Chapter 1737: Sacrilege |
"So, master...?" Vex purred.
"It’s none of your concern, disciple."
The words left Black Fang quietly.
"Ohoho~ A nameless disciple now, am I?" Vex closed the distance again, pressing herself against Black Fang’s side with her tail curling around her thigh, chin tilted up, voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. "I can’t wait to hear what really happened during your ’rescue.’"
Black Fang stood like a woman being climbed by a cat she couldn’t bring herself to throw away.
"But first..."
Vex’s eyes shifted toward the remaining pockets of resistance, and the playfulness in her expression hardened into the same killing focus she’d worn when she took Ryonosuke’s head.
"We have work to do."
...
Scar felt the battlefield tilt.
The Fujimori lines were collapsing to the west and dwarven surrender was spreading through the northern ranks like a plague, and the undead front that had been grinding since the ambush started suddenly had arithmetic that favored the living.
She redirected the bulk of her Elites toward Vozen’s flank without a word, and five hundred blue-skinned soldiers pivoted as one.
The Scarlet Lilies hit the same flank at roughly the same time, professional violence that Black Fang had dismissed from her warpath and pointed toward the nearest worthy target.
Bronnya went through Vozen’s shielded line like a siege weapon, Lilith’s sword sheared through necrotic constructs behind her, and Orianna’s vines closed around the Archlich from three sides while Scar’s dagger found the binding gem at his collar.
"Sacrilege upon sacrilege!" Vozen screeched, gems flaring. "You think raw numbers can-"
The dagger punched through the gem mid-sentence, and the blue fire in his sockets guttered, scattered, and went out.
The Pale Tyrant of Karth, who had spent millennia perfecting an army in his crypt, was defeated with the same philosophy he’d mocked all his life: raw, immediate, overwhelming force applied without ceremony.
Scar pulled her blade free and walked toward the center.
Elisabeth’s mace connected with Gorthrax’s barrier and the necrotic wall cracked but held, divine light bleeding through the fissures.
The Eternal was weakening with his horde thinning, but he yielded ground without yielding composure, each retreat measured and controlled.
Scar stepped into the gap on Elisabeth’s left with both daggers drawn and the pale flame burning at her back.
The radiance pouring off the Arch Priestess flickered the moment she registered what had arrived to help her.
"I don’t fight alongside the dead."
Scar studied her, head tilted, then shrugged.
"Leave, then."
The dismissal hit Elisabeth harder than anything Gorthrax had managed all day.
"You dare tell me to leave when I’m about to expel the oldest recorded monster?! This is my divine mission!"
Scar had already turned her back and was pressing Gorthrax, blades flickering into the ancient lord’s defenses in strikes so precise they left no room for recovery, and the Elite Souls flooding in on every side cared even less about Elisabeth’s fury than their general did.
The Lilies hit Gorthrax’s right flank before Elisabeth finished sputtering. Bronnya’s shield caught the Eternal across the pauldron, Lilith opened a seam in his guard, and Scar drove both blades through the gap in his breastplate.
His barrier shattered, the light in his sockets dimmed to embers, and the oldest lord of the Covenant of Eternity went to his knees in the dirt.
The dry rattling that escaped his ribcage was almost a laugh.
"The Goddess’s inquisitors hadn’t managed to touch me for millions of years, then I get defeated by a brat who was a non-factor less than a year ago..." Blue fire flickered in his sockets as he looked at the blue-skinned soldiers pinning him from every side. "What a joke this fate of mine is..."
His skull turned toward Scar, and the ancient intelligence behind the fading fire studied her the way it had once studied Iris on the field.
"Your master is an interesting creature. I hope he’ll bring the art of Necromancy to levels I never would’ve managed."
"He already has," Scar spoke flatly, eliciting rasping chuckles from the undead.
"True, true..."
"Return to your grave, filth." Elisabeth stepped forward with divine light concentrating at the head of her mace. "By the Goddess’s mercy, I grant you the peace of-"
A dagger caught the mace shaft six inches from Gorthrax’s skull.
