Chapter Seventy-Five: Recognizing Hell (Part Twelve)
“I said, wait a minute.”
But the very next moment, just as Anacelis zipped by, cloaked in lightning, her vision blurring, she noticed a sudden surge of frost energy from the girl standing atop the high tower. The faint sound of the girl’s voice floated towards her, carrying a hint of warning, and her heart skipped a beat.
She was mad…
Can’t take a loss and still want to throw hands?
This thought rushed through her mind, and quick as a flash, the Sword Demon Miss began to slow down. She realized the girl was about to attack and desperately tried to adjust her position in midair. But alas, it was too late.
Crack crack crack crack crack—
The sound of enormous, tooth-aching ice blocks shattering echoed in front of her. In her field of vision, Anacelis only saw a sharp blue light flare up before her. She sensed danger, but her mind realized it too late. Stuck in the air, unable to use her momentum, all she could do was muster every ounce of effort to slow down with lightning, and then—BAM—she slammed into a cold, hard wall.
Buzz—
In that instant, the Sword Demon Miss felt as if her head was buzzing with the sound of a million bees swarming in her ears. Everything went dark, followed by a flurry of golden stars; her consciousness blurred, and every bone in her body felt like it was going to shatter. She felt nothing except pain, and in a daze, she plummeted helplessly towards the ground.
“Ah…”
In her foggy state, she thought she heard the girl exclaim, sounding slightly surprised, “Why didn’t you dodge…?”
Boom!
In the next moment, a huge commotion accompanied by the sound of howling wind rushed right up to her. Anacelis felt two arms wrap around her waist, catching the scent of a faint, lilac-like fragrance.
So fragrant…
Whoosh—
An astonishing rush of wind accompanied by the lingering sound of lightning swelled up next to her ears and then faded away. Anacelis, momentarily dazed by the floral aroma, regained her senses, only to realize she was now lying at the top of the tower, and that lovely scent had vanished.
The girl released her hold on Anacelis’s waist and stepped back, seemingly mumbling to herself, “That was too much… I shouldn’t have conjured up such a thick ice wall in mid-air…”
Then, as if questioning herself, she added, “Are you okay?”
“…Uh.”
Anacelis felt the hint of an apology in the girl’s words. She wanted to say she was fine, but when she opened her mouth, no sound came out. It felt as if all the air in her lungs had gone haywire. In that moment, she suddenly realized there was bl**d on her face…
Can’t move…
Everything hurts…
I hope my bones aren’t broken…
After lying there for what felt like ages, when the girl began to dab something on her face, Anacelis finally regained her ability to speak: “You… cheated…”
Honestly, even she didn’t know why she would first accuse the girl of that—it sounded more like the playful complaints of friends after a friendly spar, completely unlike her usual self.
If something like this had happened before, she would have either remained silent and gone straight into battle—if she could fight, she would k*ll; if she felt outmatched, she’d at least take a chunk of flesh from her opponent. Because only by feeling pain would she learn to fear, to hesitate, to weigh the cost before trying to hurt someone next time. That had been Anacelis’s way of handling things all along.
Yet somehow…
In front of this girl, she felt no such intentions.
“Hatred,” even if it was simply “dislike,” any negative thoughts about wanting to k*ll her just wouldn’t arise…
Why?
Wrestling with this question, Anacelis slowly lifted herself off the cold stone floor.
“It hurts…”
She cringed, holding her nose and mumbled.
“Sorry about that.”
Looking up, she saw the girl squatting in front of her, just as she discarded a cloth that had been used to wipe Anacelis’s nosebleed. The bloodied cloth fluttered down to the ground like it was something hastily torn from a cloak. The girl shrugged and muttered a half-hearted apology.
This annoyed Anacelis, but not knowing what to say, she silently endured the pain and stared at her.
“Don’t look at me like that!”
The girl, slightly peeved by Anacelis’s gaze, pouted and grumbled, “I told you to wait, but you had to barrel in like a headstrong idiot! How could you not dodge? I thought you were good at dodging… this isn’t my fault! Seriously, at least look down once in a while!”
…Down?
Anacelis blinked, slightly taken aback.
She had indeed only focused on the girl…
“What’s down there?”
She asked instinctively, and feeling the pain dissipating and her body seeming to be okay, she forced herself up, took a few deep breaths at the tower’s peak, and tossed those strange thoughts from her head. She moved her wrists, neck, and ankles, confirming her agility before leaning out from the tower’s ledge.
At this moment, Anacelis realized something was amiss.
As soon as the floral fragrance from the girl faded, she faintly detected a strange odor wafting through the air—though faint, it was far more nauseating than the bloody aroma she had sensed during her hallucination outside the city walls.
Having crawled out from among the dead, she knew all too well what that smell meant.
Corpses…
Countless, numerous, and a staggering amount of dead bodies…
And not just any bodies, but those long deceased, decayed, and dried out, or perhaps on the verge of becoming skeletal—that was the source of this smell.
Anacelis had always been sensitive to odors, but just earlier, when the bloody hallucination had ended, she hadn’t caught a whiff of this scent.
Which meant—
Even though she had mentally prepared herself, when Anacelis poked her head out from the high tower, she was still taken aback by the scene before her, her pupils dilating to the point where she didn’t even feel her nose bleeding again.
From her earlier glimpse over the city wall, blocked by the towering structures, neither she nor the girl had seen the street in the castle’s center. Now, she suddenly realized that this was far from the empty city she had imagined…
On the contrary, the castle was actually filled with people.
Dead people.
A mass of people who had long since passed on.
Most of them were kneeling or sitting by the streets, some huddling beside houses, others curling up beneath the tower, while many were densely packed in every alleyway. They mostly appeared to be tattered commoners, but included among them were clerics in church robes, or nuns, and even knights donning sturdy armor… and if her eyes weren’t deceiving her, in the far distance on a street near the square, she could see the lifeless form of someone wearing the gold robes only bestowed upon high-ranking clergy…
All around, aside from the rooftops of the towers overhead, nearly everywhere her gaze landed was teeming with bodies—bodies packed in like ants, a chilling sight.
Of course, if that was all, it wouldn’t be enough to shock Anacelis, who was accustomed to d*ath.
What was even more bizarre was that these corpses didn’t look like they had suffered a massacre or that there had been a fierce battle inside the castle; there was absolutely no sign of struggle.
Their d*ath stances were eerily “quiet”—in their final moments, they all remained kneeling or sitting, like the most devout of believers caught in prayer, whether they were commoners or knights, almost without exception, they all looked the same.
No struggle, no resistance…
As if they were facing a deity, they all faced in the same direction toward the inner fort’s north side, where a small chapel sat beneath the city walls.
