Lackey's Seducing Survival Odyssey

Chapter 1828: Long time no see… Prophetess

BOOOOOOM!

The Shadow figure crashed into the ground with enough force to fracture the stone beneath it. Dust erupted in every direction, rolling through the ruins in thick, choking waves as though something had disturbed a thousand years of forgotten silence.

For several moments, the Shadow remained motionless. Then its body slowly began to rise, its form flowing upward like smoke pulled against the wind.

The darkness that composed its body twisted and gathered itself back into shape.

The Shadow flickered as it looked around.

It was standing in the middle of a ruined city.

Broken towers leaned against one another. The streets had been swallowed by layers of ash and dust, while shattered statues lay half-buried beneath the rubble.

No.

Not the city it had ruined.

This place had already been destroyed by someone else and abandoned for millennia.

The Shadow figure slowly lifted its head.

Across the ruins, standing atop the remains of a crumbling building, was a woman dressed in pristine white robes. Her hood concealed most of her face, but beneath it, two calm eyes watched the Shadow without fear. In one hand, she held a wooden staff.

The same staff that had struck it.

“Though he is ruthless… He is not crazy,” She muttered coldly.

The Shadow stared at her for several silent seconds before finally speaking.

“What… art… thou?”

There was no anger in its voice for her hitting it.

No curiosity that could be recognised.

Only an impossibly profound indifference, as though the answer would mean nothing to it unless the woman could somehow make it matter.

The woman in the white robe slowly shook her head. When she finally spoke, her voice carried a strange softness, almost pitying.

“The Demonic Primordial Blood… You should have known better than to awaken what you could not understand. You believed you had absorbed its power… Yet you never understood that you had also inherited its hunger.”

Her gaze remained fixed upon the Shadow.

“Have you forgotten Mary Scarlet? She made the same mistake. She drank his blood, believing its power would become her daughter’s salvation. How tragic… She reached for a miracle, only to discover that the hand she extended toward salvation was the very hand that would drag her daughter toward the abyss.”

The Prophetess glanced briefly toward the distant ruins, as though remembering something buried beneath them, before returning her attention to the Shadow.

“That blood is not some ordinary source of power that you swallow, absorb, and discard once its strength becomes yours.”

Her fingers slowly tightened around the wooden staff.

“It is primordial for a reason.”

The wind shifted.

Dust drifted between the two figures, catching the pale light that filtered through the ruined sky.

“The vessel is not what makes it terrifying…”

Her eyes narrowed beneath the shadow of her hood.

“The blood is.”

The words settled over the ruins with a weight that seemed far greater than their volume.

The Shadow remained perfectly still.

A faint distortion passed through its formless body, as though something within it had stirred.

The Prophetess continued.

“And now, look at you.”

Her gaze travelled across the Shadow’s shapeless existence.

“A creature that did not even possess a form.”

Its headless form tilted by the slightest degree.

“That… answereth not.”

The Prophetess’s expression did not change.

Then she nodded.

“Indeed, child. It does not answer what you asked. But you were never truly asking for an answer, were you?”

The Prophetess smiled faintly.

“You wanted to know what stands before you.”

The wooden staff struck the stone beneath her feet.

THOOM!

A circle of pure white light erupted from the impact point, racing across the area in every direction.

In the next second, Shadows appeared.

No… Not emerged.

They were already there.

Hundreds upon hundreds of identical Shadow figures suddenly stood around the Prophetess, their existence only becoming visible as the surrounding light revealed them.

Each possessed the same featureless black body and the same empty silhouette. They crowded around the Prophetess from every direction, their countless hands reaching toward her.

Then the wave of white light burst outward.

It struck them like an exploding bomb.

The entire swarm was blasted away in an instant, their dark forms hurled through the ruins as the shockwave tore across the city.

The Prophetess disappeared.

BOOM!

She appeared directly before the real Shadow figure, her wooden staff already descending.

The staff struck the centre of its body.

The impact did not produce an explosion.

