Chapter 279
Chapter 279. Awakening (1)
"Was the sacrifice worth it?"
At the question abruptly cast by a man's voice, the water-haired girl stood motionless, saying nothing.
Gazing at her frozen back, Enoch's eyes suddenly flew wide.
—This scenery. It can't be.
The scene had unfolded so naturally that it took him time to realize this was a vision born of the Inner World's erosion.
At the sensation, indistinguishable from reality, he happened to glance down — and the lake of Rhodes had already risen to Enoch's chest.
Submerged in the water like that, he quietly watched the vision, more vivid than any before.
Cold winter wind lashed his cheeks.
The surroundings had once again become the battlefield of Rhodes — the one saved by the Dragoons, in the past.
There, the water-haired girl stood clad in silver armor, her expression dyed with despair.
"A — a sacrifice, you say."
Following her gaze, Enoch suddenly stopped.
Right there stood the Knight Commander of Rhodes.
On the white ice of the frozen lake, helmet pulled low, he braced his sword against the ground and rose, swaying, to his feet.
A wind bearing white snow swept once around the Knight Commander, standing solitary and alone.
"Suleiman's 0th Unit, reinforced by a 1st Rank Mage, was beyond our strength alone to stop. And yet my order to hold the line drove the Guardian Knights to become sacrifices — that, and that alone, grieves me."
"Commander."
"This is neither atonement nor excuse."
The Knight Commander slowly shook his helmeted head.
"Everyone simply carried out their duty according to the optimal tactical deployment. Nothing more, nothing less. Only — the responsibility for it rests with me."
Enoch glanced at the surrounding landscape and lost his words.
With his back to the rear gate of Rhodes — the great fortress door — the Knight Commander stood utterly alone.
Across the lake around the Knight Commander, the host he had cut down — more than several hundred of Suleiman's soldiers and beasts — lay strewn in every direction, every one of them slain by his blade.
In the middle of a lake made of his enemies' corpses, he quietly raised his head and looked up at the sky.
Then the Knight Commander slowly removed his helmet. At the face revealed within the steel visor, the girl covered her mouth, her expression drenched in shock.
"C-Commander......"
The face beneath the helmet was so ravaged it could only be called broken.
Beneath disheveled golden hair: a bleeding mouth, and one eye half-shut as if his strength had finally failed.
The moment his blue cloak rippled out behind the Knight Commander's frame in the snow-laden wind—
She finally saw that where his left arm should have been, beneath the cloak's cover, there was nothing. He had lost the arm in battle.
"The Guardian Knights assigned to stop the enemy infiltrating the rear gate were already annihilated when I arrived."
He set his sword down against the lake ice.
"And also — regrettably — it seems this is my limit as well."
The Knight Commander, who had held back every enemy seeking to invade Rhodes with nothing but a single sword, murmured quietly.
"It troubles me. The Dragoons have come to our aid, but the enemy has merely withdrawn for a time. At this rate, the fortress of Rhodes will soon be breached."
He let his head fall.
"All of it is my responsibility."
"I-it isn't your fault, Commander!"
"That is not correct."
The Knight Commander slowly raised his longsword and, gazing down at his own face reflected in the mirror-like blade, spoke evenly.
"Failure of the guard is annihilation. The Knight Commander of Rhodes is the one who bears that responsibility. I took up the sword and swore the eternal protection of the fortress city of Rhodes — therefore this, too, is plainly my failure."
"Duty......"
"Do you remember what I once said?"
The Commander drew a small, labored breath.
"I do not wish to become a symbol."
From the corner of the Knight Commander's mouth, where a thread of blood ran down, a faint white breath rose toward the sky.
"Some call me the strongest of the Guardian Knights of Rhodes. And yet — as you see — in the end, I cannot become hope."
"But you fought with everything you had......!"
"Hope is a symbol. And hope, by its very existence, becomes the radiant light that illuminates someone's dreams and future. But such a role is not right for me."
"Then......!"
The Commander let the sword he had raised in his one arm fall slack, and gazed at the girl with a calm expression.
"Sacrifice is not the role of one who would be someone's hope. Therefore I must not become the hero of Rhodes. Because it is not right for anyone's dreams and future to look up in admiration toward a form defined by a life being taken."
He bowed his head, braced on his sword with his single arm.
