Chapter 522: Slay All (XXVI)
Surrounded by a battlefield that looked less like war and more like the aftermath of divine punishment, Aventurine stood amidst the dispersing veil of True Darkness and stared down at the crippled Great Devil before him.
The creature had once resembled a wolf, at least in the same way a nightmare resembled a memory. Now, its form was warped into something grotesquely humanoid, towering even while half-collapsed into the snow. Its limbs were too long, its ribcage too exposed, and its spine arched upward beneath torn flesh like something trying to crawl out from inside it. Rotting gray fur clung to patches of diseased skin, while clouds of spores leaked endlessly from the cracks in its ruined body, drifting into the air like the breath of a corpse that refused to understand it had already died.
Thankfully, Aventurine’s armor filtered the poisonous bloom.
The polished plates of his armor were layered with precise enchantments and subtle engineering, sealing him away from the Corruption trying to seep into the air around him. The spores brushed harmlessly against the armor surrounding him, unable to find purchase. Without that protection, even approaching the creature would have been a gamble most sane people would refuse.
Fortunately for him, sanity had never been one of his primary investments.
The Great Devil was dying.
That much was obvious.
It had only one leg left, the other torn off somewhere in the chaos of its battle with the Drake Devil. Massive claw marks carved deep trenches across its chest and abdomen, exposing muscle, broken bone, and blackened organs that still twitched with stubborn life. A savage bite wound gaped across its torso, large enough to fit a man inside, and whatever had made it had clearly intended to tear the thing in half.
It had almost succeeded.
Almost.
Aventurine did not allow himself the luxury of underestimating it.
Only moments earlier, despite missing limbs, despite half its flesh hanging loose from its bones, despite being close enough to death that the Nightmare Spell was probably already drafting paperwork, the Wolf Devil had still managed to kick the Drake Devil away with enough force to send that massive reptilian horror flying across mountain ranges.
That was the sort of thing one respected.
’Unkillable rascals, you and I...’
Speaking of which, the Drake Devil was also almost certainly dying. Aventurine had watched it disappear into the distance with a neck wound so deep that even from kilometers away he had been able to see the black flood of True Darkness spilling from it like blood from an opened artery. The fang dagger that inflicted that wound had done the world a favor, though, it seemed to have been lost in the chaos of the Devils’ battle.
From Aventurine’s perspective, the Drake’s luck had run out.
And if luck had a market value, he considered himself something of an expert.
With a small, practiced tilt of his fedora, he stepped forward.
The Wolf Devil noticed.
Its ruined head turned toward him with painful slowness, yellowed teeth exposed beneath shredded lips. Its remaining claw dug into the snow as it tried to rise, rage and hunger still burning inside its dimming eyes. Even dying, it wanted to kill.
Aventurine smiled behind the mask-like helmet covering his face.
"Honestly, I admire the dedication."
Then he stomped on its head.
The impact drove the creature’s skull into the frozen earth with a wet, ugly sound. Snow burst outward around his polished shoe, stained black and gray by blood and rot.
The Wolf Devil convulsed violently.
Its jaws snapped upward with lingering strength, trying to bite through his leg even as its skull cracked beneath the pressure. Aventurine simply shifted his weight and stomped again.
And again.
And again.
Each strike was methodical. Efficient. Almost bored.
The creature thrashed beneath him, claw scraping uselessly against armor, jaw snapping shut on empty air as its strength bled away. Its body twitched with stubborn refusal, but refusal did not alter outcome.
A few moments later, something gave.
There was a sharp, final crack.
Then its skull collapsed.
Brain matter splattered across the snow in a steaming ruin, and the Great Devil’s body finally went still.
Silence settled for half a heartbeat.
Then the Nightmare Spell spoke.
[You have slain a Great Devil, Avenger Of The Hunted.]
[You have received an Echo.]
Aventurine stood there for a moment, one foot still resting on the corpse, and let the words sink in.
Then he grinned.
It was hidden beneath the elegant brutality of his helmet, but the expression was there all the same — sharp, satisfied, and entirely too pleased with himself.
The thirteenth Echo.
A full decade had passed since his First Nightmare, and in all that time, he had gathered twelve Echoes. Each one had been earned through blood, luck, and a frankly irresponsible willingness to bet his life on terrible ideas.
This one, however, was the strongest by far.
A Great Devil’s Echo.
Not merely valuable.
Obscene.
Not only had this turned the expedition into an undeniable success, but it also meant they no longer needed to waste another second on this frozen backwater of a planet. The IPC had already extracted enough value from Jarilo-VI to justify the entire operation several times over.
And Diamond...
Ah.
Diamond would be pleased.
More importantly, Diamond would probably let him keep it.
That was the sort of detail that made life worth living, even if his job made him reconsider.
Aventurine exhaled slowly and adjusted his gloves with the air of a man reviewing an especially favorable investment portfolio. He murmured to himself, voice warm with amusement:
"Ah... fortune really does favor the bold—"
The world interrupted him.
Far in the distance, beyond broken mountains and the scars of battle, a pillar of light rose into the sky.
It happened so suddenly that for a moment his mind refused to process it.
One second, the horizon was frozen ruin.
The next, a star had been born.
Light erupted upward with apocalyptic force, expanding so violently that it seemed less like an explosion and more like reality itself being corrected. It consumed everything around it, a blinding column of white-gold fire that pierced the heavens and turned the frozen wasteland into daylight.
