Chapter 557

Chapter 557: Marching Toward Doomsday

The Ranger who had been born in the Evergreen Mountains often said this. Every day, when they made camp before sunset, he would look up at the band of Deep Crimson that crossed the sky and sigh those words. In his own phrasing, it was “a rather romantic way to put it”—the greatest courage and the ultimate romance in the world, when Doomsday was drawing near.

But courage and romance could not stop death’s footsteps. The Ranger fell on the last kilometer before a crossroads, an evil arrow driven straight through his chest. It was the most ironic way for him to die—a master of the bow killed by an arrow.

The Spirit Medium took care of the attackers. They were two already-rotten corpses that had lain in ambush on the road, launching their vile attack when the group drew near. Their Undead nature—no breath, no heartbeat—let them slip past the Ranger’s scouting, and the wind carried away the stench from their bodies. Together, it all created yet another unlucky accident, just like every farewell along this road.

The armored Warrior walked to the edge of the camp and sat down on a dry, dead stump. He lifted his head and quietly gazed toward the dusk.

That unsettling band of Deep Crimson stretched across the sky like a blood cut that would soon tear the world apart, sinking toward where the Sun went down. Inside the Deep Crimson, it was as if blood was flowing. It was also as if countless phantoms beyond Mortal minds hid and brewed there, casting their cold gaze upon this world that was rushing toward ruin.

Footsteps came from the side. The Spirit Medium sat down on the ground next to him and watched that blood-red scar in the dusk together with the Warrior.

Silence lasted for a while. Then a low voice came from inside the Warrior’s helmet: “Those two attackers from earlier today…”

“They were that Hunter brother and sister… the first ones to die,” the Spirit Medium answered. His voice came from under his black hood, so gloomy it sounded almost like a dead man talking. “They caught up. The dead don’t need to rest, so they are faster than we are.”

“We buried them ourselves in the forest outside the kingdom’s gate, and you even performed the Requiem ritual. Why would the dead you soothed get back up?”

“Many things have been getting back up along the way,” the Spirit Medium said quietly. As always, he showed no emotional ups and downs. His words were only the cold, sorrowful ‘statement of facts’. “Do you see that Deep Crimson at the edge of the sky? The direction where the red light first fell… It has already grown to twice the size it was when the Prophet first made his prediction. It is a wound that has cut open our world. The earth under our feet and the sky over our heads are both rotting from that wound—and the rot is getting faster.

“The process of going from life to death is starting to become different from what I once understood.”

Not everyone could accept his way of speaking. If the Shield Knight were still here, he would already be lecturing them at length, trying to console and encourage everyone.

But when the Warrior looked back, he saw only the lonely figure of the Templar Knight sitting by the campfire. In the Shadows cast by the flames, the small, thin figure of the Pyromancer was curled up. Aside from them, there was no one else left in the camp. The Shield Knight, who had always argued with the Spirit Medium and loved to lecture his teammates, was gone—he had fallen in the wilderness outside Sandstone Fort, his cause of death still unknown.

“Later on, others may ‘catch up’ too,” the Spirit Medium went on. He seemed unused to the quiet of this moment. After a few seconds of silence, he forced the topic to change. “Most likely people who used to be in our group.”

“Why? Just because the Hunter siblings caught up today?”

“Because they still remember their mission to march toward Doomsday—but no longer remember us,” the Spirit Medium said softly. “Before the influence of that red light grew, we did not handle their bodies properly.”

The Warrior was silent for a moment: “…What counts as proper handling?”

“Burning them. Use Wraithfire to burn them completely. Then smash all the larger bones. If possible, soak the skull in acid and bury it deep.”

“All right. I understand.”

The next day, the Spirit Medium died.

They found him lying at the edge of the camp, his heart stolen by some power in the darkness, a gaping hole left in his chest. Strangely, he had a faint, odd smile on his face in death, as if… he was relieved to have escaped this heavy mission ahead of time.

The Warrior, the Templar Knight, and the Pyromancer held a “funeral” for the Spirit Medium. They used Wraithfire to burn his body to ash, crushed all the bones they could find, then soaked the fragments of his skull in a clay jar filled with acid and buried it at the campsite.

