[V9C20] Judgement Time
Translated by Jodas 9: Battle for the TowerFresh blood dripped from his mouth, staining the crystal blades red.
What in the world were those blades? What trick of the Monsters made them?
Even while skewered by the crystal blades, Möbius didn’t let go of ‘Ignatius, the Severer.’ He would cut down any who came close enough for him to reach. He hadn’t yet lost his will to fight.
With the flame of his life burning out, this man pushed through by sheer force of will when he heard a voice resound from behind him.
“Welcome back, Möbius.”
With his whole body impaled, Möbius could only crane his neck to look where the voice came from. His eyes shot open in shock.
Walking towards him under the moonlight was a girl with straight black hair and a white dress. This was the Daughter of God whom he had imprisoned; whom he had protected.
“…Fie…ne?”
Blood pooled from his mouth alongside his voice.
Fiene displayed a merciful smile befitting of the Daughter of God.
“I tried implanting Crystal Rivets into ‘Chariclea, the Wedge Tower.’ Soon enough, the mana contamination — no, the crystal contamination will begin.”
He could hear the clinking sounds of some hard material scraping against itself from all around him.
Möbius lifted his face and saw. The Wedge Tower before him — from the First Spire to the Third Spire — was becoming enveloped in crystals.
Those crystals became one with ‘Chariclea, the Wedge Tower,’ and emanated a strange mana.
He recalled the announcement that the Harpy had made earlier while flying around.
“This land will soon become flush with mana, and the Wall will disappear in three days’ time. Then we will have true freedom.”
This was what she had been talking about.
The Wedge Tower, built to fight against Monsters, was changing. Changing to become like the Crystal Territory, a land of mana. The ground, the foliage, and even the buildings, were all enveloped in crystals.
“Möbius. I know what you wish for from the bottom of your heart.”
Fiene stood before Möbius and reached out a hand towards the man’s bloodstained cheeks.
“It’s judgement, isn’t it?”
The moment Fiene reached out her hand, chains flew out of the blue to wrap around her wrist. It wasn’t just Fiene; those chains also ensnared the nearby King of Monsters, the Primordial Beast, and the Werewolf as well.
All those chains stretched towards Director Linke’s corpse. Reaching out to touch ‘Despina, the Chain of Fools’ that was wrapped around her wrist was none other than Assistant Headmaster Miriam, who had been struggling to even breathe.
‘Despina, the Chain of Fools’ had the power to seal away the mana of a target ensnared in its chains. However, that sealing affect did not activate.
‘Despina, the Chain of Fools’ expended the mana of its user to do such things. In her current condition, Miriam had no mana to give this Ancient Magical Artifact.
Thus, these chains could do no more than restrain their movements.
Fiene drew her brows together in dismay.
“Oh dear, Miriam. Why would you do such a thing? I can’t save you guys like this.”
“…That action is not in accordance with the will of God.”
Neither Möbius nor Miriam had lost their will to live.
Möbius’ hand grasped tightly onto ‘Ignatius, the Severer,’ while Miriam’s fingers held on to ‘Despina, the Chain of Fools.’
For the briefest moment, things were at a standstill.
Fiene, the King of Monsters, the Primordial Beast, and the Werewolf were all restrained by Assistant Headmaster Miriam’s ‘Despina, the Chain of Fools,’ but Miriam was on her last legs.
Meanwhile Möbius was immobilized, blood pouring from all over his body.
When the moment inevitably came where Miriam reached her limit and the chains dissipated, Möbius’ ears picked up the sound of many footsteps.
Director Böll of the Protection Office shouted “The Headmaster headed this way! We need support!” It appeared several people had clued in to what was happening here.
The King of Monsters spoke to Fiene.
“This place will soon become quite rowdy.”
“Then I’ll have to leave things here. Möbius, Miriam.”
Fiene gave the two ‘parents’ who raised her a merciful look, then spoke without mercy.
“Starting today, the Daughter of God will become God. The God of humans and Monsters.”
How had a simple wish — for the people you care for to live on — grown so sick and twisted?
