WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Order

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◈ Paladin of a Ruined Order

Chapter 71

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God's Love

The scenery outside the castle wall looked almost like the sea.

Kwarrr-

Every time the God of Flowing Water gestured, a massive wave rolled in and swept across the ground.

The wild boars instinctively curled up, trying to withstand a wave the likes of which they had never faced before.

But not even the size and weight of the wild boars could stand against a wave that huge.

Squeal, squeeeal!

The boars swept up by the wave thrashed their limbs desperately.

But their swimming skills were pitiful at best.

Most of the wild boars never surfaced. The few that did bob up briefly soon sank again.

They had been saved from the threshold of death by a god's intervention.

Yet the people were gripped by unease. The priests of the Order of the God of Flowing Water felt it most sharply of all.

Isalvius murmured.

"...my god."

Elbridge offered a quiet prayer.

"Goddess. Can the God of Flowing Water handle this?"

"Impossible."

"I thought so. Even a god couldn't intervene directly on the earth like this, could they-"

"No, Elbridge. This isn't about how the divine power is being used. It's about the sheer total amount being manifested."

The goddess's voice was usually bright and lively, but not now.

Elbridge could hear a mix of emotions in it. Sorrow, tension, and even a trace of relief.

Elbridge asked, "What do you mean by the total amount of divine power? Isn't divine power granted in proportion to heavenly seats, as the Chief God decided?"

"Similar, but different. A god can manifest overwhelming divine power even without a seat. Look. The God of Flowing Water, who has only a single seat, just showed power far beyond that standing."

"Then why can't the god grant more divine power-"

"Because it hasn't been permitted. Every god knows exactly how much power the Chief God has allowed them, and they don't cross that line."

The goddess's voice had dropped so low that Elbridge could barely hear it.

As if she were telling him a secret she wasn't supposed to reveal.

"A god manifests power through a paladin to use that power efficiently. Rather than doing everything with divine power alone, from start to finish, it's far more efficient to lend strength to a capable paladin."

Which meant, in other words, that the God of Flowing Water was right now using power in an extremely inefficient way.

An inefficient method. And a total amount of power that had obviously blown past any reasonable limit.

"Goddess. Then... what happens if a god exerts more power than the Chief God's set limit?"

"You're about to see."

The oracle ended with the goddess's deep sigh.

Elbridge leaned against the half-collapsed southern wall and looked out.

As though an invisible wall stood in place of the fallen stone, the waves churned and crashed against the wall's edge without ever breaking through.

Time passed. Eventually the waves settled.

The enormous volume of water that had covered the ground around the wall scattered in every direction.

The earth beneath, turned to mud, came into view.

The corpses of drowned wild boars lay scattered everywhere.

Gurgle...

Some, whether fortunately or not, still clung to life.

The boars who had miraculously survived rose, coughing up water, and staggered away into the forest in terror.

The boars at the front of the charge were either dead or fled.

Their momentum broken, even the boars that hadn't been caught in the wave fled into the Great Forest. The foolish creatures probably wouldn't even remember the cries of the young wild boar that had started all this.

People looked up at the sky.

Rain still poured from the clouds overhead. The God of Flowing Water slowly descended to the ground.

While still in the sky, the God of Flowing Water had looked like a kind old man.

But now his eyes were bloodshot, and dark red veins bulged across his face. His two arms were turning a strange, dark crimson color.

Marcus muttered nervously, "Fuck, that's obviously not looking good-"

It was an extremely blasphemous thing to say, but thankfully, none of the paladins or priests who served the God of Flowing Water heard him.

The God of Flowing Water spoke, gasping.

"If only I had decided a little sooner..."

The God of Flowing Water didn't regret having used his power. He didn't feel joy looking at the believers he had saved from the stampede.

He was grieving for the believers already swept away and killed.

The God of Flowing Water murmured.

"Goddess of the Rusted Shield. God of Fox Rain. God of the Silver Javelin... You must be watching me. But now I can no longer hear your voices. Was I always too weak-hearted to rise to heaven?"

The God of Flowing Water was still crying.

His once-clear tears turned ash gray. The color of the raindrops falling from the sky darkened too, little by little, into gray.

'This is bad.'

What stood before him looked like a fallen god. But Elbridge's instincts screamed that the thing standing there wasn't a god at all. It was a demon.

It was a bewildering situation.

And yet, apart from that, Elbridge's mind had never been clearer.

The answers to so many questions he'd carried for so long stood right in front of him.

Why could paladins hunt demons and demonic beasts to build up divinity?

Why had the Goddess of the Rusted Shield told him never to hate demons?

The god's breathing grew rougher.

Huff, huff...

And all over his body, things began to swell.

Crack, crackle.

His spine bent, and sharp spines burst out along it. His facial features, except for his mouth, seemed to melt away and disappear. His skin turned entirely dark red, and a strange sheen spread across his whole body.

Before long his frame had grown to nearly twice the size of an ordinary human, and it was still growing.

No one could deny any longer that he was a demon.

The dark red demon snarled and glared toward the wall.

Blind bloodlust toward humans. The most common reaction shown by demons.

Whoosh-

The demon swung its arm violently.

A massive pillar of water rose from its fingertips and slammed into the wall.

Boom-

A heavy tremor rolled through the wall and spread in every direction.

The force in that pillar of water was on par with the stampede itself.

Nearly everyone froze in terror. They feared the demon, and they feared the fact that the God of Flowing Water had become one.

But some pushed through the fear and stepped outside the wall. Elbridge, Rombel, and Marcus.

Marcus's legs trembled faintly, though no one else noticed.

'It hasn't fully awakened as a demon yet. We need to settle this as fast as possible.'

Elbridge finished his judgment and kicked off the ground.

