Chapter 41

Chapter 41. A Talent Beyond Measure

'Impossible.'

He shook his head at once.

The crystal orb in the Chamber of Selection was absolute.

It was an instrument governed by the System.

Then there was only one answer.

The man truly had shown no 'aptitude.'

No—it would be more accurate to say he couldn't show it.

'Black.'

Cryos had completed his investigation of Rag.

When Rag placed his hand on the orb in the Chamber of Selection, the crystal had turned black, he'd been told.

The Administrator had judged it as 'Null.'

Emptiness.

Bearing no color whatsoever.

But that was wrong.

It wasn't empty.

'Mix every color together and you get black.'

Every color of every Disaster that existed in the world.

A chaos born from blending them all into one.

That was the true identity of that black.

'And yet, this too defies reason.'

He wanted to deny it.

In the world of gods, a hodgepodge was proof of weakness.

The more powerful a god, the more obsessively they devoted themselves to a single Authority.

The god of fire pursued hotter fire; the god of water pursued deeper water.

This was 'purity,' and it was 'caliber.'

Not even the Twelve Sovereign Gods were exceptions.

They, too, had reached those seats by standing at the pinnacle of a single domain.

But that man?

Cryos stared at the battlefield before him.

CRASH—!

Hellfire melted ice.

The meltwater soaked the earth.

The saturated ground collapsed beneath its own weight.

A storm howled over the wreckage, scattering debris.

There was no collision.

Mana of different attributes was tangling together, yet no repulsive force arose.

They meshed like gears, turning in perfect synchrony.

An exquisitely restrained level of control.

The artistry of juggling multiple Disasters with a single hand bordered on art.

'Can that truly be called a Disaster?'

It couldn't be explained by any single Disaster.

Every attribute harmonized to create one immense current.

A symphony of destruction.

A prelude to the end.

Cryos had to concede.

'Yes, if I had to define it......'

His mouth went bone-dry.

'A Great Calamity.'

An aggregate of Disasters.

Calamity incarnate.

That man possessed a vessel capable of wielding a Great Calamity.

"Ha."

A hollow laugh escaped.

They'd mocked him for having no talent.

Ridiculed him as a Parachute who'd ridden luck to the top.

But the truth was a monster.

An off-the-charts being that no measurement could even capture.

But Cryos shook his head.

'I have to crush the bud now.'

His eyes sharpened.

Impressive, yes.

Worth acknowledging.

However.

'He is a greenhorn.'

A newcomer who had only just begun climbing the Tower.

No matter how exceptional his talent, 'time' could not be cheated.

Their accumulated Divinity ran to different depths.

Their total reserves of divine power were incomparable.

How much divine power did it cost to maintain that grandiose Great Calamity?

It couldn't last.

He'd surely hit bottom.

'I will show you what a true war between gods looks like.'

Cryos raised his hand.

His shadow stretched long.

From a darkness deeper than the abyss, four shapes rose.

RUMBLE!

Cold howled.

A savagery fierce enough to make even Rag's storm falter for a heartbeat.

Knights clad in black armor.

Riders astride skeletal horses. Harbingers of death.

Death's Four Knights.

Cryos's personal guard and the chief architects of his floor's impenetrability.

They were not living beings.

They were killing machines, condensed over millennia from the resentful spirits and cold Cryos had gathered.

They did not tire.

They knew no pain.

Above all, their bodies were composed of 'absolute zero' cold.

Any half-hearted flame would freeze before it could even touch them.

"Go."

Cryos commanded.

"Bring me that impudent greenhorn's head."

NEEEIGH!

The skeletal horses shrieked.

All four knights kicked off the ground at once.

CRASH!

The earth froze solid.

Neither the poison fog nor the flames could halt their charge.

Where the knights passed, only white frost remained.

They barreled toward Rag in a straight line.

'Regret meeting me today.'

Cryos was certain.

Talent?

Before overwhelming power, such things were meaningless.

***

Heavy.

Wielding two Authorities simultaneously was like trying to thread a needle while holding iron balls in both hands.

The weight of an Authority was on a different plane from magic.

If magic was the art of deceiving the world through calculated formulas, then an Authority was the violence of crushing the world beneath sheer will.

The nature was different.

The scale was different.

An ordinary being would have suffered a mental collapse and self-destructed.

But.

'I am a mage.'

A deranged mage, at that.

I had spent my entire life immersed in the currents of mana.

There may have been others who wielded more destructive magic, but no one who could dissect mana with more precision than me.

'Micro-control.'

That was my specialty.

The Philosopher's Stone.

How had I created that impossible artifact?

How had I drawn a magic circle spanning the entire globe?

I connected tiny dots to form lines, layered lines to form planes.

Hundreds of millions—trillions—of mana circuits linked without a single margin of error.

The process of splitting a vast ocean of mana into grains of dust and reassembling them.

That hellish cycle of repetition and mastery had forged me.

That was why I could do it.

Two wholly disparate Authorities danced in my hands.

No collision.

No friction.

Wherever my will reached, the Disasters flowed, mingled, and detonated.

CRASH—!

Cryos's legion was isolated.

Trapped in poison fog, scorched by flame, shredded by the storm.

Perfect control.

But the enemy wouldn't give up.

"Kill him!"

At Cryos's roar, darkness surged forward.

Death's Four Knights.

They tore through the storm of Disaster.

Hellfire licked their armor, but the absolute-zero cold would not melt.

Strong.

Raw firepower alone couldn't halt their charge.

Killing intent, right at my doorstep.

Spear tips aimed for my throat.

I had to choose.

Continue maintaining the Authorities and fight, or defend.

I didn't hesitate.

'I stop.'

I pulled back my left hand.

I lowered the staff.

