Life Hunter

"[In fabula incipit c.u.m tristis mundi] (The story begins when the world falter)"

"[Leges inutiles fragilis] (The Laws are useless and fragile)"

"[Vita cantare potest, ut velit ut] (Life can sing as much as it wants)"

"[Quoniam sicut non indiget ut possit mors clamate] (Death can cry as much as it needs)"

"[Acta est fabula iam coepi] (The play has already started)"

Arima"s words and the pace at which he was chanting them sounded a lot eerier than usual. His voice was calm, cold and overbearing. As if a king was talking to his subjects.

h.e.l.l was oddly calm. The shaking had stopped, the wind even stopped blowing. The clouds were frozen in the sky. Only the noise made by the Téra echoed in this silence. It was like the world was stopping any movement to listen to Arima.

"[Secundum Actum] (Second Act)" The latter continued and this time, another "1" appeared above Arima and formed the number "2" in roman letters.

"[Quod in hac sola] (In this lonely existence)"

"[Elementa non opus] (Elements are not needed)"

"[Reliquis egredientur] (They will depart with the rest)"

"[Non erit ibi exitium] (There will be no destruction)"

"[Sicut inanis et nihil] (Just void and nothingness)"

The ground under Arima"s feet acted strangely. It was as calm as ever. No sound was produced, not even a small vibration. But it was silently cracking like gla.s.s. The fissures spread with no restriction and the area filled by them fitted perfectly the form of the giant magic circle in the sky created by Arima.

Those cracks then glowed like there was a source of light illuminating from the underground. Arima just waved his hand a little and the ground immediately faded away like a mirage.

When the earth was gone, a bright red sphere the size of a planet was revealed. It was, of course, h.e.l.l"s core.

Arima extended his hand. The number above him glowed ominously along with his eyes. After that, still in complete silence, the core actually displaced and begun to ascend. Just after a few seconds, the core filled the circular hole and now looked like an enormous dome sticking out of the ground.

It wasn"t the end. Afterward, the fissures started their propagation again and spread across h.e.l.l with the dome"s circ.u.mference as a start line.

In a circular fashion, for tens of thousands of miles, h.e.l.l"s surface was covered by glowing fissures that also reached the Téra"s group. The "bear" and "human" looked at each other when they saw the changes and then accelerated.

Arima"s magic circle was also expanding dangerously. It almost looked like the sky had always been covered by that circle and not clouds.

"[Actum Tertium] (Third Act)" The Téra felt something really wrong and hastened themselves but Arima had already entered into the last step of his magic.

"[Quam exprimere hunc finem?] (How to express this End?)"

"[Quo modo enim non ostendit?] (How can we show it?)"

"[Quomodo potestis vos testimonium perhibetis abyssi deambulasti?] (How can you witness the abyss?)"

"[Nolueritis] (You won"t)"

"[Nec lux et tenebræ iaculis] (Grab either your Light or your Darkness)"

"[Salvatores esse vana sunt et per] (Both are your saviors in an empty existence)"

Arima closed his eyes and h.e.l.l"s landscape under the magic circle lost any kind of color or shade. You could still see forms, but there wasn"t even any black or white in their vision. The Téra were blank. They had not even lived for an hour but they had gotten used to the world as it was.

Then, they suddenly lost their sense of color and became disoriented. They understood just after that this was not something natural but the act of a single person.

They stopped moving. They couldn"t even hear any sound as if it never existed. They couldn"t see any color but there was still light. But even that soon vanished, and in the darkness which wasn"t even black, the only thing they could see was the illumination coming from the fissures on the ground.

While they were hesitating between advancing or retreating, Arima had already reached the point of no return.

"[Nunc, quod non vestris tamquam mundo?] (Now, what does your world look like?)"

"[Id est pulchra? Autem sola est? Frigus? Hilaris?] (Is it beautiful? Is it lonely? Cold? Cheerful?)"

"[Ego te huc ad nuntium] (I"m here to give you a message)"

Arima opened his eyes. If anyone was in front of him at that exact moment, he would have either died because of the pressure or turned into a speck of dust.

His look couldn"t even be described as a dragon or a human"s. They shined with a color that directly interacted with your mind and didn"t match with anything your brain was capable of translating. The dragon had now terrifying irises filled with runes. But the scariest was that he had gained two new irises.

To be exact, he had now four of them, with two in each of his eyes. It was then obviously the same with his pupils. It could sound disgusting for some people, mystical for others, and scary for the last bit. But the fact was that these odd eyes perfectly fitted the sharp look of the overwhelming dragon.

Arima blinked and teleported just above h.e.l.l"s core, right on the center axis.

"[Suus "non custodierit, suus" a d.a.m.nationem] (It"s not a warning, it"s a sentence)"

"[Haec ultima rerum] (This is the last line of the story)"

Arima finished his chant and landed on the core. He deployed his wings and inhaled.

"[First Destruction Art, Comoediae Mundi] (World"s Comedy)"

He invoked his magic slowly and starting from where he was standing, the core lost his color and turned gray. Absolutely devoid of any glow or hue. It was nothing more than a dry color. The entire core which was the size of a planet became like that in no time.

