Ch.148Chapter 148 – Lucifer (3)

The entire world was covered in an ochre hue. Sand grated between teeth. Sand-laden winds whipped through the Colosseum.

“My skill has clear strengths and weaknesses. Without sand, I might be weaker than an A-rank hunter, but conversely, with this much sand prepared…”

The fallen angels clutched their throats, choking. The sand filling their airways made breathing difficult. Sand that had invaded their bodies moved randomly, blocking not only their airways but also vital pathways like blood vessels and lymphatic ducts. Fallen angels dropped from the sky one by one like insects hit with pesticide, their wing movements ceasing.

“…Impressive.”

A massive storm encompassing an entire city. Adriano expressed genuine admiration. Thanks to the Pharaoh’s will directing the sandstorm around allies, they could converse without difficulty.

“Have you dealt with most of the Four Heavenly Kings’ minions?”

“Yes. But don’t let your guard down. I can still sense some alive.”

It was obvious that enemies surviving in the sandstorm would be stronger than those who had perished. Sure enough, four angels flew through the ochre wind. They were among the strongest of Gregory’s fallen angel officers.

Rather than showing anger at his subordinates’ annihilation, Azazel shouted with excitement.

“Hahaha, finally an opponent worth fighting! Sariel, Samael, Ramiel! Support me!”

Behind Azazel, the Angel of Burnt Offerings, followed Sariel the Angel of Command, Samael the Angel of the Vine, and Ramiel the Angel of Visions.

The Teleporter glanced at where flashes of light and thunderous explosions erupted beyond the sandstorm-obscured view. It seemed the Esper and Zeus were still fighting Lucifer.

‘Tsk, I can’t let them monopolize the experience points. I should quickly take down these mid-bosses and land the final blow…’

Just then, the Pharaoh spoke to the Teleporter while concealing himself in the sandstorm.

“I won’t be able to lend a hand while maintaining the storm. I’ll stay hidden for now.”

“I’m enough on my own.”

The Teleporter wore a fierce smile.

“Now that Lucifer’s vision is blocked, I can use my skills.”

In an instant, the Teleporter vanished. Spears thrusting from four directions lost their target and collided in empty air.

“Spatial movement? How annoying!”

Azazel spat out his frustration upon realizing the nature of the technique. The sand already obscured their vision, making it difficult to track positions, and now they faced an enemy using spatial movement. It was extremely bothersome. For Azazel, who preferred direct confrontations of power, this was an incredibly irritating opponent.

Like a skilled fighter, the Teleporter gladly obliged by acting in ways his enemy despised. Appearing silently behind the angels, he placed his hands on their wings and twisted space.

With a crack, Azazel’s steel-strong wings folded in on themselves spatially and broke.

“You!”

Samael extended grape vines toward the Teleporter. Adriano mocked the slow attack and disappeared from space. Once again, the ochre wind obscured their vision.

With broken wings, the angels had no choice but to land on the ground.

“Lord Azazel, healing…”

“No, this is better. He can’t teleport underground, so we’ll wait for him to reveal himself on the ground.”

Ramiel used illusions to create doppelgangers everywhere, preventing the Teleporter from identifying targets, while Samael raised grape vines from the ground to monitor the sky, ready to impale the Teleporter the moment she appeared.

The angels completed their preparations and waited for the Teleporter to appear. However, the Teleporter didn’t move according to their expectations. Instead of using skills on them directly, he targeted the space surrounding them.

The angels’ vision suddenly cleared.

“…?”

They felt an alien sense of floating. Their feet weren’t touching the ground. Below an entirely black background was a blue sphere. Earth.

“…!!”

Only then did the angels realize they were in space, specifically in Earth’s exosphere.

Is movement at this distance possible? Azazel’s expression conveyed his shock. In the airless void, the angels could neither fly nor communicate. The four angels flailed helplessly in the emptiness of space.

Soon after, gravity, the lover of all things, pulled them back into the embrace of the earth. The broken-winged angels fell toward the ground.

“Burning trash, I suppose.”

The Teleporter drank a mana potion while admiring the biological shooting stars glowing in the atmosphere. Even for someone like her, manipulating space at such distances was taxing.

‘I got lucky. I expected them to be at least S-rank boss level… but this was simpler than I thought.’

