WIEDERGEBURT Act V: Chapter 17

The moment I sensed the indescribable Spiritual Power emanating from the figure, I realized why something about Fritz felt off.

At the moment, Fritz was releasing a horrifying power that was terrifyingly familiar to me. It was the same power that Ask had been using when he led those Sekbeists to invade Nevaria. It was the same power the Sekbeist Warlords used in my previous life. It was the same power the Great Overlord of the Seventh Plain used to kill Kari and my daughter. This was a power I could never in a million years forget.

I was not the only one who felt his power. Raul was bawling his eyes out. Because he had the genes of two powerful Spiritualists—one of whom was not fully human—he was highly sensitive to Spiritual Power. Fay was doing her best to calm him down, but she also had her eyes locked onto the figure down on the arena floor. Siv and Lin were similarly pale as if the blood had been drained from their faces.

“What is this… terrible power I’m feeling?” whispered a shocked Alexis. Out of all the people present, she was suffering the worst because, unlike the rest of us, she was only at the Third State of Spiritualism.

“That is a type of power belonging to an enemy so terrifying, you cannot possibly imagine it.” I didn’t say anything more to Alexis as I looked at my wives. “Fay, stay here with Raul. Siv, come with me. Lin, meet up with Commander Ashten and have him begin a wide scale evacuation of the arena and the surrounding area.”

Fay, Lin, and Siv already knew what kind of roles I needed them to play, so none of them hesitated after I handed them orders like a sect leader commanding his subordinates.

I leapt at the window, the glass shattering around me as I transformed into a bolt of lightning and zipped toward Fritz. At that moment, Fritz was standing in front of a terrified Erica, who was so frightened by the man in front of her that she couldn’t move. Her body had already frozen solid in horror. She was so terrified she couldn’t even shake.

There was a leering grin on Fritz’s face as he reached out for Erica, but I arrived in that moment. Spiritual Power coalesced. A ruler-shaped weapon made of water and lightning appeared within my grip. I swung it and sliced straight through the hand, which fell off Fritz’s body with a plop. The dark-skinned creature roared in anger and agony as he stumbled back backward, but his eyes still retained their clarity as he glared at me.

“E-Eryk…” Erica muttered in a daze when she saw me.

I had no idea what thoughts were going through this woman’s head as she stared at me like I had descended from the heavens. It wasn’t like it mattered.

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “You’re going to be all right. Siv!”

At that moment, Siv swooped down with a flap of her wings, grabbed onto Erica, and lifted her off the ground. Erica released a surprised shriek. However, Siv chose that moment to unleash her powers over wind, which allowed her to break through the sound barrier and travel at speeds few creatures in this world could match. They were nothing but a speck in the distance seconds later.

“You… this is the second time you have interrupted me!” Fritz roared in anger. “I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU! I’LL MURDER YOU FUCKING DEAD! YOU HEAR ME! DEAD!!!”

Fritz had obviously lost whatever was left of his sanity, so I didn’t bother listening to him. The only thing I could do right now was beat the snot out of this man.

That was why I attacked without mercy.

Lightning gathered along the tip of my hands, becoming compressed into a small sphere, which I launched at Fritz. The lightning moved extremely fast. Any normal human would have only seen a flash of light before my attack blew a hole clean through their body. However, Fritz appeared capable of tracking and reacting to my attack, for a powerful dome of darkness sprang up around him and absorbed my lightning. I frowned when my Spiritual Power scattered and disappeared.

“It’s just as I thought.” I sighed. “That is not the darkness element. You are using the Void. You are a Sekbeist.”

Perhaps it was my words that caused him to regain his rationality. Fritz snarled at me in shock.

“How do you know about the Void?! How do you know about Sekbeist?! There’s not a person alive who should know about us now!”

I snorted. “I have no obligation to tell you how I know these things. If you want to find out, then why don’t you come here and try beating it out of me.”

“GLADY!”

Fritz went on the attack this time, raising his hands above his head and created several spinning discs of darkness. They reminded me of blades as they rotated at extreme speeds. I had no idea how powerful these things were, but I could tell they would likely be able to cut through this arena like it was made of jelly. There were still hundreds of thousands of people inside of this arena. I could not let these attacks hit anything.

