Chapter 128: The Righteous Knight's Faith Crumbles
Snow dust ca crashing down, scattering across the faces of the 2 giants.
They pried open their hazy eyes, shook their heads, and unsteadily hauled themselves back to their feet.
Once again without a shred of tactics, relying purely on brute force, they stomped across the trembling earth and charged at the furious Demon.
The blazing greatsword in hand suddenly erupted to a hundred ters, powerful fla elents coiling around the Fla Giant's entire body.
Laiton plunged his pitch-black claws deep into the greatsword and tore that enormous blade of energy clean in two, reducing it to drifting wisps of natural essence that dissolved into the air.
The Fla Giant stared at the greatsword in his hands as it suddenly reverted to its original form, and let out a deflated breath.
The instant he raised his head again to look at the Demon, a pair of massive crimson hands ca lunging savagely toward him.
The Demon hoisted that enormous body—flesh, blood, and snow dust all together—and under the red moonlight, hurled it crashing down into the frozen ocean.
It continued to tornt the helpless giant relentlessly, until once again it lost consciousness, its four limbs hanging limp toward the heart of the earth.
The Ice Giant behind it advanced step by step toward Laiton.
The trendous force, carried through the surging of that sea of blood, sent a powerful shockwave reverberating through the Demon.
It grabbed the unconscious Fla Giant by the arm, swung it several tis around, and brought it smashing down hard against the Ice Giant's skull.
Bang!
The colossal impact sent an entire mountainside crumbling down in an instant.
Torrents of shattered rock and snow dust slamd against the hardened ground, erupting into a frigid gust of air that sent everyone present tumbling off their feet.
Bracing against the blast, the mbers of the Pallid Mage Society stared ahead with nothing but shock in their eyes.
They simply could not fathom how those 2 giants—each the size of a small mountain—could be so utterly helpless before the Demon.
They stood frozen in place, not even realizing they had already been knocked over, lying flat on the snowfield.
The snow dust drifting around them carried not a trace of blood—at so point unbeknownst to them, they had already been teleported to a distant elevated outcrop far from the fighting.
The entire vast Extre Northern Ice Plains had, at this mont, beco a battlefield between the Demon and the giants.
That crimson, savage crocodile swung its viscous drool around, gripping the giants in its hands and slamming them against the ground over and over again as though they were toys.
Dike stood at Vladimir's side and asked slowly:
"General, you're a man of vast experience—could you explain this scene to everyone?"
Vladimir raised a hand and slapped Dike hard across the back of the neck.
"Do I look like soone who's seen sothing like this before?"
"Get the hell out of here and take a casualty count! Damn it!"
Dike swallowed the pain and chuckled a couple tis, then hurried off.
Vladimir took another drag of his cigar, scratched the back of his pale head as he stared at the staggering scene before him.
"Hisss—well, this is going to be a bit hard to explain..."
The Pallid Mage Society had mobilized in full force, initially with the sole objective of driving the Savage Beasts back a hundred miles.
As it turned out, this battle had directly wiped out the vast majority of the Blazing Sword and Glacial Fang.
Even with so remnant factions still surviving, those Savage Beasts would no longer pose any real threat.
Even Vladimir himself had always believed this would be a brutal, bloody struggle.
He had not anticipated that the Savage Beasts would summon 2 massive giants at the brink of annihilation.
And yet what stunned him even more was that, accompanying the arrival of the giants, what followed imdiately behind them was a Demon of world-swallowing proportions.
A Demon helping humanity exterminate Savage Beasts?
Even if that headline landed in the Royal Capital, it would set off a tidal wave of controversy.
Biting down on his cigar, Vladimir took a deep drag into his lungs, clearing his head sowhat.
Beneath this blood-soaked sky, everyone watched with wide-open eyes as the giants and the Demon clashed in ferocious combat.
Or rather—a one-sided beating.
The Demon seed to deliberately retract its claws, using its red fists—each the size of their skulls—to drive a vicious uppercut straight into the giants' chins.
