[448] Mental Armament (3)
The moment the aura of death vanished, the Forcemetry returned Jullu and Kangnan to their original space-time.
Kangnan stared blankly at the ice now cleared of darkness.
Only Gaold was heaving, shoulders rising and falling with ragged breaths.
'Foolish human.'
Even the attendant who always accompanied him had not expected Gaold's power to have risen so much.
It wasn't from special training or some newfound enlightenment.
It was Miro, whom he had met again after twenty years.
The closer he drew to her in time and space, the more the magnitude of pain he could endure grew exponentially.
That was Kangnan's worry.
Even if Gaold had, through self-compensating mutation, pushed past the limits of tactile sensation, a living being's endurance is not infinite.
Just like the day fifteen years ago when Gaold first fell into the Great Primordial Hellfire.
"What are you planning to do…!"
"Not over yet."
As Kangnan moved closer, Gaold spoke.
As if he had been waiting, darkness rose again from beneath the ice and re-formed Hel's shape.
'An unsubstantial substance, is it?'
In Gaold's world, ghosts were the typical example.
Beings that crossed the boundary between mind and matter: in a mental state they neither affected nor were affected by the physical world; in a material state they could exert and be subjected to physical force.
Hel had slipped from matter to mind just before Gaold's Air Pressing crushed its body and thus escaped destruction.
It was a tricky ability for humans to contend with, but for Hel—the ruler of Niflheim—it was a blow to pride.
Hroooooo!
Hel's hollow pupils spun like a vortex and dragged Gaold down into the depths of the abyss.
Darkness swallowed the world again, and the duel between the deathless and the undying began.
Air magic at five hundred thousand times normal pain had already exceeded the domain of the air attribute.
Air Gun's air bullets fired at brutal speed.
Even with rapid bursts, Hel's torso erupted with holes as if hit by buckshot.
Ragged and torn, Hel surged toward Gaold.
"Human! I will sprinkle your bone dust upon that wretched Miro's corpse!"
"Krrrgh!"
Hel's taunt backfired.
Hundreds of furrows folded across Gaold's distorted face, and hot vapor hissed from between his clenched teeth.
Gaold's ascetic Great Primordial Hellfire unfolded.
In a space as dark as the night sky, waves of searing heat rolled; the cries of deathly spirits and ghouls mingled; extreme cold and blistering fire began to tangle together.
Even Hel, lord of the dead, fell silent before the overwhelming intensity Gaold exhaled.
'Is there such a human?'
Hel immediately revised his thought.
'No—can he really be human?'
This was pain at five hundred thousand times sensation.
No one could imagine the hell Gaold was enduring.
No one could even guess.
But to Gaold, there was only that reality.
'Miro….'
No matter how excruciating, he would not die.
'Miro.'
Reasons no longer mattered.
On that day twenty years ago, when he had been powerless to stop Miro from being dragged away, Gaold had given up on being anything else.
So many shocks had tangled his memories that even recollection had become a mess, yet the one thing that never faded in that chaos was Miro's voice.
- Because you were weak.
Twenty judged. The whole world clung desperately. And Miro walked into Istas by her own will.
But the truth only Gaold knew—only Gaold could hear—was the voice he had met on the eve of the twenty's judgment.
- You do nothing while pretending you can do nothing!
Blood and tears poured from under Gaold's upturned whites.
'Miro!'
Pain multiplied to a millionfold—Air Pressing.
Hel was flattened with a pop, then reconstituted in midair.
Had the change back to a mental state been a moment slower, Hel would have been annihilated.
Confusion flickered across Hel's face as if his soul were being pulled free.
He wished Gaold dead.
Never since his existence had he wanted someone's death so desperately.
'Am I afraid? Of him?'
The ruler of the dead should not know fear of death. What Hel felt instead was the terror of endless acceleration.
Gaold's ascetic ability, with no measurable limit, ran like rails that seemed destined to speed forever.
"Kieeeeeee!"
Hel tried to muster his full power, and all manner of dead attached black smoke tails and floated in the air.
Seeing the dead surging toward the ground, Kangnan and Jullu scattered in separate directions.
They could defend with the Forcemetry, but because of the space-time bird's nature, displacing something by three seconds would demand omnipotence approaching four years of real time.
Even for summoning's strongest, Jullu, the spell would consume more than thirty percent of his mental strength, and he only had that capacity for a single use.
Using it now would be poor judgment if they needed it at the decisive moment.
"Ugh!"
Kangnan raised both arms and curled in on herself against the onslaught of the dead that tore through space like a vortex.
Every time claws raked across her skin, black scars burned into her flesh.
Her body, conditioned for a lifetime, tried to strike back, but could only hollowly pass through the corpses that had shifted back to a mental state.
'Offense and defense must happen together. The only chance is when the enemy attacks.'
Having found a thread, Kangnan took the Rammuai stance.
Her eyes, set between arms planted like the numeral eleven, pierced the enemy sharply.
Hoooooo!
As the dead attacked, her body moved in time.
