Patricio swallowed hard. He tried to keep calm, but it was not as easy as he hoped.
‘They’re all dead.’
The Cayden Lumos family’s forces and Knight Commander Valrut. The Red Mage Alon Pavlo. The Purple Mage Coilwat. The Order of the Guardian of Light, and Commander Bentham—one of the Holy Nation’s three greatest knights. Special Division 11. The Archbishops of the Lumenis Church. The Hunter Association. The Golden Rule Mercenary Corps. Even the high-ranking priests and paladins from the Holy Nation.
A massive army numbering in the thousands—all annihilated. And all by just one man.
“D-Don’t you dare...!”
“If you touch me.”
The words Patricio barely managed to squeeze out were nothing more than a pitiful threat. Even that much, Ludger cut off sharply before he could finish.
“More of you plan to come from the Holy Nation to judge me? Then let me ask you something.”
Ludger, whose eyes glowed with a red radiance, looked straight at Patricio.
“Who will judge me?”
“L-Lu...”
“Lumenis?”
Ludger scoffed softly, lifting his gaze toward the black hole still lingering above his head. To others, it might look like a hole torn in empty space, but its true nature was that of a gate.
The Heavenly Gate—a path to the heavens.
Yet neither man nor god could truly pass through it. Humans were far too weak and lowly in rank to ascend through such a gate, while gods were far too vast and immense to descend through it. To a human, it was like the eye of a needle. Even now, after unlocking the Third Seal Technique, perhaps a single finger could slip through at best.
And even that was only possible if one monopolized the gate entirely. With all the gods crowding on the other side, drawing numbers like in a queue, no single being could exert proper influence through it.
Even so—Ludger had used that very divine power to annihilate the crusade.
And that crusade had also been blessed by divine power.
“Lumenis. Are you watching?”
Ludger called toward the gate. There was no reply, yet he could feel it—the constant noise of the gods that had been chattering moments ago had fallen silent. The master himself had stepped forward.
“You’ve been searching for me all this time, haven’t you?”
The god of Light and Order, the owner of this cage—Lumenis was now gazing down at Ludger through the open gate.
The sticky, covetous feeling in that gaze made Ludger want to shudder, but he brushed it off like a droplet on his coat, with a cold smile.
“Yes. I’m right here. I’m not hiding anymore. I won’t run.”
At Ludger’s provocation, a wave of displeasure rippled through Lumenis’s presence. That feeling said everything. The vessel meant to contain his power, the Grail itself, dared to bare its will before its creator.
“You wanted to use me as a vessel, erase my mind, and make me your tool to control this cage. But that won’t happen. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Wh-what are you talking about?”
Patricio couldn’t understand a word of it.
Ludger answered with calm precision.
“You saw me as a dangerous existence and tried to eliminate me. I may have inherited the blood of the Holy Sovereign, but my potential was far too great.”
Ludger had been born with immense power. Loved by the gods. A vessel strong enough not to shatter beneath their favor. For the Holy Nation, it should have been a blessing unlike any other. But they did not see it that way. A bastard child born with heavenly talent while the legitimate heirs still lived—how could they hand the Holy Sovereign’s seat to an illegitimate son?
It was not as if the other children lacked talent. The current generation of the Holy Sovereign’s bloodline was among the most gifted in all of Bretus’s history. If they had been born in another era, any one of them could have become the next Holy Sovereign. But among them all, one child—an illegitimate one—was born with talent that overwhelmed the rest completely.
That was dangerous. That had to be removed.
And so countless assassination attempts surrounded Ludger from birth. Being a bastard, they branded his back with a curse, fed him poison, and sent assassins after him without end. The entire royal line became one great beast devouring its own offspring.
Yet he did not die. Instead, he escaped Bretus entirely. Even after he fled, assassins were sent time and time again—but his traces were eventually lost.
Until at last, they found him again—as if guided by divine providence itself.
As if reading Patricio’s very thoughts, Ludger narrowed his eyes.
“You didn’t try to kill me out of faith. You did it out of greed. You were afraid a bastard with too much power would take your place. That was the only reason.”
“T-that’s not true! We acted by the will of the god—!”
“The will of God? Lumenis is watching right now, and you still want to lie? You called me the Grail, didn’t you? You knew what I was meant to be.”
“......!”
Patricio gasped. His trembling eyes fixed on the black hole above Ludger’s head.
“N-no! Lumenis, it’s not true! I swear it’s not!”
“You may have worshipped sincerely once. But the Holy Nation of Bretus gained too much power throughout the continent’s long history. That power corrupted you. You stagnated. You rotted.”
Lumenis knew it too. He was the one who watched over this cage, after all. But he had never chosen to act—perhaps because he couldn’t.
Then one event changed everything—the battle between Saintess Arkenis and the Great Demon Suruna. It had happened here, in this very place, long ago.