Amidst his despair, Möbius repeated that question to himself over and over, unable to find an answer.
When a bird Monster with eyeballs all over flew at them from overhead, Rose swatted it away with a shovel.
“Sophie, are you okay!? Don’t get separated!”
“Waahh… Eek…”
As Rose swung the shovel about, Sophie ran up behind him, sobbing all the while.
A chain-like pattern showed on both of their wrists. It was the mark of a seal placed by ‘Despina, the Chain of Fools.’ Thanks to that, neither of them could use magecraft or curses.
(I can move around and all now that the chains themselves are gone, but they won’t let me use magecraft, huh… I guess they’re just that cautious of me.)
Muttering in his mind, Rose surveyed his surroundings.
Just as he was trying to let Sophie run away, Assistant Headmaster Miriam caught them, then as he was wondering why Armster was running at them all of a sudden, the Monster attack began.
He bet Assistant Headmaster Miriam probably had her hands full dealing with the Monsters. As for Armster, he didn’t know. That guy just up and vanished at some point along the way.
Rose glanced at the pattern on his wrist.
(It looks like no one but the one who placed this seal, Assistant Headmaster Miriam, can remove it, huh…)
Rose wasn’t an expert on things like seals or barriers, but he had studied them quite a bit here at the Wedge Tower, so he could tell.
With seals like this one, it was common for them not to come undone even if the person who placed them died. In the worst-case scenario, the caster could die without passing on the necessary dispelling formula to anyone.
In a sense, it was like if someone died without telling anyone the key to a code.
Which meant that, if Assistant Headmaster Miriam died in this battle, things would be really bad for him.
“Rose… W- What’s gonna happen to us…?”
As Sophie sobbed, Rose adjusted his grip on the shovel.
Right. His first priority was to get all of his fellow Apprentices out of here. He was the only grown-up out of these Apprentices after all.
(It’s a big issue that my magecraft has been sealed. I can’t even use defensive barriers.)
To be entirely honest, if it were an ordinary sealing barrier, Rose would have simply been able to break through through the sheer force of his mana. But naturally the seal of an Ancient Magical Device was on a whole different level.
As it stood, Rose was no different from an ordinary person. Nevertheless, if he tried his best, there had to be something he could pull off.
“Sophie, I’m sorry about this!”
Rose stuffed the shovel under his armpit, then picked Sophie up. Making sure his hand was protecting Sophie’s head, he dashed towards a spot with denser tree cover. He figured it would be easier to defend against attacks from the skies in a more wooded area compared to out in the open.
The talons of these circling birds scratched at Rose’s back and pulled on his fuzzy hair and beard. It really hurt!
“Rose! Sophie!”
Roswitha’s voice rang out.
In an instant, the birds hounding Rose were taken down by a fish of water. Furthermore, those blown-away bird Monsters were then diced up with a single slash from Gerald’s sword.
Sophie, in Rose’s arms, raised her voice between her sobs.
“Roswithaaa! Gerald, you came toooo! … Oh, Julius! You escaped! Thank goodnessssss…!”
Rose set Sophie down and looked around.
Running up to him were three people: Roswitha, Gerald, and Julius.
“Thanks for saving us. By the way… what happened to Finn and Ella?”
“…We’ll tell you later. First, let’s get out of the Tower. The mana density is climbing rapidly. We’ll all get mana poisoning at this rate.”
Now that she mentioned it, the mana around him totally was getting denser… or at least it felt like that. Rose had relatively high mana resistance, but it probably would be painful for normal people without that kind of mana reserves. Gerald, with his low mana, was already breathing heavily.
“By ‘getting out of the tower,’ you mean through the front gate, right?”
Gerald nodded to Rose’s question with a pale face.
“There’s quite a few Monsters milling about over there, so we’ll have to punch through. That’s why we thought it would be a good idea to link up with you guys and go together, so we came to find you.”
As Rose nodded along, he caught sight of an orange glow emerging from above the First Spire: White Smoke. That had to be fireball magecraft.
“Look out!”
Rose shouted just as the fireball came flying towards them.
