Berserk of Gluttony (LN) - Volume 8 - Chapter 24

Chapter 24:

Indestructible

COUNTLESS BLACK CUBES continued to hover in the air, moving in such an orderly way that it was clear they were seeing some kind of objective through. And I was not about to simply wait and find out what it was. I transformed Greed into the black bow.

“Eris, give me a hand,” I said.

I wanted her gunblade with its long-range capabilities.

“Envy is a support weapon,” she said, perplexed. “You know that there’s nothing I can do to help you against those things.”

With a shrug, Eris fired a buff bullet at me to raise my stats. I couldn’t stand to see her like that.

“Come here for a sec,” I said.

When Eris stood in front of me, I put my hand over hers so that we were both holding Envy. Then, I brought an image from the spiritual plane to the front of my mind.

“Uh… Fate?”

“Just a little bit more…” I muttered. Eris fell silent as her gunblade transformed before her eyes. “Envy has an Assault Mode. Hope I’m not being a nuisance by forcing it on you.”

“Not at all. I like it.” Eris wielded the huge gunblade with ease, and struck a pose. She thought very highly of what I’d just done. “Releasing me from my collar. Transforming Envy. Now I’m certain. You’ve awakened to your true self.”

By exploring the depths of Gluttony and battling Kairos, I’d been given the chance to reassess myself. As a result, I was finally able to fully accept it. 

“So you knew?”

“Of course. I’ve been watching you for a long time.”

“I see. And Myne, too?”

Was she like Eris? Had she approached me because she knew about me? Thinking about it made me feel like a puppet and they were pulling my strings. 

Eris laughed, seeing me sulk. “There’s no way Myne knows. All she knows is that you are both bearers of Skills of Mortal Sin.”

“Oh? Really?”

“Think about it. We’re talking about Myne here.”

That was a good point. I’d traveled far and wide with her, and she’d never been one to think about things too deeply. The only exception to that was when it came to her lost siblings.

“Well, I don’t think Myne would care, regardless of who I really was,” I said.

“That’s true.”

I pictured her face and laughed along with Eris.

“Myne… She and Roxy still haven’t made it here yet,” said Eris, worried.

“They’ll be fine. I can’t imagine those two ever losing a battle. Let’s focus on the task at hand right now.”

“Let’s do what we have to do!”

I readied my black bow while Eris took aim with her gunblade. Our targets were the floating black cubes. We poured our magic into our weapons and fired. The arrow and the bullets swirled together, growing in power as they collided with the black cubes.

“Damn, they’re tough!” I said.

The black cubes didn’t have a single scratch on them and continued to drift through the air. 

“That color… I didn’t want to believe it,” she said, surprised.

“They’re made from the same material as our Weapons of Mortal Sin,” I said.

Part of me had felt it the moment I’d first seen them, but the sky was practically filled with them. I hadn’t wanted to believe that they were all made of the same indestructible material as our own weapons.

“Look at you two, puffing your chests out and getting all confident just to find yourselves stuck,” muttered Greed.

Well, if we couldn’t destroy them, we could at least rely on Myne’s favorite hobby. I readied the bow for ­another shot.

“If we can’t break them, we’ll just have to smash them so hard they turn to dust,” I said.

Eris slapped her palm against her forehead. “You’ve clearly been spending too much time around Myne,” she said, her voice dripping with exasperation.

At least she knew the plan, though. I still had a decent reserve of stats due to everything I’d devoured along our way, so I fed 10 percent to Greed to engage the Bloody Ptarmigan.

“Need my help?” asked Greed.

“I’d love it.”

“Atta boy.”

Eris watched us, grinning. 

It was time to put a stop to the black cubes. The black bow morphed into a new shape as it absorbed my stats and formed into a much more aggressive weapon. This was why I needed Greed. The burden on me was lighter now compared to when I activated an attack on my own. Yeah, I could do without his moaning, but he always had my back.

“Ready when you are, Fate. How about it?”

“Let’s do this.”

