WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 386

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Lightning Did Not Fall from the Sky - 9

The most dangerous moment isn't when the path ahead goes dark, or when you agonize over too many choices, or when your heart is riddled with doubt.

It's when everything feels clear. When you're convinced only one road remains. When your heart is full to the brim with belief. That is when a person becomes more dangerous than anything else in the world. To themselves, and to everyone around them.

At the end of her deliberation, the Thunder Lord chose her faith.

Lightning alone hadn't been enough to kill him, so she had drawn a sword she rarely used. She had struck from behind, using the thick fog as cover. Filled with belief, she was an angel carrying out heaven's will, and the King of Humanity had no real answer for it, rendered helpless. Lightning coursed along the blade and shook his body to its core.

But only for a moment. The lightning dispersed, spent for nothing. That power of hers, discharging it. All that remained was the blade. The Thunder Lord poured more force into the hand gripping the sword, intent on finishing it cleanly.

Then the blade snapped like a dry reed. The steel that had stood sharp along its spine crumbled to nothing.

That wasn't all. A creeping presence pressed in, swallowing the space around them. Dangerous to anyone, but to the Thunder Lord with her perfect body, lethal. Rustscale's power, the force that unraveled structure, ate through the blade first and kept coming.

The Thunder Lord drew on her thunder to shield herself. Contact would discharge her power, so she had no choice but to pull away from the King's body. The moment the blade piercing his abdomen disappeared, he lost his balance and crumpled forward to the ground.

The attack had been fatal, but he wasn't dead yet. To finish it, the Thunder Lord needed to move fast. She called out to Perru.

[Please withdraw your power, Rustscale Lord.]

Perru stared at the Thunder Lord, plainly changed, plainly wrong, with an expression of disbelief.

"...Why? Thunder Lord-nim, why would you do that to him?"

[He is dangerous. For the city's future, he must be eliminated.]

"...That can't be right. How could killing him possibly be... for the future?"

The hostility was plain. She had just watched her stab a man in front of her, so it was only natural. The Thunder Lord summoned a measure of patience and pressed on.

[You're a ruler yourself, so you understand. Some secrets can shatter the world with ease. The Golden Mirror's bell that you carry, making that public would not make this country safer. It would make things far more dangerous.]

"...That's a reason to kill him?"

[He is the King of Humanity. The voice of all humankind. Any secret he comes to know will, in time, belong to every human being. As a king speaks for his people, the people take after their king.]

The Thunder Lord extended her hand. Lightning stretched from her palm and felt along the ground and stone, drawing out scraps of iron sleeping within. Claudia was the greatest city of the Lesser States, and fragments of abandoned alchemic steel were buried throughout its soil. The Thunder Lord swept the gathered iron with one pass of her hand. She, too, was a lord of the Lesser States. Her lightning-woven alchemy scraped away rust and grime and hammered the material into a keen edge.

The angel of thunder leveled the lightning-charged sword once more. At the King of Humanity, bleeding and fallen.

[What the Golden Mirror has already revealed to the world, I can let pass. But the secret of the lightning thief is another matter. I cannot allow that to be known. One day it would cast all of humanity into suspicion. Into suffering.]

Perru was thrown.

The King of Humanity. She had heard of the Progenitor, and Holy Maidens, and the Beast King, but never the King of Humanity. Perhaps such a person existed, but that was the kind of question she might think about after every pressing problem in her own life had been sorted out.

Still, maybe that was exactly what he was. Maybe that was why he traveled with the Progenitor.

Perru reached her own conclusion and gave a quiet nod. Taking it as a sign of agreement, the Thunder Lord's expression brightened.

[You understand. What a relief. Then....]

The blade that had been radiating killing intent went dim again. The Thunder Lord tried to run lightning through it, but lightning through a crumbling blade was a burden, not a weapon. The sword snapped in two from the middle.

Perru had broken the blade in an instant. She let out a long breath and said quietly, "...I am an alchemist. The only thing I believe in and follow is the law of value. There is no value in killing him."

