Ch.116Chapter 116 – Assault (2)

The assailant turned around to check his pursuer, only to flinch when he spotted Shin Jaehyuk rapidly closing in. High-speed movement was the assailant’s greatest talent, and when he ran at full speed, no one could catch him.

However, Shin Jaehyuk was equally bewildered.

‘I’ve enhanced my body with both mana and holy power, yet I can only close the distance this much?’

The assassin’s escape skills were remarkable as he fled through the fog. He wasn’t merely familiar with the path; he moved as if flying, traversing both ground and air to evade pursuit.

Moreover, he seemed to employ some assassin’s trick that created fog wherever he went, obscuring visibility. Shin Jaehyuk called out impatiently.

“Stop—right—there!”

Holy lightning formed above Shin Jaehyuk’s shoulder and launched forward. Naturally, lightning travels faster than any runner. Just as the thunderbolt was about to strike the fugitive’s back, the assailant’s body momentarily dispersed like mist, allowing the lightning to pass through.

He couldn’t maintain the mist form for long, as his body returned to normal immediately after the lightning bolt passed through. However, the assailant hadn’t accounted for the residual electricity in the air. As sparks traveled through the blood vessels beneath his skin, he twitched in pain from the electric shock.

Thanks to this, his speed slowed slightly. As the distance closed, Shin Jaehyuk could vaguely make out the figure’s attire through the fog—black clothing and a cloak, typical of an assassin, designed to blend into darkness.

‘At least he’s not a demon.’

Having confirmed that his target was human, Shin Jaehyuk first tried persuasion.

“Assassin! There’s no use in running!”

No criminal ever willingly surrenders to such warnings. Shin Jaehyuk repeatedly launched lightning bolts and warned him to stop, but the fugitive showed no intention of giving up his escape.

‘I see. Since your identity hasn’t been exposed, you’ll keep running, is that it?’

Shin Jaehyuk gauged the distance. Once he determined it was close enough, he gathered mana in his eyes and activated his skill: Insight.

Since the assassin wasn’t an Awakened, no level or achievements were displayed. However, he could see the name.

Shin Jaehyuk uttered the assassin’s name in bewilderment.

“Duke August?”

August Romania. The man who had welcomed the delegation from Earth on behalf of the Imperial Palace. Why was he dressed like this?

Hearing his name from his pursuer, the Duke abandoned his escape.

“Damn it, how…?”

His voice carried unmistakable dismay. It wasn’t easy to maintain composure when one’s identity was instantly exposed.

The Duke tried to conceal his agitation and act normally—which meant attempting to dismiss the matter by invoking his status. He straightened his wind-tousled clothes and spoke with feigned dignity.

“You’re the foreigner guarding the east gate? I order you to forget what you just saw.”

It was bound to fail. Shin Jaehyuk pointed his spear with an incredulous expression.

“Bullshit. I just saw you kill someone and run. You criminal bastard.”

“I didn’t kill him! …I was merely… educating him.”

This was an admission that the Duke had indeed done something suspicious. Having confirmed that his authority held no sway over his opponent, Duke August drew a dagger from his breast.

“Wow, you’re really going all out. Planning to commit murder and destruction?”

Instead of responding, the Duke lunged at Shin Jaehyuk with an assassin’s movements—stealthy and swift. Shin Jaehyuk considered taking the hit, trusting his recovery abilities, but decided against it, considering the possibility of poison.

The spear tip surged upward, deflecting the dagger and aiming straight for the Duke’s chin. As the Duke quickly tilted his head back to avoid the attack, Shin Jaehyuk’s palm swooped toward his face.

“Kugh!”

The Duke leaped back, slashing at Shin Jaehyuk’s wrist with his dagger. Blood spurted from the artery, transforming into thick fog that engulfed Shin Jaehyuk’s face. This was the source of the fog that had blanketed the night streets.

“Blood magic? You’re becoming more suspicious by the minute, Duke…”

As Duke August tried to escape while Shin Jaehyuk’s vision was obscured, he found himself unable to retreat more than a few steps before his back hit an obstacle. It was a protective barrier spell that Shin Jaehyuk had secretly cast. Originally a dome designed to block evil intrusions, it now served as a prison preventing the Duke’s escape.

