Chapter 123 120: Total Eradication and the Lingering Ember

'Even a direct, kinetic blitz didn't leave a corpse?' Regulus mused, staring down at the bloodstained crater.

On second thought, it made a twisted kind of sense.

None of the Sin Archbishops of the Witch Cult, regardless of their direct combat potency, were entities that could be dispatched easily. Their sheer survival mechanisms were grotesque and varied: Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti of Sloth could endlessly body-hop through his contracted 'Fingers'; Capella Emerada Lugnica of Lust possessed limitless cellular regeneration and flesh manipulation; Sirius of Wrath could synchronize mortality and transfer fatal wounds; while the Sin Archbishops of Gluttony were divided into three separate entities, with the youngest, Louis Arneb, remaining untouchable within the Od Laguna's Hall of Memories.

And as for himself—the conceptual invulnerability granted by the Authority of Greed made him the undisputed pinnacle of survival.

From the sheer volume of blood splattered across the shattered canyon stone, Stride Vollachia—the Sin Archbishop of Pride—clearly possessed some emergency survival artifact or spatial technique of his own. Yet, unless Stride had inherited absurd, instant-regeneration capabilities on par with Capella, or body-snatching like Petelgeuse, taking a time-frozen kinetic barrage head-on meant he was hanging onto his life by a mere thread.

Death should have been an inevitable conclusion.

Even so, Regulus had zero interest in gambling on the survival of an enemy. Leaving a calculating schemer alive in this world was an intolerable liability.

Looking back, his previous leniency in letting Capella escape after marking her had been a lingering irritation. At that time, his subconscious worldview was still chained to the soft morality of the modern world—a peaceful society where common civilians never felt the looming threat of sudden death.

This parallel world was nothing like that. Here, brutal civil wars erupted overnight, terrifying Mabeasts roamed the wilds, and supernatural Authorities defied human comprehension. The law of the jungle was naked, simple, and merciless.

In a world like this, leaving an enemy alive behind your back was asking to be stabbed in the dark.

'Fortunately, the submission crest is already etched into Capella's lower abdomen,' Regulus reminded himself, narrowing his eyes. 'Once the crest completes its assimilation, that venomous dragon will naturally crawl back to my side as a devoted pet.'

'As for Stride Vollachia... I must see his rotting corpse with my own eyes.'

With that ruthless resolve, Regulus initiated a thorough search.

No matter how miraculous Stride's escape method was, an instantaneous short-range shift couldn't carry a critically mangled man very far. With his eight-armed guardian Kurugan already reduced to red mist, moving on his own was physically impossible.

He had to be nearby.

Regulus systematically combed the rocky terrain, filtering his senses. Before long, an unmistakable anomaly caught his attention.

The heavy, metallic stench of fresh blood hung in the cool mountain breeze.

For Regulus, who had single-handedly annihilated the vanguard of the demi-human army, fresh blood carried a sharp, unmistakable scent. To ensure total safety, he re-engaged the Stillness of an Object's Time around his body, stepping cautiously through the dense thicket.

Pushing aside the jagged branches, he found a patch of disturbed earth.

"It's not him?" Regulus murmured, clicking his tongue in disappointment.

Judging by the heavy drag marks, scattered tufts of fur, and cracked bones, the immediate clearing was merely the aftermath of a wild beast's hunt.

However, just as Regulus was about to redirect his search...

"Hmm?"

His sharp eyes caught a tiny splash of crimson on a low sapling. Snagged on a sharp twig was a delicate, embroidered silk handkerchief stained with blood.

Regulus knelt down, picked up the fabric, and brought it close to his nose.

The faint, lingering fragrance of lavender and high-grade perfume was unmistakable—a woman's scent. And judging by the freshness of the floral undertone, the handkerchief had been on her person within the last hour.

'Someone arrived to extract Stride before I caught up?' Regulus realized, his brow twitching.

Intrigued and thoroughly annoyed, Regulus followed the subtle drag trail leading deeper into the mountain range. The rescuer's movement speed was remarkably fast, weaving effortlessly through the crags.

