WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 389

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Lightning Did Not Fall from the Sky - 12

Lungken's charge was not merely destructive, it was world-shaking. The earth flipped and the clouds shuddered with every stride. He barreled straight into several hundred armed soldiers and met them head-on without a shred of hesitation.

The thunder practitioners did what weaker humans always do: they grouped together.

They locked into formation and linked themselves through alchemy. Magic flashed, and in an instant thirty human bodies became a single massive wall. Between the gaps, spears crackling with current thrust upward. A battle formation passed down since ancient times fused with alchemy and showed itself to the world.

"Now that's more like it!"

Lungken let out a howl of laughter and threw everything he had at them.

Spears snapped. Bodies broke. Steel shattered.

The boar beastkin's charge was several times more powerful than any real boar. Spearheads cracked, and the hands of practitioners who could not hold against his strength tore open. Thirty soldiers reinforced by alchemy and locked in formation were pushed back step by step.

Not that Lungken was unscathed. Spear points had lodged in his body, and blood ran from his forehead where he'd rammed into them. He looked ghastly, painted head to toe in red like a beast being run to ground.

Yet he was smiling. As if even pain were a pleasure.

One of the thunder practitioners muttered.

"A-a monster...!"

Lungken grinned at that, baring his teeth as though those were the most welcome words he'd ever heard. He fixed his gaze on the one who had spoken and drew his head far back.

Then he headbutted with everything he had.

The boar beastkin's headbutt struck the formation like a battering ram and split it with a crack. Once a crack formed, it spread beyond all control. Lungken drove into the gap and shook himself in a wide arc; the formation shattered, bodies flying in every direction. Walking away with only one broken bone was a lucky outcome. The unfortunate practitioners who had been directly in front of Lungken were all dead on the spot.

Drenched in blood, Lungken let out a roar.

"Yes! I am a monster! You lot aren't enough to kill me! More! Is there nothing else out there?!"

He swung his head around and spotted a massive shadow closing in.

It was a vehicle built by retrofitting the Geraut of lords whose time had passed. Its sheer size and presence were not the kind of thing any single individual ought to challenge, but Lungken was too worked up to care. He scraped the ground with his feet.

"Let's FIGHT!"

He charged the armored vehicle without a second thought. The operator inside was caught off guard. Throwing an egg at a boulder was sheer madness, but there was no reason to talk an enemy out of their own madness. Startled though they were, the practitioner at the controls drove the vehicle forward harder.

Boom. The Elder and the Geraut collided. Blood splattered and steel crumpled. The one pushed back in that first exchange was, naturally, Lungken. Even an Elder could not overcome the Geraut's raw mass. Muscles burst with blood. Lungken's legs bent at a hideous angle and ground deep into the earth.

"Ugh, grrr, AAAH!"

By any reasonable measure, he should not have been able to hold. But sometimes the reasonable measure exists only to be broken.

Lungken bellowed and threw his strength against it. He held on even as his own body was being crushed, and gradually, the Geraut's advance slowed. The more blood ran, the more thoroughly red he became, and the stronger he grew.

At some point the Geraut stopped entirely. Its lifted wheels spun uselessly in the air. The practitioners manning the vehicle stared in horror at the monstrous strength pinning them in place.

"The blood tide...! This much...!"

A Geraut without its lord could barely reach half its normal output, but it still drew on the power of thunder, and it was not built for fighting people in the first place. It was heavy machinery meant for felling trees or excavating earth.

Yet an Elder was less a human than a force of nature. Just as no human could go up against a Geraut, no human could go up against an Elder. A superhuman beyond the boundaries of humanity, or more accurately, an entirely different kind of creature. A thunder practitioner muttered from somewhere deep in despair.

"...If there are three of them. What on earth are we supposed to do."

Cabilah split the back of a doll open. Inside, bone needles were packed in tight. She divided them between both hands and screamed.

"Did you really think Cloud Village was perfectly fine all this time because you were something special?! Heh heh. Stupidity is only cute in small doses! This is exactly why livestock with big egos become useless!"

Cabilah the Bloodsorcerer makes dolls. The materials she works with are bone, blood, and flesh. She shapes them and fills the forms with blood and darkness to bring her dolls to life.

The Progenitor Tyrkanzyaka's greatest power is the ability to create thralls. In that sense, Cabilah is the vampire most like the Progenitor. No other vampire can match her when it comes to creating and commanding thralls.

"The only reason we never even glanced at the Lesser States is because your blood tastes absolutely foul! By any ranking you'd be Grade Four, garbage not even worth throwing out! You knew we were beyond the fog, and you called down the Celestial God's servant anyway?!?!"

Cabilah shrieked and flung her bone needles. They fell across the bodies Lungken had made and melted in. Blood that had scattered coalesced through the bone as medium and took shape. From the dark crimson pool, skulls wreathed in ghost fire rose up with a dreadful air.

Every one of those bones had once been her subjects. Even in death they fought as her thralls.

"Bone soldiers! Kill every last thing standing between me and my sister!"

Ten bone soldiers moved as one.

Only ten, a meager number for an Elder, one of the world's great terrors, to be fielding. On top of that, thralls who cannot channel energy are necessarily weaker than their maker.

"Don't be afraid!"

One brave practitioner threw herself into the arms of a bone soldier. She slipped past the bone saw swinging down at her by a hair and seized its ribcage.

Alchemy had not developed only in the direction of creating harder materials. The thunder practitioners also studied combat alchemy, researching every means of weakening an enemy. Against thralls, that research paid off.

The bone soldier's ribcage crumbled in an instant. Well-built structures tend to share certain qualities, but poorly-built ones each have their own particular flaw. The thunder practitioner who had dismantled the bone soldier with such ease called out boldly.

