City of Witches
chapter-268

1.

“Huh?”

In the middle of the tunnel, Siwoo was there, standing dumbfoundedly.

Or rather… he was in the middle of a strangely widened tunnel.

The situation was bewildering.

Out of the blue, the Red Knight appeared, carrying a terrifying atmosphere, as he had killed the two witches as if they were insects. After the creature and his Master, who had single-handedly beaten hundreds of White Knights, fought for a bit, they both disappeared.

Leaving him all alone in this place.

“This is…”

Dangerous.

Siwoo didn’t know what exactly caused them to be separated, but he was in the middle of the enemy’s territory at the moment, that fact was enough to ring his alarm bells.

I can still run.

Throughout his training with Eloa, his physical strength wasn’t the only thing that was improved, his usage of Dimension Shift too.

He managed to simplify the casting process.

Before this, he needed to ‘declare his current position’, then ‘declare the coordinate of his destination’, only then he could ‘calculate the distance between the two and teleport’...

Well, a handful of steps were omitted, but that was roughly how it went.

Dimension Shift was a complex and precise magic, one needed a high level of concentration and magic control to even use it.

They could try and not to concentrate too much, but doing that would increase the casting time significantly.

In most cases, this wasn’t the spell one could use to escape during combat.

So, to cover this major flaw, Siwoo had been trying to optimize the aforementioned three steps.

The way he came up with was to always declare the coordinate where he was at, every time he moved.

As for the coordinate of the destination, he could always set it at random to speed things up, and by adding the clause ‘strictly on the ground’ he wouldn’t need to worry about suddenly getting thrown into the sea or whatever.

Unless he was inside a barrier that completely isolated him from the outside world like Ea’s barrier, he could secure an escape route quickly with this.

Whatever the Cowardly Witch’s plan was…

Siwoo had resolved himself to not sit idly against it.

He promised to himself that no matter how small it was, he’d try to help out. At the very least, it would be better than him just sitting around and watching.

That was why now was the perfect time for him to escape.

He had done what he could, the enemy was too strong for him to fight, and besides, he had more than enough time to run.

Moreover, he got separated from Eloa for some reason he didn’t know.

“Bloom.”

Without hesitation, Siwoo started calculating for Dimension Shift.

Since the tunnel suddenly widened, the mana around him had changed.

It felt like something was restricting the mana, as if some kind of jammer was around, but that wasn’t a problem for him.

He just needed to treat it as a variable, insert it to his calculation and calculate accordingly. Just like that, he successfully calculated a way out of here.

At that moment…

-Bang, bang, bang!

A loud sound echoed through the air.

It was so loud that the whole space trembled, similar to when the Red Knight first appeared.

He could even tell where the sound came from due to the vibration, even though it sounded like the source was over hundreds meters away.

That’s probably where Master and the Red Knight is.

He concluded that the Red Knights was the reason why the space became jumbled like this.

It probably deemed him as a ‘pebble in the road’ or ‘an annoyance’, so it teleported him away from where he was previously.

“Is this really the right thing to do?”

Eloa had told him in advance about the Red Knight.

It was the greatest fighting power the Cowardly Witch had, so it was only natural that Eloa shared the information with him.

According to her, the creature was a formidable one that managed to escape her grasp seven times in the past.

For it to be able to run away from Eloa seven times, even after being beaten seven times by her, the creature’s power was simply way out of his league.

And he knew that.

The reality of the situation became even more apparent to him when he saw how Eloa had to give it her all to fight it.

Witnessing their fight made him think ‘I’m glad I’m not the one who’s fighting’. After all, this was the monster who managed to survive Eloa’s onslaught seven times and escaped from her.

If it was him who was fighting the monster, he wouldn’t have lasted even for a second.

Even more so when it was even stronger now.

He didn’t even dare to guess exactly how strong it was, but there was something that was bugging him.

Siwoo took off the gauntlet on his left hand.

On the back of that hand, Eloa’s covenant, with its hourglass-looking pattern, was engraved.

This was the covenant that she had conferred to him ever since the day that he was ambushed by the Drowned Witch.

According to her, this would help him if his life were ever in danger.

It was one out of her twelve covenants.

In other words, a twelfth of a 23rd ranked witch’s power was in him.

Well, the extent of a witch’s power couldn’t really be measured by simple arithmetic like that, so nobody really knew exactly how much power she infused in him.

-Baaang!

Another loud roar echoed in the distance.

Which meant that their battle was still going on.

From this, he could tell that Eloa was unable to overpower her opponent and finish the battle quickly.

Is it really okay for me to run away just like that?

She can’t use her full power because of me. Now that I know that, is it really okay to just leave her like this?

Technically speaking, Eloa was the one who made him stay here, since she didn’t approve of him going back to Gehenna.

Because she was being paranoid over Periwinkle’s ominous divination.

But, it was him who didn’t want to sit back doing nothing.

So in the end, this was the result of their choices, no one could solely be blamed.

The responsibilities lied on both sides.

At least Siwoo thought so.

“If this thing…”

Siwoo looked at the four-leaf clover that Periwinkle gave him.

From her explanation, this seemed to be an amulet that would protect him from death once.

With this clover and the music box…

As long as he tuned the music box up, he should be able to catch a glimpse of what was happening in Eloa’s side.

He still didn’t know how at the moment, but, as long as he got there and met his Master, they should be able to find a way to return the covenant to her.

This is something I must do.

Resolving himself, he then took a step toward the source of all the loud noises, where the battlefield was located.

2.

All 1,200 White Knights and the Red Knight with a full power Red Branch.

Just as Siwoo suspected, Eloa’s situation was grim.