Before long, Regulus halted at the foot of a towering, sheer rock mountain. Several dozen yards ahead, a gaping cave entrance was carved into the cliffside, with the fresh drag marks leading straight into the dark interior.

Regulus did not take another step forward.

'The range of Lion's Heart is nearing its limit,' Regulus calculated coldly.

If he ventured any deeper into the subterranean cave network, the distance between himself and his wives at the ruins' campsite would exceed the maximum range of his Authority, temporarily forcing his conceptual invulnerability to deactivate.

Was this location chosen by sheer coincidence, or had Stride calculated the boundary of his range?

Regulus leaned toward the former. Stride had never crossed paths with the previous Bishop of Greed, and even if he had, an arrogant narcissist like the original Regulus would have never publicized the existence of a range limit to anyone.

Looking at the dark cave, Regulus chose the simplest, most absolute tactical solution.

He casually walked behind a ten-ton granite boulder resting on the slope.

With a flick of his right boot, he kicked the massive rock.

BOOM!

Frozen in time and carrying infinite, unyielding kinetic momentum, the colossal boulder instantly transformed into a supersonic siege shell. It tore through the cave entrance, pulverized the bedrock, and punched straight through the entire mountain, emerging from the far side in an eruption of shattered stone!

Regulus didn't stop there.

Over the next five minutes, boulders, ancient trees, and slabs of bedrock were torn from the earth and hurled like an apocalyptic railgun battery.

The entire mountain collapsed into a deafening avalanche of rubble. To ensure total annihilation, Regulus scooped handfuls of dirt and gravel, hurling them like buckshot across the ruined expanse.

The roaring dust slowly settled, revealing a completely flattened, cratered wasteland.

Assuming anything living inside had been reduced to atoms, Regulus turned and walked away.

Several minutes passed in total, eerie silence.

Suddenly, Regulus's figure flashed back onto the ridge. He surveyed the quiet ruins, his sharp eyes scanning every crevice.

"Either entirely dead, or never here in the first place," he muttered aloud to the empty wind.

He turned and departed once again.

A few minutes later, he vanished—only to abruptly materialize on the opposite ridge for a third time.

That discarded handkerchief still sat uncomfortably in his mind.

'If you want a job done right, never leave room for miracles.'

Regulus took a deep breath, leaped into the air above the pulverized crater, and unleashed a sweeping barrage of time-frozen gravel straight downward. The pebbles struck the collapsed mountain with the force of meteor strikes, blowing through the subterranean strata and creating bottomless, pitch-black voids in the crust.

He repeated the bombardment three more times until the entire bedrock was obliterated into fine sand. Only when the restless paranoia in his chest finally subsided did he truly turn on his heel and depart toward the caravan.

Ten minutes passed.

Half an hour.

An entire hour passed in dead silence.

Deep beneath a tilted overhang of ancient bedrock that had miraculously wedged itself over a subterranean fault line, a pale, slender arm suddenly thrust upward through the loose shale.

A woman with long, wavy gray hair struggled violently, coughing blood as she dug her way out of the suffocating debris.

Panting heavily, she turned back toward the dark cavity and pulled with all her remaining strength, dragging a mangled, blood-soaked body from beneath the crushed stone.

Unlike the woman, who had barely escaped the shockwaves, the man she dragged was barely recognizable as human. His torso was riddled with shattered bone fragments, his regal robes were torn to wet rags, and his left leg had been sheared off at the hip during the mountain's collapse.

"Stride..." the gray-haired woman whispered, her voice trembling.

"Take... take me... to the Capital..."

A rattling, agonizing rasp slipped through the shattered jaw of Stride Vollachia.

Looking down at his shredded body, the woman nodded silently.

If they had reached a top-tier water mage an hour ago, survival might have been a slim possibility. But after enduring an hour trapped beneath a collapsing mountain, combined with catastrophic blood loss, even the Divine Dragon's blessing would struggle to mend this husk.

To cling to consciousness and breathe in such an utterly shattered state... even as the woman who had stood beside Stride through decades of dark conspiracies, she found his sheer, spiteful obsession with life almost terrifying.