A longsword. A shortsword. A greatsword.
Filthy grey strips of cloth wound its frame, and over them coiled vines like twisted tentacles, golden seal-script flowing along their length.
The [King of the Night] rose to its feet.
Three or four metres tall at the very least, taller even than the fully armoured Maxim standing across from it — yet gaunt, its body carrying an air of terrible frailty, of something already broken.
The crown-like head was no more than a few strands of withered wood, as though some ancient sovereign, long buried beneath the years, had finally been dragged back into the light.
The King of the Night had three arms.
Each arm held a different sword. Swinging. Hacking. Thrusting.
Maxim had known no shortage of fine swordsmen, but not one of them measured up to the King of the Night in front of him.
Right now it felt like fighting three "Sword Saints" at once.
The technique flowing from every one of those arms was flawless, without a seam to exploit, and the three moved in concert, weaving a net that let nothing through.
Cold silver light braided together, forcing him back, step after step after step.
[Back?]
For the first time in his life, that thought surfaced in Maxim's mind.
Impossible.
As captain of Zeus Familia, naturally he only ever—
Forward. Never back!
Thunder fell from the sky like rain, bolt after unbroken bolt hammering into the King of the Night's withered body, and as the lightning burst, countless sword-scars began to surface across Maxim's armour, dense as stitching, as though bent on shaving that fortress of a suit away entirely.
The clash of gold against iron never stopped.
Call it momentum, or call it sheer overwhelming Strength.
Little by little Maxim seized the advantage, pinning the king of night to the ground until it could barely move at all.
Now this was satisfying!
He paid no mind whatsoever to the fact that most of his armour was already ruined.
That was a loss counted in the hundreds of millions of Valis — and to Zeus Familia, or to Maxim himself, a trifle beneath notice.
What mattered was that tonight's battle felt good. Clean, bright, joyful.
It had clearly been a long time since Maxim had cut loose on anyone like this, so whoever this thing was that dared ambush and challenge him, he was glad of it. He wouldn't hold back, though — that too was the respect owed to a [Warrior].
"Is that all of it, then?"
He raised a fist wrapped in roaring serpents of lightning, and the words carried a trace of regret.
But clearly it was not all of it.
The real battle had only just begun.
Boundless black came pouring out of the King of the Night's ruined body, swallowing the sky, the earth, and everything in sight.
Maxim stood where he was and watched it happen, the grin on his face growing broader.
Good. So there's more?
When all that darkness scattered and his vision cleared again—
the sky had changed its "colour" entirely.
[What is that?]
A scene beyond understanding had simply appeared in front of him: exquisite stars whirling like a maelstrom, streaming, flowing, until they formed a circular passage that seemed to lead to some far distant end of everything.
And at the end of that passage stood the [King of the Night], returned.
Maxim saw it at a glance.
The greatsword in its hand had changed. It was no longer that plain, ancient, broken thing, but shimmered instead with a beauty past all describing.
A greatsword made purely of stars.
Deep violet radiance began to blaze, and Maxim saw it — saw the stars fall across the earth like raindrops, drifting through the air, rising, sinking, and then bursting all at once.
A flash of brilliance, and with it a soundless detonation of Magic.
Bone-deep pain went through him. The motes of light passed through his armour without the slightest resistance, driving straight into his flesh, coursing wherever they pleased, making their presence unmistakably felt.
Stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing—
Like countless insects wandering loose inside his body. What Maxim felt now was agony there was no way to stop.
[Good.]
[Very good!]
Bare-handed, he grabbed straight for the star-moon greatsword in the King of the Night's grip.
And the blade only blazed the more brilliantly for it.
In that same instant the thunder cracked again.
Fighting in a way that gave not one thought to the wounds on his own body, Maxim buried the King of the Night beneath a deluge of thunder a second time.
This time, though, it didn't work.
Because space itself warped, and the towering king simply "slipped" out of Maxim's hands, effortlessly.
The world bent out of true. The night had no shape to hold.
Only now did the man realise that he could not lay a hand on the thing before him at all.
It was not human.
Once he had grasped that with absolute certainty, the look on Maxim's face changed — because the [King of the Night] plainly wasn't a Monster either.