"I am not a Sword Saint — not one who has reached the sword's ultimate truth. Only such a one should carry the future. And right now, Rhodes needs such a person."
For an instant, the girl lowered her lashes.
"I...... see."
"The duty. Remember the duty of the Guardian Knight."
He glanced down at the sword braced against the ground.
"Perhaps it is fated that no one but you, standing here, will remember in the end — but the sword of Rhodes, which sought to protect everyone in this place, surely—"
The Knight Commander whispered, faint.
"—may yet have worth."
The mightiest Guardian Knight of Rhodes let his head fall, just so. The helmet he had been holding alongside his sword dropped onto the ice with a dull clatter.
In that very moment, from behind, a crescent-shaped blade punched through his bowed chest, armor and all, with a wet thrust.
Then the blade was wrenched free from his back, and someone kicked the Commander's body down, trampling him aside.
Fresh blood sprayed across the ice as the body of the Knight Commander — who had fought to the very last — collapsed limp against the ground with a dull, heavy sound.
"Ah......"
The girl, robbed even of words, raised her eyes to the enemy soldier before her, crescent blade drawn and dripping.
A massive enemy draped in white cloth stood there. At some point, another warrior of Suleiman's 0th Unit had closed in behind the Commander.
"When did — reinforcements, here......!"
But heedless of the girl's shock, the mighty enemy soldier — entire body veiled in white cloth — casually reversed its grip on the bloodied blade, kicked off the ground, and charged.
"Ngh!"
The girl brought her sword up and barely caught the enemy's blade — but was hurled backward, defense and all, crashing down.
The next moment, with a heavy impact against her back, the ice beneath her split with a resounding crack.
Weightlessness swallowed her body. Losing her balance backward, she began falling into somewhere deep — it happened in an instant.
"......!"
The ice of Rhodes broke, and the freezing water of the midwinter lake flooded in on every side.
Reaching desperately upward with the hand not holding her sword, she understood.
She had fallen into the lake. Again.
The water-haired girl sank deeper and deeper into the lake's fathomless abyss.
And in that very moment — the surface of the Rhodes lake that had been rising through the Inner World surged over Enoch's head, swallowing him completely.
Enoch, too, began to fall into the deep abyss of the lake, just as she once had.
He reached out, but only water filled his grasp in the lake's deep dark — the knight of the past and the swordsman of the present sinking together, unable even to breathe.
And so Enoch, at some point, had become the water-haired girl sinking into the lake of the past.
She weakly opened her hand toward the surface.
Her breath burned. Feeling as if she would drown, the girl squeezed her eyes shut, and as she sank, her blue cloak floated up over her head above her silver armor.
Sinking into the abyss of that day when everything precious had vanished — the voice of her past self murmuring brushed through her mind.
[......Ever since then, I have hated water.]
In her flickering vision, through the transparent surface above, enemy soldiers were arriving one by one, trampling across the ice.
Already more enemies than the Commander had stopped were advancing on the Guardian Knights arriving belatedly at the line.
Watching from beneath the sinking surface — from below the ice — as the enemy flooded toward the walls of Rhodes, the girl stretched out a powerless hand.
Sinking.
Deeper. And deeper still.
The memories of the past she had never wanted to face shimmered in the water. Into the waters of the lake that had taken everything that day — the lake that, no matter how desperately she had struggled, had only ever let everything slip away.
[......It's infuriating. Playing at chasing a dream alone, as if reality doesn't even exist......!!]
[Staying here with no talent at all, acting like you'll become something— it's nothing short of an insult!]
And yet — even so, I—
She half-opened her eyes and let out a single breath; white bubbles rose through the blue abyss.
And within those transparent bubbles, the familiar face of the red-haired knight shimmered, her whisper echoing at the girl's ear.
[When I watch you push yourself that far, striving toward your dream — I can't help finding it beautiful, you know?]
The girl slowly opened her eyes.
Watching her breath, caught in white bubbles, rise once more toward the surface, she remembered.
[—Find a way to make that fear your own power.]
At the realization surging through her like a current, she quietly stretched her hand toward the slowly receding surface and clenched it into a fist.
I can't give up. I don't want to. Even with blistered hands, there was an ideal I wanted to seize with a sword in my grip.
Even if I could never reach it — there was a star in the sky I wanted to hold.
