Chapter 291: I Still Have to Say I’m Sorry

Yuuta stared at the approaching storm of poison.

Then his grip on the stick shifted.

He drew in a long breath, steadied his trembling hands and began rotating the stick in front of his body. The movement was awkward for the first few turns, but Yuuta kept his breathing controlled and gradually increased the speed, passing the stick from one hand to the other in a continuous circular motion.

He had seen this technique on television years ago. Shaolin practitioners had spun staffs around themselves so quickly that Yuuta, fascinated by it, had spent plenty of time trying to imitate the movement with random sticks whenever he had the chance. Back then it had been nothing more than something fun to copy.

Now his life depended on it.

The first bottle reached him.

CRACK!

The spinning stick caught the glass and sent it flying backward before it could shatter.

A second bottle entered the rotating path and was immediately knocked away, followed by a third from Yuuta’s left. Yuuta shifted the rotation with his wrists, keeping the stick moving as the bottles reached him one after another.

CRACK! CRACK!

The Poison Demons’ expressions changed.

Their own bottles were coming back.

One demon jerked sideways as a violet bottle flew toward its head, while another was forced to rise sharply to avoid one coming toward its chest. Several bottles shattered against buildings behind them, splashing poison across concrete, while others passed between the demons and forced them to scatter through the air.

Yuuta didn’t stop spinning.

His shoulders burned and every collision sent painful vibrations through his wrists, but the continuous rotation left the demons struggling to find a clear opening. Whenever a bottle entered the space around him, the aura-covered stick struck it before it could reach his body and hurled it elsewhere.

Vezrath ground his teeth.

A mere human wasn’t simply surviving their attacks anymore.

He was forcing them backward with their own poison.

"No..."

Vezrath watched Yuuta’s hands carefully, searching for a weakness in the rotating defense. Attacking from the left wasn’t working. Neither was the right. Even throwing from above had become difficult because Yuuta could change the angle of the rotation quickly enough to intercept anything entering his reach.

They needed something he couldn’t strike away.

Vezrath’s eyes narrowed.

"Use the poisonous gas!"

The other demons immediately stopped throwing their bottles and moved apart.

Yuuta noticed the sudden silence.

"What...?"

The seven demons tilted their heads back and began drinking the poison from their bottles. Violet liquid disappeared down their throats before they tossed the empty containers aside and drew in long breaths. Their chests expanded unnaturally, and thick purple vapor began leaking between their teeth.

Yuuta’s expression changed.

All seven demons leaned forward.

Poison erupted from their mouths like dragon breath.

The separate streams merged as they crossed the street, rapidly expanding into a massive violet cloud that swallowed the road from one side to the other. There was no bottle for Yuuta to strike this time and nowhere obvious for him to dodge.

His eyes widened.

He recognized it immediately.

The screams of the seventeen officers returned to his mind. Yuuta remembered watching the gas consume their clothes and bodies before continuing through the armored vehicles behind them as though even reinforced metal meant nothing.

And now that same poison was coming for him.

"No..."

Yuuta’s body instinctively shifted backward.

His heel moved half a step.

Then stopped.

Behind him was the passage where Elena was hidden.

Yuuta looked down at his retreating foot.

"NO!"

He slammed it back against the pavement.

His fingers tightened around the wooden stick as he faced the approaching cloud instead of turning away.

Aura surged through his body.

The energy flowed through his veins with greater intensity than before, gathering through his arms until the sheer density finally made it visible. Green aura rose around Yuuta’s body and poured into the wooden stick as he began rotating it again.

The first few rotations were fast.

Then Yuuta pushed harder.

His wrists turned continuously while his hands guided the stick around itself, each rotation becoming faster than the last. The green aura traced its movement until the wood almost disappeared completely, leaving only a circular blur in front of him.

From above, it looked like Yuuta had suddenly raised a glowing green shield.

In reality, he was still holding nothing more than a broken wooden stick.

The poisonous cloud reached him.

Yuuta roared as he forced his arms faster.

"AAAAAAAHHHHH!"

The spinning stick ripped through the surrounding air, and a violent current exploded outward. The front of the violet cloud slammed against it and twisted apart, poison curling violently around the circular pressure instead of reaching Yuuta.