"Anything that can't distinguish its inside from its outside is just raw material for alchemy. Everyone, close in and break them apart!"

The thunder practitioners charged the bone soldiers, weaving past the bone saws and latching on. Some took hits, but with their companions covering them actively, they managed to keep their lives.

Just as the bone soldiers were being overwhelmed and brought down, Cabilah, who had been watching in silence, extended a hand as if conducting an orchestra.

"Stupidity makes excellent fertilizer. Now then, bone soldiers. It's harvest time."

And dark, terrible blood magic seized hold of everyone at once.

The thunder practitioners who had taken wounds and pulled back pressed down hard on their arms to stop the bleeding. The injuries were minor, and once they had treated themselves they planned to return to the fight immediately.

Except... those wounded practitioners began to tremble, a chill running down their spines. They searched for the source of that cold and found their blood still flowing.

"The blood, it's..."

"It won't stop..."

The blood flowed. Blood, the food and source of power for vampires, was being drawn out of human bodies. It had merely stepped outside for a moment, and already it had changed owners.

Without mastering the redirection of internal energy and control of one's own body, a person was nothing more than prey. But those capable of matching the military state's generals were not easy to come by.

Victims with nothing more than small cuts collapsed one after another in defiance of all reason, and their blood flowed into the bone soldiers. Shattered and broken, the bone soldiers soaked it up and revived, multiplying among themselves.

Cabilah wet her throat with blood and crowed.

"The virtuous cycle of blood! This is what a next-generation farm looks like!"

The Thunder Lord had not moved. More precisely, could not move.

She knew the battle was going badly. She had already made her move. If the Thunder Wheel's defensive functions activated, there was a chance she could gain the upper hand against the Elders.

Even so, she would not be able to kill them. Just as capturing someone alive is many times harder than killing them, capturing a being that cannot die is nearly impossible.

And beyond that... something far more dangerous than any other Elder stood right in front of her. Crimson Duke Valdamir tilted his head at the Thunder Lord blocking his path.

"Were you not trying to give me a message?"

["...Why would you think that?"]

"Because if you weren't, you would not be standing here looking at me while your subordinates are dying."

She had simply been stalling for time, but the Crimson Duke seemed to have read it differently. The Thunder Lord said,

["As if I'd have anything to say to a vampire. I'm standing here because I'm the only one who can face you."]

"Interesting."

The Thunder Lord flinched at even the smallest movement from the Crimson Duke, but he paid it no mind and simply drew a hand along his greatsword, unhurried.

"The Celestial God may demand sacrifice openly, but it would not deceive you outright. How did you arrive at such a mistaken judgment?"

["Mistaken? I'd call it the right judgment. I'm the only one here who can stop you."]

"Oh."

The Thunder Lord held herself ready to respond at any moment and thought it through.

What made the Crimson Duke dangerous was his intelligence. Raw power, accumulated experience, and sharp political instinct, applied exactly where each was needed. An intelligent beast is the most frightening thing in the world.

Her role was to hold him in place and keep him from joining the other Elders. That was the Thunder Lord's judgment....

"Very well."

The Crimson Duke raised his greatsword. Red killing intent flowed from his body into the blade. As he readied the strike, the Thunder Lord met him head-on, drawing down lightning from the city and scattering it wide.

Her lightning was pulling on the city's own power. This moment, while his killing intent was poured into the attack, had to be her chance.

Divine punishment came down on the Crimson Duke. Lightning raked across his body without mercy. He shook. With his vision bleached white, he slowly drew his greatsword down with a trembling arm.

"Blood Script."

The Cloud Waterfall split in two.

Distance had always been the greatest obstacle for energy practitioners. Wrapping energy around a weapon did nothing when the target was out of reach, they could only stand there, weapon in hand, with nothing to show for it.

The Crimson Duke had overcome that limitation in a way no one could have anticipated.

The blood energy flung wide by sheer force leaped across space. That red blood energy was blood itself, a part of the Crimson Duke's own body. What had seemed like sword energy was himself, condensed at the greatsword's edge.

A technique possible only because he was a vampire. The humans caught in its path were hurled away like scraps of paper.

Catch an arm and the arm was severed. Catch a leg and the leg was cut. Finely honed blood sliced through human bodies, leaving wounds, drinking the blood that spilled from those wounds, swelling in momentum, and crashing forward like a storm. Inside the Cloud Waterfall, a cloud of blood rose anew.

Over a hundred pieces of human bodies were swept away by the red tide.

And the Thunder Lord watched clearly as the slash that had passed around her tore through her people. She had not dodged. The Crimson Duke had deliberately left her outside the path of the strike. As if mocking her.

["You vile--!"]

"Do you understand now? You cannot stop me. Not even if I stand perfectly still."

He had been mocking her. That much was true.

Taking the Thunder Lord's attacks with his body without bracing, killing her thunder practitioners from where he stood, all of it had been purely to prove a point.

The way they thought was simply different. Beyond tension and beyond fear, the Thunder Lord felt a vast distance, as though they were glaring at each other across a chasm that could never be bridged, standing on opposite shores of an eternal divide.

"Back to the earlier subject. If you have nothing to say, I will go about my business."

Nothing.

No fear of death meant no hesitation in killing. He had taken dozens of lives from where he stood and remained as composed as if he had finished a task. A piercing tragedy for some, nothing more than clerical work for them.

They would never understand each other across all eternity. The only shared language was blood and fists.

["You, vampire--!"]

The Thunder Lord charged in fury. She grabbed the earth with wings of lightning and moved like a bolt herself. She crossed the distance to the Crimson Duke in the blink of an eye, fist wrapped tight in lightning and swinging.

["I'll kill you--!"]

Her words cut off in the middle. Snap. The Crimson Duke's arm shot out and caught the Thunder Lord cleanly by the throat as she came flying in.

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