Chapter 188: Apostle of Chaos
The heart pulsed once, deeply, and the world turned upside down.
Thud, thud, thud—
The noise that had been filling his ears cut off abruptly, and warmth drained from the space. The earth was still splitting, yet no sound followed. Only a vibration that rang through the bones remained.
Calix looked down at his feet.
It was not ground made of soil. Finely shattered fragments of memory had layered and hardened together. He could not tell whether what seeped through the deep crimson cracks was blood or mana. They fell from the walls, poured onto the floor, and were absorbed back into the walls again—over and over.
"……It's collapsing."
The words that slipped from his lips did not travel far. They were cut off just ahead of his mouth, and dissolved cleanly before his eyes. A place where even a single sentence had no room to linger. He raised his head, and beyond it all, there he was.
Verhas.
Skin through which no blood flowed, bones without nerves, a face layered with countless expressions. The grotesque body seen before had already been overturned once. Now, it was even more stripped down than that.
Flesh and bone were no longer necessary. What remained was memory alone.
Red cracks surged from behind his back. Dark mana whirled in every direction. It looked like a tree with its roots exposed. Countless fragments of lives extended like branches, flowing into his torso, his head, and his eye sockets.
Soon, the waves of power subsided.
Their eyes met.
Countless afterimages flickered across the eyes of the beast. Names, dates, faces, deaths, screams, prayers. Everything seemed to have been sorted into a single category for him.
It had no mouth, yet it soon tore through its own intact skin to speak.
[Memory is the order of immortality.]
The entire space shook along with those words. The boundary between it and reality had grown hazy; around them, glimpses of the Mountain Rabbits fighting the copies flickered through.
Then, red lines extended from the half-collapsed walls. They began to be absorbed into Verhas's main body all at once. Rather than halting the cracks, the beast chose to accelerate the collapse.
[Chaos is nothing but destruction.]
The corners of Verhas's mouth shifted ever so slightly. He had regained his composure, belatedly. He left behind only conviction. The expressionless face of one who views the world entirely through his own lens.
Calix drew another breath. Air that was neither cold nor warm flooded his lungs. There was no scent. Instead, only a dry sensation knocked against his chest.
‘Order.’
It was the name of the memory Verhas pursued.
Calix poured strength into the hand gripping his sword. The tremor that rose through his wrist traveled past his shoulder and reached his eyes. He could see the dregs of shadows falling through the cracks—things that, until just a moment ago, had held the shape of human beings.
"What you've seized are corpses."
This time it was Calix who spoke. His voice, carrying mana, reached all the way without scattering.
"None other than yourself made them that way."
Verhas offered no further reaction. They could not look toward the same direction. He generated copies and stained the space with dark mana.
Calix, too, took a step forward to meet him. The fragments underfoot transmitted the sensation of crumbling—crunch—with a faint sound trailing after, belatedly. The only permitted noise in this world.
"Chaos is……"
The blade trembled finely. The chaos mana that had surged from his heart flowed down his spine, along his arm, all the way to his fingertips. The sensation of the world's grain shifting gathered at the tip of his sword.
"Movement."
With each syllable he uttered, the frozen space shook little by little. The red roots extending from Verhas's back momentarily faltered.
"The imperfect fragments that prove one is alive."
Calix leveled the tip of his sword at his opponent.
"The moment they stop, they are no different from the dead."
[Then we shall simply settle with force which of us is right.]
The moment the words ended, the space between them was torn apart.
There was no explosion. Instead, color shattered.
A gray ripple spread outward in circles from Calix's blade. Like the surface of a lake struck by a thrown stone, wherever the ripple spread, the crimson hues lost their momentum and retreated. The roots of memory that had been clinging to Verhas's feet were severed in an instant.
For just a moment, faces of people surfaced from within the cracks, then vanished. Lips crying out in anguish, the corners of eyes lifted in joy, the profile of one meeting their final moment.
"……As you said, let us settle this here."
Calix muttered inwardly and pressed the sword steadily downward. Chaos mana extended ceaselessly along the blade. Gray flashes poured toward Verhas—and toward the core of the world that had been sustaining him.
