Ch.204Descent (3)

Hector laughed incredulously.

“Right! Even the Ten Commandments can be broken if someone tries hard enough. Now that it’s come to this, let’s start with the Green Eye… Huh?”

The Green Eye was nowhere to be seen.

“About that, sir. The Demon King manifested through the Green Eye. We tried to destroy it, but the Demon King emerged faster than we could break it, and that’s how things ended up like this.”

The lengthy struggle that had occurred in frozen time was summarized in an instant. Hector rubbed his forehead.

“So you’re saying the Demon King has already swallowed one of the Ten Commandments? Then his magical power is essentially infinite now.”

Hector drew his sword. It wasn’t a minimalist design like the high-frequency blade Ortes carried around, which was so plain it resembled a flat board.

It looked exactly like an ordinary sword that knights used in the old days. Ortes clicked his tongue.

“Wow, you’re still using that thing. It’s lasted quite a long time.”

“The sword is pretty sturdy.”

Ortes gave Carisia a meaningful look, silently asking what to do next.

“I’ve mostly completed analyzing the Tower Lords’ formula. It was similar to the magic I was conceptualizing, so I finished early. I’ll join them and buy more time until Etna City arrives.”

The implication was that the real battle against the Demon King would take place while connected to the artificial Ten Commandments. Carisia only explained her own course of action.

She was leaving the rest—including the command of Hector and the Pope—to Ortes himself. Her habit of bossing people around hadn’t changed.

“Hector!”

“Yes?”

“Let’s go together. It seems it’s time to give the Demon King a taste of our blades.”

Hector laughed hollowly. Since meeting Ortes, he had always thought they might cross swords someday, but he had never imagined a future where they would fight the Demon King together.

Yet this future was far more appealing than his fantasies.

“Indeed. It’s time to fulfill the founding purpose of the Order.”

Next, Ortes looked at the Pope. The holy rupture caused by Ortes’s overuse of his eyes had subsided faster than expected. This was partly because Ortes was accustomed to pushing his body to the limit, and partly because the cause of the overload was entirely his own doing.

Natural healing was possible since there was no further cause for overload if he simply closed his eyes and rested. But the Pope’s holy rupture was different.

Up until the point where he had forcibly used the Holy Spirit to occupy the Ten Commandments, natural healing might still have been possible.

However, the Demon King had invaded and seized his Holy Spirit formula. The aftereffects of changing the subject of the formula and completely reversing its direction from backward to forward in time were entirely the Pope’s burden to bear.

Even Ortes’s eyes couldn’t precisely measure his remaining lifespan.

“Pope. How much time do you have left?”

“…I’m not sure. Perhaps a little over an hour.”

“Are you prepared to die?”

The calm confirmation continued. The Pope nodded with an expression that could have been resignation or responsibility.

“A death to eliminate the Demon King would be as meaningful as life would be meaningless with the Demon King’s presence.”

“Hah,” a sigh escaped Ortes’s lips. How much easier it would have been if they had just agreed to share the Ten Towers from the beginning.

“Within that magic circle, all properties of magical power are dismantled. That means magicians’ attacks are essentially useless. But abilities outside of magic are a different story. We need your Holy Spirit.”

Simply containing the Demon King and waiting for thousands of years wasn’t the right approach. No one knew when the Tower Lords’ magic would reach its limit. Moreover, hadn’t the Demon King already absorbed one of the Ten Commandments whole? There was even a possibility that his magical recovery rate exceeded the consumption caused by the dimensional barrier.

Therefore, Ortes decided that he and Hector would attack the Demon King directly to reduce his existence time.

The Pope was their insurance—a lifesaving measure in case the two attackers faced a crisis due to the Demon King’s counterattack, or a safeguard in case the Demon King broke the property-shattering sealing formula with some mysterious technique.

“I will follow my brother’s choice.”

***

Carisia approached the Tower Lords. Her tension was evident. The ancient elders retreated while transmitting sufficient information through the Tower Lords’ exclusive channel.

The white-haired magician over there was the monster who had defeated the ancient White Light. The “White Light’s bastard” that Blasphemia had been tracking.

