Ch.213Gods, Kings, and Humans (5)

Hector felt a sense of unease. He was quite familiar with how Ortes would deceive others with his silver tongue.

First, capture attention with a shocking declaration, then block any rebuttals with strange yet persuasive statements, and finally reap the benefits behind the scenes.

However, the Demon King’s current demeanor was markedly different from Ortes’s typical deception.

Rather than being swept up in Ortes’s eloquence, wasn’t the Demon King engaging in a battle of wits, revealing his own information?

Despite Ortes’s revitalized rhetoric, the Demon King consistently maintained his own pace, presenting Ortes with new questions.

Yet Hector could also sense the arrival of Elysion—a sign that Ortes’s plan had succeeded.

No matter what extraordinary plan the Demon King might have, now that things had reached this point, the initiative belonged to Hydra Company—

Hector suddenly felt a chill run down his spine.

He himself could sense the “arrival of Elysion.” Normally, Elysion should have appeared quickly and swiftly, like when Etna City fell in a flash of white light—to prevent the Demon King from having an opportunity to counterattack during Elysion’s spatial transfer.

But now, Elysion’s spatial transition speed was slower than expected. Whether due to repulsion created by extra-dimensional magical power or some other factor, it was clearly not as swift as needed.

Yet the Demon King showed no reaction—even up to the point where Hector, a knight rather than a magician, could notice it.

It was a trap. Pretending to fall into Ortes’s trap while setting up an even greater trap in return.

But what on earth was this trap for?

***

Karisia activated Aigio’s Scales without hesitation the moment Elysion was deployed. Ortes had entrusted her with the use of these scales, so he shouldn’t have any complaints about her using them now.

Lampades was slightly displeased, but he was merely a figurehead in the Hydra Company alliance with no real authority.

“Just by exploring the wisdom inherent in the Ten Commandments, our magic tower’s future could become limitless…”

But if sacrificing the Yellow Thunder would grant them the right to use the Ten Commandments from the Ten Towers, and furthermore provide an opportunity to defeat the Demon King, it obviously had to be offered as a sacrifice.

After all, the magic tower’s future depended on their survival.

Karisia held Aigio’s Scales and infused them with magical power. On one side, the Ten Commandments’ Yellow Thunder; on the other, the Demon King’s integrity.

It was the first step in tarnishing the perfect divinity of Simon Magus, the god and king of the magical world.

***

The scales, having received the Yellow Thunder as payment, began to fluctuate. The Mandate of Heaven twisted. Thousands of years of history and immeasurable magical power recorded in the Ten Commandments. All powers sublimated to interfere with the metaphysics of fate.

And so fate was distorted. A new destiny was engraved in the metaphysical realm.

The Demon King’s integrity was dismantled. His divine position faded, and though still powerful, he was nevertheless mortal. A fate was prepared for the Demon King to contend with the adversaries of the age as human against human.

It was a movement that overturned the principles of the world, outside the realm of human perception.

But the Demon King was not human. He reached out toward the realm of fate and scraped away the engraved destiny.

The Demon King’s integrity was ▚▉▜▌. His divine position ▋░▊, still powerful▅ ▉▆░▒ ▝▙▚. ▚▙ against human, a fate to contend with the adversaries of the age was ▇█ toward the Demon King.

The winds of fate are ever-changing. But aren’t even winds bound to windmills and caught by sails to be utilized?

The Demon King’s integrity remained unchanged. His divine position was eternal, still powerful and consistently immortal. A fate to contend with the adversaries of the age as divine king against human was offered to the Demon King.

This should be sufficient.

From the first moment he descended into this world, he had never been entirely within the human realm.

The Demon King contaminated the world’s principles with magical power. This meant more than just the phenomenon of magical power spreading throughout reality.

He knew about Aigio’s Scales, the most powerful weapon possessed by the Divine Decree Order.

The Demon King contaminated even fate itself. This was why he was the “protagonist” of the novel. The inexplicable strokes of luck described as “protagonist’s plot armor” in what Ortes thought was the original novel were actually fragments of the Demon King’s ability to interfere with fate.

Manipulation of the Mandate of Heaven using Aigio’s Scales—the sharpest knife meant to harm the Demon King himself.

The Demon King twisted the direction of that knife. By adding more force to the power that twisted fate, he made it stab itself.

In a sense, this was a technique similar to Ortes’s spell overwriting, just extended to the realm of fate.

Everyone intuitively sensed that something had gone wrong. Warning bells rang incessantly from the deepest parts of the human subconscious.

It was the frustration and despair naturally felt when witnessing a natural disaster. The instinctual urge to flee immediately in the face of a massive tsunami or approaching lava, knowing there’s no way to resist.

But the disaster now approaching had no physical form—it was the woven fate itself. There was nowhere to run.

