Chapter 206: The End of Trampling
A man leapt into the center of the battlefield.
Black hair soaked in dust, gray mana shimmering over a silver blade. As hooves struck the earth and the ground trembled, the surrounding soldiers caught sight of his arrival and held their breath.
It was Calix.
He crossed the battlefield, scanning the state of his allies.
Soldiers holding their ground like islands with shields planted in the earth, Masters charging toward the enemy, tentacles dragged up to the surface and thrashing wildly, and the Latia forces alongside the Mountain Rabbits binding them with ropes and hooks to haul them down.
Everyone was resisting in their own way.
‘This wasn't built by me alone.’
That truth was unmistakably clear. This war had long since surpassed what a single person's strength could contain. Those who had faced the monster each in their own way had bled to carve out this opening through sheer desperation. Calix threw himself straight into the heart of that opening.
Saulak's gaze found him.
The eyes veiled in crimson film fixed, for the first time, on a single point. The upper body bearing the shape of a woman tilted its head toward Calix.
[……Another pair of eyes.]
The voice was low and heavy with moisture. Sorrowful on the surface, yet unmistakably threaded with interest.
[You don't resemble Yoman.]
[But you carry the same will as him.]
At the mention of Great Chief Yoman's name, Calix's eyes wavered briefly. The desert warrior who had nearly killed Saulak—yet De Generitum had intervened and overturned that outcome.
Saulak remembered that moment. It meant she perceived this battlefield as a second chance given to her.
Calix didn't respond. He had no intention of exchanging words.
Rather than her body or her mouth, he surveyed the entire battlefield. The movement of tentacles, the flow of mana, rhythms that broke and reconnected. And beneath it all, he sensed the direction of something else entirely.
Thwump!
Tentacles burst through the surface of the earth, but Lunos, the warhorse, sidestepped them with practiced ease.
The smile drained from Saulak's face. Her chaos could not spread wide, and she could no longer dominate the battlefield with tentacles alone.
[To seal off the tunnels. What stubborn little children you are.]
Her upper body trembled faintly. In that instant, the tentacles stilled. A brief silence—then dark mana erupted in a violent surge.
A soldier swept up in that mana hung his head. The hand gripping his shield went slack, and his eyes rolled white. It spread in chain reaction to another soldier, then another.
The lips of those who had been struck trembled. As though murmuring to someone.
A burning hometown, fields soaked in blood, the sight of their own backs as they fled without looking—memories of defeat were dragged up all at once.
Saulak's voice fell over the battlefield like a shroud.
[A battlefield is the act of connecting the threads of memory. I merely show the outcome in advance.]
[The children will scatter in tears.]
That sound reached Calix as well.
Not through the ears. It was a sound that scraped directly inside the mind. Like a shard of iron burrowing into the brain, noise surged alongside a wave of dark emotion. It felt as though someone's regret, someone's fear, someone's death had been given form.
Without a moment's hesitation, he made his choice.
Sssss—
Calix absorbed the dark mana that had invaded his domain. The neural accelerator's output reached its limit and time stretched thin. His senses sharpened to an unbearable edge.
As the dark mana lost its momentum, color returned to the soldiers' faces. The only problem was that he had to absorb every one of those foreign memories as well.
Calix clenched his teeth. It felt as though his head would split.
‘If I ran……It would be easier.’
He had no obligation to carry the burden meant for others. Even so, Calix accepted it willingly. Rather than weighing gains against losses, he looked only toward victory on the battlefield.
Above all—
"Is that everything you have?"
Within his heart, chaotic mana stirred. Legion Commander Saulak had shown too much. What ability she possessed, and how she wielded it. Compared to how much she had revealed, the casualties among the Alliance Forces were relatively few.
The more you know your enemy, the more fear dissolves.
Calix stopped observing his opponent. The enemy's domain, its flow, came to him with near-tangible clarity. Now he would seize that flow and turn it against her.
