Chapter 31. The Border Between a Monster and a Hero
“Hah… Hah…!”
Godspeed's face began to show fear and stress. So this is the time when he begins to suffer from the side effects of his power… I suppose there was no way to use such a power without paying the proper price for it.
Accelerator looked at his subordinate's face once, and tightly gripped onto the blades in his hand.
Paah!
Eight blades shot at the Warrior.
Baaang!
Multiple explosions went off at once, as bits of meat flew everywhere. Burnt armor fell to the ground just a moment later. Godspeed, who was sighing in relief at this point, couldn't help but widen his eyes at what he saw next.
“Hah… Hah… Huh…?”
It didn't even take a second. There were no signs of regeneration whatsoever. The Warrior “just seemed to be there from the start”. It was evident that the Warrior's body had been destroyed to pieces just a moment before, but the man was standing in place casually as if nothing had happened.
“Just… Hah…! Fu… No way…!”
Godspeed was panting to himself with his hands on his knees. Accelerator came up to him and pulled him backwards.
“Get over here and stand behind me, assistant.”
“Hah… Hah… I'm not…”
“Just rest.”
Godspeed barely managed to nod as he moved back. By the looks of things, it looked like he exhausted himself completely after three minutes of using his power. The two had showered the Warrior with attacks, but in the end, they were the ones to become exhausted. The Warrior didn't attack, but just looked at the two people silently. Almost as if he was telling them to give up.
Godspeed recovered his breath and turned towards Accelerator.
“Wow… Phew, now what? It really didn't work.”
“I told you it won't work on him. Why did you have to be so stubborn? Your suggestions never work damn it.”
“How's all this my fault?”
Accelerator raised his feet, as if he was trying to kick Godspeed for speaking out, but ended up grabbing his back instead.
“Ow, ouch ouch ouch. My back's killing me. Just bring out the soldiers to deal with him. He's going easy on us anyway.”
“Does it matter? The guy isn't dying.”
“He's immortal, but he must have a limit as well. He'll die at some point.”
Godspeed nodded, and raised his hands up in the air. He was calling for the Second Subjugation Battalion.
Shf, shhf!
Teleporters and speedsters began to appear around the Warrior. The speedsters took out their weapons and shot them straight at the Warrior. Each of these projectiles were enforced with the powers that these soldiers had, allowing them to reach speeds well above that of sound. Only then did the Warrior find that the situation was a little more dire than before.
“Imagine Citadel!”
The air was bending around the Warrior and a sphere of prismatic light surrounded him.
So it's here…
The miracle of the Warrior that could only be invoked once a day. It was a barrier that would protect a group of people for one whole minute. He probably activated this in order to prepare himself for battle. Each time the weapons hit the barrier, it let off a powerful burst of energy that impacted the buildings below. The heat generated from it was enough to turn the stone floor underneath them into lava. But the Warrior didn't take any damage whatsoever. He simply sat in his barrier, casually activating each and every one of his spellstones.
[Virtual Skeleton = Physical Frame] – A spell is cast upon the spine. It creates a physical barrier that can act in place of the skeleton. In other words, it recreates the skeleton with mana. It protects the bones with mana. The strength of this barrier is enough to withstand a hit from a dragon.
Because he's perpetually under the blessing of [Dragon Blood], one might as well say that he's under four blessings at the moment. The Warrior didn't seem to think that this was enough, however, seeing that he was downing a potion as well. He was drinking it now, as the potion wouldn't activate as soon as one drank it. The saint and Necro confirmed the Warrior's use of the spellstones. Then they nodded to each other.
Pshhh- Chichichi!
The second barrier was cast, and the Warrior's blessings were all nullified.
“This is…?”
The Warrior didn't seem to have expected anything like this to happen. He just stood in his place, fumbling around with the spellstones in his hand.
Five seconds left now.
Tudadada!
The Warrior turned into mush from the unavoidable attack. Even as a powerful hero, it seemed difficult for him to go up against so many ability users at once.
“The way I see it, you just need to burn him. There's no way he'd revive if we burn away all of his cells, right?”
The giant sword that the user of High Speed threw was accelerated by Accelerator, which caused the weapon to move at a velocity of mach 25.
Ka-bam!
The weapon left a streak of red light as it traveled through the air, causing a massive explosion upon contact with the ground.
Kugagagaga!
The scale of the explosion could be felt even where we were, three kilometers away from the battlefield. The saint had a worried expression as she watched the battle using my Floating Eye.
“As expected, it isn't working.”
The man wasn't dying. No matter what they were doing, he didn't die. [Memento Mori] was a high-leveled power. Strength no longer affected a power like this. It was something closer to a puzzle at this point.
“Prepare yourselves. We'll need to move out the moment [Death Eye] fails.”
Necro asked me a question in a nervous tone of voice when I said this.
“Can I trust you?”