“The Church lost the Saintess’s power. To cover it up, they claimed she sacrificed herself in a noble battle against the demon. Then, desperate to keep up appearances, they clung to the Saintess’s lingering fragments of power and continued their endless experiments.”
“So what?”
“The Holy Nation became nothing more than power-hungry parasites. They tried to control even the Saintess, and in the end, they tried to erase the Grail that the god himself had given them. Why? Because it didn’t suit their rule. Because they couldn’t allow a crack in their absolute power.”
But now, all their grand designs had turned to dust.
“The worshippers sought independence from their god and clung to worldly power, while the god lost faith in them and sought to create a new Grail.”
Ludger slowly closed his eyes.
“And now, the god lends power to the worshippers, and the worshippers cry out his name in battle. There’s no irony greater than this.”
Patricio’s face went pale. He wanted to deny it, to say something, but his lips wouldn’t move.
Because he ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) felt it—the gaze.
The gaze that had been fixed on Ludger through the black hole was now on him.
He could not see anything through the darkness, but the sheer presence pressing down on him left no doubt.
No, Lumenis! Please! That’s not true!
He tried to reject Ludger’s words in his heart, but the black desire buried deep inside him could not escape Lumenis’s sight.
The divine gaze turned wrathful.
That wrath—only a fraction of the god’s true emotion, split and diluted countless times over—was still enough to crush Patricio’s heart.
It was no illusion. His heart was literally being squeezed.
“Kh... gghhk!”
He should have screamed, but his lips would not open—as if glued shut.
For the god did not permit even the relief of a dying scream from one who had sinned.
‘No, Lumenis! Lord Lumenis!’
His silent plea was nothing more than the primal thrashing of a mortal facing death.
Lumenis began to withdraw every ounce of divine power he had granted the cardinal. Not only what he had bestowed, but even Patricio’s own original divine energy—and his very life force itself.
It was all sucked upward into the gate.
Patricio’s body crackled with golden lightning. His entire being turned to radiant light particles, breaking apart, scattering, and being absorbed into the black hole.
It all happened in an instant, but Ludger understood. For that single second of time, Patricio had felt it stretch into a century, experiencing his body being torn apart cell by cell.
“To think you’d treat your own follower so cruelly,” Ludger sneered toward the void.
Lumenis, having delivered divine punishment, turned his gaze back to Ludger.
You. Are. Mine.
The words came slowly, heavy with intent.
As if to prove they were not mere sound, white sparks danced around the edges of the black hole. Lumenis was trying to force the gate wider.
Unlike the other gods, who adjusted themselves to the narrow opening, Lumenis sought to expand it—to break through by sheer force.
That was how confident he was in his own power.
“So, you plan to use this opening to widen the gate and impose your will directly.”
Ludger watched the expanding Heavenly Gate without a trace of fear on his face.
“But no matter who you are, even you can’t completely overturn the laws of this world.”
And as if to affirm his words, the expansion of the gate stopped. Then, even faster than it had grown, it began to shrink.
“This cage wasn’t built by you alone,” Ludger said coldly. “You drove out the other gods, stole their names, trampled their divinity—but the world they made still remains.”
The world you can never have.
Thunderous rage echoed from beyond the gate. Ludger began weaving the sealing technique again. Starting from the Third Stage, he calmly reversed the process, lowering the seals.
As he reached the Second Stage, the halo above his head vanished, and the gate shrank rapidly.
Just as it was about to reach the First Stage, a golden bolt of lightning shot straight down from the hole toward Ludger’s crown.
It was Lumenis’s strike—an attempt to brand Ludger with his mark before the gate closed.
Ludger was too focused on reconstructing the seals to react in time.
The bolt was about to pierce him when—
“I can’t just stand by and watch that.”
Suruna swung his sword, deflecting the golden lightning to the side.
The divine bolt lost its target and dissolved into the air.
You... dare...!
Recognizing Suruna, Lumenis roared in fury, but the sealing formation had already restored the Second Stage and was moments away from the First.
“Don’t take it so personally,” Suruna mocked. “I haven’t even started paying you back yet.”
“Don’t worry, Lumenis,” Ludger said as he completed the final seal. “I’ll be the one to come find you next.”
Pah!
The black hole vanished. The crushing presence, the suffocating divinity—all disappeared with it.
“Mm. That stung a bit,” Suruna muttered, glancing at his sword, frowning.
Just a single strike of divine lightning—barely a fragment of Lumenis’s true power—yet to deflect it, he’d had to swing with a force greater than what he’d used to behead the Fire Elemental Lord. Even so, his sword hand had suffered a faint burn.
He hadn’t blocked it head-on but diverted it, and still it left a mark. The wound healed quickly—compared to his past battle with the Saintess, this was nothing more than a scratch.
“Now then.”
With the situation finally settled, Ludger’s eyes, once glowing red, returned to their original blue as he looked at Suruna.
“It’s time we talked.”