Chapter 133
Chapter 133: Who Told You an Ultimate Skill Can Only Be Used Once Per Battle?
All the Knights stared up at the monstrously hideous creature blotting out the sky. Its wild, frenzied aura clashed ceaselessly against the biting cold of the air.
Like a colossal mountain suddenly breaking free from a seal and erupting from the earth,
every single person present was overwhelmed with shock.
"Beneath the Delin Manor.....something like this was actually hiding down there?"
"What in the world is that thing!?"
Someone voiced their confusion, yet no one could answer.
Viktor stood amid the crowd, letting the foul stench endlessly pouring off the creature wash over him.
He raised his head and looked at the terrifying being before him, its entire body ablaze with black flames. Magic Power welled up inside him in a steady, unbroken torrent.
【Devotee of the Goddess】
This designation did not refer to a follower of any single specific Goddess. Within the game, this was the name of a category of creature.
These beings held a fanatical devotion that had twisted their very sense of purpose to an extreme and warped degree.
As though their reason had been completely stripped away, they instinctively lashed out against any being that ran counter to their own stance—enacting acts of fanatical belief.
As followers who had pledged themselves to a particular Goddess, they were a collective of consciousnesses—the ultimate embodiment of extremism.
The form of the 【Devotee of the Goddess】 was not originally what it appeared.
They may once have been human—devout believers who revered a God.
But as time consumed them, those fanatics became so grotesquely warped in the stance they adhered to, that belief utterly displaced reason, until they willingly transformed themselves into the living avatar of the 'faith' within their hearts.
The flesh turned numb under the dominion of the spirit, until it was wholly and irreversibly tainted by belief.
An ordinary Follower, by nature, holds a belief that is quite pure and upright.
Such a Follower may even receive the genuine favor of divine messengers.
Yet in the eyes of an extreme Follower, there exists only the absolute.
So absolute—that they believe themselves to be the divine messengers of the Goddess's will.
In the faraway lands of the Northern Frontier, Angus's extreme sense of justice had drawn this extraordinarily hideous 【Devotee of the Goddess】 to him.
These extreme Followers had not sprung from within the Empire itself.
Strict codes of conduct, along with upright guidance, kept the Empire in a state of exceptionally balanced equilibrium at all times.
Those chaotic Followers existed almost exclusively in Goddess Churches outside the Empire.
Their devotion to their own faith had reached a degree of fanaticism that was nothing short of appalling. Even the Goddess herself had completely given up on them.
Yet precisely because they lacked the Goddess's guidance, they grew ever more convinced that everything they did was righteous.
In their desperate eagerness to prove themselves as messengers of the Goddess they worshipped, these extreme Followers continuously enacted twisted judgments throughout the world.
Their singular goal was one thing alone—to bring the Goddess back down into the mortal world.
By any means necessary.
At this moment, the hideous creature amid the wind and snow endured the searing agony of its body being burned without end. It raised an enormous mass of thick, writhing tentacles from within that dark form, ripping through the wind and snow and driving them forward in a direct assault.
Gwen swung her blade and stepped in front of Viktor.
Those tentacles surged rapidly toward Gwen—but the next instant, they froze completely in place.
They immediately twisted their direction, converging from every side toward Viktor behind her.
Viktor merely watched that frenzied blackness, utterly unmoved.
Wind blades rose from all around him, transforming into something like a storm, shearing through every incoming tentacle without exception.
The severed tentacles fell to the ground, twitching and convulsing, before ultimately dissolving into a burst of scattered fragments and burning away to nothing.
At this moment, Viktor watched as the Devotee's Health Bar abruptly shot up, his voice level.
"Is this the extent of it?"
LV40—
The Devotee before him was not particularly powerful. It had even needed to conceal its True Form beneath the Delin Manor, using Jaxiu's body to scheme everything from behind the scenes.
Perhaps Jaxiu had never truly existed at all.