The collision nearly threw him backward.

His shoes scraped across the pavement, leaving marks beneath his heels as he struggled to remain standing. Yuuta bent his knees and lowered his weight, forcing both feet against the road while continuing to spin.

His arms began hurting almost immediately.

The speed was beyond anything his muscles were prepared to sustain. Pain spread from his wrists into his forearms and shoulders, growing worse with every rotation, while the wooden stick repeatedly threatened to slip from his sweat-covered palms.

Yuuta didn’t slow down.

The poison pressed closer.

He spun faster.

Blood began mixing with the sweat along his hands as the skin across his palms split beneath the constant friction. His shoulders screamed for him to stop, and his fingers were becoming increasingly difficult to feel.

Yuuta tightened them anyway.

Above him, the Poison Demons stared.

The human they had expected to dissolve within seconds was still standing in the middle of the street.

More importantly, he wasn’t retreating.

Yuuta shifted one foot forward.

Then another.

The demons’ eyes widened.

He was advancing.

With the wooden stick still spinning at an almost invisible speed, Yuuta pushed himself directly against the poisonous cloud. Every step was small and brutally difficult, but the violent air pressure moved with him, forcing the violet gas backward little by little.

One of the demons stared in disbelief.

"He’s pushing it back..."

One of them finally realized what was happening.

"Wind...?"

The demon stared down at the violet gas curling away from Yuuta.

"He’s using the rotation to push it away!"

Vezrath’s teeth ground together.

The sight infuriated him.

This human had killed one of his men, repelled their bottles and was now forcing his way through an attack that should have reduced him to bones within seconds.

"Enough!"

Vezrath snatched several poison bottles from beneath his robe and drank them one after another. Violet veins swelled along his neck as the poison entered his body, and thick vapor poured from his mouth with every breath.

"DIE ALREADY!"

Vezrath inhaled until his chest expanded.

Then he unleashed everything.

A far larger stream of poison crashed into the seven existing currents.

The cloud swelled instantly.

Yuuta’s forward movement stopped.

His shoes were dragged backward across the pavement as the pressure suddenly multiplied, and the spinning circle of green aura trembled in front of him. Violet gas curled dangerously close around its edges while his already damaged arms struggled to maintain their speed.

Yuuta grunted through clenched teeth.

His right foot slid backward.

He forced it forward again.

His shoulders burned.

He kept spinning.

Blood ran over his fingers and onto the wooden stick.

His grip only became tighter.

Vezrath poured more poison into the cloud, expecting the human’s defense to finally collapse.

Instead, Yuuta lowered his body and took another step toward them.

He didn’t say anything this time.

He didn’t need to.

Every trembling muscle in his body was already giving the demons his answer.

The pressure continued to build until Yuuta could barely keep his feet beneath him. His arms felt as though they were being torn apart from the shoulders, and blood ran between his fingers as the wooden stick spun faster and faster.

Then Yuuta screamed.

"I WILL NOT DIE!"

He poured everything he had left into the rotation.

The green aura surrounding the stick thickened until its movement became almost impossible to follow. It wasn’t a true shield, but the combination of raw aura, reinforced wood and impossible rotational speed made it look like one. The stick dragged the surrounding air with it, creating a violent outward current that pushed against the poisonous gas like an enormous fan driving smoke away.

One of the Poison Demons stared down at him, his violet eyes widening.

"How is this possible...?"

The poison they had used could eat through flesh and metal alike, yet it couldn’t touch the human below them. Every time the cloud tried to advance, the roaring current around Yuuta caught it and forced it backward.

Yuuta’s arms screamed in pain.

Something inside his right shoulder felt wrong.

He kept spinning.

His left hand was becoming numb.

He tightened his fingers around the stick.

"I’M NOT BACKING DOWN!"

Yuuta forced another step forward.

The violet cloud moved with him.

"NOT UNTIL I SEE MY WIFE!"

His voice cracked beneath the strain, but his feet continued advancing. The muscles along his arms were beginning to fail, and blood mixed with sweat before being thrown from his hands by the violent rotation.

Yuuta remembered Erza’s face.

Not the tears.

Her smile.

The smile he desperately wanted to see one more time.

"I STILL HAVE TO SAY I’M SORRY TO MY WIFE!"

