Chapter 306: Victim of Unearned Misfortune
"Ahhhhhh!!!"
Lee Lim’s scream pierced through the noisy shore.
...
Despite the fact that the explosion was still expanding and shredding the environnt, Cedric didn’t wait and imdiately lunged into the eye of the storm in the form of a hundred ravens.
Inside the swirling flas, he could see Lee Lim yelling at the top of his lungs in pure, agonized fury.
The man was fully naked because his fine clothes had all decayed, leaving him exposed in the blast. Half of his face had decayed and all his hair was gone. A small part of his right hand, which held the small rod, was now nothing but brittle, grey bone.
It seed that the only reason his entire body was not reduced to dust was because he had activated the flas of decay at the last minute.
"W-what is this?"
When he saw and heard the ravens flying around, his face twisted in sheer disbelief, and with his one good eye darting around, he yelled:
"What is this?! I thought I killed you?"
So many emotions went through his body, including fear, as he suddenly rembered the words Leon had uttered before his death:
"...You will die a special death. If not by my hand, then by his!"
’No, no, I killed him. I was sure I killed him. I even ripped his spine out, so what is this?’ Lee Lim thought as he began to panic, because he felt his end draw near.
In order to not be taken by surprise, he kept his eyes on the multiple screens in front of him, which included a map that showed him the ravens as tiny red dots. Because of this, he could see a dot behind him suddenly expand into a larger one. His eyes widened and he imdiately twisted his body around, raising the small rod to block Cedric’s katana in a shower of sparks.
The young samurai didn’t relent, and using his second weapon, he slashed upward in a vicious arc, forcing Lee Lim to stumble back and nearly lose his footing.
Luckily, he could adjust the size of the small rod in his hand. He extended the length to create a makeshift staff, yet despite that, it took a lot to hold back Cedric’s blades, which were currently overwhelming him. As the two of them locked eyes over the clashing tal, he suddenly heard Cedric speak.
"You thought you could kill , huh?"
Their weapons collided again, and Cedric roared with a terrifying intensity, "The likes of you CANNOT KILL !"
Those words caused Lee Lim to falter in a mont of pure terror, and in that brief opening, Cedric’s katana slashed a line across his chest, spilling dark blood onto the cold sand.
Gritting his teeth, Lee Lim managed to block Cedric’s follow-up. He suddenly let out a raw yell and began fighting like a man who had completely disregarded his own life. Unfortunately for him, Cedric didn’t care much about his own survival at the mont either. He only cared about ending the only life this man had once and for all.
After a minute of brutal exchanges, both n disengaged to catch their breath, though they already looked like walking corpses. Lee Lim only had one arm left after Cedric chopped the other off. His ribs were exposed where the black fire had eaten through his side, and the skin across his neck was hanging in loose, grey tatters. Even his breathing sounded like wet glass grinding together.
Cedric looked just as ravaged. One of his eyes had been crushed into a bloody socket by the end of Lee Lim’s rod, and his left arm hung uselessly at his side with the bone snapped in multiple places, poking through the skin.
’I’m going to die,’ Lee Lim thought as he watched Cedric limp toward him. In that mont, his rage for the boy finally started to disappear. But it was imdiately replaced by a cold, paralyzing dread, because behind Cedric, he could see the towering figure of a hooded skeleton holding a massive, jagged scythe.
Let’s not forget, gentlefriends, Cedric still had his Aura of Decay and Blight of Will activated all this ti. Since Mr. Lim was now in a bad way, coupled with the fact that his ntal state was at an all-ti low, it seed the properties of the Yoroi had — finally! — caught up with him.
’No!’ Lee Lim shook his head as he took a step back.
He couldn’t accept this outco.
He couldn’t accept being lost in a horrible world and to a war that he didn’t even fully understand.
And more importantly, he couldn’t accept dying a aningless death!
In the depths of his despair, a thought suddenly flickered to life. ’If... if I’m going to die, then... then none of them should live. I... I need to... I need to...’
While still shaking with terror, he suddenly gathered the last of his energy, then leapt into the sky and raised his hand up towards the heavens.
Of course, all this while, the voices in his head yelling "kill" had beco a deafening roar, and so, Lee Lim had completely lost control over everything.
