"Excuse me, but would you all be willing to listen to me properly now?"
The question was polite, but with the overwhelming presence of the three giant Dragons standing behind the mysterious figure, Serafall could not bring herself to refuse.
"Good. Since no one objects, then…"
"Why?! Why does my Red Dragon Emperor obey you so completely? I added such precious things to him, yet he still lost to Vali. Doctor, did you tamper with him somehow?!"
"…"
The mysterious figure silently turned toward Kokabiel, whose face was twisted with rage after interrupting her, then raised a hand and lightly snapped her fingers.
"You really are an incredibly foolish madman…"
"Whoosh!"
It was so fast that Kokabiel had no chance to react. The shadow of a massive red dragon tail swallowed his body before slamming him away, smashing a human-shaped crater with several pairs of wings into the ground.
"Tell me, how stupid does someone have to be to leave both the brain desire stimulation surgery and the mind-control surgery to an outsider like me? You didn't actually think I'd be loyal to you just because you put me under house arrest, did you?"
Her tone was mocking. Even through that thick mask, everyone could feel the way the mysterious figure was looking at Kokabiel, like she was staring at an idiot.
"What about you, Vritra? I was the one who awakened you. I helped you successfully fuse with Genshirou Saji's soul and bypass the mechanisms of the Sacred Gear system. I haven't treated you badly!"
Clinging to consciousness, Kokabiel turned his gaze to Vritra. As far as he was concerned, Vritra, the Evil Dragon he had personally revived, had no reason to betray him no matter what.
"Ah, right. I suppose I should thank you, you useless Fallen Angel, for waking me up and gathering the rest of my body parts. But serving you? Forget it."
"Why?"
"There are a few reasons…"
Vritra swayed the tail behind him, looking at Kokabiel as if he were watching a clown.
"First, I'm an Evil Dragon. For now, joining the Khaos Brigade, which is controlled by us Evil Dragons, seems more suitable and gives me more freedom."
Stare…
Feeling everyone's gazes turn toward them, and in order to stop Vali from declaring war on everyone there, Kuroka Toujou thought for a moment before explaining.
"Don't look at us. We're just borrowing the name. Our captain is still Delta. Or do you actually think Shadow has joined forces with the Infinite Dragon God?"
Ignoring Kuroka Toujou's explanation, Vritra continued, every sentence stabbing Kokabiel straight in the heart.
"Second, your plan doesn't interest me. We Evil Dragons don't mind bullying the weak. Actually, bullying the weak excites us. But only bullying the weak is just pathetic. We are immortal Evil Dragons, after all.
Compared to your plan, I much prefer the Doctor's. At the very least, her plan will actually get me killed a few times. Add in the fact that she was the one who pieced me back together, and I decided to join her."
"Third…"
By the time Vritra finished speaking, Kokabiel was nearly exploding with rage, but Dahaka chimed in as if joining the fun, all three heads wearing mocking expressions as they stared at Kokabiel.
"Naturally, it's because you Fallen Angel are utterly useless. You're still traumatized by a few Excaliburs even now, hahaha…"
"You even acted so irrationally over those Excaliburs that you exposed our operation, and you still thought you could control us Evil Dragons. You're not even as good as that second-rate Demon King, hahaha…"
"In short, you're useless, narrow-minded trash who dreamed of controlling us Evil Dragons. Of course we would turn on you, hahaha…"
"Guh…"
Mocked by Aži Dahāka, Kokabiel could not withstand the fall from believing everything was under his control to being betrayed by everyone. Already barely holding on, he spat out a mouthful of blood on the spot and passed out from sheer rage.
"He fainted? And this is supposed to be a Fallen Angel officer?"
"Boring. I thought we'd get to play with him a little longer…"
"Might as well put this trash to use. I remember that Elf gave us something pretty interesting, didn't she?"
As if something had just occurred to him, Aži Dahāka strode over to Kokabiel and swatted the unconscious man, along with a certain object, toward the Red Dragon Emperor with his tail.
It was something like a sphere. The moment it landed on the red Dragon, it fused instantly with the Red Dragon Emperor's flesh.
"…Looks like nothing changed?"
"Did we get scammed?"
"Let's go find her and kill her right now!"
With a headache, the mysterious figure known as the "Doctor" held back the unhinged Aži Dahāka, then turned toward Cid and the others.
"Right now, listening to me finish explaining my plan is your only path to survival. What will you choose?"
