Ch.784Diving into the Toilet Bowel

With a blast of white steam, a thunderous roar shook the canyon.

The ice sheet, thicker than my height, shattered into thousands of pieces and flew upward as the lake water instantly boiled upon contact with the heat, sending cloud-like steam shooting up like an explosion.

Steam hot enough to boil a person alive in an instant. Thanks to the rune’s protection, I managed to avoid full-body burns, but without it, I wouldn’t have been so lucky.

“What are you suddenly doing, Haschal!”

Demian, who had flown up with all his might to avoid the steam, shouted from a distance as if scolding me. He seemed to be putting the emotion of anger he’d learned from me to good use.

To be honest, I didn’t think there was much reason for him to be so angry. I’d even warned him in advance to stay clear in case he got caught up in it.

“I told you! We just need to get rid of all the water!”

“You’re going to evaporate the entire lake? Is that even possible?”

Demian asked incredulously.

Ah, I see. He must have thought I was going to evaporate all the lake water and turn it into dry land after seeing me ignite my Karma.

“I don’t know if that’s possible… but why go to all that trouble?”

I flew up beside Demian and pointed to the result of my strike below.

– Rumble!

With a thunderous roar, the blue lake water swirled as it was sucked down into the massive hole I’d punched in the lake bottom.

“If you want to drain a full bathtub, you just need to make a hole at the bottom, right?”

My goal was never to dry up the entire lake. Demian didn’t know, but I did—that the holy sword wasn’t inside the lake itself, but at the bottom of a deep, massive cavity beneath it.

So, all I needed to do was deliver a fully-powered strike to the surface, creating a shockwave that would collapse the lake floor. Then the icy water would drain away like flushing a toilet.

“See? Professor Haschal always has a plan.”

I turned to Demian with a smug grin, satisfied that everything was going according to plan.

All that remained was to wait patiently for the water to drain completely, then leisurely descend to retrieve the holy sword once the lake bottom was exposed.

There was still one difficult task ahead, but things were progressing so smoothly that it seemed like heaven itself was helping us.

“…”

Demian, however, rather than offering due praise for my solution, was staring blankly at the canyon walls.

“Demian?”

“Haschal. So… you’re saying that punch powerful enough to split Nidhogg in half that you just slammed into the canyon floor was all part of some plan?”

“Of course. Why?”

When I tilted my head questioningly at his response, which sounded more like criticism than admiration, Demian clutched his forehead and let out a deep sigh.

A picture-perfect display of disappointment. It was such a natural expression of dismay that I questioned whether his confession about not understanding emotions had been a lie.

“Then… I suppose that’s part of your plan too?”

Looking at me like I was a six-year-old who had burned down the house while playing with fire, he pointed toward the cliff with his right hand.

“Please tell me it is…?”

His gaze was so reproachful I wanted to dig a hole and bury myself, but I couldn’t exactly blind Demian for it. Instead of poking his eyeballs with my finger, I turned to look at the cliff.

And I realized.

This was no time to be thinking about poking anyone’s eyes.

– Crack!

The impact traveling through the ice had penetrated the cliff, causing fractures.

Like an axe splitting firewood or a mace crushing stone, small cracks gradually expanded as the cliffs that had stood firm for hundreds of years began to split and crumble like drought-parched fields.

Thunder-like sounds shook the canyon.

“Uh…”

I gaped as I looked up at the canyon edge thousands of meters above.

I could roughly guess what was about to happen.

And then.

– RUMBLE!

Rocks that had broken loose and an avalanche triggered by the earthquake-like vibrations poured down toward us like a torrential rain.

“Ha…”

Faced with this triple natural disaster—part landslide, part avalanche, part ground collapse—all I could do was let out a deflated laugh and mutter curses that no one would hear.

I fucked up.

Hit it too hard, I guess.

—-

The downpour of rocks and snow that crashed into the lake completely buried it, reducing the canyon’s depth by about ten meters.

Well… that’s what I assumed happened. I hadn’t actually witnessed the aftermath of my major blunder with my own eyes.

“Ah… ACHOO! Has-chal! Please, *cough, cough*! When you’re going to, *wheeze*, do something like that, warn me…!”

Demian scolded me while coughing violently like someone with tuberculosis.

I had nothing to say in my defense, so I silently increased the heat of our campfire. Even I had to admit he looked pitiful, soaking wet and shivering.

When the avalanche of snow and rocks came pouring down to fill the entire canyon, I had grabbed Demian by the collar and leaped into the hole at the bottom of the lake.

