Ahead of Zelkova, the tiny fires—the death markers—flashed into bright bonfires one after the other and transformed into human-shaped shadows. The reborn feet of these shadows had no sooner touched the ground than they were dashing away, trying to distance themselves from the jet-black giant.
In the center of the scattering Burst Linkers, the god of the end raised its right foot up high and brought it down with a thunderous roar.
Zelkova was still dead, so he couldn’t hear the sound, but shock waves rippled outward from the monumental foot, cracking and shattering the supposedly indestructible ground, and mercilessly swallowed up the fugitives. Their feet kicked out from under them, they pitched forward, and before their bodies could touch the ground, they burst and scattered one after the other. Not one of those Burst Linkers could withstand the force of even a single footstep, despite the fact that the majority of them would have been level-five or level-six veterans.
Even still, the ones who managed to flee the farthest had gained more than twenty meters of ground in those seconds before they died. If they kept hammering away at escape like this, they would eventually make it out of Tezcatlipoca’s attack range. Zelkova himself had thought so in the beginning.
The next group regenerated and similarly attempted escape. The god of the end raised not its foot but its right hand this time. A black ring floated up above its open palm, and an inky sphere shot forth like a bullet of concentrated darkness.
The dense mass dug into the ground, as if it were made of butter, as it swelled to enormous sizes and churned violently. The fleeing Burst Linkers were instantly and helplessly sucked toward this wild vortex and broke into pieces that scattered in all directions the moment they touched the sphere.
This was one of Tezcatlipoca’s special attacks, Toxcatl. Gravitational waves radiated from its palm and flattened its targets, or it generated a micro black hole at a random location, sucked the target in, and crushed them. The latter was the more terrifying, ruthlessly resetting the meager distance the Burst Linkers had desperately put between themselves and the giant every time they regenerated. The only way to escape from the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, was to use a teleportation-type ability or to fly like Silver Crow. This was the conclusion Zelkova Verger had come to over the course of his week in the Unlimited EK.
Naturally, neither he nor Taupe Cape had any such ability. The lone hope left to him was that someone—with luck, someone from the seven Great Legions—would come to their rescue.
But he was well aware that there was hope and then there were pipe dreams. The group Exercitus had been born of a determination to overthrow the current system of control via the seven Great Legions. Their objective was to muster the combined forces of the midsize and small Legions, defeat Tezcatlipoca, and petition the Seven Kings of Pure Color for an apology and reparations for all the damage they’d done up to that point. The seven Great Legions would lose a vast sum of points and their territories, and the hegemony of the Seven Kings, ongoing since the dawn of the Accelerated World, would be overturned.
He still thought the stated aspirations of the instigators of Exercitus were the correct course of action. But they and the more than five hundred people who agreed with them had misjudged the threat of Tezcatlipoca.
The key part of their strategy had been to sink the Enemy in water up to the neck in an Ocean stage, where the sea reached depths of eighty meters, and then freeze that water to render the creature unable to use the majority of its attacks. They had succeeded in this for less than five full minutes. Before the order to begin the actual attack could be given, Tezcatlipoca had exploded the ice apart with its fiery special attack, Miccailhuitontli, and the incredible heat this generated instantly evaporated Zelkova and the others in position on the thick ice.
For a while after he fell into the Unlimited EK, he blamed the people who came up with this plan, but three or four days of EK wore away these feelings, along with his burst points. If the leaders of the core Legions—Ovest, Cold Brew, Gouen, and Night Owls—had fled, his anger might have lasted a little longer. But they had been pulverized together with Toshima Ecomuse Town, the high-rise building that served as the command center for the mission, by the long-range blast wave emitted from Tezcatlipoca’s mouth, and they had joined him as ghosts bound to the location of their death.
When he thought about it with a cooler head, the possibility of help arriving would have significantly increased if even one of the leaders had managed to escape. But the current time in the real world was past seven in the evening. Given that the majority of Burst Linkers were in elementary or junior high school, with even the oldest among them only in grade ten, this was pretty much suppertime if they were living in an average household. It was one thing if they’d made their excuses to their families, as the Exercitus attack participants had, but it would have not been a simple thing for most Burst Linkers to immediately dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field after getting the call. Even if they shoveled down the rest of their supper and did the bare minimum in preparation, they still wouldn’t be able to dive until seven thirty at the earliest.
Assuming that help did come at that time, twenty minutes from now in the real world was 20,000 minutes from now—330 hours, give or take. If nothing changed about this Unlimited EK, the math said that he would lose another 3,300 points before anyone arrived. While he and Taupe would obviously have lost all their points by then, the carnage would most likely expand to include more than half of the two hundred and some Burst Linkers still surviving.
But the fact of the matter here was that help wasn’t coming, no matter how many hundreds of hours they waited. Exercitus was a powerful group formed to overthrow the seven Great Legions. Their initial objective might have been to crush Tezcatlipoca and obtain the incredible bounty it would offer, but their future sights were set on a direct confrontation with the seven Great Legions. The Kings no doubt picked up on that, and if they were the sort of friendly souls who would expose themselves to the risk of total point loss to come to the rescue of the people who were trying to kick them off their thrones, they could never have reached level nine to start with.
No one was coming to save them.
No matter which way he looked at it, this was the only conclusion he could come to. As he digested this fact yet again, Zelkova stared at the timer counting down.
Time left until regeneration, ten seconds…five…three, two, one. Zero.
At the same time as the six digits turned into white flames and vanished, his avatar ghost was yanked back to directly above his death marker. The materialization that started with the tips of his fingers was complete in the blink of an eye, and his restored feet gripped the earth again, felt it tremble beneath him.