Chapter 135 — The Power of Evil
The Niboria Empire had built its reputation on exceptional military might. A nation of warriors who trained ceaselessly from childhood through youth to old age. This was precisely why they had refused to seek the Alliance's aid until the very end.
"The Empire does not lose!"
"I shall hang Kohtan's head and beco a hero of Niboria!"
Whether the enemy was human or monster, it made no difference. Even if wicked beings were resurrected, one need only kill them again and again.
They had once believed this, and so they had been defeated. And at this very mont, the Mountain Rabbits found themselves in precisely the sa situation.
Deep in the night.
The fog blanketing the plains was cold and heavy, like the breath of the dead. A strange stillness hung over the encampnt of seventy thousand troops before Palrn Fortress.
The first change was a very minor one.
"Where am I?"
"You…… What was your na again?"
A ssenger passing through the camp lost his bearings, and a sentinel forgot the na of the comrade standing beside him.
Soldiers woke from brief sleep and looked at one another with unfamiliar eyes. So among them could not even recognize the insignia of their own unit, and one man fumbled clumsily with his weapon and cut himself on his own blade.
It was, to say the least, bizarre and uncanny.
The clouds in the sky drifted in reverse, and the night air carried the scent of seasons long past. A knight who had been drinking water retched, spitting out blackened filth from his mouth.
Silently, almost imperceptibly, the chain of command ca undone. A low-ranking officer wandered the camp murmuring to himself.
"What is the point of any of this? No matter how fiercely we fight, no matter how narrowly we survive—in the end, it will all disappear."
"You can't say that! We're the ones throwing ourselves into the jaws of death on your word alone!"
Soldiers who had just stepped out of their tents heard his words and erupted in fierce protest. The duty to protect their comrades, the conviction to serve the Empire—in an instant, it summoned rage.
Thud!
"Gkk—urk!"
Dozens drew their blades and drove them into the officer's back. No screams, no shock, not a single cry of warning.
The chaos that began at the very bottom spread swiftly across the entire encampnt.
Before long, the whole camp shook. Human will, military order, the aning of life—even the sense of ti and mory were warped.
Knights rallied to calm the situation, but flas spread to the tents, and smoke rose from every direction.
The vast formation of n was quietly, eerily, shattering apart.
This was the Night of Reversal.
Corps Commander Kohtan, from dozens of kiloters away, released a single burst of power—and with it, twisted and broke every living thing.
Quite literally, it was a disaster that unfolded in an instant.
***
Whether by fortune or misfortune, Calix stood one step removed from that chaos.
‘The difference in scale compared to when I fought Nergas before is incomparable.’
A power vast beyond comparison to any re subordinate's. Kohtan was shaking the entire region.
Inevitably, rcenaries who had only recently joined were seeing things that weren't there, holding conversations with the dead, unable to keep their wits about them.
The veteran Mountain Rabbits, however, were a different matter.
"Battle formation!"
"Rally, now!"
A cavalry force of one thousand assembled swiftly. Warriors resisting a transcendent power. Their hearts filled with doubt and fear and hatred just as any other's—yet one truth they never forgot.
"We are the Mountain Rabbits! Keep your heads!"
Under Royce's command, every combat-capable mber completed assembly in an instant.
Dwarf Basim, Zahira, Volga, and the others—those exposed to the power of darkness wore pale, ashen faces, yet not one abandoned their post. Veterans staggered and sank to their knees again and again, but the comrades beside them seized them roughly and hauled them back upright.
Humans, Dwarves, even Elves. Having weathered so many strange and terrible phenona before, none of them broke ntally.
anwhile, Calix had already mounted his horse and was scanning the surroundings.
‘Quelling the chaos from within can wait. Right now, I have to hold back the threat from outside.’
His eyes took in burning barracks, rising smoke, allies cutting down one another. And threading through it all, a clear flow of energy shone.
A foul, horrific, nauseating force surged and rippled as it seized the entire space.
A faint tingling ran to his fingertips. Darkness had claid everything. He strained to keep his emotions suppressed, but a small seed of doubt took root in a corner of his mind.
Could it be that he had misread the situation—that it was nothing more than the aftershock of so nightmare?
