Chapter 211: Battle For Salvation (V)

Ishiki, now disguised as a demon circled around the castle and reached a wall that was unprotected and where no soul was wandering. The castle wall was thirty meters of smooth, unbroken gold.

Up close, it was even more overwhelming than it had looked from a distance. Every stone had been transmuted into solid gold that caught the Silver Moon’s light and threw it back tenfold. Standing at the base of it felt like standing before a small sun that had decided to become a wall.

Ishiki pressed his back against the surface, staying out of line of sight from the main gates, and looked up.

There were no handholds or seams. Not even some kind of architectural flourishes he could use to climb.

But then again… he didn’t need conventional handholds.

He willed the Divine Blood in his palm to extend, pressing his hand flat against the gold surface. Slowly, thin tendrils of black liquid spread from his palm, filling the microscopic imperfections in the metal’s surface and hardening. He pressed his other hand against the wall, doing the same.

Then he began to climb.

It was slow work. Each handhold had to be created and dissolved in sequence, his body moved upward in careful, deliberate motions. The scythe he had formed earlier had already shifted back into the Divine Blood pool, helping him climb up the wall.

No reason to carry something cumbersome up a thirty-meter wall.

Halfway up, a patrol of Dragon’s guards passed directly below him. He froze, pressing himself flat against the gold surface and activated [Ghost Blade]

They passed by from beneath him without any notice.

He reached the top in three minutes and hauled himself over the parapet in silence. His landing was soft and he immediately pressed into the shadow of a decorative spire before scanning his surroundings.

He was on a narrow walkway that ran along the interior of the castle’s upper wall. Below him, the castle’s inner courtyard spread out in the moonlight.

And it was made entirely of gold.

The courtyard’s flagstones were gold. The archways were gold. The fountain at the center that had gone dry, he noticed was carved from a single massive block of gold. The walls, the window frames, the doors and their hinges and their handles and the decorative vines climbing their surfaces.

Gold… All of it. He had entered this place once before too… but it never ceased to amaze him.

It was magnificent and deeply unsettling in equal measure.

’Who builds a castle out of solid gold? Well… the walls are made of Gold as well, a Castle is no big deal. What was Mandecium’s skill?’ He wondered.

But the most unsettling thing wasn’t the gold.

It was the silence.

The courtyard below him was empty. There were No guards patrolling the inner walls, there was no sounds of conversation or movement filtering from the windows.

Ishiki descended into the courtyard using the same method as before and landed silently on the golden flagstones.

The sound his boots made was softer than he expected… almost non existent, thanks to the Divine Blood that absorbed the shock.

He moved toward the main entrance of the palace proper, a set of doors tall enough to accommodate giants. They were slightly ajar.

He slipped through.

The corridor beyond was lit by lamps mounted in golden sconces at regular intervals. The light they cast was warm and yellow, giving everything an almost dreamlike quality. The floor was gold… The ceiling was gold.

Ishiki moved quickly, staying close to the walls, his footsteps were silent on the gleaming floor.

He slowly made his way towards the throne room and for some reason a weird unsettling feeling settled in his heart.

He didn’t find a single soul in here.

’Where is everyone?’

He had expected guards or some players at least roaming around.

Instead he found room after empty room, corridor after empty corridor, a palace that felt less like a seat of power and more like a mausoleum dressed in gold.

The emptiness made his skin crawl.

’Something is wrong. Either they are all outside dealing with the Secondary Ring situation, or…’

Who knows why… but the thing was that there was no one here.

Which raised questions Ishiki couldn’t answer yet.

He kept moving, following the corridor’s gentle upward slope.

not after too long the corridor ended at an archway and beyond it was the throne room.

Ishiki stopped at the threshold.

He had seen this place from afar once before. When the Dragon announced that he was the Emperor of Aethelburg… but now he was very close to that very place.

The ceilings soared above… how high exactly he couldn’t tell.

The light here was reflected off every golden surface and bounced between the pillars in cascading waves, creating the impression of being inside a sun.

The massive pillars carved from gold lined both sides of the chamber in perfect symmetry, their surfaces engraved with scenes of ancient glory.

Cobwebs stretched between the highest pillars like tattered curtains. Dust lay thick on every surface. Dust that had been undisturbed for decades.

At the center, elevated on a dais of seven steps, stood the throne.

It was wrought from gold, shaped with artistry that defied explanations… its curves and angles and details were so fine they seemed impossible to have been made by hand.

On either side of the dais, three lesser seats were arranged in perfect symmetry. There were six chairs total, three on each side.

All of them were empty.

But the throne was not.

Ishiki pressed himself behind the nearest pillar and went completely still.

The Dragon sat on the throne.