“I told you, didn't I? ‘You can't kill the Warrior’. That's how it goes.”
Necro probably knew already.
“If the Warrior's body was something that possessed regenerative properties, you could just get rid of the energy he contains by killing him over and over again. But as you might've seen already, part of the air and the mana around him constantly gets absorbed by him every time he dies.”
He might die sometime at this rate. Problem was, no one knew how long it would take. A thousand years… A million years… There was just no telling how long this might go for. It's been just five minutes since the battle started. It might seem short, but for the ability users, it was extremely stressful for them already. And…
As time passed, more and more began to realize this. This began to shake the hearts of the soldiers in the field.
“Hey! What are you doing! It's dangerous!”
“I'm telling you, just throwing shit won't do anything!”
A select few of the soldiers began attempting to attack the Warrior with melee attacks. This prevented the others from being able to use projectile weapons. Accelerator tried to stop the soldiers from doing this, but ended up stopping himself.
“Well, this is annoying. It's not like they'd get caught by him, but still…”
What he was concerned with was the deployment was the [Hundred Eight Eyes]. At a time like this, when their safety wasn't guaranteed, it was extremely risky to deploy them to deal with the Warrior. The Storm was currently beating down the Warrior one-sidedly, but this in itself was a problem. Killing someone who never dies over and over again breaks something in one's head. It breaks the ‘heart’ that a person possesses. Seeing how the Warrior recovers a second after having his head broken changes something in a soldier's mind. It eats away at the soldier's personality.
Those with low tolerance to death would throw up, and others would begin to smile in joy. To them, the Warrior was no longer a human. As more and more time passed, the state of the battle changed into something entirely different instead.
—A play.
The soldiers no longer used their full power. They treated the Warrior as something akin to a target. At one point, this was the person who had taken down the Demon King with the hero. Taking down someone like this was giving the soldiers a certain sense of ecstasy.
‘I'm amazing.’
‘My power is stronger than his.’
These soldiers were, in the end, normal people who managed to awaken to their abilities in a different world. Their current state of battle gave them a huge sense of satisfaction and catharsis. And their arrogant act, in the end, managed to bring out the Warrior's anger.
“…It, looks like, I'm being looked. Down on. Really looked, down upon..”
The warrior almost sighed out his words but widened his arms to the side. He died several times more in the process, but this didn't stop him.
“No matter how fast mosquitos may be, they are simply mosquitos in the end. Just bugs.”
It was slow. At least, to the human eye it was. The Warrior brought his two hands together.
A clap…?
Right. It was a simple clap. One slow enough to be seen by the human eye. But the result of this was…
Kii-!
“Urk!”
The saint frowned as she put her hands over her ears. My body was vibrating from the shockwave. A sound loud enough to rip apart the area shook through the town, causing the soldiers nearby to moan in pain. If it's this bad here, over there in the battlefield must be…
“Kaah…!”
“My eyes…!”
The soldiers that had been mocking the Warrior just a moment ago were bleeding from their orifices. Seeing how their eyes had turned white, it seemed that they had suffered from burns as well.
“Aerodynamic heating, huh…”
“○○○○…?”
“Can't hear.”
The saint waddled over my way, and put her hands over my ears. They immediately turned warm.
“Aerodynamic heating…?”
“Yes, aerodynamic heating.”
The saint spoke a little angrily when I intentionally stopped myself there.
“Shouldn't you be explaining around now?”
“It's the heating of a solid object produced by its high speed in the air. It can be commonly observed on space shuttles and fighter jets.”
The saint listened to me carefully, then stood up with a worried face.
“Where are you going?” “Where do you think you're going?”
The saint gripped onto her pants after hearing my and Necro’s question, and replied quietly.
“The injured…”
It almost sounded like she herself didn't know what to do. Necro frowned, seemingly bothered by that tone of hers.
“Don't be ridiculous. Sit. The injured will come when they feel that they need you.”
His words made sense. I backed up his words.
“I'm against having healers going into the battlefield as well. It'd be better to leave the injured to be transported here by the teleporters.”
The saint thought for a moment, then sat back down. Her actions had no finesse whatsoever. She didn't care when her clothes and hair got dirty from the dirt as well. It was almost as if she was taken by something. She balled herself up, and watched the battlefield silently.
We were sharing our vision using the floating eye. So far, there was just one person who got killed by the Warrior's counterattack. Eight were injured, and the rest managed to escape by moving away faster than sound. The teleporters immediately came to recover the patients. The soldiers who had been surprised by the Warrior's counterattack began to get together, and started to buzz about what he had said moments before.
“Didn't he say something just now?”
“He called us mosquitos, right?”
These weren't the type to just take an insult like this. To them, the Warrior was nothing but a ‘stepping stone’. To them, they still had the upper hand.
The battle between the Warrior and the speedsters resumed. Except this time, the soldiers became more violent, and even more cruel.