Shin Jaehyuk brushed the blood mist from his face and approached slowly.

“There’s no chance to escape. Stop wasting time and surrender.”

The Duke apparently didn’t trust this kind offer. He attempted to use his mist-transformation ability to escape the barrier. In doing so, he unwittingly proved Shin Jaehyuk’s point.

After subduing the Duke and throwing him to the ground in just three minutes, Shin Jaehyuk interrogated him.

“What were you doing in that alley? What’s your relationship with the victim?”

“…”

At first, the Duke kept his mouth firmly shut, but when Shin Jaehyuk seared his side with a weak lightning bolt, he writhed in pain and finally spoke.

“…E-everything is for His Majesty the Emperor!”

‘He opened his mouth after this little pain? Not a trained professional assassin, then. Did he commit the crime for personal reasons?’

Shin Jaehyuk pressed down harder with his right foot on the Duke’s back and persisted.

“What nonsense is this? Explain in detail.”

The Duke rolled his eyes left and right like a child trying to come up with an excuse for wrongdoing.

“W-well…”

“Come on, don’t try to pull anything.”

Shin Jaehyuk had no intention of letting this matter slide easily. The reason he had stayed in the Empire for three months was to prevent “a certain incident”—an incident that would lead to the Empire’s downfall.

From Shin Jaehyuk’s observations of the Empire’s defense system over the past three months, he knew the Empire was well-equipped to repel the Demon King’s army. Yet in the first timeline, where Belphegor was captured late, the Empire had failed to stop the Demon King’s army and ultimately collapsed.

Shin Jaehyuk’s theory was this: somewhere in the time difference between the first and second timelines—those few months—an event would occur that would breach the Empire’s defenses and lead to the capital’s fall.

For three months, Shin Jaehyuk had hunted demons while meticulously examining the walls for weaknesses and investigating possible secret infiltration routes for demons, but he had found nothing amiss.

With the investigation yielding no results, the Duke’s bizarre behavior was the most suspicious thing Shin Jaehyuk had encountered in the past three months—the most out of the ordinary, and therefore likely related to the Empire’s downfall.

When Duke August showed reluctance to answer straightforwardly, Shin Jaehyuk drove his spear into the ground next to the Duke’s face and growled.

“Duke, have you tampered with the walls? Or is there a secret passage to let demons in?”

“W-walls? What are you talking about— ARGH! Damn it! That lightning! I-I don’t know about any walls. I only act for His Majesty!”

“A criminal invoking the Emperor’s name…”

Shin Jaehyuk lowered his eyebrows, dismissing the Duke’s words as nonsense. But the Duke twisted his body and protested.

“S-selling out? You ignorant foreigner! Do you even know what state His Majesty is in?”

“The Emperor? I heard from the Chancellor that his health is critical.”

“Kugh, and do you know that illness is caused by the Chancellor?”

“What?”

As the weight on his chest eased, the Duke coughed and gasped for breath.

“Damn it, foreigner! You know nothing about the power dynamics and secret struggles at court! Don’t you understand why the Chancellor keeps the Emperor from public appearances, why he prevents him from meeting you? The Chancellor is controlling the Emperor and wielding power!”

“Nonsense. What reason would the Chancellor have for that?”

Chancellor Behemdorf, whom Shin Jaehyuk had met, was a seasoned politician with many schemes and inscrutable motives, but he didn’t seem inherently evil.

The Duke disagreed.

“That friendly appearance is all a mask! Did you know the Chancellor is a magician? An ancient one who was active even a hundred years ago when the Hero was summoned! That traitor has been using magic to secretly but steadily weaken His Majesty since he ascended the throne. He aims to weaken imperial authority and devour the Empire!”

“And what does that have to do with your crime?”

The Duke hesitated momentarily, then stammered.

“W-well, that man was the Chancellor’s subordinate! I personally ended the traitor’s life!”

‘Hmm… something seems off.’

Shin Jaehyuk sensed something disingenuous in the Duke’s explanation—a feeling that he was hiding something. He would need to hear the Chancellor’s side of the story as well.