Neural acceleration was pushed to its limits. His body trembled and vibrated in fine pulses, and the dust of the ground and the surrounding mana were forced outward.
He quietly readjusted his grip on his sword.
"Then……Your battlefield ends here."
The moment the words fell, chaos moved.
Saulak's eyes shook beyond all control.
***
Calix's steps were unhindered. A distance of roughly a hundred paces shrank to half in an instant, then halved again.
Saulak had no choice. She had no option but to play her final hand. The monster raised her fist and pointed to the front—the direction from which her thousands of subordinates had been pouring.
Crack-boom!
The veteran soldiers of the Silver Shield Legion were in the midst of raising their shields. With no warning whatsoever, the bodies of the monsters exploded outward. In the wake of the eruption of bloody pus, they dissolved into black particles and flowed toward their master.
[Let thee sink into the abyss!]
The Trampling Abyss.
In that instant, the battlefield vanished.
Calix's vision dimmed and sank, and the sensation beneath his feet dulled first. A space with no earth, no blood, no wind. Instead, countless fragments drifted through the void.
They were memories.
Someone was wailing. Someone knelt. Someone dropped their sword and staggered backward. All those scenes crossed and tangled with one another, forming a single abyss.
Saulak's voice resonated from its center.
[Throwing a tantrum will do you no good, child.]
[These are things that cannot be killed.]
Srna, the masterwork sword in Calix's hand, rang low.
He knew as well. That he could cut through them with ease. Unlike before, wrapped in chaos—pushed into his own domain—he could sever them however many times he wished.
He could have advanced, driving forward with mana and cleaving through with his sword. But this time was different. He raised his sword, yet did not bring it down.
He simply took one step forward.
One memory latched onto him.
A burning village. A small child stared up at him with vacant eyes. The child had become a sinner by the sole fact of having survived.
Calix drew a breath.
He didn't avoid it. Didn't flee. Didn't cut it away. He stood still in that place and received that memory.
Pain surged through him. His head rang as though splitting apart, and his heart beat in broken rhythms. Even so, in the end—he did not break.
‘This……Is not mine.’
Calix separated reality.
His own memories from the memories of others. He recognized the difference between warmth and violation, stepped back by a fraction, and watched.
The space under Saulak's dominion trembled faintly.
[You won't cut?]
[Do you think you can simply pass through this by pretending to endure?]
Calix raised his head.
"No."
His gaze swept across the entire abyss. Countless tangled memories gnawed at one another and multiplied without end.
‘Now I can see it.’
This was not memory. It was a feeding trough—one that fed on memories to manufacture hatred. It repeated endlessly, seeking out the vulnerabilities within the human interior and driving into them.
Calix lowered his sword and extended his bare hand. His forearm carrying the weight of chaotic mana drove straight through the currents between them.
Not cutting—but grasping.
The origin point of every vicious cycle, the knot where memory called upon memory. He saw it, reached out, and closed his hand around it. The force that wrested at the rules touched the very essence of the abyss.
Saulak let out a shriek bordering on a howl.
[That—!]
Crack-crack-crack!!
The abyss tore apart, almost pitifully easily.
The memories drifting through the void broke apart and vanished. Cracks spread through the entire space and it shattered into pieces, as though slashed by hundreds of blades. When the repetition was severed, no one's past rose again.
The Trampler could no longer manipulate the memories of others.
The abyss collapsed entirely.
Only then did Calix raise his sword.
"I'll say it again."
Not to cut through—but to bring an end.
"Your battlefield is already over."
The instant the words landed, the boundary of reality returned and the light of the blade flashed. The Mountain Rabbits, the Masters, and the knights who followed him.
Everyone was charging straight toward a single target—Saulak.
***
The moment the pressure of memories was severed, a brief void opened in the battlefield.
The noise that had scraped at their ears was gone, and the sensation that had been churning inside their minds receded. But no one caught their breath. No sighs of relief, no gasps of exhaustion.
