Chapter 379: The Story After (11) [Side Story, Part 11]

Helia let out a small sigh. Even with Ignisia and Karin, two Hero powerhouses, supporting her, she had been pushed back. Now that she was the only one left, there was no chance of victory. Even so, she did not retreat. Instead, she stepped forward with calm dignity. Ketal’s eyes glinted with faint amusement.

“You look pleased,” he remarked.

“In truth, I have been curious,” Helia answered. “I wanted to see how far my full power would go against you.”

Helia lifted her hands high toward the sky and began to pray.

“O Sun, descend upon me,” she said.

Light poured down from the heavens and settled into her. Ketal raised an arm to shield his eyes. Radiance bright enough to strain his vision descended upon the desert and wrapped itself around Helia.

“Oh,” Ketal murmured. He sounded genuinely impressed. “The sun has taken root in you. You have grown stronger.”

The power of the sun itself settled into Helia. Heat and light surged outward, scorching the world. The ground began to melt, the air roared and boiled, and even the moisture beyond the distant desert slowly started to evaporate.

It was the overwhelming power of a god. Naturally, Helia could not bear it completely. Merely receiving that power seemed painful. She clenched her teeth as if to endure it.

“This is not something I can maintain easily,” Helia said quietly. “At most, it will last one minute.”

It was an ultimate technique with a strict time limit of a single minute.

There was a very simple way to deal with it. All Ketal had to do was avoid her. If he simply kept his distance, the technique would end on its own. There was no sensible reason to entertain someone who wrapped herself in fire and tried to blow herself up along with her target.

However, Ketal had no reason to obey common sense. He never had. He opened his arms wide, as if welcoming her assault.

“Come,” he said.

“Thank you,” Helia replied.

A thunderous impact shook the ground as Helia kicked off the desert floor and charged. She gripped her spear and thrust with brutal force. Ketal twisted himself and slipped past the attack.

A high, piercing sound filled the air. Everything caught within the arc of her spear was pierced by that intense light. For dozens of kilometers, the desert was burned clean through and melted.

“This is scorching!” Ketal said with a laugh.

Even for him, this heat could not be taken lightly. He wrapped his body in Aura to protect himself and swung his axe. Helia raised her shield to meet him.

A heavy crash rang out as heat and pure physical power collided. Shockwaves tore outward in all directions. Far off, the forests beyond the desert trembled, and sparks began to flare among the trees.

Her spear sought Ketal again and again. He dodged and parried, using each opening to drive his foot into her shield and counterattack.

Neither side yielded easily. It was a fierce deadlock. In such a situation, the one pressed for time was Helia. Her sun-given power would not last. She could feel the seconds slipping away. Urgency crept into her eyes.

She tightened her grip on the spear. The air swelled and bulged as if pushed outward by an invisible force. The surrounding atmosphere was driven back. She was preparing a massive technique. Ketal recognized it at once and shifted his stance, bringing his axe in front of him to brace for impact.

Helia drew in a sharp breath before thrusting her spear. She pulled it back and thrust again, and then again, until time itself seemed to compress around her movements. In the span of a single heartbeat, hundreds of thrusts poured toward him.

A shrill metallic screech filled the world. Hundreds of rays of light pierced straight through the desert all at once. Every grain of sand in their path melted and fused, turning into glass.

To anyone who did not know what had happened, this place would no longer look like any desert in the Mortal Realm. It looked like it had become a Demon Realm where everything had been transformed into glass.

“

Haah...!

” Helia gasped for breath. She had used an extremely powerful technique meant to finish the fight in a single blow. The burden on her body was enormous. That strain turned into an opening.

“That was quite sharp,” Ketal said. Within the glass world she had created, he stepped into view.

Even though it had been an attack meant to kill him in one strike, not a single wound showed on him.

He smiled broadly and reached out. Helia tried to retreat, but she had already spent too much power. She could not muster enough strength to respond in time. Ketal’s hand closed around the back of her neck, and he drove her straight down into the ground. A deep tremor resounded through the glassy earth.

