It was immediately after that chilling voice froze the cold air of the administrative district on the ruined surface, where enormous purification tanks stood in grotesque rows.
What pressed down on my entire body was no mere pressure. Gravity. The magic the red-eyed man had spread did not distinguish friend from foe; it poured every mass on the battlefield toward the ground.
Even the oxygen that should have entered my lungs had grown heavy, and each breath felt as if shards of glass were scraping my throat.
I was squeezing out Dao power to protect my organs, but if my mind slipped even a little, I would be reduced to a lump of meat and driven into the ground.
I was completely pinned to the floor, unable even to turn my head. But that did not mean my sense for reading the flow had been blocked. The energies beyond the crushed space scraped into me with startling clarity.
Some distance away. The artificial light I had first encountered on the surface, the one that gave off a pleasant warmth.
My senses were directed beyond the boundary of that pouring white radiance. In the thick darkness where the light did not reach, eyes flashed.
It was not just one or two. Contaminants that had been holding their breath behind the wreckage of the water treatment facility were silently crawling up to the boundary where the pressure of gravity loosened.
In the face of such pressure, scattering would have been natural. But they did not scatter. They crawled only toward the center where I had been slammed down.
“······Wretched things swarm in without end.”
The gaze of the red-eyed man floating in the air sank downward in displeasure.
Crunch.
With a light wave of his hand, the contaminants stepping inside the boundary were crushed in a straight line. Whatever had crushed them could not be seen.
At that moment, an explosion rang out from somewhere on the outskirts. The air trembled once from far away, and the sensation that the outside of the battlefield was already collapsing traveled through my body, pinned to the floor.
A sound of friction tore through that chaos, slicing through the air.
A massive lump of scrap metal shot toward the red-eyed man, ripping through the air. It was the wreckage of drones, their crushed wings, flickering optical sensors, and tangled wires all knotted together.
The red-eyed man turned his head and extended a hand, and the mass of scrap metal flying toward him halted in midair. A moment later, it was crushed beyond recognition with a bursting sound.
Hissss.
Something walked out, tearing through the cloud of dust.
The liquid armor covering its entire body writhed like a living creature. A heavy silence flowed from within its spiral mask.
It was not a contaminant. It was not human, either. It resembled nothing I had ever seen before.
The formation of the mercenaries in the rear wavered.
“Insane······ That’s knight-class. Why is that thing here······”
The cry, thick with desperation, scattered before it could finish. It was not merely because of the pressure that bizarre thing was emitting. It was the sound of everyone’s common sense collapsing at once, the knowledge that such an existence should not have appeared here.
Thud.
It took one step forward.
The surrounding contaminants all turned their heads at once. Every one of them faced the red-eyed man. Until just a moment ago, they had been crawling in separately, but now they were aligned in a single direction.
The red-eyed man’s eyes settled coldly. His palm dropped downward.
The ground screamed as it caved in. The bizarre thing’s knees punched through the floor and sank in. My head, too, was driven back into the ground.
But it did not stop.
Crrrack.
Its armor warped. The next instant, it shot toward the red-eyed man, tearing through the air.
Kuwaaang.
They collided. The red-eyed man was not pushed back. But his stance faltered half a beat late.
It was in that instant. The red-eyed man’s attention was wholly drawn to the bizarre thing before him.
The air in midair trembled like a heat haze.
Behind the red-eyed man, empty space tore open, and an unfamiliar young woman appeared.
Her eyes flashed red. They were exactly the same color as the red-eyed man’s. Yet the red-eyed man did not sense the presence behind him. No, even if he sensed it, he did not react.
In her hand was a rusted dagger. An ominous energy seeped from the tip of the blade.
The one-eyed man, who had been collapsed on the floor coughing blood, saw her and screamed with his eye wide.
“Reze! I told you not to come!”
The shout was closer to a scream. But the woman’s hand did not stop.
“Die!”
The rusted dagger plunged toward the back of the red-eyed man’s neck. The moment the blade touched him, something surrounding the red-eyed man distorted like ripples.
The woman’s eyes shook briefly.
Kaaang.
The sound of metal striking metal split the battlefield. The blade failed to dig into flesh and bounced away.
The red-eyed man did not let out even a groan. Only a single line of dark-red blood ran down from his neck. Then he slowly turned his head.
“······You dare.”
Killing intent exploded. At the same time, smoke bombs burst from all directions with a series of pops.
A group that appeared to be the woman’s comrades began to force their way in. Drones pouring in belatedly, surviving mercenaries, and figures similar to the bizarre thing tangled together. The battlefield descended into madness beyond anyone’s control.
—-
At the same time, at the highest point of the battlefield.
A high-ranking flight artifact engraved with the crest of the Roen main family hovered quietly in the air, as if mocking the red-eyed man’s gravity field.
On top of it, a woman looked down below. Her silver hair scattered in the wind. Red eyes, the same as the red-eyed man’s, calmly swept over the chaos.
Rin was estimating the location of the thing she had been chasing.
A short sigh escaped her lips, as if she found it absurd. At the end of it, the corner of her mouth twisted coldly.
“What a mess. Well, I just have to retrieve it in the meantime.”
Her fingertips moved slightly toward the ground.
Wuuung.
The gravity on the battlefield wavered for an instant. The weight pressing down on me trembled faintly. I did not know what had shaken it. But every sense beneath my scales clearly caught the fact that it had.
