-11-
WE REACHED the crumbling upper floor of the palace where Reniement was standing in no time.
Wolzottl rushed toward the palace. When it looked like he was about to collide with the people running the other way, he leapt up from the ground to a short building, then bounded onto the roofs of the taller buildings.
“My, oh, my, you…” said Reniement, turning to face me as I approached from behind.
I pointed my sword at him and fired off the spell I had prepared. “Fire Magic Level 20: Apocalypse!”
A flaming dragon burst from the tip of my sword and destroyed the upper part of the palace, but in that moment, a magic circle appeared, centered on Reniement, and he vanished.
He teleported to the roof of another building. Wolzottl landed on the upper section of the palace, now in flames from my spell.
“My, oh, my, how terrifying! Quite dreadful really… Having a level twenty spell cast at me is a tiny bit more troublesome than I was expecting. It is my own failure of calculation to ignore that the higher beings’ management has been this careless.” Beneath the cowl of his red robe, the man’s mouth split it into a wide grin.
“Naiarotop sent you, then,” I said.
“You would be half-right. But also half-wrong.”
“Half-wrong…?” I asked, and Reniement clung to his staff and ran his long tongue over it.
“I made this happen! So that I may use my master’s spirit to bring the curtain down on Locklore! The higher beings did not orchestrate this, I did!”
“What are you saying…?”
“I made the Staff of the Saint in the first place! And I was captured by the higher beings, my soul stored away as punishment, never to rot away…but in the end, I would be able to return to Locklore when it was in true peril! I was certain of it! And when that happened…my master’s soul would obtain power like that of a god from the faith in him. Now I could use it to end this comical puppet show!”
Reniement’s eyes widened, and the words rushed out, his eyes bloodshot and spittle flying.
“And, for the first time, my master will not be a puppet for the higher beings but the true savior of the world! The prophecies and our faith will become real! It will not be a false salvation, like a sweet placating a child, but true salvation! Oh, my master, watch what will happen! I will accomplish this!”
“…I don’t really get what you’re saying, but it sounds like the higher beings are stuck and resurrected you, and you’re going to destroy the world with Jonas’s power? How is that salvation?” I asked.
Reniement’s breathing grew ragged from agitation, and he bent over backward. “Because I believe it to be so! What more is needed? My long journey with my master, my training, none of it could alleviate the rage in my soul! Is my soul simply beyond salvation? No! No! The destruction I cause is to raise Lord Jonas into a true god, to where the higher beings can no longer reach him! When I encountered the higher beings, that wall blocking our faith, I had an epiphany! Everything was for this purpose! That is why I had to kill my master!”
“That is just not right…”
I’d seen a lot of humans that wouldn’t listen to reason on my journey through Locklore, but this was my first time meeting someone so absurd and beyond understanding. He kept going on about Jonas, but as far as I could tell, his actions weren’t what Jonas would have wanted. Reniement just wanted to destroy the world.
“You think me strange?” said Reniement. “Only stupid beasts and those as dumb as them never think about what they are and where they are going. All lost children contemplate existence to find meaning in their own nature and life…and that is how it should be! Are you different? Do you not try to find some value in yourself and your life? Such a valueless way of living looks horribly sad to me!” Reniement narrowed his eyes and glared at me. “I had hoped to reunite with my master on a more appropriate stage under better stars, but…it appears I won’t be given the opportunity to choose that.”
A magic circle appeared around Reniement, and he cried, “Death Magic Level 17: Incarnation!”
Purple light spilled from the staff and coated the area around Reniement. It quickly took form, changing into
the upper half of a skeleton with long hair. It floated behind Reniement, like some sort of spirit guardian.
I felt an incredible force coming from the skeleton glowing with purple light. That was most likely Jonas’s spirit residing in the Staff of the Saint.
“Oh, Master! My dear master! It has been two thousand years…and for the entire time, I thought of nothing but how much I wished to see you again! There are no words for the miracle that brings us together again!” Reniement’s wide mouth split open as he cried to the spirit. Emotional tears spilled from his eyes. But then his expression instantly went back to the empty one from before.
“Now, then…I honestly couldn’t care less about you, but I can’t very well ignore the will of the higher beings, so I shall take care of you quickly.”
12
“THIS ENEMY could be annoying…” I murmured as I stared at the spirit floating behind Reniement.
JONAS
Race: Skeleton God
Lv: 5500
MP: 21877/32000
In straight numbers, his level was higher than mine. It was the first time I’d been beaten in levels since leaving Cocytus. It was also my first time seeing something with only MP and no HP. Was it because he was a spirit?
