< Glory did it!! >
After Summerneken died, the Academy’s professors felt complicated emotions.
It felt like they had climbed a gigantic mountain.
They had tasted their limits several times in frostbite and cold snaps and finally succeeded in summiting, but many comrades died on the way up.
They were overwhelmed that they had survived, and grief coexisted among them.
Only, many sought out Dante Hiakapo.
“......”
Meanwhile, after calming Eve, Dante rejoined the fight. Even after Summerneken died, many hornless demons were still moving.
Not long after, he lost the light and fell, crashing somewhere on the ground below.
He clutched his chest and panted. Some capillaries in his sinus had burst. Blood began to pour from his nose and mouth.
A common [Overoutput] symptom.
But if it differed from usual, it was that he had been overoutput for some time already. His mana tank of 8,200 had dropped to 5,000 in the fight with Quan and Ultra-Bomiteka. He came here and, fighting one-horned demons, it already hit 0, and after that he kept wringing mana to kill Summerneken.
It would come out to around -4,000 or so. If this were a game, it was [Overoutput] that would already have killed him. But now, he was somehow still alive.
“......”
No.
Maybe not.
‘......’
From the moment one becomes a Constellation, the flesh is reconstituted and you gain a body of superhumanity without inefficiency. That is why he was barely breathing.
Muscle recovers from damage, but excessive damage brings loss.
Dante already recognized he had pushed himself far beyond the proper degree.
‘Quan......’
In the end, that bastard was the problem.
For now, he raised his body. And then he looked for Eve. While medics everywhere were carrying away the wounded, his staggering steps were urgent.
It was already a moment of heightened tension from the war with the demons.
If her demonized appearance was seen by outsiders, it would be intolerable.
*
Meanwhile, there was also someone looking for such a Dante.
Rebecca.
Even after blasting great magic in succession and receiving major wounds in the fight with the hornless demons, she was somehow able to move.
“......”
Rebecca panted as she searched for Dante because she wanted to tell him immediately what she had done.
I accomplished what you wanted.
I defeated your enemy.
Such a feeling kept Rebecca’s injured leg moving.
“Y-Your Highness! You’re bleeding badly!”
“Let go....”
“You must go to the infirmary!”
“Let—let me go... Don’t piss me off....”
Somehow, after shaking off professors and medics and running several times.
After twisting her ankle and pitching forward to smash her face into the ground once.
Even so, she stood and searched for Dante.
Now, the fact that he was nowhere to be seen left her helplessly anxious like an abandoned puppy.
The mistress of mana read the flow of the world. Rebecca spotted Dante’s back beyond a small hill of building debris created by the battle.
Smiling, she hurried diligently up to him.
There, Dante was lifting Eve in his arms, worried.
“......”
Rebecca had to stop.
A child hated from youth grows up sensitive to people’s expressions. Rebecca was like that.
Such a Rebecca remembered clearly. Dante Hiakapo had never shown eyes that sad.
“......”
As she stared like a fool, Eve opened her eyes.
She winced as if in pain, but when her gaze met Dante’s, she smiled pure white. It was that smile Rebecca once envied and hated.
Then the sorrow on Dante’s face also eased considerably. A smile spread across the man’s face.
In other words, everyone was smiling.
“......”
At that moment, Eve blinked and tried to turn this way. Rebecca hastily ducked and hid behind a stone wall.
Once again, she felt like a monstrosity.
So then... what should she call this feeling?
Rebecca found herself thinking she wished the world would end. Hero Party. Demon King. Whatever. Now it all felt pointless—a hollowness.
However, a few minutes later, three Constellations abruptly rushed in and attacked Dante Hiakapo.
The wounded Dante Hiakapo forcibly squeezed out light, shot into the air, and counterattacked, and then, at last, when one of their blades pierced Dante’s back and burst out through the heart in front, Rebecca’s thoughts flipped over.
“......Dante!!”
She screamed and ran out.
After that strike, the Constellations vanished.
Dante Hiakapo, too, squeezing out the very last of the very last of his strength, chased them, and then fell like a streaking meteor somewhere along a ridgeline.
*
There had been an attack by Constellations.
Dante knew who they were. They were neutral Constellations who had had no particular point of contact with him. Constellations by nature respect one another while keeping distance and guarding their domains, so originally they were ones he should never have touched until the day he died.
In fact, by killing numerous one-horned demons—by the death of a two-horned demon, no less—there had been another explosive stat surge for Dante, and at present he recognized he had reached single-digit rank even without Abraxas’s power.
He succeeded in breaking the limbs of the ambushing Constellations one by one...
Even so, his injuries were severe and he couldn’t properly respond.
At the end of it, his heart was half cut.
Dante had fallen on the ridgeline and sat with his back against a large tree.
As he swallowed and let out wheezing breaths in repetition, he thought.
“......”
It would be a lie to say he hadn’t foreseen it.
From the moment he saw Quan earlier, he had a feeling.
Because he knew at whose side that bastard served and whom he aided.
“......Kai, ser.”
Along his fading breath, a dry voice flowed out.
From beyond the woods, a young man limping with a staff approached him.
“I’m sorry, Professor.”
“......”
