Chapter 338: The God Who Eats Is [III]

Vince went pale beside me, his hand clamping onto my shoulder to both steady himself and shake me. "S-Sam... You killed him!"

"No, I didn’t! And you all shouldn’t hold back either!" I snarled, shouting to ensure my voice was heard over the commotion from the seismic activity I’d just caused. "If you hesitate for even a second against him, you’ll die. Fight with the pure, unbridled intention to kill!"

...As if to prove my words, countless sharp arcs of black energy erupted skyward from beneath the ginormous stone baseball bat.

Swish, Fwoo—!! Swoosh—!!

I had never heard a mountain being chopped and diced before, either. But again, I guessed it would sound very similar to the noise that followed.

A high-pitched yet gravelly keening resounded as those arcs sliced through reinforced stone like a new knife through silk.

The massive bat shattered into a torrential rain of dismantled rock fragments that sprayed across the battlefield.

Michael was standing there, perfectly calm amidst the downpour of falling rubble.

His black armor was

completely

untouched.

His cursed sword was angled downward, oozing a creepy dark energy that gave me literal, bone-deep chills.

His polished visor was reflecting nothing but our terror-filled faces.

I heard someone gulp anxiously. Then I realized it was me.

This was the protagonist of this world we were facing — the center of the story, the one the universe revolved around.

...And he was truly going all out.

He was... death incarnate.

For a heartbeat, the battlefield froze in a tableau of impending bloodbath.

That silence, however, was soon broken when I heard someone laughing a wild laugh.

Let me clarify. I don’t mean a nervous or afraid laugh.

I actually mean a wild, crazy, feral laugh. It was the sound of someone who had found a challenge worth dying for.

It... was Ray.

"Fine then!" he bellowed, pulling his arms back to immediately detonate a chain of explosions and launching himself forward like a living missile.

The air turned to searing plasma in his wake as he shot toward Michael.

Juliana hesitated for a microsecond to calculate her moves, then followed after him, moving at a speed totally incomprehensible to the human eye.

Vince pursued immediately after, while Kang took the opening to trigger his partial transformation to the maximum. He looked like he was preparing himself to pitch out of here with Alexia as soon as a window for escape opened.

Only I didn’t follow them.

Because I felt a shift behind me. Call it a premonition.

I turned just in time to see the

God Who Eats Is

descending from the fractured sky, his abominable body slowly lowering toward the canyon floor with a grace that was both divine and deeply disturbing.

He landed a few steps away from the fallen white mask and slowly raised a crooked staff held by one of his six arms.

The wind picked up in a confined gale before him to levitate the

Divine Mask

off the dirt and tow it back toward its master.

I had to stop him.

So I moved quickly.

...Or at least, I

tried

to.

But before I could take a single step in that direction, my wrist was grabbed. I stumbled back as slender yet surprisingly strong fingers closed around my sleeve.

"Sam—!" Lily’s voice reached me, so full of desperation that it made me pause despite the adrenaline. "Don’t! That thing... it’s at least a

Greater

Beast! Maybe even an

Ancient

! But those items! Look at them! Those items he has are all above

Supreme

or

Mythical

grade! You won’t survive, please!"

It was one of those moments for me where time slows down when you have to make a split-second decision in the middle of a chaotic situation.

She wasn’t wrong. Not... mostly.

The

God Who Eats Is

would definitely be an upper

Greater

-rank Spirit Beast if we strictly had to put him within the classification system for monsters.

But I personally preferred to think of him as an

A

-rank Hunter. Yeah, I’d rather put him in the classification system for humans.

Still, even that didn’t fully justify the sheer lethality of that fallen deity. Every single one of his weapons was a Divine Armament or Charm. Yes, the same as my sword,

Aurieth

.

Meaning all those weapons grew in power alongside his soul.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

If that’s the case, Samael, then why are those weapons so goddamn strong if his soul is supposedly only

A

-rank?

Usually, your logic would be correct. How was an

A

-rank creature’s soul handling so many

Supreme

and

Mythical

-grade artifacts?

For instance, I was a

B

-ranker. Since my Divine Sword was linked to me, it should have been as strong as a

Rare

-grade.

By that same logic, the

God

’s weapons should have only been

Epic

or

Legendary

.

But they weren’t.

That’s because... his soul was, in fact, comparable to that of an

SSS

-rank Hunter (or an

Unholy

Spirit Beast.)

It was just his physical body that wasn’t performing up to his full Soul Rank. Think of it as a hardware issue.

I’ll explain why that was the case later.

For now, I was grinding my teeth.

Lily continued in the meanwhile, "Let’s just leave that creature and push Michael back toward the caldera! We’ll retreat for now! Then we can—"

And I stopped listening to her.

Her plan was unrealistic, born from nothing but panic and distress. By now, she ought to have realized it...

Realized that the prophecy of my death was very clearly headed toward its fulfillment.

Because what would we do after pushing Michael back to the caldera, even if we could? We’d still have to fight him. And retreating even from there was not an option. We weren’t going to survive another encounter with Vaeghar in our state.

So if we left now, we’d have to come back. And by then, the

God

would be wearing his Mask again and lurking in our wait.

We’d be right back where we started, none the wiser, getting hunted like cattle all over again.

Oh, and did I mention that the only way to save Michael was to kill the

God

puppeteering him?

All our options were spent. We were at the end of the road.

From here on out, our only choice was to move forward.

...To fight.

I tore my gaze from the

God

and looked at Lily. She was still babbling while holding onto my hand.

Behind her, the clash between Michael and the others had already devolved into chaos of explosions, clangor of steel, and flashes of energy blasts.

Ahead of me, the mask hovered inches from the

God

’s reaching hand.

Someone

had

to stop him.

Someone

had

to kill him.

A split second.

That was all it took for me to decide.

I

had

to be that someone.

I shrugged off Lily’s hold, ignoring the betrayal and apprehension in her haunting violet eyes, and bent my knees until I was all but crouching.

Then, a slanted pillar of stone sprang out from the ground under my boots like a hydraulic piston to hurl me forward with the speed of a heavy bolt shot from a ballista.