Not in the triumphant display he had made when first claiming it. Not with his wings spread and golden flames erupting. He was just… sitting with one leg crossed over the other.

His massive frame settled into the throne’s contours as if it had been made for his exact proportions—which it probably had, given whose bloodline had built this place.

His golden eyes were fixed on nothing visible. Thinking, perhaps.

The Orb on his forehead pulsed slowly, like a second heartbeat. Like something that was aware and alive in its own right.

But what was unbelievable was the fact that he was alone. There was no one here.

Renji… his two other subordinates… or any guard. There was absolutely no one.

Just the Dragon. Alone in his golden throne room, surrounded by centuries of dust and silence.

Ishiki’s back pressed flat against the pillar as his mind raced.

’Renji isn’t here.’

That was the first thing. The man he ad come to confront was absent. Which meant either he was elsewhere in the castle or outside entirely, dealing with the chaos in the Secondary Ring.

’So what now?’

His eyes tracked back to the throne. To the Orb pulsing on the Dragon’s forehead.

He thought through scenarios.

Renji was his target… he could simply wait for him to come back and avoid the dragon entirely.

But… if Ishiki waited for Renji, Renji would already be standing at the Dragon’s side when they met. With the Dragon’s protection and favor behind him.

And Ishiki would be alone.

In another scene… he confronts Renji elsewhere. Finds him and forces a confession or an answer, settling it all without involving the dragon.

Except that there was nothing that kept the dragon out. Either way… The dragon must be eliminated.

And right now he was alone.

Ishiki stared at the golden sphere pulsing on the Dragon’s forehead.

’If Renji needs the Orb to complete his plan, then removing the Orb from play removes Renji’s leverage.’

But taking the Orb meant going through the Dragon.

He let that sink in properly.

The Dragon was a creature that had broken free from three-thousand years of imprisonment. This entity had lived for so many decades and still looked as if he was in his youth.

But there was still something.

The Dragon was not careful. He was confident, yes—supremely, perhaps justifiably confident.

But he was not careful at all… He enjoyed talking because of spending so much time alone.

A careful opponent was harder to work with than a confident one.

And there was another thing Ishiki kept returning to.

The Dragon’s third seal had broken when he claimed the throne. Two seals before that had broken in sequence as well. He was more powerful than he had been when Ishiki first encountered him.

But Ishiki wasn’t at full strength back then and he didn’t have much time to think as well.

’Maybe… I can win.’

Maybe… a very fragile maybe built on incomplete information and a lot of assumptions.

But even if he couldn’t win, even if the fight went catastrophically against him—he needed to try.

Ishiki exhaled slowly through his nose, feeling the Divine Blood mask shift slightly with the motion.

The decision settled into place with quiet finality.

He was going to fight the Dragon.

Not because it was smart… but simply because, Renji could not have that Orb.

And because Nina’s death deserved more than him running away and waiting for a better moment that might never come.

Ishiki stepped out from behind the pillar.

The throne room stretched before him in all its vastness and golden glamour. The six lesser seats flanked the dais on either side, three and three, like an honor guard that had long since abandoned their posts.

He walked forward. His footsteps echoed in the chamber, each one distinct and unhurried, rising to the heights of the unseen ceiling and coming back down.

He stopped in the center of the path that led directly to the dais and its seven steps.

He reached back and grabbed the imaginary scythe that took form according to its masters will.

Slowly, almost lazily, he spun it once in a single rotation in front of him, and then settled it across his right shoulder.

The dragon had noticed him the moment he stepped inside and now he was looking at the newcomer intently.

The golden eyes, which had been fixed on the middle distance, descended from wherever they had been and found Ishiki. They traveled across him… observing his mask, horns and the scythe.

A small furrow appeared between the Dragon’s brows.

Ishiki didn’t flinch and looked back into the dragon’s eyes.

The silence stretched between them like a third presence in the room.

Then the Dragon spoke.

“Are you another one of those Demons?”

His voice was not alarmed at all or even particularly interested. It was the way a man sitting in a comfortable chair might acknowledge a knock at the door.

Waiting to see what it wanted, not yet bothered enough to stand up.

Ishiki was silent for a long while… before he finally spoke.

His voice came out rougher than usual through the mask.

“Yes,” Ishiki said. “Give me that Orb.”

He let a beat of silence land before adding… “Or I will have to take it by force.”

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the Dragon unfolded himself from the throne.

He rose with deliberate ease, his massive frame ascending to its full height, four wings spreading slightly behind him.

He descended the seven steps at a measured pace, each footfall a soft golden echo.

He stopped at the base of the dais. Three meters from Ishiki.

He looked down at him the way a man might look at an interesting crack in a stone he’d just turned over.

Then a smile spread across his face.

“Is that so? Then take it from me.”

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