The force was so trendous that even their bones were on the verge of shattering.
Another jab ca flying in; the 2 giants were lined up on the sa axis, their ribs pulverized to fragnts.
Inside their bodies, their organs scread with stabbing pain.
The flas that had burned ceaselessly across the Fla Giant's body grew noticeably dimr under those savage gusts of fistfalls.
The Ice Giant dragged its agonized body forward, attempting to freeze the Demon within the sea of blood.
Ice crept up from the sea of blood, spreading toward the Demon's legs.
But Laiton simply let out a light breath.
The solid ice shattered in that instant like a sheet of thin film.
Its enormous steel-scaled tail cracked out in a single whip, and the Ice Giant's legs split apart like chunks of ice, reduced to total ruin.
It collapsed onto the ground, letting out an anguished howl; the towering white freezing aura dozens of ters high stood out starkly beneath the blood moon.
Countless Mage-soldiers and Mages stood atop the cliff face.
Watching the scene before them, they could not hold back their exhilarated cheers:
"Beautiful! That's the way to hit!"
"That punch—damn that felt good!"
"Cut to the middle! Cut to the middle!"
"Wooooo!"
Amid those cathartic roars, it was as though every ounce of hatred they had ever harbored toward the Savage Beasts was now being channeled through those 2 wretched fire-and-ice giants.
Gwen, however, stood dazed, staring at the scene with utter incomprehension.
"Why?"
That Demon—one deserving to be called a world-ending existence—was at this very mont delivering rciless blows upon 2 giants.
Nobody felt fear or dread. They were even slapping the ground in wild celebration.
This was nothing like what she had imagined.
"You believe a Demon will inevitably slaughter humans?"
"That humans will inevitably cower before Demons?"
A voice drifted up from behind her, unhurried, as though carrying so kind of magic that guided the currents of her thoughts.
"Why?"
Gwen opened her mouth, but everything she wanted to say lodged in her throat, unable to co out.
No words, in this mont, held any weight.
From the first Demons to appear throughout history—including the Demon of Greed that had appeared in the Royal Capital not long ago—every ti, humans had always been the side that suffered catastrophic losses.
They were, by nature, the very source of the terror humans knew.
And yet...
How, then, to explain what stood before her eyes.
"You're not wrong—Demons and humans truly cannot coexist."
"But they have always existed by our side."
Viktor's voice kept coiling around her ears.
"Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, Lust. 7 emotions—corresponding to every source from which Demons spring. Doesn't that seem strange?"
"Because these 7 emotions are ones that almost only humans—creatures of such rich feeling—can possess all at once."
Suddenly, Viktor let out a quiet laugh.
"The Demon before you is the embodint of Wrath."
"Can you guess why it appeared?"
Gwen's eyes snapped wide open. She stared blankly at the Demon before her, watching its battle, watching the Mages cheering and applauding.
A heart-shaking tremor rose from sowhere deep inside her chest.
"Because... the Delin Family?"
As though sothing had just dawned on her, Gwen's voice trembled slightly.
"Because of the rage within their hearts."
Viktor's hand ca to rest atop her head, as though offering comfort, his tone carrying a faint note of satisfaction.
"Don't dwell on it. Even though you share the Delin na, what this family has done has nothing to do with you."
"I know—you understand very clearly the weight of Angus's sins."
The red Formation lit up behind Viktor in an instant—no runes or patterns etched into it, just simple flas, burning around the 2 of them.
Beneath the blood moon, that warm glow felt strangely out of place.
But the flas did warm Gwen sowhat, enough at least to help her settle her mind.
Yet Viktor's words had not stopped.
"Their fury beca the Demon's nourishnt, and so the Demon appeared and aided them."
In the sa breath,
Viktor's voice grew several degrees colder.
"Their existence brings no benefit to Angus."
"And so the iron fortress of the north shut them out, beyond its walls."
In the end—who was the Demon? Who was justice?
Gwen closed her eyes. She felt the Knightly faith she had always held to be crumbling.
