Chapter 1106

BOOM!

The flash that filled my vision was red as blood.

Pwoom!

Unfathomable power seethed in every strike.

Krrrunch!

The world kept turning upside down, then righting itself.

No—not the world. Me.

Fwoooooosh—BOOM!

A tremendous shock shot up my spine and spread through my entire body.

After dozens of exchanges in the space of a lightning flash, I ended up buried deep in the layered rubble of the wall.

Cough.

Blood surged up against my will and spilled past my lips.

A System warning chime sounded through the ringing in my ears. The pain coming from every part of my body told me the warning was real.

I’m sure I heard something.

I muttered it weakly to myself, remembering a familiar voice that had rung out somewhere in the distance just before the assault sent me flying.

But I must have imagined it.

One of those hallucinations that came to me every now and then when I was exhausted and hurting.

“…Damn it.”

Blood kept welling up. My torn-up hands tingled.

Even so, I forced my aching body upright with a quiet curse.

No. I had to.

If I didn’t stop that monster, none of the thousands of allies risking their lives to defend the West Gate could.

Splash. Splash.

Heavy footsteps approached, neither fast nor slow.

With every step, the blood swirling ankle-deep in the downpour trembled like a living thing.

Shhhhhh.

It was enough to chill anyone who saw it.

Hundreds of snakes, red from head to tail, seemed to slide across the surface of the water.

And at the end of their eerie advance stood a monster, ready to take in more power.

Hssss.

The blood seeped into his skin as though it had never existed outside him.

Then the monster’s eyes blazed a fiercer red through the pounding rain.

They were fixed on one person among the countless allies frozen like statues.

Me.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

His low voice reached me clearly.

The monster of blood had absorbed every drop within a radius of more than a hundred feet, devouring the life and strength it held. He gazed at me, eyes bright with delight.

“You can never be my equal. No one on this battlefield can.”

Veterans who’d survived for years in Murim, a mountain of sabers and a forest of swords, had a saying.

Too much confidence became conceit and arrogance. Go further still, and it became hubris. Those were the feelings a martial artist had to guard against most.

And if an enemy fell prey to them, you seized on that weakness to find a way out alive.

The advice had been passed down among martial artists like a maxim. Jeok Cheongang had often told me much the same thing.

But—

This isn’t conceit.

I knew it instinctively.

No—I was facing that monster myself. I knew better than anyone.

This wasn’t arrogance or hubris. It was certainty.

A certainty even I, who had created more possibilities and variables than anyone under heaven, couldn’t deny.

The monster who had become the Blood Lord in the truest sense approached, crushing everything around him with power and presence greater than anyone else’s on this battlefield.

Krrr.

The air trembled. The ground shook.

Neither the torrential rain nor the arrows loosed by archers who’d scraped together their courage atop the parts of the wall still standing could touch a hair on his head.

They had only irritated him.

Vmmmm.

The hundred or so arrows that had stopped above the Blood Lord’s head as though caught by an invisible hand trembled. Then their points turned.

Toward the insects who deserved to die for daring to bar the path of a monster who had drawn close to the absolute ruler.

“Get out of the way!”

The warning burst from my lips on instinct.

Fwhoosh! Thud-thud-thud!

The arrows streaked through the air in a flash, their fierce whistle merging into one.

Through the shield-bearers protecting the archers with iron-plated shields. Through the archers sheltering behind them.

Through everything in their path.

Thud.

The unit commander at the front was the first to drop to one knee.

The others stared blankly at one another.

Eyes wide with disbelief, they looked back and forth between the huge holes in their bodies and the monster standing hundreds of feet away. Then they breathed their last.

“T-This can’t be…”

Thump. Clatter.

One by one, bodies fell onto the ground slick with blood and rain.

Some stumbled backward in terror. Some tried to advance, refusing to accept that they were dying. Some crumpled where they stood without even a final cry.

They met death in different ways, but not one escaped it.

They all died.

Two hundred of our allies—archers, shield-bearers, even martial artists.

In a single instant.

Slide. Splash!

Someone whose name I didn’t know rolled down from the wall and landed in a pool of blood.

“Heaven above and earth below.”

In the suffocating silence that settled over everything, Dark Heaven’s followers had entered past the broken ranks and wall ruins that had crumbled with the Blood Lord’s arrival. As if bewitched, they began reciting their creed.

“All demons bow!”

They no longer shouted.

The killing intent they’d given off while struggling to cross the wall was gone, too.

Shhk!

They simply swung the blades in their hands without a word.

“Heaven above and earth below…!”

Rapture filled their faces as they marveled at the miracle before their eyes.

“All demons bow…!”

