Chapter 498: Age After Ending (12)

Soon the moon disappeared, and the sunset, coloring the grey city.

Z was standing on a broken and split four-lane road with his lonely and grand legacy shattered.

“…”

He stared into the air for a moment as if he was lost in thought. Considering that he slowly leaned his head to hear something, it seemed that he was listening for something.

“…”

Someone was whispering into his ear in an urgent voice.

How long did it last?

Thump- Thump- Thump-

He slowly lowered his head and looked straight ahead.

Thump- Thump- Thump-

The vibration was coming from that direction. It was the sound of somebody’s footsteps.

A boss monster the size of a house was moving behind the building on the left.

The cracked asphalt floor twisted whenever that giant creature moved. His gray fur could be seen through the broken windows.

Thump- Thump- Thump-

Of course, Z was not interested in the boss monster because he didn’t take the initiative on Beast Terror, nor was it the kind of operation that he liked.

But he accepted the operation of others, or more precisely, the “judges,” because he thought he could not cross the wall and step on the shadow of the World Tree alone.

“Disgusting!”

He didn’t like it, though.

But more disgusting scenes had yet to begin. Rats started pouring out from all over the cracks in buildings, alleys, and the road on the left. Each of them was as big as a big dog. They were rats that the warlord monsters took all over.

The rats were running somewhere, entangled with each other, and trampling on each other.

Z stared intently at the procession of the rats.

‘They’re running away with their mother.’

But the next moment an explosion occurred.

Bang!

One side of the building collapsed and a beam of light poured out from the inside.

About thirty beams of light moved quickly, chasing the procession of fleeing rats.

Then they ground them like a mixer.

When the beams of light, or Einherjar, passed here and there quickly, a swarm of thousands of mice were reduced to ashes in an instant. They crushed those rats hiding in overgrown street trees, cracked buildings, and rusty vehicles.

Grrrrrrrrr- Grrrrrrrrrr-

The boss monster that hasn’t appeared from the building, believed to take all these rats probably, screamed in shock. Even the ‘mother’ of the plague of rats was also being slaughtered.

Flop!

And the red blood that gushed out of that mother splattered and spilled all over the road.

Then his flesh was torn apart in chunks, and the cars parked on the side of the road were stained with blood like sticky red paint.

It didn’t take long for Einherjars to kill the mother rat.

Thud-

Soon, the rat’s head the size of a house slowly tilted and fell over the pool of his blood.

He stuck out his long tongue, with his eyes slowly overturned. He was dead

Shortly afterward, someone landed on its head. A woman in sword-red armor wiped the blood splattered on her face and shook off her blood-stained sword.

As she slowly lifted her head, the aura emitting her divine power shrouded her head in dark green. She was none other than a woman called Valkyrie, or Jisu.

She slowly turned her gaze and looked at Z, the purple giant standing at the end of the road.

“…”

The two looked at each other, but no one spoke first. Were both of them reticent?

Jisu had Einherjar lined up behind her back, and tried to identify the unidentified opponent standing before her.

‘This guy is far from ordinary.’

She could feel instinctively that he was quite different from the many players she had met.

‘And he’s not easy to deal with.

It was the first time she felt that way after she had met the assassin Vivona, who was one of the Demon King’s subordinates long ago.

She instantly found herself on edge.

She finally opened her mouth first.

“I think I know who you are.”

“…”

“You are the leader of the Originals, the guy who has been chosen by the ‘helper’ ahead of the Necromancer, right?”

The guy with that odd name Z wasn’t a mystic. But it was known that no one had seen him before.

‘But I’m sure this is that guy.’

She was convinced that given his terrific energy, he was that guy with such a good reputation.

“You know how to speak, right? You used to tell people you’re ‘the first chosen one,’ didn’t you?” she demanded.

He still didn’t answer. Instead, he dropped the huge iron case he was holding in his left hand. It fell freely.

Thud-

The moment it hit the asphalt, his right hand moved at great speed and touched his waist, and the next moment, he stretched out toward her faster than ever.

Her eyebrows twitched. She found a hole in the metal reflecting the early dawn sun. It was the muzzle of a gun, which was incredibly large.

Bang!

He was firing a black bullet with a large-caliber revolver.

The black bullet drew a straight line, and the space around it was instantly distorted like a liquid.

Puck!

The head of a giant rat fell on the floor, which was the head of an unknown warlord monster, was crushed by the waves of the bullet alone, splattering his broken brain in all directions.

But Jisu was not there when he fired.

“…”

Z raised his head slightly and looked to his left and right. He missed her movement.

“I think I understand why you have not been chosen.”

She was already behind his back. She raised her right hand, swung her sword in a curved line, then stabbed his heart in an instant.

Z avoided it, but he was a bit slow. When his left shoulder was touched by the sword, his scaly armor was scraped by the blade. The iron scales fell one by one

“…”

It wasn’t just the armor that was damaged. Dark red blood dripped from his shoulder and ran down his fingers.

She raised the tip of the sword that she had stabbed into his heart, then cut him again.

She aimed at his neck. But at that moment he raised the revolver.

Bang!

Her sword and his revolver collided, emitting sparks.

“Well, that’s why you have not been chosen. Why? Because you can never be the Necromancer’s rival!”

Jisu made provocative remarks like that, but she, not he, frowned at that moment because she felt an unexpected pain.

Something like black waves got stuck on her shoulder, inflicting the so-called ‘dot damage’ to her.

‘What the heck? Surely I avoided it’

It was a curse. She avoided the first bullet that Z fired, but just its mere brushing against her seemed to have the effect of causing curses all over the area.

As if it didn’t cause big damage to her, she took a step back and raised the sword.

‘As expected, he’s not easy to deal with.’

Then, for the first time, something like a sound came from the inside of that guy’s purple iron mask. It was a very small laugh. Z’s tone was low and thick. And it was kind of cold.

“Yeah, Valkyrie, you may be right to some extent. The Necromancer is a difficult opponent for me.”

He chuckled again and looked straight at her. A red-eye glow rose from the inside of that purple iron mask.

“But he might not know that you’re going to be killed by me.”

She let out a breath without showing any reaction. She was determined to confront him with all her might.

But at that moment a great vibration came from somewhere, and something like a huge wave passed under her feet. The asphalt cracked with deep dents here and there.

Because of the impact, the windows were shattered, sending off pieces of glass everywhere.

Jisu and Z had to tighten their legs so as not to fall at the tremendous impact.

“What the heck is this?”