So what was it?
Something conjured up by one of those so-called "heaven-sent gifts"?
A Strength tied to the gods?
Never mind. It didn't matter. Whatever the thing was, tonight's fight had genuinely lifted his spirits, and that was enough!
Come on, then. More.
The King of the Night began to move like a phantom, vanishing, appearing again out of nowhere, all the while swinging the star-moon greatsword and leaving streak after streak of deep violet across the world.
Those glittering motes were as dazzling as a river of stars, and every bit as lethal. Even Maxim began to notice his own body letting out a "wail" that said it was near its limit.
How long had it been, since he became a Lv.8 adventurer, since anything like that had happened?
Interesting. Truly interesting!
Yet no matter how the thunder surged and raged, turning the towering man into a rolling, crackling sphere of lightning that hurtled and smashed in every direction, trailing serpents of electricity just as blinding—
Maxim's speed had reached something close to an absolute limit.
Lightning-attribute magic carried the trait of "swiftness" by its very nature; where speed alone was concerned, no magic in the world could rival it.
Even so.
He still could not catch the King of the Night.
It wasn't a question of fast or slow. It was as if the thing simply did not "exist" within the space he stood in.
What was going on?
Maxim had faced countless powerful enemies, and he was no fool who could do nothing but throw punches, but for the moment he could make no sense of the situation.
Time, however, was not on his side either.
Isagi's purpose here was a simple one: to test exactly what kind of Strength a Lv.8 adventurer could put on display.
So there was no sense in dragging it out. The boy prepared to let the King of the Night take on its strongest — and final — form.
And so.
Maxim saw it.
That night of streaming stars opened its eye.
"Ah—"
Beautiful.
Stars glittered across the dim night sky, and at the very centre of that whirling vortex, as the longsword in the King of the Night's hand came sweeping down, almost in the very same instant, a vast fissure split open across the heavens.
It was the night's [Eye]!
From it golden light radiated out in endless shafts, mist and cloud coiling within, like the boundless furthest edge of the sky.
And then came the heavenly fire, pouring down to set the garden alight; golden flame welled endlessly up out of the ground as if to devour everything there was.
In that moment.
Maxim seemed to understand how small he was.
He stood there dazed, looking at the sight before him with nothing in his eyes but bewilderment.
It was a beauty he had never imagined and never foreseen, visible only in this single instant — the one wonder in all his life that he would ever be permitted to glimpse even a sliver of.
How vast the night was, and how utterly incapable a human was of understanding even a fraction of it.
What rose in Maxim then was the feeling that comes naturally to any man who stands before the towering immensity of heaven and earth: that he was very, very small.
But even so.
Even so!
The only answer to all of this incomprehensible thing, the only answer to that whole black and boundless world, was thunder and a fist!!
Isagi watched it happen. Maxim swung his fist at the [King of the Night] regardless — a pure fist, unmixed with anything else, holding nothing but Strength and the fury of pressing forward. It broke through the starlight. It broke through the mist. And in the end, it touched the night.
The sky itself nearly shattered under that single blow.
The Nightmare along with it.
Isagi studied that punch with absolute seriousness, because on it there most certainly rested a certain "something"—
You could call it Divine Power and not be wrong, because it truly was not a Strength that belonged to a human being.
But what Isagi felt was not the thing Goddess Astrea or Goddess Demeter had once shown him, nor the power of "charm" wielded by a Goddess of Beauty such as Freya or Aphrodite.
There was a clear distinction between them — and this one he knew well.
Mm—
It wasn't the Divine Power he himself possessed, either.
It was... that's right... that! It was that!!
The Fianna knights' banner.
That Strength gathered out of the hopes and the belief of people — that was how the god Goibniu had put it.
Which meant that the punch Maxim had just thrown also carried the hope and belief of someone, or of a great many someones?
He was captain of Zeus Familia, and one of the [City's Strongest] adventurers of this age—
You could even say one of the strongest in a thousand years, going all the way back to the birth of the profession called "adventurer".
So that was it.
Isagi felt he had understood something.
And so the Nightmare was closed. Maxim, hazy-headed, lurched to his feet and discovered that he was standing in the middle of a noisy hall.
