Paladin of the Dead God
chapter-161

The witches fell silent, freezing in place.

“I apologize for ruining the atmosphere of the banquet with my rude manners, but now it’s time to end this.”

The final main dish is goat’s head.

Isaac decided that the goat-man was no longer a threat, and suddenly charged at him.

The goat-man swung its scythe in convulsions.

Crack. The Luadin Key collided with the scythe. The resentments embedded in the scythe screamed and clung to the flame of the Luadin Key as if to extinguish it.

But at that moment, Isaac infused sword energy into the Luadin Key.

The flames of the Luadin Key surged like tentacles, rotating like a saw blade, and began tearing and biting everything around it. Even the resentments could not escape being its prey.

Crunch, crackle,

The gruesome sound of a beast crunching bones raw echoed as the resentments shattered. Simultaneously, the scythe also began to crumble and shatter. The witches, having clashed countless times with the knights of Elil, realized what Isaac had unleashed.

“Sword energy! Isn’t he a paladin of the Codex of Light?”

Their screams were meaningless, unheard by anyone. Isaac swiftly destroyed the scythe and swung his blade. The goat-man’s wrist was severed in an instant.

Losing balance, the goat-man staggered. Isaac immediately thrust his sword towards its chest.

Crunch! The goat’s chest was gruesomely penetrated. Centered around the wound, flesh and bone seemed to twist and crush inward. Instantly, the goat-man’s form tilted into an asymmetric shape.

“Aaah! Aaaha haha, kahaha!”

However, the Hectali witches, instead of panicking, laughed and manipulated the goat-man to grab Isaac’s arm fiercely. Despite the Luadin Key penetrating deeper, the creature paid no heed.

“Cackle cackle! Fool! This is just a temporary skin we are using!”

“We’ll now encase you inside and transport you! You might be half-dissolved by the time we arrive, but you’ll be alive!”

With the witches’ mocking laughter, the goat-man’s abdomen was ripped vertically long. Inside, hundreds of teeth and tongues awaited to swallow Isaac.

Then, the laughter abruptly stopped.

A witch screamed sharply.

The goat-man, driven mad, began biting off its own arm and retreated from Isaac as if trying to escape. It didn’t stop there but rolled over the fallen leaves, frantically scratching its severed arm and various parts of its body.

It scratched so violently that flesh seemed about to fall off.

“Yikes, what? What was that?!”

“What! What is it!”

“We need to eat the Holy Grail Knight!”

The bewildered witches’ voices continued. Isaac smiled at the scene.

The goat-man, or rather the Hectali witch hiding within, gasped for air and looked at Isaac. Unknown to her, at the moment she tried to consume him, something had burrowed into her body instead.

It was the poison that Isaac had sent back through his blood.

[Poison of a Rotten Angel (S) / Rare Angelic Corpse Poison. A potent poison combining strong regenerative and holy properties, the aura of death, and curses. Especially effective against beings with holiness.]

The poison, obtained from consuming the corpse of the Drowned King, was lethal to beings with any holiness. Hectali, being an ancient deity, possessed some form of holiness, which she had drawn from human sacrifices and fear-based worship, which became her strength.

But now, that holiness had become a catalyst for the poison spread by Isaac.

Hectali felt the holiness decaying from the severed arm’s tip. Despite it being only a trace amount of blood, she felt an intense toxicity. She couldn’t imagine what would happen if she consumed Isaac whole.

But that wasn’t the only problem.

Toxins were familiar to her. But ‘something’ that tried to invade her body along with the poison was the issue. It was akin yet entirely foreign to her own essence.

“Ah… So only one witch came as ‘the real one’, and the others supported with curses?”

Isaac’s cold voice snapped Hectali back to reality.

Caught up in the façade of being a Holy Grail Knight and her greed for the Rite of Division, she had ignored the true nature of Isaac, which now became evident to her. Although it was just a glimpse, something ominous and indescribable was swirling around his entire body.

The sin created by the heavens and earth approached, whetting its appetite.

“Oh, don’t come! I’ll kill you…”

Isaac snatched her by the nape like a snake, but all he grabbed was a large piece of goat skin. In the distance, a naked old woman was frantically running through the leaves.

‘Now I see how she’s survived for so long.’

***

The true form of Hectali was revealed: a head adorned with a crown-like formation of thick vines, with only the lips of a young woman visible within the vine. Below that, the body of an old woman, wrinkled and ancient, suggested centuries of life.

“Hah, ah! Aaah!”

Despite appearing to be an old woman of several hundred years, Hectali moved through the forest with surprising speed. However, no matter how fast she ran, it felt painfully slow because she could sense Isaac persistently following behind her.

