Chapter 281

A sea of blood, a mountain of corpses, and a field of vengeful souls had formed in a certain city located in the western region of the third zone. However one wanted to describe it, it did not change that countless people had died there. The victims had a snake’s lower body and a human’s upper body—they were nagas.

“Ahahaha! Ahahahahaha!” a handsome man laughed ecstatically amidst the slaughter.

His black silky hair reached his waist, he had unnaturally pale skin, and two curved horns grew from his temples. His right eye was closed, and his left eye was as black as the abyss.

“What brings you such joy, Master?” someone asked the handsome man respectfully.

He was wearing a tunic woven from threads of gold and silver, and a blood-red cloak with gems such as diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires embedded in it. His shiny crown and scepter completed his extravagant style, but the most eye-catching of all was the man’s identity itself.

“Be quiet, Doom. I’m at the best part. Ahaha! Grandis, huh? How interesting,” the handsome man said.

The silenced individual was a crystal skeleton. His skull, spine, shoulder blades, ribs, pelvis, femurs, kneecaps, fingers, and all other bones of his body were ivory white. Bluish-white lights shone from inside his eye sockets. He was one of the Ten Lords and Fiends, twelfth in the world ranking, the leader of Necrophilia—Doom, the Immortal Prince.

The handsome man opened his right eye, flashing with an unsettling green light.

“It has been a while, Doom,” he said.

“Yes, Master Curiositas. You do not know how happy this lacking disciple was to hear your summons.”

Curiositas stared at Doom’s crystal skeleton hand with his heterochromatic eyes. He was holding a broken and corroded sword’s edge.

He asked, “Is that Skrep?”

“It is.”

“Where is the other half?”

“As lacking as I am... it managed to escape.” Doom noticed Curiositas’s chilling smile and immediately added, “But I have secured half his causality and the piece of the Master Plot.”

“Give it to me,” Curiositas asked as he brought his hand forward.

Doom politely placed the corroded, broken edge on Curiositas’s hand.

[AS, one of the pieces of the Master Plot, confirmed.]

“As...Tsk, a particle. It’s not a core piece. You can use the remaining causality as you wish,” Curiositas said as he threw aside the sword’s edge as if he had lost all interest in it. “I am leaving. I have business with an underplot I have been developing for a long time.”

Doom caught the sword’s edge and stared at the turning Curiositas. He respectfully asked, “May I ask a few things, Master?”

“What are they?”

“Why are you... collecting the pieces of the Master Plot? They just have overblown names; they are the most useless part of a race stone. You would be better off collecting the history of the race, or causality.”

“Because I am curious,” Curiositas answered as if it were obvious.

“Pardon?”

“Aren’t you curious about what the Master Plot says once all the pieces are put together?” Curiositas turned around with a smile, his expression filled with curiosity and interest.

Crazy motherfucker, Doom mumbled inwardly as he stared at the radiant smile.

He was standing before a demon who was willing to destroy the entire world if it would sate his curiosity.

Tsk, I will never figure out what this demon is thinking. That aside... he trailed off in his thoughts.

“Master. Are you planning... to create your own faction?” Doom cautiously asked.

“No, I have no time to waste on something so unproductive,” Curiositas answered instantly.

“In that case... May I lay hands on that human?”

A deathly chilling wind blew between them.

Doom’s bluish-white lights for eyes flickered amidst the continuing silence. Finally! Have I discovered your weakness at last?!

However, Curiositas’s answer did not live up to Doom’s hopes.

“You are more than welcome to.”

***

Once the two individuals vanished, all that remained in the city was blood and weapons. The mountain of corpses was nowhere to be seen, as if every single one had just walked away.

A few silhouettes approached the city a few hours later. They were roughly fifty humans, pulling twelve wagons.

“Urgh, what the hell is all this? What happened here?”

“Isn’t it obvious? War.”

“All we need to do is sit back and enjoy the show.”

“Look at all this! This place is a goddamn treasury!”

The humans explored the ruined city in duos and collected weapons with ecstatic expressions. Although most of them were destroyed or low-rank, such opportunities were rare.

“I’ve never seen a battlefield like this in five years of my time in Silver Crow. There’s not a single corpse,” mumbled a large Asian man.

“I was thinking the same thing. It’s kinda creepy,” replied a black man, his duo partner.

“Stop fucking complaining and fill those wagons! How are you gonna pay that thirty-percent increase in survival tax if you keep slacking?” someone shouted from afar.

“Okay, okay. Damn that fucking survival tax! I might as well become an escaper at this point,” the Asian man grumbled.

The black man cackled and said, “I’ll pop your head personally if you become a Body.”

“Hah, I wouldn’t lose to you even if I were a drunk Body.”

They joked around with each other as they grabbed weapons from pools of blood, such as destroyed shields, bent spears, armor with holes in them, broken daggers, and more.

