Ch.1004That Time, Underground

It crumbles and shatters.

It fragments and collapses.

Alvheim, the fairy realm with thousands of years of history.

The sanctuary of a goddess who refused complete ascension and rooted herself to the earth.

The twilight fire devoured the fairy world.

Endlessly, ferociously.

As if denying the very existence of everything it touched.

Everyone witnessed it.

The massive pillar that seemed to stretch to the edge of the sky, burning.

The miraculous sight of the dense forest around it withering completely, crumbling to dust like sand.

Some raised their spears at the sight and shouted victory. Others fell to their knees, lamenting and crying out in despair.

Elation, joy, hope, righteousness, pride, awe, admiration.

Frustration, anxiety, disbelief, fear, hatred, shock, lamentation.

People across the world gazed upon that enormous pillar of fire with a variety of emotions. The final moments of a god meeting twilight.

The great forest was collapsing.

Marking the end of a grudge that had persisted for thousands of years, and the ambition born from it.

======[ Demian, Ophelia, Perne. ]======

Rewinding time slightly, about ten minutes earlier.

Demian’s group had tunneled beneath the base of the World Tree with legendary explosive power—enough to wound even a dragon—and finally reached its deepest part.

There, a black cavity stretched before them. A cavity large enough to swallow an entire city whole.

“Is this…?”

“Yes, this is the bottom of the World Tree. Niflheim.”

Perneisia said as she looked around the cavity with an expressionless face.

Though it was her first time setting foot here as well, she could recognize it at a glance, as it matched perfectly with what she had heard through oral tradition.

This was indeed the deepest part of the World Tree managed by the fairy elders, the realm called Niflheim.

“What a gloomy place.”

Ophelia offered her brief impression.

A vast underground lake with thick fog. Tree roots spreading in all directions like blood vessels. And countless cocoon-like masses hanging from them.

It was an eerie, chilling space.

“What are all those? They look like spider food—quite unsettling.”

“Spider food… an accurate comparison. Those are sacrifices offered to the World Tree.”

“Ah.”

Ophelia nodded slightly as if to say “I see.”

In a way, she had just disparaged the victims of the fairy elders’ atrocities by comparing them to spider food, but was she the type to feel embarrassment or guilt over such things?

There was no sympathy or guilt in Ophelia’s eyes after learning the identity of the cocoons—not even interest.

The only emotions contained within were tension from not knowing when an enemy might attack, and disgust at the creepy, unpleasant scenery.

Perneisia didn’t bother pointing this out.

What could be more meaningless than demanding conventional ethics from a mage who had learned necromancy without hesitation?

Besides, Perneisia felt she had no right to criticize Ophelia’s attitude.

She herself felt not a shred of sympathy for the deaths of others, except perhaps for her old comrades.

“So, you’re not saying we need to open each of these many cocoons one by one, right? This doesn’t look like something we could finish in a day or two.”

“Most of them are already dead. We just need to identify those who are still alive.”

Perneisia answered while looking around at the cocoons on the walls and ceiling.

“How do we distinguish them?”

Ophelia asked. Her tone suggested that distinguishing between them would require checking each cocoon individually anyway.

“Um… with magic…?”

Perneisia answered hesitantly, not having thought that far.

“You say that so easily. How exactly am I supposed to do that?”

Ophelia let out a hollow laugh.

It was a laugh of disbelief at how Perneisia had confidently said there would be no problem, only to dump the most important part entirely on her.

“…You can’t do that?”

“Magic isn’t omnipotent, you know?”

Fairy magic was a technique based on “spirits.”

Therefore, unless a fairy had deeply specialized in magic alone, ordinary fairies knew little about magic beyond elemental attacks.

The same was true for Perneisia.

Despite having lived more than ten times longer than Ophelia, her knowledge of magic fell far behind Ophelia’s.

So much so that she couldn’t distinguish between what was possible with magic and what wasn’t.

“…I see. If it’s impossible… then there’s nothing we can do.”

And this task was nearly impossible.