Yuuta roared and threw his entire body behind the spinning stick.

"AAAAAAAHHHHH!"

The air exploded outward.

The balance between them finally broke.

The massive violet cloud stopped pressing toward Yuuta and violently reversed direction. Poison rolled backward through the street like smoke caught by a sudden hurricane, gathering the combined breath of the seven demons and Vezrath before surging directly back toward them.

Vezrath’s eyes widened.

"What?!"

The demons tried to scatter.

They were too late.

The violet cloud swallowed the group.

Normally, a Poison Demon had considerable resistance to its own toxins. A single demon breathing its poison back onto another would have accomplished little.

But this wasn’t the poison of a single demon anymore.

Seven Poison Demons had consumed their potions and released their toxins together, and Vezrath had poured his own far stronger poison into the mixture afterward. The cloud that returned to them was a concentrated combination of everything they had produced.

Even their resistance had a limit.

The seven demons began coughing violently.

"Wa... Warden...!"

One grabbed his throat.

Another desperately tried to fly out of the cloud, only for his body to jerk in midair as another violent coughing fit tore through him. Panic spread through the group when they realized their natural resistance wasn’t enough.

Yuuta didn’t see what happened next.

The moment the poison reversed direction, his hands finally lost their grip.

The wooden stick flew from his fingers.

Yuuta’s knees slammed against the pavement.

His arms dropped uselessly beside him, and a violent spasm suddenly tore through his chest. Yuuta doubled forward and coughed before warm blood spilled from his mouth and splattered across the road.

His eyes widened weakly.

Something was wrong.

Not just with his arms.

His entire body felt empty.

The enormous surge of aura had taken everything he had. It felt as though the energy hadn’t simply been drained from his muscles, but pulled from somewhere far deeper, leaving his whole body hollow. His heartbeat pounded painfully inside his chest, yet he could barely feel strength reaching his limbs.

Yuuta collapsed onto his back.

"Hah... hah... hah..."

The dark sky above him blurred in and out of focus. He tried to keep his eyes open, but even that simple act felt exhausting. His eyelids repeatedly sank before he forced them apart again, his vision narrowing until the streetlights above became nothing more than smeared shapes.

He tried to move his right arm.

Nothing.

Yuuta stared at it as though it belonged to someone else.

Pain tore through both shoulders so badly that he couldn’t tell whether something had been dislocated, torn, or simply pushed beyond its limit. His forearms twitched uncontrollably against the pavement, his palms were split and covered in blood, and even closing his fingers had become impossible.

He tried his left arm.

A finger moved.

That was all.

Yuuta swallowed, tasting blood.

For the first time since the fight began, his body wasn’t responding to his determination anymore.

He had pushed it as far as it could go.

Then the screaming reached him.

Yuuta weakly turned his head.

Through the thinning violet haze, he saw the seven demons falling from the air one after another. They struck the street coughing and screaming, some desperately trying to crawl out of the poison while others could barely move.

One clawed at his throat.

Another grabbed his own hair and screamed as panic completely overtook him.

Yuuta’s crimson eyes widened as their bodies began breaking down beneath the concentrated poison.

It was the same thing he had witnessed only minutes earlier.

The same screams.

The same terror.

The same poison that had killed those seventeen officers.

Only this time, the victims were the ones who had done it.

Yuuta lay helplessly on the road and watched their movements gradually stop. One after another, their screams disappeared until the ruined street became quiet again.

His breathing remained heavy.

He couldn’t even lift himself from the pavement, yet as he stared at what remained of the demons, a strange sense of relief settled over him.

They wouldn’t hurt anyone else.

Yuuta still didn’t like what he had done. Sister Mary’s teachings hadn’t suddenly disappeared simply because his enemies were monsters. Taking a life still left an uncomfortable weight in his chest, but it wasn’t the same crushing guilt he had felt after killing the first demon.

He had seen what these demons had done.

The people screaming for their missing eyes.

The seventeen officers who had stepped forward to protect him and died for it.

Countless civilians who had been attacked tonight.

Yuuta hadn’t hunted these demons down because he wanted to kill something.

He had stopped them.

And perhaps, in some small way, he had avenged the people they had already killed.

Yuuta slowly closed his eyes.

