City of Witches Chapter 218

The landscape one easily imagines when speaking of the so-called 'Arctic.'

Amelia stepped onto the snowfield where a blindingly white snowy scene stretched indistinguishably ahead and behind.

Amelia still couldn’t believe that this solid, endlessly stretching ground was actually a massive chunk of ice drifting slowly atop the ocean.

Nor the wind that howled all day, clawing at her skin.

Nor the sky, robbed of the sun, submerged in twilight for days on end.

Nor observing life sprouting and surviving within such barrenness.

It was all a first-time experience.

Walking across the frozen snow with a travel bag in one hand and the Death Ledger given by Keter in the other, Amelia suddenly stopped.

In this snowfield where the horizon was visible in every direction, finding a Homunculus hidden in a pocket dimension was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

After all, the location written in the Death Ledger was merely a rough estimate of where that Homunculus had settled.

Her fingertips trembled slightly.

Her body was telling her she needed rest.

A Spirit Body does not require sleep or food.

The bone-chilling cold could also be somewhat managed with Magic.

But that didn’t mean she was some imaginary perpetual motion machine.

She had repeated tracking the Homunculus without holding a single map, without resting even for a moment.

It was only natural that her body was reaching its limit.

"......."

But Amelia was not afraid.

She neither despaired nor complained.

Why must I do this now, after having lost everything? Such questions had long been discarded.

She merely repeated the tasks given to her, like a mechanical device.

"Wail."

As Amelia’s lips moved, a Wave of Magical Power spread across the area.

Responding to her call, countless minuscule particles became her tentacles and began scattering in all directions.

The particles, dyeing the pitch-black polar night in vivid colors, were undoubtedly a spectacular sight, but Amelia merely watched them with indifferent eyes.

To question, to appreciate, to possess a heart—it was all just pain.

Thus, she offered her heart to the frigid wind.

If she froze her heart and let it necrotize until it turned a deep indigo, she would feel neither pain nor loneliness.

It was what Amelia was most confident in and had done the longest.

Defining duty and responsibility, burying herself without projecting any emotion.

She merely repeated it.

The particles that had spread around Amelia returned to her side even faster than they had scattered.

The sight resembled a beautiful cluster of stars, following celestial laws to maintain their orbits without anyone dictating them.

Amelia’s sky-blue eyes, which had been glowing, dimly opened.

-Kugung! Kugugugung!

A vibration resonated.

A Hidden Barrier unfolded, and cracks formed on the Arctic ice floe that had never melted or shattered before.

Amelia was not flustered.

Strictly speaking, this task she had been repeating for days was not to find the Homunculus.

It was to announce the presence of a Witch to the Homunculus that had hidden in the polar regions and entered dormancy.

An invitation declaring that a delectable Witch was here.

And the Homunculus responded to Amelia’s invitation.

-Kwooooooo!!!!

A Homunculus that roared as it revealed itself, driven by instincts imprinted upon it to devour Witches and protect its legacy.

Its appearance resembled a whale.

Since arriving in the Mortal Realm, Amelia had also seen whales near the sea, flipping white bellies and creating sprays.

She remembered their unbelievable size and majesty.

But the monster now revealed before Amelia’s eyes could not be simply described as "resembling a whale."

Its streamlined body, short neck, thick tail almost indistinguishable from its torso, wing-like pectoral fins stretching left and right, and the pure white baleen extending from its mouth to its chest—these were not so different.

But the size of its body, floating leisurely in the air.

In length alone, perhaps 900 meters? No, closer to 1,000 meters?

The infrasonic roar emanating from its massive body, which seemed to shift the landscape with the slightest twist, became a Shockwave itself, lifting all the frozen snowflakes into the sky.

That wasn’t all.

The enormous whale, with twelve pairs of eyes on either side of its blunt head, carried the wreckage of shattered warships on its back as if bearing them.

The first page of the Death Ledger described this bizarre entity.

A living calamity that had roamed the deep sea for 300 years, sinking hundreds of warships and arming itself with their remains.

The King of the Abyss, Dagon.

-Kwooooooo!!!!

The whale’s roar swept past Amelia once more.

Mixed with the stench of the deep sea and the sticky odor of petroleum, it cracked and split the ice.

Even though it was a Shockwave that would have ruptured the organs and killed any ordinary human instantly, Amelia’s expression remained utterly unchanged.

This was her first time facing a Homunculus.

Even though a life-threatening battle might await, Amelia found herself surprisingly devoid of any thoughts.

If her abilities were insufficient and this life ended, so be it.

There was nothing to lose from the start.

The warmth that had once filled her hands had already been lost twice by mistake.

-Giiiiiiing

Only when she felt the Magic power tangling and gathering against her skin did Amelia shake off her reverie.

The hundreds of cannons mounted on Dagon’s body began sucking in Magic power.

The overwhelming Magic output and reflected light emanating from the massive body awakened the pitch-black Arctic night.

The sky brightened as if the sun had risen, and cannons of overwhelming caliber aimed at Amelia and fired.

-Kwagwagwagwagwang!!!

