WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 396

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Even Heroes Wouldn't Have Wanted to Be Born in Troubled Times

The Sky God had been Claudia's resident deity. On overcast days it would creep in from the distant sea, peer around, then rail against the earth and loose torrents of lightning. Not all that dangerous, thanks to the Lightning Rod Towers and the Thunder Lord, but loud and overbearing as old things tend to be.

All of it had been intentional, though. The Sky God had simply been fulfilling the role of an alarm assigned to it, never directing its power at anyone in particular. It announced the coming of lightning and let itself be outwitted by human cleverness. Like the mighty but dim-witted giants out of old stories.

[... . -]

That description, however, no longer applied.

The Sky God raised its spear.

The world shook.

Fine hairs stood on end.

Small sparks crept across soil and stone. The Sky God's fury was searching for a sacrifice. Every living thing held its breath and bowed low, waiting only for the terrible punishment to pass it by.

Not once, in all the ages before this, had the god aimed its wrath at any human. Had it ever done so, the world would not have retained the shape it now held.

The Sky God proved that.

[..-. .. .-. .]

A spear more than ten meters long blazed white-hot. Soil and rock stirred and rose from the ground. Then, in a single moment, the world seemed to stretch, and the spear became a shaft of pure light.

No earth-splitting thunderclap. No blinding flash to startle the crowd. Even the force it had been scattering across the world condensed into one. To throw the spear. That single purpose.

There was no throwing motion. The light flared, and by the time anyone registered it, the spear had already vanished from the Sky God's hand. A steel lance moving at the speed of lightning was too fast for any eye to follow.

"...Huh?"

Azzy had been barking up a storm. She blinked. Lungken, who had been slaughtering humans right in front of her a moment ago, was simply gone. His severed arms and legs hit the ground in a series of dull thuds, and along with them, the humans who had been caught in his grip.

Where exactly Lungken had ended up was anyone's guess, but he was clearly a good deal closer to the Fog Duchy now than to Claudia. Even an immortal Elder would need considerable time to rebuild his body and make it back.

Perru, who had just driven off an Elder, stood with one arm outstretched, breathing in sharp gasps. Vampires and humans alike had gone silent and were staring at her. The one who had fired that lightning stared at the destruction she had made.

A branching pattern like a tree had been seared into the ground where the spear passed. That was where the lightning lance had torn up the earth. Through the cracks and splits, thin tendrils of electricity rose like reeds. The ground, saturated with lightning, waited on nothing but Perru's command.

In the middle of that silence, Perru's face stayed blank as pure confusion washed through her.

"...Wait, what?"

This was not what she had intended. Her plan had been simple: use the Golden Mirror's power to fix the Sky God and scare everyone off. The Sky God in its original form, noisy and threatening, but nothing more.

The moment she reached out to fix it, though, an unknown force cut in and things went badly wrong. The lightning thief had surrendered the power he had kept hidden away for so long, placing it entirely in Perru's hands. Without realizing it, she had taken command of every last bolt of lightning in the earth and made a true Sky God in the process.

"...This isn't what I wanted."

When you fire a warning shot and a live round comes out, the most frightened person in the room is the one who pulled the trigger. That was exactly where Perru found herself. When the Sky God she had patched together as a bluff sent an Elder sailing away, she nearly jumped out of her skin at the force she had unleashed.

The trouble was that the range of her expressions was extraordinarily small. Even her startled face stayed close to blank. She pressed her lips together and watched the Elder as though she had planned for this all along, and the composure radiating off her made her look like something beyond the reach of ordinary concerns.

There was no time to correct the misunderstanding. While everyone's attention was fixed on her, Perru spoke quickly and got straight to the point.

"...Last warning. Stop!"

The unspoken implication, that she would do the same to the rest of them if they didn't, was hard to mistake. Hard to say it was wrong, either.

Having already proved she could, Perru's words were no longer a bluff. They were mercy. She was holding back the force that could overturn the world and unravel its laws, and offering them the chance to live.