—Water. Yes. Water, like the abyss of the lake.
The force that, no matter how fiercely I strained and struggled, slipped through my fingers and flowed away, all of it. If I could face that force — and make it my own power.
If I — who could never gain strength no matter how I trained — could turn it into the power to realize my will to protect—
She clenched her teeth.
Somehow she churned both arms toward the surface, desperately, teeth gritted, forward.
She had never even learned to swim — and yet, somehow, she knew exactly what to do.
And the next moment.
When her fingertips finally touched the surface — from that point, a furious spray of water exploded, and the ice of Rhodes' winter lake burst apart entirely, scattering into the sky.
***
At the roar of the surrounding rocks bursting apart and scattering skyward, Enoch snapped his head up.
He glared at the enemy.
There, beyond — Anarchilon still raged, the wings stowed within its carapace spread wide in frenzy.
But though its regeneration had finished, the scar at the spot where the bomb lay buried remained — a perfect marker.
To deliver an impact to the AP Bomb deep inside the enemy's body, however, he would have to land a tremendously powerful blow.
The Inner World's erosion. In his hands, not even a sword but an axe. Wounds across his whole body. Motor function drained to the dregs by battle after battle.
But there was nothing to do except try.
The crackle of flames blanketing the surroundings. The clash of weapons. The stench of burning skin; air that seared his lungs with every breath.
His throat was raw — and yet, somehow, all of it felt impossibly familiar, almost dear.
Over it all, Enoch walked slowly forward.
His consciousness was already dim. Since the last inheritance, he could no longer even be certain who he was — whether this battlefield was the lake of Rhodes or the land beyond the 19th Outsourcing District's wall.
The erosion's toll? He didn't know.
Beside him, Alicia's voice reached him muffled, as if through deep water.
"Direct Lineage! It's dangerous — get down, please......!"
He didn't answer. He didn't know what he could even say. He glanced to the side.
A short distance away, Sirocco — ears and tail standing on end — stared at him and shouted.
"W-wait. You. Something's wrong—?"
But Enoch said nothing, only raised his head, gazing expressionless at Anarchilon raging through the battlefield of hellfire.
"D-Direct Lineage?"
The moment Alicia's voice called softly after him from behind—
He gathered even the last scraps of consciousness still resisting the inner erosion, converting all of it into a single will: the final blow to be dealt to the enemy before him. He gripped the axe.
His mind was muddied beyond all compare — but the one thing he had to do now, that alone, he remembered.
He had no intention of making any of his Follower Family the sacrifice here. Then this was a task that had to fall to the one with the highest chance of survival.
[It boasts the strongest thermal-type damage in the present Empire. Its output — under very limited conditions, granted — rises to the level of a 7th Rank Unique Magic.]
Elena had said it clearly. The AP Bomb's power was thermal damage rivaling a 7th Rank Unique Magic. Which meant the bomb's power was not mere explosive — it was magic.
In other words—
"Then this counts as a spec-up too."
The Magic Resistance Reagent. Murmuring as he recalled its effect, Enoch stopped, feeling the soles of his shoes grind into the sand.
Drawing the battlefield's flame-like heat deep into his lungs, he whispered.
"......I'm right here."
Anarchilon noticed him.
Thirty meters to the target. Anarchilon loosed a quake-raising bellow and lashed the tentacles along its flanks in desperation.
In the same instant, Enoch began his final sprint. The colossal Experimental Beast's tentacles — faster than sound — fell from the sky like meteors.
Evading them, cutting across the battlefield, he dropped lower and lower, accelerating.
He raised the axe behind him, parallel to the ground.
Then the tentacles came driving down sideways out of the sky. Five. Ten. An indiscriminate, frenzied bombardment.
The enemy's offensive — split three ways earlier between Enoch, Alicia, and Sirocco — was now converging entirely on him alone.
The tentacles hammered down hard enough to overturn the very ground, blasting dust, rock, and trees to fragments in every direction.
But Enoch spun the long axe once at his side, ignoring his fading consciousness.
▊▊▊▊▊ - Swordsmanship Form ▊, [Water Moon Rain]
Ignoring the enemy's entire offensive, he loosed a counter-slash at the tentacle hurtling in head-on.
