Chapter 93

Chapter 93.

CRUMBLE. Tap, tap-tap.

Wood Severance No. 2 was turning to ash and scattering away.

Watching the ash slip between my fingers, I clicked my tongue softly.

‘You did well, Wood Severance No. 2.’

An Outer God’s Authority.

And one obtained by sacrificing thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people, giving it overwhelming mass and deadly poison.

No matter how tightly I had wrapped it in Sword Energy, it seemed an ordinary tree branch could not fully withstand that corrosion.

“Ahaahahaha! It’s breaking! Your weapon is breaking!”

Iranshu laughed madly right in front of my nose, the veins standing out on his neck.

Watching the brat who had mistaken this for finally cornering me... I turned my gaze to the side.

BEEP!

[Agent! Due to the surrounding high-concentration toxic Mana, Nopi’s battery is being consumed at extreme speed.]

[B:12%]

In the corner of my vision, Nopi’s battery was shrinking by the second.

Even in the brief moment I looked away, the battery that had been at 12% dropped to 11%.

The deadly poisonous mud Iranshu had spread everywhere was corroding the Mana flow inside the fortress itself, gnawing away at the battery needed to maintain Synchronization twice as fast as usual.

“Hah!”

I drew up Mana and forcefully released Sword Energy, pushing back Iranshu’s mud.

Instead of resisting my strength, Iranshu let himself be pushed back and widened the distance.

With that final stroke, Wood Severance No. 2’s blade completely turned to ash and scattered.

“Now. What will you do?”

Iranshu was smiling broadly.

From the moment Wood Severance No. 2 began to break, he had been looking at me like a rat driven into a corner.

‘Looks like he’s convinced he’s won.’

Seeing that stupid expression...

The face of the boy who had once looked up at me in the Tower and smiled brightly overlapped with it.

It was strange.

The Tower had appeared. In other words, ten years had passed since the day every Climber, myself included, finished clearing it.

And yet Iranshu looked the same.

The same half-grown child from back then.

Not even the slightest bit of him had changed from that point.

As if someone had stopped only Iranshu’s biological clock.

“You really haven’t changed.”

Looks like you’ve been avoiding the years very well.

“...I haven’t changed?”

Perhaps those words annoyed him, because Iranshu’s eyebrow twitched.

“I...”

“Ah, no. Something has changed.”

At my words, expectation appeared on Iranshu’s face.

“...Heh.”

If other people saw it, they would still think it was a creepy smile, but I knew.

When he wanted ‘praise’ from me, his ears perked up very slightly.

As if he wanted to listen more closely.

‘Looks like he wants to hear something like, You’ve gotten stronger, or That’s impressive.’

“You’ve gotten rude.”

“...What?”

A crack formed across Iranshu’s smiling face.

“Who taught you to speak casually to me, you ill-mannered bastard?”

“Y-you...!”

Iranshu’s face twisted, and sharp anger surged over his reddened face.

If.

...If he had not become something like an Apostle of an Outer God.

If creating this situation where he had ‘pushed me this far’ had been the result of his own strength...

I might have praised my first disciple, whom I had met again after ten years.

You did well. You worked hard. That was impressive.

Warm, pleasant words like that.

But he had become an Apostle of an Outer God.

And one who boasted of power obtained by grinding up countless humans as sacrifices...

An Apostle of an Outer God so powerful and fucked up that I had never seen anything like him even in the 90th-floor range.

So Iranshu was no longer my disciple.

He was an Outer God’s lackey who had to be killed on sight.

“Kgh, khkhkh.”

Perhaps because he had gone mad with anger, Iranshu suddenly laughed like a middle-school syndrome patient.

“I wasn’t going to kill you. I was only going to cut off your arms and legs, then ask you to serve Father with me.”

“You think you could?”

“Shut up and listen!”

BANG!

When Iranshu stomped the floor in fury, the entire fortress shook with a thunderous boom.

“What the hell are you trusting that lets you act so relaxed? The moment a swordsman loses his sword, it’s your defeat. Did you practice fist arts for ten years? Even if you did, would that be as strong as your swordsmanship?”

“Haha.”

I laughed dryly.

He really had been...

spouting nonsense for a while now.

“Brat.”

Why do you think I bothered coming all the way here with Wood Severance No. 2, which could break at any moment?

“You haven’t improved.”

That malignancy of letting your guard down because you think you’ve already won, then trying to play with your prey.

That was always your weakness.

“What?”

Even during this brief moment of exchanging useless words, the battery dropped another 1%.

‘There’s no time.’

This reunion with my disciple, who had become less than human...

Let us end it here.

‘Do you know the disciple who became an insect?’

Only the base of Wood Severance No. 2 remained.

I extended the hand holding it into the air.

Then I focused my mind.

Wooooong—

A world created by extreme concentration.

...Time slowed to the utmost.

Within the desperate situation where the battery was being gnawed away,

I instead sank my senses into endless stillness.

Standing upon the clear surface of water like a polished mirror...

I reflected upon Enlightenment.

—What is a sword?

A fundamental question...!

My answer had already been decided.

A lump of metal for cutting and stabbing.

A physical shell meant to hold my Internal Energy and give shape to my killing intent.

Yes.

—A sword is nothing more than a tool.

Then, just because a mere shell has rotted away...

does that mean even the ‘true sword’ forged within me has been lost?

‘Impossible.’

As I broke through the Tower from its very bottom up to the 90th Floor, countless pieces of metal passed through my hands, then broke and melted away.

But had the killing ‘trajectory’ and ‘will’ I had swung toward my enemies’ necks ever broken?

I could state with certainty that they had not.

I had always hated the Tower.