As a Knight, one was ant to guard and protect a land.
Yet the truth of it was playing out right before her eyes.
The annual casualty figures that kept rising year after year in the Northern Frontier—they found their answer here.
Angus had always been sculpting an image of himself as the paragon of fairness and justice.
Even now, countless Knights remained his devoted followers, shaped by his influence, by his justice.
The northerners living within the Northern Frontier's fortresses never stopped being grateful to this so-called hero.
Within those walls, they diligently wove together the justice they believed in.
All the while ensuring that everyone turned a blind eye to those beyond the Northern Frontier—the people further north.
They, too, were humans. They, too, were fellow citizens of the Empire.
Yet with information sealed inside the fortress walls, everyone sang Angus's praises.
Praised this righteous Grand Knight.
In the end, Viktor had stepped forward.
He had torn apart Angus's counterfeit justice—torn apart the Delin Family's ugly face, ugly from beginning to end—and thrown it out into the open.
Deliberately. Laid bare before her eyes.
"Look, Gwen."
"Look at what is happening before your eyes. The most unvarnished truth."
Gwen's lips had gone sowhat pale.
The battle had not yet ended.
That enormous Demon had seized the Fla Giant's skull as it kept rolling across the snowfield and hoisted it into the air.
It slamd it hard into the ground, then drove fist after fist into the already broken and battered head.
Its resistance gradually faded. The flas burning across its body dimd little by little.
Yet the Demon continued.
In Viktor's eyes, the Fla Giant's HP bar was on the verge of reaching zero.
Countless Mages and Mage-soldiers were even launching various explosive spells into the sky above as fireworks in celebration; wave after wave of exhilarated cheers rose higher and higher.
"Yes!"
"Keep going! Keep going!"
"Don't stop!"
"Wooooo!"
They kept venting the anger in their hearts, and with each burst, the red light radiating from Laiton's body surged stronger and stronger.
Until it illuminated the overcast sky completely.
The Ice Giant, naturally, could not escape its fate either.
Laiton snatched up a jagged shard of ice and drove it deep into the snowfield.
It then grabbed the Ice Giant's skull—encased in layer upon layer of ice and stone—and brought it crashing down upon that sharp spike of ice.
Clearly determined to test whether the giant's skull or the ice was the stronger of the two.
Accompanied by sprays of blood, the Demon grew more and more frenzied, the frequency of its blows increasing faster and faster.
At last, the HP bars of both giants went completely blank.
Their bodies dissolved into natural energy and, carried on the howling blizzard, gradually dissipated.
The Demon spat a mouthful of blood from its enormous jaws.
A roar that shook the heavens erupted from it, accompanied by the crowd's cheering like a bursting dam, echoing across the entire Extre Northern reaches.
"They, too, once placed their hope in the Northern Frontier's Knights."
"But that hope never once received a response."
Viktor gazed ahead with satisfaction—at Laiton displaying its power, at those Mages and Mage-soldiers howling with release and wild excitent.
"Do you see it?"
"Those Knights who call themselves righteous—they are not even worth as much as a single."
"Demon."
Gwen cast her eyes downward, biting her lip.
Sothing seed to flicker through the depths of her gaze, and her emotions refused to settle for a long while.
As a Knight, to witness a Demon aiding humanity, while the Knights who were ant to defend the Northern Frontier cowered in the shadows and dared not show their faces.
It was exactly what Viktor had laid out as fact.
When a blood-soaked reality was set before her eyes, the naless sense of justice she had always kept in her heart felt as though it were crumbling.
At this very mont, even she herself no longer knew what the conviction she had once guarded truly was.
"I..."
All at once, a finger ca to rest against her lips, rendering her speechless.
Viktor pressed his chin to Gwen's shoulder, his voice soft, drifting against her ear—tickling.
"Shh—"
That profoundly intimate gesture sent a faint, tingling warmth shivering through Gwen.
And likewise, that voice—audible only to her—sounded in her ear.
"I said it before."
"All you need to do is trust in ."
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