[Even knowing it would protect the Lesser States, and the future beyond them?]

"...Death is the loss of value. Whatever form it takes, whatever comes of it."

[One step back, so that everyone can move forward.]

"...No. It's different from retreating. It's not the same. Once value is gone, it doesn't transform into something else. It never... comes back."

Those words carried a weight unlike anyone else's, coming from the Rustscale Lord, who held the power to erase value itself. Certain now that Perru would not step aside, the Thunder Lord shook her head with something like regret.

[It can't be helped, then. I had hoped to make you the Golden Lord, to entrust you with this country and build order here.]

The Thunder Lord threw the broken blade aside. Already crumbled and rusted, it made no sound when it landed. With empty hands, she spread her palm and raised it toward the sky.

Within Claudia, the Thunder Lord was the strongest. As long as she wasn't robbed of her power by some cheap trick, every force woven through Claudia belonged to her. Using her hand as a lightning rod, the seeds of lightning drifting through the clouds responded to her call.

[I won't kill you. Survive on your own. I don't know how long that broken body of yours will hold out.]

Thundercatch. She seized the lightning and brought her hand sweeping down. A flash crackled out of the clouds, connecting sky to earth. The torrent of force tore through the ground and shook the heavens.

The tremendous boom scattered into the distance. Clods of earth flung upward settled back down through the clouds. The path the lightning had carved lay bare. The Thunder Lord looked to see what remained of her targets and frowned.

Sharp iron spines had risen up around them like a shell. The Rustscale Lord had countered with alchemy. Sound instinct, but improvised lightning rods that small could not contain the force of a strike like that.

But the lightning hadn't been stopped by the makeshift lightning rods.

"Ahahahat! Father, you've been too loose with your lower half, and a woman finally put a blade in your belly for it? I knew this day would come!"

Hilde appeared out of nowhere, white light gathered in her hand.

She had deflected the lightning as though it were nothing. Now she crouched and looked Hughes over. His abdomen had been run through and bled freely, and he appeared to be unconscious. A fatal wound, but had it really been enough to knock him out...?

Then Hilde saw where his fallen hand was reaching. It held tight to the kite tethered to the back of the Sky God. A small scoff escaped her. She let out a sigh and pressed her hand over his wound.

"Honestly. No response, so there's no fun in it. Father really does have better insides than outsides. Seeing him fallen and wrecked like this, he just looks pitiful."

White light gathered beneath her hand, and his wound knit back together as though being rewound.

The Thunder Lord recognized what that was. She had never seen it in her life, yet it was bound to faith, and without anyone telling her, she understood what it was and what it required, as though she had always known.

[Sacred power?]

Healing took time. Hilde spoke helpfully, buying the seconds needed.

"Yes~ 'I,' believe it or not, carry a very sincere faith. I can recite the whole Scripture~ 'When the first Holy Maiden anointed the suffering with oil and laid hands on them, the wounds closed and the sickness lifted.' Hold that passage in mind while praying with all sincerity, and what do you know! The whole universe rises up to work a miracle!"

[I know that! Then why are you healing him? You must already know this is the will of the Celestial God....]

The Thunder Lord trailed off as something else was transmitted to her, and she cried out.

[The White-Face! That apostate!]

"Apostate? That's absurd. How could someone who abandoned their faith use sacred power?"

An obvious truth. Only those with genuine faith could wield sacred power. Sacred power was a higher grace granted by the Celestial God watching over humanity. Thus, those without sufficient faith, those who could not follow the Celestial God, could not use it...

...And that was why Hilde had become a taboo of the Sanctum.

Before joining the Holy Sword Corps, Hilde had been a performer. With fierce immersion in her roles, she could play the real thing. Even a Holy Sword Corps member who wielded sacred power through faith.

And so the Holy Sword Corps' most promising member had been posted somewhere no one would ever find. To make sure she had no room to even wonder what that meant.

