Before long, Reida's body, like a puppet that had lost all support, fell heavily face-first onto the ground and never moved again.
A Water God of an era had died just like this.
Yet none of the other survivors present could understand why things had developed into this situation.
Even after the man called the Evil God disappeared into the crowd with a child, the entire street seemed as though time had stopped. No one moved, simply allowing fear to control them.
But besides fear, they even more could not understand why two God-level beings had clashed here, and also... why the difference between them had become so enormous.
It simply did not look like a battle between God-level beings. Instead, it was more like a Sword God instructing an insignificant disciple.
———
After witnessing Ash kill the Water God as though he were playing with a child, Eris also unconsciously widened her eyes, her mouth opening just as wide, almost as if she could fit an egg inside.
Even after the battle ended, she merely stared blankly at Ash's back, her mind completely blank. Like everyone else, she was utterly stunned and at a loss by this unimaginable scene before her.
She had never imagined that Ash possessed such terrifying strength. When facing the powerful Water God Reida, who had been strong enough to make people despair, he had not shown the slightest sign of defeat. Instead... when he truly made a move, he had pulled out her heart with a single strike, ending the battle in a shocking and cruel manner.
Eris, who had unconsciously followed him, only seemed to awaken from a long and absurd dream after they had left the crowd and he stopped and turned around.
"As... Ash...", Eris's voice was trembling slightly. She struggled to swallow and tried to recover from that overwhelming shock, but her heart was still pounding nonstop, as though it were about to jump out of her throat.
She recalled how worried she had been about Ash before, afraid that he would be killed by the Water God, and had even been prepared to charge forward and fight the Water God to the death. Thinking about it now... those actions of hers must have seemed incredibly ridiculous in Ash's eyes, right?
This made her clench her fists. There was both the relief of surviving a disaster and an indescribable grievance and anger in her voice, "That's too much!"
"The Water God? Indeed, trying to kill someone in the middle of the street, that's completely the behavior of a criminal."
"Stop pretending! You know I'm talking about you! How could you hide something this big from me!"
"No... You never asked either, did you?", He spread his hands with an innocent look, making Eris's little face flush red with anger as she directly roared, "Because you said you were a Sword Emperor before!"
"Well... I suppose there was such a thing, but if I said I was the Evil God, you probably wouldn't believe me either. Besides..."
"Besides? What!"
"...It feels really difficult to say," Faced with the little girl's aggressive questioning, Ash looked as though he had been forced to bring up a dark part of his past, appearing as if those memories were too painful to look back on as he hesitantly said, "Putting aside the embarrassment of the title, more importantly, doesn't it sound like I'm the same as a bad person? I clearly haven't done anything bad, and I'm full of righteousness..."
"You just reached out and ripped out someone's heart! And then threw it on the ground and crushed it! And you're telling me you're full of righteousness?"
"Wasn't that a righteous counterattack?"
"But other people's righteous counterattacks use swords!?", His matter-of-fact rebuttal made Eris so angry that she wanted to bite him, "Who does things like you do! You're basically a villain! Even in stories, isn't it usually demons and Evil Gods who do things like that?"
"That's too much... Crushing it was to prevent her from resurrecting. I didn't do anything bad. I even raised you from when you were a baby, taking care of everything for you, and you actually call me a demon," Ash crouched on the ground with a hurt expression, drawing circles like Roxy did whenever she was emotionally struck.
But the appearance of his blood-covered hand drawing a bloody circle on the ground was simply too bizarre, and it even directly made Eris laugh despite her anger, "Do you think crouching on the ground and pretending to be aggrieved will really make you look pitiful? At least wash the blood off your hand before pretending to be pitiful, will you? What's the difference between this and a demon drawing a curse?"
"....At least I look more like a good person?"
"So where?!"
"All of me?"
"....Where exactly do you get the nerve to say something like that?", Eris was almost angered into fainting by his shamelessness.
There was simply nothing she could do about Ash. She helplessly supported her forehead, and for a moment she genuinely did not want to look at this guy who was both infuriating and hateful, so she simply turned her head to the side, trying to calm herself down first.
