Chapter 67: Minister of Stars
Roger was standing there. Under the dim lamp lights, his bloodied facial features were overlaid with expressions of pure happiness and deep relief, as if he had finally discovered the treasure he had spent his entire life searching for.
Throughout those years, he had believed with fatal certainty that he had lost his mistress, and that his old sin had condemned him to wander, but here she was now, standing before him again, in her little body.
Throughout all that past, guilt and a suffocating feeling of fear had afflicted him at every moment. The looks of reproach he imagined in his waking hours and in his sleep would freeze his blood, and had caused his magical progress to be curbed.
Every time he would begin practicing energy cultivation, he would see his mistress’s specter, lose focus, and the mana in his veins would become turbulent.
This psychological barrier made him weaken day after day, until all of his mistress’s other disciples had surpassed him by stages and became stronger than him, while he remained stuck in the Noble Level for a long time, unable to break his shackles.
But now, with his reddish eyes nearly congested with blood from excessive emotion, he sees his living mistress before him.
Roger wanted to say a lot. He wanted to shout and confess to her how much he regretted his old silence and not telling her the truth, and how much madness had possessed his mind as he accused himself at all times of being merely a piece of scum that did not deserve forgiveness. He remembered how he repeatedly tried to convince himself that he was the one who had closed his mouth at that time as a betrayal, and how he forced himself to be more and more evil and dark every day that passed, only to prove to himself that he was evil by nature and there was no hope of reforming him.
He wanted to step forward... He wanted to kneel at her feet and apologize to his mistress... But the crushing and bloody battle he had fought shortly ago against the Transmigrators Organization’s followers was fierce and beyond his body’s capacity, to the point that he himself does not know how he survived it alive.
Logic no longer mattered to him at all. His rational thinking was completely extinguished, and he no longer saw anything in existence except that child standing there. He began to step toward her with dragging, heavy steps, trailing a cloud of blood.
"My Lady... I..."
He moved his lips with extreme difficulty. The instant he took another step forward, affected by the overwhelming feeling of relief that seeped into him after having been forced to search for her in every nook and cranny of the vast capital, his knees suddenly buckled.
His body fell entirely and slammed into the ground with hardness, refusing to respond to any order. Roger had exhausted every drop of mana in his body; for although his magical strength had developed and erupted with immense speed shortly ago upon breaking the constraints he had placed on his heart because of his guilt, the human body has limits. And now... at the moment he became able to bring out all his regret, and vent all his buried feelings to his mistress... he falls helpless.
He wondered within himself with bitterness, darkness creeping into his consciousness before he fainted from the intensity of exhaustion: Am I really feeling tired? Am I really injured, is my body bleeding and am I in pain? Was I really subjected to all this beating and nearly died under the weight of the strength of the Transmigrators Organization’s dogs, and fought like a madman until I eliminated them all, then remained running and searching everywhere until I finally found her?
Although the logical answer was yes, his subconscious, sick with guilt, believed something else; it believed that he was still a true sinner, and that he was a weak villain who did not yet value his mistress sufficiently, and therefore his body let him down in this critical moment. And finally, Roger surrendered to the looming darkness and collapsed, unconscious, onto the cold pavement before Amelia’s widening eyes.
Amelia narrowed her eyes with bewilderment, as if to say, "What happened to this insane scoundrel to ruin his body like this?"
Three hours before this tragic fall... in the black night sky filled with the brilliant stars of the Starry Empire, the scene looked like a majestic cosmic backdrop upon which Roger stood gripping Hazen, who had been brutally beaten in a terrifying manner. Roger did not settle for shattering the Guard Captain’s bones through beating; he also pumped and infused the violent, silver star energy into Hazen’s mana channels, causing him to burn and writhe from the inside as if his entrails were melting.
"Aaaaaah!.. Stop... please stop!.. I swear to you that I do not know where they went.. I am merely a commanded servant carrying out instructions, nothing more!.." Hazen screamed, pain tearing at his throat.
But Roger paid no mind to Hazen’s words and pleas. His face was entirely destroyed and filled with fractures, his body feeble and completely devoid of energy as he dangled like a corpse in Roger’s iron grip. "Have mercy... I truly know nothing else!.."
Roger’s expressions were cold, dark, and utterly dissatisfied with these answers. In an icy voice devoid of humanity, he said: "You are merely a piece of useless scum.."
Behind dangled Hazen’s back in the air, Roger began to form a massive, burning star of deep blue color. The star pulsed violently and emitted vicious, terrifying hammering sounds, resembling a cosmic engine of destruction. Roger was on the verge of pushing Hazen’s bound body directly into the heart of this star to burn him a thousand times in hell...
However, at the moment he moved his hand to fling him...Ssssssswoosh!
The sky was cleft by a sharp sound. Roger, with terrifying combat instinct, avoided a blazing magical arrow in a fraction of a second; it had been targeted with extreme precision to penetrate his forehead and explode his head.
This was merely the beginning.
Roger lifted his eyes coldly upward to see the arrow’s source. His vision expanded to behold a majestic sight; dozens of the Organization’s "Valkyrie" fighters had appeared in the sky, floating in the air with their majestic white wings, gripping massive and charged magical bows of the "Noble Level."
The visual contact between Roger and the Valkyries lasted only a millisecond. The fighters’ hands moved with supreme speed, invisible even to superhuman eyes, and they loosed the arrows with terrifying intensity that transformed them into something resembling arrow machine guns, the arrows raining down as a torrential and dense storm targeted entirely at Roger’s isolated body in the sky.
Before this overwhelming ballistic attack and the rain of arrows enveloped in brilliant, lethal energy, Roger did not waver; rather, a cold, mocking smile etched across his lips. In a swift movement, he lifted Hazen’s tattered body that he was gripping in his hand and thrust him forward, using him as a human shield to take the hit instead of him!
But this heinous act did not alter a single shred of the strict Valkyries’ facial expressions, and their leader said with disdain:
"He is truly a fool if he thought this would save him.."
As if those arrows possessed their own conscious mind, they all veered in the air at sharp and impossible angles the moment they neared Hazen. They began to circle and twine around Roger in closed circular trajectories, re-targeting him and striking him from every direction and angle simultaneously!
The scene looked like the inevitable end of the Minister of Stars. The arrows surrounded him like a glowing cocoon of death. At light speed, they penetrated his body entirely from dozens of angles, and the magical points became intertwined within his flesh.
However... amidst this light explosion, his voice echoed calmly and mockingly from the heart of the attack
"Try harder, you dogs.."
The arrow lights faded, to reveal Roger standing in his place completely clean, not hit by a single wound nor touched by an individual arrow! In the final moment, he had utilized the law of "Star Void," causing the arrows to pass through his body and cross to the other side as if he were merely a specter or complete void in this universe.
Rather, the terrifying irony was in Hazen’s body. The arrows that had veered and circled to hit Roger, on their path, had again penetrated Hazen’s own body, and his entire insides were pierced! Hazen convulsed in the air violently, his limbs beginning to move with hysterical madness, exactly like a slaughtered chicken fighting the agonies of death, while Roger was preparing to annihilate the Valkyries and destroy the sky above them...
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Is the novel good so far? Some Chapters will be rewritten soon anyway... Thank you to all the supporters!