The walls of memory burst, and Verhas's domain began to collapse beyond all control.
***
The gray ripple was not a simple clash. Its aftershock pierced through Verhas's domain and spread to the outermost edge of reality.
In that instant, the same tremor rang through the heart of the battlefield.
The ground on which the Mountain Rabbits stood shook, and the dwarves urgently steadied their centers of balance, fixing their eyes on what lay ahead.
That lasted only briefly before the dwarf Nuri Sarui raised his axe and shouted.
"The end is near! Follow the king!!"
His gaze turned toward the man in the mask. The dwarves followed suit, as though they had rehearsed it.
"Broc-k Basim!!"
Basim scowled at having his son's name stretched out that way, yet continued cutting down the enemies blocking his path one after another.
Somewhere here, Calix was.
Of course, the enemy's assault was by no means light.
"Cook, comrade, where are you! Where are you hiding yourself!"
While Gregor called out desperately, Adrian gently swept one arm and sliced through the back of an enemy's neck. In rapid succession, the mage Yelayen sent dozens of copies hurtling through the air.
On the right flank of the battlefield, the unit led by Marik drove deep inside. The shield imbued with divine power emitted a vivid light.
Meanwhile, Royce had not even wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, yet still spat flames from the tip of his blade. No matter how many times he slashed and thrust, the number of enemies did not diminish.
Even so, they advanced. With nothing but the belief that they would meet again someday.
Amid it all, Ella closed her eyes. In a space where the light had been cut off, she murmured with a desperate heart toward the place where an evil pulse could be felt.
"Calix…… I can hear you."
A faint golden thread was drawn beneath Ella's feet. A small ember that had been flickering in the darkness was awakening from somewhere beneath her chest.
***
As Verhas's domain crumbled, shadows rose from within the cracks. Half-melted armor, hazy eyes, and familiar faces appeared. Mercenaries bearing the Mountain Rabbits insignia, soldiers who had died in past battles, even a child encountered during a mission—all of them were there.
Verhas's enraged voice cut through the air.
[This is the world you chose. Every time you moved, someone was left behind. Their memories formed me—so now let them cut you down!]
Calix's hand trembled slightly. As he raised his sword, the first remnant came charging. On instinct he swung the blade, and a flash of light burst forth. He cleaved through the enemy's form, yet from within it, not blood but the light of memory seeped out.
That light flickered in agony, then faded.
In that instant, he understood.
To cut was not to kill—it was to set free.
Once his hesitation vanished, the movements that followed held no restraint. The memories that had been bound scattered in the wake of Calix's blade. They became tiny sparks of starlight and rose beyond the walls.
"It's the same with memory, with thought, with life. Lock it away and it only rots."
Together with Calix's murmur, flames containing chaos surged atop his sword. Fire mingling gray and gold severed the deep crimson threads in a single stroke.
Verhas let out a shriek. It sounded less like pain and more like a cry filled with despair. Then, from beyond the crack, a familiar voice was heard.
"Brother, aren't you afraid?"
It was unmistakably a voice he had heard before, somewhere.
Calix bit down hard on his lip and answered.
"……I'm alright now."
In that instant, the color of the space reversed entirely. The darkness split, and gray fragments filled the sky. The red light Verhas had been emanating lost its force for the first time.
The shadows that had been rushing at Calix were crushed by that pressure. And soon, the force of the impact shattered the false space into pieces.
At last, he had returned to reality.
***
Calix lifted his sword and split the space open. The mana in the air flipped along the blade's edge, and with a single swing, the boundary between sky and ground was overturned.
As Verhas raised his arm, the roots of memory erupted upward like an explosion. Hundreds of afterimages cut across Calix's field of vision and came crashing down. The hands of the dead, torn faces, every piece of the past he had traversed.
Calix cut through the middle of them all.
[Combat Facilitation activated, '5.4'x][Sudden surge in output detected][Warning! Be wary of physical overload.]
The moment he returned to reality, the concept of speed came back to life. Only, he no longer dwelled on numbers.
If Verhas had lost his memories, then Calix, too, had learned his opponent's. He now knew the ancient sword arts, the characteristics of techniques from every corner of the continent—north, south, east, and west.