Instead, the world behind the Shadow shattered.

A circular fracture spread through space like a crack across glass, branching outward from the point of impact and revealing an endless black void beyond reality.

“AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“WWWWWWWWWWOOOOO!!!!!!”

“NNNNMMMMMMMM!!!!!!”

Something screamed within that emptiness. Distant cries of agony and pain echoed from somewhere beyond the broken boundary before the fracture rapidly sealed itself.

The Prophetess whispered,

“I will bring you back.”

The Shadow’s body stretched unnaturally.

For the first time…

It moved.

One arm slowly rose.

The surrounding space instantly froze.

Every falling fragment of stone stopped in midair.

The wind ceased.

The light stopped flickering.

Even the Prophetess’s robe became completely motionless.

The Shadow slowly lifted its head.

“Back…”

The single word was barely audible.

Yet reality trembled around it.

“…to whath?”

The Prophetess’s eyes narrowed.

A blinding light suddenly flashed around her hand as she shot it toward the Shadow’s face.

The Shadow raised its hand.

The blinding light stopped mere inches before its face.

The darkness surrounding its palm swallowed the radiance, holding it perfectly still.

“That… feeble… coward…”

The light trembled violently before the darkness slowly corroded it, its brilliant radiance staining into deep blackness until it was completely consumed.

Then the newly formed darkness abruptly shot back toward the Prophetess.

Her wooden staff snapped upward.

The incoming darkness collided with it.

BOOOOM!

The impact shattered the ruined building around them, reducing stone and twisted pillars to clouds of dust that erupted across the reality.

“He is not a coward…” the Prophetess said, her voice carrying calmly through the destruction.

“He is… just confused and lost, just like you.”

Her robes suddenly fluttered.

Golden-white light poured from beneath them, spiralling around her body as the air itself began to distort.

Then the entire space flashed with light.

FLASH!!

For a single second, the Shadow disappeared beneath the overwhelming radiance.

And for that single second…

Something else appeared beneath the darkness.

A broken body.

A fractured silhouette.

A figure lying beneath layers of impossible darkness, its form barely visible before the light vanished.

The darkness swept back over it.

The Shadow’s arm extended.

Its hand reached toward the Prophetess.

She leapt backwards.

Then backwards again.

And again.

The darkness followed.

Not one hand.

Dozens!!

Tens of enormous shadowy hands erupted from the darkness surrounding the Shadow, stretching across the ruined city in pursuit of her. Their fingers clawed through the air, tearing apart anything in their path.

One hand slammed into the ground.

BOOM!

The earth shattered beneath it.

Another swept across the ruins.

BOOM!

The stone towers collapsed as the fingers tore through them.

Another hand crashed down where the Prophetess had been moments earlier, pulverising the ground into a crater.

Yet the Prophetess continued to retreat, each movement precise and effortless, her white robes flowing through the gaps between the grasping hands.

Then she noticed something.

Her eyes shifted toward the darkness surrounding the Shadow.

It was slightly thinner than before.

Only slightly.

But it was there.

The darkness had diminished.

A faint smile appeared beneath her hood.

“I can do it.”

She abruptly stopped retreating.

The wooden staff struck the ground.

THOOM!

Cracks spread outward from beneath her feet like veins through stone. Golden-white light travelled through them, racing across the ruined ground toward the Shadow.

Crackkkk~

The Shadow frowned.

It lifted one hand.

The instant its fingers moved, the entire ground ahead of it vanished.

The incoming cracks disappeared with it, leaving behind nothing but scorched earth marked by broken red veins glowing beneath the surface.

The Shadow lowered its hand.

THOOM!!

The Prophetess struck the ground again.

This time, the world itself tilted.

The Shadow’s head turned slightly.

For the first time, genuine confusion passed through its featureless form.

The horizon bent.

Buildings leaned sideways without falling.

The ground curved upward into the sky while the sky seemed to fold beneath it. Distance twisted upon itself, and the ruined city stretched and warped like a reflection trapped inside a kaleidoscope.