With a ferocious roar like a rabid beast, Fritz threw the discs at me. They did not move incredibly fast. Even so, they were faster than most attacks launched by normal humans.

I held aloft the sword made of water and lightning, my two strongest elements, and then added a single layer of the light element. Veins bulged on my forehead from the strain of using three elements at once, but I didn’t let myself become overwhelmed. I raised the sword above my head and roared as I swung it down, slicing the first rotating black disc in half, causing the attack to disperse before it could hit the arena.

Fritz gawked at me like I’d done something shocking, but then he let loose a frightening scream and flung the remaining discs at me. There was one, two, three, four, five more discs. Each one was flying my way at a slightly different angle.

I did my best to remain calm and channeled unholy amounts of Spiritual Power into my ruler-shaped weapon. Lightning crackled. Water swirled. Light coalesced together like tiny particles combining to form a single beam. Unleashing a roar of my own, I swung my weapon down and began slicing through Fritz’s attacks. The power he unleashed was impressive, and I was sent skidding backward, but I gritted my teeth and fought back.

I needed to hang on until everyone was evacuated.

***

“Stop pushing! Don’t run, people! Everyone, calmly and quickly leave the arena!”

Lin shouted at the groups of people who were trying to shove and trample others in their path to escape the battle between Darling and Fritz. The battle had reached a feverish pitch. Fritz was launching hundreds of black discs that looked like spinning saws made of vile energy, while Darling was cutting them down with his massive sword made of several elements.

While watching the battle with a frown, Lin decided half the reason these people were panicking was because they could see the battle. She also noticed that Darling could not expend his full strength because he was busy keeping those black discs from hitting the people.

Lin merged suddenly with the ground, her body turning the color earth. Because of how in tune she was with the earth element, she always felt connected to the earth so long as she was on it, but when merged like this, she could feel everything. The footsteps of people running upon it. The animals hiding beneath the surface. The magma boiling far, far below. Lin felt it all.

With this power in her grasp, Lin let her will surge, causing the ground before her to rise up around the fight taking place. It rose high into the sky, blocking the arena floor from the stands. Several muffled explosions echoed from beyond this wall. Lin flinched when one of those disc attacks sliced a hole through her wall. What ferocious power! She absorbed Spiritual Power from the earth and quickly repaired the wall.

Lin was not the only person helping with the evacuation. Commander Ashten and his Midgard Spiritual Knights were everywhere, ordering the citizens to evacuate quickly, helping protect children who’d gotten separated from their families in the panic, and doing everything they possibly could to get everyone out of this arena before it was destroyed. They were rather impressive.

When the Midgard Spiritual Knights saw what she had done, many of them gawked at her. Even their commander looked like he’d been struck dumb. Lin wanted to puff up her chest, laugh, and proclaim herself the best earth user in the entire world. It really was unfortunate the situation wouldn’t allow for that. She kept working her hardest to help with the evacuation of the people in the stands, and then she traveled out of the arena with the others.

Because she was connected to the earth, she could still feel the battle taking place, still sense the thundering footsteps of Darling and Fritz. The battle was becoming more intense. The wall she had erected was already broken. Lightning, water, light, and darkness shot into the sky like vast arcs of ancient and infernal power.

“Commander! All the citizens have been evacuated!”

A Midgard Spiritual Knight came up to Commander Ashten and saluted him. The commander nodded, but his eyes weren’t on the man. They were locked onto the arena, which was rumbling and shaking fiercely. Even though they were so far away, they could still feel the earth shaking, making it unknown whether they had retreated far enough.

Lin only paid them a modicum of attention. At that moment, two familiar faces appeared next to her.

“Lin!” Fay said as she and Alexis ran up to her.

“Fay. Is Raul safe?” asked Lin.

With a smile at hearing the concern in Lin’s voice, Fay nodded once and said, “He is at the Battling Valkyries headquarters with Kari. She finished her project just a little while ago. Although…” She glanced at the arena. “I’m not sure it matters much now.”

