The third detonation to go off in the Sanctuary.
It was a nuclear explosion created by magic, but it was no different from a real one.
High-temperature thermal rays burst forth with a blinding light.
Fwoooooosh.
The moment the nuclear bomb detonated, I had dodged as far away as possible via spatial movement, but this time, I couldn’t avoid it properly.
The shield I had deployed beforehand shattered in the middle of teleportation, and the thermal rays that broke through it scorched my body.
My skin burned, and radiation killed my cells.
After that came the shockwave and the heat.
Had I been an ordinary person, it would have been instant death.
I survived thanks to healing magic, but in exchange, pain unlike anything I had ever felt pierced through my body.
From the top of my head to the tips of my toes.
The healing magic revived my cells while pouring agony into my body.
Rumble.
My teeth, clenched tight, broke apart, and bloody tears streamed from my eyes.
I couldn’t tell if it was blood from my cells collapsing or blood from the pain itself.
Even through the pain, I could feel emptiness in parts of my body.
The arm I had restored from corpse fragments, the patched-up side of my torso—none of them could be felt anymore.
That wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t feel.
I couldn’t feel my left leg. I had lost that too.
Even so, I didn’t have the luxury to worry about my leg right now.
I was grievously wounded, in so much pain I wanted to die, but I had survived.
Since I had survived, I needed to verify.
I forced my eyes open.
Hazy vision.
Along with the pain, my sight slowly returned.
I was floating high in the sky, several kilometers up.
Far ahead, another nuclear cloud was billowing upward.
The first nuclear cloud seemed to have been torn apart by the shockwave; it was no longer visible.
Floating before me was a spear riddled with wounds.
An old spear whose every black stone had lost its light.
That spear was floating in front of me, creating a shield.
"I'm glad you woke up in time. I can't hold out much longer. I'll take a short nap...."
Sopeu’s voice cut off, and the spear lost its strength and fell.
The faint shield that had been protecting me vanished as well.
I barely snatched the spear with my remaining arm.
Only after checking the spear could I feel relieved.
It wasn’t broken. It had simply run out of energy.
*I survived thanks to Sopeu again.*
It must have been hard to endure with all its energy gone, yet it had held on for my sake until now.
I was no different—I too was lacking energy.
I was struggling just to remain airborne while maintaining healing magic.
Even through the pain, my eyes kept closing.
But I scraped together every last bit of visible energy and created a shield.
A shield even fainter than before.
It looked like it would go out at any moment, but I needed a shield to check the hypocenter.
I slowly made my way toward the nuclear cloud billowing up into the sky.
A body barely moving via gravity control.
It was far too slow, but using magic to increase my speed was too difficult.
The closer I got to the hypocenter, the more I felt the radiation and heat, and my vision was obscured by the nuclear cloud, but my senses were alive, allowing me to confirm the hypocenter.
The mountain where the Sanctuary had been was changed beyond recognition.
The gray snow had all blown away, revealing a desolate body, and the half-collapsed mountain covered part of a dried-up lake.
The vertical passage I had emerged from, the place where the Demon King had been, had transformed into a massive crater.
Blue light raced across my red-hot shield, and the heat felt like it would cook my body, but I continued approaching the crater.
Not the small hole I had come from, but the mountainside inside the crater where a massive vertical cave had formed.
I stepped down into the crater.
Standing on one leg on the scorching ground, leaning on the spear, I looked around.
The mountain of corpses was gone.
Corpse fragments, white blood, mummies—all of it seemed to have been blown away.
*The Demon King’s core, where is the black stone?*
I couldn’t sense the black stone.
Instead, the crater was filled with corrupted energy.
Within the crater, an aura several times more terrible than the place where the Demon King had been sealed was flowing out.
Instead of searching for traces of the Demon King, I moved to find where the corrupted energy originated.
The place I reached after hobbling along, leaning on my spear.
When I pushed aside the boiling ground with the spear, the black stone lay in the dirt.
A black stone split in half.
It was the Demon King’s black stone.
Not an ounce of the terrible power called the Demon King’s aura could be felt from the black stone.
But it was not like other black stones either.
Unlike other black stones that didn’t leak any energy outward, this one was spewing corrupted energy like mad from the split gap.
Black smoke was visibly billowing out.
"Did I really kill it?"
I spoke aloud as if asking Sopeu, but Sopeu, now asleep, did not answer.
To confirm, I reached out with my intact hand to grab the rolling black stone.
Sizzle!
But it wasn’t easy to grab the black stone through the gushing energy.
Crackle!
On the contrary, my feeble shield nearly shattered.
"It doesn’t look like it’ll even fit in a box...."
If I could at least put it in a box, I could be certain the Demon King was dead.
Like this, confirming it was impossible.
That wasn’t the only problem.
Fwump! Fwump! Fwump!
Tentacles burst from the ground.
Twisted monsters rose up, parting the boiling earth.
Monsters shedding blue light from their bodies.
They were monsters corrupted by radiation—no, monster corpses.
Even after another nuclear explosion, these monster corpses had begun moving again.
The radiation monsters were approaching me—no, heading toward the black stone.
They seemed to be protecting the black stone.
They were enemies I could have handled easily before, but not now.
Setting aside the fact that parts of my body had been cut away, I was so depleted of energy that using magic was difficult right now.
Far from attacking the approaching monsters, I was barely able to maintain the shield around me.