A vast circular cut that cleaved through every line of the enemy's assault issued vertically from Enoch's rotating body — sweeping the tentacles from all sides like a great waterwheel — and in that sliver of a moment—
With a ringing metallic crash, a straight cut-line was scored across the bundled tentacles around him, and they sheared apart in unison, flung in every direction.
In that instant, the boundary between himself and her grew faint.
The supreme realm that the water-haired girl had one day reached was pouring out from his own hands.
The wide landscape of the battlefield flickered, overlapping more and more with the memories of the past.
Lowering his stance once, Enoch began to run — across the great lake of Rhodes.
Again the tentacles came surging from all sides, billowing in. Shattering the ice of a lake that existed somewhere in the past, they rained down around Enoch.
The moment he realized that, with the erosion's toll, evading them all was impossible—
From atop a high pile of stone beside a tree he was just passing, a girl's familiar voice rang out, clear as a bell.
"So here's the thing."
Glancing over mid-sprint, Enoch's eyes flew wide. Within the erosion's world, overlaid with the lake's scenery, she alone stood out vivid and sharp.
April, alone atop the high forest rock, settled into firing position, lying prone as she whispered.
"Even if I can't be the hero—"
Ball cap pulled low, cheek welded to the stock. Crosshairs aligned beyond the scope — watching the enemy past the reticle, she smiled faintly.
"—wanting to watch someone like that walk their path? That's legit thrilling, you know?"
She was already wrecked from the fighting — one eye forced shut by the blood running from her forehead, the shoulder bared by her slipped jacket covered in scrapes.
She looked utterly spent — without even the strength left to pull a trigger.
And yet April pressed her other hand over her trembling one, as if in desperate prayer, and clenched her teeth hard.
The blood forced her to abandon both-eyes-open shooting; switching to single-eye aim, she sighted the enemy through one eye alone.
"So——"
April narrowed her eye, wrung every remaining ounce of strength from her body into her finger, and squeezed the trigger.
"GO! ENOOOCH————!!"
With the creak of the trigger spring compressing — contraction. The pin within the linked bolt struck the primer at the cartridge's base — discharge.
A small detonation bloomed within the receiver, and from the tip of the suppressor, glowing pink, a suppressed muzzle flash burst out.
Simultaneously, the .308 sniper round, fired through the spiraling rifling of the barrel, took up its gyroscopic spin and tore through the air toward its mark.
The round, tracing a dead-straight streak of pink, hurtled into Anarchilon's head as if drawn there — and the bullet, trailing blue current, drilled spinning into one of the beetle's distinctive eyes.
Enoch seized hold of his consciousness once more, and as the enemy's pained shriek rang out, accelerated head-on.
Heedless of the erosion, eyes only on the enemy, axe couched, he sprinted like a black bullet.
Then, bending his knees deep, he kicked off the earth and leapt high into the air.
Falling toward the enemy's body, Enoch extended the axe far behind him and spun it into his grip.
At the same moment, Anarchilon, ignoring its agony, fixed its remaining eyes on Enoch — and readied its own killing blow.
Before its gaping, fang-studded maw, a pattern of brilliant light surfaced and began to spin.
The ultra-long-range laser cannon he had seen before.
Within the creature's opened mouth, crystals of mana-light condensed. The beast's mighty magic — the kind that punched through the world's very common sense — began constructing itself, drawing geometric patterns in the air ahead.
The instant he saw it, he knew he was in a position from which there was no evading — and with no particular feeling at all, he foresaw the future.
The lance of light that had claimed countless allied lives — at this zero range, his body would be torn to shreds.
SHRIIIIIEK—!
In that very moment, a razor-sharp shriek of torn air ripped through Enoch's thoughts and split his ears.
And the next moment, a silver wire spun whirling around the enemy's head, and with tremendous tensile force wrenched the entire colossal skull sideways.
The enemy's mana muzzle twisted for an instant — its aim swinging not at Enoch but uselessly toward the sky.
The enemy's laser, condensed to its limit, fired off into empty air, futilely carving a colossal straight trajectory that pierced the clouds of the night sky.
VWOOOOOM—!
He understood at once what had happened.
In the instant before the laser fired — at a timing that could not have been more perfect — silver thread had intervened from the flank.
The wire, scattering silver-white light, had wound around the enemy's broken horn and skull together and wrenched them aside, twisting the laser's aim away from Enoch in a single heartbeat.
