Chapter 342 |
Code Written in Blood (8)
The sanctuary of Omniscience began to collapse.
Once started, the collapse only grew, impossible to contain. The gears that formed the sky came crashing down, and the laws Hermann had believed without a shred of doubt shattered apart.
Ah, aaah, aaaaaaah!
The sanctuary shook with a tearing scream. Within the sanctuary of Omniscience, Omniscience itself had been denied. What shook the sanctuary of a ten-star Transcendent was, laughably enough, the history built up by ordinary humans who had not earned a single star.
A variable even Omniscience could not foresee.
Not a variable born from some singular, exceptionally gifted individual. Not a gap torn open by a lone Transcendent facing thousands upon tens of thousands at once. Just a variable born from ordinary, unremarkable humans gathering together.
Tap.
Where Transcendents could leap hundreds of steps at a time, humans could only take one step at a time. And yet, every so often, humans achieved things that left even Transcendents astonished. Because their steps were connected.
The person behind followed in the footprints left ahead. Where the footprints ended, that person managed a few steps more before their life ran out. Then the next person walked that same path. Slowly, step by step, they moved forward.
One step, one step, and one more step.
A whole life spent to advance just two or three steps, yet those steps clearly carried forward to the next. Ten people made dozens of steps; a hundred people made hundreds.
Tap.
And so, they finally caught up to the Transcendent standing hundreds of steps ahead.
Tap. Yuel stepped forward.
The footprints left by the wardens who had come before became a footing, carving out a place for her to stand. Using their lives as a foothold, Yuel stepped toward the sky.
Gripping the Inheritance Star, she reached the sky.
A sky that had begun to crumble. Through the gaps left by falling gears, Hermann's True Body was exposed. Without hesitation, Yuel reached out toward him.
And then, in one swift motion.
She dragged Hermann's True Body down. With a grinding, wrenching sound, the gears connecting Hermann to the sky were torn away. The screaming that had echoed through the sanctuary grew louder. Hundreds of billions of gears shuddered violently, then crumbled apart.
The god caught in a human's hand fell.
Together with the gears that had made up the sky, Hermann plummeted. The falling star slammed into the ground with a thunderous crash. The fallen Constellation lifted his head and looked up at the sky.
The perfect sky was now broken.
The truth he had built up was collapsing.
Against the backdrop of that crumbling sky, someone was looking down at him. A human with white hair falling loose around her. A smirk played on her lips.
"You really are an ugly piece of work."
The positions had been completely reversed.
"You..."
"Oh, we meet again. I was rather hoping I'd never have to see that wretched face of yours, but somehow you managed to survive? Stubborn little thing, aren't you."
"You, right now..."
"Well. No matter."
Yuel, who had been looking down at Hermann, moved. She retraced her path and descended to the ground.
"Last time, given the circumstances, I carried out the execution without any proper procedure. Shouldn't you at least be told what you did wrong before the sentence is carried out? Skipping that entire process? That simply won't do."
The sanctuary of Omniscience was collapsing, yet unlike the falling sky, there was a place on the ground that still held its shape intact. Because that place no longer belonged to Hermann.
The Sealed City.
The city that had proven the Star of Omniscience was not truly omniscient now belonged to Yuel. What adorned its sky was not Hermann's star, but the Inheritance Star.
"Therefore."
The Warden of the Sealed City had returned to the city.
To punish and carry out sentence on the one who had broken its laws.
"Hermann, Star of Omniscience."
Yuel's eyes turned cold. Her voice, low and measured, rang out across every corner of the Sealed City. In the plaza where countless criminals had been executed, the city's warden spoke the name of the one who had committed the gravest sin.
"Execution begins."
2.
Najin tightened his grip on Excalibur.
Hermann's sanctuary was collapsing, but the Sealed City where Najin and Yuel now stood had stopped falling apart.
And that was not all. The Sealed City, which had been churning like waves at Hermann's command, had already returned to the form Najin knew. Not its past form, but the form it held when Yuel was its warden.
The lord's castle, the plaza laid out before it, the execution grounds where criminals' blood ran through the channels in place of water...
There, Yuel stood as warden.
And Hermann stood in the plaza as a criminal awaiting punishment.