The Shadow remained standing as reality rotated around it.

Reality itself had become a broken mirror!

The Prophetess stood upside down across the distorted horizon, her white robes floating weightlessly as golden light gathered around her staff.

She looked down at the Shadow with an almost amused expression, as though everything happening around them was little more than an inconvenience.

“You are nothing more than a child, thrashing against the world because it refused to give you what you wanted.”

Those words seemed to provoke the Shadow figure.

Instantly, the darkness exploded outward.

“Death… cometh… for… all that liveth.”

It spread like a tsunami across the distorted city, swallowing everything in its path. Buildings were torn apart before the darkness even touched them, their foundations ripped from reality as entire structures shattered into fragments.

The darkness did not care about the twisted laws of reality.

It simply consumed them.

Roads dissolved.

Buildings broke apart.

The warped horizon fractured into countless pieces.

Even the distorted space itself cracked beneath its advance.

The Shadow’s darkness surged toward the Prophetess with terrifying speed, its leading edge rising like an enormous black wave about to engulf the entire ruined city.

It was almost upon her when…

FLASHHH!!!

Her body suddenly erupted with another brilliant light.

A colossal wave of radiance burst outward from her, expanding through the surrounding space with tremendous force.

The collision was instantaneous.

Darkness and light crashed together.

BOOOOOOM!!

The shockwave swept across the city.

Several nearby buildings crumbled instantly, their stone structures disintegrating beneath the pressure. Chunks of masonry were thrown into the sky before being reduced to dust by the radiance.

The Shadow’s darkness screamed.

Not merely the sound of something being burned.

It was a distorted, unnatural cry that seemed to vibrate through the surrounding reality itself.

The mass of darkness closest to the Prophetess recoiled violently, its surface twisting and writhing as the light carved through it.

Then it was driven back toward the main Shadow!

For a moment, the Shadow seemed to curl inward.

Its darkness wrapped tightly around its body, layer upon layer folding over itself as though desperately trying to shield its existence from the radiance.

The light was hurting it.

Actually, really hurting it!!

But the Light… merely pushing the darkness back to its vessel!!

“Ha… Ha…”

The Prophetess panted softly.

Her shoulders rose and fell as she struggled to catch her breath. The brilliant aura surrounding her had weakened considerably, and even the hand gripping the wooden staff trembled slightly.

She looked toward the Shadow.

The darkness surrounding it had been reduced greatly.

What had once covered the ruined city like an endless night was now only a fraction of its former size.

The Prophetess’s eyes sharpened.

“One last time…”

She tightened her grip around the staff, but then,

TTTTTTRRR!!

The building beneath her suddenly trembled.

A deep vibration travelled through its foundations.

The Prophetess’s expression changed.

Her eyes immediately dropped toward the ground.

The Shadow moved.

Its darkness slipped between the ruins like a living serpent.

It poured around the base of the building, then rapidly climbed upward, twisting around its foundations and wrapping itself around the entire structure.

The building groaned.

CRRRRKKK!

Stone cracked.

The entire structure bent inward as the darkness tightened around it.

Then the Shadow swallowed the building whole and all other nearby buildings into the dark void as it expanded more and more.

The Prophetess’s footing disappeared beneath her.

She fell!

Below her, the darkness opened like a gigantic void, expanding into an enormous black maw that swallowed the remains of the building piece by piece.

There was no bottom.

No visible end.

Only an immeasurable blackness waiting beneath her.

The Prophetess tried to stabilise herself in midair, but the darkness surged upward.

Countless tendrils reached for her.

One passed inches from her face.

Another tore through the edge of her robe.

A third snapped shut where her body had been a fraction of a second earlier.

The void mouth was almost upon her when…

“AEVUM!!” She shouted, and in the next instant.

Crack-SHATTER!

The space behind her bent.

Reality folded inward like an invisible hand twisting a sheet of paper.

The Prophetess vanished.