Rather than impact Rose and others directly, the fireball slid past them and exploded on contact with the Wedge Tower’s outer walls.
The section of wall crumbled into rubble, revealing a grassy plain on the other side.
(That attack just now…)
Rose looked up at the roof of the First Spire: White Smoke. There he could see a small silhouette. Could it be that someone had blown up that wall to make an escape route for them?
“Rose, let’s escape through there! Quickly!”
Egged on by Sophie, Rose nodded “Yeah,” as he gripped the shovel.
Sophie then asked with uncertainty.
“Once we escape through here, where do we hide? There’s gonna be Monsters outside too, aren’t there?”
She was right. At first, Rose’s plan had been to run away with Sophie and Julius, but things had gotten a whole lot worse sense then.
Rose wondered what to do about this unpredictable situation, when Roswitha spoke with confidence.
“I’ve already came to a decision with Ella. Okay? Listen up…”
Before dawn, as the long battle was winding down, the Harpy with orange hair and wings, Charonlala, flew high into the sky and looked down upon the Wedge Tower, now covered in crystals.
They had acquired both the Ancient Magical Artifact ‘Chariclea, the Wedge Tower’ and its contractor.
Only the Western Wall, which prevented Monsters from escaping, remained activated. A seal had been placed over its controls, but that too was said to be disappearing in a mere three days.
Once that happened, Monsters would be able to go wherever they wished.
From now on, the Wedge Tower would stand not as the hope of humanity to exterminate Monsters, but as a new fortress for those Monsters.
The light of the morning sun, peeking out from between the distant mountains, made the crystal-encrusted Tower sparkle beautifully.
The corpses of both humans and Monsters were scattered all about the Tower. The gruesome sight contrasted strangely with the beauty of the crystal Tower.
(But compared to the Monster corpses, there’s way fewer human bodies… I guess most of them got away.)
The King of Monsters had not told them to follow the humans, and the Monsters had no intentions of completely wiping out the humans. Humans were the important targets of their obsession, after all.
Without humans, there would be no Monsters. The moment humans went extinct would be the moment Monsters went extinct as well.
Once Charonlala had flown around and grasped the situation, she landed in front of the First Spire: White Smoke.
Standing before the spire was a Monster in the form of a blond young man — the Vampire Jill — who wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. It seemed he had just finished his meal.
“Hey, Charonlala! Were there any survivors?”
“None that I could see from the sky.”
“Same here. Now that I’ve had my fill of the delicious kids hiding in the buildings, I don’t think there’s any cute little humans left. Even if they somehow survived, unless they had Crystal Rivets, I bet they’d be long since dead by now.”
The powerhouses of the Wedge Tower, Headmaster Möbius and Assistant Headmaster Miriam, were heavily injured.
The Ancient Magical Artifacts ‘Ignatius, the Severer’ and ‘Despina, the Chain of Fools’ had also been retrieved.
“The Möbius guy is something else, huh~. No matter what, he just wasn’t letting go of that sword! I had no choice but to cut his whole hand off, you know… Oh?”
Jill looked up to the sky. From there, a boy carrying the essence of Winter descended to them.
It was Jack, the Monster of Winter.
“Hey, Jack! Long time no see~! Where did you run off to? I was lonely, you know?”
“I got a little killed by the humans earlier. It took me a while to revive myself.”
As he spoke with his icicle-decorated sleeves swaying, Jack turned to address Charonlala.
While Jack looked young, he was a Greater Monster far stronger than Charonlala. As Charonlala’s expression tensed up, Jack spoke with a sing-song voice.
“Beside the humans who killed me, there was a Harpy.”
“What did you just say!?”
Charonlala raised her voice, to which Jack answered with another question.
“They called her ‘Tia.’ Does that ring any bells?”
(…Tia!? Folulutia!?)
The image of her younger sister’s face playfully calling her ‘Sis~!’ emerged in the back of her mind.
Her cute little sister, who’d gone missing, was alive. She was still alive.
Charonlala’s heart fluttered with joy, to which Jack spoke coldly.
“That Harpy is a traitor who has sided with the mages of the Wedge Tower.”