Light blinded the boy when he opened his eyes, and so he immediately closed them again.
'Urgh! It was never this bright before… How long've I been out?'
Through a few more strenuous tries, his vision managed to adjust to the omnipresent light of the Tower, and slowly but surely he could make out his surroundings. That was when he had the opportunity to see the various confused individuals surrounding him.
There were many faces he did not know. In fact, he knew none of these people. Not the brown-haired woman with the long ponytail going down her back, nor the pudgy man whose glasses looked crooked. He didn't recognize the amputee that struggled to hold on to a nearby crate for support, and he certainly didn't recognize the man who was vomiting over the side of the wall.
The first similarity he noticed about all of those people, including others he did not study nearly as intently, was that there was a light in their eyes.
Thralls did not have the light in their eyes. He did not know what it was, perhaps it was truly one's soul glimpsing through their eyes. Whatever it was, he'd noticed that the thralls lacked that light, and so it was how he recognized that Asterie, the space-warping woman, had been enthralled by the Demon of the Mind.
Each and every person he saw was free, confused, and perhaps even traumatized.
Worthy had woken up standing on his own two feet, and when he went to take a step, it was a wobbly one. It felt like his legs were putty, and that the single step he took could've made his whole body lose its strength and crumble to the ground. He did not fall down, though.
'Urgh. I thought damage to the mind would only affect just that…'
The boy had severely underestimated the repercussions of having his mind damaged. He might not have suffered physical damage, but one's brain was more important than any other part of the body. If there were any important parts of the body that did not share an intimate relationship with the brain, and thus a distant connection with one's mind.
All of that was to say, his attempts to walk were comparable to the first steps he took as an infant. Someone might've made a joke about him being a newborn fawn, if not for the fact that there was a shocking reality being dropped upon all of the Climbers.
The entire town had become thralls, and most of them had retained the memories of their actions and the things they saw. If there was one component they were missing, it was the rationale behind why they'd followed Lord Edwin's—Furfur of the Mind—commands so readily.
They knew they'd been controlled now that the fog that settled in all their minds had been lifted. Behind that fog, their thoughts were manipulated, so every action they took seemed reasonable at the time. They truly thought that they were making their own decisions, in one way or another.
Whether Furfur had controlled all of them and manipulated their memories or truly altered their minds so that they did not find any way to resist his dominance, it didn't matter. Nobody could quite comprehend why they'd agreed to do such terrible deeds, and that was the most heartbreaking piece of it all.
Somehow, for Worthy, that was not the worst of it.
He was still all the way on the southern wall. There were people around him who hadn't been there before, who must've come up through some sort of elevation device. He was idle, standing in the same spot he'd been when Furfur took control over his mind, and sent him into the mindscape created when he destroyed his mind and witnessed Alice.
Lady Freya and her Stone Titan, on the other hand, could see all the way across the Prime Settlement from him. She rode atop of the golem's head, and he could not see her face, but she can tell that she must've been maintaining the same unmoving expression.
In fact, the Stone Titan was moving much quicker than it'd been capable of before. It was smaller, sized to fit between the structures in the settlement without crushing them or knocking them over. For some reason, the woman was in a hurry to get to the northern wall, even though she was no longer enthralled.
Likewise, the boy also noticed that Walkyr was nowhere to be seen. He'd been near the center of the town when he was enthralled, but now he was not there in the slightest.
His eyes scanned around for the gunslinger, but he did not find him.
Instead, a crater impacted against the eastern wall.
There, buried in the depression, he saw a splatter of crimson where Asterie had met her end, life unceremoniously brought to an end by the Lady Freya's Stone Titan. It had covered the distance between them with one movement of its leg, and Asterie, or perhaps Furfur who was puppeteering her, was blindsided by it.
Asterie, who showed a power that was not short of divine, did not survive the kick. Even with the physical enhancements gifted to her by Furfur, her body could not endure such ungodly punishment. A few dozen tons of weight crashing into her body full force, in addition to her crashing into the wall, is what marked the end of Asterie, who was hidden in the darkness of the wall's hole.
