Chapter 1216. To Name the Corpse Was to Make the Nightmare Permanent

Chapter 1216: 1216. To Name the Corpse Was to Make the Nightmare Permanent

If the demon side of the corridor was a roaring inferno of triumph, the Aethelgard side was a frozen tomb.

The contrast was not merely stark; it was apocalyptic. Where the Underlayer screamed with the birth of a new era, the defenders of Aethelgard stood in the death throes of an old one.

Pale, hollow faces stared out from the ranks of soldiers who had just laid down their weapons, but there was no relief in their surrender, only a profound, soul-crushing emptiness.

Some soldiers simply collapsed, their knees hitting the blood-slicked stone with wet THUDS, their bodies convulsing in uncontrollable tremors.

Others stood like statues carved from grief, their eyes gone glassy and vacant. They weren’t just defeated; they were spiritually eviscerated.

The power they had placed their absolute faith in—the divine certainty of their Apostle, their hero, their living god—had been snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.

Apollo, the champion of their salvation, now lay as nothing more than a broken heap of flesh and shattered armor amidst the wreckage.

The silence on their side of the corridor carried a different weight than the one that had preceded the surrender.

That previous silence had been tense, pregnant with expectation. This silence was heavy, permanent, and suffocating—the specific, hollow silence of a people who had watched the very floor of their worldview disintegrate beneath them.

In the center of this devastation, Elliot clung to Evelyn like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

His ribs screamed in protest as Evelyn’s arm wrapped around him, supporting his collapsing weight, but he couldn’t have cared less about the pain.

His gaze was locked on the crumpled form of Apollo, whose golden armor was now dulled by blood and cracked like eggshells.

The dam inside Elliot finally broke.

The tears came not as gentle streams, but as violent torrents, carving clean paths through the dried blood and grime caked onto his face. His shoulders shook with such force that each breath became a ragged, wet struggle.

Huuu... gaaah... huuu...

His fingers clawed at Evelyn’s arm, gripping her sleeve so hard his knuckles turned white, leaving bruising crescents in his desperate attempt to anchor himself to something real.

"We lost," Elliot whispered.

The words didn’t sound like speech; they sounded like something breaking. "We... we actually lost. Apollo... Apollo is—"

The sentence died in his throat, choked off by a sob that tore from his lungs like a physical wound. He couldn’t say it.

To name the corpse was to make the nightmare permanent. His knees buckled, the strength draining from his limbs as he sank toward the bloodstained stone.

Evelyn caught him, pulling him tighter against her own body. Her own body was a map of agony; her muscles screamed from her brutal clash with Xerollion, her ribs felt like they had been ground between millstones, and every movement sent sparks of white-hot pain through her nerves.

But she refused to let go. She pulled him into the hollow of her shoulder, her own tears sliding silently down her cheeks, hot and bitter.

’How could this happen?’ her mind screamed in a wordless cycle of denial. ’How could something so bright be extinguished so cruelly?’

She didn’t offer platitudes. She didn’t whisper empty promises that they would rise again or that this was merely a temporary setback.

She couldn’t bring herself to lie. To offer comfort would have been an insult to the magnitude of their loss; any word of hope would have sounded like a hollow mockery in the presence of Apollo’s corpse.

Instead, she simply held him, her grip iron tight, offering the only thing she had left: the shared weight of their shared catastrophe.

The devastation rippling through the Aethelgard lines was not merely a loss of military capability; it was a systemic collapse of the soul.

Along the fractured ranks, the sounds of war had been replaced by something far more unsettling: the quiet, rhythmic weeping of broken men and women.

These were not the screams of agony from the heat of battle but the stifled, private sounds of grief.

Soldiers clung to one another, their fingers stained with the blood of comrades they had watched die in increasingly horrific ways—limbs severed by magical discharge, torsos split open by overwhelming force, and skulls crushed beneath the weight of divine retribution turned sour.

Sniff. Hiccup. Sob.

Each quiet sound was a small puncture wound in the fragile silence.

But beneath that raw grief ran something colder, something far more corrosive: terror. It was a dawning, existential dread that settled in their marrow like ice.

They had just witnessed the impossible. They had seen an entity, Xerollion, shatter the fundamental laws of their reality.

He had snuffed out an Apostle of Life as if he were extinguishing a candle; he had parried a reincarnator’s ultimate strike with casual disdain; he had moved with a speed that defied human comprehension; and he had broken their strongest Headmaster like a child breaking a wooden toy.

’We are nothing,’ the thought echoed through their minds like a death knell. ’We aren’t soldiers.’

’We aren’t heroes...’

’We are insects beneath the boot of a god who doesn’t even bother to look down when he crushes us...’

Near the rear of the formation, a captain, a man whose hair had gone gray from decades of service, stared down at his sword. The blade lay on the blood-slicked stone beside him, its polished steel now dulled by gore and dust.

He stared at it with a detached, alien fascination, as though he were looking at a foreign object from another world. He no longer recognized what it was for.

He had enlisted eleven years ago with the uncomplicated, unshakable certainty that discipline, steel, and courage could meet any threat Aethelgard faced.

Watching Apollo fall had not just cost him a battle; it had dismantled the very foundation of his identity. The sword, the training, the honor—all of it felt like a pathetic lie told to children.

Where his certainty used to sit, there was now only a yawning, hollow abyss that no amount of military doctrine could fill.

"What was it all for?" he whispered to the empty air, his voice cracking. "All those years... all those lives... for nothing?"

A few paces away, the scene was one of frantic, desperate futility. A battlefield healer moved between the wounded, her hands shaking so violently she could barely hold her vials.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

The sound of glass against glass punctuated her movements. She murmured, rehearsed reassurances to soldiers whose wounds were tangible deep gashes, broken bones, and arterial bleeds, but her voice failed her when she reached those whose injuries were spiritual.

She found nothing to say to the men whose eyes had gone hollow, whose souls had clearly left their bodies long before their hearts stopped beating.

She knelt beside a young soldier whose leg had been grotesquely crushed beneath a fallen marble column.

CRUNCH.

The sound of grinding bone still seemed to echo in her ears as she worked, her fingers slick with crimson as she applied salves to the mangled flesh.

"Stay with me, lad, just stay with me," she pleaded, her voice rising in pitch. "Focus on my voice, breathe through it, please—"

But even as she worked, her movements became mechanical, her concentration fracturing. Her eyes kept drifting, drawn by some morbid, gravitational pull, toward the corpse of Apollo.

She looked at the fallen champion, then back at the dying boy beneath her hands, and the futility of her entire existence crashed down upon her.

She could stitch flesh, she could seal wounds, and she could bind bones, but she could not heal a world that had been broken beyond repair.