The moment the great demon’s body crumbled.
The ash-gray world, woven with chaotic lines, began to tremble and tilt. The sight of the enormous trees falling with uneasy noises was strangely lacking in reality. Colin, who was blinking his eyes blankly, came to his senses when he heard a voice calling him.
“Colin!”
“Wha, what? Shit! Crazy!”
Colin, who had lost consciousness and slumped under Kyle’s armpit, moved his feet with all his strength. But it was almost impossible for him, who was exhausted from the continuous battle, to drag a heavily armed and muscular man and speed up.
“···Amela! This!”
Colin suddenly remembered something and shouted, throwing the protector on his right arm toward the fallen mage.
Amela clumsily attached the leather protector that fell in front of her feet to her arm. She knew what Colin wanted without any further explanation.
She stretched out her arm. The spell engraved on the protector pulled its pair strongly, and the dagger was firmly held by Colin.
In the powerful attraction. Colin held the dagger with all his might, trying to escape from his grip. Fortunately, he had the spell of power that Amela had given him to make throwing easier, and he didn’t lose the dagger even though the flesh of his palm was peeled off.
Sliding to Amela’s close range, Colin grabbed her wrist with his bloodied hand. And he started walking again.
“Shi···t! I’m not a porter or anything!”
He spat out all kinds of curses with his mouth, but he succeeded in moving a few more steps with his diligent steps, carrying Kyle and Amela. But that was it.
Eventually, his legs gave way and he collapsed. Colin muttered dejectedly as he saw the tree above him start to fall.
“···We’re screwed.”
The next moment, he realized that his surroundings were moving incredibly fast. He gasped for a moment at the speed he had never experienced before. He was lightly thrown and rolled on the ground. He opened his eyes wide at the fact that there were many knights who had lost consciousness around him.
“Hahaha. There’s no monster like that.”
Ruon, who had arrived late, tilted his head at his hollow laugh. Kyle and Amela were hanging from his armpits.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Come on, if you’re going to save me, come faster. It was so close. I almost pissed myself.”
Ruon answered with a faint smile at his deliberately whining words and put the two men and women on the ground. He didn’t bother to say that he had the time to move the others because Colin had taken care of Kyle and Amela.
He didn’t have time for that.
Scre-ee-ee-ee-ee!
With a tearing scream, the fallen tree collided with the ground and a shock wave swept like a tidal wave.
Ruon faced the approaching wave and stabbed his ego sword into the ground. A red curtain rose from the surface of the sword that sensed the owner’s will and confronted the invisible force. Then, a flash of light soared and a thunderous sound shook the earth.
A moment later. As the aftermath of the shock subsided, Colin, who had opened his eyes tightly, said to Amela, who was coughing.
“Ouch? You’ve got a nosebleed again. It wasn’t that bad this time.”
“···Shut up. It’s because Kyle’s shield interfered with the dagger pulling. No, it’s over. What’s the point of saying that?”
Then Colin lay down on the ground and chuckled.
“Yeah. Let’s put aside the painful words for a while. It’s over, as you said···”
Then Ruon, who had put his sword in the sheath, dusted off his battered clothes and asked.
“How do we get out of here?”
“It’s a random world created by the power of the tree. It won’t last long without the driving force. It’ll disappear soon. As if it never existed.”
At that, Ruon frowned for a moment and shrugged his shoulders.
“It sounds like we’re not an exception. We’ll have to suffer a little more at the end.”
Amela laughed soullessly.
“I wonder what kind of guts you had to form a party with three warriors without a decent mage···Ha, I might become a fool today.”
Then Colin got up.
“Hey, you never know, maybe you should confess to Kyle first. Hey···brother, brother!”
He slapped the cheek of Kyle, who had lost consciousness, and Amela glared at him with a murderous look.
“I don’t have to do that, so just stay still!”
“Why are you angry at the wrong person?”
When did they get so close?
Ruon snickered at the sight of the two bickering. It seemed that the few hours they had been stuck together in the extreme situation had been much more effective than the ten days they had spent together.
He stepped back to avoid disturbing Amela’s concentration.
And he reflexively drew his sword.
In his bulging eyes, the dark abyss that swallowed the fallen tree and bubbled up was reflected.
────!
The thing that started to erode the tree was not something that was born from the lack of light, but the darkness itself that destroyed the mind with its existence.
“Ugh!”
Colin, who had been talking well until then, suddenly started to vomit as soon as he saw the darkness. The blood that flowed down under his red eyes showed that his condition was serious.
As if he had plunged into the deep sea where the depth was hard to gauge, Ruon resisted the chilling pressure and drew out the brightest light from within. Thanks to his instinctive confrontation with the presence that the darkness emitted, his companions behind him barely regained their composure.
“Ru, Ruon. That is…”
“Quick!”
He shouted and cut off Amela’s words. Ruon took a big step toward the darkness that was crawling toward him, as if it had taken an interest in him.
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Like soaked in oil, thousands of arms and legs emerged from the darkness and then began to crawl like arthropods, tapping the ground mindlessly.
Ruon, who had furiously wrinkled his nose at the disgusting horde, glanced back. He saw Amela, who had both hands on the ground, muttering a spell with her lips twitching.