The doubt within was instantly extinguished. For what lay before him to be a re illusion of the enemy's making, he had already crossed paths once with its source. Kohtan's subordinate—Nergas.
"Calix!"
"To the north! Duke Akron is in danger!"
Setting aside complex deliberation, he moved quickly.
"Hadiya!"
Calix entrusted Hadiya with passing a ssage on, then shot out of the encampnt like an arrow. He had summoned allies who would be of genuine use.
***
At present, the greatest fighting force within the Alliance Forces was held by Master Imran Akran. Two peak-class knights alone, supported by hundreds of upper-rank knights at his back.
And they were furious.
"Master! The chaos within our encampnt has reached its peak!"
"I knew it! Gathering all the commanders in one place—what a fool he turned out to be!"
Ard for battle and mounted on horseback, they pressed him urgently for a decision. And rightly so—across the sprawling camp, it was as though the gates of hell had been flung open.
Screams rang out without end. Flas erupted skyward. Within, allies swung blades at one another.
Helmut Barben shared the sa thought.
‘Calix, this ti you've made a grave mistake.’
The forr Knight Commander of Richterkreutz—the man who had been placed under a reprimand order by Emperor Caracal—gazed silently upon the scene. Yet in the end, he added no words of his own.
‘One who has surpassed the wall is not swayed.’
Master Imran Akran's face showed no emotion whatsoever. He was neither anxious nor unsettled. With flat, expressionless eyes, he sought an answer.
Where must we advance?
Helmut observed his every manner and etched it into his heart.
Being nothing more than an attendant, he had had no opportunity to co face to face with Calix. But as he pressed further toward a higher realm, the day of that encounter would co.
He did not wish to et as allies—he hoped for the mont their lives would be decided against each other as enemies.
"Lord Akran! A ssage from the commander!"
Just then, a figure who appeared to be of desert origin ca galloping up on horseback. Despite the hostile eyes bearing down on her from all sides, Hadiya continued steadily.
"The point of attack is to the north—Duke Akron's encampnt! There are three enemy entities confird, with large numbers of the Corrupted pressing in!"
"……And the rest?"
"A straight advance is not advised. Circle left and strike from the flank. We will take the right flank."
Yet this was not so easy to accept.
Helmut Barben felt a strange sense of déjà vu.
‘How could he possibly know?’
His own eyes could not make out the enemy. The Master, too, seed to feel the sa question—he paused for just a mont. Military encampnts were stretched across the entire plain, and the dark energy rose from every direction. It was impossible to distinguish what was real from what was false.
Even so, the Mountain Rabbits had already set out.
"Calix."
Without question, this was that man's judgnt.
Imdiately, sparks flew behind his eyes. Hatred and loathing surged up—and alongside them, an obsession from which he could not escape.
"The numbers are not small. Take command and follow."
"Yes."
For but a mont—as soon as Master Imran Akran's order fell, even the violent surge of emotion swiftly subsided. He was a Master. The sword of the Empire, and the embodint of great order.
Soon, to the thunder of hoofbeats, two thousand five hundred knights carved through the night's shadow and advanced.
"Kiiieee-eeek!"
"Retreat, fall back!"
By then, Duke Akron's army had already half-collapsed. The low palisades had been broken and toppled by the Corrupted, and between the flickering torches, blood sprayed continuously.
The enemy's full scale could not be grasped, but one thing was certain. Again, Calix's judgnt had been correct. Monsters packed the entire encampnt.
"We advance from the flank—now!"
And when the finest of the finest reached the battlefield, a pure white light gathered at the tip of Imran Akran's blade.
Tzzzt-tzzzt-tzzzt-tzzzt-tzzzt.
As the neural accelerator was pushed past its limits, his body split into countless forms for a single instant. In the mont that followed, sound and screams, light and darkness, every current of the world—ca to a standstill.
‘Absolute Extinction.’
The next stage beyond Conflagration, the ultimate power symbolizing the authority of a Master, was revealed. Imran Akran swept his blade in a gentle arc.
In the direction it traced, everything that had stood in the way crumbled to dust. The path opened before the cavalry could even crash into the enemy lines. No trace of destruction remained, nor any scent of death.
