Ch.195Reverse-Flowing Hourglass (3)

Ortes could easily interpret the phenomenon that had just occurred.

It was replaying past events in the present.

The problem was that understanding the principle didn’t guarantee success in breaking it. The Pope could block Ortes’s advance simply by repeatedly recreating past attacks, without needing to launch new ones.

‘Did I make the wrong judgment?’

Perhaps instead of trying to prevent the Pope from manipulating the Ten Commandments, he should have struck down the Commander alongside Haltos. But Ortes considered all possibilities.

‘The issue is that the Pope’s Holy Spirit manipulates time.’

Fighting the Commander directly would have higher odds of success than confronting the Pope. This was certain. Yet the Pope had sent the Commander to face Ortes without hesitation.

A choice he would never have made if the Commander’s death would lead to the plan’s failure. Yet the Pope acknowledged the Commander was central to the plan.

‘Even if he dies, I must assume he has the ability to return to a time before death.’

That’s why Ortes had attacked the Pope directly. The attempt was somewhat successful, preventing the Pope from manipulating the Ten Commandments.

But now that the Pope had entered combat stance himself, approaching him became impossible.

Even trying to examine him with the “Eye,” Ortes couldn’t perceive the Pope’s Holy Spirit in the “present.” It was reviving a Holy Spirit that had operated in the past. Ortes couldn’t fathom what kind of power functioned in such a manner.

The Pope slowly began approaching the Ten Commandments. Ortes was analyzing the scythe’s trajectory, assembling a path to intercept the Pope with minimal bodily damage.

Light.

First came the flash, then the sound followed.

A thunderous roar that tore through frozen time.

If the Pope had created a wall with the scythe’s trajectory, what followed was a vast bombardment that could sweep away that wall and more.

In that moment, a torrent of light scattered in a circular pattern. Like rushing river water meeting a rock. The magical power dispersing in all directions proved the Pope had hastily frozen space.

Now. Ortes’s intuition whispered.

The past “replay” had been shattered by the light cannon, and the scepter’s time-stop had been consumed to block the torrent of light.

Ortes’s high-frequency blade activated. Just like when fighting against the White Light, the black blade became even sharper.

The scepter aimed at Ortes. Ortes smiled.

He had witnessed the freezing technique and copied it.

Not the freeze blocking his path. The freeze that stopped the wave of light approaching to annihilate the Pope.

He shattered the transparent spatial barrier.

Light surged from the Pope’s left side. From his extended left hand to his right hand holding the scepter pointed at Ortes. The Pope’s entire body was buried in the destructive torrent of light.

“Ha.”

A cold sneer drifted from beyond the fading light. Though the voice was certainly familiar to Ortes, he felt an unbearable chill.

Clank. Carisia threw away the gauntlet on her right hand. The gauntlet, which had surely been black, now glowed white from overwhelming heat and light. The astonished Ortes shouted.

“Carisia, your arm!”

“It’s fine. I used light-body transformation to minimize the damage. But I overloaded it too much to use that one again.”

The gauntlet had assisted Carisia’s magic in various fields. A multipurpose device for distributing and focusing magical power, forming buffer zones when using atomic impact fists.

Even with the loss of this weapon, Carisia’s combat ability wouldn’t change dramatically. She still had the gauntlet on her left arm. However, having to invest additional computational power in magical distribution would gradually create an imbalance in fighting power as the battle dragged on.

If the Pope had perished from this single attack, there would be no problem.

Ortes knew the Pope had survived. Not from analyzing with his “Eye.”

The stopped time hadn’t resumed flowing, and the Commander hadn’t stopped attacking Haltos.

The Pope appeared in midair.

“I am… surprised.”

For the first time, the smile disappeared from his face. In its place was doubt.

“Brother. Were you not using that thing?”

“I should be loyal when you pay me well, shouldn’t I?”

Ortes gave Carisia a look. It meant: I’ll stall for time with words, so prepare a surprise attack with maximum destructive power, but don’t waste your weapon with reckless bombardment like before.

“How can you do this?”

“What do you mean ‘how’? You give money, provide housing and meals—what more could I want?”

A moment of silence followed. The Pope spoke with difficulty.

“That is not human.”

“Excuse me?”

“I—brother—we should know. That is not an ordinary, righteous person unavoidably corrupted by the Demon King in this era. It is a flawed creation designed from the beginning to imitate the Demon King.”

Ortes realized why the Pope hadn’t even attempted to take hostages. For him, Carisia was definitely something to be destroyed someday, not a subject for human empathy or communication.

