HPDBC Chapter 242: Staring into the Abyss
Chapter 242: Staring into the Abyss
His eyes narrowed with a strange feeling inside his chest. Despite their knights winning without casualties and effort, this tight feeling in his chest made him doubt the situation.
'Something feels wrong.'
Asura slashed across his chest, killing another enemy soldier. His blade tore the black leech apart.
However, the heavy feeling in his chest only grew larger.
"Asura, this battle is almost over. We're going to win!"
Akkrum looked at Asura, holding a bloody weapon with a wide smile on his tired face. There were traces of blood and flesh discolouring his silver armour, which looked horrible.
"You should wash your armour." Asura didn't hate Akkrum and gave a simple reply. Their unit's orders were to push towards the Lord's quarters, where they last spotted Duke Aldric.
He knew Akkrum's actions were to distract himself from the feeling of killing the first humans in his life, and his laughter wasn't distasteful. Yet the feeling in his chest didn't disappear. It became more intense with time.
'Maybe it's because we're moving towards this place?'
"The Scarlet Flame is a brilliant tactician!"
Asura remained silent after listening to Akkrum while entering the broken wooden doors.
The walls were dusty, created with pale bricks. The decorations on the wall were also in disarray because of the fighting. There were even bodies of the knights lying around with their weapons still held. Asura walked towards them and checked their bodies—several penetration wounds and widened eyes filled with confusion now faded after death.
'Their eyes look shocked as if they don't realise they died...'
"Strange. Where did the ambush come from?" Asura whispered, his eyes searching the knights, only to find the attacks came from all directions.
"Clarice, Akkrum, get out!" He roared.
However, Asura's call came far too late.
Hundreds of black tentacles tore through the foundation of reality, their sharp tips penetrating the bodies of dozens of knights, both seasoned and students.
The slimy purple flesh penetrated their bodies from various angles, appearing from thin air with no clue of origin.
'Akkrum? Clarice?'
"Gukh..."
Asura's crimson eyes overlapped Clarice's, and the boy's face turned pale as he tried to mouth something to Asura, no longer showing a face of hatred or disgust.
"F.....fo.....give... me...."
"P.....ple.....ase.... K.....ll...me...."
The tentacle penetrating his body seemed to move, squirm and tear at his wounds, and then black fluids seemed to spread from the wound across the skin like an infection. Asura could see the flesh retracting into thin air, pulling the knights somewhere.
Asura unsheathed his sword and slashed, slicing the tentacle away and freeing Clarice.
Yet when he looked into the boy's eyes, he only saw a pool of madness slowly consuming him as blood pooled in his chest and throat.
Clarice tried to speak while Asura placed his hand on the wounds, thick Animus flowing through his body as he tried to heal them.
"I....don't want to die! I'm not like this. It's my fault! I know you save us...."
"Don't speak, save your strength. It's fine! I will help you."
However, the moment Asura's Animus surged towards his palm, the black marks and fluid inside Clarice suddenly started moving, spreading faster than his healing rate. The boy's expression changed to one of shock, horror, and pain as he grabbed Asura's hands.
"P-Please! End it. I cannot bear it."
"NO, I won't do that!"
Asura whispered as his mind fell into a deep meditative state, allowing his mind to travel through the depths of the world.
He could feel Lorem's blazing magic, Barbatos, and his ferocious earth spells empowering his flesh, the students flinging weaker spells and filled with a sense of victory.
His mind travelled around the village like an astral projection. However, what Asura saw shocked him.
"How many tentacles? This is one being?"
His eyes moved around the village, spotting tens of thousands of tentacles hidden inside a destroyed building that spread through the underground dungeons.
'This is beneath me?'
The tentacles were everywhere, infecting, slaughtering, and transforming the soldiers into terrifying creatures.
Their skin turned into a black tentacle with purple runes, and their flesh melted and fell off, becoming Abyss wraiths, those without souls and will who only followed their master's call.
"I remember everything, Azoth. Why were you so kind, despite being an Abyss Monarch?"
Honestly, Asura knew the answer.
Despite being the same person, Azoth chose another belief. Instead, he viewed each life that followed him as his kin or spawn.
Thus, in Azoth's mind, Asura became his great-grandson.
He taught Asura the many theories and ideas that would allow him to meet Verana and fall in love despite being a no-mag, even the abyss ceremony to break the seal on his core to use magic again.
'However, I never used this method. Maybe Helliana could tell me about that one day.'
Asura's mind returned to his body.
Now aware of the scope and size of the abyss fiend he needed to hunt, he grasped his silver sword with a faint smile.
The blade slowly transformed into a black blade as his Devil Shroud enveloped his body, transforming his figure as if entering his liberación form.
"This form, and why I could use it. All because of Azoth. To think that damn old man was Azoth, haha."
It turned out that the strange form that used his various bloodlines like a manifestation was something all Devils would use.
Those born of high standing in the Abyss could manifest their Devil's Shroud in mysterious ways.
Asura's liberación was actually fusing his Devil's Mantle with his bloodlines, basically the Devil's version of Manifestation, however unique to Asura himself.
No other creature would manifest their shroud the same as he would.
Thus, the transformation was gentle, and there wasn't a sense of pain or discomfort.
Two long horns curled from his forehead, one white and the other black, as the twin plumes wrapped around the horns with the same colour as if his phoenix bloodline finally saw this transformation as worthy of its acceptance.
'Damn proud bird bloodline.'
The left half of Asura formed black, metallic armour with sharp claws, a blade that could extend from his elbow, and dark red runes that wrote magic absorption spells.
His right side created white-coloured armour that felt more smooth and human, with the black lines from before creating protection spells in the ancient language that Azoth taught him.
In the past Asura couldn't read the runes and ancient language due to them being incomplete and distorted.
Now, he could feel the world in a different light, as if the breeze brought him copious amounts of magic to devour and the power given by the protective spells like nothing he had felt before.
"So this would be called my Ultima liberación?"
'The perfect fusion of my Devil and Asura bloodlines as if Azoth knew, rather was it because of the pure human bloodline he could help me?'
One day, Asura would beat the truth out of the old man that made him into someone who loved older maids with a plump ass because of the old man's training.