They praised the one ruler who wasn’t on this battlefield, yet could bring all under heaven to its knees from within that deep darkness.

Even if death awaited them.

Crunch!

“Hea—khhk. Lord of Heaven.”

Even when a stray blade cut their throats, when their arms and legs were severed, when their chests were pierced, they never lost the smiles etched across their lips.

The dozen fanatics charging at me without a hint of fear were no different.

“A-at last. The glory of martyrdom…”

Stab! Krrrunch!

In the end, humans were made of flesh. Once their heads were gone, they couldn’t speak.

It didn’t matter whether they’d taken a Temporary Strength Pill, drawing on strength beyond their limits at the cost of their lives, or swallowed anything else.

But why?

I’d swung my hand like a blade and taken their heads off in one stroke, yet I could still hear their unfinished words.

Over and over. Without a moment’s pause.

“These… crazy bastards.”

The curse slipped out between breaths that had somehow grown ragged.

It felt as though every drop of blood in my body had turned to ice.

I’d thought I’d seen and dealt with enough lunatics to last a lifetime.

The twenty-first-century world I’d been born and raised in had its own kind of barbarity, different from Murim’s.

Skyscrapers soared above the clouds. More than half a century had passed since humanity first ventured into space. A civilization combining cutting-edge science and Magic had grown brighter and more powerful than ever.

But none of that changed a thing.

The modern world was still full of madmen.

People were murdered in broad daylight. Judges’ gavels and reporters’ cameras swayed under the weight of money and liquor.

And that wasn’t all.

Dictators, relics of a bygone age, prepared for wars—and started them.

Plenty of people tried to bridge the distance between their religions and sects with missiles and terror instead of forgiveness and reconciliation.

In the world I’d seen, they were all fanatics.

Madmen who’d lost their minds by attaching themselves blindly to their own goals. They saw and felt only what they wanted, swaying as they got drunk on it.

Of course, the most extreme had been the fanatics who followed the Doppelganger. But now I could say this with certainty.

The madness I’d seen in them, in both its scale and its purity, was nothing next to that of the Dark Heaven followers before me.

And at the center of this bloody storm of madness, a monster came hurtling forward with the momentum of a great mountain.

“Have you ever seen moths?”

I could feel it.

The Blood Lord was at ease, but he hadn’t let his guard down.

His red eyes were fixed solely on me, as though he had no interest in the battles raging around us. They brimmed with certainty and killing intent.

“I have. Countless times, before the Tianshan Mountains fell under that person’s control. I saw those foolish things fly toward torches and burn to death.”

I didn’t answer.

Instead, I drove the shaft of White Flame, still in my grip, deep into the ground at my feet. Then I kicked up the weapons strewn around me and sent them flying at him.

Fwoooooosh—BOOM!

Krrrunch!

The blades, wreathed in Force, cut through the air one after another. Then an immense shock wave slammed into the space around them with a deafening roar.

Not where I’d aimed—the Blood Lord—but somewhere in the air and ground.

“But one day, while watching the moths, a question occurred to me.”

The Blood Lord swung his Red Blade at lightning speed, casually knocking aside everything flying toward him, and continued in a clear voice.

“Did they fly toward the torch knowing they would burn to death? Or did they fly toward it because they didn’t know?”

Crunch!

I cut down the enemies charging at me from every direction. After the wall, our ranks were now collapsing fast, too.

The fanatics came on crying out for martyrdom. The sight of them—and the wave of fear they stirred up—was overpowering even the effect of One Against a Thousand.

“I still haven’t found the answer. No—I never bothered looking. It wasn’t long before I met that person and gained enough power that I had no need to wonder how moths felt.”

At that moment—

Whoooooom!

The Blood Lord lifted his Red Blade high. A massive Force surged along its scarlet edge.

An energy unlike anything I’d ever seen—or imagined could exist.

“But I think you might know the answer.”

Certainty in himself.

Killing intent sharp as a blade. Hatred beyond anger. The elation of finally achieving his purpose.

All of it—every feeling, every ounce of his aura and power—was directed at me.

My breath caught. My hand trembled.

But I was ready.

I’d prepared the best strike I could manage. Perhaps my last.

I took a deep breath and said what had been on the tip of my tongue.

“I’m not one of them.”

“What?”

“I’m the kind of bastard who doesn’t burn to death even if he flies into the flames. Who flies in first whether he knows what’ll happen or not. That’s me.”

“…!”

The silence felt like an eternity, though it lasted only an instant.

At its very end, the Blood Lord answered.

No—he moved.

So did I.

Pop.

More than a hundred feet of space vanished between us in an instant, and his Red Blade carved a massive blood-red line.