Since the icy water hadn’t completely drained yet, we ended up soaking wet despite my efforts to create a drainage hole. But if we hadn’t escaped that way, Demian, if not me, would have suffered serious injuries in that disaster.

Of course, there was a price to pay.

We managed to dive deep into the freezing water and enter the cavity beneath the lake, but the moment we escaped the waterfall-like deluge, both Demian and I began to freeze rapidly.

I hurriedly lit a fire to avoid cardiac arrest, but while I could endure, Demian collapsed, shivering like someone with a terrible flu, unable to withstand the cold.

The moisture that had soaked his clothes and body froze instantly, stealing his body heat.

Even when I applied enough heat to melt his frozen clothes and body without causing burns, his body temperature dropped dozens of times faster than his clothes could dry.

So I had no choice but to strip off Demian’s outer garments and warm his nearly-naked body and his frozen, crisp clothing separately.

What about me?

Well, unlike Demian, I didn’t have much of a problem. I could simply scorch my body directly with flames to raise my temperature.

Thanks to that, while Demian was shivering in just his underwear, I was perfectly fine except for some burned spots on my clothes.

No, more than fine—I felt refreshed.

Thanks to being soaked once with water and once with fire, my body, which had been a bit dirty from not washing for several days, was now as clean as if I’d bathed in hot springs.

Well, not that I felt as comfortable as I would in a hot spring bath.

“…Feeling better now?”

Sensing that the cold and trembling transmitted through his back and shoulders had somewhat subsided, I turned my head slightly and asked quietly.

To Demian, who had come under the wing of my outstretched coat and was sitting pressed against me with his arm around my shoulder.

Hersella was throwing a fit in my head, and I wasn’t particularly thrilled about being pressed against a man in his underwear either…

But I couldn’t just leave Demian, whose physical body was merely that of an ordinary hero, nearly naked in temperatures dozens of degrees below zero with only a campfire for warmth.

So I had no choice but to keep him pressed against me, who was heated to the point of being almost too hot, and share my body heat until he calmed down.

“Y-yeah… better than… better than before…”

Demian stammered in response.

He was still shivering, but his complexion had somewhat returned, unlike earlier when he had looked more like a corpse than a person with his pale face and blue lips.

“Good. That’s fine then.”

I dried my wet cigarette by the campfire, lit it, and exhaled smoke while waiting for Demian’s clothes to dry completely and my half-burned outfit to regenerate.

“…Sorry about that.”

Since the accident was 100% my mistake, I scratched my cheek in embarrassment while offering the apology I obviously owed him.

—-

After his clothes had dried from the heat of my rune, Demian left my side, got dressed again, and rested in front of the campfire.

Meanwhile, I sorted through our soaked and frozen belongings, thawing what could be salvaged, while conversing with Hersella.

[Nice work. For someone who claimed to be the strongest on the continent, you can’t even control your strength properly and caused this disaster. Have you gotten stupider lately?]

It was less of a conversation and more like scolding and sarcasm.

‘No, the strange thing is… I definitely didn’t hit that hard. I only struck with enough force to break the lake bottom…’

At the time, I’d been in such a hurry that I just moved on, but no matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t understand how a single punch could cause cliffs to collapse.

[What a ridiculous excuse. How could a strike meant to break the lake bottom collapse a cliff?]

‘Well, how should I put this…’

I looked down at my right hand, flexing and unflexing it while recalling the sensation from earlier.

I certainly had struck with all my might, but considering the amount of heroic Karma consumed, the concentrated power of my Karma fire, and my usual strength, such destructive power shouldn’t have been possible.

That meant either some external factor was involved… or my strength had exceeded my own calculations.

First, there had been no change in my Karma power. Neither heroic nor murderous Karma. The output of my Karma fire, which consumed murderous Karma as fuel, remained the same as well.

Then, was it my physical strength that had changed?

Even without Karma enhancement, my pure physical strength was enough to tear apart trolls. Orhan had called it the blessing of divine blood.

Had that superhuman strength grown incomparably stronger without my noticing?

That was the only possibility I could think of.

There was even compelling evidence: not long ago, I had dragged Nidhogg’s remains by myself.

At the time, I thought it was because the power of my accumulated Karma had reached such an immense level that I could drag dragon remains…

But perhaps not just my Karma power, but my basic physical abilities had improved beyond their previous state.

My strength before was already enough to wrestle with trolls, but if it had grown even stronger… I wonder if I can even be called human anymore.