I hated every enemy that interfered with me reaching the 100th Floor.

I hated my own ‘humanity,’ which held me back every time I was in the middle of clearing something.

Cut them all down.

That alone was the reason my sword existed.

Form was only a vessel meant to contain intent.

If the vessel had broken, then all I needed to do was manifest the intent itself into the world.

‘Sharpen intent.’

Wooooong-!

Mana surged fiercely along the Meridians throughout my body and gathered at my fingertips.

‘Temper will.’

A sword was a tool for ‘cutting to death.’

Holding that intent and will, I forged a new blade from the base of Wood Severance.

‘Manifest the sword within me...’

SHRIIING-!

Though it clearly was not a sound of physical friction, a clear Sword Cry, like an ancient famous sword being drawn from its sheath, struck my soul and rang out in my ears.

Where Wood Severance’s body had turned to ash and vanished.

The blue Mana that had risen there like a shimmer of heat gradually compressed and condensed to an ultra-high density, beginning to take on a distinct ‘form.’

There was no weight of steel, nor any limit of wood’s durability.

A sword of will and intent, completely casting off the shackles of a physical shell and forged solely for the pure purpose of cutting.

A tiny fragment of the Heart Sword, where the will itself became the sword.

The beginning of the Formless Sword, where even without a sword, a sword existed.

To name it.

—‘Light Sword.’

PAAAAAAAT—!!!

‘Cry out, Lightsaber!’

The Force is with me, you bastard.

[B:8%]

Raw, unrefined killing intent stormed through the inside of the fortress like a tempest.

“...Huh?”

I saw the smile vanish from Iranshu’s face, and horror fill its place.

‘Are you afraid?’

Of course you are.

Because this is the sum total of killing intent that cuts to death.

[B:6%]

“Let’s finish this quickly.”

Like this.

Because I have ‘my sword’ that I can draw at any time.

That is why I don’t need tools called other swords besides Star Severance.

You moron.

BANG!

The steel floor burst apart as if exploding, and my body shot through the air like a bullet.

“Uwaaaah!!!”

As the distance between us closed in an instant, Iranshu desperately poured out a rough tidal wave of mud and blocked my path.

But.

WHIIIR-!

Its cutting power was on a completely different level from when I had blocked with Wood Severance No. 2!

Every time the Light Sword in my hand sliced through the air once, the tidal wave of mud Iranshu released could not even touch me; it hissed and evaporated in midair like steam.

“You insane...! Block him! Block everything!!!”

Iranshu tore up all the steel from the fortress floor and clumped it together with the mud, raising a massive rampart.

It was an iron fortress several meters thick, with deadly poison tangled like blood vessels between steel bones.

But it was nowhere near enough to block my path.

Without even stopping my steps, I drew the Light Sword sideways.

SLAAAAASH—!!!

The solid barrier split smoothly as if sliced like tofu.

No, the steel and mud around the severed surface failed to withstand it, melted down, and evaporated wholesale.

Then even the dozens of awl-like spears flying toward me turned entirely to ash and vanished within the Light Sword’s trajectory.

I broke straight through the barrier debris scattering in the air and, in an instant, burrowed beneath Iranshu’s chin.

“No way...! Th-this didn’t exist before!!!”

“Humans are capable of something called development.”

In Iranshu’s eyes, full of shock, the blue trajectory of my Light Sword reflected coldly.

“We’re different from degraded insects like you.”

“Uwaaaah!!”

In panic, Iranshu instinctively crossed both arms and scraped together the mud he had spread across the entire fortress into a defensive barrier.

But.

I aimed the tip of the Light Sword at his heart...

SQUELCH.

And stabbed lightly.

Iranshu’s arms.

The mud.

It pierced through all of it.

“That won’t stop this.”

“Hrgh, uh...”

Iranshu’s pupils expanded as if they would tear apart.

Blue light erupted from his heart and began to burn his entire body.

SLAAASH!

Without even giving him time to struggle, I raised the Light Sword embedded in his heart diagonally and perfectly bisected Iranshu’s body.

Thud. Splat.

The upper and lower halves of the bisected Iranshu collapsed weakly to the floor.

CRUUUNCH, craaack-

An unpleasant rupturing sound that should not have been heard.

The upper half of his body, rolling on the floor after being split in two, forcibly twisted its neck and looked at me, smiling grotesquely.

“H-hehe...”

...Not a single drop of blood flowed from the cut surface.

An empty interior where neither organs nor bones could be seen.

It was merely a mud shell with black smoke rising from it.

SHOOOONG-!

From the very center of the empty shell, a pitch-black orb that seemed to have condensed dense Demonic Energy suddenly rose.

Crackle...! CRUNCH!

With a rupturing sound like someone was forcibly twisting space and tearing it apart, the air was savagely ripped open.

A dimensional gap revealed between the cracks tried to greedily swallow the orb.

[You are my master indeed.]

A low, languid voice rang out from beyond the dimensional gate.

[I will admit that the current ‘vessel’ is insufficient. But next time... it will be a little different.]

It was a familiar yet unfamiliar tone, one I was sure I had heard somewhere before.

It was not the voice of the ‘half-grown’ Iranshu.

It was the voice of a mature adult, the kind that brat might have had if he had grown up.

PAAT-!

With those words, the dimensional gate closed as the torn air sealed back together.

At the same time, the heavy pressure that had been weighing down the entire fortress disappeared as if washed away.

After watching all of that...

I reached out and slowly opened the ‘loot’ he had left behind.

“I don’t know what this is, but...”

The ‘sphere’ that had popped out from inside Iranshu’s mud shell quietly shone.

“I make it a point not to let my drop items get stolen.”