Chapter 184: One, and All
The scent of metal rippled through the air.
Each breath made the tip of his tongue sting. It wasn't the smell of blood. It was the scent of molten iron and mana intertwined—as though the earth itself had melted and disgorged it.
At the center of it all, Verhas stood.
The crimson body was far from whole. Black fluid seeped through a surface riddled with cracks, and steam hissed from every gap. Creak—with each step forward, the leg bones shattered. At the same time, fresh muscle tissue knit together to bear the weight.
The moment a footprint was pressed into the ground, the earth transformed. The soil hardened and solidified into metal plating, and the surrounding air froze with a visible shudder.
Calix instinctively tightened his grip.
He had tried to read the enemy's movements through his Bloodline Ability, but the outcome was impossible to predict. The dark mana reversed and twisted at every instant.
An unpredictable existence.
Above all, they stood in the same flow of time. The Neural Accelerator's alerts had gone silent. It seemed as though the numbers and figures could no longer keep up.
"……Within the domain, there's no difference in acceleration."
Calix murmured softly to himself.
At that moment, Verhas slowly raised his head. His face was unmistakably different from the copies. It was as though fragments of contradiction had been layered atop one another—one eye smiled while the other wept. The smile at the corner of his mouth was gentle, yet the flesh beneath was contorted in agony.
Calix sensed it intuitively—that Verhas's very existence was an error, and that he had built his perfection atop that very error.
[How dare you, of all things, judge this body by your standards.]
The moment Verhas's voice rang out, the atmosphere convulsed violently. It was less a single voice than a command rewriting the laws of the world.
In response, Calix took a step forward as well.
A grey texture flooded the surroundings. The Domain of Propositions—the force that dominated space—spread outward. Yet the moment that power made contact with the enemy's mana, it began to melt.
To establish a new set of laws, a silent struggle erupted.
Thud.
Verhas did not walk. It was not a simple step—it was a shift in texture itself. The balance of mana tilted in the direction he stood. The chaos mana was extinguished, then surged back once more.
Calix's body was pulled forward.
In that instant, Ella's light reached him again. She closed her eyes, clasped her hands as if in prayer, and poured out the divinity dwelling within her, adding it to Calix's strength.
The divine power flooded into the Core, restoring the balance within his body. The darkness lost momentum, and the chaos dulled its sharp edge. The second Core, offered by the mage-gatekeeper, regained its stability.
"The world has held its breath."
And yet, Ella spoke with trembling lips.
"From here on……this is your fight alone."
Before her words had even finished, Verhas swept the air with his fingertips.
The ground beneath Calix's feet flipped entirely. For a moment, the very concepts of up and down collapsed, and the grey mana was swallowed by crimson light.
Calix pushed his neural acceleration to the absolute limit. He pressed down on the ground with chaos mana and recovered his center of gravity in an instant.
But 1 thing he felt with certainty.
‘My body has slowed down.’
More precisely—it was not himself, but time itself that appeared to have accelerated alongside him. The very concept of ‘speed’ simply did not exist in the vicinity of Verhas.
Verhas took another step forward.
Beneath his feet, remnants of memory erupted like graves being clawed open from below. Phantoms of the past blanketed the earth.
Thousands, tens of thousands of soldiers. Countless wars and divine sanctuaries, battlefields where swords had been thrust hilt-deep into the earth—all of it lay superimposed.
He trampled all of it and spoke.
[What is perfect returns to its original form.]
A proclamation—that while the world still existed, this place alone was entirely his domain.
***
In the instant before the collision, space shattered apart. Stone fragments crumbled and scattered through the air. The moment the Domain of Propositions and the Domain of Memory clashed, everything caught along their border was reduced to dust.
Calix moved first.
Along the tip of his blade, a grey trajectory slashed straight downward in a single line. The air groaned and twisted, and for a brief moment, Verhas's torso split open.
But then—characters seeped from the wound where the slash had landed. The language of shadows writhed as though alive, sealing the fractures in the flesh.
Not even a hairbreadth of an opening remained. The characters that flowed out in place of blood packed the wound shut, and over it, an entirely different appearance was layered.
Calix's eyes narrowed.
"Is he……restoring himself with memory?"
Verhas drew a dagger. From the very spot that had just regenerated, things resembling the hands of an infant grew and gripped the blade. There was no telling when or where it had come from.
As though refusing to be caught twice—he had evolved on his own.
In the meantime, the enemy's counterattack was already right before his eyes.
Kraang!!
Hand and blade collided. In the moment of impact, color vanished. A grey shockwave radiated outward, and the 2 weapons became entangled. The fist that had transformed into metal wavered for a moment under the chaos mana, but immediately after, it began to drive Calix back with raw force.
What collided were objects—but what contended were the laws of 2 beings.
Calix gave up a weakness to take what he could. He twisted the tip of his blade, and Verhas's fist drove inward, grazing his chest. No blood flew. Instead, his skin transformed to metal, then reverted back to human flesh.
Immediately after, Calix's blade carved a deep gash into the enemy's forearm. Verhas attempted to regenerate, but the chaos mana lingered around the wound, weakening his authority.
The 2 stepped back simultaneously.
Calix steadied his breath and muttered.
‘Just as I am measuring my opponent, Verhas is trying to read my thoughts as well.’
Then—
Schk!
Verhas severed his own wound. An entire forearm dropped away, raising a cloud of heavy dust from the floor. Yet in that instant, the severed arm dissolved in a crimson melt and was reassembled into an entirely different shape.
What had been an arm attached itself to a leg, and the flesh of the upper body pulsed and shifted to one side. Soon, bone, muscle, and sinew were replaced with new ones.
[What is incomplete disappears, and is reborn.]