Now, only three people remained.

As the black smoke of burning bones rose into the sky, the Warrior again gazed into the distance at the Deep Crimson that looked as if it was cutting the entire world apart. The Pyromancer came to stand beside him. After a long silence, this small woman finally asked the question no one had dared to speak.

“Are we still going forward?”

The Warrior turned his head and looked at this red-haired Groska woman.

He still remembered what she had looked like when they first set out. Back then, she had been full of confidence. Her eyes had shone with energy, and her words had been full of pride. Chosen by the kingdom and named by the Prophet as the “chosen of fate”, she had believed in her own power and her destined glory more than anyone.

Yet now, she was the one asking this question.

“Of course we are going forward,” the Warrior said in his muffled voice. His heavy visor hid his face, but his tone stayed firm. “We have to save our kingdom and stop the spreading Doomsday.”

“Marching toward Doomsday—can that really stop Doomsday itself?” The Pyromancer looked at him and asked quietly. “At the end of that Deep Crimson, is there really an enemy waiting for us to defeat it? Will everything really be solved once we defeat it, like the Prophet said?”

“The Prophet has never been wrong,” the Warrior said stubbornly.

After a short stare-down, the Pyromancer nodded: “I understand.”

Three days later, as the group passed through a nameless forest, the Groska woman fell on an open patch of ground by a river.

There was no enemy and no trap. She was burned by her own flames. Magic in a runaway state suddenly surged out of her body, like countless living Evil Spirits tearing her apart and burning her to ash in an instant. Her scream was short. Perhaps her pain only lasted for a heartbeat.

The good news was that the runaway state flames burned very cleanly. There was no need for further handling of her remains. In those ashes, they could not find a single bone fragment larger than a fingernail.

Now, only two people were left in the group.

There was the Templar Knight, even more taciturn than the dead mage had been and growing quieter with every day of the journey, and the Warrior himself, forever wrapped in heavy armor.

After they entered the true wilderness, they still marched in a straight line. They did not need to worry about getting lost. The Deep Crimson of Doomsday always pointed their way.

How long would this march last? Where would it end? What would be waiting there… for those who marched toward Doomsday to face their own fate?

In the eyes of the Warrior who walked on and on, the world under the red light became a little stranger every day.

The time when the Sun rose and set had changed a lot and was shifting further each day. Sunset was no longer in the west, but now lay a clearly visible angle to the north.

The sky was slowly being dyed a strange purple-red. From time to time, eerie lights appeared deep in the clouds. Sometimes, it even seemed as if living shapes moved within those lights.

The distant mountains looked as though they had begun to twist. Cliffs that had once been straight now bent and curled like wet wooden boards. Farther away, the horizon itself seemed to rise, as if the whole land… was undergoing a slight change of shape.

Or perhaps there was something wrong with the eyes of the observer.

And along with these many visible oddities, invisible changes were happening as well.

The Magic in the world was changing in strange ways. Power that had once been hard to sense was now as active as a rushing stream. The mage had once complained that, outside the civilized world, it was hard to gather arcane energy from the air. But now even the morning wind seemed thick with Magic. These energies would build up on the surface of metal armor, causing tiny flashes and sparks, and when enough power gathered, they would release with a sharp little pop.

The Warrior felt that these changes might be a sign that the journey was nearing its end. They were close enough to the place where the red light had fallen. It still looked very far away, but hope… seemed almost in front of them.

Yet at a nameless river, the Templar Knight stopped.

This tall, silent woman took off her helmet and suddenly said: “This is as far as I go.”

The Warrior looked calmly at his last companion: “Why?”

“You aren’t surprised?”

“I only want to know why,” the Warrior said in his usual stubborn tone.

The Templar Knight fell silent for a moment, then took a Cracked Ruby from her tunic and set it on the grass beside her.

“The kingdom is destroyed,” she said. “Fire and lava surged up from the depths of the earth and covered the whole kingdom within one hour. The Prophet’s soul held on until the last moment to witness the final outcome.”

Even as he heard this terrible news, the Warrior still stood quietly where he was, looking straight into the Templar Knight’s eyes.