Within absolute silence, reverence and emptiness mingled. No matter how many tis one witnessed it, there was no growing accustod—only the dizzying reality of the chasm between them made itself felt, again and again.
"Are you watching? This—this is true strength!"
And so Helmut Barben felt pride.
‘Under the Master's tutelage, this body too shall one day surpass the wall.’
He had a teacher. What Calix did not possess was here at his side. Moreover, since suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Mountain Rabbits, he had not rested for a single mont in his training.
With a faint smile, Helmut swept his blade. Perhaps because confidence had swelled within him—the Conflagration burned a remarkably deeper shade of red.
He plunged in succession into the mass of tens of thousands of monsters, cutting down everything in his sight.
It was precisely at that mont.
Kwa-jijijijik!!
At the cutting sound of displaced air that bored into his ears, Helmut lifted his head—forgetting even that he had entered the thick of battle.
On the opposite side, there was another force carving through the horde of monsters.
The Mountain Rabbits, no—
All he could see was Calix.
Thwack!!
Conflagration blazed at the tip of his blade—yet unlike before, it bore a distinctly dark crimson hue. The contained flas lted through the flesh and armor of enemies, and erupted with force that did not waver, like lava bursting upward in an explosion.
Then, as enormous monsters several ters tall and airborne creatures ca charging—without Calix so much as twitching a hand, the bodies of the monsters were torn to shreds.
"……Impossible!"
Helmut Barben let out a cry of astonishnt, yet even that had not captured the full extent of the ability.
As Calix advanced, piercing deep into the heart of the enemy lines, a strange pressure and chill intermingled and spread out around his body like ripples on water.
The cold reached out and froze a giant's thick forearm, and shards of ice erupting from the ground drove through the tops of feet and tore out the other side. As the energy of Chaos surging from his Core pressed down upon that space, crack-crack-crack—the frozen sections shattered into fragnts.
Even the Corrupted—those emotionless monsters—
"Grrrr."
Hesitated, and shrank from charging.
Cold and fla, darkness and divinity, and even Chaos. Opposing forces beca entangled in a single place, turning and turning upon each other.
What remained in the end was a scene of overwhelming devastation. Even Royce and Adrian, and Basim who followed in his wake, instinctively flinched and drew distance.
Where Master Imran Akran had imposed order upon a specific space, Calix did not suppress his power. He simply swung with everything he had, unleashed it, shattered it.
He was, in every sense of the word, a predator that had bared its savagery.
***
Calix felt a paradoxical emotion.
‘So I have grown this powerful.’
Looking back, since his body's reconstruction, he had never fought at full strength. Wherever he thrust his blade, the path opened. What was lacking, his ‘Mind's Eye’ and sixth sense filled in.
[Reality Acceleration 3.8x sustained]
[Core activated, energy release normal]
The instant a threat was perceived, cold would reach out; a pressure field would act upon it, binding the enemy's body. Powerful enemies were cut down with the energy of Chaos, until the entire space beca his own.
Yet at the sa ti—
‘Maddeningly incomplete.’
This was not the ability of a swordsman. He was wielding new power by instinct alone, but it had slipped beyond the control of his will.
[Energy balance warning, Dark attribute re-absorption in progress]
Light is the seed that gives birth to life; darkness is the ans wrought for destruction. Naturally, the ability absorbed from Midra was astonishingly efficient. The cold energy did not stop at devouring Kohtan's subordinates—it made them its own nourishnt.
But in exchange for that, victory was equally true that it was before his eyes.
"Now to the center! We join with the knights and strike the enemy's head!"
Calix swept the battlefield once with his gaze and called out briefly. Rather than saving Duke Akron's army, he chose to drive back the wicked things.
Just then, his eyes t those of Imran Akran—Master of the Empire. The imnse energy filling his vision was, indeed, worthy of being called humanity's blade.
‘To think he holds such strength, even while carrying an injury.’
His rumination went no further. Calix turned his gaze deep into the enemy lines. From beneath the earth, he could sense the presence of tunnel worms, and above them, a single point of darkness lay coiled.
[Ca—lix. What formidable dread. Truly, your power soars high.]
Over the wreckage of battle and the heap of corpses, from within an empty silhouette, a dull voice echoed.
[Please—co closer.]
It was the second encounter with Nergas.
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