But just after she had slightly settled her emotions, Eris suddenly remembered what he had said to her before the battle. She immediately became angry again, suddenly turned her head, and growled at Ash through gritted teeth, "Come to think of it, you're clearly so strong! And you were saying all those things back there... You really were messing with me, weren't you?"
"No such thing. There's always a possibility of something going wrong, right? I already said from the beginning that it was just in case, but you didn't believe me."
"Because that's what a normal person would say!"
"And besides, the atmosphere had already reached that point. It wouldn't have been good not to say some last words... Right?"
"No! In the end! Since the atmosphere was already like that, why didn't you just go die?"
"Don't say things that hurt our relationship. We just narrowly escaped death, didn't we? Normally, this is when we should celebrate first."
"Narrowly escaped death...", Hearing this, Eris, who had been roaring and complaining until her mouth had gone dry, could not stop the corner of her mouth from twitching, "Do you look even slightly like someone who narrowly escaped death?"
"I got injured, you know?", He silently pointed at his face, at the place that had been cut by the sword energy and had not yet been treated.
This left Eris so speechless with anger that she could only say, "With an injury like that, if you don't treat it, it'll be healed on its own in no time, won't it?"
"I remember you clearly promised me that you would be a good girl?"
"I did not! Absolutely not!"
"Sigh, as expected, a woman's words are lies from a ghost."
"You also said you liked me!"
"Actually, men's words are too."
"You! You bastard!"
His righteous response and his completely unyielding attitude finally made Eris unable to endure it any longer. She directly gave up on using words, pounced onto him, and bit down on his arm.
Well, in the end, she was still like a rabid dog?
He had clearly gone through an "intense" "life-and-death struggle," and had also worked hard to say the lines he had always wanted to say in the appropriate setting, yet they had not had any effect at all. Ash glanced at the loli still biting him, then could not help raising his head and gazing at the sky with a long sigh.
Afterward, he silently stood up and simply let Eris hang from him like an accessory while biting him, walking toward the outskirts of the city... doing his best to avoid unnecessary trouble after revealing his name.
———
Just like that, Ash silently left the city with Eris, while on the other side, the entire city instantly erupted into an uproar because of that astonishing battle that had just taken place.
The shocking rumor spread as though it had grown wings, rapidly spreading at an astonishing speed. It did not even take much time before it surged outward like a raging tide, reaching the entire continent and even the entire world.
Everyone was spreading the story that, for some unknown reason, the Water God had gone to challenge that mysterious Evil God, but the result was that the Water God had her heart ripped out by a single move during the battle and was easily killed by him, with even her sword being taken away.
The enormous disparity in the battle, the tragic outcome, and the Evil God's final words completely convinced everyone that the Evil God being called the Evil God was absolutely no coincidence.
However, not long after Ash left, the corpse being kept by the higher-ups of the demons here. The old woman who, no matter how one looked at her, should have been completely dead, suddenly opened her eyes while being transported.
"What? I had another strange dream... Does that god really exist?", Reida slowly sat up, somewhat blankly looking at everything around her, and subconsciously touched her chest, which had already been completely restored.
Her mind continuously recalled that strange dream just now, and she also remembered the mysterious existence in the dream that resembled a humanoid light.
As she recalled the incomprehensible conversation with the Human God, she unconsciously muttered in a low voice, "Among the gods protecting the world, the only remaining god... sensed the threat of death, and in order to prevent his own death from causing the destruction of this final world, he did not hesitate to expend divine power to resurrect me?"
But if all of this really concerned the survival of the world, then in order to save this world, it seemed that she could only try to work harder once again. And also... she was somewhat concerned about whether Ash had actually looked through her memories, as well as the fact that the Human God somehow gave her a somewhat suspicious feeling.
Because the Human God clearly wanted to help his benefactor, yet his benefactor Darius was a piece of trash that even she herself despised.
And Ash, who had just killed her... was now standing right outside the carriage, curiously observing the entire process of her resurrection from death, or rather, the flow of divine power.
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