The darkness swallowed nothing.

It froze for a brief moment.

Then the enormous void mouth slowly closed.

The darkness returned to normal.

The Shadow remained still.

Its featureless head turned slowly from one direction to another.

It searched…. It sensed something.

“Another… one…”

The Shadow’s voice carried through the ruined city.

Then a voice suddenly rang out behind it.

“I am here!!”

The Prophetess appeared directly behind the Shadow.

Her wooden staff was already swinging.

She brought it down with all the strength she had left.

BOOOOM!!

The staff struck the centre of the Shadow’s body.

The impact compressed its darkness for an instant before violently launching it away.

The Shadow shot across the ruined city like a black meteor.

It tore through one building.

Then another…. Then another.

Each impact detonated clouds of stone and dust until it finally crashed into the remains of an enormous tower.

BOOOOOOMMM!!

The entire building crumbled around it like a sandcastle struck by an ocean wave.

For a moment, there was silence.

Then the rubble moved.

A single black, indistinct hand emerged.

Stone fragments rolled down its arm.

The Shadow slowly began to rise.

But before it could fully stand…

The Prophetess was already there.

She hovered directly above the ruins.

Her wooden staff hung loosely at her side.

SSSSNNNNNNNN!!!

Then her entire body began to glow.

The light grew brighter.

And brighter.

… And brighter.

Golden-white radiance poured from her like a star reaching the final instant before its death. The surrounding air began to tremble violently, and cracks of light appeared across the space around her.

Even the ruins beneath her began to melt into glowing particles.

The Shadow looked upward.

Its body stiffened.

For the first time, something resembling instinctive caution passed through its movements.

The darkness around its body recoiled.

“!!!!”

The Prophetess’s eyes narrowed.

Then she released everything.

FFFFLLAAASSSSSSSSHHHHHH!!!!!

A blinding explosion of light swallowed the entire battlefield.

For several seconds, there was nothing except pure white radiance.

The wave expanded beyond the crater, sweeping through the surrounding ruins and reducing everything it touched to drifting particles.

The light even pierced through the remaining darkness, tearing away layer after layer as though countless invisible blades were carving through it.

For several long seconds, nothing moved.

Then…

The light slowly began to fade.

The ruined city gradually returned to view.

Dust drifted through the air.

Fragments of stone fell from the sky.

The ground had been transformed into an enormous crater, its surface scorched black and covered with glowing cracks.

At the centre of it… something lay motionless.

A tall, muscular man.

His body was covered in countless cracks, spreading across his skin. Faint traces of smoke rose from his body as his chest barely moved.

His clothes were completely gone.

Even the two layers of illusions that had concealed his true form had disappeared long ago, leaving only his natural body exposed beneath the fading light.

His mechanical left arm was gone as well.

It had crumbled completely.

The man did not move… he was completely motionless, not even breathing!!

“Ha… Ha… Ha…”

Prophetess crashed onto the ground, her knees buckling beneath her as blood spilled from the corner of her mouth. She braced one trembling hand against the broken earth, coughing until her chest burned.

“Cough… cough… I… I reached my limit,” she muttered, her voice barely holding together.

Her eyes slowly lifted toward Aether.

He had not moved.

For a moment, relief softened her expression. She had survived. Somehow, despite everything, she had managed to bring him back.

A faint, exhausted smile appeared on her lips.

But then… she never noticed her own shadow beneath her.

It moved!

Not with the flickering motion of ordinary darkness, but with deliberate intent. Something inside it slowly raised its head, as though it had been waiting beneath her feet all along.

Then a black hand erupted from the shadow.

Its fingers wrapped around her throat with brutal speed, monstrous claws digging into her flesh as it lifted her from the ground.

The darkness slowly corroded her pure white clothes… as if nothing stays pure under its touch!

“ARRHH!!!”

The prophetess gasped and screamed as the darkness hurt her neck.

Her feet kicked helplessly in the air.

“Hehehe~”

Then a wicked chuckle appeared.