Radiant light overflowed.
Divine power gathered around Kult as he detected Yuna’s presence.
“Well then, shall we see what you’ve got?”
Tap!
Kult charged toward Yuna.
When it came to combat, Kult was still close to a novice. His lack of real battle experience was overwhelming.
However, his strength was so immense and his abilities so versatile that it compensated for that inexperience entirely.
Ding!
Yuna hurled a dagger at Kult who was rushing straight at her, but the dagger bounced off his shield before it could even touch his body.
Complete confidence in his own defense—
Kult didn’t even flinch and continued running in a straight line.
“Tch.”
It was a bad matchup.
Kult’s defense and endurance were unmatched by anyone.
Unless she could strike a critical blow in a single, clean moment, Yuna had no chance of winning.
What’s more, every one of Kult’s attacks was deadly.
“Hup!”
For the moment, Yuna was able to dodge Kult’s fierce attacks with relative ease.
However, all of her counterattacks were blocked, and even a mere graze from his weapon could slice off chunks of flesh.
Clang!
Unleashing attacks while evading such fierce strikes proved meaningless.
It was a frustrating situation.
Even a blow delivered with her full strength failed to leave so much as a scratch on Kult’s barrier.
“Hmm, I guess I’m just not cut out for close combat.”
With the tip of his spear aimed at the ground, Kult raised his hand.
Then, spheres of light began to rise above his palm.
The lights emitted beams as they connected, eventually illuminating the entire room.
“Let’s end this.”
A blinding spectacle.
The moment Kult clenched his outstretched hand—
“Kh!”
“Damn it…”
As if they had been buried underground, Yuna and Johan came to a complete stop. They were frozen in place.
Kult had used the scattered light to lock the two of them in space.
By the time Kult walked up to Johan and aimed at his neck with a spear in hand, neither Johan nor Yuna could move an inch.
Feeling the cold steel against his throat, Johan squeezed his eyes shut and spoke.
“We lost, Kult.”
“I wasn’t really planning to accept a surrender, you know?”
“Just spare our lives.”
“You really have a knack for making every line sound like something out of a third-rate villain…”
“If I ever came across as more than that, wouldn’t that be the real problem?”
Kult studied Johan.
It wasn’t an act. He was genuinely begging for his life.
Should he kill him?
Johan’s knowledge was dangerous. Even if it wasn’t, it was undeniable that Johan was an extremely cunning man.
“If you kill me, people will get suspicious.”
“That ship sailed the moment you showed up here.”
Shhk.
The light pierced Johan’s neck. Blood pooled and trickled down the spear.
Kult could feel the warm slickness of the blood as it reached his palm.
It felt unpleasant.
“But… if I kill you like this, it might end up being a hassle.”
Slash!
Kult swung the spear downward from Johan’s throat.
Johan’s coat ripped open, and something hidden inside dropped to the floor with a dull thud.
The Demon’s Book, Lemegeton.
Kult had already figured out what Johan’s hidden trump card was.
He had deduced it from Johan’s past encounter with the Judge.
He hadn’t been certain, but now, with this undeniable piece of evidence in front of him…
If pushed to the brink, Johan might actually form a pact with a demon. That possibility came to mind.
“You really are… strangely popular with all the wrong things.”
“I didn’t want it to be this way either.”
“Haha.”
The demonic energy emanating faintly from the book was so powerful that even Kult found it hard to ignore.
It was undeniably the power of a great demon.
“Well, I’ve already neutralized you, so there’s no real need to kill you now, is there?”
In the end, Kult let go of the divine spear he was holding.
As if it had never existed, the spear dissolved into the surrounding light and vanished without a trace.
“Too troublesome to kill, too risky to let go… so I’ll keep you confined here. You might serve as bait, after all.”
“A wise decision.”
“Every move you make really does come off as pathetic.”
“Isn’t it true that the more pathetic your tactics, the more effective they tend to be?”
“Is that so?”
Once again, Kult raised his hand.
This time, a radiance far greater than before bloomed above it.
Johan felt as if he were going blind from the intensity of the light, and at the same time, he could feel the pressure binding his body grow even stronger.
He couldn’t even muster strength. Not even his mana would move.
The divinity had sealed his current state in place, locking him in place.
“Do stay scared like that, if you would.”
With those parting words, Kult quietly exited the room.
***
Whether it was by coincidence or intentionally, Yuna and I had ended up frozen in place facing each other.
“Yuna, is he gone?”
“Mhmm, I think so.”
Kult had been more cautious, more extreme, and more powerful than I had expected.
Honestly, I had considered the possibility that he might try to kill me, and I’d also suspected Yuna’s ambush might be stopped.
But when I realized that Yuna’s presence had already been discovered from the start, a chill ran down my spine.
“Johan, did you expect things to turn out like this?”
“Other than you getting caught? The result wasn’t far off from what I predicted. The process just turned out to be a bit more brutal.”
“It wasn’t that brutal.”
You couldn’t even do anything.
Is there any point in trying to save your pride? A loss is a loss. And getting beaten by a final boss candidate isn’t exactly something to be ashamed of.
“Still, I’m glad you say the outcome was expected. But was it really necessary to take such a risk, especially when it’s not like you?”
