Chapter Ninety-Five: The Name of Obadiah

To be frank, the Bearer of Glory had already encountered far too many surprises in the lower district, or perhaps too many shocks.

Setting aside the higher demons said to rival even the Great Swordbearers, springing up one after another like bamboo shoots after rain, the very existence of Ignati, the dark traveler who had crossed into the deepest night, and the Dice House, which seemed to know everything and meddle everywhere, had already been enough to make him realize how vast the world truly was.

And now the cards Dick had laid on the table still left him deeply shaken.

Was this a scion of glory, born to carry glory on his shoulders? A Swordbearer implanted with a holy mark? Or a higher demon disguised as human? Or perhaps one of those so-called avatars of calamity from the rumors of the upper district, beings said to require several Bearers of Glory or Swordbearers to match?

Amy Ulysses did not know the true nature of the Dice House apostle, but that did not prevent him from making a rough assessment of the abilities the handsome youth had displayed.

A word of power, or some ability similar to a word of power.

Of course, it could also be some binding power that controlled pressure and the like, something capable of temporarily restraining all powered armors, disguised as a word of power to obscure the truth.

But the information they had now was far too scant, and this was not the time to probe the essence of his opponent’s power. Amy Ulysses had never forgotten that the powered armors of the House of the Lost were still lurking nearby, waiting to strike.

"Dick," the Bearer of Glory stared at the golden-haired beauty who was struggling to hold on. From his expression and the beads of sweat standing on his brow, it was clear he was under tremendous strain, and the situation was far from optimistic. "How long can you hold?"

The Dice House apostle gave no answer, only shook his head and held up three fingers.

If that meant three seconds, there would be no reason to force himself to hold out at all.

So it was three dozen breaths, or three minutes? Of course, thirty minutes would be even better, but it was still early in the day; daydreaming would not help.

Amy thought this silently, drew a deep breath, and set the girl down from his back. He pulled free the two-handed greatsword strapped behind him, hefted it once, and felt the heavy weight of it in his palms.

Then, in the next instant, his tattered black greatcoat snapped open like the wings of a swallow, and the howl of the wind was left far behind him with effortless ease. Since he could not know whether the time remaining was thirty breaths or three minutes, the only thing to do now was make full use of every last drop of time slipping through his fingers.

The boy began to run.

He was half a head taller than Mia, and the greatsword, nearly as tall as a Swordbearer, was a huge weapon even for him. Fortunately, perhaps thanks to the battle instinct every man is born with, his compatibility with this heavy armament, one he had never used before, was far greater than he had expected. When he swung it, there was not the slightest trace of sluggishness; it moved so smoothly it seemed like an extension of his arm, as natural as though it had always been part of his body.

Horizontal slash, vertical cut—

Within the space of only a few seconds, the Bearer of Glory felled several powered armors as easily as chopping melons and slicing vegetables.

The silver-white cross sword of the Order was indeed a fine thing, no worse in quality than the antique weapons circulating on the market, and its weight was just right: neither so heavy that it impeded his swings nor so light that it lost the cutting power a heavy weapon ought to possess. Against these lumps of iron, it performed far better than the short sword Dark Blood, by more than one rank. If not for the need to carefully avoid the location of the power core when striking, he might have swept them away even faster than this.

Yes, Amy was certain of it: the power core rising from the backs of these steel monsters like camel humps was not their weakness. On the contrary, it was their most powerful weapon. Once detonated, its effective kill radius reached fifteen meters. Within that range, everything living or dead would be reduced to nothing more than unrecognizable metal wreckage, leaving behind only a horrifying hemispherical crater in the ground.

The reason steam power had gradually withdrawn from the stage of history after the end of the age of the ancient kings was that the corruption of darkness and chaos had already penetrated to the level of law itself, causing the objective regularities familiar to humankind to warp in subtle but profound ways. Steam engines became violently unstable; even the slightest mishap could unleash a catastrophe of unbearable cruelty. Though centuries of improvement had made them far better than they were at the onset of the dark descent, their unstable and ferocious nature remained unchanged. In other words, one careless mistake in battle could trigger a suicidal explosion, dragging every ally and enemy nearby into its blast and granting them equal destruction.

What an utterly dreadful design!

Amy Ulysses expressed his fierce indignation at such an inhuman contrivance.

As for how he knew this so well, the Bearer of Glory declined to answer.

After all, being vaporized while still alive was not a pleasant experience at all.

It counted among the worst ways the boy had ever died. Well, do not ask about the others.

Shaking his head to toss those unpleasant thoughts out of mind for the moment, Amy continued his slaughter of the restrained powered armors, all the while calculating time in the midst of swinging his greatsword.

Thirty seconds had passed. Of the twenty-odd steel shells from the beginning, only a handful remained, and the Dice House apostle still maintained his binding over them. It sounded as though victory was already decided, but in truth it was entirely, disastrously, and utterly wrong.