“This is E-rank, this is F-rank, oh! This armor used to be C-rank. As for this... Huh? It doesn’t have a rank. Is it just scrap metal?”

The two men carried handfuls of weapons to their wagon and dropped them inside. The screams of dead metals echoed, and a weak voice sounded among them.

“Fuck... I’ll have my revenge... no matter what!”

“Huh? Did you just swear at me?” the Asian man asked, frowning as he turned to the black man.

“What? What did I say?”

“You just swore at me! You said fuck!”

“The fuck?” the black man mumbled exasperatedly.

“You just did it again! You wanna fucking go?”

“Hah! Fine by me. I’ll save you the trouble of becoming a Body.” ℯ

Their voices grew louder, dwarfing the voice growing weaker.

“No... my power... Someone... help...”

***

All incidents that occurred in Lunatic were resolved after the appearance of Grandis, the Guardian Titan. He was like one giant period mark. The vampires who were freed from Blood Call-up after Haema Sanguis’s death returned to the city as per Scite Armor’s and Erzsebet Melos’s orders.

Abyete of Humilitas had run with his tail between his legs the moment he saw Grandis. Members of Barbaria, like Ranko and the forces of Sol, evacuated to the first-class safe zone, Justitia, with the injured Pseraslav. The only forces remaining in Vampyr Forest now were Underground and the Vindicta Resistance.

***

Two men approached one another. One was Gilder Roy, a bald man with brown eyes and a golden right arm. The other was Cheon Seong-Hwi, a man with black hair and eyes, wearing a black hoodie with holes in it and torn cargo pants.

“It’s been a while, Gilder,” Seong-Hwi said.

“Yeah, since you practically used us for your own benefit back in Ferrum,” Gilder replied.

“You’re hurting my feelings, comrade.”

“This isn’t even close. I could actually try to hurt your feelings if I wanted to. You only ever call me your comrade if you want something.”

A few seconds of silence passed as they stared at each other, and they smiled.

“Heh.”

“Ahaha!”

They simultaneously laughed and hugged, pounding each other’s backs.

“Thanks for coming to our aid, Gilder.”

“What are friends for?”

The two men separated. Seong-Hwi stared at the smiling Gilder, sensing the powerful energy exuding from his entire body.

He’s strong. He’s on the level of a High Ranker—possibly a Spare Ranker, he thought.

The Vindicta Resistance was a group of individuals with animosity toward the dragons. Gilder had likely become powerful through countless battles against dragons. Seong-Hwi smiled from witnessing yet another destiny he had changed after his return to the past.

“More importantly... You weren’t lying, right? Do you have Echo?” Gilder asked.

“Hm? How do you know Echo’s name?” Seong-Hwi asked back.

He had written in the letter he had entrusted to Ilia that he was with the Fairy Queen; he had not written the name Echo.

“Huh? Didn’t you have them, too?”

“Have what?

“The dreams!”

“Dreams?” Seong-Hwi stared at Gilder in confusion.

“I thought for sure you were having them, too. Wasn’t that how you found Echo?” Gilder scratched his bald head and shook his head. He then explained the situation to Seong-Hwi. “Dryas granted me the privileges of the agent of succession. Initially, I planned to enter the Vindicta Resistance and select a fairy High Ranker to become the next queen.”

However, he had failed. The Queen’s Crown had rejected even Galatea, the current number one in the fairy ranking.

“It was then that Echo began to appear in my dreams,” Gilder remarked, recalling Echo’s voice in the dream.

“Ya—hoo! Yaaa—hoo! Is anybody there?”

She was a small little girl with a striking resemblance to his beloved Dryas. Her golden hair looked as if it were woven with silk made from sunlight, and her golden eyes were bright and warm. She also had twenty-four wings on her back. In the dream, she was crying and in pitiful solitude.

Gilder could instinctively tell that what he had seen wasn’t just a dream.

“I must find her! She has to be somewhere! I will find her, even if I must search the entire Mirror World!”

“F-First Knight? Who are you searching for?”

“She’s waiting for me in a forest I’ve never seen before! There were leaf cradles in the forest, and...”

He recalled his conversation with the other fairies and explained, “I inferred from the dream that Echo was located in the Phantom Forest. I immediately headed there with the Queen’s Order.”

However, the Phantom Forest was an infamous prohibited zone, even in Pavelaya, the fairies’ home dimension. They did their best to search for Echo, but they couldn’t find any traces of her. On the other hand, Echo had decided to search for her First and Second Knights herself. Their paths had failed to intersect.

“After days of searching, we arrived at the location I saw in my dreams, but... she wasn’t there,” Gilder said.

By then, Echo had already been captured by a black clan and sold to Clan Blood Cross, then stuffed into a bronze-cast Venus de Milo statue by Peter Geraghty.

