Chapter Ninety-Seven: Farewell, Ignati

Behind the abyssal dark lay the utmost brilliance.

The radiant figure raised a hand to shield his eyes from the faintly blinding white glare. His gaze skimmed across the limitless expanse of pure white, finally coming to rest for a moment on an inconspicuous little black speck before he stepped forward.

The boy’s pace was not fast, yet the distance between him and that foreign point on the white canvas closed at an inconceivable speed. At first it was nothing more than a negligible black dot; after three or five steps, it became a vague, blurred human silhouette before his eyes; and a few steps later still, the old man’s sinister face, furrowed and mottled with age, had already emerged before him.

“Mr. Ignati,” Amy Ulysses came to a stop. There was not the slightest trace of hostility on his face; instead, he was calm and solemn, like a boundless sea before a storm. “Long time no see.”

“It has only been a few days,” the demonized face forced out a twisted, ghastly smile that somehow carried an eerie hint of friendliness. “And yet time has already left such clear marks upon you. Sometimes one cannot help but sigh that youth itself is a young person’s greatest capital.”

“No,” the boy said, despite the enemy before him, with no sign of any intention to test himself against him. He merely shook his head in earnest, and in a low, forceful voice stated his view. “I think it should be life.”

“True enough.” As though recalling something, the old man showed a look of reminiscence, then let out a long, faint sigh. “Once a man is dead, nothing remains.”

The Radiant pressed his lips together and lifted his eyes. His dark pupils shone like gemstones: “Then what you are considering now is... what to leave behind?”

“Mm.” The wrinkled, bluish-purple face, set against the pure-white world, carried a somber gravity. The traveler returned from darkness nodded and said evenly, “The older one grows, the closer one comes to death, the more one fears that omnipresent darkness and chaos, and the more one wants to leave something behind in this world.”

“Even infamy?” Amy Ulysses raised an eyebrow.

The old man looked at him, regarded him with eyes that glimmered with a faint green light like a beast lurking in the dark, hungry for prey, and regarded the reflection of himself in the boy’s black pupils. Then he paused for two or three breaths before giving his answer in a voice so calm that not even the slightest ripple stirred: “Even infamy.”

The Radiant fell silent.

Yet the demonized traveler noticed none of it and only continued in his own way, “Whether it is infamy or sin, if I can truly exhaust my remaining worth before I burn out completely, I do not care what role I play in the course of history.”

“That sounds rather noble,” Amy said, though there was no warmth in his tone.

“Only a license for the vile.” The old man sighed. “People always find many reasons and excuses for their actions, using them to justify what should not be justified. Even at my age, I am no exception. I, too, wish to give my mad acts a dignified pretext, even if to many people that is neither fair nor just.”

“Then what noble excuse are you using to disguise your despicable deeds?” The Radiant looked at him without averting his gaze, something stirring in his dark eyes. “Do you intend to take words like, ‘This wicked man opened the barrier between the lower district and the mist district, causing tens of millions of human beings to die in terror and turning most of Hemtica into a living hell,’ and make them your epitaph?”

“If that is how you wish to do it,” the traveler who had returned from darkness said with a shrug, “I do not mind.”

“So you really are insane.” The boy did not hide the disappointment in his eyes. Though he had no hero complex and could not be said to trust him all that much, he had indeed, at first, regarded him as a senior on whom some limited reliance could be placed. “Just as the House of Dice said, the corruption of demonization has warped your perception of the common world.”

“Demonization?” The old man merely snorted at that. “That is nothing more than the adaptive evolution produced by humanity under the erosion of chaos. If you insist on saying otherwise, then I had already gone mad the moment I set foot in the Black Zone of the deepest night, and, after glimpsing the truth of the world within that absolute taboo, I had become utterly, irretrievably insane.”

“The truth of the world...” Amy could not help but hesitate. It was clearly nothing more than the ramblings of a madman, the mutterings of a lunatic, yet impossibly, a surge of yearning and joy rose in him, like that of a traveler who, after trudging through the desert for three days and three nights without a drop of water, suddenly lifts his head and sees an oasis.

“What exactly is it?”

The traveler returned from the depths of the deepest night lifted his eyelids with a touch of surprise. “You want to know?”

“Yes.” The Radiant did not hide his desire in the slightest.

“Unfortunately... I cannot tell you.” There was not much emotion on the old face. No joy or anger could be read from those green eyes. He only said, in that same low and steady voice, “I could tell anyone else, but not you. It would destroy you, Ulysses.”

He shook his head. “Even if there is only the slightest possibility, I cannot take that risk, nor am I allowed to. For this world, scarred and broken beyond recognition, you are more important than you know.”

“Is that so?” The Radiant clenched his fist, then loosened it. “Because of Ulysses?”

His voice was remarkably calm.

