Following Karen’s message, the two Cardinals and several senior knights of the Holy Iron Inquisitors joined Leon’s party in mere minutes. The rest of the order had no choice but to stay behind, still holding back the soldiers possessed by wraiths.

Adela was the first to rush over and call out to Leon.

“Hero! What the hell happened? That ridiculously huge thing, is that really the Emperor himself?!”

Leon calmed the agitated Adela and explained, “Yes. According to Lyon, that’s his face we’re looking at right now.”

“To turn a man who’s neither an Aura Master nor an Archmage into a transcendent... these exogods really are absurd. I think I finally understand why those lunatics in the Evil Order worship them so blindly.”

“He didn’t seem particularly sane. You can talk to him, but communicating is not an option.”

“Of course not. He wouldn’t have fallen for Morse’s blatant sweet talk unless he was missing a few screws in his head.”

Adela muttered a few more insults about Nex while healing the burn scars that marred her body. They were wounds left by exolaw, so they recovered quickly enough, but she had less than half of her strength remaining after having overexerted herself fighting Morse. She had been thrown out of her rhythm.

Still, she couldn’t leave the battlefield here. She wasn’t completely spent like Irexana; her power had only waned a little.

I’ll have to brace myself, she thought.

Even she, who had lived several times longer than a human lifespan, had never faced a being like the Death King. Even from kilometers away, her body trembled.

The fists she’d always believed could crush anything suddenly felt small. The blood that had boiled like molten steel cooled to ice. Like a person watching a volcano erupt, she felt no anger or hatred—only the despair of standing before a natural disaster.

Even so, Adela steadied her trembling hands and spat a clot of blood to the ground.

I can’t panic in front of the kids.

She had lived long enough, even past the normal lifespan of gnomes. If she died fighting the monster, so be it. She’d simply join the Goddess she’d served all her life, without seeing the face once, and finally complain a little directly to her.

Maybe next time, she’d be born into a taller race.

Anna, after a moment of thought, spoke.

“Sir Geoff. Have the Holy Iron Inquisitors withdraw in sequence. From this moment on, our primary objective is the elimination of the Death King.”

“Your Eminence, then what about the possessed soldiers...?”

“Defeating the Death King comes first. If we have strength left afterward, we’ll intervene again. Leaving that massive abomination roam for a day will cost far more lives than a million wraith-soldiers ever could.”

It was a cold, logical decision. Geoff obeyed without argument, leading the senior knights toward the battlefield. Truthfully, even without them, the Ferma and Revolutionary armies wouldn’t be wiped out completely.

The possessed soldiers had strength several times greater than ordinary men, but their minds were little more than those of wild beasts. With their officers reorganizing the lines and maintaining formation, the armies could still hold out.

Of course, every Holy Iron Inquisitor was worth a hundred men. Without them, the casualties would multiply. Anna knew all this, yet she decided anyway.

“Hero, how much time until the Death King’s seal breaks?” Anna asked Leon.

“That’s...”

Since he had simply activated the artifact, Leon also didn’t have a clue. As he was hesitating to reply, the answer came from El-Cid.

—Ten minutes. Give or take about thirty seconds.

Leon relayed it, and Anna closed her eyes in thought before unfolding a map. She drew a hexagon centered around the point where the Death King was sealed. With the thirty or so remaining Inquisitors, the vertices lined up perfectly.

“This is a sacred spell barrier. It’ll be tight, but if we start moving now, we should make it in time. It won’t have much effect on the Death King himself, but it might at least halt his movements and suppress the domain he’s locked in.”

At that moment, when Anna said, “halt his movements,” a flash of inspiration struck Leon. The Death King might be an incomplete transcendent, but even so, he was nothing like Nephren-Ka.

Concentrating the firepower of a few Masters might not even scratch him, but what if there existed another being of equal rank? Something older, purer—more refined than a man-turned-god born of human sacrifice?

“It... might work...”

Even El-Cid clicked his tongue, sharing the thought.

—There’s a possibility, for sure. Though if it goes wrong, we’re even more screwed than before.

If we can’t bring him down here, we’re finished anyway.