As if that weren’t hopeless enough, the black stone showed a different behavior.
Shhhwoop!
The corrupted energy spewing from the black stone began to coil around it again.
The two split pieces of black stone slowly drew closer to each other.
No matter how I looked at it, they were trying to merge back into one.
I didn’t know if that would revive the Demon King, but I couldn’t leave it like this.
I scraped together my remaining energy and struck down with the spear with all my might.
Clang!
The spear bounced off without leaving a scratch.
"Damn it! Just break already!"
Clang! Clang! Clang!
No matter how many times I repeated it, nothing changed.
Though it was split, the black stone’s hardness was no different from before.
If it wouldn’t break, I wished at least this terrible energy would stop flowing out.
I struck down with the spear again and again, nerves frayed.
The radiation monsters approached, but I didn’t care about them.
As long as I could be certain the Demon King was finished, nothing else mattered.
Either the black stone had to be completely destroyed, or the corrupted energy had to stop flowing out.
*Wait.*
Stop the corrupted energy from flowing out?
If I needed to stop the corrupted energy from flowing out, I didn’t necessarily have to block the energy.
I just needed to change the corrupted energy back to its original dark energy.
And I knew a magic that could do that.
*Purification magic.*
Sopeu had created a purification magic that could even eliminate radiation, and I could use it too, but the purification magic I was talking about wasn’t that.
Not a magic created by a person, but a magic deployed by a relic.
It was the magic of the Terraforming Ruins.
When I had attached the black stone to the spear, I had modified it at the Terraforming Ruins.
The modification was purifying corrupted black stones.
Just as the Terraforming Ruins had purified the black stone before, the ruins’ purification magic should be able to purify the black stone before my eyes.
Just as I had replicated Sopeu’s purification magic, I could replicate that one too.
I reached my hand toward the black stone.
And I despaired.
"I don’t have enough energy."
Far from purifying the black stone, I didn’t have the energy to even deploy a magic circle.
I looked around with a bewildered expression.
The radiation-corrupted monsters were right in front of my nose.
Close enough to be sliced apart the moment they swung their tentacles.
But I couldn’t dodge them.
"Was it greed?"
A hollow laugh escaped me.
I definitely wasn’t in my right mind right now.
To think I’d move to find the black stone despite having no energy left and being injured like this.
It was something the usual me would never do.
I had clearly been too excited, or lost my reason to the pain.
Or perhaps I too had been swept up by the corrupted energy.
Swish!
The monster at the front swung its tentacle.
Shatter!
The shield broke apart immediately.
"Urk!"
Dry heaves wracked me.
My head spun.
Even scraping the bottom of the barrel, there was no more energy left.
My energy was completely depleted.
With the shield gone, the heat cooked my body.
Burns spread, but perhaps because of adrenaline? I couldn’t feel the pain.
No, I couldn’t feel pain from my other wounds either.
The healing magic had stopped.
Cells were dying again from radiation, and blood poured from my severed limbs.
In my dazed mind, I felt the tentacle flying toward me again.
This time, I couldn’t avoid it.
I couldn’t block it either.
Was this the end?
*No.*
I shook my head.
I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t end like this.
Even if I had truly felled the Demon King, I couldn’t welcome death with joy here.
I had to confirm the Demon King’s death until the very end.
*No.*
That wasn’t it.
It wasn’t to confirm the Demon King’s death.
I still had things left to do.
There was someone waiting for me.
I had to return alive.
I raised my other hand to block the flying tentacle.
The tentacle would shatter my remaining hand, but in the moment my hand broke, I should be able to roll my body and preserve my life once more.
It would only buy me a few more seconds of life, but I hadn’t given up yet!
Shhhriek!
The tentacle flew toward my raised arm.
I glared at the tentacle and clenched my teeth.
Kugugugung!
At that moment, the ground shook violently.
The tentacle struck the ground instead of my arm.
The monsters staggered, and I fell flat on the ground.
I raised my head while prone.
This wasn’t an earthquake.
Something was coming up from underground.
Through the massively expanded vertical cave from the detonation, an immense energy was surging upward.
A force similar to when the Demon King’s energy had risen to the surface.
But this wasn’t corrupted energy.
Pure, clean black energy.
Kwagwagwagwa!
That energy erupted to the surface through the vertical cave.
I raised my head and looked at the vertical cave.
From the massive vertical cave, black energy was billowing up instead of a nuclear cloud.
Beautiful dark energy soared toward the heavens.
I knew the moment I saw the energy.
That energy was the dark energy of this star that the mages and the Sanctuary’s devotees called the power of the star.
The Sanctuary had been destroyed in the nuclear explosion, and the energy that had been bound there was now erupting.
While prone, I stretched out my remaining arm.
And I chanted a spell.
"Purify."
With my words, a massive magic circle unfolded over the surging dark energy.
Snow-white light poured down from the magic circle.
The light of purification.
Purifying snow began to pile up softly inside the crater.
Kieeeek!
The blue light vanished from the radiation monsters’ bodies.
The monsters began reverting to corpses that could not move.
The light of purification settled on my body as well.
The destroyed cells returned to normal, the heat disappeared, and the murky air cleared.
Finally, the light of purification descended upon the split black stone as well.
Fwoooosh!
Light began to emanate from the split gap.
The corrupted energy that had been spewing out began to change.
Moon (1)