Chapter 258: Embodiment of Death

The silhouette that pushed away the rubble and stood up was Aegis.

The iron titan stood several meters tall, its colossal, dark-plated armor unmarked by the thousands of tons of concrete that had collapsed upon it. From beneath its heavy, horned visor, two hollow eyes burned with an intense, terrifyingly brilliant sapphire-blue radiance.

And resting safely within the cradle of Aegis’s massive, impenetrable gauntlets was Risa’s corpse.

She remained bundled in the white laboratory coat, her pale, peaceful face shielded from the dust, entirely unblemished by the cataclysm.

Standing directly at the phantom’s hip, emerging from the shadows of its armor, was Hide Volter.

He did not look like an Exterminator now, or like a man if one saw from any distance.

From his boots to the crest of his brow, Hide was entirely subsumed beneath the scales of the Abyssal Scale Carapace. His skin was an abyss of shifting black armor. His eyes were not blue anymore, but vortexes of deep violet—ancient, predatory, and entirely devoid of human light.

Hide did not speak to the phantom. He gently reached out, resting his scaled hand against Risa’s cold forehead for a fleeting microsecond, before pulling his touch away.

“Guard her body,” He said. “She will have a proper burial in her home, if they have left anything of it.” the command resonated through the tether.

Aegis bowed its massive head, stepping backward into the protective shadows of the ruined foundation.

Then, Hide vanished.

BOOM!

There was no sound of a leap.

A colossal, concussive atmospheric ripple tore through the dust cloud hovering above the shattered facility. The immense shockwave violently parted the smoke for miles in every direction, blowing the drifting ash into oblivion and exposing the pale sky.

Before Arius’s nervous system could even register the displacement of air, the world darkened.

SCHLUCK!

Arius gasped, his single eye bulging from its socket.

He looked down at his own chest.

Punching cleanly through his reinforced ballistic breastplate, shattering his ribs, and driving through his sternum was a black, scale-clad arm.

Hide was standing inches from his face, his right hand buried deep inside Arius’s torso.

And locked securely between Hide’s razor-sharp, dark-metal talons was a brilliantly glowing, translucent silver sphere—Arius’s living mana core.

“H-Hide… stop!”

A desperate, cracking voice cried out from the rubble behind them.

Kiko was clawing frantically at the gravel, dragging her shattered body forward with her bare hands, her face pale with terror.

“Please! Spare him!” she begged, tears spilling down her dust-caked cheeks. “Leave him, Hide!”

Hide did not pull his arm back. He did not loosen his grip on the pulsating core by even a millimeter.

Slowly, his neck tilted to the side, his violet irises locking onto the crippled girl lying in the dirt.

When he spoke, the sound that emerged from his chest shattered whatever remained of the human boy. It was not a mortal voice. It was deep, multi-layered, and terrifyingly ancient. Like that of Calamity Lord.

“Why?” Hide rasped, the words scraping through the air like grinding stone. “Don’t you want him dead?”

Kiko’s breath hitched, her eyes trembling as she looked at the monstrous, scaled figure towering over the crater.

“I… I will get you away from here!” she cried out, her voice breaking with desperate sincerity. “That is why I came to this awful place! To save you! Remember… remember gate before the tournament? You saved my life from the beasts back then! I never paid you back! Let me pay you back now! I can open a path… but please, don’t execute him like this! This is all being recorded and they will use it against you.”

Hide stared down at her, his expression an unreadable slab of black iron.

His gaze took a quick mapping of the surroundings. There were broken buildings around them, wines creeping over them. They had been abandoned. This was a dead zone, Hide inferred. A place that is left hollow after a dungeon break.

And there were cameras, one some buildings. This was being recorded, maybe Walter Bigiva was watching it live. But what does that matter? If it helped, Hide would want to piss the prick licker so that he comes here to him. But he knew the older mam was as sharp a snake.

“You lied to me,” Hide said, his abyssal voice devoid of warmth. “You stood outside my cell and said it had been nine hours. It has been two months.”

“I… I didn’t want to break your mind!” Kiko wept, shaking her head frantically. “I knew what Walter did to you, I knew the lies they were spreading, and I was terrified of what the truth would do to you! Please, Hide, listen to me! If you butcher him here, you become the monster they painted you to be in the news! Don’t let them make their lies real!”

Hide turned his violet gaze back to Arius.

The knight was trembling uncontrollably. His single functioning eye was dilated in paralyzing horror. With Hide’s claws wrapped directly around his mana core, Arius could not draw a single breath of energy. His talent was completely suppressed, rendered entirely useless. For all his arrogance, for all his talk of peerless duty, he was nothing more than mortal meat caught in the jaws of a predator.

Hide leaned forward, his shadowy crown brushing against the cold wind.

“You are too late,” Hide whispered into Arius’s ear. “I am what they have made me.”

Hide closed his fist.

CRACK—SHATTER!

With a single, effortless flex of his dark talons, Hide pulverized Arius’s mana core into millions of glittering, useless silver shards.

“AGHHHHHHH—!”

Arius shrieked—a high, blood-curdling wail of soul-shattering agony as his lifeforce violently imploded within his chest.

The scream did not finish.

Hide’s left hand blurred upward. His dark-scaled claws clamped over the top of Arius’s skull.

CRUNCH!

With a cold, merciless exertion of his physical strength, Hide burst open the knight’s head like an overripe fruit. Brain matter, bone, and crimson blood exploded outward, splattering across the ash.

Hide withdrew his right arm from the hollowed-out chest cavity, letting the limp, headless corpse of the Peerless Knight collapse into the dirt.

Silence crashed down upon the crater once more.

Kiko remained frozen on the ground, staring at the pool of blood with wide, glassy eyes, her hands trembling violently in the soot.

Hide did not look down at the dead man. He turned his head slowly toward the trembling girl.

“I am the embodiment of death,” Hide spoke, the dark mana swirling around his boots like an unchained ocean. “And I don’t need anyone’s help.”