She still couldn't use that force with any precision. But precision wasn't what you needed to kill a person.

There was one individual on the field who had both overwhelming power and the trained mastery to use it precisely. He had been fighting the Steel Maiden, and the instant he sensed something new, he moved without hesitation.

"Blood Mist."

Valdamir squeezed his fist shut. The pressure alone was enough to burst it open, and blood sprayed outward in every direction. A crimson fog spread instantly and swallowed the space around him. The blood pouring from his body swept up the pooled blood on the ground and kept expanding.

Life so close to death that it had circled back to immortality. The Progenitor had been the seed of a Demon God, one that never fully bloomed and became instead the god of a people. She had written new rules that applied only to her own thralls, the vampires.

But making the rules of a game does not guarantee you play it best. Tyr had invented the principles. What Valdamir had done was study those principles and refine them into technique.

In an instant the sky above became a waterfall of crimson cloud. No sunlight penetrated the dark-red mass, and the ominous reek of blood hung in the air. A space made by vampires, for vampires. Within it, Valdamir moved through the red mist like something dissolved into it. Only a pair of red eyes left afterimages in the dark before his silhouette blurred and vanished.

He was not too fast to track. His body had literally melted into the crimson fog.

Spectral Blood Step.

It had the name of a footwork technique but resembled swimming. Press the point further and it came close to instantaneous movement.

A vampire's boundary between inside and outside is blurred. Blood flows, the body breaks apart, and they assign no significance to either. They bind and remake themselves through the bloodcraft that flows from the Progenitor's true blood. Their root, in other words, lies in that blood itself.

If you scattered your own blood like a mist, the entire mist became the vampire's body, and the reach of the vampire's power. Valdamir, expanding himself without limit, shifted his center of gravity ever so slightly.

That was all it took. He was in front of Perru in an instant. He caught the greatsword that flew after him and murmured, "You're handling power you can't control."

A technique that moved by dismantling the self first. Nothing could chase him, nothing could stop him. Perru reacted too late to even feel fear. Looking down into eyes that held only bewilderment, Valdamir brought the greatsword down in one expressionless stroke, no test of whether she could respond, no chance given.

But I read minds. I always know what my opponent is going to do. Ordinarily I have to watch helplessly while knowing, but this time, luckily, I had a way to block it.

The greatsword grazed Perru's ear. A sound like the world being split rang out on the wind, and a red streak of blade energy carved a deep gash into the ground. The greatsword sank halfway through the earth.

A sword that treated even solid ground as something to be cut through. And yet it had not drawn a single drop of Perru's blood. The Duke of Crimson Blood's greatsword had missed her by the width of a sheet of paper.

Valdamir looked at his right arm. The Elder's arm, which he had just dismantled and reassembled. From inside it, something like an impossibly thin thread stretched out, finer than spiderweb, flickering with a pale yellow light.

What had pulled the arm of the most powerful Elder was a pathetic little thread that looked too weak to lift a single leaf. Valdamir followed the thread to the card at its end. Spade 7. The card that revered the Sky God was wound thick with lightning, coiled like a ball of thread.

Spade 7, Lightning Cord. Like a reel winding in a kite string, it was a dense concentration of lightning thread wound in the thousands, the tens of thousands, no, in numbers that climbed past the hundreds of millions and beyond.

Valdamir showed a faint trace of curiosity.

"So you were the one handling the power."

Phew. Nearly let that slip. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief and deflected.

"No. It's not my power. I'm borrowing it too."

Literally true. What deflected Valdamir's attack was not me. It was Valdamir's own body.

When Valdamir was reassembling himself, I had scattered threads of lightning through the space. Thin strands had slipped in between the converging blood, and when he swung the greatsword they interfered and moved his arm.

If I could touch the inside of a body directly, even my meager arcane could make the Progenitor's heart skip a beat for just a moment. Speaking from experience.

