Campione: Strongest# 474: Sever

The demon blade—Móralltach.

In Celtic myth, the A+ rank anti-army Noble Phantasm bestowed by the sea god who ruled over ocean and Otherworld.

Normally, for someone like Haru—who’d stocked up on high-grade holy relics and divine armaments—an A+ anti-army weapon was decent, but nothing special.

Hardly the sort of trump card you’d expect him to waste on a coward hiding in a stone shell.

But this sword carried a very specific concept:

Ignore defense.

For an enemy cowering inside a fortress-tortoise, you couldn’t ask for anything better.

As the low True Name chant slipped from his lips—

The blade in his hand detonated in azure light.

The deep-sea-blue sword cast off its restraints. The ocean sealed within the demon blade bared its fangs.

Ink-dark seawater exploded outward, dragging with it the crushing weight of the abyss.

The four Graelms crowding Haru—each weighing tens of thousands of tons—were blasted back dozens of meters by the surge. The already fragile floor split open beneath the impact, gouged into titanic trenches like some buried dragon had rolled over in its sleep, threatening to flip the whole foundation.

At the same time, the abyssal pressure coiled tight along the blade.

The sword stirred the sea.

Within the hall now drowned in that ink-blue ocean, a massive whirlpool rose around him, spanning tens of meters.

Haru gripped the demon blade as if holding the core of a deep-sea maelstrom.

He looked up at the towering, fifty-meter tortoise-Graelm and smiled faintly.

“So this body is a divine vessel, huh… I’m actually curious now—what happens when a god’s authority and a Noble Phantasm overlap?”

Silver light traced across the fingers of his right hand.

In an instant, flesh and blood turned to argent metal.

A silver arm.

“Try surviving this, Dark Six.”

Haru’s eyes sharpened. His voice shifted—solemn, resonant, absolute.

“With this, I swear—there shall exist nothing I cannot cut. Therefore this blade shall sever all things under heaven. It is the undefeated edge.”

No need to aim.

There was nowhere to run.

Haru had already fixed him in place.

He swung.

The authority derived from the King of Swords—who severs all creation—erupted through the vessel of Móralltach.

In this Reality Marble no longer suppressed by the Counter Force, the slash bit into the world itself.

Air split.

Sound split.

Even space ruptured—sheared open into an invisible fault, a scar of pure severance.

The strike—laden with the concept of “cutting all things”—raced straight for the colossal tortoise.

Danger. Extreme danger.

“Shit—what is this??” The sense of death slammed into the Dark Six like a tidal wave.

In his recollection, the “Jehovah” who sealed him had been a caster-type existence—and that seal had been laid down personally.

Yet today, from the very start, Haru had pushed close combat.

And now, suddenly, he was swinging like a sword god, unleashing a strike that trespassed into the realm of true divinity.

The discrepancy was too insane.

For the first time, the Dark Six genuinely doubted whether this was the same being.

But right now he had no time to care.

“Whale! Squid!!!”

At his roar—

A three-hundred-meter stone whale and a two-hundred-meter giant squid materialized in front of him.

The remaining two of Vanfem’s Seven Demon Castles—forced onto the field as disposable shields.

But he didn’t stop there.

That all-severing strike was too terrifying.

Snarling, he hurled his hands through the air, fingers leaving behind a storm of afterimages as he carved sigils into the void. A grand ritual spell triggered—recalling the other five Graelms to him.

Tortoise, sphinx, vulture, mammoth, whale, squid, dragon.

All seven stood at his side.

To cling to his life, he unleashed Vanfem’s greatest and most burdensome secret art.

Seven Castles, as one.

The seven grotesque titans—born of reality and fantasy both—twisted, merged.

A seven-headed monstrosity rose, eerie and overwhelming, reminiscent of the Beast 666 Haru had once faced—another abomination that defied proper taxonomy.

By then, the severing strike was already there.

With death at his throat, the Dark Six shoved the fused Graelms in front of himself and simultaneously detonated his magic, hurling his body back hundreds of meters in a desperate bid for safety.

It was like slicing tofu.

The united bulwark of the Seven Demon Castles—history’s proudest war citadels—met the god-empowered, Noble Phantasm-wielded slash—

And shattered.

Starting from the dragon’s snarling head at the front, the seven-hundred-meter behemoth, legend of four thousand years, was carved cleanly in two.

The sky roared.

The sundered mass began to fall apart.

Struck by the concept of severance itself, their cores were split down the middle. With their fundamental concepts destroyed, there would be no regeneration.

The Demon Castle Vanfem—once free to stride across the world—was erased in a single blow.

At the same moment, the Dark Six—who by rights should have escaped—suddenly lurched to a halt in midair, frozen unnaturally.

Haru saw it.

He immediately stopped his follow-up swing and instead watched, intrigued, as the Dark Six let the slash catch up to him.

A slow, vicious smile curved Haru’s lips.

“Vanfem, are you insane??”

The voice that came from that mouth wasn’t the Dark Six’s.

It was Vanfem’s.

“Those were my seven ‘children’!!!!”

The shriek tore through the hall.

Even with his body hijacked and his power usurped, Vanfem was still a Dead Apostle King who’d lived for thousands of years. A momentary counter-seizure was nothing to him.

To him—who had already gone to war with the Black Princess’s camp over the loss of the “Vulture” Castle after her servant shot it down—each Demon Castle was as precious as his own offspring.

And now, all seven of his “children” had been thrown away as fodder.

By the Dark Six’s hand.

Vanfem’s fury was incandescent.

He wrenched control of his own stolen body back, dragging the Dark Six with him into ruin as compensation for the four thousand years he’d spent with those castles.

“It seems this sixth of me was always fated to die here.”

The voice that followed was cold—the Dark Six again, his rage pressed down into something flat and resigned.

Before that all-cutting blade, even the Dead Apostles’ vaunted immortality may as well have been tissue paper.

Outplayed, outmaneuvered, he faced his end without struggle.

Space split.

When the world finally stilled—

Haru glanced once at the bisected corpse.

He didn’t bother confirming.

He turned on his heel and headed straight for the apartment entrance.

And then—

A crimson fruit silently appeared in the hall.

A forest of blood bloomed into existence.