Read Novel Full Chapter 444: Grief
Chapter 444: Chapter 444: Grief
Chapter 444 – Grief
Did the world stop?
Kaden, in his dazed and barely mended mind, couldn’t even be sure of that simple fact. The sight in front of him was just that horrific.
At first, his mind instantly rejected what he was witnessing, tying it to a nightmare his transformation had caused. Oh, he damned wished it was one.
Yet reality was often disappointing, if not all the time.
The sight in front of him was not a nightmare. Rea was dead, her headless body still twitching in front of him, as if even in her death... the God-Touched knew how to cling tightly to life.
For a moment, there was this strange belief inside Kaden that told him that it was not over. Rea could still be revived.
But before his thoughts led him towards that direction, something snapped inside his mind.
"KADEN!" Reditha billowed and instantly appeared on her own, her bloody figure holding her sword shape.
She blocked the attack of the bear, while Blanche exploded outward, appearing in the sky with her blazing pale Phoenix’s form.
Her eyes were smouldering ashes of anger and pain, looking at her master kneeling like a ball, his eyes transfixed, lost and even more, on the corpse of Rea.
She stretched her mouth, screeching with all the strength of her throat. Dozens of suns spawned from the sky — painting it into an immaculate white horror — then plummeted down mercilessly.
Reditha moved like the vessel of death — with efficiency beyond understanding. She was using her own body better than Kaden himself.
The appearance of the two new opponents was not lost on the two fighting factions. However, strangely — or maybe not — nothing changed.
Their madness was palpable — undulating all around in a vicious stream of black liquid coursing through unseen veins — not caring about anything else but killing whatever was in front of them.
Blanche and Reditha then created a wide circle with Kaden and Rea as the center, trying to fend off the threats.
At the beginning they succeeded quite fairly, but the two immediately realized the dreadfulness of the situation.
Their opponents were beings with unbelievable strength. And if they wished to protect Kaden from even dragons and other gigantic snakes, added to that Herculean humans with war-axes enough to fatally wound them...
...the two companions knew they were risking their own bloody lives.
Yet they said nothing.
They neither complained nor talked. They simply hardened their eyes, and went head on, bearing ghastly wounds in the process.
They just needed to hold off for a moment, the two thought in eerie sync, knowing that Kaden would soon return to them.
’His Will!’ Reditha thought as she sidestepped to the left, escaping by a hair’s breadth the spear-like claw of a mangled beast.
’Kaden’s Will is strong! He won’t—!’
She didn’t manage to finish her words as a punch cracked her jaw, making her spin. Her lower jaw fell down. She snarled in anger, counterattacking in the same motion, driving the sword inside the beast’s flank.
The battle raged on, and Kaden, protected by his two companions, was still lost. But Reditha was right.
His Will was high, and after a near minute of daze and confusion and twisted shock, the man slowly but surely regained himself.
’Rea... is dead.’ Kaden whispered inwardly as he slowly crawled on the horrific ground rotten with horror, going towards the head of Rea drenched red.
That sentence repeated itself nonstop, threatening to drown him into a pain he only felt one time. That pain he never wanted to feel again.
He took the head of Rea, cradled it within his arm with care, and almost broke down again.
Still now, even in death, her face was one of relief. As if seeing him wake up — seeing him witnessing her death — brought her a kind of twisted joy.
It was sickening yet it was undoubtedly Rea.
Kaden, by now, understood her more than the woman herself realized.
He knew how his fiancée was, and that knowledge coupled with how she died sent a hot fire of anger bursting through his whole body.
His aura was erupting, crackling and drowning around him in wisps of emptiness.
He took the head of Rea and put it beside the headless corpse — just like normal — and got up onto his two feet.
He was so focused on his anger and sadness that he didn’t notice his left eye was crying blood; but also that the body of Rea was subtly glowing a faint, but intense grey light.
Kaden wondered for a moment if he should kill himself, but he was past that state of deliberate death.
If he was going to die, he was going to do so by giving everything he could. So he took a deep breath, feeling the second core — True Soul Core — pulsing inside of him like a beating heart.
He was not fully aware yet of the benefit of this core, but Kaden let his instincts completely guide him at that instant.
’I will die.’
Kaden instantly knew, looking at the battling monsters around him. Even with his current strength, he knew for a fact that he would die if he fought these monsters.
His perception was accurate, and the cold familiar sense of death grabbing his insides was ever so ubiquitous.
He would have a chance to escape with his power if he decided so, but not to win.
Yet it hardly mattered.
Inside his mind, the only thing that replayed itself was the headless body of Rea and her relaxed expression as she died.
And so it was with that image that fueled his anger notch by notch until Kaden’s body could no longer be seen.
An overwhelming crimson-black aura detonated from his body, bloating the whole bloody war landscape.
For a moment, everyone stopped their battles, snapping their heads towards him, their eyes filled with madness holding a kind of... recognition?
But it was fleeting, as if the madness inside of them was too much, robbing them of any rational thoughts.
Kaden didn’t care either.
"Come back." He ordered, voice reverberating all around, and Reditha disappeared from the battlefield, appearing inside his right grasp.
He stretched his left arm, and pale light bled through the space, swirling around it. The swirls and twists continued until a katana appeared — white and sleek, shimmering and crying like a living thing.
It was his first time, yet Kaden used soul energy to create a sword as easily as breathing. It was one worthy of a moment of awe.
But Kaden was no longer Kaden at that moment.
He was Death.
And Death has a role to fulfill.
"Need my help, sweetie?" Blanche asked, flying high above, her body dripping blood.
"Hell." Kaden said, as his body pulsed, seeing his opponents roaring, running towards him with greater zeal than before.
They looked especially eager to kill him. Especially the Shapeshifters, the name Kaden decided to call them.
"Make this Hell."
Blanche’s body instantly burned, hotter yet dimmer, "As you will, Prometheus."
He clicked his finger, creating a barrier around Rea without looking, and immediately ripped through the battlefield in a straight line, creating a mess of blood and flesh in his wake.
Soon enough, a third party appeared in a battlefield of two. The previous land became hell on earth, as fire almost as hot as a sun writhed, swirled, devoured all over the world.
The Shapeshifters were screaming, the death-wearing cloaks were screeching, the blood controllers were melting, the humongous war-born humans riddled with tattoos were singing while dying...
Only one being was moving freely, harvesting the lives and souls of all in front of his path with merciless precision.
He was The Harvester. He was Death and his heralds.
That day, all of them were unleashed through him.
—End of Chapter 444—