Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 2977: Baeldum Battle 5

In the sky of Dravos, the battle raged on.

Ten minutes passed, and the heavens themselves seemed to tremble beneath the force of the clash. Sword-light, stellar fire, holy radiance, and corruption collided again and again, each impact sending shockwaves rolling across the desert below.

Then Duke Damien felt it.

A faint coldness had begun to seep into his body.

His expression darkened.

He was the strongest of the four, and he had remained at the rear the entire time, furthest from the haze. If the corruption was reaching even him now, he did not want to imagine how badly it had already burrowed into the Sword Demoness, who had spent every second of the fight wreathed in the thick of it.

His fear was not unfounded.

Within her cocoon of blades, the Demoness had begun to feel it surface — fine threads of cold creeping up the veins of her sword arm, her spiritual energy snagging and stuttering where the rot had taken hold. The first pill had bought her this long. It would not last another minute. Without breaking her assault, she crushed the second between her teeth and swallowed, and a fresh wave of warmth pushed the creeping cold back down.

It was her last one. After this, there was nothing left between her and the disease but her own power.

"We cannot hold this much longer," Damien said.

It was not only a matter of survival. Killing this creature quickly was itself the objective — to strip away the parasitic enhancement it granted the infected and ease the pressure on both besieged cities. Every second it lived, the war on two fronts grew harder.

Meanwhile, Hubert had done almost nothing.

Throughout the battle, he hovered quietly at the rear, watching the fight unfold with the detached expression of a man attending a performance rather than participating in a life-and-death struggle. To the others, he appeared almost useless.

In truth, he had been working the entire time — divining, calculating, threading a thousand branching outcomes through that strange power of his, waiting for the single thread where everything aligned.

His golden coin flared.

In one fluid motion, he drew six bullets from his coat, each engraved with crimson-gold runes, and slotted them into his revolver.

His divination had shown him the moment

That moment arrived.

The Star Tower Lord’s eyes flashed.

A silver disk suddenly appeared above the battlefield.

A high-grade artifact.

The artifact released a pulse of pale starlight that washed across the creature’s body.

Immediately, the darkness surrounding it reacted violently.

The writhing corruption that had protected the creature since the beginning of the battle began to separate from its flesh, peeled away by the starlight like mud stripped from stone. For the first time, everyone saw what lay beneath.

And several of them nearly recoiled.

The creature’s true body was a grotesque mass of fused flesh. Human limbs protruded from its torso at impossible angles. Half-formed faces were embedded throughout its body, their mouths frozen in silent screams. Bones pushed through layers of diseased muscle while veins of purple corruption pulsed beneath translucent skin.

It looked less like a living creature and more like countless infected beings melted together into a single monstrous organism.

The moment the corruption veil separated, the remaining shield collapsed.

Hubert moved.

His figure blurred forward beneath the battlefield, placing himself directly beneath the opening.

Then he pulled the trigger.

BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.

Six shots echoed across the sky in a single breath.

One missed completely.

Two vanished into reforming shadows and were swallowed.

But three struck true.

The bullets punched deep into the creature’s exposed body before detonating.

Brilliant holy fire erupted from within.

These were no ordinary rounds; each bullet had been packed with a potent holy-flame talisman, forged for exactly this kind of abomination.

The creature convulsed violently as sacred flames exploded through its flesh, burning from the inside outward. Corruption hissed and screamed against the holy power, black smoke pouring from countless wounds as the infection attempted to resist purification.

The Sword Demoness did not waste the opening.

She struck with everything she had — more than a dozen sword-cuts in the space of an eyeblink, each one shearing through shadow and flesh alike.

The creature’s defenses came apart.

Her final blow split clean through its grotesque torso, and a fountain of dark purple blood burst high into the sky as the abomination loosed a ragged, wounded roar.

The shadow that had clung to the creature through the entire battle finally began to thin — unravelling strand by strand, the dark haze breaking apart and scattering on the desert wind. Stripped of its shroud, the abomination lost the last of its strength and dropped from the sky, crashing limp into the broken sand below.

Hubert holstered his revolver with a flourish, a proud smile spreading across his face.

"Did we get it?"

For a moment, it seemed they had.

And yet something was wrong — and the veterans among them felt it before anyone gave it words.

The swarm had not broken.

Across the desert, the hounds fought on exactly as before, mindless and relentless, hurling themselves at the walls as though nothing at all had happened above. Worse, hundreds of them had begun peeling away from the gates entirely, abandoning the easy slaughter to surge toward the fallen body, drawn to it like iron to a lodestone.

The Sword Demoness was breathing hard, sweat sheeting down her face; the long minutes pressed against the corruption had drained her far more than she would ever admit. Even so, she descended after the body at once, blade leveled, every sense screaming caution.

Above her, the Star Tower Lord loosed another wave of stellar orbs, scattering them into a glowing perimeter that vaporized any hound straying toward the landing site. Hubert thumbed fresh rounds into his revolver, eyes never leaving the corpse, ready to fire the instant it so much as twitched.

It did not twitch.

The upper half of the creature had split wide, and as the Demoness drew closer, she watched the last of it come apart — the great yellow eyes sliding shut one by one, the grotesque outer flesh crumbling away into grey ash that the wind drew off in ribbons. And beneath all those rotting layers lay a different shape entirely.

Slender. Human.

"...It’s a woman," the Demoness said quietly.

Duke Damien drifted down to her side, and for the first time, even he looked worn, the strain of holding back the mental assault for so long carved into his ancient face. Then his gaze settled on the figure laid bare in the ash — and his eyes widened.

He knew this face. From the mission profile, and from his own long memory besides: a renowned soul-cultivator who had stood at the very threshold of becoming a spirit champion. One of Supreme Marc’s own advance team.

Lirien.

"...We have been fighting her this whole time?" The Demoness lowered her blade a fraction, frowning. "I don’t understand."

Neither did Damien. And so he did the one thing a spirit master could.

He reached out, his fingertips coming to rest gently against the still body, and sent a thread of his consciousness inward — a soul-seeking art, searching the dead for the answers the living could not give.

One second.

Two.

Then, to everyone’s shock, Duke Damien threw back his head and let out a scream of agony.