MHHC Chapter 157

Awakening

Adelheid swung her dagger at it in blind fury.

She cut, stabbed, slashed at whatever came within reach. But hope felt impossibly far away.

No matter how much divine will she unleashed or how many of the hands she rendered powerless, new things burst forth immediately to coil around Valentin once more.

She severed two black hands attempting to push her back—slicing through them with her dagger—and simultaneously surged her power outward, pouring it against them in waves.

The swarm seemed to regard her as a plunderer who had come to steal Valentin away.

[Get away from him. Now!]

Even commanding through her will lasted only a moment. Whether it was the weakness of her power still, or some fundamental limitation of her nature—the inadequacy of it ached through her, wretchedly.

In that instant, a single massive black mass lunged from within the shadow.

While the other entities had done everything to shrink away from her magic, this mass flew straight toward her.

Her mind told her to dodge. Her body refused to obey. Fortunately, the mass halted at perhaps two handspans' distance from her.

"……"

Adelheid held her breath and watched it.

A round, spherical object. A fine fissure ran through its center, and its surface was covered in things that twitched and writhed like earthworms. Whatever it was, it looked utterly, viscerally horrifying.

Before she could shake off that revulsion, the fissure tore open—splitting wide from top to bottom. And what it revealed—

—was an enormous eye, weeping pale, viscous fluid that dripped in slow threads from its rim.

Adelheid knew it instinctively: this eye was the swarm's leader, and its weakness.

And she understood, equally, that it was the entity holding Valentin captive.

She had to kill it. Only then could he live.

She had never felt hatred of this magnitude in her entire life. Her eyes burned with it, hot as cinders—as though the fury might scorch through from within.

Her whole body trembled as the emotion mounted toward its extreme. She raised the blade clenched in her fist high above her head. She was a breath away from driving it down with full force—

"Don't."

A hand burst from within the swarm and seized her wrist. The sound of labored, rasping breaths followed.

Valentin. He—who had appeared unconscious only moments before—forced himself upright with tremendous effort.

[You.]

"There is nothing left... that can be undone."

He moved his drained, bloodless lips with the last of his strength.

"The body has already been torn, and the soul is damaged—as you can see. Even if you were fortunate enough to find a way to reverse this now... I cannot return to your side."

Golden eyes, drained of light and sinking into shadow, traced the contours of her face. He continued, his voice steady.

"Only the corruption will spread... all the more swiftly. You still need more time."

[But this means you'll be completely annihilated.]

"I've already made my peace with it."

[Since when? This entire plan—since when did it begin?]

Valentin gave no answer. He simply gazed at her for a long moment.

As though, perhaps, he were savoring her will itself. Adelheid could read the satisfaction that had crept into his eyes with perfect clarity.

"I always believed a moment like this would come."

[Answer me.]

"I want you to be happy. I want only that, and so—"

He smiled suddenly. Perhaps even—contentedly.

"You will become a god."

That she would become a god. That this alone had always been the purpose, from the very beginning. The face of Valentin as he confessed it was utterly, terribly peaceful.

Adelheid said nothing. Her trembling hands clenched slowly into fists.

You'll become a god. I'll give you everything in the world. Always the same words. And yet the shock cut through her fresh, as though for the first time. For a single reason.

Because he had stopped pretending to have any will to live.

Adelheid let out a hollow, humorless laugh.

[It was from the very beginning, wasn't it. You planned all of it from the very beginning.]

"……"

[Did I misunderstand something?]

Valentin studied her with deepened eyes, then shook his head slowly.

She exhaled a long, exhausted breath. A profound emptiness swept through her. It felt as though she had opened her eyes for the very first time since her birth.

All the past and present braided together and unfurled before her in naked, unbearable clarity—the full measure of the deception that had been wrought upon her, all this time.

It didn't know because it was never... taught. Adele never taught it, after... all.

A lie.

And what was it he said... Did I harm Adele's nurs... emaid? If you want an answer—the answer is no.

A lie.

Humans cannot become gods. Even if you've learned to wield origin to that degree, absorbing magic regularly like this—things will remain as they were before.

A lie.

Everything as you wish.

A lie.

I want to be with you in every moment of every life you live.

A terrible lie, without a single thread of sincerity woven through it.

Before the enormity of this deception, she was swept away—helpless, unmoored. It was horrifying. Those days she had naively believed him.

She had never felt his inhumanity as acutely as she did today.