And only Ortes could clearly see the engraved fate in its distinct form.

***

“What is this?”

Ortes muttered in astonishment. He knew that concepts created and spread by the Demon King had already risen to the level of world rules. But for that infiltration to extend even to the abstract notion of fate?

Did you not already know that divine power and magical power could be combined?

What reason is there that the power emanating from divine objects, also a branch of sacred paths, cannot be interfered with by magical power?

The Demon King explained kindly. A tone so gentle it made Ortes want to beg to be sent back home.

Ortes knew this was the Demon King’s inducement. He gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to flee. But still.

How on earth could one interfere with that?

Even with Ortes’s eyes, he could only confirm the principle; it was a realm beyond reach. This was truly magic. Magic where one could neither explain the trick nor know when the deception began.

Nevertheless, Ortes did not abandon hope. It was the moment he tried to open his eyes wide to see fate.

The Demon King’s magic obscured Ortes’s vision. The fractal information that endlessly repeated, blocking Ortes when he tried to dig into the source of Nastion. It was of the same quality but different in density. The burden on his eyes rose instantly.

His vision blurred. No matter how he struggled, the Demon King seized and altered all visible information, obscuring Ortes’s eyes. Like an omnipotent being watching human folly, the Demon King declared:

This is my magic.

“…’Magic.'”

Hector echoed, staring at the Demon King’s back.

***

Hector raised his sword.

A very old sword passed down from swordmaster to swordmaster. He reflected on the knight order’s sword technique.

Melmapabub. Destroy magic and break laws.

If what the Demon King used was “magic that usurps fate,” then the knight order’s sword technique, which breaks all magic, should be able to shatter that magic.

This would have been impossible for the original Hector. He knew the limits of his own capabilities well. His best would have been a mutual destruction with one of the Ten Tower Lords.

But he had met Ortes again and was able to cast aside an old fear—the delusion that his disciple might be an avatar of the Demon King.

In the space lightened by discarding fear, Hector could accommodate something else.

For instance, Hydra Company’s records.

The proposition that the Demon King was also a god broke the limits of the sword technique. The realization that if one could break magic, one could also break sacred paths. Anything represented by ritual formulas and concepts of order could be destroyed.

For instance, the Ten Commandments’ Silver Iron.

The knowledge gained from conquering the Silver Iron Magic Tower and connecting to the Ten Commandments for a moment expanded Hector’s limitations. It laid the groundwork for dismantling ancient magical structures that he wouldn’t have been able to understand originally, breaking down mythical magic from ancient times.

For instance, Ortes himself.

Ortes used his “eyes” to twist and distort ritual formulas in truly extraordinary ways. Even massive world-scale ritual formulas that he and other knights wouldn’t have even thought to interfere with.

Hector had been learning from Ortes all along. His disciple had constantly challenged the impossible. When Hector himself would have been afraid and looked for another way, hadn’t Ortes always moved forward?

Even this current operation was like that. It was Ortes who had suggested changing their plan from setting a trap to lure the Demon King’s movements to a more aggressive approach of launching a surprise attack.

As a master, I should set an example at least once.

Ortes, who had closed his eyelids to escape the Demon King’s magic and was now squinting, shouted:

“Old man, what are you trying to—”

“Ortes.”

He did his best to raise the corners of his mouth. The knight order’s long-cherished wish was before him. He had obtained the opportunity to meet the adversary he had yearned for and fight with his life. How could he not smile?

“The sword is yours to keep.”

Hector infused the sword with fighting spirit. All the fighting spirit he himself could draw out.

The Demon King could sense Hector’s approach.

Empowered by the overwritten fate, he activated his powers of literalization and semantic decomposition once more. These were powers he couldn’t use simultaneously with world infiltration due to the limitations of his avatar body, but now with fate supporting him, he could use them without any difficulty.

Hector entered the Demon King’s range. His skin gradually became symbolized and fell away. The entirety of the human called Hector began to decompose into a single story, several chapters and tens of thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of millions of letters.

Nevertheless, the sword in his hand remained distinct.

He unleashed the sword technique that had been honed over centuries, dozens of generations, to pierce the Demon King’s heart.

The central axis of the Demon King’s magic of fate usurpation was ultimately the Demon King himself. Because the usurped fate had to be offered to the Demon King.

Therefore, the center of the ritual formula that Hector needed to pierce and destroy was also the Demon King.

His limbs, including the hand holding the sword, slowly disappeared and scattered. But his will did not scatter. Hector’s final sword strike undoubtedly reached the Demon King’s chest.

That was his limit. Hector’s body, already decomposing and disappearing, could no longer hold the sword.

A scratch on skin inscribed with white letters, a single drop of blood. The physical damage was merely that much.

But Hector had changed fate.

Ortes could see the new fate written by his master.