Chapter 99: Saint Ilarion Hospital (30)
He was the one who looked them dead in the eye and shouted with absolute conviction that he "saw the Harvest."
He was the one who insisted, with a desperate, manic urgency, that they had only forty-eight hours to save Elysium from a catastrophic end, systematically manipulating their fears and their duty, forcing them into this suicidal, god-forsaken raid on the very hospital they were strictly ordered to avoid.
"Hah...?"
Valisera’s breathing voice broke, a pathetic, ragged sound escaping her blood-stained lips.
Her wide, trembling eyes slowly dragged themselves to look at Kyle, whose bruised and battered face was pressed against the sickening, fleshy floor of the cathedral.
What does this mean...?
Valisera’s mind screamed, the words echoing in the hollow, shattered chambers of her sanity.
The cold realization began to spread through her veins like a paralyzing venom, far worse than the physical injuries she had sustained.
Did he lie to us?
Did he look at Gray’s corpse and fabricate the entire Harvest story right there on the spot?
Why?!
Her thoughts spun into a chaotic vortex of betrayal.
Every drop of blood they had spilled tonight, every agonizing sacrifice her comrades had made, the limbs lost, the lives extinguished in these cursed hallways—was it all based on a calculated, theatrical lie constructed by a G-rank porter?
Why drag the elite Alpha squad—and himself—into the jaws of this slaughterhouse if there was no?
What twisted, sickening agenda was hiding behind those dark, calculating eyes of his?
But before her fractured mind could speak the words, before she could truly comprehend the sheer, terrifying magnitude of the ultimate betrayal that had meticulously led them to their deaths...
BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The entire fleshy cathedral shook with catastrophic, world-ending violence.
It wasn’t just a mere earthquake; the structural integrity of the subterranean hellscape groaned in absolute agony.
It was as if a celestial meteor forged of pure kinetic anger had struck the very heart of the earth directly above them.
The grotesque, red flesh walls tore apart from the ceiling down, the sound resembling the ripping of a thousand wet sails.
Massive, muscular pillars that supported the cavernous room snapped like brittle silk threads, spraying geysers of corrosive blood, yellow marrow, and gigantic chunks of pulsating tissue across the room.
The air was instantly choked with the suffocating stench of vaporized iron and burning organic matter.
Saint Ilarion, who had been savoring his absolute victory just a breath ago, raised his head toward the collapsing, weeping ceiling.
His eerily calm, benevolent smile slowly faded, the mask of the holy savior slipping to reveal the face of a man thoroughly inconvenienced.
His expression was replaced by clear, cold irritation.
"How incredibly annoying you mortals are..."
Ilarion sighed heavily, a breath of profound disappointment, as he looked at the apocalyptic chaos unfolding directly above his pristine form.
"Do you have any idea how much Eitra I’m currently draining from my own core just to keep what remains of this cursed, wretched hospital from total collapse?"
He clicked his tongue, watching a massive slab of concrete intertwined with veins crash a few meters away.
"The upper two floors have already been completely pulverized by those mindless beasts you so graciously unleashed."
Ilarion lazily brushed a speck of dust and a drop of rogue blood off his immaculate white robe, his movements terrifyingly relaxed amidst the storm of destruction.
"The Transcendent Kaiser Dravion wanted to investigate this hospital next week,"
Ilarion began, his voice cutting through the deafening roar of the collapsing facility with eerie clarity.
"His inquisitors are thorough, I’ll give them that.
His committees would have inevitably breached the lower sectors.
They would have uncovered the Chimera mutation projects hiding in the dark wards.
They would have found the human blood farms in the basement, where we harvest the despair of the weak to fuel the strong..."
A wicked, triumphant gleam returned to Ilarion’s golden eyes.
"But now... looking at this beautiful, chaotic mess... I must thank you.
I thank you from the very bottom of my heart, Valisera."
Ilarion slowly opened his arms wide, as if he were a messiah embracing the rain of destruction, concrete, and torn fleshy tissue falling from the ceiling.
"Thanks to your squad’s savage, unauthorized intrusion, your brutal killing of my loyal guards, and your reckless awakening of the S-rank nightmare monsters you desperately keep fighting above... I don’t need to hide anything anymore.
I can simply lift my Eitral protection right now and let the entire hospital be completely, utterly destroyed.
