“No...”
No sooner had she muttered that word than her Miasma of Rejection spread around her and enveloped everyone present.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Come on!” Griffith said in frustration. “How much longer can this bastard keep regenerating?!”
An entire hour had passed since they’d trapped Loki inside a barrier filled with never-ending flames. He’d been laughing the entire time, even as his body repeatedly burned to ashes.
“We can keep going for a while longer thanks to our potions, but...do you think we might be in trouble?” Leen, the one supplying the flames inside the barrier, said as sweat poured down her body. She was right; if they couldn’t kill Loki before she or Griffith ran out of mana, things would turn ugly.
Loki brimmed with expectation. Heh heh heh. Almost. Just a little longer.
He’d received word from the fragment he’d sent to the castle ruins, and it had completely vanished instead of returning to him to regenerate. His wish would at last be granted after three hundred thousand years.
“Come on, hurry up, don’t keep me waiting,” he murmured.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Yoshida said. His years of combat experience warned him that something horrible was about to happen—and they were right on the money.
“Hey, who’s that girl over there?” said one of the Seventh Kingdom’s soldiers near the back of the regiment.
Walking toward them was a lone girl dressed in nothing but rags.
“There she is.” The moment Loki laid eyes upon her, his face broke into a wide smile.
“No...way...” Yoshida was almost struck dumb.
“The heck, what’s a little girl doing in a place like this?” Strong asked.
“Forget about why she’s here, what even is she? Is that thing really human?” Stephan said as she broke into a cold sweat.
Everyone could tell from the moment they saw her: something about her was off. Her presence writhed with an uncanny and dreadful aura, even more so than the shenmo before them.
“Everyone, get out of here, now! This is no time to stand and fight!” screamed Yoshida, the one who knew the girl’s true identity.
By all rights, the Great Six shouldn’t have listened to Yoshida’s warning, not when they’d managed to corner a shenmo and had the opportunity to kill him. However, they’d all felt something unfamiliar in the air, and they’d grown to trust him in the earlier battle, so they gave up on their attack and retreated. They left Loki—his body still melting and regenerating—as the girl approached his position.
“Ooh, at long last. Will you be my death?” Loki said. He raised his reformed right hand and fired a pitch-black beam of mana at the girl. He didn’t hold back an iota of his immense shenmo strength. Nevertheless, right before hitting her, the beam was swallowed up by noise and erased in an instant.
The girl turned toward Loki as if she’d only just noticed his existence. A grotesque cracking sound rang out. From her back, around her right shoulder blade, sprouted rainbow-colored wings as dainty as a butterfly’s. They were beautiful, but glowed with an ominous and otherworldly light that evoked an instinctive fear in anyone watching.
Loki spread both arms in a welcoming gesture and grinned from ear to ear as he looked at the girl. “Yes! Come on! Come on! Do it!”
The girl pointed her tiny hand toward Loki. Around her, an enormous amount of noise rose with a deafening sound. Her Miasma of Rejection rushed forward like a dark, raging river and swallowed him up along with everything around him.
“Whoa!” The shock wave was enough to blow away Yoshida and the Great Six. Not even a shenmo like Loki could resist when he was caught right in the center.
Ahh, I’m disappearing and not regenerating, Loki thought. He closed his eyes and lost himself in the feeling of the noise gnawing away at his body, erasing his very existence. As the last traces of his form wore away, his five senses started to follow suit. So this...is death? Nice. It’s peaceful. Not too bad.
His wish granted, the last of the New Seven Black Stars vanished from this world with a satisfied smile on his face.