......This is — it can't be.
In that sliver of a moment, where time itself seemed to slow, he glanced to the side.
Beyond the far battlefield, lit by the laser-light bent into the sky — there she was.
Among the trees of a forest so distant she was barely visible, the maid who had fired a single strand of wire with pinpoint precision across all that distance and struck the enemy true.
Even within the thin darkness of that faraway forest, the silver-haired maid's frost-blue eyes were fixed precisely on him as she hauled the wire taut.
[—This time, I will stay by your side. No matter what.]
Recalling her words, he smiled faintly.
Yes. That's right, Lien. That would be just like you.
Even as his consciousness clouded deeper and deeper with the erosion, he repeated those words to himself and fixed his eyes on the Anarchilon before him.
The enemy's preemptive killing blow had already been nullified by the silver-haired maid who clung so fiercely to his life. Gazing at the enemy, its head wound round and round in slender wire, he whispered.
"Then now it's our turn."
Enoch landed on the ground, and walked forward.
The girl landed on the ice, and walked forward.
A battlefield of hellfire burning scarlet — in its flames, a uniform resembling a black suit streamed.
A blue lake frozen pure white — over that battlefield of Rhodes, a blue cloak streamed.
"It's true — perhaps Rhodes needs hope."
The Rhodes of the past. The water-haired girl stood there, landing on the ice amid a colossal pillar of spray.
Walking slowly toward the enemy with her sword hanging loose, the girl in silver armor at last raised her longsword and leveled it, true and straight, at the enemies before her.
A sword forged at the end of a will tempered through grinding effort and countless slights endured.
With the Guardian Knights of Rhodes and the walls of the great fortress city at her back — the knight stood before them all, her keen blade aimed at the enemy.
"So, from this moment on—"
The Sword Saint of the Waves quietly raised her head.
"—I will become hope."
The next moment, along the long silver blade leveled at the front, sky-blue mana coiled — flowing like the currents of the lake itself.
Shhhhrrrrrr.
As if the entire lake of Rhodes had begun to settle upon the sword, a great surge of water condensed around the blade.
Mana the color of the lake's reflecting surface took on the very form of water, and a violent spray burst from the blade for an instant.
A sword wreathed in ever-shifting, softly flowing current.
The blade, wrapped in the Unique Mana that only those who had ascended to the Sword Saint's realm could emit, sang cold above the lake.
— ......!
Seeing it, Suleiman's beast-soldiers seemed to sense something on pure instinct, and began edging backward.
Raising the two-handed sword — its blade wound in mana that flowed as living water — serenely to her side, she walked slowly toward the enemy in her silver armor.
Then the foremost of the flinching, retreating beast-soldiers spread its arms wide, roared, and let out a warped shriek.
And it came storming across the ice, sword plunging down toward the water-haired girl.
At the same moment — the Anarchilon of reality, in its final death throes, raised a leg like a stone pillar and drove it down.
Two mighty attacks, each seeking his life, fell through the cleaving air — in the present and the past at once.
But the path of the longsword's silver arc that would receive that attack — 'I' realized that I, too, knew it.
Enoch raised his head.
The Sword Saint of the Waves — no.
The sword-form I myself completed, once, somewhere.
—— [Reverse Flow].
Enoch, having reached the state of no-mind, rotated the axe once. With that single, simple motion, he slid aside even the colossal, final, desperate stomp of the enemy.
The enemy's green-glowing eyes went wide.
But Enoch, expressionless, only gripped the axe, his dark-blue eyes shining vivid.
He knew what came next. It was 'my' sword.
What derives from [Reverse Flow] is the sword that — soft as lake water — deflects and turns against its wielder any overwhelming force this world can offer.
The form woven from a will quiet as a lake's still surface, made for exactly this next link in the chain.
Like water pouring through the seams of armor — the strike that churns through everything within the enemy's carapace — its name—
His hand, gripping the axe iron-hard as he sprinted.
The black, modern-styled axe, cracks finally spreading across its whole body as its durability gave out under strike after strike.
And Enoch, black hair streaming, drove it down into the enemy's carapace without a moment's hesitation.
[Lethal Strike]
That was all there was.
In an instant, sound vanished from his ears — and in his vision, a blinding flash and a violent ball of fire bloomed.
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