And the one who has done something before does it better. Now that the lightning Demon God was in my hands, I could go as far as controlling a body, as long as the lightning thread was already touching it from inside.

Still, that only worked with direct internal contact. What kind of fool would stand still and let their nerves be touched from inside, unless they happened to be a vampire? And even then, if they were sharp enough to notice and resist, like Valdamir, it was over.

Valdamir clenched his right hand. That alone was enough to snap every thread of lightning I had planted in it. His right arm was his again. He settled the greatsword back over his shoulder and turned to look at me.

"Are you trying to die?"

Cold killing intent swept across my entire body. The most powerful Elder's presence pressed out like a physical thing, and even the hot blood racing through me seemed to go pale and hold its breath.

Even so, I kept smiling.

"You can't kill me."

Because I have Tyr's favor, and she would not allow it.

I didn't have to wait long. Tyr spoke to Valdamir in a low, steady voice.

"Valdamir. Restrain yourself."

Quiet and firm, with the clear message that he was not to act rashly. Valdamir caught it the moment it reached him and lowered his head at once.

"As you wish, Progenitor."

The killing intent vanished as cleanly as if it had been washed away. As though every action up to this moment had been a performance.

In a sense it had been. His movements, his words, the pressure he radiated, all of it had been meticulously calculated.

Killing me here would not take Valdamir a full second. He had blood spread in every direction around us. All he had to do was bring it together and squeeze, and I would burst like a pomegranate in a press, scattering red. Perru too. She hadn't yet properly grasped the Sky God, and her power wasn't enough to stop an Elder's attack. She had avoided that one strike, but if Valdamir had pressed relentlessly, she wouldn't have held.

In short, Perru and I were still alive because Valdamir had not aimed for that.

Valdamir doesn't move toward an objective until he has settled on one. He had bared killing intent toward me to gauge Tyr's wishes, and he had attacked Perru because he genuinely perceived her as a threat. He took the measure of things with his own senses and abandoned his course of action easily enough. His will to kill the Steel Maiden had been real, but the moment he judged it impossible he switched targets without hesitation.

People grow more stubborn as they age, they say, but past a certain point it seems to swing back the other way. Valdamir's judgment was remarkably quick and flexible.

My kind of person. As long as I read his sensibilities correctly and stay in step with them, there's nothing to lose.

"Let's all settle down a little, Tyr. No need for us to fight each other, is there?"

Tyr's expression remained displeased.

She did not hate Perru, but if Perru were to lend her strength to the Sanctum, Tyr could kill her without a moment's hesitation. Yet not only had I given Perru the power of a Demon God, I was protecting her on top of it. By Tyr's own principles, she should have been able to kill me for that too, but she was deliberately pushing that possibility out of her mind. She did not want to fall into that kind of anguish.

"Hyu. Are you taking their side? The servants of the Sanctum, the ones who were prepared to throw out even me, and you along with me?"

Tyr's complaint carried a deep resentment at having been dragged into conflict with herself.

She's let that out long enough. Time to reel things in a little. Human hearts work something like kite-flying: pull too hard and it nosedives, let out too much line and it blows away entirely.

"I'm not sure I'm on their side, but I've certainly never been on the Sanctum's side. If anything, I want to get in the Sanctum's way."

"Then. Why are you stopping me?"

"Because the Sanctum wants them dead too."

I hadn't pointed anyone out, but Valdamir's gaze drifted quietly to the Steel Maiden all the same. Peruel, who had been enthusiastically hammering away at Valdamir's body until a moment ago, had dropped both hands at the most decisive moment and was simply watching. No angels summoned. No divine power used.

You already knew from fighting her directly, didn't you, Duke of Crimson Blood? This one is no good sort either. Regardless, I spoke up to advise Tyr in place of the Duke of Crimson Blood, who was too loyal to voice an opinion on his own.

"The Steel Maiden intends to martyr everyone here inside the clouds!"

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