“

Kh...!

” Helia choked.

She slammed into the ground and stuck there. Her trembling hands tried to push herself up, but she slowly fell back to the side. The sun’s power that had wrapped around her began to dissipate, draining away little by little.

Her time was up. Helia stared blankly at the sky and let out a hollow whisper.

“In the end... it did not amount to anything,” she murmured.

Even after using a technique that bordered on self-destruction, she still had not been able to defeat Ketal. It was worse than a simple failure to win, because had Ketal chosen to take a single step back, she would have detonated alone and accomplished nothing.

He had extended mercy. Even so, she had not been able to stand as a real opponent to him. The despair she felt was overwhelming.

“What are you saying?” Ketal asked her, smiling gently. “Your power was truly formidable. It was dangerous.”

“Empty comfort...” she muttered.

“It is not comfort,” he said. “Look.”

Ketal tilted his head slightly. Helia’s eyes widened.

There was a burn mark on his cheek. It was not a large scar. It was a small wound, not particularly deep. Thanks to Ketal’s extraordinary regenerative abilities, even that faint trace was slowly beginning to fade.

However, it was a wound nonetheless. She had injured this impossible monster, if only a little. For that alone, a sense of fierce satisfaction rose inside her, so strong it was hard to put into words.

“I am... satisfied,” Helia murmured. “Then I will get some rest...”

“Rest well,” Ketal said. “I enjoyed this.”

Helia’s head lolled to the side as she immediately lost consciousness. The recoil from channeling such tremendous power had caused her to faint.

Ketal chuckled, delight simmering through him. Earth’s greatest Heroes had attacked him together, and afterward, Helia had poured out every last ounce of her strength. Throughout the entire battle, he had struggled to keep himself from laughing aloud, overwhelmed by sheer exhilaration.

“Helia truly is strong,” he said.

Helia stood two or three steps above even Ignisia and Karin. The burn on his cheek had already completely healed without a trace, but she had still managed to mark him. Before his arrival, she would certainly have been counted as one of the two strongest beings on the Mortal Realm.

This raised a question within him about what the remaining strongest one was doing. Ketal turned his head.

“Tower Master,” he called. “It is your turn now.”

“You all worked hard.” A crackle sounded in the air.

The Tower Master appeared. Hovering in the sky, he glanced down at the unconscious Heroes and clicked his tongue.

“They all look satisfied,” he said. “It seems they were desperate to throw themselves at you and trade blows. They must have struggled to hold back until now.”

“And you were content to simply watch,” Ketal replied.

In total, five Heroes had chosen to fight him: Bayern, Karin, Ignisia, Helia, and the Tower Master. Bayern had chosen to face Ketal alone for the sake of his own desire and had been defeated. After that, Karin, Ignisia, and Helia had joined forces and still lost.

However, the Tower Master had not taken part in any of those battles. He had quietly observed them all from the sidelines.

“They may hold that against you,” Ketal said.

“I cannot help it,” the Tower Master replied. “The magic I created is not suited for battles involving many people.”

The dim flame in his eyes focused on Ketal.

“Shall we move to another place?” he asked Ketal.

“All right,” Ketal said. He accepted without hesitation.

After they moved a short distance away from the others, the Tower Master finally spoke again.

“I have created a magic of my own, Ketal,” he said. “A great and unique magic. Would you like to see it?”

“I would,” Ketal answered, his smile shining bright with anticipation.

The Tower Master snapped his fingers as if he had expected nothing less. A fluttering sound echoed through the air. Magic circles unfolded in countless layers. They overlapped again and again until they covered the world. Ketal could not hold back a delighted exclamation.

“Oh my!” he said.

While staying at the Mage Tower, he had spoken often with the Tower Master about magic and had accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge. Driven by his own hunger for power, he had studied enough that he could stand alongside all but the greatest of mages.

Even so, he could not understand what he was seeing. There were hundreds of magic circles. Ketal could not parse even one of them. He could not even grasp a single fragment of their structure.

