Chương 104: “Heaven Was A Step Away”

Celestia could not move. Her body was against the powdery ground, her vision blurred at the edges. Blood ran from somewhere above her eyes. She could hear Paimon faintly breathing from a distance. Short, shallow breaths. Above them, Sir Ozy was walking. He moved through the air as though it were solid beneath his paws. Each step carried him higher. His body, the same absurd shape it had always been, rose above the cavern floor one invisible stair at a time. And with each step, the pressure grew.

Multiple members of the former Sky Raiders guild tried to respond upon seeing their healer liquefied into the ground. They lunged toward Sir Ozy with blades, maces, and hammers drawn. And only made it three steps before their legs gave out and their bodies slamming into the ground. The pressure had crushed them where they stood. The crossbow man fired. The bolt left the rail, flew a mere few meters, and dropped straight to the ground. He fired again and it was the same result. Sir Ozy did not look at any of them.

His eyes were fixed upward, at the ceiling, past it, past everything above. His flat, wrinkled face wore an expression Celestia had never seen on him before. Elation. She understood why. After everything she had seen in his memories, after the boy and the monastery and the centuries of climbing and the failed tenth step, she understood exactly what he was seeing. He was staring at the threshold again.

This was the unintended consequences of her skill, [Knighthood], that which brought Sir Ozy back to his pinnacle form. Bastion's body was on the ground on all fours. His body, reinforced bodyheld. His arms shook. His knees cracked against stone. Blood ran from his nose and sunk into the powdery ground beneath him. But he did not flatten. Not yet. Sir Ozy was on his fourth step. The cavern groaned. Somewhere above, rock fractured. The sound rolled through the chamber, and dust fell from the ceiling in thin curtains.

As he lifted his paw to take the fifth, The worm sees only earth. The bird sees only sky. Neither knows the river that runs between. Only the one who climbs the bank learns what both the worm and bird have missed. The fifth step fell. Bastion screamed.

"Get away! Run!" His voice cracked on the last word before pressure took him. His arms buckled and his body struck the ground face-first. The three surviving Sky Raiders, the crossbow man, and two others who responded late, turned tail. Their boots thumped repeatedly on the ashen ground in a staggered rhythm as they sprinted toward the entrance. Even now, as the light from outside grew ahead of them, none of them could piece together what had happened. Everything had been going as planned.

They had cornered the Reingarde woman and her maid. They were helpless with nowhere to run, the job was basically finished. Who would have expected that the ugly-faced dog-like creature was capable of this?

"Fuck!" The crossbow man's voice bounced off the walls.

"What is that thing?!" One of the others, running beside him: "Nobody told us that thing she brought was a monster!" The third was silent as he simply moved his legs with his life intact. The cavern entrance was ahead. Light spilled through the opening, warm and wide, and they ran for it. The light outside the cave was bright enough to make them squint, and they saw a figure. It was a man. He was tall, white-haired, dressed in a cassock.

He looked to be someone who belonged in a cathedral, not in this godforsaken Tower. He had one hand raised to shade his eyes, squinting past the three of them and into the dark of the cavern behind.

"What's happening here?" His voice was cool and unhurried, the tone of someone who had walked into something mildly interesting. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. His eyes moved across their weapons, the blood on their clothes. He placed his fist on the palm of his other hand, as if arriving at a small conclusion.

"Ah," he said. A witness. The plan had already collapsed. Bastion was down, nearly everyone who they brought here had turned into paste on the cavern floor, and only the three of them had managed to escape with their lives. A witness was something that could still be dealt with.

"Front!" the crossbow man screamed. He raised his weapon and fired. As the bolt left, he used his skill, Phantom Shot, and a half-second later a second bolt materialized behind it, trailing in its wake. The two swordsmen followed up immediately. They fanned to both sides, blades drawn, closing the distance quickly. The man in the cassock did not move to dodge. He looked at the incoming attacks and smiled.

"Now, now," he said.

