew from the start, didn’t you?” Leon snapped.
—Of course. But if I spell everything out for you, what’s the point of trying to gain real combat experience? You’ve got to get hit once and overcome it yourself if you want anything to stick.
“You’re making it sound reasonable, but nothing about your attitude... Whoa!”
Leon twisted away from another lance stabbing up from below, weaving in a zigzag pattern as he locked his gaze on the wraith knight’s position.
“He interfered with my mind back there. Isn’t the Stigma of the Prayer supposed to block mental attacks? It was such a strong impulse, I felt something was wrong, and still couldn’t shake it.”
—Call it... a difference in method.
“A difference in method?”
El-Cid explained, —Yeah. If that bucket of bones had tried to tamper directly with your mind, it wouldn’t have worked. The Stigma of the Prayer shuts down almost any external attempt at temptation or mental interference.
“So?”
—It stops anything that tries to drag you in from the outside, but it can’t stop you from walking forward on your own two feet. That tin can stirred up your own volition until you moved the way it wanted. Though I’m sure it did it more out of instinct than tactic.
“My own volition, huh,” Leon muttered, something seemingly having clicked at those words.
My composure started slipping the moment I laid eyes on him. There was no need to insist on a head-on duel, but I kept forcing a power contest anyway.
That boiling rush of blood had Leon swept up in the desire to win. He’d felt it many times before, but never so strongly that it nearly wiped out his reason. The wraith knight had obviously fanned that impulse.
—He’s not like a Death Knight. He’s one of the dead whose grudge was refined down to nothing else after rotting in Tartaros for hundreds, thousands of years. Only the most primal impulses remain, and he’s spilling that influence everywhere. If you ask me, I’d call him a berserker duelist.
This being lived in a world of lance charges, where each clash brushed the border between life and death. For a warrior who’d spilled enough blood and carved out enough karma in that world to reach the level of an Aura Master, it wasn’t rare to develop a cruel streak.
He had stabbed countless enemies and innocents alike, and for that sin, he’d been confined to Tartaros for an eternity. Yet even so, he hadn’t forgotten. His ego had crumbled long ago; he could no longer even speak his own name. And still, he’d broken out of his prison the second a crack opened.
All because he craved an enemy. A battle. Death. A duel that would decide life and death.
“So... I let myself get dragged along by that impulse.”
—Grudge or not, that’s a warrior’s fundamental karma. Anyone whose path lies close to blood and death is bound to be drawn in by it at least once.
From a few steps back, the knight looked like nothing but a clotted mass of killing intent and rancor thick enough to make Leon’s skin crawl. He couldn’t imagine how he’d ever perceived that as the spirited hunger of a fellow warrior.
Leon felt the writhing of that foul soul. A damned soul screaming to stab and skewer, to kill and impale—nothing more than the tantrum of a villain. Whatever chance there might have been for salvation had vanished ages ago. Per Cerberus’s request, Leon would put him down.
The unintelligible voice once again seemed to press him as the knight leveled his lance and lunged. Even without understanding the words, Leon could tell what the knight meant. It felt as if he were saying, “Did you not enjoy it as well? Didn’t it thrill you, too?”
Leon clenched his molars and growled back, “Yeah? I was just about to start enjoying myself, you bastard.”
The difference in skill was obvious, and so was the matchup. The wraith knight’s mental interference no longer worked, and the deathly Aura it carried could be nullified by the Stigmata engraved on Leon and by his Sun Aura. Its spearwork was impressive, but Leon’s swordsmanship surpassed it.
If he were still being swayed by the wraith knight’s impulses, things might be different. However, now that he’d gotten his head back, this opponent was nothing special.
“I’ll slam you back down to the bottom of Tartaros.”
With that declaration, Leon spread Icarus Wing and charged again. The wraith knight spurred his mount forward in answer, but this time, there was no head-on duel.
He slipped past at a hair’s breadth, and his sword flashed. One of the Bone Wyvern’s wings was severed. The wraith knight lost his balance for an instant and hung motionless in midair.
That was all Leon needed. The moment he passed by, he twisted in the air and swung.
“Grand Chariot, Heavenly Core, First Form: Dubhe.”
From sky to earth, a single vertical stroke came crashing down and cleaved the knight in two. This time, the blow neither missed nor went astray. It landed perfectly.
With a scream that never became sound, the wraith knight’s form unraveled and streamed away toward somewhere else. Its destination, of course, was already decided. The brand carved into a sinner’s soul, the afterlife prison that demanded eternal atonement—Tartaros.
