Chapter 430 (1/2)
“Just what is going on here…?”
The Emperor became utterly confused, but he couldn’t help it, especially more so when he stared at the broken treasured sword he had in his hand, Chloe.
“He could have cut my head off.”
The other knights must be thinking the same thing, but the Emperor was certain of this fact better than anyone else.
Su-hyeun could have easily killed his obstacles, but he chose to break their swords and stopped there instead.
“Yes, he didn’t cut us down and slipped past us.”
Just as Su-hyeun’s sword came bearing down right in front of the Emperor’s eyes, the weapon suddenly vanished.
He cut down all the swords wielded by the knights blocking his path, thereby rendering them powerless, and then, while they were in a flustered state, he slipped past their defensive cordon.
Obviously, doing such a thing was several times harder than simply cutting off the heads of his enemies. Even then, he still chose this method.
Maybe it wasn’t a difficult task for him in the end, but there must have been a more fundamental reason for making this choice.
The Emperor muttered softly, “Such as he didn’t want to kill anyone…”
“Your Majesty! Are you unhurt, sire?” The loyal retainer of the throne, Nepa, hurriedly approached the Emperor. It seemed that he was worried about his ruler’s wellbeing after the latter tried to personally stop Su-hyeun.
The Emperor turned his head to look and noticed that Nepa’s sword was also broken. “Sir Nepa.”
“Glad to see you are unscathed, Your Majesty. But sire, your sword…”
“It is of no concern. Rather than that, we should be thankful that we’re still breathing.”
The number one treasured sword of the Imperial Court, no, the entire Pangaea continent, was now broken. Although a broken weapon could always be reforged, this matter was already a great humiliation to the Imperial Court.
However…
“Sir Nepa, the Altar has been destroyed,” the Emperor turned his head and stared at Kali’s second Altar, now laying in the rubble. With this, the number of Altars meant for sacrifices had decreased once more. “That was the 51st Altar.”
One hundred Altars existed throughout the entire continent, and now, over half of them had been destroyed.
“But then…no one among us has died today.”
“Your Majesty?”
“It seems that it was the same story for you, Sir Nepa.”
In response, Nepa hurriedly hid the broken sword behind him.
A broken sword was a truly humiliating matter to a swordsman. That was why he reflexively hid his weapon, but even then, Nepa knew it only too well. “It seems so, Your Majesty,” he said.
“Why did that man not take our lives? Even though he was fully capable of doing so. Do you have any guesses as to why?”
“No, sire. This servant does not know.”
A “heretic”—a truly vile villain who defied the faith and teachings of this continent and went around destroying the sacred Altars—was how Su-hyeun was known as. He was a villain, and Goddess Kali had commanded everyone to kill him.
Unsurprisingly, the residents of Pangaea, including the Emperor himself, designated Su-hyeun as a villain and tried to execute him. However, right at this moment, a crack formed on the foundation of that belief.
“I’m curious about what that man’s true goal is.”
“Your Majesty? His true goal?”
“Yes. One thing is for certain, and that is…he has no animosity aimed toward us.”
“Even if that is true, sire, his current actions, seemingly based on his animosity toward the gods, are not something we can easily forgive.”
“That…is indeed true,” the Emperor nodded slowly. Even though he was nodding his head, his mind was being bombarded with many complicated thoughts right now.
The Emperor’s gaze drifted toward the crumbled ruin of the Altar. In front of it were the knights howling out desperately in sadness at this “wretched and unfair” sight.
He stared at them as a single thought began floating up in his head, “The Altar brings death to the citizens, while that man didn’t kill anyone.”
The figures of these people busy shedding their tears after such a structure was brought down and the figure of Su-hyeun from earlier overlapped in his mind.
The Emperor turned around to leave. He knew that Su-hyeun was probably heading directly to the next Altar.
No individual in existence could stop that man now. The Imperial Court pulled out all the stops, even the Emperor himself participated, yet they still couldn’t stop one man.
The only remaining ones that could possibly do it were the gods the residents of Pangaea worshiped.
“Just who is evil? And who is the righteous?” the Emperor quietly muttered while closing his eyes.
For some reason, all of the values he held dear until now felt like being shaken up from their foundation.
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“Water naturally flows downward, doesn’t it?”
Su-hyeun recalled the Emperor he met not too long ago. That old man had this pair of rather righteous eyes.
It didn’t matter which world it was, the light in most people’s eyes would grow murkier once they came to possess some political power or even physical strength. Their moral values would become less defined and blurrier.
However, that Emperor wasn’t like that. Whether that was due to his faith in the gods or he was like that, to begin with, it didn’t really matter.
“I feel like I’ve given that elderly gentleman an arduous task, but…” Su-hyeun, riding on Miru’s back, scratched his head and muttered quietly, “It’s as he said, anyway. They need an example, after all.”
It was tremendously difficult to change the world by simply changing a single person, but it would be a different matter altogether if that person happened to be the Emperor who lorded over the entire continent.
That was why when Su-hyeun met the Emperor, he sneakily undid the seal ruling the old man’s head, and so, the latter’s desire to survive, as well as his instinctive understanding of how important such a thing was, was unlocked.
The Emperor should start questioning certain things in his head now, such as was it really alright to kill tens, no, hundreds of millions of people every year through those Altars? Was that really what the gods they worshiped wanted from them?
Maybe he would even question if these gods existed for the sake of the common people.
Still on Miru’s broad back, Su-hyeun raised his head, “Alright, so what will you do now?”
A moment later, an eerie crimson pool of blood rapidly coagulated and morphed into a beautiful figure of a woman in front of him.
It was Kali.
She didn’t reveal her true self before Su-hyeun even now; she had been planning to use the residents of Pangaea and have him fight them off, but her scheming missed the mark by a wide margin—all because Su-hyeun chose to avoid direct confrontation.
“I’m sure this isn’t what you wanted, right? What you envisioned was a fierce battle where people would shed blood and die in droves, wasn’t it?”
Su-hyeun was aware of Kali observing him for quite a while now. More specifically, she had started watching him just before he clashed against the massive army led by the Emperor.
Of course, she did this not through her main body but with her clone.
“Why did you do that?” Her voice was filled with questions as if she couldn’t understand his actions at all. A trace of murderous intent was mixed in her tone as well, which was somewhat different from before.
Since this clone was created through a lump of blood, her facial features were not there, and Su-hyeun couldn’t see her expression as a result; nevertheless, he had a feeling that it wouldn’t be a happy one.
“That’s because I could destroy the Altar without killing them. Sure, it’s a bit cumbersome, but nothing more than that.”
“Is there a reason to take on this cumbersome task?”
“Doing something like this isn’t troublesome for me after all. I’m not that impatient enough to kill a few hundred million just because I couldn’t be bothered, either.”
This was rather obvious, so much so that he didn’t even need to ponder on his options.
However, what was considered obvious differed from people to people, as well as species to species—even more so, when one was a Predator and the other was Su-hyeun, who used to be a regular human.
And well…