The monster still stood in place.
The body of the Trampler, Saulak, remained massive, and the remnants of her tentacles continued to writhe slowly across the earth. Yet something had changed.
The sensation that had connected underground was severed.
The flow had vanished.
Calix felt it.
‘We're almost there.’
Not yet struck down, yet already no different from dead. The monster's core was exposed openly to the outside. The center that had linked each tentacle, the knot that had woven memory to memory, could no longer hide—laid bare.
In that moment, a single shield stepped forward.
A shield bearing a crest half-worn away, belonging to no identifiable unit. The soldier carrying it hesitated briefly, then bit down hard and took a step forward.
Astonishingly, that one step changed the mood of the entire battlefield.
"Move out!"
A shout broke loose. A comrade in the rear ran alongside him, and shield locked with shield once more. Spears leveled into horizontal lines, and allied armor clashed together.
This was no longer a fight that relied solely on Calix and the Masters.
The Mountain Rabbits ran, the Order chanted their prayer, the Silver Shield Legion at the front turned back and lent their hands. The Latia sailors gripped their harpoons and readied for another throw.
An army of humans surged toward a single monster.
Saulak's upper body swayed violently.
The force that had trampled the terrain was gone, and the whisper that had gnawed at memories could no longer reach them. What remained was a body grown heavy, and the cluster of nerve fibers that had held her together.
Before her stood Master Sevi Belgrado. The man who had managed the front line returned to the center of the battlefield before anyone had realized it, sword gripped in hand.
He charged straight at her.
Boom!!
The longsword came down and cut across beneath Saulak's throat. On the heels of the sensation of parting flesh, the tightly wound cluster of tentacles snapped apart.
Immediately, a Master of Viale moved from the flank. Serin's dagger slipped between the exposed joints and carved away the linking points that had sustained the body.
And—
Belmar's sword came in.
A single strike aimed at the core, to bring this battlefield to its close.
No blood sprayed. The severed parts lost their shape from the point of the cut, transforming into black fragments and dust that scattered into the air. As though they had never existed in that place from the very beginning.
In that moment, Saulak's consciousness sank.
Before her eyes flashed the cavalry of the Kalahim Desert, her own body falling upon a barren thicket, and Yoman's unwavering gaze.
And then—
[This is the last time.]
The voice of De Generitum.
Saulak breathed out a lament that would reach no one. This battlefield had been a test. A final opportunity given to prove herself.
She had failed.
[……Ah.]
The eyes that had been veiled in crimson film slowly clouded over.
[Yoman, and you……everyone dragged me up above ground.]
The belief in winning by hiding underground—that conviction had been utterly denied. The fear had not spread, and from that moment onward, it was crushed beneath the weight of human will.
At that, Saulak's gaze drifted toward Calix.
[Even so, one thing is certain. The one who drove me to this point was not the Corrupted Lord, but……]
As her breath faded away, the monster murmured quietly.
[It was you, human.]
The crimson veil lifted. The tentacles exposed above the earth hardened to stone, and some shattered and crumbled.
[If it's you……those who stand above will have no choice but to descend themselves.]
Those were her final words. The Trampler—Saulak—moved no more. The physical form remained, but the color of mana had gone dark.
Calix, knowing that the Legion Commander had been extinguished, lowered his sword.
Yet no one cheered. Even the Masters wore hardened expressions, making their tension plain. The soldiers kept shields raised, checking one another's faces, rolling their eyes as if confirming they were still alive.
Too much had passed, too quickly.
Calix did not look at the fallen monster, but cast his gaze further away. The direction from which Saulak had emerged.
‘We won without great sacrifice.’
Yet beyond that lay something far larger, drawing ever closer. Basim sensed the trembling of the earth and furrowed his brow, while Volga laughed it off as imagination.
But Calix knew.
This was not the end—it was the threshold leading to the last.