Chapter 535: Runes of Twentyfold Wrath (1)
on its fringes, a single young man lay, his body propped against a jagged shard of debris left by the carnage.
After Phoenix Sunlight had thrown him far from the fighting, Frey Starlight had remained motionless for a long time, unconscious in the wake of his earlier frenzy.
But that stillness did not last.
Despite everything he had endured ..the pain, the bloodshed, the brutal battles ..his eyes opened once more from behind the black mask.
...
...
...
—Frey Starlight’s POV—
"Ahh... what curse has befallen me now?"
The moment I returned to reality, a violent wave of searing pain tore through me.
It was as if every wound I had sustained until now had been waiting for this exact moment to hit me all at once.
It felt like my mind would burst from the sheer flood of nerve signals my body was sending.
I couldn’t move a single muscle. My body felt as if it had lost every bone—like I was nothing more than a pile of flesh and skin.
"What... happened to me?" I muttered in confusion.
It took only seconds before I noticed the cursed battle raging nearby.
I recognized many of the powerful auras clashing there, and slowly, my memory of what happened before I blacked out began to return.
"I can’t believe I lost control of myself..."
Forcing myself through the pain, I dragged my body until I could lean against the trunk of a dead tree ..unknowingly placing myself in direct view of the battlefield.
The last thing I remembered was trying to test my strength against Dragoth.
Then, everything flipped upside down, and I found myself transformed into a mindless killing machine, attacking everything in my path.
That loss of control wasn’t an accident.
Yes, my mind was unstable... but breaking me required far more than that.
It felt as though my body had betrayed me.
Instinctively, I pulled back my tattered clothes, exposing bare skin to assess my current condition.
The wounds and injuries had healed at a visibly accelerated rate thanks to my regeneration ability... but alongside the blood, another color crept beneath my skin.
A deep, pitch-black hue—something unnatural that had taken root within me.
"Wesker’s Shadow..."
That cursed thing was the direct cause of what happened earlier.
It was the reason I had lost control of myself in such a pitiful manner.
I found myself cursing under my breath.
"If I keep losing control of myself—and my power like this, it’s only a matter of time before it ends in disaster..."
My current state was the perfect example.
I couldn’t put this off any longer.
"I have to deal with it as soon as possible."
But before that, there was another pressing matter in front of me.
The war was still raging on, and a brutal clash that could decide its outcome was unfolding right before my eyes.
Four against three ..it was far too close to call.
"In this condition... there’s no way I can support them."
Fighting was out of the question; I could barely lift a hand at this point.
So instead, I opened my system interface, activating the Third-Person Player’s Perspective.
I’d been so fixated on what was happening in front of me that I’d forgotten about the ones I’d left behind.
Somewhere far from my current position ..tens of kilometers away ..another battle had erupted, one that brought with it its own flood of death and destruction.
Diving into the third-person view, my consciousness drifted away, peeling back the fog of war to reveal the true state of the battlefield.
...
...
...
Far from the slaughter between the SS+-class monsters...
In the rearguard, a completely different kind of battle was unfolding.
Through the blood-soaked mist that blanketed everything, the Imperial soldiers stumbled blindly, unable to locate their enemy ..let alone engage them.
They had held their ground well at first; Snow Lionheart had managed to clash evenly with the Nightmare Lord—the Cosmos.
As for the accursed Ludwig, they had dealt with him—somehow—by uniting their forces and trapping him.
But just when the Imperial troops thought they had a chance, the mist surged back once more.
And this time... dozens of horrors from hell itself crept forth, threatening to swallow them whole.
No one knew where that swarm of Mist Stalkers had come from, slipping like phantoms into the battlefield. There were dozens of them, each one projecting a powerful illusion that ensnared almost everyone in its grip.
The Mist Stalkers’ haze, mixed with that of the Cosmos...
It was a blend that condemned hundreds of soldiers to an eternal nightmare from which they would never awaken.
Among the Imperial ranks, a lone blue-haired girl staggered through the chaos, everyone around her already fallen victim to the illusion.
Clutching a jagged, sharp rock, she trembled violently before stabbing it into her own flesh—using the pain to tear away the suffocating fog that threatened to strip her consciousness away.
In that way, Celene barely managed to stay awake, remembering Frey Starlight’s warning about the Mist Stalkers from before:
"Close your eyes, and make pain your refuge."
It was the only way to survive the Stalkers’ illusions.
But in the heart of this hell, Celene couldn’t help but wonder... what could she possibly do, blind and bleeding by her own hand?
No matter how she turned it over in her mind, despair was all that filled her.
And in that moment of doubt, she made a grave mistake.
She opened her eyes.
And there it was ..looming right before her.
A foul, hideous thing with a twisted face and an elongated body shrouded in a black robe.
One of the very Mist Stalkers they used to frighten children in the old horror tales.
Its maw stretched open, fangs jagged and dripping, as it prepared to swallow her whole.
Celene froze in place, unable to move a muscle. She was about to die, but she refused to believe it.
"I won’t die... he showed me the future..."
Trying to convince herself, she repeated the words over and over.
She had seen a future where she stood beside him.
But the Stalker’s gaping mouth had already closed in, ready to crush her body in a single bite.
With death mere inches away, Celene’s will cracked for a heartbeat, surrendering her belief to the primal fear of dying.
But the end she feared never came.
At the last second, a massive beam of azure aura slammed into the Stalker, blasting it away.
The nightmare creature tumbled across the ground, howling in fury as it tried to regain its footing ..only for a colossal block of ice to crash down from the heavens, burying it completely.
A moment later, bolts of lightning and pillars of fire rained from nowhere, obliterating both the ice and the nightmare beneath it.
Celene was left stunned by the sheer destructive force on display... until a voice she’d never heard before snapped her back to reality.