The white spears held by the White Knights were resonating with the Red Branch, emitting a huge pressure to their surroundings.

In a sense, it was like an AoE debuff.

The debuff could already be felt when she was facing a group of White Knights, but now that all 1,200 came at her at once, it was even more so.

Her movements were significantly affected, as if she was moving her body in the water.

However, though she was struggling, she wasn’t being pushed into a corner.

“Haaah!”

She swung the Sword of Covenant with all her strength, cutting dozens of White Knights at once.

The first time she saw those guys coming back to life, she utilized all eleven of her covenants at once, giving her enough power to cut through dozens of them with a single swing.

At this point, she had probably cut down a thousand of them already, but the distance between her and the Red Knight, which had only been watching, didn’t seem to be narrowed at all.

This was because all the White Knights that she cut down would immediately be revived again and brandished their spears at her.

“Ugh!”

The spears came from sixteen different directions at once but she managed to swat them all.

As the huge sword touched them, the White Knights surrounding her were sent flying and exploded with a bang.

Though she could handle them easily, she still couldn’t just ignore them purely because of their sheer number and their tendency to cling to her like a swarm of flies.

At the very least, she was now able to deal with her enemy’s cheeky tactics of reflecting the damage back to her each time she hit their weapons.

Her years of combat experience wasn’t for nothing, after all.

As she was continuing her onslaught, she came up with dozens of strategies for her to get out of this situation.

And she believed that one of them would definitely work if she had the chance to deploy it.

But, just as how she knew the Red Knight well, the Red Knight also knew her well.

After their short clash just a while ago, the creature figured out that it couldn’t completely overwhelm her, so it tried to poke at her weaknesses instead.

Both of her weaknesses, to be more precise.

One.

The way her covenant worked was that she could grant one of her covenants into one person.

Which meant that, a one-on-one fight with her would be tricky, but it was a completely different story for a one-against-many fight.

Two.

She was weak in a battle of attrition.

The total amount of mana she could store in her brand was less than that of a normal witch’s.

In addition, since she was pouring everything she had to gain advantage in close quarter combat, her mana efficiency was atrocious for how much output that she needed.

Now that she was utilizing all the covenants she could utilize, both of those weaknesses became even more apparent. Even the creature could sense that her magic was leaking as she swung her sword.

Of course, even if one could call those her ‘weaknesses’ in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really matter at all.

Try to group a bunch of people against her, no matter how many of them were gathered, they wouldn’t amount more than a bunch of scarecrows to her.

However, the problem here was the White Knights that the Red Knight deployed were just strong enough to hinder her.

When they came in thrusting their spears while disregarding their own lives, even Eloa couldn’t just ignore them.

Not to mention that even if she were to cut them down, they’d still resurrect themselves and rejoin the battle again.

In that sense, the Red Knight utilizing those guys as its shield was a correct move.

For Eloa to advance a single step, she had to cut down ten of those White Knights.

As a result, her clothes were tattered, torn in several places, her beautiful pink hair was drenched in so much sweat that it looked like she had just been splashed by water.

Though at the very least, she gained a little bit of solace from this outcome.

Because Siwoo managed to get away from here.

Even after this much time had passed, she hadn’t got any warnings from the Guardian’s Covenant.

If some kind of crisis were to befall him, it would act as an autonomous defense to protect him and inform Eloa of it.

Since that didn’t happen, chances were that he had already taken shelter somewhere.

If that was the case, she could rest easy.

“Haa…”

She swung her sword again and dispatched ten White Knights at once in a blink of an eye.

Now was the time for her to decide.

To run away.

Or to fight and risk her life until the end.

The Red Knight and all these White Knights was probably the Cowardly Witch’s entire force.

In other words, if she could handle these guys, the threat that was looming over Seoul would disappear.

Her mana was almost depleted.

But, there was still enough for her to shake off their possible pursuits and escape.

However, if she really were to escape, it’d take a whole week of treatment and mana gathering before she could recover her power again.

In other words, while she could save her own life, she couldn’t fight off the looming disaster,

The problem here was, if this fierce battle continued, the Red Knight would definitely come forward and join the fight.

And if that were to happen, she’d lose her chance to escape.

“Gavaakkkk—!”

The Red Knight roared.

All the White Knights held up their spears and rushed toward Eloa as the Red Knight rushed into the white waves.

The distance between the creature and Eloa was quite far, but for both beings, whose might transcended that of a human’s, it was a distance that could be closed easily.

Only five seconds had passed since Eloa started thinking.

But in that brief moment, she managed to think about a lot of things.

Especially her own death.

There was a great chance that even if she were to give it her all here, she’d end up succumbing to her enemies anyway and perished.

She was scared.

If she could run away, she would.

Whenever she was dancing between the boundary of life and death with a sword in her hand like this.

There wasn’t a single moment when she didn’t feel scared.

“Ravi…”

She remembered Ravi’s words about protecting the innocents.

The upright conviction of her lovely apprentice that she had never approved of back when she was alive.

And now, she foolishly held onto that conviction like her weapon.

“Siwoo…”

If I knew that today’s the last day we’ll ever meet, I shoulda praised him more.

I shoulda been more honest and praised him as much as I can.

Sorry, Siwoo.

As if the stopped time began to rewind again, the sound of footsteps echoed in her ears.

She held her sword tightly, as if trying to break it.

“Come forward.”

She used up all the magic in her brand, turned it into strength and allocated them to her legs.

With this, she sealed her own escape path as she sent a glare towards her enemies. Her magenta eyes glowed.

Eloa Tiphereth might die here today.

But she wouldn’t fall before she achieved victory.

“I will stand my ground.”