After screaming her heart out, Miledi fell silent. She’d said everything she needed to. She’d explained who the Liberators were, what they’d done, and what their goals were. The question was, had her words resonated with the people?
Did my words change anything inside them?
Miledi looked up at the sky, her expression tinged with worry. Feeling a gaze on her back, she turned around and saw her friends all gazing warmly at her.
It’ll be okay... their eyes seemed to say.
Of course, there were still some pressing matters that needed to be addressed. If the Templar Knights refused to surrender, Miledi and the others would need to fight them to the death, and if they did surrender, they’d need to be imprisoned in the palace. They also needed to invite all the various nations’ leaders into the palace to hold a meeting about how humanity would move forward, then figure out what to do with the capital’s citizens. Fortunately, some of those questions had been answered in a secret meeting Miledi had held with the various world leaders ahead of time.
Forgetting for a moment that the world was still watching her, Miledi slapped her cheeks to psych herself up. However, just as she was about to take the first step toward a new future—
“I order you in the name of Ehit—shut your mouth,” an androgynous voice said, and Miledi’s mouth shut of its own accord. She glanced around in surprise. Oscar and the others tried to call out to her, but they couldn’t speak either.
“I order you—kneel.”
Everyone’s knees buckled, then their heads started lowering into a bow. A force so powerful it chilled Miledi and the others to their very cores was forcing their bodies to act against their will. And yet, they refused to kneel. Everyone in the world was watching them right now, so the one thing they couldn’t do was kneel before Ehit.
“Uwoooooooooooooooh!”
With a scream, Laus’s pitch-black mana surged and he freed Miledi and the others from Ehit’s control. Then, they all glared up at the sky.
“Ehit!” Miledi spat.
It seemed Ehit didn’t need that pillar to manifest in the world after all. He’d clearly been waiting for Miledi to make her speech before coming down and forcing her to kneel in order to humiliate her as much as possible.
A silver storm brewed in the sky above, looking both wondrous and terrible at the same time.
“How boring. You failed to meet any of my expectations,” Ehit said in an apathetic voice. “What an utter disappointment.”
Ehit had wished for a desperate struggle that ended in tragedy and despair, he wished to see Miledi and the others experience the loss of everyone important to them. But in the end, they had proven too strong for that outcome.
“It seems this era is a failure.”
The way Ehit felt about all the struggles the Liberators had faced thus far was the same way a child felt about a game they were really interested in setting up, but then tried playing and found it wasn’t all that fun.
Miledi seethed at the utter callousness in Ehit’s words.
“If you don’t like how things went, then come down here and fight us, you bastard! We’ll show you how strong mortals can be!”
“Just how strong mortals can be?” Ehit asked in a curious voice. “Hmm, I see. Very well,” he said, his apathetic tone replaced by clear amusement.
Miledi suddenly felt as though she’d made a huge mistake.
“Please, show me how strong you are, you pawns who’ve seen too much and grown too powerful.”
Even though he’d had the symbol of his power destroyed and his primary pawns annihilated, Ehit still acted as though Miledi was completely beneath him. And because he found Miledi unworthy of his attention, he wasn’t even going to face her personally. A god didn’t need to personally duel unruly pawns to put them in their place, after all.
No, Ehit would simply test Miledi and the others. He would show the yapping dogs who their master truly was.
“Struggle until your last breath. Appease my boredom for as long as you can.”
“What are you...?” Miledi trailed off, while Oscar and the others gaped openly.
God’s Apostles started pouring out of the silver vortex in the sky. And not just ten or twenty either. No, there were tens of thousands of them, enough to cover the entire sky.
“Lyu-chan!”
“I know! Supreme Ascendance!”
“Heavencrush!”
The same sphere that had obliterated the pillar appeared in the center of the apostles. Five hundred apostles were crushed immediately.
Miledi and the others had planned for a situation like this. Honestly, they’d expected that Ehit would send an army of apostles down once his pawns had been defeated.
Still, even an army of a thousand apostles could be dealt with so long as they knew where they were coming from. Miledi would simply obliterate them all with a powerful gravity spell. Not even apostles could avoid the power of gravity magic. And if there were more than a thousand, Miledi would keep on using the same spell until they were all crushed.
Unfortunately, they didn’t just spring out from one location.
“Shit! He can send them out from anywhere?!” Oscar shouted as he analyzed the information coming into his glasses. He had built a Skynet into his lenses, so he could see what was going on below in the capital, and he saw another swirling silver vortex had appeared right above the palace.
“Nacchan! We need to get to where Ehit is! We have to go through that vortex!”
“I’m trying to get us there! But...shit! I’m sorry.”
The frustration in Naiz’s voice made it clear that even after understanding the true nature of spatial magic—the ability to manipulate boundaries—he still couldn’t push his way into Ehit’s domain.
Laus couldn’t sense any souls on the other side of the vortex either. Lyutillis couldn’t appraise what the vortex was even made of, nor could Miledi find any way to destroy it. Whatever it was, it was beyond even ancient magic.
Miledi and the others’ expressions stiffened. They definitely hadn’t underestimated Ehit’s power. Had it not been for the public execution, they would have spent as much time as they could gathering information on him and ways to beat him. However, they’d believed that at their current level of strength, they had a good chance of defeating him. Only now did they realize how naive they’d been.
Still, Miledi fought on valiantly, exclaiming, “What, too scared to fight us yourself, Ehit?! No one will follow a god who hides away and lets his puppets do all the fighting for him! There’s no future for you if you don’t fight us!”
“You seem to be under a grave misunderstanding,” Ehit replied with a mocking laugh. “I am the future.”
Ehit was the arbiter of all prosperity and decline, of all creation and destruction, in all of its forms.
“It is I who should ask you, Miledi Reisen. Do you have a future?”
Ehit’s second vortex was poised to spill an army of apostles into the capital and slay every innocent citizen left within it. Miledi bit her lip so hard she drew blood.
Oscar gently laid a hand on her trembling shoulder and said, “Miledi. We’ve already accomplished our main objective.”
His composed voice helped Miledi calm down.
“We’ve saved who we came to save and delivered the message we came to deliver. Isn’t that right?”
Oscar was speaking sense, but that didn’t make this situation any less vexing. Miledi sorely wished to take Ehit out here and now. However, so long as they had no way of reaching his domain, they couldn’t stop him from spewing out apostles and turning the city into a battlefield. Even at their current level of power, Miledi and the others wouldn’t be able to kill all the apostles while protecting the citizens...and it would go against the Liberators’ creed to sacrifice innocents for their cause.
“We’re retreating!” Miledi shouted, the order reaching everyone thanks to the Skynets.
“You got it. Does plan 2 sound good to you, Miledi?” Salus asked. He, too, had realized the necessity of retreat, and so he was already primed to leave.
Plan 2 had been created with precisely this scenario in mind, so it was the perfect choice. Miledi and the others would serve as bait together with Lac Elain, while everyone else scattered to the four winds via Oscar’s Dark Gates.
“Remember, my princess, this isn’t the end. I’m looking forward to our eventual reunion,” Rasul said.
“Your Highness, leave the beastmen to me. Miledi-dono, if we both survive this ordeal, let us meet again,” Sim said.
“Yo, Miledi, that was a pretty good speech. We did what we came here to do. I bet you the world’s definitely gonna change after this, so you can run with your head held high, all right?” Badd said.
Laus confirmed they’d all left via soul detection magic, while Miledi dispelled her Heavencrush.
“This isn’t the end. We’ll be back to kill you before you know it!” she shouted.
However, the only reply she received was Ehit’s echoing laughter.
Salus was overseeing the retreat from the main deck of Lac Elain.