Only the White Light, who had already perished at Carisia’s hands, would know her exact identity, but she was powerful enough to directly kill the White Light and harbored hatred toward magical society. If Carisia were to attack any of the eight Tower Lords now, the Demon King would be released.

Then the world would end.

Mobilizing an expeditionary force against Carisia wasn’t feasible either. All the magicians present were supplying their magical power to the Ten Tower Lords.

Their magical reserves were already depleted, and they were holding on through the combined magical power of the entire expeditionary force and the desperate will of each Tower Lord. They didn’t even have the slightest leeway to speak.

Carisia slowly walked in between them. It was the point where two squares of the magic formation created by the eight Tower Lords overlapped.

Slowly, she infused her magical power.

The burden on the Tower Lords lessened considerably. Their gazes turned to Carisia in bewilderment or shock.

Carisia adjusted the distribution of magical power from the vertex of the magic formation and added the light attribute to repair the property-destruction formula. Now the colorless magical power constricting the Demon King became visible to the eye.

Originally transparent, the magical power was so dense that visible light refracted through it, making it appear glass-like.

“Let’s go, old man!”

Ortes rushed toward the center where the Demon King was bound, with Hector beside him. The Pope granted them acceleration and used his reversal formula to restore the magical power Carisia had consumed.

‘Damn it. Having such a great ability and using it for a mass suicide that drags the entire world down.’

If only the Pope hadn’t attempted to reverse time in the name of restoring the world to its proper form, they might all be living happily by now.

Ortes swallowed his complaints and swung his sword. It had been reduced to half its original length after being decomposed into letters by the Demon King, but Carisia had already repaired it with steel-attribute magic.

The bound Demon King seemed unable to unleash his letter-transformation power at the moment. The evidence was that the colorless magical power enveloping him remained intact.

The blades of Hector and Ortes aimed at the Demon King.

The Demon King offered no resistance. Surprisingly smoothly, the swords penetrated the Demon King’s body made of letters.

And when Ortes’s blade emerged from the Demon King, his body was already beginning to reattach itself.

The same was happening where Hector had cut.

‘Ordinary physical attacks don’t work?’

This was expected. Ortes immediately interfered with the letters forming the Demon King’s body, mixing them up to dilute their meaning.

Ah.

The Demon King made a sound.

There you are.

The moment Ortes interfered with the letters forming the Demon King’s body, the Demon King began to move. The mixed arrangement returned to its original state.

KRAGAGAGAGAGAGANGGG!

The invisible chains binding him shattered in an instant. The Demon King had separated the attribute-less magical power, which had already canceled itself out, and restored it to its original state.

It was unbelievable. Restoring magical power that had already been consumed in a spell and lost its properties back to its original form. It was nothing short of a magical reversal of entropy.

The separated attribute magical powers clustered together by type and floated around the Demon King.

Spheres of materialized magical power rotated around the Demon King, forming a solar system-like structure with him at the center. Then the Demon King raised his fingertip.

At that moment, the Pope’s Holy Spirit flared. The nine magical spheres reverted to magical power, and then one step further back to chains. This workaround was possible because he interfered not with the Demon King himself but with the “phenomenon” created by his magic.

The Pope shouted with a stern face:

“He was waiting for my brother! We must not let him find you!”

Without any warning, the Demon King repeated his magical reversal. The specialized formula meticulously coordinated by nine great mages, including Carisia, scattered like a sand castle.

“What the hell…”

Someone’s muttering echoed.

Where are you? I know what you desire.

The Demon King’s voice was transmitted directly to the will of every sentient being in the surrounding space. Hector realized something from the Demon King’s words.

Beneath the obvious fact that the Demon King was searching for Ortes, something else was hidden.

‘Even with Ortes right in front of him, he couldn’t recognize him.’

No, it was more than that. Hadn’t the Demon King been attacked by Ortes? Even after the first attack, the Demon King failed to perceive Ortes’s existence. The Demon King only detected Ortes after the second attack.

It was when Ortes used formula overwriting to interfere with the Demon King’s physical structure.

Only after receiving an attack that only Ortes could perform did he recognize his existence. That meant…

‘The Demon King’s senses cannot detect Ortes?’