“Don’t ever crawl back out again, trash.”
Watching the last of him fade, Leon spat on the ground. That was the fate of the first escaped prisoner.
***
The battle with the wraith knight had only been the beginning. No sooner had he thrown the first escapee back into Tartaros than the others, hidden in the deeper regions of the Nether Valley, began to stir.
Most of them seemed to take their comrade’s capture as a death sentence and came thrashing out for one last struggle. Each of them was, without exception, a creature that had lost nearly all reason and intellect, left with nothing but the karma and instincts of their living days, clawing for a hollow shell of freedom. Over the course of a week, Leon hunted them down one by one.
El-Cid grumbled, —Every last one of them is a pain in the ass.
There was the Arachne that fired off five spells at once without a single chant. Leon had been forced to devote a full ten minutes just to fending off its multicolored bombardment.
There was the four-armed monstrosity that wielded a different weapon in each hand. Every one of its weapon styles was at a Master’s level, and it wasn’t easy to suppress it with a single sword.
Then there was the werewolf that erupted from the shadows without a trace of presence. If not for the experience he’d gained thanks to Karen, he might have taken a serious wound.
And then, a vampire whose sonic attacks rattled his organs. If he hadn’t once fought a high-tier vampire back in Rubena, that one could have gone badly.
“Well, it was good training in a lot of ways,” Leon said, catching his breath.
There had been a few more, but only those stood out clearly in his mind. The rest hadn’t been too bad.
Some had troublesome or peculiar fighting styles, but he’d never felt on the verge of losing, or truly endangered. If they had still possessed sharp, lucid intellect and a firm sense of self like in life, they would have been far stronger, but once they fell into a mindless rampage, their strengths and weaknesses became painfully easy to read with just a bit of observation.
Leading the way, Rodlin suddenly halted and said, “Master Leon, from this point on, my detection magic no longer functions at all. I recommend heightened caution.”
“Not at all? Magic just... doesn’t work?” Leon asked, surprised.
“Yes. It dissipates less than one meter from the point of casting.”
To prove her words, Rodlin opened her hand and invoked another detection spell. The wave of power promptly unraveled and vanished. Just as she’d said, this was an area where detection magic wouldn’t work.
It was something Leon had never encountered before. Then again, looking for common sense in one of the Four Great Demon Realms was foolish to begin with.
Leon thought it over for a moment and muttered, “It would be nice to go back to the others once more, but... it feels like a waste of time. At the same time, marching in blind doesn’t seem all that smart either.”
However, Britra’s attack was looming ever closer. If he didn’t use every last minute and second efficiently, he’d pay for it in blood. Which meant his options were effectively decided.
“Let’s go,” Leon said.
“Yes, Master,” Rodlin answered.
Fighting the escapees from Tartaros had given him some solid experience and earned him more karma, but it still wasn’t enough to reach his goal. To step onto the exalted plane of Grandmastery, he needed far greater achievements.
Leon and Rodlin stepped into the true depths of the Nether Valley, onto the land that formed the very threshold of Tartaros. A sickening sensation welled up, as though the ground clung to the soles of his boots. Every instinct screamed that the living had no place here, that he needed to get out at once.
Rodlin, not being a living creature, remained unfazed, but Leon’s face had gone pale without him even realizing it. That was when it happened.
Thoom. A heavy impact, followed by a spreading tremor, rang out not far from where Leon and Rodlin stood.
It sounded like some massive boulder had just crashed down. It didn’t feel like the noise of battle.
“Hm... Let’s at least have a look from a distance.”
“I will begin collecting observational data.”
They veered off the straight path and slipped into a side corridor, and before long, they saw what they’d been looking for. Leon’s instincts had been dead on. A huge boulder, just like he’d imagined, but there was also a man carrying it.
What is he doing...?
The man was all muscle. He looked over two meters tall, his frame packed with steel-hard muscle. And for some bizarre reason, he was holding the boulder on his shoulder.
El-Cid chimed in, —Is he crazy?
Most of Tartaros’s escaped prisoners were out of their minds anyway. He probably is, too, Leon thought.
—A rock fetishist, huh. I’ve seen people who get off on trees, but this is a first for boulders.
What are you even talking about?
Leon let out a long sigh at the inane joke, then blinked rapidly, his eyes going wide. The man was gone. The man who had been standing there with the boulder on his shoulder just seconds ago had vanished.
Then, before they knew it, a voice came.
“Εί, μαι... Σίσυφος.”
From behind Leon and Rodlin, the man pointed at himself with a smile, introducing himself in an unknown tongue.