Verhas neither enjoyed the battle nor felt pain.
He treated every element within his domain as a variable in an equation. Even the dark mana was nothing more than a means to arrive at the correct answer. There was no hatred, no animosity.
The battle resumed.
The more Calix swung his sword, the more precise Verhas's counterattacks became. When one side struck at an opening, the other immediately reinforced it.
It was as though the 2 were calculating and evolving in response to each other.
‘……He is learning my movements.’
Cold sweat beaded on Calix's forehead.
Minor injuries were no great concern. The crux of the matter was that Verhas's attacks were growing sharper with every passing moment.
Fwip!
Even a single moment's delay meant death. The enemy's blade, drawn from within the flesh, grazed the tip of his nose.
Adding to his burden, Verhas's responses grew more practiced as time wore on.
Sever the wrist—it regenerates. When the same situation repeated itself several times, Verhas simply grew an entirely new forearm. When falling behind in swordsmanship, he increased the number of hands outright. He compensated for insufficient precision with sheer quantity.
When Calix targeted the lower body to break his center of gravity, Verhas increased the number of legs. Even with 1 severed, he held his ground on 3.
When the chaos mana slowed his regeneration, from a certain point on, instead of severing limbs, he began selectively carving away only portions of flesh.
The shadow of death multiplied. It surrounded Calix and screamed at him to give up.
And then—Verhas's sword strikes rained down in succession.
All 3 strikes aimed at different points simultaneously.
A spear tip drawn from his fist drove downward toward the thigh. A blade aimed for the right shoulder. A reddish-black fist advanced in a straight line, intent on piercing through his chest.
Calix bit down and stepped back.
Using the tip of his sword, he batted the enemy's spear tip upward and swept aside the crimson fist and the mana-laced blade in turn. Even so, taking damage was unavoidable.
Zzzzt—
The grey and crimson lights shattered each other's frameworks and bled together. For every inch he was pushed back, his domain lost the same ground.
But the light in Calix's eyes had not yet broken.
‘He's not fighting. He is calculating……perfection.’
He too had to think.
The path to victory.
***
The crimson wave cleaved through the sky and scattered. The pillar of light lost momentum, as if it had never blazed so fiercely to begin with. As Ella raised her fingertips, the clerics gathered around her recited the prayer in unison.
A golden veil expanded once more, enveloping the wounded. Even amid broken spears, fallen shields, and groaning men crawling across the ground, that brilliant light alone refused to be extinguished.
But then, something began to pull at that light.
At first she thought it an illusion, yet she quickly understood. The pillar of light bent toward the wall. Legion Commander Verhas was drawing the divinity into his own domain.
Ella cried out.
"Hold your hearts firm! We can still endure!"
Yet contrary to her words, the veil rapidly lost its shape. Rather than scattering, the light fractured into multiple streams. The flow of divinity bent in 2 directions, and one of them was sucked toward the center of the battlefield—toward Verhas's domain.
It was not aimed at Calix. Drawn in by the shadow's sigil—that malevolent summons—it bled into the darkness.
Ella's lips trembled finely.
"……Verhas is reaching for even the divinity."
The priests showed expressions pale with fear.
"Ella! The prayers……our prayers are flowing toward the enemy!"
Blood dripped from her fingertips. She tried to forcibly pull the divinity back, but it was not something that could be managed by willpower alone. The veil of light writhed as though it were a living creature. Responding to 2 divided wills, it split and divided over and over again.
The sky grew ever deeper red.
In this moment alone, even the laws of the divine were Verhas's.
***
Calix released control of his mana. The moment the restraining reins were undone, the power surging from his heart poured into the Neural Accelerator.
A place he had never reached before.
[Reality Acceleration, 5.1x reached]
Fire lit through the neural network. Time stretched, and the world, caught in time, ground to a halt. This was the best he could reach in this present moment.
Within it, only 2 beings moved.
The tip of Calix's sword charged forward in a straight line. The chaos mana expanded in all directions along a single thread of trajectory. Everywhere that path reached, the texture of space split open.
But Verhas did not evade his attack.
One of the monster's forearms swelled violently. What had been skin vanished, and bone fused with metal to form an enormous mass. It was less a chunk of flesh than it was a wall.
In the instant Calix's sword made contact with it—
Everything stopped.
There was no impact—no movement of mana whatsoever.
‘……It wasn't blocked. It was ensnared!’
He understood in an instant.
That his sword had collided with the opponent's domain itself.
The arm composed of crimson mass grew larger and larger. Even as the chaos mana cracked and shattered it, it kept stuffing new flesh into the gaps.
And with that—it finally succeeded in capturing him.
"……!"
For a fleeting moment, the tip of Calix's blade came to a standstill. Caught between the flesh, it briefly left him exposed. But it was more than enough for Verhas to counterattack.
Kraaaaaang!!
A forearm erupting from the chest drove straight down and struck Calix.
He flew several meters in an instant, barely managing to recover his center of gravity. His bones creaked, and his vision swayed. The Neural Accelerator's warning tone rang in his ears, but his insides were already in chaos.
From a single moment of capture, he had allowed a devastating blow.
[Imperfect one, do not stand against 'all']
Verhas's unhurried voice rang out.
Those words were neither a warning nor advice—they were a recitation of truth.
Calix coughed up blood. His knees buckled. Just as he had said—was it a foolish choice to face him alone?
He erased the question flickering through his mind.
"Calix!!"
From behind, a faint yet unmistakable cry reached him. It was a familiar voice. Not someone of great renown and strength like Master Sevi Belgrado or the mage Yelayen—
But it was more than enough to prove 1 thing.
Calix was a Mountain Rabbit.
And the Mountain Rabbits were not just 1.