It did not matter if the enemy before him wielded veteran sword arts. It did not matter how great the number of copies.
Calix moved as though reversing the flow of time. There was no need to steady his breathing. Even breath was part of battle.
Wherever his sword passed, crimson remnants turned to light.
The enemy's blade pierced through Calix's body, yet he felt no sensation of flesh being run through. He had already taken his next step, leaving behind only an afterimage.
Verhas roared.
[Behold! You do nothing but destroy!!]
‘Did he, really?’
Just as Calix countered inwardly, an all-too-familiar voice cut in without warning.
"You damn brat, I thought I told you not to do things on your own! Should've crushed that spirit of yours right from the start!"
It was Basim.
One arm was already soaked in blood, and a split wound was on his brow opposite the mask. Following behind him, Royce, Gregor, Marik, and Volga pressed through a countless mass of enemies and approached.
"Always hogging everything for yourself!" "Do you even remember our names?"
Armor was cracked all over, with blood running down atop it. But not one of them stopped. Royce spat blood and smiled faintly, and Marik hurled his broken shield to the ground and raised his divine power.
Volga looked up at Verhas and shouted loudly.
"Son of a bitch!!"
"……"
"No…… I mean, we went through hell getting here."
Laughter that had no place on a battlefield burst out, and then a war cry followed. Verhas looked down at them in silence.
[Insignificant things…… Do you still not know fear?]
He had not yet been defeated. He did not even allow himself to think such a thing. Dark mana still filled every direction, and merely a portion of his domain had collapsed.
Yet Calix seemed to think differently.
"It's not that we don't fear."
His eyes burned, with warmth.
"We simply know how to move forward together."
Then, the Mountain Rabbits took their places alongside Calix, one by one. They assumed battle formation and readied themselves to face Verhas. Though the power granted to each of them differed, they believed they could be of help to their comrades.
And at the center of it all, Calix's gray flames blazed fiercely. It was as though the two forces—human and chaos—had mixed and become a single current.
***
Naturally, Ella was also among the Mountain Rabbits.
She watched as Verhas's copies came rushing in. Dark mana surged like a storm, and deep crimson roots drove down like spikes.
Yet the Mountain Rabbits pressed forward fiercely through a swirl of blood and fire and war cries. Gregor was even smiling.
Even in the face of death, they encouraged one another and stepped forward one step more.
"Ah……"
And then, Ella finally understood.
Why did they push forward so stubbornly. They could fear and flee, yet what was it that had brought them here.
It was a question that could not be answered within the realm of reason.
Yet she knew it in her heart.
‘We did not wait for a god's salvation.’
That was right.
Instead, they chose to become each other's salvation. They had sworn to stand by one another until the last, and it was to keep that promise that they had walked this far together.
The destination was the same—the path to reach it was different.
Ella closed her eyes.
Her fingertips trembled finely, and one side of her chest pricked and stung. The divine power within her had already run dry, yet the heartbeat heard from outside overlapped with her own.
"O Kriya……"
She called the name of the god.
Not to make a request of anything.
"We rise."
She wished only that those who held such fierce and warm hearts would be remembered. Beyond that, she wanted nothing at all.
Ssss—
A golden pattern spread beneath Ella's feet. At first it was the faintest flicker of light, but it soon consumed the surroundings and drew a circle on the ground.
Above it, the mana of the Mountain Rabbits intermingled. Very small threads gathered together and drew lines within the circle.
It was not prayer, nor was it a command. It was simply a phenomenon created by human faith.
Kwaaaaaaa!
In that instant, a pillar of light stretched greatly toward the sky. The deep crimson mana was driven back sharply, yet the flames of chaos were unaffected whatsoever.
And soon, it filled the entire plain. Time passed, and still more time, and still it did not fade.
"This, could it be…… Sacred Territory?"
The Crusaders murmured with blank expressions.
Within it, Calix raised his head. His eyes were fixed on Verhas still. The moment their gazes met, the beast's body flinched.
It was because his eyes were divided into 2 colors. One was gray, and the other was gold. Opposing forces mingled together, and a new light bloomed.