"......"
Najin watched Hermann in silence. Hermann's body was already half-collapsed. From being exposed at close range to the blight star's explosion that day, perhaps? His stature and stars as a Constellation had suffered severe damage.
Seeing that state, Najin could easily piece together why Jeclin's brain had melted when he connected to Hermann.
'He's still under the influence of the blight star, and on top of that, he connected those gears to his own body trying to recover from it...'
The collapse the blight star created, and then the state of being connected to hundreds of billions of gears while resisting that collapse. The overload must have been immense, enough to melt the brain of any ordinary Constellation.
That Hermann had endured it for over 150 years was enough to suggest his caliber. As befitting a Constellation with ten stars, classified as a Grand Constellation under Merlin's system, Hermann's stature was enough to astonish even Najin.
,Well, he's from my era.
Merlin sighed.
,He was already active when I was. That means he's lived at least a thousand years. Living long doesn't automatically mean strong, but it does mean seasoned, at the very least.
Seasoned. Najin caught what Merlin was getting at. As if confirming his guess, Merlin nodded.
,He'll find a way to survive no matter what.
Exactly like right now.
The moment Merlin finished speaking, Najin's arm moved. A sword beam fired in a straight line cut across the space between Hermann and Yuel.
Schaaaaaaaaak!
The magic formula Hermann had been quietly weaving was severed in two by Najin's sword beam. Hermann's eyes narrowed. He let out a bitter laugh and glared at Najin.
"Aah, Excalibur. So in the end, some fool who actually pulled that sword has shown up. Utterly brainless..."
Hermann clicked his tongue as if he genuinely pitied Najin. With the sneak attack cut off, he no longer bothered to hide anything. The hundreds of millions of gears that had been falling from the sky halted and hung in midair.
"Did you say you would execute me?"
Grinding and clicking, the gears began to spin.
The clattering rang out again and again.
"You, execute me?"
Even in collapse, this was still Hermann's sanctuary. And Hermann was a Constellation with ten stars, a Constellation who had lived for a thousand years. His stature and the stories he had built were nothing to take lightly.
From Najin's perspective, Hermann was undeniably a formidable opponent, comparable to the Carnival King, or depending on conditions, potentially even more troublesome than her.
That much was true.
But unlike when he had faced the Carnival King, Najin felt not the slightest sense of crisis. It was not simple arrogance from being stronger than before.
'It's just...'
To Najin's eyes, this fight was already over.
A battle whose outcome had been decided long ago.
He had suspected it before, but watching the scene unfold before him now, he was certain.
'Hermann's defeat was settled long ago.'
More than 150 years ago, at that.
So what was about to happen next was, strictly speaking, closer to a settling of accounts. The winner collecting the winner's rights, the loser paying the price of defeat. A simple calculation.
In terms of Trial by Combat, the duel itself had already ended.
All that remained was concluding the trial.
And to Najin, the disgraceful display Hermann was putting on right now looked no different from a criminal who had already lost a Trial by Combat screaming "I refuse to accept this outcome!" and causing a scene.
Disgraceful. Shameful and pathetic, in the truest sense.
The law of the Sealed City was not lenient enough to let a criminal throwing a tantrum in the middle of a trial run amok. Najin looked at Yuel, and she gave a small smirk and nodded.
If a criminal refused to admit their guilt and would not bend the knee, one simply had to shatter those knees.
Najin raised Excalibur.
3.
Hermann's Authority took the form of gears.
The laws and rules that composed the world, Hermann had defined them as gears, and by manipulating those rules at will, he imposed his own laws on the world.
Gravity reversed, fire turned cold, and everything seen and heard became false.
In his world, he was omnipotent. The world calls one who is omniscient and omnipotent a god. At the very least, within his own domain, Hermann was a being like a god.
But that was all in the past now.
His Omniscience had been denied, and because Omniscience was denied, his world had collapsed, and in a collapsing world, his omnipotence had lost its worth.
Click, click, click...!
The spinning gears forced their rules onto Najin. Binding his feet, the countless gears pouring down from the sky tried to batter him with sheer physical force.
"......"
Najin watched all of it in silence, then brought down the foot he had raised and stamped it into the ground. The gears that had bound his feet were torn free. One stomp, and Hermann's Authority faded.
