Chapter 119
#Chapter 119: Demonic Sword Forte (21) - The One Left Behind
Setting jokes and exaggeration aside, the Sage judged that he could overthrow just about any nation on the continent by his own strength alone.
He could strike the ground once with his staff and turn every piece of land within sight into a sandy beach, grow trees as large as houses, and use his ability to manipulate rocks and plants to raise a powerful legion of golems.
And the Hero and the saintess, the Sage's companions, were each as powerful as he was, even if their strengths took different forms.
Therefore, the Sage thought,
‘If we can encounter the Demon King safely while keeping our full strength intact, we will have a chance of winning.’
He had not underestimated the Demon King.
On the contrary, the fact that the three of them, each possessing the military strength of a nation, considered that they merely had a chance of winning rather than being certain of victory against one Demon King showed that the Sage's judgment was so cautious that ordinary people might mistake it for cowardice.
But the Sage could not help thinking anew.
He should have been more cautious.
“What a monstrous bastard…!”
The Sage gritted his teeth.
Although he was desperately trying to kindle his fighting spirit, his body was trembling faintly.
Unconsciously, he rubbed his neck.
The slash the Demon King had unleashed at the very moment the battle began.
The afterimage of that slash, which had seemed capable of severing his neck in one stroke, still flickered before his eyes.
If the Hero had failed to block the Demon King's sword in time, they would have been wiped out instantly without even having a chance to fight properly.
No, the crisis was still unfolding in real time, even at this very moment.
Clang!
The Demon King's and the Hero's swords collided.
The Demon King's aura, refined and compressed to an extreme degree without the slightest tremor, collided with the Hero's splendid shower of flowers.
“Kuh!”
The one at a disadvantage was the Hero.
Every time their swords crossed, dozens of petals protecting the Hero's body vanished, and small wounds appeared across him.
As though aiming for the opening this created, the Demon King unleashed a single slash, drawing a diagonal line across the center of the Hero's torso.
“Fernando!!”
Before blood and entrails could spill from the Hero's abdomen, the saintess's blessing forcibly restored the wound.
The Demon King released aura from his sword to cut down the Hero and the saintess at once, but the golems created by the Sage threw their bodies in front of him.
The time bought by sacrificing dozens of golems, each stronger than most knights, was less than a second.
It was enough time for the Hero to regain his stance, but the Sage's forces were greatly diminished because of it.
The Demon King continued his next attack without any sign of regret or delight.
More than a hundred spears formed in the sky and poured down like rain toward the Hero's party, but walls of rock created by the Sage and the saintess's blessings blocked them.
The Sage tried to turn the ground beneath the Demon King's feet into a thick swamp and bind him in place, but the Demon King coated the entire ground with his own magic, preventing the Sage from interfering with it.
The Hero's party was putting up a fairly good fight against the Demon King.
They were exhausting his mana and damaging his armor.
The freely drifting shower of flowers, the sacred radiance, and the surging army of puppets made this possible.
But that was all.
The Hero's party would run out of mana before the Demon King's mana did.
The Hero's party would fall before the Demon King did.
Click.
The Demon King swung his sword, his pitch-black armor clattering.
The Demon King, a mass of darkness given form and clad in black armor as he mimicked a human, showed no emotion even amid the fierce battle.
He did not rejoice. Nor did he grieve or grow anxious.
It was not that the Demon King lacked emotions.
Just as no one rises and falls emotionally over every detail while doing paperwork, the Demon King simply did not display emotion because this battle itself was nothing more than ‘work to be processed’ to him.
The Sage realized.
In the Demon King's eyes, he and his companions were nothing more than numbers on a document.
‘This isn't enough. Our calculation of the forces was wrong from the beginning!’
It wasn't merely a difference of one tier.
The distant boundary between the transcendent and the non-transcendent stood between the Hero's party and the Demon King.
The Sage's mind spun desperately.
Escape? Impossible.
Even if the three of them tried to flee side by side, their backs would simply be cut down, and even if one of them became a decoy, they could not buy any meaningful amount of time.
Force the battle into a short engagement somehow? Impossible.