“If that is what you think.” The lost traveler neither admitted it nor denied it. Yet in that ambiguous atmosphere, the boy seemed to have found the answer to the riddle.

“I see.” He said this, the black pupils hidden beneath his broken fringe impossible to read. “Then let us return to the matter at hand. Even knowing the answer, I want to ask you again: do you really intend to open the barrier between the lower district and the mist district, and let those higher demons that drift endlessly through the fog, forever hungering for fresh flesh, into the lower district, so that blood and slaughter may raise a triumphant hymn beneath the silent night?”

“That is right.”

Not even the slightest hesitation remained.

“The reason need not be asked again, I suppose.” Having received a definitive answer from the old man for the second time, Amy Ulysses did not continue. He simply looked deeply at the old man before him, the demonized old man. “Then, is there anything else you want to say before the end?”

“Regrettably,” the traveler shook his head, and there was not the faintest trace of regret in his eyes, “no.”

Almost the instant the words fell, the Radiant burst into motion—

Like wind, like light, like lightning. The distance of only a few meters vanished in the blink of an eye. The red-and-black shortsword split the void like a long rainbow, and the dazzling blade-light capable of severing steel and iron had nearly already touched the old man’s clouded green eyes.

And then—

Though it is called and then, in truth it was only 0.012 seconds after everything had begun.

The withered traveler from darkness extended a hand dried like a corpse and covered in mutated scales, and at the critical instant seized the sword that was about to pierce straight through his brain.

A foul stench spread.

Viscous blood, thick and nearly black with red, ran down both sides of the blade.

“Weak.”

With a brief, clear appraisal, the five fingers curled, forming a fist. His upper body leaned forward, without any flourish at all, and a straight punch struck directly at the face.

Fast. Simply fast!

A blur flashed before Amy’s eyes. Before he could even be astonished by the dark traveler’s physique, the furious wind raised by the punch pressure had already scattered the stray strands of his hair.

No way to dodge.

In that instant, the boy made his judgment. Before his brain could even react, his body had already moved first.

Five fingers spread like a net.

Then, as though heaven and earth themselves were colliding.

His bones gave a crisp, dislocated crack, and the Radiant was forced back again and again—only after the third step did he barely manage to steady himself. But the expected stalemate did not come. After only the faintest pause, the boy simultaneously released both his right hand, which had been gripping the sword, and his left hand, which had been clenched into a fist, and then, without warning, his body toppled straight backward like an iron plank.

The next instant, the air was cleaved clean in two.

A sweep as sharp as a razor.

Even with a battle instinct that was almost cheating, Amy’s evasive movement was still extremely strained. The abrupt motion completely shattered the body’s self-protection mechanism, and the tremor from his back left him with the disorienting feeling that his internal organs were all shifting out of place—yet that was not a reason to give up.

Bracing himself with his back hand and driving power through his waist, the Radiant sprang up from the ground.

Then—

Retreat! Retreat again and again!

He retreated to buy time for his left hand to recover its fighting strength; he retreated to disrupt the enemy’s control of the pace.

This was a strategic withdrawal.

The boy narrowed his eyes, not daring to let his gaze leave the traveler returned from darkness for even an instant.

But the other man did not move.

More precisely, he did not pursue.

With a series of cracking sounds like bones grinding against one another, the old man’s face as hideous as a demon merely loosened his somewhat stiff joints. He lifted his hand, looked at the shortsword embedded halfway into his palm, shook his head, pulled it from the flesh, and casually tossed it to the ground.

“Not bad post-meal exercise,” he commented, an inscrutable smile appearing on his ferocious features. “It has been a very long time since I felt this happy. As expected, if one goes too long without moving, one starts to rust like a machine.”

Amy Ulysses gave no reply, and even the gaze fixed on him did not slacken in the slightest.

The enemy was stronger; he was weaker.

That was an obvious fact. As the weaker side, he had never enjoyed the luxury of the strong.

So he simply kept the enemy before him locked in his sight while making his left hand repeat the motion of clenching, then relaxing, then clenching again, setting the dislocated bones back into place, waiting quietly for his body to recover, waiting for his condition to return.

“What is it? Already afraid? Already chilled to the bone?” During that seemingly interminable wait, the elderly traveler returned from the deepest night did not move a single step from start to finish. He merely watched the boy before him, cautious as a startled rabbit, with those emerald eyes and teased him with considerable ease. “You should know that time is on my side. If you cannot take down this great demon king in time, then all the lower district can look forward to is...”

He paused.

“Blood and slaughter.”

“Though I do not know the reason, it seems you are quite eager to fight me.” After a brief silence, the Radiant lifted his head, the darkness in his eyes as profound as darkness itself. “Still, that is fine. Let us continue the battle we left unfinished.”

A smile split his lips, and then he spoke the old man’s name.

“Ignati—”