Yes, the first wave of enemies had basically been crippled, but before an enemy that had fully exploited the advantage of its home ground, their resistance was meaningless. In the span of those dozens of breaths, another batch of powered armors had arrived on the battlefield and completed their warm-up.

Not many, only a dozen or so, not yet to the point of being invincible.

But the problem was that the enemy reinforcements were nowhere near their end.

Damn it!

The Bearer of Glory had finally come to understand how weak individual might was before the strength of a collective.

But so what? They still had to keep fighting.

If it came to it, he would have no choice but to unseal Dark Blood.

Amy Ulysses was not without resolve; he simply did not want that resolve to come so cheaply. The Sword of Flame and Light used by the ancients to cleave through dark chaos did indeed possess a mysterious power beyond the limits of human understanding, but the boy knew full well that this power did not belong to him. It was only borrowed through the blood of the ancients within his body. If he relied on it blindly, he would become a slave to power and lose his potential for growth.

Yet the present situation seemed to have reached the point where the final trump card had to be revealed in a desperate fight to the death, leaving him no room for further hesitation.

Dodging the steel giants’ cleaving strikes while struggling through a choice that was not, in fact, all that difficult—if nothing unexpected happened, the Bearer of Glory would, in roughly three to five breaths, cast aside the hesitation and wavering in his heart, murmur the secret key to unsealing, and awaken the Sword of Flame and Light, already rusted by the long passage of time.

But just then, something unexpected happened.

Within the encirclement of the powered armors, the boy launched a fierce counterattack and split one of the steel giants cleanly in two. The pilot inside happened, just happened, to be severed at the waist—but no blood spurted out. All Amy Ulysses saw was a blaze of searing fire.

A living life vanished just like that.

No, perhaps the phrase living life was never meant to apply to "it" in the first place.

The Bearer of Glory saw with his own eyes that the warrior piloting the powered armor, after being killed, turned into a mass of flame, a flame identical to the one that had once been used to send them into Obadiah’s body.

Note carefully: it turned into flame. It was not devoured by flame.

The boy was absolutely certain of that.

In other words, from the very beginning, their enemy had not been the House of the Lost at all, but only Obadiah.

The fiend of fire, Obadiah.

Since the true nature of the enemy had been identified, the next thing to determine was our own hidden card.

Amy Ulysses dodged the trampling of the pack of giants like a little mouse. Though he could hardly be called flustered, the process was certainly dangerous. Even so, he did not remain idle. He split off a portion of his concentration and shouted toward the handsome youth outside the battlefield.

"Dick, answer me." His voice came in broken bursts amid the thunder of earth and iron. Clearly, this chaos was no place for a conversation. "Is your ability a word of power?"

Without waiting for the Dice House apostle to answer, he shouted on: "Listen carefully, this is important!"

"No," after a brief pause, the golden-haired, green-eyed beauty gave his reply. "Not a word of power in the usual sense, but an absolute command akin to one."

"Then tell me." After quite some time, Amy found enough attention to ask a second question, with flames and explosions naturally providing the accompaniment. "What limits your ability? The number of targets, their names, or both?"

"The subject of the action, and the number of objects under restraint." The Dice House apostle seemed to have guessed the Bearer of Glory’s intention, and his answer was exceptionally precise. "Of course, there are other limiting factors as well. For example, I can only use one command at a time. While a command remains in effect, any words I speak will be treated as the terminating token that ends it."

"Good." Amy Ulysses shouted at the top of his lungs. "Then can you command Obadiah?"

"I need to capture its existence with my sight. If I issue an order toward an abstract body such as the wall or floor around us, the effect my ability can produce will be very slight." Dick shook his head. "And even if I made Obadiah submit to me, we would still have to face these steel monsters. As the demon lord who conquered Obadiah, Ignati still holds authority above Obadiah’s."

"For now, don’t worry about so much." As yet another batch of powered armors joined the fray, the Bearer of Glory’s situation became increasingly dire. "Just listen to me—these iron lumps in front of us are all Obadiah’s avatars. Use them as the basis for an absolute command directed at Obadiah. It might work."

A little later, the boy’s words—Please—I’m counting on you—came through amid the explosions.

"Ah, you’ve asked me to help. What can I do?" With all the clues now fully sorted out, the Dice House apostle also eased the tension in his chest. Then, with those clear eyes like green gemstones, he gazed at the powered armors not far away and issued the absolute command in a low, steady voice.

"Obadiah, submit to me!"

Invisible sound waves spread outward. Time itself seemed to come to a halt at that instant. All the steel giants stopped their movements as if a pause button had been pressed, and then—

They knelt in perfect unison.

"I salute you, my master."

A metallic voice came from within each powered armor, and before them, the somewhat diminutive handsome youth looked down on them with a superior gaze and gave a slight nod in acknowledgment.

Thus, the crisis was averted.

Thus, the balance of victory and defeat was reversed.