Each straight, shortest-path strike that erupted shattered the black smoke of the dead into fragments.
Farther away, Jullu summoned a massive Odd Worm to swallow up the dead who remained in material form.
The mindless dead refused to give up, but as their numbers dwindled, the haze in the air began to clear.
"Where's Gaold?"
He was in the sky, his face now grotesquely altered so much that it was hard to tell who ruled the dead.
Life and death, asceticism and despair clashed in the heavens.
"How annoying…!"
Gaold's Great Primordial Hellfire spread at a scale none present had ever seen, extending beyond Hel's darkness.
Vacuum Press!
At that moment, Gaold unleashed his trump card—so powerful it could compress even Ataraxia's Photon Cannon.
The vast atmosphere compressed to a single point, and Hel's whole body began to constrict rapidly.
'Can't get out?'
Even having shifted to a mental state, Hel could not pierce the vacuum force that was crushing his form.
Asceticism.
Only then did Hel understand why the ruler of death could feel fear before a mere human.
Because Gaold felt no fear.
"Kieeeeeeee!"
Hel continued to be compressed.
From a small sphere to an even smaller one, to a point, and finally to nothingness…
At the moment of annihilation Hel exploded, scattering the countless dead he had contained in all directions.
Their roars spread through Niflheim like shockwaves; their force carried such power that any creature hearing them could die on the spot.
While Gaold floated defenseless, Jullu and Kangnan, arriving from behind, used the Forcemetry to move all three of them to another space-time.
The roars propagated by compressing the air in waves, and then a perfect silence fell, like the eye of a storm.
Gaold, settling on the ice, lifted his head. From the transparent air he heard the wind's voice.
- Even if you deny mortality, nothing can be held forever. Go to Jebul. There is the wretched Miro. She will shepherd you into true death.
It was the sound of the wind.
"...."
Everyone fell silent. After a moment, nearly a hundred Black Elixirs rained down from the air like a shower.
Whoever Yameng had been counting the Black Elixirs wouldn't have expected more than what they actually had.
No one in Purgatory could have gathered so many Black Elixirs.
Gaold did not laugh.
All that remained after terrible pain was the blunt reality of still being alive.
Some memories were erased, some remained, but what value did memories have if they could not be ordered by time?
Gaold threw all memories into the trash bin of oblivion and turned back, clutching only Miro.
This was how he had lived since that day twenty years ago.
"Pick them all up. We're leaving."
Gaold turned and walked away with a cold air.
Kangnan, watching him pass, bared her teeth.
Their objective had been met, thankfully, but recklessly raising tactile thresholds could have jeopardized the project.
She could no longer stand by and watch such thunderous, strategy-less fighting.
"Wait. Not like this—!"
As she snapped at him, Gaold's body wavered.
Kangnan, who had unconsciously taken a step forward, stopped herself.
Do not grab him. No one could understand his pain.
He had walked alone for twenty years.
'Right. Whether he returns alive or is buried dead, this ends here.'
Kangnan resolved it. By any means, she would bring Gaold to that place.
* * *
Shirone returned at once to the First Corps Command after integrating all the troops under the Second Corps Command.
Armin's party, which had been permitted to run the munitions factory, was the first to return, followed by Gaold's group, who delivered the Black Elixirs to Yameng and came back.
All three divided parties had completed their missions perfectly, but Shirone could not bring himself to smile.
The shocking news had greeted him on arrival.
The command had already been razed.
The perpetrator who slaughtered so many was Babel—the metal angel whose seal Shirone had broken.
He could not bring himself to face Kanya and Rena.
Clove and Gardrak had died with the collapse of the Second Command, and now Kanya's father was gone too.
Every death felt like his fault.
'But… I have to tell them.'
Shirone mustered his courage and went to the room where the two women were.
He had to be honest with them—he was the one who broke Babel's seal.
Only then did the sisters force a smile for his sake, and the expression fell away again when Shirone confessed everything.
Even after hearing the horrifying truth, Kanya and Rena gave no reaction.
Shirone did not know whether they were angry or simply too drained to show anger.
"I'm sorry. It's my fault. If I hadn't undone Babel's seal… everything is my fault."
Rena couldn't hold back and burst into tears.
Shirone honestly didn't know how to expect them to respond.
Kanya flung her eyes open with a fierce glare and snapped, "If Father had been killed by some angel other than Babel, you'd think it wasn't your fault?"
Shirone could not answer.
"No, it's all your fault, Shirone. All the deaths that happened in Heaven are your fault."
Kanya rose from the bed and approached Shirone. She buried her face in his chest and said, "So fight for us."
Shirone felt his chest go moist.
"I…I couldn't do anything. Not even vengeance… I was too powerless…"
In the end Kanya broke into sobs as well.
What she had felt before an enemy beyond imagination was that humans were but insignificant things.
But Shirone was different. And those who had come with Shirone were different.
How could they be? How could they have borne that overwhelming enormity?
Shirone drew a long breath.
He had come to Heaven to meet Ikael, but now he could no longer simply do that.
"Let's go to Babel."