'...Huh?' Worthy was in the midst of looking away, but suddenly looked back.
There was one consistent theme on the First Floor that was hard to notice.
Worthy had thought it was strange, but never theorized more about it until recently. No, it was just now when he had an epiphany, gazing at the darkness that concealed Asterie's corpse. He could not see it because the inside of the wall was darkened.
But, only living things in the world produced shadows that could conceal things…
Walkyr had a shadow over his eyes when they met back at… wherever it was they'd met at—the name missed him. Shadows existed constantly, but most were inefficient, in the same way that the towering walls of Middle Town—the Accursed Port—cast shadows that did not darken the space whatsoever.
During their climb up the bone mountain, there were dark fissures on the surface of the mountain. Beneath, unknown things were waiting to capture their prey indiscriminately, without a care in the world for whether they were flesh abominations or humans. Thinking back, the mountain must've been alive in a way too. It should have been obvious.
Yet, that did not explain why the walls of the city showed signs of life too…
'It… It couldn't be…' Alice was almighty. She was the strongest being Worthy had ever seen, second only to the Blood Deity—the Blood Marauder—whom she'd defeated with an unstoppable army of golems and weapons that'd never been seen before. It could be, and it was.
Before the child could fully think about the scope of what he was looking at, the world trembled.
A tremor ran through the world, and even beyond the walls of the Prime Settlement, the landscape of blood quivered in unrest.
Somehow, Worthy knew where to go without even having to use his power as a Guide. Instead, he broke into a sprint with all the strength he could muster, stumbling over his own feet and even outright falling to the ground during his first few attempts.
He was desperate to be proven wrong in his assumption. The young man was dragging himself across the ground, and the various Climbers who were recovering from their respective traumatic experiences did not bat an eye at him.
They should have. Each and every one of them should have been afraid of what the child feared, because it would impact them too.
'Come on! Come on!' Alas, his legs did not move quickly enough.
Yet, the movement on the northern wall confirmed his worst fear.
There was panic. In fact, for the first time in his life, the young man watched as the artillery on the wall was utilized. They were not wasting any time charging. Instead, the cannons were unleashing hell upon whatever was on the opposite end of the wall, smoke rising into the air.
A relentless defensive effort, which was stagnant only because of the confusion from being freed from enthrallment, was underway.
Eventually, someone did grab Worthy. A firm hand, catching him by his shoulder.
Before he could turn, he heard the snap of a finger, and he was at a different location—Walkyr had just teleported him.
He finished looking back to see the gunslinger standing there, sweat leaking down his face. He showed signs of exhaustion and pain, and there was smoke rolling off of his skin, as if he'd been set on fire or exposed to heat capable of singing his formidable skin.
The sound of cannon fire was louder now than it was moments ago.
Walkyr yelled something to Worthy, which was drowned out by the sound of cannon fire, and then turned and snapped his finger again, disappearing into… the wasteland. He went over the wall, into the outskirts of the Prime Settlement.
What Worthy saw made his jaw loosen. It dropped, because he was seeing something he could not have fathomed in his wildest dreams.
Mountains were approaching them. Mountains with thousands of abominations pouring out from cavities within them. They were the same mountains that the Army of Hope had crossed to make it to the Prime Settlement from… wherever they'd been. Escaping from each of them, an army that numbered the millions were swarming towards the city.
From the bone mountain, which was the closest, burning spikes were rising from various holes, striking through the bodies of conjured projections unleashed by some of the Climbers with unique ranged abilities. Whatever they were throwing at the thing was not closing it down, as its mountainous shell of a body appeared unmarred.
Flying through the air, projectiles and Climbers alike were moving in a unified effort to clash with the horrors of the sky who were descending down from the clouds… which no longer quite looked like clouds at all. Somehow, the fog that once dominated the sky that the avian inhabitants resided in lost much of its vigor. It was still there, stopping humans from witnessing the true scope of the Blood Deity's boundless interior, but now it shrunk to allow a clear view of the unfathomable, terrible amalgamations of flesh that stared down at them each day.