Lin and Alexis also looked at the arena, which looked like it was in the process of crumbling, with large chunks breaking off the wall and falling to the ground. The entire arena was shaking. Several bolts of lightning flew out and penetrated the thick walls. Dark flames consumed more of the surface, creating large gaps in the arena’s main structure.

“We don’t know what will happen yet,” Lin said at last. “We should stay here in case Darling needs help.”

Fay nodded in agreement, though Alexis looked like she wanted to say something. She would never get the chance. At that moment, the bigwigs who had introduced themselves the other day arrived. Tungsten was next to Rainere, Àn Shen stood with her father Ming Shen, and Dagan and Cathrine were also present. All of them looked quite serious.

“What in the nine great realms is going on here?” demanded Rainere, his eyes hard. “Do any of you know?”

He was looking at Lin and Fay. So it seemed he understood they probably knew something because Darling was battling against Fritz. Hmph. Lin crossed her arms and gave this man an unwavering gaze.

“This princess knows absolutely nothing.”

“Now isn’t the time for jokes!” Rainere shouted.

“She is not joking,” Fay said in a soft murmur. “None of us know what is going on right now. All we know is that man you call Fritz is very unusual and incredibly strong. That power he is using also feels… familiar, but I can’t quite figure out where I’ve felt it before.”

“That guy who attacked Nevaria used the same power, but his was a bit stronger,” Lin said at last. “That said, I do not know what kind of power that is. It looks like the darkness element, but…”

The power erupting from within the arena reminded Lin so much of that man they all fought that she could not help but shiver. Back then, it had taken their entire army and every Spiritualist above the Third State of Spiritualism to defeat him. Even Darling had not been able to win on his own.

Of course, she now had confidence that Darling could defeat this fool. He was much stronger now than he was back then. This person was also a little weaker than that man. Darling would definitely kick this Fritz person’s ass.

At that moment, a massive explosion of darkness, lightning, and water crashed into the arena, tearing it asunder. A shockwave so powerful it tore apart the ground as it moved raced toward them. Many people screamed. Rainere, Ming Shen, Cathrine, Dagan, and their apprentices all tensed as looks of despair crossed their faces.

“Hup!”

Lin responded quickly. She merged with the earth, her body sinking into the ground. Like this, she could take in all the power of the earth because she was the earth and the earth was now her. She willed and manipulated the earth to create a massive wall several dozen meters thick, then condensed the wall several times. Amongst all the elements, the earth element had the greatest defense.

The three separate elements crashed into the wall, causing it to shake and rumble. Those people behind the wall screamed as they crouched down and covered their hands with their heads. If Lin had lips at the moment, she would have been biting them as she continuously pumped Spiritual Power into her fortifications, repairing the damage done by the backlash of the combined elements attacking them.

Finally, after what felt like hours but was really only a minute or two, the shockwave died down. Lin let the wall crumble and emerged from the earth. Because she was using the powers of the earth, she was not tired in the least, but she did have a really bad headache. Merging with her element so thoroughly required a lot of concentration. She was mentally exhausted.

“Is everyone okay?!” asked Fay.

“We are fine,” Rainere said for the group he’d come with, though his eyes were locked onto Lin. “You saved us.”

“All in a day’s work,” Lin said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “We should move further away from the arena.”

Rainere’s hard and cynical laugh made her raise an eyebrow.

“What arena?” he asked.

Lin would have said something to the effect of asking if Rainere was blind, but then she turned to look at the arena—or rather, she turned to look at where the arena used to be. There was no arena anymore. All that was left was a massive crater at least one hundred meters across and who knew how many meters deep.

The sounds of battle echoed from within the crater.

***

It had been a very long time since I had been forced to use everything within my power to fight an opponent. The last time I fought this hard was when Ask led the Sekbeists in an attack on Nevaria. That had been an intense battle, one that required everything I had, and even then I had come close to losing.

I was confident I wouldn’t lose this time, but it was still a fierce battle.

