Chapter 1269 (1/2)

Kiersty narrowed her eyes when she felt the obvious power of the creator of the bloodbeasts. She couldn’t exactly tell what Skill he used in his punch and palm, but they were certainly potent. And that image of the empty-eyed monster made her wary. But she snorted and gathered herself for another attack. As a Priestess of Arbor, she had a responsibility to step forward, despite the danger. She pulled back the first Divine branched and raised her left hand in preparation to make a second one.

But before she could move, Straud continued to speak. From his pocket, he pulled two objects. One was a drop of blood and the other was a coin. “First, let’s clear the way for our Lord to descend. With the formation, God has given me… With this Coin of Territory in my right hand, I claim this area in thy name!”

There was a strange ripple of the air. A breeze wandered through the stadium, touching upon the exposed skin of everyone gathered. Shivering, Kiersty was filled with a strange sense of deja vu from the sudden gust of air. She sensed an extremely familiar feeling that somehow felt dangerously foreign as it pressed down over the stadium. It wasn’t truly an image, but it was something close. The sense of strangeness seemed to reach out and grip the entirety of the structure.

Kiersty pressed her mouth into a thin line; she could sense that a strange barrier surrounded the stadium now that would prevent people from leaving.

Realizing that she couldn’t keep giving Straud more time to follow through with his plan, Kiersty raised her hands. Yet the opponent moved faster. Straud smirked over at her and said, “And as the new liege of this place… that being’s influence is banished!”

Kiersty yelped as the scion of Arbor beneath her rapidly began to wither. The blow struck her just as firmly as it struck Arbor’s incarnation. She tumbled to the ground and rolled for a few rotations before popping back up to her feet. Her expression twisted as she saw the Bandit King had bounded gleefully toward her to strike while she was down. And to her horror, when she reached for the power of Arbor, she felt that same strangeness in the air blocking her from reaching her Priestess Skills. Yet even as Kiersty’s heart began to pound at the danger, a voice cut in from the side.

“Do you really think the people of Earth are just gonna let you get away with this?”

The Bandit King cursed and rolled clumsily to the side as a huge, spiked sphere of iron smashed into the place where he had been about to step. Tykes hopped out of the stands and landed next to Kiersty. He beckoned and the huge metal sphere flew back to smack into his hand. His eyes were grim as he looked at the assembled Nemesai. The air became heavy as Tyke’s image spread out to fill the surrounding air. “Just come all at once. That will make things quicker.”

Yet Straud continued to seem serene as he looked down at the two people who had jumped onto the field. “And in my left hand… a drop of blood from a true God. With it… shatter the shackles and free our images!”

His left hand tightened into a fist. There was a strange rumbling and the air seemed to press down on them in an entirely different manner than the strange feeling from before. Kiersty only frowned from the weight, but she could feel that the individuals who hadn’t ever encountered an image before directly passed out beneath its pressure.

It was a ripple of boneless bodies collapsing in the stands. The crowd, which had been largely dumbstruck by the conflict on the field, began to scream and panic as its weaker members fell onto those fortunate enough to endure the attack. Chaos ensued as different groups began to try and help the unconscious while other people just fled. The Order Valorem guards surged into motion, but that was also the very moment that bloodbeasts began to pour forward out of the interior of the stadium and strike at their backs.

Before they could respond to the new threat, Kiersty could sense that almost a dozen of the guards had been killed. As their blood splattered on the ground, more bloodbeasts poured out of the bowels of the stadium.

As the crowd’s screams grew even louder, Kiersty looked grimly up at a towering figure that appeared in the sky along with the vast pressure. Because that figure was a weapon bared, but not wielded. The pressure they felt was simply the existence of the image.

The figure was a man. He was hairless and disdainful, sneering down at the world. His eyes swept across the stadium without seeing anything, more of a recording than a true intelligent entity. Which would help them survive it, but it still didn’t give Kiersty any good ideas of how to deal with its power.

Yet just as Kiersty began to fear how the image would attack, the image quickly faded away.

At the same time, Kiersty twisted to look in shock at the Nemesai as images far more powerful than any she had seen from them in the past erupted from their bodies. Straud glanced over toward the Winged Serpent. “There, it is done. You are freed from your shackles by the grace of my God. Now, do your part.”

“As it was agreed, so it shall be.” The eyes of the Winged Serpent began to glow. A huge stone wheel appeared in the sky, constructed by a series of consecutively larger circles of stone that moved independently of each other. Each circle was covered in carefully spaced runes with rigid designs. It was a thing of constant motion, filling the surrounding space with the noise of stone rubbing against stone.

And gradually, the different circles shuddered to a stop. The light in the Winged Serpent’s eyes increased. The screams grew even louder as the bloodbeasts finally managed to escape around the guards and cut into the vulnerable crowd. After a series of grinding clicks, each portion of the huge wheel aligned.

A line of runes spreading from the interior to the edge began to glow.

The Bandit King grinned over at Tykes as his image blasted outward and pushed away Tykes’ image. “Still want to act cool? Then how about-”