Christa cannot see anything at the moment.
She had seen something unspeakably majestic; the image of a divine being. She opens and closes her eyes but she is currently unable to see anything at all except the burn of its image on her retinas.
She has heard screams. The sound of rocks crumbling. The noises around her were so loud that it caused a ringing in her ears.
(“Ms. Rowfield!”)
It feels like she was just falling but her landing is somehow soft and slow. The ground below her is uneven and hard however.
She doesn’t understand what any of this means.
“Ms. Rowfield!”
A voice screams at her.
“Ms. Rowfield, are you alright! Get up!”
“J-Jacquelyn… what just--”
“I-I don’t know, there was this… I don’t know what to call it, like, woman made of light who was just here a-and then--”
“Hey, is everybody ok? Juliana, are you alright?”
“H-Harry, I’m f-fine but… wait… oh no… oh my god… where are we?”
Boom!
A thunderous noise coming from nearby. Everyone in the area cowers at its suddenness.
Christa can’t see anything still but from Juliana’s question, she can only infer that they are no longer on the mountain top… or perhaps the mountain top has become unrecognizable.
Boom!
However, she knows that at least Jacquelyn, Juliana and Harold are near her.
Then, a new voice emanates.
“Children! My name is Rurik, the current foremost protector--
Boom!
“--of humanity! I need you to keep--”
Boom!
“--calm right now! Please! Please!! Those of you--”
Boom!
“--with rings, I need you to check--”
Boom!
“--that they are attached securely to your-”
Boom!
“--fingers! Please do so--”
Boom!
“--immediately, we don’t have any time left!!”
Everyone moves their heads towards where the incessant noise is coming from, a few metres away.
What the fuck is that noise? It’s splitting my head, Jesus Christ!
Christa who can’t see the noise asks Jacquelyn,
“Hey, what’s that noise right now, Jackie?”
“...”
Jacquelyn, who had just been kneeling next to Christa, looks up to see the man named Rurik. His hands are raised and from those hands flows a green vapour made of light.
Above their heads and in all directions is a translucent barrier, glowing green and... cracked…
It’s clear what has caused it to crack. It is what has been causing the loud noises for a while now.
“Come on, Rurik! Let me in, Rurik!”
A foreign voice speaks from past this semi-spherical barrier, coming from its side. An angry voice.
Before her eyes is a man. A man with blonde hair speckled with red, wearing light armour with a very athletic build. And horns.
The man raises his left hand. He strikes the barrier repeatedly.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The cracks in the barrier grow deeper. Rurik keeps holding his hands up to allow the green vapour to power the barrier.
If he stops this, these heroes will die. Currently… he’s holding up this barrier to help protect the heroes from the magic attack made of light but… he couldn’t save all of the heroes from Alin’s attack… or even most of them.
“Come on, come on! Check your rings, check your rings now!”
Boom!
Jacquelyn looks around and sees those who have rings on their fingers. Not everyone has them.
Jacquelyn, Christa and a few others have them.
Boom!
“Shit, shit, shit! What the fuck… my ring is on… Wh-Who the fuck is that guy? Who the--”
Christa can hear Maxwell complaining in panic.
Boom!
“Unbelievable… Is this… Is this… really happening?”
Christa can hear Jordan. Jordan almost doesn’t seem to be considering the situation. He’s speaking as if he’s just seen something amazing. Something astounding and surprising… Perhaps he’s in shock…
Boom!
“W-Where are… Weren’t there more people around us? Where? Where did they all go? Wh--”
Boom!
Alice looks around holding her shoulders in fear. She looks for the people who should be with them. The armoured men. Her fellow students. There are many students in their vicinity but not nearly enough compared to before.
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The armoured men are nowhere to be seen at all past the green barrier.
Jacquelyn looks around at their surroundings. It’s true, the number of people around them has diminished significantly. For some reason, they’re also standing on a pile of rubble right now.