The raging typhoon died. The erupting pillars of fire guttered out.

Wide open.

A glint of triumph appeared in the knights' eyes.

They must have thought I'd given up.

Must have judged that my mana had run dry and I'd collapsed.

Their spears accelerated.

But I smiled.

'Idiots.'

I gripped the necklace at my throat.

I channeled mana.

HUMMMM!

A transparent light burst forth.

The Ancient-grade item.

Aegis of the Ancient God.

The domain deployed.

It wasn't wide.

Barely enough space for me to lie down.

A narrow absolute sanctuary that wrapped around me like a coffin.

But its effect was certain.

CLANG! CLAANG!

Dull impacts.

The knights' spears halted in midair.

They hadn't reached me.

A single centimeter.

That thin membrane repelled them, impenetrable.

"......?!"

The knights panicked.

They swung again.

Pouring dark mana into downward chops, thrusts, slashes.

This was a barrier that could withstand even a high-ranking god's strike.

A wall that puppets of a Lesser god couldn't dream of breaching.

I watched them with my arms folded.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't attack.

Inside this Aegis, I was a thoroughly isolated observer.

But that was enough.

My role ended here.

'I've drawn their eyes.'

Cryos.

His gaze was fixed entirely on me.

Trembling with excitement, waiting for the moment his personal guard killed me.

That carelessness would be the noose around his neck.

I shifted my gaze.

Behind the knights.

Far off, toward where Cryos stood.

A shadow flickered there.

A covert killing intent that no one had noticed.

The one who had inherited the power of the Bow Demon—stealth that evaded even a god's eye.

Seria.

She was drawing her bowstring.

Holding her breath, erasing her presence.

For the sake of a single, certain kill.

'Fire.'

Had she read my lips?

FWIP!

The air split.

An arrow flew.

A transparent death—soundless, formless—hurtled toward Cryos's heart.

THUNK!

"GRAAAAAAGH!"

A scream erupted.

The God of Frost, Cryos, clutched his chest and staggered.

Unbelievable.

He'd summoned Death's Four Knights, his personal guard.

He'd sicced them on Rag and positioned himself safely in the rear to direct the battle.

He'd considered it a flawless setup.

And it had been a trap.

'A decoy?'

Rag had made himself the bait.

He'd locked himself inside the absolute defense of the Aegis, pinning the knights' attention in place.

In that opening, the hidden sniper—Seria—had drawn her bow.

"You wretched......!"

Cryos ground his teeth.

His heart was pierced.

A fatal wound.

An injury that would have killed any ordinary being on the spot.

But he was a god.

It wasn't over yet.

HUMMMM!

Blue cold exploded from Cryos's body.

"...You managed to hit my heart."

He grinned through the agony.

"Lucky you. Of all things, you struck the one weakness."

Cryos was a god born with the quality of 'immunity.'

Physical attacks: nullified.

Magical resistance: maximized.

Most attacks couldn't even scratch him.

Save for one spot—the heart.

But that was only the story of Phase 1.

"There will not be a second time."

CRASH—!

Cryos's body began to change.

His skin turned transparent, his blood vessels froze.

He shed his humanoid form and was reborn as a colossal mass of ice.

Phase 2.

The Glacial Colossus.

In this state, Cryos's entire body was composed of sacred ice.

The heart was no longer a weakness.

The 'core' had retreated somewhere inside his body and was constantly on the move.

It couldn't be found.

It couldn't be broken.

The only vulnerable moment was a fleeting instant when the core rose to the surface to discharge mana.

Catching that timing was next to impossible even for a god's eyes.

"Despair. This is the true power of a......"

FWIP!

Before the sentence could finish.

The air split once more.

An arrow from somewhere.

It bored into the right shoulder of Cryos—precisely where the ice grain rippled, just barely.

CRACK!

"......?!"

Cryos's eyes bulged.

The pain arrived a beat later.

"GRAAAAAAGH!"

The scream shook the snowfield.

His ice shoulder shattered.

The core hidden within was struck dead-on.

'Th-this can't be!'

He was aghast.

It couldn't be coincidence.

The core moved.

It changed position by the second.

And yet the arrow had flown without hesitation and embedded itself as though it knew exactly where the core would be.

'She can see it?'

His skin crawled.

The sniper, Seria.

Could her eyes perceive it?

Or had Rag told her?

Each strike targeted the lethal weakness with surgical precision.

RUMBLE!

The Colossus's body crumbled.

Phase 2 was forcibly terminated.

Cryos rolled across the ground.

Terror.

An emotion he hadn't felt in millennia crept up his spine.

'I'm going to die.'

At this rate, he'd truly die.

Of course, Phase 3 still remained.

His final form.

The most powerful, the most devastating.

But if even that last weakness had been seen through?

'N-no.'

Cryos stumbled backward.

He couldn't do this alone.

He needed a shield.

A meat shield to protect him.

"Death's Four Knights! Get over here, now!"

He screamed in a ragged voice.

"Protect me!"

The order was given.

Death's Four Knights, who had been hammering Rag's Aegis, froze.

NEEEIGH!

The skeletal horses wheeled around.

Their master was in danger.

A forced recall.

They abandoned Rag and tore toward Cryos at breakneck speed.

"Block them! Kill the sniper!"

Cryos shrank into himself, screaming.

He was desperately gathering every scrap of cold around him.

Because he was transforming into his final Phase 3.

***

I smiled.

'I've beaten this boss before.'

Before the Regression, climbing the Tower with the Strike Force, I'd been able to map his weaknesses.

In other words, I knew exactly what Cryos's vulnerabilities were.

No matter how he tried to hide.

No matter how he tried to run, once he was inside my kill zone.

"Welcome to a mage's battlefield, Cryos."

Cryos would die here today.