The same would be true for every other mage in this world. Even the Tower Master’s own disciples would be no different. These magic circles were simply too high in order. Layer upon layer of them settled over reality. The Tower Master clenched his fist.

𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

“Fix,” he commanded.

The world stopped. Ketal’s eyes widened. Nothing in reality had actually changed—wind still blew, sand still stirred, the air continued to move, and Myst continued to ripple.

However, in a certain range centered on Ketal and the Tower Master, everything was fixed in place.

Matter held its position. The air no longer moved, and even Myst seemed to be caught on something, unable to fluctuate. It was as if the very axes of space and time had stopped.

A whistle of wind came from outside. As soon as that wind brushed against the boundary of the frozen domain, it hardened and stopped. The drifting sand at the edge did the same. It was as if the Tower Master had pressed a pause button on the world itself.

“Tower Master... what is this?” Ketal said.

“It is my first time using it in an actual battle,” the Tower Master said, sounding quite pleased. “It seems to have worked well.”

He spoke with pride.

“This is the Eleventh-Class magic I created,” he declared. “World Fixation.”

***

A quiet breath escaped Ketal’s lips. The world itself had become fixed in place around the Tower Master.

“So this is the magic that wounded the White Serpent,” Ketal said.

“This is its developed form,” the Tower Master replied.

Ketal had heard that the Tower Master had created a new spell and used it to wound the White Serpent. At first, that had seemed unbelievable, but seeing this with his own eyes, Ketal understood.

“You took the laws we discovered in my previous world and implemented them in this one,” Ketal said.

“Correct,” the Tower Master replied.

He had fixed the outcome itself. After analyzing Ketal, he had crafted magic that locked the world into a predetermined state.

“Remarkable,” he said, letting out a low laugh.

Even though it used the laws of Ketal’s previous world as a foundation, Ketal himself could not understand the concept. This was a miracle that only the Tower Master could perform. Still, there was one thing Ketal could infer.

“If the world is fixed,” he said, “then anything that is not fixed will be rejected.”

“Correct again,” the Tower Master said. He raised a finger. “I believe it is an unnecessary worry, but once this spell is activated, even I cannot control it. So try not to die.”

The moment he spoke, the fixed world began to move again—or rather, it began to move in a way that sought to eliminate Ketal, the only thing within it that had not been fixed.

A harsh scraping sound rang out. Everything that had been fixed turned against him. The world treated Ketal as a foreign substance, like a virus that had invaded a living body, and attempted to remove him.

Ketal drew out his Aura. The fixed values of the world collided with the Aura that deleted all things. The clash sounded like a storm tearing through the desert.

Needles of sand rose up without warning and shot toward him. These were the same glass sands that Helia’s attack had created, now weaponized by the fixed world. Ketal raised his axe and blocked them. An alien sound echoed through the frozen domain as if the world itself were grinding its teeth.

This was absolute fixation. The attacks did not pierce through him; they simply imposed the result that they had already pierced. It became an absolute value.

Not even Ignisia, nor Karin, nor even Helia could have done anything against such an attack on the level of pure outcome.

“

Ha... ha ha ha!”

he cried.

Now he understood how the Tower Master had managed to wound the White Serpent.

“This is incredible!” Ketal shouted. “It is nearly on par with the powers of the Oldest Ones from the White Snowfield! I acknowledge it. Aside from me, you are the strongest being in the Mortal Realm!”

“That is kind of you to say,” the Tower Master answered. “Although I would have preferred to be first.”

“I am afraid that would be difficult,” Ketal replied, baring his teeth.

Aura roared around him in a wild surge. The fixed world began to tear. Cracks formed in the frozen fabric of space and time. Ketal’s power crushed the ground beneath his feet.

The desert shook as he smashed everything in his path and flew toward the Tower Master. The Tower Master hurriedly grabbed hold of the fixed Myst that filled the domain. Aura and Myst collided, sending out strange and terrible sounds as the world screamed in protest.