[An apostate stealing and using the divine power...!]

"Hehe. Strange, isn't it? Apostate, Heresy. How do you steal divine power? Is that even something that can be stolen? Is an all-powerful god really the kind of thing that gets its power robbed?"

The emergency treatment done, Hilde smiled, and from above, the Thunder Lord's lightning poured down again. Having grasped Hilde's true nature, she poured her power in without the slightest hesitation. Yet.

"Neither rain nor wind, lightning nor storm, could halt the approach of the Holy Maiden."

Hilde placed a hand over her chest and recited the prayer, and the lightning missed. That single word missed fell short of what actually happened. The lightning veered sharply as though avoiding Hilde entirely and struck the ground instead.

Something that had happened once, long in the distant past. A miracle said to have been performed by the first Holy Maiden herself. The account of her crossing a continent through storm and lightning, carried across time, realized now through faith.

[The Celestial Aegis...!]

"See~ 'I' can clearly use sacred power. More skillfully than you, even! In that case, isn't what 'I' am doing also something God has permitted?"

[Heresy!]

Even without the Celestial Aegis, an energy practitioner who had truly arrived would not be greatly threatened by lightning. Reach the state of heaven and earth, grasp the sense of it, and you could route lightning harmlessly underfoot through energy work alone.

The only way to fight was up close. The Thunder Lord stopped hurling lightning and drew it back into herself. To personally cut down the Heresy and end the savagery.

Facing the approaching angel of thunder, Hilde smiled brightly.

"For reference, 'I' can do this, too~"

Hilde crossed her arms and ran her hands over her own shoulders. The face she wore was forlorn and pitiable, like someone performing deep loneliness.

"'My' faith is a single blade. To cut evil with light and illuminate the way. O first Holy Maiden, look upon 'me' with grace."

From each shoulder, she drew blades made of light. She breathed out long and slow, twirled the blades, and murmured.

"Holy Swords, deploy."

The reason the Holy Sword Corps was called the Holy Sword Corps. Those who forged their faith into a blade received a blessed weapon. They carried at their heart a holy sword bearing divine authority.

There was no room to doubt it. Hilde was a sincere believer. The blade forged from her inward faith was proof of that...

"Impressive, right? Well? Even from 'my' faith, a holy sword comes out!"

[You wretch!]

The Thunder Lord's fist came down like a lightning strike. A fist wrapped in the power of thunder held destructive force beyond lightning itself. Against it, Hilde drew one of the short blades smoothly and received the fist, letting the force flow past. The blow slid down the angle of the crossed blades.

Hilde used the opening to drive energy-packed strikes into the Thunder Lord's side. Posture broken, she couldn't respond. Instead she moved her body as though to meet the kicks head-on. The two forces clashed and repelled each other, and both were pushed back with a grinding slide.

Hilde dusted off her feet and said, "You took that kick with your side. Are you saying that if your body is hard enough, tactics and technique are just unnecessary? How crude."

[This too must be heaven's arrangement. I will root out every remaining threat here. You, and the savage alike.]

"Do you really think you can? 'I' have drawn my holy swords, you know~ With a vampire standing right next to me!"

Throughout their travels so far, Hilde had barely been able to show her sacred power. The Progenitor, who would tear apart anything connected to the Celestial God on principle, had been watching with sharp eyes the whole time. Never sleeping, relentless, and powerful, that Sanctum-specific killing machine possessed a strange sixth sense as well, detecting the trace of sacred power with uncanny precision and hunting it down.

To begin with, no matter how capable a Holy Sword Corps member, working openly in front of her had never been an option. What on earth had given Hilde the confidence to make her move.

There was someone to pass the anger along to. Hilde spent her sacred power freely, with the intention of drawing the Progenitor in. Any moment now, the vampire would come running and wipe out everything connected to the Sanctum.

But the Thunder Lord answered as though she had already anticipated all of it.

[If you mean the Progenitor, she won't be coming.]

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