All the damning evidence, all the unethical laboratories, the vats of failed experiments—they will all vanish permanently beneath millions of tons of steel and rubble."
He looked down at Valisera, his eyes mocking her despair.
"And the best part?
All the blame, every single ounce of public outrage and Guild fury, will fall squarely on you, the rogue Alpha terrorist squad!
The headlines will read that you went mad and destroyed a public hospital!
And of course, whoever miraculously survives among you will be publicly executed by the Guilds for high treason, while I...
I will emerge from the dust as the tragic, innocent victim of your senseless terrorism.
A survivor who lost his life’s work."
This was his real, sickening plan!
He was never going to fight them seriously.
He was using their desperate battle with the monsters as a massive, organic demolition blast to erase his traces before Kaiser Dravion’s inspection!
They were nothing but a convenient cleanup crew for his crimes.
And then... suddenly.
Amid the deafening roar of the collapsing ceiling, the crashing of tons of reinforced concrete, and the sickening squelch of torn fleshy tissue hitting the floor...
the world simply stopped making sense.
The apocalyptic vibrations of the monstrous battle raging above them—the devastating clash of the three S-rank nightmare beings: the Executioner, the Viscous Reaper, and the Broodmother—stopped.
They didn’t stop gradually.
The sounds of their roars didn’t slowly fade into the distance as if they were retreating.
They stopped with a sharp, instant, absolute "cut," exactly as if a cosmic switch had been violently turned off.
The continuous, earth-shattering roars of the beasts, the blinding electromagnetic Eitra explosions, the screeching sounds of melting iron and shattering barriers... all of it vanished entirely in a fraction of a single second.
It left behind a strange, heavy, terrifying silence.
It wasn’t a peaceful quiet; it was a violent, manufactured vacuum that physically choked the breath in the chest and made the eardrums throb with painful pressure.
It was the silence of a graveyard that had just been forcibly created.
Saint Ilarion, who was just raising his hand and preparing the final spell to end Valisera’s life, froze entirely in place.
The smug confidence melted from his features.
He frowned deeply, a genuine crease of confusion marring his perfect forehead.
His glowing golden eyes blinked—once, twice—for the first time since the battle began.
He slowly raised his hand, his long fingers trembling ever so slightly, trying to sense the pulse of the Eitral network within the hospital, trying to connect with the immense auras of the monsters above.
"What...?"
Ilarion whispered, his voice stripped of all its divine arrogance, carrying an unfamiliar, deeply unsettling tension.
"The nightmare monsters... the Eitra signatures of the region kings... they’ve vanished."
Ilarion took a slow step back, his pupils dilating.
"I can no longer feel their power.
All three of them.
Did they annihilate each other at the exact same millisecond?
No... that’s statistically impossible.
Even in death, their Eitra should linger..."
All sounds faded in the collapsing, fleshy cathedral.
The silence was sepulchral, thick, and oppressive, broken only by Eva’s uneven, terrified breathing in the corner and Sia’s weak, pain-filled groans.
Then... piercing through the unnatural quiet...
From the pitch, suffocating darkness of the collapsed ceiling above them, where the S-rank monsters were supposed to be rampaging...
Tick...
Tick...
Tick...
Footsteps.
Light, agonizingly calm, incredibly confident footsteps.
They were descending onto the suspended, jagged concrete rubble, stepping over the void with impossible ease, slowly heading down toward the Cathedral of Flesh.
Each step didn’t just echo in the room; it echoed directly in their skulls.
The sound carried no heavy murderous intent, no explosive rage, and yet, the sheer, concentrated absolute dread it brought with it made the air temperature plummet.
Ilarion stepped back again, his golden eyes widening in unmasked apprehension in anticipation of what was coming from the darkness.
His instincts, honed over decades of survival and manipulation, were screaming at him to flee.
Valisera, despite her total physical paralysis and the crushing weight of Kyle’s betrayal still fresh in her mind, struggled desperately to turn her head upward.
Who is it?
her mind whimpered.
Who is the entity capable of silencing three kings of hell in a single, unperceivable second... and walking so calmly over their fresh corpses?
The answer was approaching from the shadows, and its steady, rhythmic footsteps were hammering the final, inescapable nail in the coffin of this night.