"Dangerous or not, we end this fast. Rombel! Go for the back! Marcus! Draw its attention any way you can!"

As Elbridge charged straight in, the demon formed another pillar of water and aimed it at him.

"Grant me the divine power of No Retreat!"

Elbridge's shield flared white and blocked the ashen pillar of water. The pillar skimmed the ground and shifted toward Marcus instead. Marcus yelped and rolled across the dirt to dodge. Not graceful, but it worked.

The demon seemed to decide to remove Marcus first, firing pillar after pillar of water at him.

"Fuuuck-!"

Marcus swore.

He ran, rolled, crawled, even twisted his body into strange shapes, dodging a full three attacks in a row. Genuine progress.

While Marcus bought the opening, Rombel had circled around to the back and leaped. He meant to split the demon's head open with his axe.

At that moment, Rombel saw the spines along the demon's spine twitch, just slightly.

"...!"

Rombel stopped mid-swing and thrust the flat of his axe forward instead, using it like a shield.

Tat-tat-tang-

Spines fired off and struck the flat of the axe. But that wasn't all.

The demon spun immediately and swung at Rombel.

"Guh!"

Rombel spat blood and tumbled across the ground.

But Rombel's approach hadn't been meaningless. The demon had, if only for a moment, lost track of Elbridge.

Slash.

Elbridge had already closed the distance. His sword swept out and severed the demon's right arm.

'Its skin still isn't hardened.'

That much went well. But there was another problem.

Sizzle-

A few drops of the demon's fluid splattered across Elbridge's face. It hissed with a strange sound as it began burning into his skin.

The burn on his face wasn't the real problem. He could tolerate that much pain.

The problem was that one or two drops had landed in his left eye. Almost instantly, the vision in that eye vanished, and his sense of distance blurred.

He could endure pain. But a functional failure wasn't something endurance could fix.

'Should I request Healing Authority from the Goddess of Spring Rain and Moss right now? No. Not yet-'

At that moment, the demon's left arm came flying in from outside his field of vision and struck his cuirass.

Crack!

He'd been too focused on his skewed sense of distance to account for his narrowed field of vision.

'I think a couple of ribs just broke.'

But the pain didn't slow him down.

Elbridge rolled twice across the ground, then rose almost immediately.

A demon always kept coming after any target that showed an opening, so it was almost certain to chase him down and try to finish him off.

He looked up, and sure enough, the demon was closing in.

Just as Elbridge steadied his precarious balance and raised his shield again, someone stepped in front of him.

"My god..."

It was Isalvius. He had somehow slipped out of the fortress and thrown himself into the fight.

But Isalvius had no way to help in a battle like this. He was the man who couldn't even take part in the Grand Festival himself, the one who had hired five paladins from other churches instead.

And now that the god he served had become a demon, he couldn't even call on Healing Authority.

The demon's left arm, its fingers grown into long claws, lashed out toward Isalvius.

Ta-

Elbridge clenched his jaw and kicked off the ground. Would he reach Isalvius with his shield first, or would the demon's claws tear through him first?

'Too slow.'

However he calculated it, the claws would reach first.

'If it comes to this...'

Just as Elbridge was about to use Isalvius as a sacrifice and cut the demon down anyway,

the demon wrapped its left arm around Isalvius instead.

'What?'

Elbridge's movement froze at the unexpected turn.

The demon growled, breathing hard.

Then it spoke, faintly.

"Isalvius... crybaby Isalvius..."

Elbridge was stunned. The demon could speak?

Isalvius, overcome, threw both arms around the demon.

Fluid leaking from the demon's wound burned into one of Isalvius's arms, and a foul smell rose from it. It had to be excruciating, but Isalvius didn't let go of the arm wrapped around the demon.

"My god..."

Isalvius was crying.

The demon raised its left hand, claws and all, and carefully wiped Isalvius's tears away, taking care not to cut him.

Still not fully formed, the demon trembled as it rose to its feet.

Then it pushed Isalvius gently aside and spoke to Elbridge.

"Silent Knight. Kill me before it's too late."

The demon knelt, so that Elbridge could cut it down easily.

"No. Don't..."

Isalvius shook his head violently, as if in convulsions, and tried to rush toward the demon again.

Quick to react, Marcus ran over and grabbed him.

"Come here!"

"No. No!"

The demon's body shuddered every so often, as if fighting to hold back its instinctive bloodlust.

But Elbridge planted his sword like a cane and asked the demon, "God of Flowing Water. Do you have any final words?"

Elbridge had lived through countless battles.

But this was the first time he had ever given a demon time to speak a last word.

The demon said, "I left a sealing tool at the Lake of Eternity."

"Did you know this would happen someday?"

"A little... perhaps."

Still kneeling, the demon straightened its violently trembling body.

And then, for the last time, it roared with everything it had.

"My children! Come to me! I will share my foolish father's final moment with you!"

Elbridge raised his sword.

And swung it twice.

Thud.

The first strike pierced the demon's heart.

Slash.

The second cut off its head.

Thump.

The demon's headless body collapsed, lifeless.

From the not-yet-finished demon's body, faint glowing fireflies rose into the air.

Their numbers grew and grew until they became too many to count, scattering into the darkened world.

Then, divinity so dense it felt as if it filled the whole world spread out in every direction.

This divinity was the God of Flowing Water's final act of love. It would become strength for the priests and paladins who had lost the god they were meant to follow.

'Though that story only matters once they've come to serve a new god...'

The lukewarm southern rain, so distinct to this region, had already stopped.

Elbridge looked up at the sky.

As the rain clouds drifted away on the wind, a sky full of stars slowly began to show itself.

Elbridge sat quietly, watching the stars and the fireflies mingle in the night sky.

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