As the Pope considered himself and Ortes to be the “same” demigods, he must have assumed Ortes shared his fundamental disgust toward Carisia’s existence.

“How can you cherish that thing?”

“How can you consider that thing human?”

“How can you—”

Blue eyes stared at the Pope. No emotion could be found in Ortes’s strange gaze. It was a mechanical stare that made the word “coldness” seem inadequate.

“Are you curious?”

The Pope nodded honestly, reflecting his true feelings. Ortes answered just as honestly.

“I’m curious too.”

“?”

In that moment of the Pope’s confusion, a cluster of light instantly formed around him. Each one a star containing a lethal explosion.

It was an explosion flowing like the Milky Way. Yet the Pope remained unharmed.

“He stopped his body’s time…?”

Ortes muttered in disbelief. Resurrection followed by invincibility? What kind of ridiculous abilities was this guy equipped with?

How could he maintain consciousness while his body’s time was stopped?

“It is a holy technique I cannot use lightly.”

The Pope ended his answer with that brief statement. He grasped two scepters in his hands. Ortes now realized the two scepters were different sizes. Perhaps representing hour and minute hands.

Carisia clicked her tongue. Even without understanding the theory, she could intuitively grasp it.

The White Light’s final light, refined and extracted from the solar eclipse. If she had used Infinite Starlight, she could have shattered even the Pope’s immortality.

She had succeeded in recognizing and entering this stopped time. It was entirely thanks to witnessing the White Light’s magic beforehand. While observing the realm of the White Light—the being closest to the Demon King under heaven—a vague starting point toward ascension had begun to appear within Carisia.

The transmission to the ascension realm she had witnessed many times while supervising the artificial Ten Commandments, or the wisdom-filled soil of the mythical era she could sense when connected to the Ten Commandments’ White Light, even at minimum output.

The seed of the final battle with the White Light planted in that soil. In the extreme situation of time suppression by the Holy Spirit, the seed had sprouted.

But beyond that, grasping ascension realm magic that the White Light could use was still a distant goal.

Even for the Pope, it should be impossible to interfere with the Ten Commandments while in a state where his body’s time was stopped—a state rejecting all interactions. He would have to release the invincible time-stop to approach and manipulate the Ten Commandments.

Therefore, Carisia’s only viable option was to block the Pope’s approach with area attacks.

The Pope had anticipated this strategy. Having experienced that massive light torrent firsthand, he couldn’t help but think of battlefield control through area attacks.

Silence continued in the standoff. Only the discordant sounds of destruction from Haltos and the Commander’s battle drifted over.

“Carisia.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to kill the Commander. Please stop the Pope.”

Ortes spoke after completing all calculations. Cracks like fissures rippled across his face around his blue eyes, but he paid no attention.

Ortes recalled the temple where he had met the ancient priest of Phoibos¹. Three elements had been prepared in that temple.

The pure white altar representing the heavens where gods descended, the sacred object manifesting the god’s presence, and the priest connecting god and human.

The Pope’s plan became clear.

The pantheon created through the Commander corresponded to the heavens. The priest was, of course, the Pope himself. The problem was the sacred object.

Ortes could easily deduce that the Pope was the other entity collecting sacred objects that the ancient priest of Hestia had warned about. In this world, only the Holy Name Order, Blasphemia, and Hydra Company were obsessed with collecting sacred objects.

Niobe, an insider of Blasphemia, hadn’t mentioned anything about relics containing ancient priests’ souls. Naturally, the remaining candidate was the Holy Name Order.

The Pope was trying to create something by gathering numerous sacred objects. Ortes recalled what Kaikel had said regarding the progress of the artificial Ten Commandments.

‘If about ten sacred objects like Phoibos’s crystal were supplied, it could reach near completion at once².’

Of the sacred objects inhabited by ancient priests—the twelve apostles’ divine objects—Hydra Company owned three.

The remaining divine objects numbered nine. How many were in the Holy Name Order’s possession and how many in Blasphemia’s was unknown, but it no longer mattered.

Since the Commander was under the Pope’s control. The Pope could have fully acquired up to nine divine objects and completed some divine object equivalent to the artificial Ten Commandments.

Through excessive use of the Eye beyond its limits, as with the White Light, and the delusion the Pope still muttered, Ortes could discern the nature of that divine object.

It was a body to bring down and bind a god.

The starting point was a very simple logic. The heaven that the ascended reach.

If one can ascend, one can also descend.

The Demon King proves this.