“You’ve become too strong now and a preposterously dangerous being. If not now, it was something # Nоvеlight # we could never do for eternity.”
“......”
Dante looked at Kaiser Truman’s face. Like the day they first met, it was an expression whose inner thoughts could not be read.
And now even the 【Script】 did not rise up.
“...Is this... the righteousness... you found.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“......”
“What you desire is the complete dominion of this world, is it not?”
Dante closed his eyes.
And then answered calmly.
“......Yes.”
If there was a purpose common to Abraxas and himself, the two of them,
it was “a world where peace has come.”
Abraxas, in his essence, was a figure who moved to save the world. He was one who dug through the past to identify in advance and improve the various “errors” of this hell-difficulty crookedness.
Conversely, he himself was an ordinary person who, as a gamer, threw himself into the given task. This world paved with trials and rewards kept driving him to the front line, ordered him to train warriors, and at the end hoped he would seize peace.
In that process, Kaiser, who had been moved by him, attacked him.
Was it betrayal?
It was not. At this point, he had only been injured enough not to die.
Rather, Kaiser was giving him a gift.
A quasi-permanent impairment of might.
That was the gift Kaiser handed him.
The reason the guy made this judgment was that he had gone a step ahead of him and seen the “ending” of Heaven’s Way.
Now.
Kaiser placed his staff in front of him and bowed his head.
“......Will you take me to the sanctuary.”
The cripple rose and came closer.
“Yes. My god.”
Kaiser slowly came, supported the wounded professor, and helped him up. Leaning on the staff. The formerly weedy body was gone; he had become much stronger.
Then a huge, aged dragon descended from the sky and bowed its head before the two. Sitting there was Song Chien∞.
“Give us a ride.”
At the order of Song Chien, who loves mortals, the Competitiveness Constellation↑ supported the two and set them upon the dragon’s head.
A dragon sick and near death, but with strength enough to fly.
Thus the dragon flew and arrived at Hiaka’s royal castle.
The palace interior was thrown into an uproar by a dragon that suddenly appeared in the dead of night, but they did not care.
With a body slightly recovered, Dante got down in front of it and staggered as he walked.
To Setian’s sanctuary.
One step.
And another step.
This was the last place that held Abraxas’s secret and the final point where his memory cut off.
Another step into its depths.
Dante Hiakapo closed his eyes.
“......”
There is such a thing as context. If what began in front continues to the end and meshes, a person can quietly infer the past and future by it.
It was a fact Dante had also quietly surmised.
That an all-time Constellation named Abraxas vanished all of a sudden. The work he had to do while throwing away his own personality. The body that, in the end, was not discarded.
And the strangely, residually internalized, abnormally high comprehensive combat power that remained even after removing personality and might entirely.
< ⧉ Measured Comprehensive Combat Power: 3,314,252 >
< ⧉ Realized Value: 401,227 >
< ⧉ Inherent Value: 2,913,025 >
Yes, this.
That preposterous number that placed Dante Hiakapo proudly at rank 1.
What the 2.91 million meant, he had once assumed was Abraxas’s might.
But it was not.
The 2.91 million was the Demon King’s combat power.
Immediately upon entering the sanctuary, Dante realized this sanctuary was not “Setian’s sanctuary,” but “Abraxas’s sanctuary.”
Before Setian had grasped this place, Abraxas had first done some deed here.
Abraxas, who had lured out the Reaper Constellation Ω in the past and obtained the seed of the Lord of Eternal Return—he could by no means find a way to destroy it.
In this place, where mana is amplified more than anywhere in this world—in this sanctuary—he came to think of one solution.
To seize the darkness and confine it, to set it within the light. In other words, to seal it inside his own body.
“......”
When Dante opened his eyes, he saw a mirror before him.
Now he realized where the Demon King was.
***
A week passed after the war with Summerneken ended.
The Kingdom of Hiaka was in an uproar. With the movement to restore the half-destroyed Academy and to settle the situation, many people were wracking their brains.
Neighboring Kreutz, unable to read the room, let the ambition of war curl up in smoke, but, out of the blue, six Constellations began to protect the Kingdom of Hiaka.
The wounded Hero Party and professors diligently received treatment. Still, even having come this far, they thought fights with the demons, including the Demon King War, remained ahead.
Dante Hiakapo left the house in the capital and returned to his house in the professors’ wing.
And then lay on his small bed and waited for the “time.”
< Time until the contract of 「Curse-Suit♠」 expires: 30 minutes >
In the end, a contract staked with one’s life, by law, cannot be revoked.
About thirty minutes from now, Dante Hiakapo will die.
Of course, he had prepared the 「Rune of Revival♥」, so it would not be a complete death.
Only... since he had taken the Demon King’s seed into himself, he did not know what would unfold from here.
An interaction was about to begin that even he did not know.
In the midst of this, he couldn’t know how fortunate it was that his body was as “declined” as possible. It was like taking a gun from the hands of an old man with dementia.
— Kaiser.
— Yes, my god....
— If everything ends well, will you have a drink with me? Since we’re both people who’ve lived hard.
— ......
The guy’s face, brimming over, was quite a sight.
“......”
Dante lay on the bed and waited for the end.
Death did not frighten him.