This was the moment. They had to settle it here.

After devouring hundreds of thousands of souls, the Death King was still incomplete. However, if he escaped Calelum and consumed millions more, the resulting calamity would be no different from an exogod descending in full. Not even Kasim could defeat a complete transcendent.

Once the Death King completed his apotheosis, as he claimed, the world itself would become one with Nex.

Leon turned to Elahan and Adela and whispered his instructions.

“Elahan. Your Eminence.”

Both women froze for a moment, dumbfounded, but neither questioned nor demanded an explanation. They understood that every second mattered now. Seven minutes remained before the seal broke.

And thus, the operation to slay the Death King began.

***

Time flew like an arrow loosed from the string. Seven minutes vanished in the blink of an eye.

The Holy Iron Inquisitors’ preparations and Adela and Elahan’s advance work were both completed with about a minute to spare. Even while gasping for breath, the two never took their eyes off the spot where the Death King would burst out. However foul the means of his creation, there was no room for carelessness against a monster who had reached the gods’ domain.

Right then, the Holy Sword in Leon’s grip flared with a riot of light.

“He’s coming!”

As he shouted, the outer wall of the Dimension Lock collapsed, and several fissures began to race across the night sky without a sound. From beyond the torn seams of the heavens, thick, enormous fingers reached through and pried the cracks wider, left and right.

The boundary of space, which should have been untouchable by definition, was forced open. It was interference from a dimension no three-dimensional lifeform could perceive or touch. That phenomenon itself proved the Death King’s order of being differed from theirs.

—Pay the price for troubling Me, harlot’s dog.

The instant he slipped free of the Dimension Lock, the Death King found Leon, and his eyes flashed. He didn’t need to look hard at all.

Leon hid nowhere, looking up at him from directly beneath the giant’s feet. He had no intention of buying time again with wordplay. Instead, the amulet Grania had given him clinked on his neck.

“Deceleration!”

With his shout, an eighth-tier temporal spell unfolded. The space centered on the Death King suddenly suffered a slowing of the time axis. Even the flow of air turned sluggish and syrupy.

It wasn’t just movement. Within the field, cognitive speed itself dropped by several multiples.

A full transcendent would have stood outside the flow of time and felt no effect, but the Death King was still incomplete. Realizing his limbs had gone dull, he bellowed.

—So... you resort... to petty... tricks... again...?

Instead of his mouth, Leon answered with his sword, the Holy Sword El-Cid. Without hiding its true nature, its splendid radiance lit the world. It felt like the sun had risen at the deepest depth of night.

The Death King’s ectoplasmic body hissed and bubbled as if burned, and the “people” touched by the nimbus felt their vital force return.

It was light bestowed directly by the Goddess, a power that bolsters the vigor of life. The Holy Iron Inquisitors and the Cardinals realized what they were seeing, and their eyes flew wide.

“All hands! This is the Holy War!” Adela roared, her voice echoing out for hundreds of meters. “The Goddess is watching over us! Don’t disgrace yourselves at the end—punt that dim-witted lump straight to the pit of hell!”

In unison, thirty-or-so Inquisitors cried out as if coughing blood.

“Deus Lo Vult!”

How could they not? Through prayer, through training, through penance, they had always felt that light and grace from far away. Now, in this moment, it lingered at their very side.

This was the will of God. For devout believers, there was no greater wellspring.

Every single one of them was ready to die on this spot. With that resolve, the power they raised exceeded their usual output by triple. The six points of a hexagram around the Death King linked with a fierce flash.

The sacred spell barrier was the law of order that pressed down beings from the outer dimensions.

—What... are you doing... slaves... of the harlot...!

Chains of light surged from beneath and coiled the Death King’s ankles and waist, constricting his lower body.

The instant his movement was sealed, Leon sprang up. Fixing himself with Icarus Wing, he drew up power.

“Sun Sword, Crimson Lotus, Second Form: Flare.”

Holy power and Aura gathered into a globe like a small sun. Leon delicately shaped it, set it upon his blade, and slashed for the Death King’s ankle.