"Grant
the strength that I may lay waste to everything, oh God of Unearned Misfortune."
Lee Lim, who was himself a victim of unearned misfortune, pleaded to the God.
The voices in his head suddenly ceased.
And then... he began to hear the voice of an old man laughing in the back of his mind. Lee Lim didn’t pay the voice any mind because at the sa ti, he felt a surge of essence flow through him.
He channeled all the essence he received into the palm of his skeletal hand, and a massive orb of the flas of decay appeared above him, humming as it grew larger and larger, plunging the world into darkness.
anwhile, Cedric had raised his head just as the Lord flew up into the evening sky.
At first, he wondered if the Lord was running away, and this caused so many emotions to surge through his exhausted mind.
But when he saw the Lord raise his hand to summon that towering sphere of decay, his eyes widened in horror as the realization of what was coming hit him like a physical blow.
’Crap!’
He imdiately thought of his friends who were all going to die should they be hit by those flas.
...By now, many people had halted and were now also staring at the sky in horror. Many of them began screaming while many just dropped to their knees because... where would they even run to escape such a disaster?
’Alicia...’
Cedric spun around looking for the only person he could think of at the mont who could salvage this situation. When his raven locked onto her, he swapped places with it without any hesitation.
The young girl had just killed a Naga when he appeared beside her.
Quickly grabbing her by the shoulders, he yelled in utmost urgency. "Alicia! Draw us into another dinsion or you are all going to die!"
However, Alicia, whose face was already pale from seeing the horror dropped to her knees, shaking her head, "I can’t... I can’t, Cedric. I-I don’t have the strength for it."
Bringing a Grade Four into her reality was no doubt too much for her. But...
"You need to try." Cedric implored as he looked up from her to the growing orb. "You only need to pull us in for a few seconds."
He looked down into her blue eyes, then added, "And don’t worry, I’ll protect you from the flas."
For a short mont, Alicia wavered and her eyes shook in hesitation. But she quickly pulled herself together and bit down on her lips as she looked down. Then, she held the sides of her head with both hands and began to let out a loud cry of pain.
Blood dripped out of her eyes, nose, and mouth. And at that mont of agony, the massive orb of decay began its descent upon the shore.
Seeing that, Cedric crouched to Alicia’s side and wrapped his arms tight around her, pulling her into a tight embrace.
Not long after, the terrifying explosion sounded and the entire shore was suddenly engulfed in black flas that consud everything and everyone they touched.
The cadets began to yell as they decayed at a visible, horrifying speed, their armor rusting into flakes and their skin turning to dust before they could even hit the ground. Even the few Nagas that were left were not spared and decayed as the fire consud them.
When the flas reached Cedric and Alicia though, they simply moved past the duo in a circle, as if repelled by an invisible, impenetrable barrier. Cedric’s grip on Alicia tightened even further as he forced every ounce of his essence into the space surrounding them.
Then, all of a sudden, Alicia fell unconscious in Cedric’s arms as she could no longer bear the toll. Her eyes rolled back to normal and when they did, the reality that she had pulled Cedric and Lee Lim into shattered, putting them back into the real world.
When that happened, everything returned to exactly how it was before Lee Lim unleashed his final, desperate prayer.
To the cadets, they were not hard or decayed, because although they had seen the flas descend, they suddenly saw the darkness vanish, leaving them wondering what had happened. The shore was intact, the air was warm again, and the sll of rot was slowly being replaced by the freshness of the lake.
As for Lee Lim, who had seen the flas consu everything, his eyes widened and he sunk into despair when he saw that the world was perfectly, agonizingly whole. The cadets he thought he had erased were standing there, confused but alive.
Lee Lim exhaled resignedly, then... he finally surrendered and let himself fall out of the sky to the ground.
After crashing heavily on the sand, he stared at the sky for a mont, then thought to himself bitterly.
’I really tried...’
His one good eye blinked slowly, struggling to stay open. He could feel the cold of the sand seeping into his exposed ribs, and the taste of copper and ash filled his mouth. He was no longer a Lord or a harbinger of a god. He was just a tired man dying a aningless death.
When he forced his eye open again, he could see Cedric on top of him with his sword raised high above his throat.
’I really, really tried.’
The sword ca down, turning his world black.
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