After that, it was the turn for everything else under that magic circle in the sky. The ground turned gray and brittle. As if all humidity was being vaporized and every mineral extracted. The Téra perfectly felt that the land they were standing on had become incredibly frail.

After a few minutes, they thought that it was the end but immediately took back their thoughts when they saw that the same phenomenon was happening directly to their body. Their limbs became dehydrated and weak.

When the entire body had been affected, most of the Téra died without any possible struggle. Only the stronger ones could barely survive the decay of their own brain.

Afterward, it was the air itself which was affected. The humidity also disappeared and the Téra were now breathing nothing more than what you could call dust.

The more they stayed in that zone, the stronger the deterioration became.

Until the moment Arima finally moved again. He just gently tapped the core below him with his tail.

From that point onward, everything was over. The core, from the top, started to separate into microscopic particles which looked like ashes. The part of the core which was above the surface of h.e.l.l turned into nothingness just after ten seconds, like a sand castle falling apart.

When the core had completely disappeared, there was blatant, perfectly circular crater in the middle of h.e.l.l"s landscape. The hole was larger than the planet Earth. And just like that, a magical core, as big as a small planet, powering an entire portion of h.e.l.l, vanished in an instant like powder.

But even after that, Arima"s eyes were not relaxed the least. The Téra who witnessed the departure of h.e.l.l"s core suddenly felt some vibrations going through their weakened body and jolting their minds.

The earth was trembling. It was weak and no sound was coming out. But it was definitely shaking and the cause was not some magic power. It indeed felt like a natural shaking triggered by a particular incident.

If the Téra could speak, they would definitely say that the ground below was gradually becoming unstable. As if it couldn"t withstand their weight as it did until now.

It didn"t take long for the answer to be given. When the first Téras roared and disappeared from his companions" sight. The leaders turned around to look at what happened.

What they saw made them shiver. Even if they had never learned fear before, it wasn"t the case anymore. At the location the Téras went missing, there was a hole in the ground. A bottomless hole. The Téra were deprived of their ability to see the colors and both black and white had become blurry in their minds as if they couldn"t recognize them anymore.

But what they saw in that hole, was darker than black. If they would have called it darkness before; in their actual state, it exactly felt like an endless abyss where everything would be crushed. Time, colors, light, darkness, matter, life…nothing could exist in it.

After the first Téras, multiple others fell after him. Furthermore, the time between each fall kept decreasing. Some Téra tried to jump to get out of this area, but they ended up falling because of the strength they put on their legs caused the collapse of the weak terrain.

Arima looked at them from afar with an emotionless face. He saw them falling and then closed his eyes once again. After that, he just sighed.

That sigh, contrary to everything else there, actually provoked the wind to move and sound to be produced. With just that small stimulus, the ground around Arima fell apart and turned into the same ash-looking particles.

Leaving the place for the abyss. The disintegration of the earth reached the Téra"s group in no time and made them fall into the abyss. Even the huge bear and the ten-meters tall human couldn"t do anything to escape.

The aerial Téra just couldn"t fly anymore with their dry body and fell along with the rest. As they were falling in the endless abyss, their fear made their heads turn blank. After a moment of continuous fall, they finally began to turn into ashen powder like everything else.

Those particles joined with all of the others and were all taken by the abyss. Arima gasped when everything was over. His eyes suddenly pained him and the world returned to normal as the colors and sound came back. The magic formation in the sky also broke and was dispelled.

"{Arima! Don"t lose consciousness!}" Night shouted but it was in vain. Arima"s eyes returned to normal but he was then knocked out by the exhaustion. His aura weakened and the huge dragon started falling.

Below him was a literal, bottomless hole. Since the Art had stopped, he won"t be turned into dust anymore. But, even Arima himself didn"t actually know how deep this hole, which was larger than a planet, actually was.

Night tried to pull back Arima"s mind with Karma"s help but he couldn"t succeed even after many tries. Meanwhile, h.e.l.l started to collapse like Heaven and even reached a worse level of damage than the latter in just a few seconds.

"{Dammit}" Night cursed "{The entire core was destroyed in one go. It"s not like Heaven who gradually deteriorated. Right now, h.e.l.l is like a table who suddenly lost its legs}"

"{So, are we doing it after all?}" Karma asked as Arima was falling in the darkness of the hole. She seemed to be unnaturally calm about the situation.

"{Well, Arima told us to do it if it happened}" Night sighed and Karma hummed in response "{Hey, wake up}"

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"Go! Quick!" Chulainn and Zeus shouted. They had finished opening the Gates just when Arima had turned the core into dust.

The G.o.ds, angels, devils, and demons went through their respective Gate while shivering in fear. It was the same for the group of G.o.ds which was with Arima a moment ago. If h.e.l.l was already collapsing, it meant that Arima had completely destroyed the core in just a few minutes.

Of course, that was scary. The cores of an Original Land are the hardest thing in the known existence. Arima said that he will destroy it but they never thought that he would do it so quickly and easily. What they didn"t know was that he also had made disappear an even larger chunk of earth and the Téra along with the core.

To give a scale, the range of Arima"s magic was big enough to destroy around five Earth if they were put near to each other. That was also how big the hole he had created was.

"Where is Layla?" Chulainn frowned and inquired when he noticed Layla"s absence.