No matter how powerful a warship’s cannons might be, they would be useless against a Witch of a certain Hierarchy or higher.

But the warships it had sunk and fused to its body were now essentially part of Dagon itself.

A threatening attack that posed a danger to Witches—indeed, it had a record of killing three Witches.

A massive explosion engulfed Amelia’s small frame.

The concentrated, compressed, and intensely powerful bombardment, which no technology in the world could block, did not stop there—it shattered the enormous glacier like a cookie.

The water vapor, transformed from solid to gas by the overwhelming heat, froze in the ultra-low temperatures.

Amid the artificially created diamond dust, a bluish light flowed forth.There stood Amelia, without a single wound.

Though the ground she stood upon had changed so drastically that maps would need to be redrawn, not a single fold of Amelia's clothing was out of place.

Beyond the 15th hierarchy where the magic of the Brand and instinct become one. Beyond the 20th hierarchy of a Great Witch who defies even natural order and laws.

The 23rd hierarchy, a realm reached by fewer than ten individuals in all of history.

A Witch who has ascended to that realm overwhelms everything beneath her feet by her very existence, even if she lacks combat experience.

-Kwooooo!!!

Dagon twisted its body once more.

In its 300 years of existence, this was the first time it had encountered a Witch who could receive its attack and reveal herself so composedly.

But if it repeated the attack, if it poured down bombardment after bombardment until it could no longer be blocked, that would suffice.

The beast swimming through the sky gathered its magic power once again, initiating a full-scale bombardment.

Within the storm of destruction where the term 'natural disaster' would not be an understatement.

Within the barrage of magic cannons surging towards Amelia like a meteor shower.

"Weep."

Amelia merely murmured.

A white puff of breath rose from her lips.

Silence fell.

Hundreds, thousands of strands of magic cannons halted as if time had stopped.

Filling every inch of the visible range were Amelia's 'particles', countless beyond measure.

Her innate magic, which had transcended its limits by killing Ea Sadalmelik, had gained the ability to seize control of all magical power in the surrounding area.

The magic cannons suspended in mid-air gradually lost their cohesion and soon scattered into the void.

That scattered magical power was then converted into Amelia's particles, becoming her strength.

-Kwooooooo!!!!

The colossal whale, bewildered by this inexplicable phenomenon, let out a strange cry.

But the beast had no means to understand how this situation had come to pass.

It could only continue firing magic cannons in rapid succession, making a final, desperate struggle.

And.

-Whoosh whoosh whoosh

Not a single one reached its mark.

Even if it poured out magic cannons, each shot comparable to a bunker buster, if they stopped and vanished mid-air, failing to reach their target, the attack was meaningless.

Amelia flicked her fingertip.

Along with a thickly spreading floral scent, the giant whale that had been swimming leisurely through the void lost its buoyancy and fell.

Amelia's particles had already begun to infiltrate every nook and cranny of Dagon's massive body.

-Kugugugugung!!!

Dagon crashed down without a chance to react, splitting the glacier in half as it sprawled.

The deafening roar that shook the very earth and the pale, scattered snowflakes made it seem believable that a flying island had fallen.

Amelia took a step.

With each step she took, wildflowers that never bloomed in the polar regions blossomed.

But one cluster of flowers had no color.

A flower path woven only in achromatic hues, as if all color had been stolen by a curse, unfurled like a long carpet following Amelia's heels.

She did not walk far before arriving at Dagon's head.

For a body of that mass to free-fall from hundreds of meters in the air would itself be a fatal wound.

Perhaps because of that, black blood, thick like crude oil, oozed sluggishly from its gaping maw.

-Kwoo... kwoo....

It was too late now for any final struggle.

Amelia had infiltrated particles through its opened mouth and skin before Dagon could even notice.

For a Homunculus that moves by magic power, it was no different from inhaling vast amounts of colorless, odorless poison gas.

"........"

Amelia gazed intently into its eyes.

Each glistening eye, far larger than her own body, rolled its pupils, looking at Amelia.

Soon, she would take its life.

Once the particles had sufficiently spread through its body, they would bloom into flowers and annihilate it.

She felt no particular emotion.

If Amelia hadn't killed it, she would have been killed.

She would have been the one lying here.

She felt no guilt whatsoever about that fact itself.

Amelia suddenly recalled a tale of the dead from a very old fairy tale her Master had once read to her.

A pitiful soul, having lost the meaning and reason to live, wandering through the netherworld in a rotting corpse.

Yes.

This life was no different from that.

She could not deny that the sight of this beast, wounded and waiting only for the moment of death, overlapped with her own.

Amelia reached out her hand over the whale's large snout.

"...You and I are the same."

The wave of magical power spreading from her hand caused the particles that had infiltrated various parts of Dagon's body to bloom into flowers.

The flowers, beginning to bloom in full like waves from snout to tail, unmistakably stole away its life.

A body breaking apart.

Leaving the scattering achromatic petals behind, Amelia turned the page of the Death Ledger.

Author's Note (Afterword)

You've worked hard today.

Read Witch City and dream of the Twins!