"…Please, go ahead."
Serafall glanced at the Red Dragon Emperor and Aži Dahāka behind the Doctor, two Heavenly Dragon-class fighters, then at Vritra, an Evil Dragon King-class fighter, before answering with a bright smile. There was no helping it. When you were under someone else's roof, you had to bow your head.
"Then listen carefully…"
Speaking without emotion, the Doctor took a crystal emitting faint white light from her robes.
The instant the crystal appeared, the light across the battlefield seemed to grow brighter. The Power of Light inside the Church warriors surged out of their bodies uncontrollably, and the weapons in their hands kept sending their masters a desperate sense of longing.
Of everyone present, the one with the strongest reaction was undoubtedly Cid, who was lying on the ground pretending to be dead. Don't misunderstand. It wasn't that Cid had lost control of his Magical Power and ruined his disguise. His control was actually quite good.
Rather, as he stared at the white crystal in the mysterious figure's hand, his eyes nearly popped out of his head. Someone please tell him why the high-concentration crystal this mysterious figure had pulled out had his own backdoor on it!
"Where should I begin… Ah, right. Since this idiot was the reason you discovered it, let's start with the Chaos Curse he leaked to you…"
"Chaos Curse…"
Rias could not help murmuring the name the "Doctor" had said, then looked at the idiot the "Doctor" was pointing to. Kokabiel. The answer was obvious. This so-called "Chaos Curse" referred to the "Light and Dark Curse" Kokabiel had released, spreading it across three cities.
Rias swallowed despite herself. She had a feeling that what the "Doctor" was about to say next would shake the entire world.
"The Chaos Curse is extremely powerful. It manifests by upsetting the balance of light and darkness inside the human body, severely damaging a person's vitality and mind. If their strength or life level is insufficient, that person will die on the second night."
At that point, the Doctor paused slightly, then continued in a tone tinged with emotion.
"Do you know? After I joined the Fallen Angels, I discovered through their instruments that the balance of light and darkness in this world is severely distorted.
It's not that the line between them doesn't exist. But compared to the world's other polarized physical laws, which oppose each other as fiercely as fire and water, the line between light and darkness can be crossed with only a little time. Just like him…"
An arm clad in a gauntlet extended from beneath the mysterious figure's black robe, one finger pointing toward Yuuto Kiba, who was bound by several Magic Circles and unable to move.
"The Holy Demonic Sword. A miraculous sword that successfully fused demonic power and holy power. If the line between light and darkness truly existed in the way it should, Yuuto Kiba would already have died from his clashing powers and blown himself apart."
Rias frowned and withdrew her gaze from Serafall, then quietly exchanged a look with her Queen, Akeno Himejima. Neither of them understood why the "Doctor" had suddenly begun explaining her Chaos Curse, but they knew one thing very clearly. Sitting back and doing nothing meant waiting to die. They had to resist.
"Speaking rationally, by exploiting the flaw in the imbalance between light and darkness, along with the conceptual existence of light and darkness, this curse can successfully bypass the body's defensive mechanisms. Add in its ability to spread through simple contact between living beings, and it truly is an excellent curse. Unfortunately, it has two flaws."
The Doctor raised one finger and continued with a hint of regret.
"First, the Index. At its core, this curse exploits the world's imbalance between light and darkness. So, in order to break that fragile line between them, we need a treasure that has reached the extreme of either light or darkness to guide it. Only when the purity reaches a certain level will the damage and range caused by the imbalance become significant."
If most of the world's rules were like a seesaw with its central fulcrum firmly chained in place to stop it from shifting, then the fulcrum between light and darkness was only held down by two boards. Stepping over it was easy.
"This is a serious problem. In theory, even if we used a holy relic at the level of the Thirteen Longinus, its range would at most cover a large country. As for the damage it would inflict on true powerhouses, it still wouldn't be that difficult to dispel."
Stepping across was easy, but how far one could go after crossing was another matter. If one side of the light-and-darkness seesaw stretched for several thousand or even tens of thousands of meters, then an ordinary treasure would only reach a few dozen meters, and even a Longinus-class treasure would only reach a few hundred.
"Fortunately…"
Changing the subject, the mysterious figure excitedly raised the peculiar crystal in her hand, her voice suddenly rising.
"The Fallen Angels somehow got incredibly lucky and picked up a Light Crystal of this purity by the sea. It's so pure that I even suspect it was personally created by God, the Lord of Light."