For an ordinary mage.

“Of course, my magic is omnipotent.”

Ophelia took out a long mana herb from her pocket and bit it, then made a shallow cut on her palm to draw blood, using it to draw complex patterns on her arm and the ground.

“I’ll borrow some of your hair. And blood too.”

“Ouch.”

She plucked about ten strands of Perneisia’s hair, placed them on the ritual circle drawn on the ground, and dropped plenty of fairy blood on top.

Preparations unnecessary for casting ordinary magic. But a procedure absolutely necessary in this situation—to utilize the knowledge of sorcery extracted from Meiharin.

“ᡝᡵᡤᡝᠨᡝ ᠮᡠᠰᠣᠩᡴᠣᠰᡠḢᡝᠯᡝᠮᠪᡳ.”

Ophelia’s lips produced a strange resonance.

An incantation from the eastern plains.

A ritual that used the blood of a living person and fairy hair as its core to find those who showed a resonant response.

Then.

– Guuuuung…!

The ritual circle written in blood emitted a strange resonance and spewed out an ominous red mist.

The mist rose into the air as if carried by the wind, dispersing and spreading in multiple directions.

“Done. We just need to select the cocoons where the mist sticks.”

Ophelia smiled as she removed the mana herb she had been biting to enhance her magical sensitivity.

She felt satisfied that the ritual she had created on the spot and used for the first time was working as intended.

“So we follow the mist, right?”

“For now.”

Nodding at Ophelia’s confirmation, Demian took the lead with his holy sword resting on his shoulder. The white sacred light illuminated the dark cavity like a torch.

“Be careful, just in case. Somewhere here, elders or their minions might be hiding…”

Perneisia warned while looking around the cavity.

Since this was the most important place in Alvheim, they must have stationed defensive forces here, she reasoned.

“We should be more careful of the tree itself than those creatures. In this land, even trees move around as they please.”

“That’s true. We were attacked several times on our way down here.”

Just as Haschal had to break through the World Tree’s desperate resistance to reach the divine core, their path toward Niflheim had also been filled with all kinds of dangers.

Tree roots bursting through walls and ground like snakes. The earth shaking violently as if trying to collapse the passage. Flames, water streams, and lightning suddenly erupting from all directions.

It was fortunate that the World Tree’s hostility and vigilance were focused on Haschal, making the underground route relatively less threatening. Otherwise, they would have become corpses before even reaching Niflheim.

But now that they had reached Niflheim, those interferences had completely disappeared as if they had never existed.

They couldn’t understand why.

‘Is Haschal giving it so much trouble that it can’t pay attention to us? Or is it conserving strength for a more threatening attack?’

Demian guessed the World Tree’s docility was due to one of those two reasons. That’s why he remained vigilant.

If it was the former, things would be easier, but if it was the latter, he needed to be prepared to respond immediately to any impending threat.

—-

There was no interference.

As if the hardships they had endured on their way down had been a lie, they were able to reach the cocoons on the World Tree’s roots with surprising ease.

The reason was simple.

“Worried for nothing. Well, the forest turned into a desert, so why would these things be any different?”

Ophelia laughed as she kicked at a stone beneath her feet. The clump of sand touched by her shoe crumbled and scattered with a soft sound.

It was the head of a monster that should have been guarding this place.

Yes, Niflheim’s defensive forces had already been annihilated. They were dried up without a trace of moisture, just like the desertified forest.

They had been caught in Varnir’s fully manifested power of absorption and had all their vitality drained.

Of course, Varnir hadn’t intended this.

The battle with Haschal had been so fierce and intense that he couldn’t distinguish which targets his power should affect.

If he had managed to defeat Haschal through this, it would have ended without any problems.

But Varnir ultimately lost, and as a result, Niflheim was left defenseless.

For Demian’s group, this was the greatest stroke of luck.

Thanks to this, they gained the time to check the contents of the cocoons where the red mist had attached.

“So we just open these, right?”

“Yes, carefully so you don’t cut too deep inside.”

