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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: FusionX
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Gripping the Sword of Rest, I chose the oni as my first target.
While the Mihwang was stronger in a one-on-one fight, the oni’s lightning attacks were wreaking havoc on the battlefield.
“Oh, Master!”
“Honestly, I never thought I’d be happy to hear your nonsense.”
Elise, wielding her sword, greeted me with a bright smile. She was keeping the oni occupied, which made my task easier.
“G-Get away…!”
Crack.
Time stopped for the ancient oni.
Elise, surprised, muttered,
“You really can stop time.”
I sliced through the oni’s tough skin as if it were tofu.
He crumpled to the ground, a lifeless corpse, unaware of how he had died.
“The lightning is gone!”
“Charge!”
With Eris’s arrows and my intervention, three of the ancient magical beasts dominating the battlefield were dead.
The tide had turned.
The overwhelming despair had been replaced by a glimmer of hope.
‘The magical beasts are weaker outside the forest.’
I had expected the beasts of the Demon Realm Forest to easily overwhelm the knights, but fighting outside their domain, on open plains favored by the knights, they were struggling.
“Elise is a good commander. This could be an opportunity for humanity to conquer the Demon Realm Forest.”
“That’s a tempting offer.”
Elise, her eyes crinkling in a smile, swung her sword with renewed vigor, leading the knights.
“Screech!”
The Mihwang’s trident swung down at me.
Having witnessed the deaths of the other ancient beasts, he had realized escape was futile and decided to attack me instead.
“Are you Kurika’s successor? Is that it? Did that monster create another monster?”
I chuckled at his broken-record-like questioning.
I hadn’t been able to kill the oni in my past life.
His lightning attacks had been too much for a normal human like me to withstand.
I hadn’t even considered fighting Belton, the demon.
I was vulnerable to flying beasts.
But the red serpent, the first one I had killed, had been a true beast, and I had managed to defeat it with strategy and traps.
The Mihwang, however, was different.
He was too human, and that was his weakness.
“You were just as loud and frantic back then.”
“Answer me! Did Kurika choose you? Instead of me, the King?”
“You die the same way every time. It’s not very interesting. I was hoping for something new.”
He had underestimated me in my past life, and I had caught him off guard. But he knew the truth.
He had lost because of his own weakness, and his frantic questioning was nothing more than a pathetic excuse.
“I am the King! I will claim the throne of the Demon Realm Forest…!”
“Honestly, you’re not on that level.”
I didn’t even need to stop time.
The Sword of Rest shattered his trident and pierced his body.
The self-proclaimed king trembled, his eyes wide with disbelief, unable to accept his death.
He wasn’t like the Tyrant or the King I had known.
“You lost to a mere Sherpa. What kind of king are you?”
The Mihwang’s blood splattered across the ground. He flailed his arms in a final, desperate attempt, but it was futile.
I cleaned the blood from my sword and took a deep breath.
It would have been nice if this were the end, but I knew it was only the beginning.
Because I could hear something being dragged from within the forest.
A heavy, rumbling sound, like a castle being pulled by ropes.
It moved with an unwavering purpose, devouring the trees in its path.
In a way, this creature, not the power-hungry Mihwang, was more befitting the title of king.
“There are a few notable landmarks in the Demon Realm Forest.”
I remembered a conversation I had with Eve when we first met, about a romance novel set in the Demon Realm Forest.
There was a scene where the protagonists reached a beautiful silver lake.
I hadn’t told her then, but it wasn’t a lake.
It was a massive, lake-sized, acidic slime.
“I didn’t expect you to move.”
The silver lake, an ancient magical beast, resided near the witches’ village, not in the depths of the forest.
I didn’t know why.
It never attacked unless provoked, remaining dormant most of the time.
I had assumed it would remain stationary even with the other beasts rampaging.
The fact that even the silver lake, a landmark of the Demon Realm Forest, was moving gave me a sense of finality, but…
“What is that?!”
“How are we supposed to defeat a slime that big?!”
“R-Run! Run away!”
“Mages! Do something!”
The people panicked at the sight of the massive slime.
Elise, however, remained calm, ordering a retreat with her mana-enhanced voice.
She knew sending knights against such a creature would be a waste of manpower.
The result was a strange sight.
Humans and magical beasts fleeing together. Before such an overwhelming force, they weren’t humans or beasts, but simply living beings desperate to survive.
They ran without looking back.
But I was different.
Looking at the silver slime, a long-time resident of the Demon Realm Forest, I felt a pang of sadness.
“Its body…”
The slime’s once-brilliant silver body was now tainted with black.
I knew what it meant.
It had been consumed by the Earliest Apocalypse.
“So that’s why you’re here.”
The ancient tree, which had been immobile due to the Goddess of Death’s influence, had been forced to uproot itself and emerge from the forest.
And it wasn’t alone.
Following in the slime’s wake came the Army of Death.
The beast-kin army, King Lyger, the ancient magical beasts who had died within the forest, even the witches buried in their graves…
It was an all-out assault.
“You’re struggling.”
The Goddess of Death had taken advantage of the power vacuum created by Kurika and Sharcal’s deaths, bolstering her forces within the Demon Realm Forest.
For the Goddess of Death, who could raise the dead, the forest was a treasure trove.
The darkness, carried by its army, spread beyond the forest, consuming the fallen knights and beasts, further strengthening its ranks.
Even the ancient magical beasts I had just killed – the Mihwang, the red serpent, the oni – were resurrected, their eyes empty, their bodies controlled by the darkness.
This was why I had failed to stop the Earliest Apocalypse in my past life.
An immortal army.
Your comrades, turned into mindless soldiers, stabbing you in the back.
It was a slow, but inevitable, path to destruction.
But…
“Not this time.”
I felt the dagger in my pocket, another legacy from Kurika. If I could just strike the apocalypse with this dagger, it would all be over.
And I was confident I could do it.
“First, I’ll open a path.”
I raised the Sword of Rest with both hands.
Blue mana, drawn from the earth, surged upwards, enveloping the sword and shooting towards the sky.
It was a strange sensation.
Mana had always been a scarce resource for me, something I had to painstakingly scrape together.
But Kurika was within me.
It felt as though he was watching over me, and with a faint smile, for the first time in my life…
I unleashed a sword beam.
The silver slime, which had masqueraded as a lake, split in two, dissolving into a rain of acidic goo.
The slime’s corrosive properties melted the nearby soldiers of the Army of Death, momentarily halting their advance.
They would undoubtedly regenerate from the darkness, but I had bought us some time.
“……Wow.”
But that wasn’t important to me.
I chuckled, feeling the abundance of mana still coursing through me.
“You’ve been keeping this wonderful thing to yourselves?”
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[Your Text Here]
So how did he absorb kurika’s power?