There were… thousands of holy knights… weren’t there a lot of other students near us? Where are they? Where did they go?
Boom!
“We don’t have rings… We don’t have rings!”
Christa hears a voice from the teacher of the 12th grade Calculus class who makes this cry for help.
Boom!
The barrier is about to be destroyed. A few more hits and it will be useless.
“Shit… I guess this is all we can get from this, huh…”
Rurik takes in a deep breath and shouts at the top of his lungs:
“One, Five, Four, Three, Seven, Two, Seven, Light Speed, divine Sapiora!”
Jacquelyn looks at her hands. There is a brightness coming from the ring she has been wearing.
Some of the students nearby also see this brightness on the rings on their fingers. But most of the people around them, about seventy five in total within the barrier, don't have rings on at all.
There is a brightness on Rurik’s finger as well. That phrase he uttered…
It’s like some kind of… command phrase or something! Like a voice recognition password!
Jacquelyn takes one last look at the man striking the barrier. She sees him try to strike faster and faster.
Jacquelyn sees the man Rurik, his finger also shining from the ring he’s wearing.
If he’s trying to… transport us then… What about… the rest of them without the rings?
“No… No… Stop!”
Jacquelyn sees the man with horns give a shout of anger… but it’s too late.
Rurik speaks once more.
“Launch!”
~
Within an instant, the barrier disappears.
“Sigh… That’s a shame… Well… it hasn’t been all wasted at least...”
Alin looks around his surroundings. He sees people in shock and confusion. They don’t know what happened. They’re standing or at least trying to stand in the rubble.
They don’t even know what they’re standing on. Alin had been careful from the beginning. Right after he immobilized the pope, he had launched an attack on the divine heroes and the holy knights who had prepared the transport circle.
Within the blink of an eye, his spell had activated. It had dropped upon the mountain top. The mountain disappeared along with the holy knights, the magic circle, the archbishops standing outside the circle.
He even killed… the divine heroes.
This is what Alin would have liked to happen but in reality he only killed about sixty-five percent of the heroes.
Within an instant, the being he manifested, the being of light who was shaped like his mother, had consumed the mountain. The holy knights, the archbishops and the heroes caught in the attack were evaporated and scattered. All of them except…
Damn that Rurik, creating a barrier at the last second… this is the tradeoff that I had anticipated after I went for the pope first...
Rurik Grishin, one of the last remaining awakened heroes from the previous generation… he had landed in the magic circle where the heroes were and created an emergency barrier.
A barrier that prevented the deaths of some of the heroes even as the mountain was vapourized. The rubble that Alin is now standing in is the rubble of that mountain, cut down in height right down to its base.
“Wh-What happened? Wh-Where is… Where is everyone? Christa was just… she was just here! Where did they go? Where did they all go!?”
Alin looks at a man speaking while standing in confusion, a bald man in his fifties. About sixty other people are standing in this area. This man is confused at where the few students who were just here went, including a woman named Christa.
They just left, humans. The question is why you’re all still here… Oh? Ah, of course, they couldn’t give all of the heroes the transport artifacts… too rare a commodity...
They’re… They’re all just children… I thought Ajax and Shaula were the exception. What… What is going on with Sapiora and the other world right now? Did they… No, I can’t truly speculate now… I’ve killed a good deal of them but from what I could tell… only fifteen heroes made it out of here. I can just kill the rest at my own leisure… And with the pope in my hands now… I have… I’ve won this...
Alin looks at the divine heroes in the area. Young men and women. Not warriors. Not threats to him. These people who Rurik has abandoned.
Those who received the ring have disappeared, teleported to the holy city of Reid and most likely to other locations. That includes Rurik himself. Alin missed his opportunity to fight and kill him.
Rurik decided to leave with those heroes he had in his grasp while leaving the rest to… to Alin. Alin looks at these heroes. None of them even know what’s happening. Men and women who haven’t even learned that Alin has already killed their peers.
