Chapter 183: Verhas
The waves from Legion Commander Verhas subsided, and the battlefield fell into silence. It was like the stillness after a storm had passed. Only the scent of blood and metallic dust drifted through the air.
Ella knelt, feeling the lingering heat at her fingertips.
Golden light had exploded from her grasp. Its afterglow remained, making every breath rough. Her heart beat even more fiercely than a moment ago—as if proving she was still alive.
Yet the other clerics still could not unleash their abilities properly. The prayers chanted by the Crusaders crumbled in the air, left unfinished.
The light would not answer.
Only Ella had come to understand that truth.
Just now, she had called no one's name. The light had simply burst forth from within her.
‘It wasn't that Kriya didn't answer. The silence was mine.’
In the middle of the battlefield, Ella closed her eyes and sank into thought.
Along the veins of her palm, golden warmth slowly flowed outward. Not a blessing that had descended from above, but a vitality boiling up from inside her body.
Thud!
In that instant, her heart beat once more—loudly. A great surge of vitality spread throughout her entire body, blazing heat pouring from her skin.
Past the 4th rank, past the Blooming that makes flowers blossom. The 5th rank was merely a title the Order had assigned; she had already pressed against the threshold of the 6th rank.
Full Bloom—a cluster of flowers bursting into full blossom.
"The light…… Has returned."
The Crusaders stared blankly up at the sky. Their faces were smeared with blood, and one forearm dangled as if it might fall off at any moment. Yet in their eyes, hope shone in place of pain. Golden particles fluttered around the pillar of light, filling the plain.
It was not a miracle that had reached perfection.
It could not heal great wounds in an instant. But the pain briefly receded. Eyes that had grown dim with despair filled once more with longing. They rose unsteadily to their feet. They grasped broken shields and returned to the ranks.
"Is this…… Kriya's answer?"
One of the nearby knights asked, and Mage Yelayen quietly shook his head. An expression of wonder was etched across his face.
"No, this is not grace given by a god."
He spoke slowly, but with conviction.
"It is the flame we kindle ourselves."
Ella heard those words but gave no reply. Instead, she lifted her gaze and looked out across the battlefield. The red mist had been pushed back some distance, but it still wrapped around the area near the wall. In front of it, Verhas's duplicates packed the space.
She closed her fist around the cluster of light gathered at her fingertips. The pillar that had been soaring into the sky suddenly died down.
Something—whether tears or light—ran down her cheek. But she smiled. From now on, they had to press forward with their own strength.
"With this light……"
And immediately after, she exhaled—
"Open the way."
She sent that earnest plea outward.
At once, golden radiance exploded outward toward the front. Some of it shot into the sky, then seeped down into the earth. Every pool of blood on the ground shimmered with reflected light, and where that afterglow touched the surface of the wall—even the darkness twisted violently.
"The wall…… is crying!"
Gregor screamed as though the words were wrenched from him.
In the direction his finger pointed, the Wall of Memories rippled like a wave. The golden pulse drove into the cracks. The mana structure inside the wall trembled, and orange lines bled through between the red grain.
At that moment, Ella's heart gave a great beat. That resonance reached beyond the battlefield, all the way to the core of the wall. Soon, a pulse that was the same yet different came back in return.
At a glance cold and dry, yet warmer and more tender than anything else—a rhythm responding in perfect answer. She recognized whose it was the instant she felt it.
Calix.
Ella gently closed her eyes.
Golden light and grey light drew each other in, meeting at the center of the battlefield. The woman's hair swayed softly in the air.
"Go."
As though she knew it would reach him without needing to shout, her clear voice spread on the wind.
"Now, it's your turn."
The crack in the Wall of Memories widened, and beyond it, a grey stage unfolded. In an instant the domain expanded, and every sound sank at once into silence.
This time, it was Calix's doing.
***
The grey space was like a frozen lake unto itself.
Calix quietly observed his own domain. Beneath a stillness where not even the sound of breathing echoed, the duplicates were torn apart and destroyed over and over again according to his will.
Then, suddenly, he felt something seeping in from outside.
It was golden divinity.
The light Ella had extended flowed in, threading through the cracks of chaos.
Calix's heart trembled faintly. It was neither hot nor cold. It seeped into his incomplete Core and quietly added to his strength. The darkness that had been churning was suppressed, and the chaos that had been stirring in response went still.
He understood.
‘Chaos isn't destruction. The gap within perfection, accepting variables—that is the true nature of chaos.’
What remained at the end was nothing but Calix's will.
Kwaaaaah!!
The grey space let out a tearing cry.
Golden radiance and grey light intermingled, and the bloodline ability Thesis Field expanded. As the boundary of the domain stretched, everything contained within it crumbled into pieces.
The Wall of Memories was no exception. The moment the edge of the wall collided with the energy of chaos, that enormous structure fractured as if warped.
And inside it—
There was a heart.
A red, multifaceted core. Its texture was that of metal, but mana boiled inside it like blood. It was the center where Verhas's consciousness lay sleeping.
The duplicates let out outright screams and threw themselves forward even more desperately.
But it was already too late.
Calix gripped his sword in a reverse hold. His fingertips trembled finely, but it was not his hand that trembled—it was the grain of space itself. Every law within the space he had perceived halted its motion in a single instant.
[Output increasing]
[Reality Acceleration reaching 4.9x]
Within a world that had frozen still, he stepped forward at his leisure.
"……Let's see this to the end."