Duke August tried to hide his anxiety while maintaining a facade of composure. He felt as if the holy knight’s spear might pierce his heart at any moment. Shin Jaehyuk observed his expression carefully.

‘Combining the micro-muscle movements, I understand. He’s not lying. He’s just not telling the whole truth.’

“I’ll throw him in prison and interrogate him until he reveals what he’s hiding.”

Shin Jaehyuk decided to take the Duke to Marco for a thorough investigation. Just as he was about to lift the Duke and move, his body swayed.

A violent tremor shook the ground.

‘An earthquake?!’

Without warning, the night streets of the capital were trembling. Brick-paved roads cracked, walls dividing buildings collapsed, and eaves crumbled. Lights turned on one by one in dark windows. The tremor striking the entire capital was waking the sleeping city.

Was it a natural earthquake? Shin Jaehyuk quickly realized it wasn’t. The culprit causing the earthquake rose from the direction of the Imperial Palace. It was a worm. An enormous worm that dwelled beneath the hot desert of hell—an ancient magical beast people called a “Death Worm.”

“Since the air is protected by barriers, they dug a tunnel…!”

Barely maintaining his balance, Shin Jaehyuk quickly turned to Duke August, wondering if this was also his doing. But the Duke was staring at the monster attacking the Imperial Palace with an equally shocked expression.

Shin Jaehyuk had an intuition.

This was “that incident”—the event that led to the Empire’s downfall in the first timeline!

Faced with this critical situation that took precedence over everything else, the Duke’s crime was pushed to a lower priority. Kwak Taewoo, who had discovered Shin Jaehyuk after the dense fog dissipated from subduing the Duke, ran over and asked about the situation.

“Jaehyuk! What’s happening? What is that monster?”

“Damn it, I’m confused too. I caught an assassin who turned out to be the Duke, and just as I was about to take him to prison, this Death Worm suddenly appears.”

As the two quickly exchanged information, the Duke’s face turned pale. That direction where the Death Worm had destroyed—it was the building housing the Imperial Library. Near the Emperor’s bedchamber…

Forgetting his arrested status, he shouted at the foreigners.

“Q-quickly, stop that magical beast! There’s a mana collector hidden in the library! And next to it is His Majesty’s quarters…!”

A mana collector is a device that extracts mana from the atmosphere to charge magic cannons. Just two of them supply energy to all the magic cannons on the walls.

As if to emphasize the gravity of the situation, a roar vibrated through the air.

The ancient worm, which had dug a twenty-kilometer-deep, thousand-kilometer-long tunnel to avoid detection, finally roared as it breathed the fresh air of the surface.

Though it was said to be a primitive creature whose only attacks were writhing and opening its mouth as if swallowing soil, its body was so enormous that it resembled a monster straight out of mythology. To the soldiers facing it, it seemed more terrifying than the dragons they had only encountered in legends.

As the Death Worm writhed, more buildings collapsed in succession, causing explosions. The Imperial Palace was engulfed in flames. Soldiers awakened from sleep were rushing toward the palace in haste.

Kwak Taewoo joined the urgency.

“What are you hesitating for, Jaehyuk? We need to go stop that thing!”

“Wait! Just a moment. Before rushing in recklessly, we need to think.”

Shin Jaehyuk quickly processed the situation. First, was there a possibility that the Duke’s words were a trap or a lie? No. He could be certain of that. The current situation was unexpected even for the Duke. So, understanding the current situation based on the results of the first timeline…

His reasoning was swift.

‘The library has already collapsed. The mana collector is likely destroyed as well.’

The Death Worm is an ancient magical beast. The reason it’s called a magical beast rather than an ancient demon is that the Death Worm lacks intelligence. It’s a monster that follows only instinct, craving life.

Yet the fact that the Death Worm specifically bypassed densely populated residential areas to destroy the library suggests that someone’s intention was behind the attack—with the purpose of disabling the magic cannons by destroying the mana collector.

Look, even now, soldiers who had been guarding the walls were flocking to the Imperial Palace. This enormous chess piece was causing enough commotion to divert attention away from the walls.

Having deduced this far, Shin Jaehyuk realized the true intention and plan of the Demon King’s army. This was no ordinary attack.

“It’s a diversion.”