Then, just as swiftly, it was gone.
The light collapsed.
The pillar vanished.
And in its place remained only devastation.
A crater so vast it looked like a god had pressed a thumb into the surface of the world.
The snow had been cleanly erased from the surrounding landscape, leaving naked stone and molten ruin. Even the clouds above had been torn apart, the entire storm system displaced by the force of the detonation. The blizzard itself seemed to bend away from the wound left in the sky.
Aventurine stared.
Even for him, there were moments where the performance of composure became difficult.
That...
That had come from where the Drake Devil had been thrown, hadn’t it?
He lowered his hand slowly from where instinct had nearly made him shield his eyes.
"Well, that seems excessive."
He paused, glancing toward the distant silhouette of Belobog.
The city still stood.
Good.
Not because he particularly cared about its survival on a moral level — morality was a luxury usually reserved for people who could afford it — but because destroying the city would have complicated accounting.
At this point, however, even if Belobog had been erased from existence, the IPC would still consider this mission a spectacular financial success.
Its debt no longer mattered. The numbers involved had already become abstract.
A Supreme Rank Echo alone was enough to buy this entire star system, probably twice if negotiated correctly.
Debt, after a certain point, became more of a philosophical suggestion.
Aventurine looked back down at the corpse of the Wolf Devil.
He sighed lightly.
’Well, no reason to waste product.’
He crouched beside the ruined body, golden eyes narrowing behind tinted lenses.
He would harvest the Soul Shards first.
After that, the corpse itself would be transported. Every fragment of a Great Devil had value. Bone, blood, flesh, organs — someone, somewhere, would pay an absurd amount for every piece of it. If not, then that was material the Interastral Space Corporation would have no trouble making use of.
Waste was bad business.
And businesses had no use for slaves who partook in it.
***
Far away, at the center of that impossible crater, another corpse was still trying to crawl.
Cocolia dragged herself across broken stone and melted snow, her fingers digging into blackened earth as golden blood spilled behind her in a ruined trail.
Her body still carried the shape of beauty, but only in the same way a shattered cathedral still remembered worship.
She possessed a feminine build of dangerous elegance, high hips and full chest wrapped in the broken remains of jagged frozen armor, but everything about that beauty had been desecrated twice over. Her limbs were too long, stretched by corruption into something predatory. Her skin was blue and cold like ancient ice. A single frozen horn pierced from her forehead like a crown forced through bone.
One arm was missing entirely.
An entire side of her torso had been eviscerated, frozen organs spilling from the wound in glittering ruin. Cracks spread across the ice protecting her chest, exposing the fragile truth hidden beneath all her monstrous strength.
She crawled anyway.
Refusal had always been one of her better qualities.
As she pulled herself across the crater, Sunny’s voice echoed through the ruined silence.
"Where do you think... you’re going?"
Cocolia froze.
Then slowly, painfully, she turned her head.
Absolute hatred burned in her golden eyes.
Sunny stood several meters away, and he looked scarcely better.
The onyx armor of the Mantle barely held together, fractured and split across his body like a statue moments from collapse. One of his eyes was gone entirely, leaving only bloodless ruin where it had once been. Shrapnel remained buried throughout his body — metal, stone, fragments of destruction itself lodged into flesh and armor alike.
But he did not bleed.
Blood Weave saw to that.
The forbidden Lineage beneath his skin refused to allow him the dignity of hemorrhaging to death. His body remained functional through sheer stubbornness and supernatural interference.
He was still extremely injured.
And completely out of Essence.
Everything had gone into the Preservation.
Everything.
Even with the corpse of a Great Devil shielding him from the Engine’s self-destruction, survival had required every last drop. He had even been forced to dismiss Tingyun just to reclaim enough Shadow Essence for a final moment of protection.
It had bought him seconds.
Nothing more.
Now, both Preservation and Destruction were gone.
He could not summon Memories.
He could barely stand.
And perhaps most unsettling of all — his own shadows had fallen silent.
For the first time since he could remember, his Dormant Ability had deactivated.
His four shadows stood motionless on the ground beside him, flat and lifeless, stripped of awareness like corpses pretending to be shapes.
It felt wrong.
Like losing limbs he had forgotten were separate from himself.
Behind them, Scar Of The Hollow remained dead and immense, its outer scales blackened by the blast but not truly penetrated. True Darkness continued to pour endlessly from the wound in its neck, spreading over the battlefield like an ocean of blind night.
It rolled over both Sunny and Cocolia.
Vision disappeared.
Shadow sense vanished with it.
Sunny could no longer see.
He could no longer feel through shadow.
Only instinct remained.
Still, he smiled.
Because Cocolia was finished too.
He could feel it.
Her surroundings were no longer freezing over. No new constructs of ice formed around her. The pressure of her Aspect had faded into something thin and dying.
She had spent everything restoring herself enough to keep moving.
She could not attack his soul.
She could not attack his mind.
She could not heal.
And the ice over her chest...
It was already cracked.
Sunny grinned despite his mangled face.
"Not too late... to get away, you know?"
Cocolia slowly stood.
The True Darkness thickened further, swallowing even the memory of light.
Sunny closed his remaining eye.
It was useless now.
What came next would not require sight.
Then, they fought.