It was nothing more than an extraordinarily vile, self-dissolved vessel of hollow faith.
Very soon, the black Magic Formation beneath Viktor's feet fragmented like a gradually tearing curtain, dissolving into several trails of smoke and drifting toward the creature's body.
Upon the snowfield, an enormous green Magic Formation, threaded with crimson patterns, began to bloom slowly across the vast expanse of the snowfield.
The thin layer of accumulated snow melted into water at a speed visible to the naked eye, spreading outward in every direction.
The long-dormant, newly revealed soil beneath their feet appeared before everyone's eyes.
Beneath that intricately constructed Magic Formation, green shoots suddenly burst up through the soil, growing at a rapid pace.
Those countless plants gradually pushed their heads up through the boundless white, dyeing the earth a living green.
In the clear blue sky above, a blazing crimson sun hung suspended—its dazzling radiance seemed to fill this place with an intense, scorching heat.
Like a deity who commanded flame, its gaze now fell upon this eternally frozen and desolate ice plain.
【Sylvan Fragrance·Scorched Earth】
Everyone stood completely rooted in place. The boundless white snowfield was actually and gradually vanishing.
What had originally been a green garden of only a few meters began to spread outward toward the surroundings.
In the blink of an eye, the lush, waist-high flowers and grass had already swallowed the armored Knights whole.
The Knights stood frozen, the dense greenery reflected in their eyes, and for a time they fell utterly silent.
This place—was the Northern Frontier.
The Empire's extreme north.
For a hundred years, it had been nothing but wind and snow, a winter that never relented.
Even during the hottest season, only a handful of days ever passed without snowfall.
And now, they were still far, far from that season.
At this moment, no one could comprehend the magnitude of Viktor's power.
Even the climate and ecosystem of the Northern Frontier could be altered at will—what kind of terrifying Magic Power was this?
The assembled Knights felt the sweat pouring unchecked from their foreheads.
Whether it was from the sudden spike in temperature or not, no one could say.
But every single person understood it with absolute clarity.
Just moments ago, they had been standing with weapons raised, facing off against this terrifying man.
In hindsight, how utterly foolish that had been.
Beneath the blazing sun, the black flames seemed to burn even more ferociously.
The tearing, fractured voice of 'Jaxiu' continued to shriek its agony without end.
Trapped in boundless suffering, it cried out over and over:
"Sa—ve—me—"
That trembling, distorted voice carried far into the distance. Standing amid the green, Kavra's heart gave a sharp jolt.
The blood-and-flesh abomination before her was clearly an entirely different species from the Jaxiu she held in her memory.
Yet she had a profoundly vague intuition.
That the wicked thing before her—was her younger brother.
Countless Knights felt the reverberating shock of that shriek, and the sweat on their foreheads poured down all the more fiercely.
Thick-trunked trees shot up from the newly born soil, rocketing skyward. Their dense, lush branches and leaves blanketed the formerly open snowfield.
Just then, Viktor tucked both hands into his pockets, and his languid voice rang out:
"Kavra."
Hearing Viktor's voice, Kavra immediately snapped back from the stupor that shrieking voice had pulled her into.
Before she could even look toward Viktor, his voice had already continued.
It was a quiet voice, but every single person present could hear it clearly.
"I've already thought up tomorrow's headline for you."
"The Second Young Master of the Delin Family attempted treason and killed his own father with his own hands."
Kavra heard these words and jolted violently, staring at him in disbelief.
Her expression carried what seemed like complex, layered feeling—and profound, crushing anguish.
She opened her mouth, but every word felt like a boulder lodged in her throat.
As a person who understood politics, she knew this very clearly.
Within the Delin Family—a family whose name was synonymous with righteous Knights standing guard over the Northern Frontier—something this wicked had appeared.
If word of this got out, it would be, without question, a blade dragged viciously across the entire Delin Family's throat.
No one would trust a family of justice that had harbored a monstrous evil from within.
