Berserk of Gluttony (LN) - Volume 8 - Chapter 26

Chapter 26:

The Angel of Death

THE BLACK-MASKED ANGEL was beyond reasoning with. It was consumed by one task and one task alone—to see through its Divine Revelation. This meant it would instinctively purge anything that tried to get in the way.

The black mask and its red sacred mark stared at me for a moment, as if setting me as its main target.

“Dad! Why would you tell me all that? You’re always looking out for me, but…am I even really your…?”

I trailed off. My words never reached him, instead swept away in the winds that whipped through the imperial capital.

“Fate! Prepare yourself!” shouted Greed.

But the moment I looked at the angel, it vanished. Is this like Gemini’s portal jumping?! No, it’s just speed, thanks to his extra wings!

I couldn’t follow it with my eyes. All I saw were the afterimages it left between movements. I couldn’t focus on the angel itself. The most I could do was transform Greed into the black shield and keep myself protected. This didn’t stop the black angel, however, who lashed at me with its spear.

“Hngh!”

The shield seemed to scream in protest as the spear impacted it. Each hit was as strong as the Noir Destruction that Myne had used on me in the underground city of Grandol. The black angel was clearly just as strong as it was fast.

I lost my footing on the black cubes and was sent flying through the air. I slammed through several buildings before finally crashing to the ground, coughing up blood at the moment of impact. The black shield had actually taken the brunt of the strikes, but those hits were so powerful that the shockwaves alone left me with internal damage. 

I crawled from the rubble and got to my feet. The black angel had turned its attention to Eris, who was keeping the black cubes from moving by constantly firing at them. It swung its black spear.

“Eris!”

The air froze the moment I shouted. I couldn’t move. I fought to look around and found the imperial capital covered in ice. I wasn’t frozen to the core, though, and I was able to melt the ice around me by raising my magical energy.

“Eris…”

She was underneath the black angel, enveloped in even more ice than I was.

“It’s fine,” said Greed. “Don’t worry. She’s much stronger than you think. She was built that way.”

Greed didn’t say who had made her that way. Both of us already knew. 

Was Libra still waiting patiently at the great canyon? He was shrewd, conniving, and untrustworthy. I just knew he was going to pull something.

“You’ve got more important things to think about, like yourself. Here he comes!”

The black angel had just shown it had enough magic to turn the whole capital into ice, and it now turned its sights back on me. With Eris’s magic bullets no longer a problem, the black cubes once again began forming a magic seal.

The black angel flew for me at top speed, afterimages trailing behind it. I readied the black shield, but the cold bit into my hands, and my grip lacked strength.

Suddenly, the sound of metal against metal echoed around me. I hadn’t been overwhelmed this time. I could stand against the black spear. I could ­defend against it. Or, to be more accurate, we could defend against it.

“You are always doing this,” said Greed, speaking aloud and with my voice. “You always say you can handle it on your own, and then this happens.”

“Greed,” I replied. “You forced the Crossing on us, didn’t you?”

“You are the partner of the mighty Greed. By doing this, we become one.”

“One and the same.”

He was right. Whenever I couldn’t overcome a battle on my own, we had overcome it together.

“You are here. I am here. And we have Kairos with us, too,” said Greed.

“The best of the best!”

I understood Greed like I understood myself now that our souls overlapped as if we were one. He enjoyed this moment right to his very core, even though he’d originally called this battle a family feud of world-shattering proportions.

“Now we fight back!” I shouted.

I pushed the black spear away and transformed the shield back into a sword. With the Poison skill still in effect, I slashed at the black angel. The angel, however, knocked away my attacks as if it had read them before they’d even happened.

“Don’t you dare take us lightly!” I shouted.

I bent backward to slip away from a spear strike, then moved closer to the angel. The spear had a long reach, but that was also its weakness. I had the advantage when things got up close and personal.

The black angel flapped its wings in an attempt to put space between us, but it was already too late. With Crossing activated, Greed and I attacked without a single wasted movement, and the black sword grazed the angel’s ribs.

“Got it!”

The timing was perfect. The strike should have opened up the angel completely, but it had deftly knocked my ­attack slightly off course. It quickly readied itself for a counter­strike, but then it seemed to realize the change in its own body and instead put some distance between us.

The Poison skill was already taking effect, and it wasn’t pleasant. Even a graze was more than enough. The angel no longer wanted anything to do with close-quarters combat. It unleashed a blast of frigid wind from its spear, one powerful enough to freeze the entire capital to its core. A fierce chill even pushed out toward buildings that lay far from where we presently fought, which then crumbled as the cold air froze and consumed them.

My hands began to freeze as they gripped the black sword. If I’d been hit point-blank, I may have crumbled, too, just like those buildings. Nonetheless, retreating never crossed my mind. Even so, my stats were not an endless well we could draw from. If I didn’t come up with a plan of attack, I wouldn’t be able to stop the black angel.

I transformed the black sword into the black gauntlets and attacked with the strongest weapon I had.

“Dimension Destruction!”

Countless black threads flew from my fingers. Each one formed something web-like and was surrounded in a golden aura as they collided with the freezing air. The threads cut through the cold like it was nothing, pulling the chilly air into the dimension opened in its wake.

It works! The secret technique overpowers the cold! We can break through!

At that moment, the black angel let out another inhuman roar, and the air instantly froze even further. It was more than even the black threads could handle, and my arms felt the heaviest they had ever been. Little by little, the black threads froze. This was how determined my father was.

“It’s not over yet!”

As long as he still called me his son, I would give him everything I had. I called upon Kairos, and his power flowed through me. The black gauntlets were wrapped in a scarlet flame that blended with the golden aura of Dimension Destruction. The air began to steam, and the black threads were finally able cut through it. I could fight through this. But when the black threads touched the tip of the black spear, something changed.

“It’s reversed!”

The cold morphed into icy flames, growing to a level of cold far, far beyond anything we’d ever experienced. My father had told me of the black spear’s powers—the ability to freeze, portal jumping—but was it capable of something else, too? Wait, he told me one more thing. That it used to be the opposite. Even after the sacred mark’s forced transformation…

“He tried to resist!”

But that was no longer the case. My father’s powers were now the black angel’s powers. Perhaps, his desire not to become the black angel was so strong that his power revealed itself as the ability to freeze everything, the exact opposite of what it had once been. There was no use asking him, however. He’d never answer me like this. It was just something I sensed as our weapons clashed.

The blue flames grew in strength, and, using the scarlet flames of my secret technique as fuel, burned even brighter. The heat was so intense that the air around me wavered and distorted. But the secret technique was still in play, and I could still fight. Even as the blue flames continued to expand, I pressed an attack. My arms felt like they would explode under the pressure, and my armor began to smolder as the blue flames neared.

Greed and I roared. It was so hot that the blood in my body seemed to boil. It was like my whole body was on fire. It was more than I could take. I couldn’t hold out any longer. 

As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I felt two hands push me back up.

What the heck are you doing? You’ve still got fire in you yet. It was Kairos, his voice calm and confident. And I don’t mean my own power. I mean the fire unique to the two of you. An inextinguishable flame.

Was that even possible? Could I do that? Right here, right now? Could I call upon that strength while I wielded the black gauntlets?

You are more than I was. The two of you can do it. So show me. 

Our two souls roared as one as Greed and I summoned the Fourth Level—the power of the black stave. The sound of flickering flames erupted from the gauntlets’ fingertips as black fire began to rise.