Under normal circumstances, a Light Crystal with this degree of purity would be useless, because something so pure should be impossible to create in the first place. As a result, no one had any need for a Light Crystal of this level. At most, they would treat it as a Light Crystal that could last longer than an ordinary one.
Unfortunately, someone had discovered the truth behind the world's imbalance between light and darkness and used it to develop a terrifying conceptual weapon. Even more unfortunately, this Light Crystal had completely perfected that conceptual weapon, turning a stats monster into a conceptual monster.
For a natural law, as long as it had not reached one hundred percent, it could not exert its full power, and people would still be able to find ways to deal with it. But once it reached one hundred percent, it could no longer be measured by numbers at all.
"You've already seen the chaos brought out by using a crystal of such purity as a catalyst. Though, because it was only a prototype curse created by Experiment No. 1, its purity wasn't fully brought out. And that is all this idiot's fault!"
Did he have any idea how precious this thing was? After all, even if light and darkness were out of balance, the scale of an entire world was not something a few Longinus could affect. At the very least, they would need to throw in the head of someone ranked in the world's top fifteen just to touch it slightly, and only slightly. Unless… a powerhouse capable of effortlessly touching all kinds of natural authorities had created a natural crystal equivalent to a backdoor. Otherwise, the difficulty would be no less than fighting a Dragon God War.
At that thought, the Doctor cast a resentful glance at Kokabiel, then raised a second finger.
"The second flaw of the Chaos Curse is consumption. Continuous production. Even if we threw in every Light Crystal the Fallen Angels obtained, it still wouldn't be enough to cover the entire world instantly. So I came up with another method…"
She snapped her fingers. Through the ice dome created by Serafall, everyone could see a white sphere and a black sphere appearing in the sky above Itogami Island.
"As I said earlier, the Chaos Potion is only the prototype. The final form of the Chaos Curse… is to use these high-concentration Light Crystals to directly contaminate the Authority of Light, smash apart the line that separates light from darkness, and completely throw light and darkness into chaos."
"When that happens, the world will undergo a drastic transformation. All life will be affected by the Authority, and more than 99.9 percent of life in the world will die from it. Only a small number of beings with S-rank strength or special constitutions should survive. Of course, the Fallen Angels, who were once Children of Light before falling because of their desires, should probably all survive."
The Doctor cast a mocking look at Kokabiel on the ground, not at all bothered as she revealed why Kokabiel had allowed her to study the Chaos Curse. At the same time, she conveniently drew hatred toward the patron who had kept her under house arrest.
What was even more terrifying was that there were some things this mysterious figure likely had not said aloud. For example, this imbalance between light and darkness would be permanent, and the world had no ability to regulate it.
The world could regulate the damage people caused to it, provided that damage did not exceed a certain limit.
The Authority of Light had left no room at all. It had been driven one hundred percent straight into the depths and mixed with darkness. Without a doubt, that was beyond any level the world could adjust. The world could not exactly delete light and darkness. If it did, its system would more or less collapse.
And by then, because of the imbalance between light and darkness, the world would no longer welcome any new life. Living beings would have no time to adapt to that kind of chaotic environment. In the end, the world might even actively eliminate the powerhouses who could not adapt and were only enduring the chaos through sheer strength, preventing those surviving powerhouses from influencing the new species that would be born in that chaotic environment.
After briefly picturing it in his mind, Cid finally sorted out his thoughts and reached a conclusion.
Damn it. This really was all my conspiracy!
At this point, there was no point trying to argue. With tears in his heart, Cid could only shoulder the blame. Although he had no idea how the other party had obtained it, the crystal with his backdoor in it was undeniable proof. He was the one who had opened a backdoor to the "Core" of light knowledge for this group of terrorists.
"Now that you know everything, do you want to stop me from destroying the world…?"
The Doctor was still speaking to Serafall and the others.
"Then leave. Spread this information. Let everyone on this island know that if I do not die, the world will be destroyed."
"What is your purpose?"
"That is none of your concern. Just spread the information. Now take your people and leave."
Speaking coldly, the Doctor waved her hand, signaling for Cid and the others to leave.
***
...
...
If you'd like to support my work and unlock advanced chapters, you can follow me on p-@-treon.
[email protected]/PinkSnake (50 Chapters Ahead).
You can also follow as a free member to read a few advanced chapters.
***