“Well, I knew Kult wouldn’t go for a confirmation kill.”
Kult was what you’d call the type of higher-up who just gave orders from above.
He was the kind who understood what happened on the ground only in theory.
He could wipe out hundreds of lives with a flick of his finger, but he hadn’t actually killed that many people himself, and he never hacked up a corpse for the sake of making sure someone’s dead.
He didn’t enjoy fighting, and he didn’t take pleasure in killing.
Even if he was a lunatic criminal, at least his goals were rooted in what he believed was good.
Of course, if he needed to kill, he would do it without hesitation.
Normally, I would’ve been killed by Kult. That would’ve been the logical outcome.
But I made it so that he didn’t even need to bother setting the stage to kill me.
We basically walked right into the trap he set, so why go to the trouble of catching a fish that already jumped into the net?
As long as he still had some aversion to killing, he would avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
Thanks to that, we survived. And we’ve been completely pushed off the stage.
“So now we’ve managed to slip out of Kult’s awareness.”
Step one of the plan: get off Kult’s radar.
That much was done.
When your opponent could see the future, you have no choice.
You have to make him forget about you in order to create a variable.
“So, what now? Do you have a way to escape?”
“That paranoid bastard let us go without a fight. There’s no way we’re getting out of here through normal means.”
If someone tries to rescue us, they’ll probably just get trapped in the light with us.
“We’re probably just bait. And this room…. it’s both a prison and a trap.”
If someone happened to see us and recklessly decided to barge into this space to rescue us, they’d be trapped here with us just like that. It was a trap.
“Well, unless they were incredibly stupid, no one would just step into a place like this without thinking.”
“Then what? How do we get out?”
“We’ll need to use a special kind of power.”
Crack!
At that moment, a faint fracture appeared in the space before our eyes.
Like a shattered window, the small crack gradually began to spread its influence.
Crash!
Soon, the sound of something breaking rang out, and in front of us appeared the figure of the Oracle with her hood pulled over her head.
In the past, the Oracle had appeared before me and Lobelia to deliver a warning.
At her words, Lobelia had tried to grab her, but the Oracle had easily slipped away, as if she were standing in an entirely different space.
It had been a bizarre form of teleportation.
The Oracle possessed that kind of ability.
Now, she stepped slowly forward, having broken through the center of space.
“I came to rescue y— Huh? Why… can’t I move my body…? Ugh?!”
And just like that, she froze in place.
Teleportation or not, once someone entered this space, it meant nothing.
“Johan? Just to be sure, you didn’t mean that stupid woman’s power when you said ‘special power’, right?”
“This is the first time I’ve realized she’s that stupid, but don’t worry, Yuna. I didn’t mean her.”
“Whew, thank goodness.”
I had no idea why she’d bother showing up just to embarrass herself like that.
Honestly, seeing her like this made it hard to believe she’d managed to survive against Kult all this time.
“Isn’t it a bit harsh to treat someone who came to rescue you like this? More importantly, I really don’t get why you’re so openly hostile toward me.”
“It’s only natural to feel hostile toward someone who, at our very first meeting, suddenly pulled a card and tried to smash my head.”
“I had no intention of actually hitting you.”
“You must be stupid.”
Well, even if that weren’t the reason, there were plenty of other ones. And honestly, that alone was enough of an excuse to dislike someone.
I didn’t even want to explain that the Oracle resembled Alice.
I’d rather just hate her for no reason at all.
“You got captured too, so who are you calling stupid?”
“We got caught on purpose. You just screwed up. Let’s be clear on the difference.”
“Ha! Then I suppose you also know how to get out of this situation? I didn’t realize you were so competent.”
While I bickered back and forth with the Oracle in this utterly pointless argument—
Crack!
A new fracture appeared nearby.
It was a fissure in midair, similar to the one that had formed when the Oracle appeared.
But this time, the force behind it was clearly visible.
“No way… That’s…!”
“This is the method I had in mind.”
The tip of a sword pierced through the light.
And when that sword sliced down from top to bottom…he appeared.
“……”
The Sword Saint, Dietrich.
The path of the sword he swung unleashed a cascade of lights in every color.
Like spilled paint, the sword energy that devoured Kult’s halo of light went on to swallow even the light around it.
“Phew… Thanks to you, I’m still alive.”
Dietrich’s ability was Trace.
It left behind a lingering force along the path of his blade.
In the game, it only applied debuffs like bleeding and healing disable, but true to his design as Kult’s counter, it now seemed fully capable of neutralizing divine power.
“Dietrich, I figured you’d want to know what’s going o—”
Shhk.
But the path that brought Dietrich here must have been brutal.
“Senior, I’ve thought about it constantly. I started by going over everything from the past, one piece at a time.”
“I see.”
Dietrich was no longer the clueless, simple-minded guy he used to be.
He must have realized just how blind he’d been to the world and started to reflect on his past mistakes.
Through that, he must’ve sensed something was off about his old friend Kult.
Even as he struggled to accept the horrifying truth, he didn’t turn away.
And that’s how he made it here.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions. Can you answer them honestly?”
“Of course.”
But the fact that he’d looked back on the past—
This meant he’d also looked back on what we’d done together.
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