This was a tactic she often employed when facing troublesome enemies: abandoning them in space. Most enemies would die on their own from internal bleeding due to pressure differences, suffocation from thin oxygen, friction heat from the atmosphere, or impact with the ground. Though the mana consumption was severe, preventing multiple uses, it was quite an effective technique…

‘…What?’

Just then, one of the shooting stars at the edge of her vision twitched. Adriano narrowed her eyes.

“Still alive?”

Azazel looked at his subordinates burning from friction heat. Their consciousness had long since faded, and their skin was charred black. Watching the burning feathers and helplessly falling angels, he recalled an old memory.

Yes, it was like that then too. The day of the Fall from Heaven to Hell. The day they were expelled from God’s dwelling, treated as failures simply for possessing self-awareness.

Was this how a child abandoned by trusted parents felt? Azazel recalled his vow from that day.

‘I hate you, God. I will destroy everything you love.’

Long ago, Azazel enjoyed offering sacrificial rams to please the Lord he served. Not anymore. The Angel of Burnt Offerings prayed for himself.

‘Become my strength.’

Azazel ripped out his subordinates’ hearts and devoured them. With surging power and recovering flesh, Azazel naturally realized what he could now do.

Black vine stems sprouted from his broken wing joints. The vines enveloped his entire body, forming an exoskeleton like muscle fibers. The angel who hated God descended to earth in a strange form covered entirely in muscle.

“Now I can see you clearly, little rat.”

Azazel moved, seeing through the sandstorm to the Teleporter’s position. His speed was unbelievable. The vines covering his body assisted his movements.

Azazel’s hand blade sliced through Adriano’s waist with strength far exceeding his previous might. Though teleporting at the last moment avoided a fatal wound, Adriano sensed the enemy’s danger level had increased dramatically.

‘I’ll end this quickly before he adapts to his new power.’

Taking a sip of a health potion, Adriano teleported again. He appeared behind Azazel.

“Since you survived space, this time I’ll bury you in lava.”

Recalling the coordinates of a volcano, Adriano placed his hand on Azazel’s body. Or rather, thought he did. His arm passed right through Azazel’s body.

‘An illusion?!’

As Adriano instinctively tried to dodge, sensing danger, Azazel’s leg appeared from somewhere and slammed into his abdomen.

“Kuh-ack-“

Shot like a bullet, Adriano crashed into the concrete road, creating a crater with a thunderous sound. Blood gushed from his mouth. His internal organs were definitely damaged.

‘My expensive automatic defense artifact broke in one hit… This guy’s strength exceeds even Skyscraper’s.’

There was no time to relax. Vine stems sprouted from the ground. Before being caught by the vines, Adriano teleported. And Azazel pounced on Adriano’s new location with speed resembling teleportation.

“I’ve been waiting. Now farewell.”

‘Oh sh-‘

A vine stem twisted like an awl shot toward Adriano’s head from Azazel’s hand. Just as the word “death” flashed clearly in his mind.

A massive sand giant grabbed Azazel’s arm.

“Pharaoh!”

The Pharaoh, who had been hiding, joined the battle. The technique that earned Muhammad the title of Pharaoh: four giant sand soldiers each grabbed one of Azazel’s wings.

“Annoying!”

When Azazel flapped his wings once, a powerful gust blew out, bursting the giant soldiers’ arms. However, being made of sand, the giants quickly recovered their arms by drawing in surrounding sand and struggled again to restrain Azazel.

Azazel flew high to shake off the annoying giants. Meanwhile, the Teleporter, having regained his composure, expressed gratitude to the Pharaoh.

“…Thanks for helping me through that crisis. I was caught off guard by his sudden strange ability.”

“Hmph, excuses. Don’t be careless from now on.”

“Right… Let’s end this quickly. I’m concerned about the other situation.”

The Teleporter glanced at where lightning flashes intermittently erupted beyond the sandstorm. It seemed the battle between the Esper, Zeus, and Lucifer wasn’t over yet. Though visibility was poor, the mere fact that the fight continued caused anxiety to creep in.

‘If the two of us are struggling against a Four Heavenly King’s subordinate, how strong must the King himself be?’

The Pharaoh drew up his power to shake off the anxiety. The giant soldiers’ bodies collapsed, and the sand reformed into massive chains. Chains erupting from the ground shot upward to capture and bind Azazel.

Azazel performed acrobatic flight to avoid the chains, but these weren’t ordinary chains pursuing him. When the main body of a chain missed its target, new chains sprouted like fractals from the middle, chasing after Azazel.