With a low rumble, a wave of light erupted along the sword’s path. Flare’s swordlight sheared the Death King’s ectoplasm, charred the cut surface black, and bored into the ground with its terrifying force.

It not only severed the thick ankle of the Death King, but it also melted the earth to form a crater before the light finally died.

—Meaning...less...

However, the Death King neither groaned in pain nor staggered; he only mocked Leon’s thrashing.

“JUUUUDGMEEEENT!!”

Following on Leon’s heels, Elahan leaped in. Wreathed in overflowing holy power, she soared and fell like a blazing comet.

Ventilating Aura to accelerate her descent over and over, she smashed through the sound barrier, and her hammer drove straight down into the top of the Death King’s foot with full force.

The shockwave that shattered his ectoplasmic flesh once more pulverized the ground and rattled the Death King’s body.

And that was not all. One after another, the rest layered their ultimate techniques atop the first two strikes.

“Tremolo, Quartet of Palms.”

Adela’s shockwaves hammered down four times in succession.

“Explosive Technique, Dragon-Form Sword: Wall-Shattering Flight.”

Valter followed, his all-out Explosive Aura churning the already-melted ground until it boiled like magma.

Lacking in raw firepower, Cedric, Anna, Karen, and Gilbert could only pour out Aura in barrages, but their output was merely less than the others, not absent.

Under the Masters’ chain bombardment, the ground sank, and the Death King’s titanic body dropped to his knees. A single stride would have freed him, but the sacred spell barrier still refused to permit his movement.

—Insects... your... struggles... are... pointless...

And yet the Death King remained hale. The severed, burst ankle had already finished regenerating, and the barrier’s chains were dimming, their power visibly fading.

To fell a transcendent, it was never a matter of pelting them with countless lower-tier blows; it required an equal or higher tier to bear and land a proper strike.

Even Cedric lowered his sword to grumble.

“Can we even bring this thing down?”

He’d been thrilled at first by the thought of cutting a monster, but finding his blows meaningless was no joy.

Valter and Gilbert wore much the same faces with the same dispirited thought.

We can’t win.

They were facing a powerlessness they had never felt, even once, since reaching the realm of Aura Masters. It soaked into them like a dry sponge taking on water.

The voice that shook off that helplessness was Leon’s.

“We can do it! Raise your swords! Even if we lose, we should at least have the pride of giving it all we had to the very end!”

He was the youngest of the Masters and yet stood at the front; his voice reached the very hearts of men weathered by the world. As for the companions who trusted him absolutely, there was nothing more to say.

Once more, they wrung their hearts dry and unleashed their secrets. With a loud rumble, the ground flipped as if an earthquake had struck. From the backlash alone, several wraith-soldiers shrieked in terror and fled their hosts; clouds far overhead tore, and the stars of the night looked down upon the earth.

At the destructive power that could barely be contained even with the White Peak Palace’s supreme barrier, dust billowed and was scattered, then billowed again, the earth sinking lower each time.

In the instant when the Masters, having spent over half their strength, paused, their enemy’s voice destroyed their spirit.

—Your frantic thrashing does you no good. I shall consider your efforts finished.

The Death King burst the chains of light, and his eyes gleamed. From pupils black as pitch, two blood-red lances of ruin shot forth.

They shuddered at the aftershock as it grazed past. All eight Masters froze, then turned as one to stare at the beams that had streaked by them seconds earlier, belatedly grasping what the Death King had aimed at.

“Y-you....” Valter stammered, face drained white.

The Imperial Capital within the walls—crowded with soldiers only minutes before—had been laid waste by the two beams.

How many had died? Even conservatively, it was in the thousands.

And from the swath where the beams had passed, the souls of the dead—leaving not even a scrap of flesh behind—rose up and began to stream into the Death King’s gaping maw.

It was one of the powers of the Grand Art of Soul Separation: soul consumption. A fundamental blasphemy against life, slaying the living forever.

—All the scratches you gnats left upon My body are now healed.

Following that statement, the Death King muttered a challenge that sounded like a mockery.

—Go on. Do as much more as you like. There are still so very many of My people in need of salvation.