Because this place was Hermann's sanctuary, and yet not his space.
This was the Sealed City. And Najin, who stood with his feet planted in the Sealed City, had been Yuel's adjutant, always at her side, one of the lead actors on this stage.
Flash.
The stars etched into Excalibur shone. In that instant Najin kicked off the ground and surged forward. Gears blocked his path, but the moment they touched Excalibur, they were cut cleanly through.
Schaaaaaaaaaaaak!
A platinum sword beam sliced through the gears. Gears that appeared to be dozens of meters across could not hold against a blade barely over 130 centimeters long and shattered into fragments. Through the scattering debris, Hermann's fingers flashed.
Before being a Transcendent, he was a Grand Mage.
Magic formed by interlocking gears.
An enormous wave of ice large enough to swallow the entire city crashed down over Najin. Frost spread across the city beneath it. Buildings and the plaza froze solid, but...
"She really doesn't look omniscient to me, no matter how you look at it."
Najin did not freeze. Merlin had materialized beside him at some point and was grinning at Hermann. Hermann's eyes went wide.
"There's a fool trying to use magic in front of me, and ice and water, of all things?"
The moment Merlin made a gesture, the ice spread across the city turned to water and rose into the air. The water droplets that had floated upward froze again, turning back into ice. Sharp, spike-shaped shards of ice filled the sky.
Snap.
The moment Merlin flicked her finger, a rain of ice poured down. Hermann frantically raised gears in front of herself and the ice buried into them. By the time the white powder from the shattered ice had spread like a fog...
Crunch.
Hermann saw it. The tip of a blade that had pierced straight through the gear shielding her and now hovered between her eyes.
The platinum-gleaming blade, Excalibur.
Najin gave Excalibur a casual sideways swing. Every obstacle between Hermann and Najin vanished. Hermann tried to move his hand again in desperation, but the word "desperation" says enough about how meaningful any of it was.
Shhk.
The sword Najin swung cut off Hermann's arm. The instant he reached out with his remaining arm, Najin didn't even bother to swing his sword, he simply reached out and seized the wrist.
He twisted the wrist, stepped around to Hermann's back, and kicked out the back of his knees. With a crunch, his knees buckled and Hermann collapsed to the ground.
Najin planted his feet on both of Hermann's legs and grabbed him by the hair, forcing his head up.
...He treated a Transcendent like a common criminal.
By nature, a Transcendent was not something that could be subdued this way, nor something that was supposed to be.
But on Yuel's stage, the Sealed City, even a Transcendent who had broken the law was nothing more than a criminal. And a criminal had to kneel and lift their head to face their sentence.
Click, click.
Yuel walked toward Hermann, who waited for execution.
In one hand she carried the blood-stained code.
"Criminal, hear your charges."
She opened the code and listed Hermann's crimes one by one. With each crime spoken aloud, Hermann's body shook in pain. The crimes did not end. Dozens, then hundreds of offenses were laid out without omission.
"That concludes the charges."
Tap. She closed the blood-stained code.
As usual, there were no citizens watching the execution.
But that did not mean no one was watching this verdict. Looking around, people surrounded the plaza, all of them staring at Hermann.
The wardens of this city.
The victims whose lives had been toyed with by Hermann's experiments.
Those who had desperately wished for a moment exactly like this one were looking at Hermann. The moment Yuel opened her mouth, their mouths opened with hers.
"Death."
The word echoed through the plaza.
Execution had always been carried out by the warden, and the other name for the Warden of the Sealed City was Executioner.
'Are you listening?'
,Yes.
'You have seen it.'
,I have seen it.
'Then?'
,Criminals must receive fitting punishment. And I am an executioner who has carried out the execution of countless criminals. What other work would there be?
'Exactly.'
Yuel smiled. The conclusion matched that of another self within her. The two had not yet merged, but a point of connection had formed between them.
The Inheritance Star held the blood-stained code.
The Star of Heavenly Slaughter raised the blood-stained sword.
Yuel, Warden of the Sealed City, delivered the verdict. Yuel Razian, Executioner of the Sealed City, carried out the sentence.
"Execute."
Yuel Razian brought her sword down.