Most of them don’t even comprehend that they’ve been left here to fend for themselves by Rurik who couldn’t save them.
They’re… They’re all just children… I thought Ajax and Shaula were the exception. What… What is going on with Sapiora and the other world right now? Did they… No, I can’t truly speculate now… I’ve killed a good deal of them but from what I could tell… only fifteen heroes made it out of here. I can just kill the ones who escaped at my own leisure… And with the pope in my hands now… I have… I’ve won this...
Alin continues examining the people here. They’re just trying to help each other. Sapiora has committed a crime against them by summoning them here to this foreign world.
Alin looks at the children with pity and sadness. A number of them are looking at him with fear. Many humans have looked at Alin this way as he proceeded to cut them down.
Alin feels empty. The pope on the ground lies next to him. Alin grabs hold of the pope’s unconscious armless body and carries him in his arms.
Then, Alin applies flight magic to himself. He doesn’t have the ability to reach home using just flight magic but it will be enough to leave the area at least. He flies upwards, aiming to escape past the clouds.
Sixty divine heroes, sixty high school students and teachers see Alin’s form as it enters the sky. A number of them give a sigh of relief. Some of them ask questions about where the rest of them are… over two hundred of the students are unaccounted for.
Some of them wonder why they’re in this flat, uneven ground now when they were just on top of a mountain, standing on the solid peak. So much has happened at such a vast scale different from anything they’re used to that they can’t even recognize what’s been happening.
They can’t conceive of the fact that, in an instant, their classmates were wiped out. Nor of the fact that the mountain itself was just destroyed completely, without traces except the rubble at the base.
Nor the fact that they only survived because the hero named Rurik Grishin had used a barrier to cushion their fall and protect them from Alin.
They noticed Alin trying to crack the barrier and enter but they only knew that he was dangerous, not anything that would lead them to believe that Alin had just destroyed a mountain and killed two hundred of them and over a thousand heavily armoured holy knights in moments.
Right now, the students can see trees in the distance. They can guess now that they’re in a space surrounded by forest. How are they going to survive? How are they going to get through this?
Only uncertainty fills their hearts.
Alin can still see them above as he looks over them while in the skies. His superb vision and reflexes allow him to see their bodies as ants.
“At least… at least let them die without seeing it coming.”
Alin holds the pope in his arms and speaks once again.
“Seraph Trinity Azazel. Give them painless deaths.”
Alin cannot leave the sixty of them alive. They are nothing less than threats to the races under his protection. They are people who would radically change this world with their power in ways that would be detrimental to his people.
A being of light forms above the clouds. This one is slightly smaller than the one he had used earlier to destroy the entire mountain but it is still shaped like his mother. Three more copies of this being emerge from nothingness next to the first.
Beings of light small enough that the children below won’t see the light above them even when it’s too late to stop it. Alin has given these apparitions the command to exterminate the remaining heroes mercifully.
In the blink of an eye, the apparitions disappear.
Alin looks down at the ground below. A destructive flash illuminates the night sky. And new craters appear where there was once the remains of a mountain.
Alin doesn’t like killing these innocents. People involved in the affairs of their world. They didn’t have to be brought here. Alin will never forgive the deity on the other world nor the deity here who allowed this atrocity to take place.
As of now, Alin has killed over two hundred and eighty of the newly summoned heroes and failed to kill fifteen who will pose a problem to him not including Ajax and Shaula.
Innocents with their lives extinguished for the good of his world, his races, his civilization.
But now, he has what he wants. The pope. Someone he never expected to find, let alone capture. The person who can be used to rectify the current order of this world.
Alin looks at the pope in his arms with a bitter smile on his face as plastic tears stream for the innocent lives he’s just taken.
“I’m going to make you pay for their deaths, Vildir. And then I’m going to get Anaxim and… we’re going to come for you, Sapiora. You will end soon… just you wait...”