"This is quite a rude first impression." He walked forward. The first bolt reached him and curved. It bent mid-flight as though, arcing wide around his body and flying out of the cavern. The second followed, swerving in another direction and striking the cavern wall. Blessing of the Lonely Wind.

"Wha—" The crossbow man's voice came out half-formed. The two swordsmen did not stop. They were already mid-swing, blades coming in from both sides, and they cut through the cloth of his cassock, touching flesh. And stopped. The edges pressed against his flesh and went no further, as if the surface beneath the cloth were made of steel rather than skin. Both men felt the sudden dead weight of a blade that had nowhere left to go. The Inch Between You and Me.

Before either of them could pull back, the man's hands were already on their throats. One hand on each neck, fingers closing. The motion was quick, completely at odds with the casual expression still sitting on his face. He squeezed, and the sound was brief. Bone gave way under his grip, and blood pressed out between his fingers as if he was squeezing a rotten fruit. Once he let go, they dropped to the ashen ground on either side of him, their bodies hitting the ground at the same time.

Their fingers twitched, not knowing the reason how quickly they died. The crossbow man screamed.

"Who are you?!" He was backing up, firing as he moved. Bolt after bolt left his crossbow, each one aimed at the man's body. His hands were shaking. His accuracy had gone, but at this range, it should not have mattered. The bolts did not swerve this time. They flew straight, but a flat barrier of light materialized in front of the man, blocking each arrow. Bulwark. The crossbow man's legs kept moving backward. His eyes were wide, his breathing fast and shallow.

His mind was trying to make sense of what he was seeing. If this man was a mage, he could not have crushed their necks with his bare hands. Mages did not have physical strength like that. But if he was an aura-user, he should be unable to generate barriers. How could this man have both? Such a person shouldn't be anonymous within this city. He was out of answers, and he was out of bolts.

"S-Spare me!" The crossbow man threw his weapon to the ground. It skidded into the ashen ground. He dropped to his knees, hands raised, palms forward.

"Please. I-I have a wife and daughter!"

"Isn't that a bold-faced lie?" Noah's voice was gentle, almost kind. Shepherd's Eye. The crossbow man's mouth was still open from his plea. The man's fingers were already inching toward his ankle, where a short blade was strapped to the skin. Noah reached out his hand. When it was done, Noah pulled the napkin from his pocket and wiped his hands as he walked. The blood came off easily. He folded the napkin once, tucked it away, and continued deeper into the cavern. The light from the entrance faded behind him.

The scene ahead was extraordinary. Flattened armor lay across the cavern floor, pressed into the stone as if something immense had stepped on it. Weapons lay beside them, underneath dark ash, blood that had sunk into the grown underneath. And above all of it, the creature. It hung in the air, small and squat, its round body suspended several meters off the ground. One paw was extended forward, mid-step, inching slowly. Each fraction of distance seemed fought for. Noah stopped walking.

When he had first seen this creature for the first time in that carriage, he had an instinctive feeling that it was not a simple beast. But this? How did he miss it? What he was looking at now had divinity in it; fractured and incomplete. His eyes moved across the rest of the scene. Celestia lay on the ground some distance away. Her body was still, her face turned to the side. She appeared to be unconscious. Closer to the creature, the white-haired maid was face-down on the stone.

Her hands were flat against the ground, and Noah could see where the metal of her gauntlets, just above the wrists had crushed into the flesh beneath. Hadn't things already finished here? The attackers were dealt with and the threat was over. But the back of his neck prickled. He moved forward. One step. Then another. And now he felt it. The pressure increased as it multiplied, increasing as the creature's paw tried to complete its step forward. He looked up at the creature.

Its eyes were fixed on the ceiling, its face was focused on something far above.

"Would you kindly stop? It seems to me that everything is over." Noah said. However, the creature did not respond, its paw continued to inch forward. Noah felt the pressure continue to increase, both distance and strength, as another fraction of a step was completed. At this rate, if it reached Celestia, then it meant that she would die. Should he use it? If he stood here simply watching much longer, then he would have walked all this way for nothing. His hand moved to his collar, and he unbuttoned it.