Chapter 370: A Final Farewell (1)
The flames engulfing Puppet City raged on ..
All that remained were ashes and ruins.
Just hours ago, this place had been one of the most beautiful cities in the heart of the corruption known as the Ultras.
Now, it had become a savage inferno, burning without end.
Scattered limbs and shattered puppet parts littered the streets.
Streams of blue blood flowed endlessly.
The clowns kept laughing without pause—
And the puppets kept crawling forward with murderous red eyes.
All of it aimed at one person ..
Frey Starlight, who continued fighting with bloodshot eyes filled with madness.
With each slash that tore through more of them, Frey felt his body slowly breaking apart.
His chest ached violently ..
Forced to breathe in the toxic smoke and gases rising from the fires around him.
His body was pushed into a constant cycle of regeneration—
Because Frey refused to fall.
He refused to stop fighting.
Even though he had become strong enough to maintain Blood Form far longer than ever before ..
This time, he had gone too far.
Surrounded on all sides by burning, frenzied puppets—
They lunged at him, desperate to drag him down into death with them.
He could no longer see the clown that had swallowed Clana.
The creature had long since vanished behind the relentless tide of puppets crawling toward him.
What kind of army is this?
How many puppets did Simon create in this cursed city?
Frey wondered—
But he no longer cared.
All he wanted was to annihilate them all—
And reach her as fast as possible.
After fighting for what felt like an eternity in a battlefield forged from hell ..
His swords had grown unbearably heavy.
Each swing drained the last remaining breath from his lungs.
His body barely responded to the desperate commands his mind gave it.
But he forced it to keep going.
And that will alone—
Made him into something more terrifying than the puppets attacking him.
It was a brutal struggle in every sense of the word.
...
...
...
A human’s life is short.
And here, on the land of the Ultras—
It becomes even shorter.
Clana Starlight had lived her entire life as a core member of the prestigious Starlight family.
You could say she did whatever she pleased, using the privileges she was born with to achieve what her peers could not.
But her life had always been... empty.
Colorless.
A dull gray.
Perhaps the only thing that added a hint of color to that hollow existence ...
Was Frey himself.
When Clana Starlight opened her eyes again—
Her vision was red, her blood clouding her sight.
She felt... nothing.
She couldn’t see clearly ...
Trapped inside the clown’s belly.
She couldn’t move a muscle—
In fact, she couldn’t feel a single part of her body.
And when she managed to tilt her blood-soaked head ..
She was greeted by the sight of her own mutilated body, Pierced by dozens of iron-like thorny teeth.
No part of her was left untouched.
But she felt no pain—
Which made it clear she was entirely paralyzed.
It wasn’t long before another wave of nausea came ..
And her fading consciousness slipped even further.
Her bloody face went dark once again.
Clana knew she wouldn’t survive.
She was ready to let everything go.
But the death she had waited for—never came.
Instead, she was left in endless darkness.
And as her sight vanished, a strange melody touched her ears.
Music.
Soft. Mysterious.
It did nothing but heighten her sense of delirium.
She still remembered everything—
How she turned back the moment she saw that massive explosion,
Following a gut feeling she couldn’t ignore.
In the end, she had arrived just in time—
Saving Frey, who had won the battle... but lost the war.
She felt sorry for him.
She knew how much he had suffered to protect her.
Ever since they ended up stranded together in this land of death,
Frey had always stood before her—like a shield.
At first, she was happy.
She thought, perhaps, he might return the feelings she had started to harbor for him...
But the more she came to understand the mysterious man named Frey ..
The more she realized the truth ran deeper than that.
Seeing that tortured soul fighting alone,
Unbothered by pain, unafraid of death,
Bleeding every time he moved—
A soul that longed to escape the hell of life and rest in the peace of death...
Clana didn’t want him to end that way.
So, she was happy...
That she could be the one to save him in the end.
Between her and Frey ...
She wished for his survival.
She wished he would live—
So that maybe, one day, he could find a shred of happiness in this wretched world.
If he could just have that...
She would be satisfied.
Those were her thoughts,
As she slowly sank into darkness ..
That strange melody still playing beside her ear.
Her consciousness drifted further away,
As she began to hallucinate.
She saw countless things floating around her—
Faces she hadn’t seen in a very long time.
All of them stared at her as the music played on...
Among them,
She saw an old man, smiling gently at her .. Tipping his hat as if to greet her.
Clana didn’t understand any of it.
Her body, her mind ..
None of it made sense anymore.
The only thing that brought her back to awareness .. Was the shaking of the clown’s body ..
As it kept fleeing...
From Frey.
She had wanted to die and end it quickly.
But no matter how long she waited—death never came.
Even with her broken, ruined body...
Unconscious. Drenched in darkness.
Time passed at a terrifying speed, trapping her within that strange, haunting music...
Hours that felt both endlessly long and shockingly short blurred together—
Until her consciousness finally returned to reality.
Slowly...
A faint beam of light pierced through the darkness as the clown’s belly convulsed and was torn open by a black sword.
The slash widened into a massive rupture, and the clown collapsed, dead at last, after being struck again and again.
It took her a few moments to fully comprehend what had happened.
With wide, stunned eyes—
Clana stared at Frey, who stood over the clown’s corpse, breathing heavily, his face smeared with blood, his body weighed down by wounds.
"Frey..."
She spoke his name unconsciously.
He didn’t reply.
He simply reached in and pulled her out of the broken clown whose eternal grin had finally vanished.
Without hesitation, Frey clutched her tightly .
And sprinted away from the battlefield.
When Clana glanced around her, she could only stare in disbelief at the devastated wasteland behind them ..
The battlefield, still burning, flooded with the corpses of countless puppets Frey had slain over hours of relentless fighting.
Somehow—
He had caught up to them with a body already destroyed,
Fought through all those puppets without rest, And reached her—
Pulling her from the belly of the giant clown.
But the cost had been immense.
Frey could barely move.
That he was still conscious at all... was a miracle.
"Frey... I "
"Don’t say anything... huff."
Breathing raggedly—
Frey kept his gaze locked forward as he carried her, running toward the burning city’s outer edge.
"We’re getting out of here."
He spoke with resolve ..
And a strange peace on his face.
A peace born of the fact that he’d finally reached her.
That he had saved her—after everything.
Clana didn’t know what to say.
She simply remained silent, letting him carry her forward.
But for some reason...
A strange sense of wrongness crept over her.
When she looked down at her body—
She was shocked to find it completely intact.
No injuries. No blood. No damage.
Even though she clearly remembered waking up inside the clown’s belly—
Mangled beyond recognition.
Somehow, her destroyed body had been restored.
As sensation returned to her limbs—
A cold, dark feeling began growing inside her.
Reaching up to touch her throbbing head—
Clana froze when she felt something strange.
Looking closer ..
She realized that it was her hand.
Or rather ..
A mechanical hand.
Perfectly attached to her arm, in place of the one she had lost to the clown.
It felt so real that she hadn’t even noticed it ...
Until now.
Staring at the artificial hand ..
The bitter unease inside her grew stronger.
Something was very, very wrong.