“All right then. Ready, aim…”

I settled on the center of the swirling black cubes and poured even more magical energy into the arrow I had nocked. My Gluttony took my fireball spell and altered it. Bloody Ptarmigan was engulfed in red flames. They glowed brighter and brighter until they were golden—so hot that they threatened to melt anything nearby.

“Ow! That’s really hot! Fire it already!” cried Eris, jumping back.

I took my time lining up my shot and reading the black cubes’ movements.

Now.

“Fire!” I shouted.

The arrow flew with enough force to pierce the heavens, and flames trailed behind it as it sped toward its targets. The black cubes may have been indestructible, but if I could disturb their movements, I could then stop them from doing whatever they were trying to accomplish.

“Fate!” Greed shouted in surprise. 

Eris’s face echoed the weapon’s shock.

“Yeah, I see it,” I replied.

I had fired an arrow of incredibly intense heat, but it had been completely frozen. No wonder they were shocked. 

I only knew one person capable of such a feat. My father, Dean Graphite. He stood on a black cube and looked down at us. In his hand was the black spear, Vanity, the weapon he’d used to freeze Bloody Ptarmigan. As if to make it painfully obvious, shards of frost danced at the tip of the spear.

My father was sending me a message: If you choose to fight, I will not hold back.

“Dad!” I shouted, louder than I had ever shouted before.

My father’s expression didn’t change. He merely pointed his spear in our direction.

“I told you not to come here,” he said.

A red shape slowly grew on his face—his sacred mark. It was a sign of his Divine Revelation, the source of his power as one of the holy beastfolk and a contract with God he was bound to complete, no matter how he felt about it as an individual. But what exactly were my father’s orders?

I had no such Divine Revelation. Was that because I was half-human? I already knew the answer to my question, though. I’d learned it during my battle with Kairos. I had my suspicions about my father’s role in all of this, and now, it was time to find out if I was right.

“I came to stop you,” I said. “I will not back down. Besides, I need to ask you something.”

My father looked me right in the eyes, then turned his gaze to the heavens. “There are things that are best left unsaid, for your own sake. What you want to ask is one of those things,” he said.

“I still have to know.”

My father muttered something, then pointed his spear at me. “Kids who don’t listen to their parents get punished. If you want to stop me—and if you want an answer to your question—then you know what you have to do. You know I cannot stop, Fate. Not when it comes to this.”

His sacred mark turned a deeper shade of red, as though it recognized that Eris and I were a threat to its objective. I felt my father’s strength surge. It was overwhelming, and I felt like I was suddenly battling against stronger levels of gravity. I gripped the black bow tightly in my hand.

“Can you handle the black cubes for me?” I asked Eris.

“What about you?”

“I’m going to fight him.”

Eris put her hand on my shoulder and turned me to face her. “We’re stronger together than apart,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Eris. This fight… It’s between father and son. I have to do this myself.”

Seeing this was true, Eris wrapped me in a hug. “Okay. Do what you think is best. Seeing you do this makes me happy, anyway.”

Eris’s reply took me by surprise. “Huh?” I asked.

“You’re always fighting for somebody else,” she said. “I wanted to see the day when you’d have something of your own worth fighting for.”

“Eris…”

“I told you, didn’t I? I’ve been watching you for a long time. Now, you leave those black cubes to me. I can handle them now that I’ve got this bad boy.”

Eris hefted the Assault Mode gunblade up onto her shoulder and nodded at me. I took off, running up the fallen buildings to get closer to my father. 

“A family feud of world-shattering proportions,” said Greed with a tired sigh. “Does it get any crazier?”

I heard gunfire from behind me as Eris took aim at the black cubes. Her bullets collided with them, momentarily interrupting their movements and keeping them from forming their magical seal. She was trying to buy me time, and it seemed to be working.

I pulled back on the black bow and loosed a magic arrow aimed straight at my father.

“We’re the worst,” I replied to the sword.

If anyone had known that it would all come down to this, then it really was all just as crazy as Greed said.