Demian, Ophelia, and Perneisia carefully opened the cocoons—only those confirmed to contain living beings.

The number was twenty in total. An insignificantly small number compared to the cocoons scattered throughout this place.

“…This is.”

“They’re alive. Technically.”

After checking the inside of a cocoon, Perneisia’s face hardened, while Ophelia shrugged and sighed lightly as if she had expected this.

“If you can really call this being alive.”

The condition of those trapped inside the cocoons was horrific.

Their arms, legs, and ears had been cut off, and long roots were embedded like tentacles in their eyes, mouths, and lower bodies.

Even their spines had a large tentacle attached as if implanted, taking root across their entire backs.

“If we remove them and treat them…”

“No, it’s too late. They’re just breathing, but their souls have already been extracted.”

Ophelia shook her head and advised Demian, who was about to cut away the tree roots. It would be meaningless.

“This is just forcibly keeping soulless flesh alive. The moment we detach them, their breathing and pulse will stop, and they’ll die.”

Ophelia could clearly see it.

The tree roots connected to the sacrifices were supplying them with nutrients, forcibly moving their internal organs, and maintaining their lives against nature.

All those found in the cocoons were merely beings who were alive but already dead. Judging by their precarious life force, even that wouldn’t last much longer.

“Then, what should we…”

“Well, do as you wish? If you don’t want to kill them with your own hands, leave them be. If you want to give them a dignified death, take them out and bury them.”

Of the two options Ophelia suggested,

Demian said that while he might decide for humans, the treatment of fairies didn’t seem like his decision to make, and passed the choice to Perneisia. After hesitating for a while, she chose the latter.

At least that would provide some comfort to her former comrades who had been sacrificed, she hoped.

And so, twenty sacrifices met a peaceful death and were buried.

Seven humans. Five fairies who were Perneisia’s former comrades.

And eight more fairies, all of them.

“Damn those elder council bastards, damn that tree…!”

After killing and burying five comrades with her own hands, Perneisia trembled with resentment and hatred as she glared at the dark red lake at the center of Niflheim.

More precisely, at the green crystal floating in the middle of the lake.

The halved divine core of the World Tree.

Their target to destroy was there.

—-

The path to the lake.

Perhaps even the World Tree, which had been focusing all its attention on Haschal, couldn’t ignore the situation where Caliburn’s master was approaching the divine core.

– Kwararrrrung…!

All the tree roots covering the surroundings rumbled like thunder and writhed, then transformed into countless thorny tentacles that swept toward them.

“So that must be the divine core after all! Look how it’s going berserk!”

“Shut up and die!”

There were too many thorny tentacles, and they were too powerful to block them all.

Ophelia compressed her mana barrier to the size of a small shield, then floated several such mana shields in the air to block only the direct attacks.

Perneisia, whose mechanical armor had been destroyed and mana exhausted, fired clumsy fire magic she had learned from Ophelia at the tentacles that Ophelia missed.

While the two women desperately held out, Demian—

“Your struggle is too late. If you wanted to stop me, you should have done it before revealing the divine core.”

He firmly gripped Caliburn, the holy sword imbued with the power to slay gods, and leaped toward the lake.

“Hey! What if you fall in! How are we supposed to handle this by ourselves!”

Leaving behind Ophelia’s hysterical shout that forgot all aristocratic formality.

– Swaaaack!

Hundreds of tree roots flew toward Demian suspended in the air.

As if declaring that dodging in any direction would be meaningless, hundreds of thorny tentacles filled every direction around Demian without a gap.

Demian paid no attention to those tentacles, focusing only on the green crystal visible beyond them as he raised his sword.

And then.

【 Skywalk 】

In the next moment, his body transcended space and reached the divine core. Still in the posture of swinging the pure white greatsword diagonally.

Elpinel’s wrath, Caliburn.

The god-slaying greatsword crushed the fragment of divinity the World Tree had left on earth.

—-

The divinity of heaven burned in twilight.

The divinity of earth shattered in rage.

It was the death of a god.