For the first time since leaving Elena, his body was allowed to stop fighting.

His chest continued rising and falling heavily while he lay motionless against the cold pavement. His arms wouldn’t move, his shoulders throbbed with every heartbeat, and the taste of blood still remained in his mouth.

Just... a little.

His breathing gradually slowed.

A shadow fell across his face.

"How dare you..."

Yuuta’s brow moved slightly.

The voice was trembling.

Not from fear.

From rage.

"How dare you sleep here after doing that to my men...?"

Yuuta’s right eye slowly opened.

At first, all he could see was a dark shape standing over him. His exhausted vision struggled to focus, but little by little the figure became clearer.

Long black robes.

A shriveled, poison-scarred face.

Glowing violet eyes staring down at him with murderous fury.

Vezrath.

Yuuta’s eye widened.

The Poison Warden was standing directly in front of him.

Burns covered parts of Vezrath’s body and violet vapor still rose from his damaged robes, but he was alive.

Very much alive.

Yuuta stared at him for several seconds.

"...Shit."

He tried to push himself up.

His arms didn’t respond.

Yuuta tried moving his legs instead, but even they barely shifted against the pavement.

He couldn’t fight.

He couldn’t even run.

Vezrath reached down and wrapped one hand around Yuuta’s throat.

"Ah...!"

Yuuta was ripped from the pavement and lifted effortlessly into the air.

The sudden movement sent agony through his already ruined body. His shoulders, pushed far beyond their limits during the fight, could no longer hold themselves properly in place. One had partially slipped from its joint, while the other felt almost completely useless. The soles of his shoes had been torn apart from repeatedly grinding against the pavement, leaving his feet bruised and bleeding inside them.

Yuuta had already pushed himself frighteningly close to his limit.

Now his entire weight hung from his neck.

His hands twitched instinctively toward Vezrath’s wrist, but his arms barely moved.

Vezrath stared into Yuuta’s crimson eyes.

"How dare you..."

His voice trembled with rage.

"You killed my brothers."

Yuuta’s legs moved weakly beneath him as Vezrath’s fingers tightened around his throat.

"Do you even know how long we were together?"

The Poison Warden’s face twisted.

"How many years we fought together? How many times we survived together?"

His grip tightened again.

Yuuta’s breath stopped.

He tried grabbing Vezrath’s arm, but his fingers wouldn’t close properly. His damaged shoulders screamed from even that tiny movement, forcing his arms to fall uselessly again.

Air.

He needed air.

Yuuta’s legs kicked weakly, but there was almost no strength behind them.

Move.

Nothing happened.

Move!

His muscles refused.

Yuuta’s vision began darkening around the edges.

Come on...

He desperately tried lifting his arm again.

It rose barely an inch.

Move, you stupid body.

His fingers trembled.

MOVE!

Nothing.

Vezrath squeezed harder.

A terrible pressure built inside Yuuta’s neck, followed by a faint cracking sensation that sent cold fear through what little awareness he still had.

Yuuta’s struggling became weaker.

There was no hidden strength left.

No aura waiting for him.

No weapon.

No clever trick.

His body had given him everything it had, and now it simply couldn’t answer anymore.

I’m going to die.

For once, the thought didn’t make him fight harder.

He couldn’t.

Yuuta’s blurred vision drifted past Vezrath toward the dark sky.

Erza’s face appeared in his mind.

He had wanted one more chance.

Just one.

One chance to stand in front of her and take back those words. One chance to tell her that he never hated her and that he had been searching for her.

But he wasn’t going to get it.

I’m sorry, Erza...

Yuuta’s eyelids began to fall.

Vezrath adjusted his grip.

Yuuta felt the pressure around his neck increase once more.

Then a small voice echoed through the ruined street.

"LEAVE MY PAPA ALONE!"

Vezrath froze.

His grip loosened for a fraction of a second.

Yuuta dragged in the smallest, broken breath as his eyes opened again. His vision was almost completely blurred now, and he could barely distinguish the buildings from the streetlights as he tried to turn toward the voice.

No.

That voice...

His unfocused crimson eyes finally found a small figure standing farther down the street.

Yuuta’s mind went completely blank.

His heart seemed to stop.

Elena...?

To Be Continued