Because from the very beginning, the grief she would feel had not even been a consideration in that magnificent plan of his.

Ah—this was truly a punishment sent down from the divine. To live an entire life in destitution, to be shown everything at last, to surrender everything in return, and then, at the very end of it all, to have every last thing taken away.

[You never had any intention of living alongside me from the very start. And yet you spoke of being curious about human life. Of staying with me. That you kept up such deception for so long—]

At her caustic words, the crease between Valentin's brows deepened faintly. Adelheid wept and laughed at once.

Ah, yes. In truth, he—the divine—would feel little remorse at all. Would the eyes of the great and exalted register a mere human's desperation as anything worth noticing?

"Don't cry."

[Why did you do it.]

"What is more important and what is less—well, the calculation is comparatively clear. There is nothing left to undo. For you, and for all of humanity, this is the best—"

[No, Valentin.]

She cut his words short and seized the enormous eye with her bare hand.

As though sensing the catastrophe to come, the swarm reversed direction and came rushing toward her.

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, she registered—slowly, as if the world had thickened around her—Valentin reaching out to stop her. But her movement was faster than anything else in that space.

[What is best for me is mine alone to decide.]

Adelheid brought the raised dagger down in a single, devastating arc. Crack— and something unknown and warm splattered across her cheek and brow.

She flinched at the foul, acrid smell—and in that same instant, the things that had been coiled around Valentin convulsed and fell away from him, each one thrashing like a severed limb.

They twisted and contracted in violent, wrenching spasm, curling every extremity inward.

If they had possessed vocal cords—if they had been capable of screaming—the sound they would have produced would have been so utterly, obscenely horrifying that no sane human mind could have endured it.

They flung themselves against the walls and ceiling in wild, indiscriminate flight, slamming their bodies against stone as they fled.

"……"

Clatter— in their wake, stalactites that had been hanging from the ceiling began to fall.

Crack. Crrack. The sound of the ceiling fracturing. A sign that the passage was collapsing.

Even amidst that urgency, they gazed at one another as though only the two of them existed in all the world.

Valentin's soul, now fully exposed, was devastated. Every visible surface was riddled with fractures, and the evidence of crushing damage lay thick across every part of him.

He raised his freed hand and turned it over, studying it—front and back—then clenched it slowly into a fist.

"...We should not have come to this."

Adelheid shook her head quietly.

She was grateful she had mastered the will. Without it, she would have been overwhelmed by the surge of feeling and unable to convey a single word.

[I could not allow you to be annihilated.]

"Adele."

[I know. Now the corruption will lose you as its breakwater and pour into the world.]

"……"

[The corruption that pours from the dragon's body—which has already begun its collapse—will be darker and denser than anything the world has yet endured. Countless people will suffer. But this was something that would have arrived regardless of whether you sacrificed yourself. It was always going to come, eventually.]

She felt the light gathering behind her. It swept past her and enveloped Valentin's entire form in a soft, enfolding embrace.

It was the sight of the dragon's body—irreversibly beginning its dissolution—calling its soul home.

[I will bear every last sin myself. I will grow stronger, that much more swiftly. I will find a way to cleanse all the corruption—so that even you may find rest. Because all of this began from my own foolishness.]

The moment Valentin's soul grazed her hands, Adelheid witnessed a terrible vision.

Countless people dying. Monsters surging endlessly southward. The harbors of the south thick with refugees desperate to board any vessel that would carry them. And even the towering ramparts of Ingrid's Wall—overwhelmed, swallowed beneath a black tide that came flooding in from every direction.

[And then I will come to find you again.]

Valentin gazed at her with eyes full of aching, helpless sorrow. But there was nothing left that he could do for her now.

Within the dim, dissolving light, she could see his soul unraveling with terrible swiftness. At the last, it gathered itself into a single luminous orb.

Adelheid carefully opened both hands, and the orb flew down to rest in her palms, lingering there in a brief, suspended moment.

Then, leaving behind a warmth that would not fade, it rose into the air.

I'll wait for you, Adele.

His voice was tender to the very end.

"...Please. Can you hear me? Your Grace?"

She forced her eyelids open with tremendous effort. Someone was gripping her shoulders and shaking her roughly.

Perhaps because of it—a sharp, pounding headache gripped her, her skull ringing. Adelheid pressed her fingers to her temple and let out a pained groan.

"...Donovan?"