Meanwhile, the being that had approached his nose rose like a wave. Thousands of hands and feet poured out of the rippling darkness.
Ruon felt the swirling power within it. He could feel the desire to swallow him up and quench its endless hunger and thirst, without any attachment to anything. It was the most pure and violent force among all the violence he had faced so far.
Ruon twisted his upper body and slashed his sword diagonally. The ego sword, imbued with superhuman strength, tore apart the hands and feet that flew at him.
He didn’t stop there, and advanced again, slashing his sword vertically.
The shapeless being, split in half by the tremendous force, seemed to have waited for it, and divided into two, attacking him from both sides.
Oh-oh-oh-oh
The being. No, the beings that covered Ruon’s body in an instant, howled with a repulsive sound and wrapped his solid flesh with a cocoon that turned into an oval shape.
“···Bro, brother···”
Colin, who had collapsed on the ground, groped his arm toward Ruon, who had been swallowed by the darkness, without even thinking of wiping off the dirt that covered his face.
Then, with a crack, a thin crack appeared in the center of the black cocoon, and a bright light burst out from between them. Immediately after, the light rotated along the circumference of the cocoon, and the upper part crumbled along the white line, revealing Ruon inside.
He peeled off the cocoon that wrapped his body with a flashing trail and swung his sword again at the shapeless beings that had split again.
Just then, Amela, who had completed the spell, pushed the fallen knights into the cloudy curtain that floated in the air. Colin, who had barely gotten up, helped her.
By the time they had hidden Cheville and Aslan in the curtain, Ruon was moving his body in a trance.
His expanded thinking ability brought about an artificial slowdown of time, and in the slowly flowing time, he faithfully destroyed the disgusting beings that ran at him.
But it was useless no matter how many he knocked down.
The darkness that rose as if to dominate this entire space had no end.
Moreover, as the darkness grew in size, its power increased exponentially, making him feel as if he was facing a natural disaster that would end the world.
“We have to follow right behind-”
Colin, who had wrapped Kyle around him, disappeared without finishing his sentence. Now, the only ones left in this ash-gray world were Amela, who was maintaining the curtain, and Ruon.
“Ruon! Come on. Hurry!”
Amela, whose mental strength had reached its limit, started to shake like an epileptic patient. She shouted in a frantic voice. Ruon, who had torn off the darkness that clung to his limbs, turned his body.
He ran with a large stride like a long jumper and kicked the ground to leap. At that moment, the darkness that crawled out of the ground behind the curtain poured out as if to tear off the back of Amela’s head.
In an instant. Ruon threw his ego sword in the air, which grazed Amela’s ear and pierced the darkness. The magician, who lost her balance by the wind, stumbled back and was sucked into the curtain, and the curtain disappeared as if washed away by water, due to the absence of the being who sustained the spell.
Ruon, who landed on the ground where everything had disappeared as if it were a lie, still had a calm expression on his face and pulled out the sword that was deeply stuck in the ground.
“Come on.”
He spun the sword in his hand and the darkness rushed at him like hungry dogs from all sides.
***
It was as if he had been swallowed by a thick fog, and nothing was clear. A languid sensation enveloped his body as if he had sunk into a milky sea.
How long had he fought?
Had his sense of time blurred?
He couldn’t remember how long he had fought with the beings of the abyss.
Ten minutes? An hour? A day? No… a year?
…Wait a minute, how did he know they were the beings of the abyss? No, that was obvious. They appeared after the divine tree collapsed. And they felt similar to the black liquid he had seen in the cradle…
Ruon kept asking himself questions and answering them, even if they were absurd, as he sank. He didn’t realize it, but it was a process of his strong inner self resisting the splitting of his ego.
It felt like a moment and an eternity at the same time, and at some point, the world began to brighten.
And Ruon found himself lying on the ground.
The sensations that had been tangled up were unraveled one by one and engraved in his cells again. He sprang up in the midst of them.
A man was looking at him.
The man had golden-red hair like a summer sunset, and wore armor that was hard to tell which era it belonged to.
He was a bit smaller than an average adult male, but his golden eyes glowed like the sun, as if he had transcended the limits of his body long ago.
Just by looking at him, Ruon’s heart started to beat wildly like never before. It felt like the thrill of watching a touching movie, or the sense of accomplishment of reaching a long-awaited moment, and at the same time, the emptiness of losing everything.
In the whirlpool of confused emotions, Ruon barely uttered a word and spat it out.
“···Garnax?”
The man did not answer or move at all. But somehow, his eyes seemed to be soaked in sadness, and Ruon licked his lips to ask him why.
But before he could, the man who had suddenly disappeared reappeared in front of Ruon’s nose in an instant. He lightly placed his finger on the chest of the startled Ruon, who had missed his movement, and said,
“I believe you are different.”
“What? What do you mean-”
Before he could finish his question, a huge force pushed Ruon away. He tried his best to resist, but his feet left the ground and he flew backwards. The scenery that was quickly fading away was covered by a black darkness. Then, his persistent consciousness snapped and Ruon lost his mind.