“This journey has no meaning,” the Templar Knight went on. “From the start, it never had any meaning.”

“The Prophet lied to us,” the Warrior said slowly.

“No. The Prophet lied to the people who stayed in the kingdom,” the Templar Knight said softly. “They needed to believe that the kingdom had sent out its finest to end this catastrophe, just like a hundred years ago when we sealed the Eribus that woke from beneath the ground, and seven hundred years ago when we ended the rule of the Frost giants. The world would be saved by heroes. If one hero was not enough, then you sent an army of heroes.”

“…The Prophet does not make mistakes.”

“Yes,” she said, “just as you said, the Prophet does not make mistakes. So he was the first to know how Doomsday would come.”

The Templar Knight spoke and pointed to the ground beside her.

“Sit. We’ve been walking for a very long time.”

The Warrior did not move.

The Templar Knight did not mind. Her silence along the road finally ended. In this last peaceful dusk, she smiled gently for the first time: “You, and many of us, already understood all of this halfway through the journey.”

“Perhaps only that red-haired Groska woman truly believed in that great destiny—she understood a little only when death finally caught up with her.”

“It might have been better if she never had,” the Templar Knight said with a light shake of her head. Then she stared, surprised, as the Warrior took another step forward. “Where are you going?”

“I am going to keep walking.”

“Why?”

“Aren’t you curious?” The Warrior looked back at her. “After realizing this expedition is meaningless, why do I still keep going? Don’t you want to know the reason?”

The Templar Knight only watched him in silence.

“I want… at least to understand what that truly is,” the Warrior said, looking toward the Deep Crimson in the dusk. “The kingdom is gone. Maybe the whole civilized world is gone. But I still want to walk on… I want to know what is slowly killing the sky and the earth.”

The Templar Knight quietly watched her last companion. She stayed silent for a long time, then finally let out a long sigh.

“You’ll never reach it.”

The Warrior turned his head: “What?”

“That red light did not fall on the earth.”

Under his visor, surprise finally crossed the Warrior’s face.

“When the Prophet’s soul left the earth, he held on for a full hour. In that hour, he stood in a very high place and saw a wider scene. Our world is a sphere floating in endless void. And that light… is larger than the land beneath our feet and farther away than the distant sky.”

The Templar Knight spoke as she bent down and picked up the Cracked Ruby from the grass.

“In the end, he told me that the star scholars’ theories were correct. The relationship between the stars and the land is just as the scholars described: all are stars floating in a vast space. My friend, the Deep Crimson you want to chase is not splitting the land. It is splitting ‘everything’.

“The only thing he could not explain is why we, standing on the earth, always see that light in the same place in the sky. Even though the land beneath us turns and moves like the other stars, the light seems printed right before our eyes, crossing the sky from east to west. So we always thought it had fallen upon the earth…

“That was the Prophet’s last puzzle. Perhaps it will become the last puzzle left to this world.”

The Warrior’s body went still. For some reason, a nameless dread… slowly spread through him.

And so, a very long time ago, in a very distant place, in the last peaceful dusk, one person finally understood the shape of the world beneath his feet—just in time, before Doomsday.

“Take a rest,” the Templar Knight said softly. Before the ever-spreading Deep Crimson covered the sky, this woman who had always seemed so hard and cold spoke gently to someone for the first time. “It’s all over.”

It was all over.

When everything ended, what should one do?

The Warrior stayed silent for a moment, then wordlessly drew the long sword at his waist.

He had once planned to use this sword to defeat the powerful enemy at the place where the red light fell, like the great heroes of legend.

But now, he knew this sword was far too short. It could never reach the stars, much less reach fate.

He and his civilization had not even had time to prepare for fate. A suddenly snuffed-out lamp never knows where the wind comes from.

He raised the blade high, then used all his strength to hurl it into the sky.

In the last instant before the sword left his hand, he seemed to hear a voice in the wind:

“Who are you? Where did you come from?”

The Warrior did not know where the voice came from, or whether it had ever truly existed. In that brief and eternal moment, what rose in his mind was a sentence one of his companions had often whispered in his ear:

“We are marching toward Doomsday.”