The entire Delin Family—every single member—would be branded by the people of the Northern Frontier, and indeed the entire Empire, with the mark of colluding with Magical Creatures.
Viktor's voice had not yet stopped.
"Do you wish to preserve the Delin Family?"
"Then do as I say."
At this moment, Kavra's fists clenched slightly.
She had no choice.
In that instant, Kavra suddenly recalled something Viktor had once said.
The grudge with the Delin Family—has only just begun.
"......Fine."
That faint, barely audible word seemed to have consumed every last ounce of Kavra's strength.
Her father's tragic death. Her younger brother's misfortune.
She, who valued family bonds above all else, felt the pain of it more keenly than anyone.
Yet no matter what, for now there was no other way through than this.
Seeing this, Viktor's eyes lit up with a smile.
"You've made the right choice."
In an instant, the wind that had been trembling ceaselessly came to an abrupt stop.
The fierce brilliance of the sun gradually dimmed, but that scorching heat still relentlessly seared the wicked black entity.
The world, gradually, became an absolute darkness.
The brilliant sun in the sky seemed to be suddenly replaced by a lustrous full moon. The surroundings fell as though they had retreated into the void—plunging into an incomprehensible black.
Even time itself could be affected?
The Knights stared into the utterly silent darkness, overwhelmed by boundless shock.
But suddenly, within the boundless black, an intensely brilliant white Magic Formation appeared.
Delicate threads of Magic Power pulsed and flickered, gradually completing the Formation.
The sky seemed to have split into 2 moons. Faint moonlight fell upon the earth.
"That.....that isn't a moon!"
"Those are eyes!"
Someone among the Knights seemed to perceive something and suddenly cried out from within the darkness.
Everyone looked up. An enormous, pitch-black unidentified entity gradually materialized from the sky.
Though it blended together with the surrounding darkness, somehow, every one of them could faintly make out the bizarre outline of that strange thing.
Those 2 round moons had become eyes. Its colossal body raised a scythe, and it gazed down at Jaxiu upon the earth below.
Chaos-attribute Magic—【Moonlight】
Whoosh!
In an instant, the blade of that scythe sliced through the boundless, silent darkness and carved a blindingly luminous white gash directly across the fabric of space.
The razor-sharp edge drove deep into the creature's body.
In that instant, the wicked entity felt an intense, searing pain—yet on its body, no wound appeared.
Instead, what it felt across its spirit and soul was a powerful, cleaving rupture.
The enormous black shadow raised its scythe again and swung it down once more.
The surrounding darkness erupted into 2 crossing beams of white light.
As though to tear apart the entire expanse of space entirely.
Finally, as the white scythe-marks expanded ever wider, the darkness gradually dissolved.
The blazing radiance of the sun once again entered everyone's eyes.
The Knights stared at the mass of flesh still writhing in agony before them, and voiced their uncertainty.
"Is the creature...dead?"
If something could survive an attack that powerful, just how strong would this wicked creature have to be?
Recalling the scene just moments before, every Knight was convinced—magic that formidable could only be used once, surely.
After all, even Mages had their limits.
And so, all eyes converged on the Devotee, watching in silence as the creature convulsed in a frenzy.
The countless mouthparts and tentacles across its body continued to twitch and spasm, as though in immense suffering.
Its chaotic and distorted voice continued to drift through the air.
"You—can't—kill—me—"
"You—can't—kill—"
The words were not yet finished when the voice seemed to be abruptly cut off.
"Is that so?"
"Then, let us,"
Viktor gazed at it calmly, raising one hand slightly, letting it hover in midair.
"Do it again."
Snap!
A crisp snap of his fingers rang out. In an instant, the sky plunged back into boundless darkness—consuming the world entirely.
A sliver of moonlight fell again across the faces of those assembled.
As those 2 brilliant moons surfaced once more in the sky above, like a hunter lurking in the deepest shadow, that boundless shock seized every Knight's mind once more.
Leaving them with nothing but—
A blank.