The Hero's party was already pressing the Demon King with the greatest firepower they could produce. They were not holding anything in reserve to maintain an even fight; they were scraping the bottom of their strength and still only managing to keep pace.
What about changing the battlefield? Sacrificing this fake body? Trying a bluff through negotiation? Would surrender be better?
Countless choices and methods combined in the Sage's mind, only to be refuted and discarded by the Sage himself the instant they formed.
And even as he searched for a solution, the battle continued to deteriorate.
At last, at the very moment the Sage fell into despair,
“─O God. To you, the Great One, I offer myself.”
The air changed.
The saintess's brilliant radiance, pouring from her body, began to seize the space occupied by the Demon King's magic that had filled the area.
The light amplifying the Hero and the Sage's strength grew several times brighter, and vitality began to surge through their bodies, but neither the Hero nor the Sage could rejoice.
The saintess's body began to disappear into light from the tips of her toes upward.
As the price for borrowing enormous power from the god she served, the saintess's very existence was offered as a sacrifice.
Kind, sincere, and deeply responsible.
Yet cowardly enough to hide her identity, and fearful in the face of death.
That profoundly human woman chose a fate perhaps even worse than death.
For victory. And to save her companions.
At that moment, the Sage hated himself.
The saintess had chosen for herself the method he had thought of but could not bring himself to say aloud.
He was as disgusted by himself for rejoicing at the chance of victory created by it as he was saddened by the saintess's choice.
────!!
With a roar, the Hero charged forward.
Knowing that hesitating now would turn the saintess's sacrifice into a meaningless death, he swung his sword at the Demon King, postponing even his overflowing tears until later.
He turned every last petal that could have been used for defense into an attack. His body was slashed, torn, and crushed in countless places, but the overwhelming light pouring from the saintess brought the Hero back from death to life.
The Sage did not remain idle either.
Regardless of whether the Demon King's spells blew off his limbs, he charged into the Demon King's embrace and drove his staff, infused with all his mana, into the center of the Demon King's armor.
Thwack!
Creak, creak-creak!
Roots that had grown inside the Demon King's armor tried to restrain his movements.
Whenever the darkness composing the Demon King's body released its power, the roots broke and withered, but the staff at their source neither broke nor withered, continuing to hinder the Demon King.
Giiiiiiind!
The Hero's flower storm battered the Demon King's body without end, gnawing away at his armor.
With a horrifying metallic shriek, the Demon King's body grew increasingly tattered.
Watching this, the Sage shouted inwardly,
Hurry. Just a little faster. Please, before it's too late!
But that wish was not granted.
Before the Demon King fell, the immense radiance lending strength to the Hero and the Sage disappeared.
And at that same moment, the Demon King's sword pierced the Hero's chest.
The Sage let out a silent scream.
An unquestionably fatal wound.
With the saintess gone, there was no longer any way to heal it.
Faced with that fact, the Sage gave up, but the Hero did not.
Rather than pulling out the sword embedded in his chest, the Hero grabbed the Demon King's hand and drove the sword even deeper.
Deeper and deeper, until the Demon King could no longer pull the sword free.
Realizing the Hero's intention, the Sage's eyes widened.
The Sage wanted to stop the Hero, but his body, which had already exhausted every last bit of its stamina and mana, no longer had the strength even to produce a shout.
The Hero and the Sage's eyes met.
The Hero forced a smile as though offering his final farewell to a friend, then tightly embraced the Demon King's body.
Deep-blue aura wrapped around the Hero and the Demon King's bodies and soon bloomed like a single flower.
A final flower storm, blooming in full glorious profusion.
After even the last drifting petals had disappeared, the Sage looked blankly around him.
The place where the saintess had been. Her garments, left behind and fluttering gently, lay there.
The place where the Hero had been. A black helmet rolled across the ground, encased in blue petals.
The place where the soldiers had been. Countless corpses of soldiers who had annihilated one another along with the Demon King's army lay scattered there.
Slowly, very slowly, the Sage covered his face with both hands.
Amid the ruins shrouded in silence,
The sound of sobbing echoed for a very long time.
***
“I wish to offer you my heartfelt thanks for your devotion and contributions to humanity.”