“You dodge quite well. How about this?”

The Teleporter opened transfer gates throughout the sky. These were wormholes that temporarily connected two points in space by tearing them open. Chains passing through the transfer gates approached Azazel from unpredictable directions, making evasion even more difficult.

“Such petty techniques-!”

Finally, Azazel gave up dodging and swung his wings to burst the chains. But that was a mistake. Sand particles stuck to his wings, making them heavy.

Neither evasion nor interception was possible. From Azazel’s perspective, it was an incredibly annoying attack.

Azazel expressed his rage with his entire body. The vine armor enveloping him suddenly released, lashing out in all directions like whips. The chains were sliced into pieces by the cutting wind and scattered into sand particles.

Before the destroyed chains could regenerate, Azazel used Ramiel’s ability. Dozens of illusory doppelgangers flew at the Pharaoh and Teleporter, confusing their vision. The Teleporter clicked his tongue. Surprisingly, his sense told him all these dozens of copies had substance.

“Don’t be fooled. The ones that sand passes through are fake.”

The sand mixed in the wind helped distinguish between illusions and reality. With the Pharaoh’s sharp discernment, the dozens of copies were eliminated one by one, until only the real body remained. When the Pharaoh clasped his hands together, sand scattered everywhere stuck to Azazel at once.

Azazel struggled like someone trapped in a swamp, but once caught, it was over. No matter how much sand he shook off, more sand clung to his body, hindering his movements. Eventually, Azazel became immobilized, looking like he was trapped in a snowball.

“HU-MAN-!!!!!”

“So noisy. Now die.”

The Teleporter placed his hand on Azazel’s head. Following Adriano’s will, the space above the neck was forcibly distorted, and when it exceeded its limit, Azazel’s head burst with a pop. Azazel’s body went limp.

“Oh, level up. He’s definitely dead this time.”

After confirming Azazel’s death through the status window, the Teleporter lowered his guard. The Pharaoh moved Azazel’s corpse to a corner for easier collection by the cleanup crew later.

The Teleporter drank potions in succession while dusting off the sand from his clothes.

“I was running low on mana, so the battle ended at just the right time.”

“It seems the other battle has ended too.”

At some point, the thunderous sounds had ceased. To secure visibility, the Pharaoh stopped the sandstorm. As the sand dust settled, visibility gradually improved. The blurry silhouettes became clearer.

“Damn, those two hogged the main dish all to themselves. That Zeus bitch must have gained some levels… huh?”

Their expressions froze as they identified the silhouette’s owner. An angel hovering majestically without a single grain of sand on his body greeted them.

“Ah, there you are? Perfect. Please bestow your teachings upon me now. I’ve learned all I need from these ones.”

Below Lucifer lay Zeus, unconscious from Lucifer’s lightning. Along with a lump of flesh, formerly known as the Esper, crumpled by telekinesis.

***

Chaos erupted at headquarters, where they were receiving live feeds from the body cameras on the S-rank hunters. The Esper, dead by his own favorite technique, and Zeus, incapacitated. This was a completely unexpected situation for the upper echelons. They had absolute confidence in victory with four of humanity’s strongest hunters engaged, but now…

The Pharaoh and Teleporter continued their struggle, but the tide of battle grew increasingly unfavorable. Both had consumed much of their mana using large-scale techniques.

“What should we do? Order a retreat?”

“No! The enemy has already acquired the Teleporter’s spatial movement technique! If we don’t stop him here, he’ll use guerrilla tactics, teleporting between cities! We absolutely cannot handle that!”

The commander screamed, dripping with cold sweat. If Lucifer destroyed infrastructure in every capital with salt beams, humanity would self-destruct without demonic attacks. This could not be allowed.

With Lucifer’s feet tied up fighting the Pharaoh and Teleporter, now was the time to eliminate him.

“But how? Sending more hunters as reinforcements doesn’t seem like it would help…”

Having deployed four S-ranks and still failing to kill Lucifer here, the commander knew all responsibility for the defeat would fall on him.

‘Wang Yui is dead, and Rome has fallen. If we retreat now, it won’t just be me who’s screwed. By any means necessary…’

With his reason numbed under extreme pressure, the commander’s pupils trembled with fear of the future and some impulse. Even though he had been delegated full authority over the operation, this was clearly an overreach. But if not now…

Between dry lips, a trembling voice without conviction made the final decision.

“L-launch the nuke.”