Fritz roared in rage as he slammed his hands into the ground, penetrating the surface like the earth was made of tofu. His Spiritual Power surged. I leapt back when my instincts warned me of danger and was rewarded when the ground was ripped apart by something surging up underneath it. It was a tentacle. Well, I called it that, but it looked more like the black root of an evil tree. This was Fritz’s Spiritual Power made manifest. A “root” made entirely of the Void… whatever that was.

It wasn’t just one tree root either. Several dozen erupted from the ground, rising high above my head as though to intimidate me before surging forward to strike me down.

I narrowed my eyes and created my ruler-shaped Spiritual Power sword again as I danced across the ground, using the Flash Step Version 3: Lightning Step to constantly avoid being struck down. A tentacle slammed into where I’d been standing. I appeared next to it, swinging my sword and hacking right through the tentacle, which dispersed into writhing shadows upon being cut. Several more tentacles rushed in from the left, right, and behind me, their spear tips pointed at my body. I disappeared in a bolt of lightning. The tentacles slammed into each other as I reappeared above them.

With a battlecry, I unleashed a powerful crescent shaped blade combined of three elements. Lightning cracked as the water increased its power, and Kari’s light element encased the whole thing to increase its effectiveness against the darkness element, or the Void. The crescent blade slammed into the three tentacles and sliced into them. It also sliced into the ground.

I didn’t land back on the ground and instead began floating in place. I surveyed the crater my enemy and I were now fighting in, looking for Fritz. I didn’t find him at first. That was because I couldn’t find him with my eyes. It wasn’t until I used Spiritual Perception that I realized he had merged with the shadows.

“That won’t do,” I muttered before erupting with Spiritual Power.

The light element was not mine. I did not have complete control over it, and I couldn’t seem to take it beyond the Second State of Spiritualism no matter how hard I trained or how many pills I took. That said, I did not need to reach a high level of power with the light element to project it outward.

My body emitted light like it was the sun, causing all the shadows inside of the crater to burn away. The man who was hiding within them screamed as the light burned into him. He emerged from the now dissipating shadows, holding his face as steam rose from it like his body was being cooked.

Those who wielded darkness and the Void were weak against light. I still didn’t know much about the Void, but I knew that light was the antithesis to darkness. In the elemental spectrum, each element was strong against and weak against another element. Fire was weak against water but strong against wind. Wind was weak against fire but strong against lightning. Lightning was weak against wind but strong against earth. Earth was weak against lightning but strong against water. Meanwhile, the elements of light and darkness were strong and weak against each other. They essentially canceled each other out.

I didn’t wait for Fritz to recover before raising my hands above my head and gathering Spiritual Power. Swirling water and crackling lightning surged above my hands, swirling around in a spiral before gathering in the center, where the Spiritual Power condensed into a tiny sphere. The sphere was small at first, no bigger than my palm. That was only at first. As the seconds ticked by, the sphere grew until it was about the size of my head. When it grew bigger, I condensed it and gathered even more power. I did this several times, until the sphere looked like a ball of white energy.

By the time I was finished gathering all that power, Fritz had recovered. He stood up and glared at me. His gray face was burned. It looked like cracks were forming on his skin, giving him a truly hideous appearance.

Fritz saw what I was doing and glared viciously as he raised his own hands and created a sphere of darkness. Darkness emerged from his hands and expanded to encompass everything around him. The ground began disappearing as the darkness—no, as the Void ate into it. Darkness did not have the power to consume matter. It was not long before more than half the crater had been eaten away, creating an even larger crater. The sphere in Fritz’s hand had also become far blacker.

Fritz and I glared at each other before we released our respective techniques. I flung the crackling sphere of water and lightning, while he tossed the ball of blackness. The two attacks created a pair of sonic booms as they broke the sound barrier and slammed into each other.

There was no explosion when the attacks crashed together, no eruption of sound and energy. Both attacks congealed together and distorted the area around them. The world turned black and white, distortions appeared in the air, and the strange cracks began forming and spreading across the sky to create a spiderweb as the two powers silently collided. It was like the area they were in had become a vacuum.