“After that, the dreams were only of Echo crying in the darkness. We had no leads after exiting the Phantom Forest, but we then received a letter from you,” Gilder said.

“I see,” Seong-Hwi remarked as he swept back his hair.

He did not even know if he had the same dream as Gilder.

Even if I did, Bulgasal probably ate it, he thought.

“So... Where is Echo?” Gilder asked, his eyes shining with desperation.

The thousands of fairies flying around behind him were also staring at Seong-Hwi with the same eyes.

“She’s—”

As Seong-Hwi was about to tell him, Bulgasal, who had returned after eating the weapons lying around the battlefield, flew toward him using the Steel Blade Hawk’s wings. On its back was a giggling fairy girl, grabbing its ears.

“Yahoo! Fly! Fly, Bulgie!”

Pwoo! Get off me! You have wings, too!

“Ah! Echo!” Gilder shouted.

“Hmm?” Echo expressed, looking down. She saw the man with a shiny head, whom she had seen in her dreams, smiling at her. “Huh? First Knight? Is that you?”

Her eyes widened. She jumped off Bulgasal’s back and flew toward Gilder, landing on his head.

“Whoooaaa! It’s the First Knight! First Knight! I wanted to see you so much, First Knight!”

“Ahaha! I found you! I finally found you!” Gilder shouted as he lifted Echo, placed her on his palm, and turned around to show her to the other fairies.

“Oh my!”

“She has twenty-four wings!”

“It’s the queen!”

“It’s really true! Sniffle! She had already been born!”

The fairies quickly gathered around Echo.

“Oh...uhhh...” Echo blinked blankly as people who looked similar to her stared at her with great interest.

“This is Echo! She is the hope of our Vindicta Resistance!” Gilder declared.

“Yeaaahhh!”

“Echo! Echo! Echo!”

“We’ve been waiting for you, Lady Echo!”

“Finally! At last!”

The other fairies cheered, shouting Echo’s name.

“You were... waiting for me? All of you? Really?” Echo asked.

Her name was echoing everywhere. She could feel delight in their cheers and see hope in their eyes. Tears welled up from Echo’s golden eyes. She had been alone since her birth. She had endured the darkness and solitude with tears in her eyes. But now, so many people were looking at her, had been waiting for her, and were calling her name.

“Hurgh! Sniffle!”

The fairies were at a loss for what to do once Echo started to cry.

“Please don’t cry, my queen!”

“W-what do we do? Someone, hand her a handkerchief!”

“It’s because the First Knight looks so scary! Monster octopus!”

“What? What did I do?”

Seeing that, a sense of fulfillment welled up in Echo’s small chest. She stood up from Gilder’s palm, raised her arms high, and shouted, “I’m Echo!”

“Yeaaahhh!”

“Echo! Echo! Echo!”

“All hail Echo!”

Her calls were being answered. It was time for her to say goodbye to the echoes that answered from the void.

She smiled widely and shouted again, “I’m Echo!”

“Echo! Echo! Echo!”

“I’m Echo!”

“Echo! Echo! Echo!”

She repeatedly said her name, and the other fairies chanted her name each time.

“Ehehe! I’m Echo!” Echo shouted as she giggled joyfully.

Just then, Seong-Hwi, who had been watching in silence, flicked Echo’s head.

“That’s enough,” he said.

“Ow! That hurt, Second Knight!” Echo shouted as she turned around, grabbing her head.

However, her smile was wider than ever. She flew toward Seong-Hwi, kissed his forehead, and smiled happily again.

“Thank you. This is all thanks to you, Second Knight,” she said.

He had found her and pulled her out of the darkness. He was her one and only Second Knight, who would always protect her.

“I only repaid the debt I owed Dryas,” Seong-Hwi said calmly.

Gilder pushed him away and asked Echo, “Echo! What about me?”

“Thank you, too, First Knight!” Echo said as she kissed Gilder’s forehead as well, and he was left with a wide smile on his face.

“That’s Gilder Loli for you,” someone mumbled from behind Seong-Hwi.

Seong-Hwi turned around and saw Ilia Volok, shaking his head.

“Did you need something?” Seong-Hwi asked.

“Yes, Tsar! Lord Bafor and Master Irura are waiting for you,” Ilia responded as he saluted crisply.

Seong-Hwi looked behind Ilia and saw a steel mansion Bafor had created.

“From the Sēmen, there are three consuls and Guardian Titan Grandis. From Consanguineus, there is the Illusion Duchess Erzsebet Melos, and Bat Marchioness Scite Amor,” Ilia reported.

Seong-Hwi nodded and turned back to the members of the Vindicta Resistance.

He smirked at the clamorous and harmonious atmosphere and thought, I suppose the matters at hand can wait.

He did not want to break that atmosphere.