“Come forth, souls of the damned! Death Magic Level 15: Gehenna!” cried Reniement as he raised his staff.
Dozens of skulls made of purple light shot from Jonas and came flying toward me. Wolzottl leapt from the roof and ran from the skulls of light, but they were faster. I used my sword to knock them aside as they came from behind us.
A skull crashed into a wall behind us and exploded. In the blink of an eye, the wall around the impact turned purple and crumbled. These skulls seemed to be magic projectiles that caused any matter they came in contact with to wither and crumble away. They were about as dangerous as they could get, seeing as he shot off loads in one go and they had tracking abilities.
Since Reniement was using Jonas’s higher-level power to fire these off, I doubted I would get out unscathed if I was hit with one. I bet my sword would have lost to the skulls’ curse when I knocked them aside if it wasn’t the Heroic Sword of Gilgamesh that I got from Lunaère.
“My, my, that didn’t quite go as planned,” said Reniement. “I see, yes, I see, my master! This man is the final obstruction for my faith! And if that is the case, I will use all my power, as I always have, to eliminate him!” Reniement raised his staff again, and a crazy number of skulls shot out from Jonas’s spirit.
“They’re never-ending! Wol, charge! Let’s challenge him to a fight!” I said.
“Awooooo!” Wolzottl whipped his tails in an arc, knocking aside the skulls chasing after us, then rushed straight toward Reniement.
“Such a foolish lost child! You dare challenge Lord Jonas, now a god, to a head-on fight?!” Reniement raised his staff.
Light bled from Jonas’s spirit and turned into skulls again. It looked like Reniement was planning to shoot the skull spell at me head on.
“You should have run, Reniement! Gravity Bomb!”
A black light appeared around Reniement. The death magic skulls that were starting to fly out all suddenly stopped.
“A-agh…what is this?! It cannot be!” There was panic in Reniement’s expression.
The black light contracted. Jonas’s spirit as well as the death magic skulls were sucked in by the black light’s implosion as they were smashed into the center.
There was a boom, along with a shower of dust.
“Yeah, got him…” I said, but as the dust cleared, I saw Jonas had wrapped his arms around Reniement, protecting him. Jonas’s skeleton was bent and broken from the space-time magic, with bones snapped here and there, but the damage was already healed by the time Jonas stepped back from Reniement to stand behind him again.
“Cursed outsider! How dare you harm Lord Jonas!” A vein throbbed in Reniement’s temple, and his right eyelid twitched with rage.
“He’s tough!” I said, but that was what you got with him being level 5,500. I didn’t expect the destructive abilities of Gravity Bomb to do nothing.
“Awooooo!”
He definitely took damage, and Wolzottl seemed to decide we needed to pile on more while we could. I readied my sword as Wolzottl raced straight toward Reniement again.
“Take this!” I swung at Reniement with the Heroic Sword of Gilgamesh.
But Jonas blocked my blade with his arm. Now it was a competition of strength, but it was no good. I was clearly the weaker one.
Wolzottl quickly pulled back when I started to think I was going to get overpowered. He leapt from the roof and flew in a zigzag, dodging the magic death skulls coming at us from behind.
“Thanks, Wol. That was close,” I said.
This enemy was a real pain. I couldn’t take him out with magic, and there was no opening in his defense for a physical attack. They were winning on real power.
Perhaps it was lucky, though, that Jonas wasn’t coming after me himself, maybe he couldn’t move that far from the caster who created him.
“Graaaaah!”
Just then, a dragon over sixty feet long appeared behind Reniement, and a huge fireball shot from its mouth toward him.
Jonas’s skeleton guarded against the sphere with his arms, the raging flames nothing to him.
The death skulls instantly slammed into the dragon. Its huge body turned purple, and it fled to the skies in a rush. While it did escape, the purple was eating away at its body, causing its left arm to dissolve off quickly.
“Drigvesha, the First Dragon…? Why is it here?!” asked Reniement, his eyes narrowing as he glared up at the dragon fleeing farther into the air.
Then a rainbow light enveloped the dragon, and the purple rotting portions of its body regenerated to its original form. It looked like Philia had used the Sand of Dreams to transform into a dragon.
“What in the…?” muttered Reniement in disgust.
“Spirit Magic Level 8: Laelaps’s Fang!”
Then a spell fired off from the top of the dragon’s head. A hound of lightning rushed forward straight toward Reniement. The lightning exploded, but Jonas took that too as if it were nothing.
“Kanata! We’ll fight too!” shouted Pomera from atop the dragon’s head. Looked like they came to help out when they saw me struggling in the fight.
“It seems there are two more buzzing insects,” said Reniement, his gaze sliding to settle on Pomera.