Whether our attacks had created a vacuum in which nothing could exist or not, something had to happen. The two attacks soon erupted into massive waves of energy. My eyes widened as a thrill of fear ran down my spine. Without hesitating, I erected a barrier composed of my two main elements. It appeared before me like a shimmering shield seconds before the intense Spiritual Power wave slammed into me.

The shield shattered like it wasn’t even there.

I was struck with the full fury of our combined attacks.

I’m pretty sure a loud scream tore through my throat as the powerful forces ripped into my body, but that scream was lost to the wind. It felt like someone was tearing me apart from the inside out. I was tossed about inside of the massive storm of Spiritual Power, my body being torn asunder, my soul being burned with spiritual fire. The world around me went black, then white, then became a multitude of colors like a rainbow shooting in every direction.

It felt like hours had passed within that swirling storm of pain. I might have blacked out at some point. When I came to, I was lying inside of that crater… only the crater now looked even bigger than I remembered.

I stood up, grunting as pain filled my insides. The interior of my body felt like it had been overcooked. Blood seeped out of my flesh. My left arm was broken. Searing pain traveled up my sides as I took a step forward, then another, and another.

Because there was no lightning element near me and the water element was thin, I was left with no choice but to slowly absorb the moisture in the air to replenish my Spiritual Power. It was a slow going process. It wasn’t like I had a choice, though. That last attack had used up all the Spiritual Power I possessed.

I made my way over to where Fritz was lying on his back. He looked like he had seen better days. His body was broken; he was missing an arm, a leg, and blood seeped from several cracks in his skin, but he was still alive. He had enough vitality to glare at me defiantly and with a hatred that seared my soul.

“Don’t think… you’ve won,” he rasped. “You might have… beaten me… but you’ll never beat… them…”

I did not know who “them” was, but I could only assume they were compatriots of Fritz. I wanted to ask him more, to ask him about that power he used, to ask if he was a Sekbeist, perhaps a species I had never seen before. But I never got the chance. Fritz’s breathing had already stopped, his eyes had become sightless, and his chest no longer rose and fell.

He was dead.

With an exhausted sigh, I fell backward. I expected to fall onto the ground, but unexpectedly, what I fell into was a soft body as a pair of arms wrapped around my torso. Both arms were dark. What’s more, the body I was laying against was one I had become intimately familiar with.

“Lin,” I mumbled.

“You worked very hard, Darling,” Lin said in a soft and loving voice. “You can rest now.”

“M’kay.”

It felt like I was falling backward, like I was descending into a pool of murky water. Lin held me against her body as I closed my eyes and slowly slipped into darkness.

***

Dunherr sat against his throne and stared into the empty hall. His black eyes were like pools of darkness, their depths unfathomable. Standing beside him was Unglück, who for once remained quiet. Down below, trembling as he knelt before them was a man who had just delivered some really bad news.

“So… Fritz is dead?” Dunherr inquired again in a soft voice.

“Y-yes, My Lord,” the trembling sack of flesh said. “We… that is… the news was just released a little while ago. They say he went berserk and transformed into some kind of monster. A man called Eryk Veiger fought against him and managed to kill him.”

“Hmmm…”

Dunherr didn’t say anything for a long time, which caused the man below to tremble even more. He was frightened. He had a good reason to be. Dunherr was aware of his own faults better than most. There had been messengers before him, ones who had delivered news less worse than this that had been killed simply because he felt like it. If he wanted to, snuffing out this man’s life would be as simple as snapping his fingers.

“Who could have imagined there’d be a human out there capable of killing Fritz,” Unglück muttered as he crossed his arms. “He might not have been as strong as us, but he wasn’t weak.”

Shifting in his seat, Dunherr stroked his chin in thought.

Fritz was indeed a powerful individual. There should not have been a single human capable of defeating him once he released his true power, and yet from what this man said, the person who defeated Fritz was indeed a human. It was utterly incomprehensible. Dunherr knew he would need to investigate this matter thoroughly before making a move.

He looked back at the trembling human down below.

“Tell me more about this Eryk Veiger,” he demanded.