"No," Scar announced flatly.
"What?!"
"My Master desires this one captured."
"Oh?" Gorthrax’s amusement increased.
"This abomination must be returned to the earth!" Elisabeth’s golden light swelled as her weapon strained against Scar’s blade. "They are a blemish on all that the Goddess stands for, I won’t let you-"
She stopped.
A hundred pale flames had appeared around her in a ring that hadn’t existed when she started the sentence, each one burning behind an Elite Soul whose weapon was drawn and level.
They’d moved into position so quietly that the Arch Priestess hadn’t heard a single footstep.
Scar withdrew her blade from the mace and walked around Elisabeth, both daggers twirling in loose circles at her sides.
The eyes above the mask promised violence, and she closed the distance without hurrying, because the soldiers at her back had already decided how this conversation would end.
"With the defeat of the Elvardian Alliance, the Primordial Villain, Quinlan Elysiar, became the greatest force on the continent of Iskaris."
Her voice carried across the field without rising above conversational volume, because an army standing behind her words made volume unnecessary. "The nations of mortals and their religious beliefs will find a way to integrate into the new age, or they will perish. That includes you and your Goddess’s church."
A hundred boots hit frozen earth in a single unified step as the Elites closed inward, and Elisabeth’s face drained of color so fast the golden radiance around her flickered.
"You... How dare you speak such blasphemy?! The Goddess is everything! Creator-"
"I’m not asking," Scar cut her off, and the daggers stopped twirling.
The Arch Priestess’s gaze snapped toward the Scarlet Lilies.
Lilith watched the standoff with total indifference toward theological disputes.
"I don’t have strong feelings about religious matters." She glanced at the ring of Elites, then back at Elisabeth. "If the Goddess objects, I’m sure she’ll let you people know."
Elisabeth’s divine light pressed outward against the closing ring, straining against soldiers who did not blink and did not care, and for three long seconds the Arch Priestess stood with every intention of fighting her way out through a hundred of them and the soul general who commanded them.
Then she lowered the mace.
"This is sacrilege."
"Yes," Scar agreed, and gestured. The Elites parted to let her through.
"I’ll discuss matters about your master and his unacceptable actions with the church..." Elisabeth decreed. "But don’t think I’ll trust you with Gorthrax! I’m not going anywhere until the Covenant of Eternity is fully dealt with."
"Okay," Scar shrugged. It never hurt to have the strongest anti-undead warrior close to you when you were dealing with a gang of ancient and powerful undead monsters.
The sound of bones scraping across the bloodied ground preceded the woman who walked out of the eastern carnage.
Iris emerged from what was left of the Drowned King’s cavalry with his ribcage dangling from one fist and his skull swinging from the other, split clean from crown to jaw.
Her armor had lost its war of attrition long before the lord himself fell, and what remained covered approximately nothing: torn leather strips, a single pauldron hanging by a strap, and the fading crimson script still pulsing down her bare spine.
The woman underneath looked thoroughly pleased with herself.
Blood and rust painted her from the collarbone down, black hair clung to her face in wet strands, and the grin she wore was so wide and so savage it had no business on a human face.
"Anybody have a potion?"
"Catch." Jallen tossed one and Iris caught it, bit the cork out, and poured the red liquid into the Drowned King’s split skull.
It pooled in the bone cavity, and the Child of Reckoning raised the ancient cranium to her lips and drank.
She lowered the skull, exhaled through her nose, and wiped her mouth with the back of a hand that was more blood than skin. Then she looked around at the silence she’d caused and blinked.
"Aurora’s potions taste better."
"...Seriously?"
"Yeah."
"...Have you considered that you normally drink potions from a clean vial, but you drank ours from a filthy skull?"
"..." Iris paused. Then shrugged and drank again.
"..." Jallen was speechless.
...
And just like that, it was time to conclude the Great War of Iskaris!
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