Drink, candlelight, and his companions all around him, laughing and bellowing.
A splitting headache came crashing in, so fierce that the man could barely remember what he had just been dreaming about.
[How did I get drunk?]
That was the first thing Maxim thought. All he could dredge up was the faintest impression of some unfathomable figure, and a battle with it that had shaken heaven and earth.
[Strange dream...]
He shook his head, eyes lowered, picked up the cup beside him and threw back another long swallow.
Who cares. He felt good, somehow!
So — another round!!
And at that very moment, in an inn not far outside Zeus Familia's home, Isagi stood at the window, his gaze turned somewhere else entirely.
Babel, visible from anywhere in the city.
Under the cold autumn night, the tower that stood as a symbol of the adventurers' "victory" still rose above everything.
Should he go challenge the [Empress]?
Isagi thought it over and decided against it.
A Lv.9 adventurer probably possessed a Strength even more mysterious and formidable than a Lv.8's, but it could wait for next time. He was only Lv.7 himself; Lv.9 and the like were still a fair distance out of reach.
Besides, with Miss Alfia as his "anchor", coming back here again was as easy as breathing.
Oh, right.
Where had Alfia gone off to, anyway? She'd had something important to take care of, hadn't she.
Familiar streets. A familiar river. A familiar bell tower. And a familiar...
Alfia sat high on the roof of the Abandoned Church. Long years without repair had opened it up, and moonlight spilled quietly down into the space below.
Which god had this place been dedicated to?
Nobody knew any more. This old quarter was full of buildings left behind by the people of the ancient age, a thousand years ago.
Abandoned churches like it stood everywhere around here.
So.
Why had her sister chosen this place, of all places, for her secret meetings with that man?
That question would likely never have an answer.
Perhaps it was nothing but chance. Or perhaps the place was so utterly unremarkable that no one from Zeus Familia or Hera Familia would ever run across them here.
After all, this was a "secret romance" that absolutely could not be discovered — one enough to stagger the gods themselves.
Alfia still remembered it.
The day Goddess Hera learned that her sister was pregnant, that face — always so full of dignity, the face of an old goddess — had for the first time gone blank with disbelief and utter helplessness.
Ah...
Alfia didn't really know why she had come here either.
Below in the church, two familiar figures leaned together, murmuring softly. She almost spoke — and in the end left her sister and her brother-in-law to their meeting undisturbed.
When you went back into the past, there were a great many things you must not do. She didn't need Isagi to remind her of that; Alfia was no fool.
If history were changed because of it, what shape would the future take?
Although.
There was history she did want to change. The fall of Zeus Familia and Hera Familia, for instance...
She shook her head. Alfia knew that even if she stepped out now and told the two captains precisely what future had been fixed for them, they would wave it off without a moment's regard and march on the Dragon Valley to subjugate the [Black Dragon] all the same.
That was the sort of people they were, the strong of Zeus Familia and Hera Familia in this era — arrogant to the bone.
It was also the very thing that had carried them this far.
Or else—
call it [Fate].
"Alfia?"
The voice came out of nowhere and startled her. She turned, and there in the night was a tall, beautiful, familiar figure, seated at her leisure atop another derelict house some distance off, watching her with eyes that held the faintest hint of a smile.
"No. You aren't Alfia."
"..."
Fighting would be meaningless.
Because in the city as it stood now, no one was a match for her. She was the strongest adventurer in the world, Lv.9 — the [Empress].
"As I recall, you went down into the Dungeon. And besides... you look exactly the same, your presence is the same, by any measure at all you're the same person — but you... you're far too healthy."
"Your illness is cured? That was a [Fate] not even a goddess could do a thing about. Have you... defeated destiny? How interesting. When was it? Was it in—"
"—the future?"
____
⚡ BONUS CHAPTER MILESTONES
✍️ 5 REVIEWS = +1 Bonus Chapter 💎 100 POWER STONES = +1 Bonus Chapter 🔥 P@TREON (Walnut-chan): Read +40 chapters ahead & unlock 60+ exclusive stories!
🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: The Retired Void Hunter — posted on The_Mikudayo