A momentary opening where gravity’s control loosened.
No, to be precise, my survival instinct had outpaced my reason.
Before overwhelming power, any trick was meaningless. That was how my previous life had ended, and that was what had just happened to the crushed mercenaries.
I could not die again, torn apart beneath their feet without being able to do anything.
Fear pulled the trigger.
Wuuung.
The balance between the explosively condensed demonic power and Dao power. I consciously released the tail I had been holding onto by a thread.
Fssss.
The dam inside me collapsed pathetically. A rampage.
It was a sensation of destruction on an entirely different level, something I had never experienced even in my previous life as a Daoist master.
The energy of the unidentified lump I had just swallowed erupted through my blood vessels like a bombardment.
The muscles beneath my scales were shredded apart, and my bones twisted.
Graaaargh.
What tore out of my throat was not a scream. It was the horrific roar of a beast.
The ground around me was crushed beyond form under the overwhelming demonic aura.
The energy bursting out from within me pushed back my surroundings.
The battlefield stopped. Gravity, blades, the bizarre thing—everything halted half a beat late.
At that moment, from the deepest part of my crumbling consciousness, my master’s voice surfaced.
— I told you not to be dragged along by power just because you have grasped it.
If I rampaged like this, it was over. I would die as a beast.
I forcibly seized the thread of consciousness that was collapsing.
I twisted the two powers that were bursting out, the body being torn apart, and bound them back into a circle. They sparked inside. Burst. Tore.
I did not stop.
The center, colliding madly, began to settle very slowly within me. Two different wills interlocked and began to turn, biting their own tail.
A malformed cycle that seemed about to break yet did not, grinding each other down yet never fully collapsing.
Golden light condensed inward.
Inside my vertically slit pupils, a pattern rotated slowly. It was a serpent. A form that continued endlessly while biting its own tail.
The word came to me first.
Ouroboros.
I did not know why it was that word, or where it had come from. The moment my thoughts reached it, it was already there.
Dao power and demonic power took the form of that serpent and meshed together.
Thanks to the lump I had swallowed a moment ago, my power had risen by one level. But it was still far from enough to smash through that red-eyed man head-on.
What I needed to survive was not power, but judgment. And my judgment now was clear.
Run. In the most overwhelming way possible.
The Daoist arts from my previous life flashed through my mind. Summon Wind and Call Rain? Madness.
Ground-Shrinking? In my current state, the risk of running through their concentrated gazes was too great.
Clone technique? There was no way I could fool their detection network with some flimsy illusion.
“···Right. If it’s this.”
There was no reason to hesitate. I lowered my body as much as I could.
I matched my flow to the vibrations of the surrounding space. I spread my Dao power thinly and layered it over my entire body.
Then I unfolded the most deceptive and massive Daoist art, one I had not even drawn upon in my previous life. The Art of Transformation.
I used that dreadful destructive energy, raised to the brink of rampage, as bait.
I projected the serpent pattern rotating inside me outward on a massive scale.
Wuuung.
The energy surrounding my body twisted as if an old shell were bursting apart, and from within it, a completely new form erupted.
It was enormous. It expanded with an overwhelming size, as if it would wrap around the entire battlefield spanning hundreds of meters.
The figure of a colossal dragon from legend, a mixture of deep silver that seemed to devour light and fluorescent poison.
At the center of that deceptive illusion, I shot all my energy up into the air and twisted my body as if ascending to the heavens.
Kuwaaaa.
A massive wave crushed down on the battlefield.
The illusion soaring into the air swallowed every gaze. The red-eyed man’s head tilted upward. The woman gripping the dagger froze. The bizarre thing’s movement stopped half a beat late.
It was that instant.
Crack.
What had soared into the air was only a shell. A bluff meant to devour their attention.
My real body was in the shadow beneath that afterimage. I threw myself straight into their blind spot.
Ground-Shrinking.
My vision cut off briefly, then connected again at once. Distance folded like paper, and I slipped out beyond the battlefield. Once more. My position changed completely.
Tuk, tuk. With the sound of concrete fragments rolling across the floor, my view opened.
Before me, enormous circular purification tanks stood in rows. Cold, artificial white light poured down over them.
The places touched by the light were clear and orderly. And precisely because of that, they were exposed killing fields with nowhere to hide.
I did not stop. Leaving the energies behind my back, I threw myself toward the boundary of the light.
One step. The moment I crossed the line where the white light did not reach, the world turned upside down.
Heavy, clammy darkness wrapped around my entire body. Thick yellow-gray fog laden with poison blocked my vision. Acrid fumes and metallic dust seeped stickily between my scales.
That terrible darkness was the curtain I had been craving.
The pressure that had pinned me down released. Stale earth dust brushed between my scales.
I did not stop.
—-
Beyond the boundary of light, thick fog swayed as if swallowing the ruins. The small shadow that slipped into that darkness was caught by no one’s eyes.
All that remained in the center of the battlefield was the afterimage of the enormous dragon that had surged into the air. The illusion, where silver poison and golden patterns tangled together, slowly collapsed.
The red-eyed man, the woman who had held the dagger, and all the others stared up at that place for a moment. They were speechless. Rin in the air was no different.
Only, even after the illusion had completely crumbled away, Rin’s gaze remained there for a long while.
The wind scattered the afterimage of the enormous dragon through the air.