Explosions poured out from inside of the bone mountain. It did not look damaged in the slightest, but the blinding bursts of energy pouring out from within it told a tale of a great war happening inside of the bone structure.
Sadly, even if someone was desperately trying to destroy the bone titan from the inside—which was likely what Asterie was hurrying to bring her golem to confront—the other mountains showed no signs of halting either. They were the primary source behind the ceaseless wave of flesh monsters, the Mindless.
Then… the mountains, which were moving as a means of deploying their troops like some kind of military carrier, must've been like the Mind Demon; the Enlightened. They possessed some form of intelligence compared to the others, though not nearly as much as the Demon of the Mind who fed on thoughts and learned from its vessels.
Somehow, the titanic bone monsters and the army of millions weren't the worst of it all. Worthy didn't know it until a second later. A second that'd have cost him his life.
In the distance, far, far away, he saw a glint.
In the next moment, a wall of light formed to cover the whole frontal face of the northern wall. 'Taiva…!'
And then, in the moment after that, a spear made of bones, the size of a mountain itself, crashed into the barrier of light, which managed to hold fast against the projectile that'd just covered thousands of miles in only a few seconds.
A thunderous sound hurt the child's ears, only circumvented by the projection a little bit. Even though the spear had not hit the wall directly, the impact with the shield made the world quake in fear, another earthquake spreading all throughout the region, perhaps the entirety of the First Floor.
Something was throwing spears at them from… afar. He didn't know where the spears were coming from. It wasn't that he was missing a portion of his memory containing the information. Instead, it was the fact that it was coming from a location he simply had never passed through before. Meaning…
They were being targeted by a spearbearer on the other side of the world from them.
'This… This is hell, isn't it…?!'
Worthy felt like a fool for his earlier remarks regarding war. He'd believed seeing Walkyr and the Stone Titan going through the city was an impressive, theatric showing of a battlefield. He was on the winning side, and so he felt that everything was right in his hands.
He'd forgotten where he was: Aciago Tower, where men were tested. It was the Tower where after many years, they'd only managed to make it halfway through. That was with powerhouses running rampant on the upper floors. Although the sheer difficulty of the First Floor was the result of things outside of their control, and potentially even the Tower's control to some degree, it was almost no different to the floors to come.
His notion of a battlefield was quickly changed, because now he was staring at a true battlefield.
Climbers desperately descended the walls, because they were backed into a corner. They were meeting the flesh abominations down on the ground, weaponizing their various Rewards to the fullest in hopes of defeating millions of abominations.
Sadly, these abominations were not ordinary either. They were truly reinforced by bones, the product of the Bone Beast creeping towards the walls.
Weapons and Rewards were effective, but the ones who were unfortunate enough to lack in firepower even by a small margin were caught and rapidly assimilated into the mass of the flesh monsters, who now possessed something similar to a skeletal structure.
It was always there, the signs.
The hounds, the incomplete structures where they'd taken a rest, the consumption of the gateways, and now the emergence of the Blood Marauder's Army.
The Blood Marauder, though idle, had slowly been awakening.
Its remnants were becoming more aware, and so too were the Enlightened who already had an unusual amount of sentience for beasts on the First Floor. Its body grew ready to consume and create based on the memories it had. It was trying to recreate structures as a means of either entrapping humans, or creating a home for its fragments, who it would treat as nutrients once there were no longer humans left alive.
'...C—Could it really do that? It can't wake up prematurely. Surely it can't, we'd all be dead. There'd be no way out…'
What a foolish child. He was an ignorant, ill-advised child who'd thought that war was something to glorify. He'd thought that the Holy Knight named after it was a fierce example of how noble war could make it. However, he ignored the essence of what real war was. Now, it crept towards them with an aura of death.
Piles of flesh marching at their enemy without a fear in the world, and more horrifying beasts descending from the fog in the sky to rain down true hell upon those who tried to stop their descent. There was simply no way a thousand, or two thousand Climbers, or even three thousand Climbers could manage to hold off this number of enemies.
They'd been content with making it to the end of the world, where everything stopped.
It seemed like the end of the world had come to them instead, and it was not holding anything back.