The chaotic energy traced a path through the air. Calix's sword drove forward in a straight line and was driven into the heart of the wall. The moment it made contact, what was inside conveyed a sense of wrongness—not metal, but something mingled of blood and memory.
The instant the blade lodged in, the entire wall let out a scream.
The earth trembled with vibrations strong enough to make standing difficult, and red mist erupted like a storm. The duplicates melted down all at once. Their forms dissolved, collapsing entirely without distinguishing sword from flesh.
The small crack quickly spread across the whole.
The red heart faded to grey and died before his eyes. Calix tightened his grip and pressed down even deeper. Gold and grey overlapped in his field of vision.
And in that moment, for the first time—
He felt someone inside the wall watching him. That gaze held neither rage nor joy. There was only the remnant of an ancient will—a lingering grudge, waiting for someone from outside to awaken it.
***
The heart grew cold and still, and silence descended.
In the very moment everyone believed it was over, a beat one measure too late shook the earth. It was a pulse that human ears could not hear.
Airien, along with a small number of elves and dwarves, flinched. They had not heard a sound—they had sensed a tremor carried along a pulse.
Immediately after, the remains of the duplicates scrolled backward across the battlefield, as if rewinding. Sand and blood and shattered metal fragments were sucked toward the wall as though inhaled.
It was like a final breath being exhaled. Yet it was not an ending—it was a beginning.
Along with an unintelligible whisper, the long wall stirred to life. Countless shadows were released within dense clouds of dust, forming a single enormous current.
At the same time, the duplicates scattered across the battlefield gathered before the wall face like thread being unwound. Light and darkness alternated, and lines of different mana flows poured into a single axis.
It was not death but return.
Pushing fiercely, then gathering what had been shattered and broken, turning it back into a surging current once more.
That was the being called the Ironclad—
"The Surging Wall…… Verhas."
Even some of Ella's golden particles responded to that current. They trembled lightly, then failed to be deflected and became embedded point by point into the wall. Those marks looked as though someone had left a record behind.
Yelayen murmured quietly as he watched the sight.
"Memory in the end has no choice but to return to its original form……"
As his words suggested, the wall was reclaiming all of the divine beings it had created. The duplicates were not mere wreckage. As portions of memory, they were elements composing the being called Verhas.
And at the center of that current, the original form stood.
A terrible mass of flesh writhed unceasingly, as if trying to complete its own shape.
Red fragments shot out from within the wall without pause and clumped together endlessly. Each one held someone's memory. The cries of warriors, the prayers of believers, even the killing intent of murderers. Every one of those fragments was drawn toward Verhas at the center, molding the form of a body.
"But can what is whole be made from those memories alone?"
Yelayen's question put into words what everyone felt.
Metal and blood could not fuse on the surface of the skin. They clung for a moment, then fell away, only one side hardening. It was not just one part of the body—it was the whole. The more it was assembled, the more it twisted; the closer it drew to wholeness, the more cracks multiplied.
Even so, it did not stop for a single moment.
Deficiency correction—fixing what is wrong. Layering flesh until perfection is reached, replacing tissue. When one arm was completed, the shoulder shattered; when an eye was formed, the mouth vanished.
As the attempts toward perfection continued, the form grew further and further from human. What remained at the end was a contradictory body forced together by memory.
Skin through which blood did not flow, bones with no nerves, a bluish carcass that only moved. And last of all, a face was formed.
Hundreds of expressions—weeping and rage, anguish and smiles—overlapped to compose a single visage.
"Bleurgh—!!"
The knights who had been staring blankly at the sight dry-heaved. Even looking at it caused mana to flow in reverse. Their instincts screamed that it was a living thing that should not exist.
Then its eyes opened.
Verhas's gaze was calm. With irises of mingled gold, black, and red, it quietly read the entire plain. Every line composed of mana was inscribed in his pupils as a crest.
In that instant, the mouth, twisted to the left, opened.
[O Kriya……]
The eyes of Ella and the Crusaders shook violently. A wicked being had taken the name of a goddess into its mouth. No mockery was mixed in, no malice. As though offering a prayer, it called the goddess's name in a low voice.
[The most perfect being stands before you. For what reason do you not answer?]
When Verhas's voice faded, the battlefield sank again into silence.
But already, an unseen battle had begun.
At the outer edge of Calix's domain, a crack opened. The grey space trembled faintly, and long red lines stretched across its surface. Those lines intertwined like blood vessels, pressing inward as though to redefine the laws of the world.
[External mana interference in progress]
The neural accelerator's message filled his field of vision.
In a sense, this was precisely Verhas's language. An obsession with obscuring the correct answer. The energy of chaos pushed against the opponent's strength, yet did not yield a single step. To complete the domain, it willingly accepted a tremendous drain of mana.
"You…… regard me as something that has broken free of the mold."
Calix muttered through gritted teeth.
From inside the wall, Verhas's low reply overlapped with his words.
[You are an impurity, and an obstacle on the path to the perfect answer.]
Naturally, there was no room for compromise.
Two worlds collided.
Grey imperfection and dark-crimson perfection devoured each other, endlessly exchanging their positions. The grain of space shattered irregularly.
A thin crack formed in the sky. A red membrane covered half the plain, heating the air across the battlefield.
At that moment, Calix gave a small laugh.
"Perfection…… You covet something you can never have."
[……]
Verhas's face twisted into something hideous.
He gripped his sword and took his stance. It was not intentional, but it was the signal that declared the start of battle.
And then—
The world began to break apart.