‘What? How is he following me? He shouldn’t know this forest so well!’

Hectali had strategically placed wild animals along her escape route to monitor the paths, but she was unaware that Isaac’s parasites were also hiding among them.

Moreover, Hesabel, who was moving through the trees, was continuously monitoring and reporting Hectali’s movements.

Hectali clenched her teeth and moved the forest.

The trees shifted and fog rose up. It was an illusion so potent that it could make a seasoned hunter lose their way. However, at a simple gesture from Isaac, colors burst forth from beyond.

This new spectrum quickly cleared the fog and cut through the branches and vines that were in the way. As Isaac relentlessly pursued her without slowing down, the witch screamed again.

“Ah! What in the world is this? What is it?”

Her horrible screams went unheeded as her sisters urged her to capture the Holy Grail Knight.

But it was impossible. ‘That one’ was not something she could deal with.

Suddenly, the forest cleared before her.

The harsh winter of the Elil Kingdom lay before her, and through the yellowed grass of the field, she could see dozens of Elil knights who had just driven off an attack by wild animals. Startled by Hectali’s sudden appearance, they quickly recognized who she was.

“It’s the witch!”

The Elil knights began to form up, reciting prayers located somewhere between curses and hymns, preparing to confront the witch. Hectali burst out laughing madly.

She muttered with a ferocious smile.

[Fine… I’ll just have to devour you lot!]

Crunch, crack.

Roots began to grow from beneath Hectali’s vine-covered head, quickly enveloping her body and raising her up as a massive figure. The closest unlucky knight was entangled in the vines and absorbed into her body.

***

“The witch has appeared!”

“What?!”

Mors, leading the left wing, hastened to focus his troops upon hearing that the witch had appeared. He had received reports from Reyna that the Holy Grail Knight was luring the witch inside the forest, but now she had unexpectedly shown up on the west side.

‘Has the Holy Grail Knight been defeated?’

Mors felt conflicted but quickly led his knights towards where the witch was reported to have appeared. However, he was shocked upon arrival.

“A Root Giant? Hectali was a Root Giant?”

The Root Giant was a calamitous entity known to appear in the frontier areas. It would suddenly appear in frontier villages, devour all the inhabitants, and completely destroy the houses, leaving no trace behind and often turning the site into a swamp or a vast forest.

The problem was the immense power of the Root Giant. Not even two knight orders had been able to defeat it. If one of the Hectali was indeed a Root Giant, it meant that the witches had been hiding their true strength all this time.

As expected, the soldiers and knights forming the encirclement were overwhelmingly defeated by the Root Giant. Knights entangled in its vines dangled helplessly, their bodily fluids being absorbed.

Moreover, the Root Giant was not only unleashing curses that caused knights to vomit rats from their mouths across the field.

Edelred, who arrived at about the same time, watched the battlefield with a pale expression.

“Keep your distance! Shoot flaming arrows!”

One of the commanders, panicking, issued an order. Mors quickly slapped the back of the commander’s head and shouted.

“Are you mad? Start a fire in a dry field? You want us to burn along with the witch in His Majesty’s presence?”

“But, General… how do we capture that thing?”

The idea of retreat never crossed their minds. Only Edelred hesitantly proposed a “strategic regroup,” but Mors’s eyes flared with anger at the suggestion.

“Strategy is only relevant until the enemy appears before you! When the enemy is in front of you, there’s only one thing to do!”

Gritting his teeth, Mors drew his beloved axe and shouted as he charged forward on his horse.

“For Elil! I go to the battlefield you lead us to!”

Ultimately, it would be Elil who decided the outcome of the battle. Soon, the knights accompanying Mors also rushed forward.

Thudding of heavy horse hooves filled the air like drumbeats of war, revitalizing the panicked knights. Instinctively, they followed Mors, who was leading the charge.

“Ah, Elil! To your side I come!”

“Elil! Elil! Elil!”

A knight with a broken arm charged at the Root Giant, and another who had been spewing rats now bit them off and grasped his sword. Even those hanging and being drained by the Giant began to bite at its roots in desperation.

Crack, bang! Each swing of the Giant’s limbs sent several knights flying with broken limbs. But as long as their necks weren’t broken, they got up and charged again. If not with swords, then with teeth, or even their heads.

“Where’s the weak spot, General Mors!”

“This beast has a head! Cut off its head!”

“But it’s too tall, General!”

“Start from the ankles! Cut your way up to the head!”

[These crazy bastards…!]

Hectali was shocked by the sudden resurgence of the Elil knights, who she had been dominating just moments ago. Battles with Elil knights were always like this; they might seem mad and close to defeat, but when on the brink of death, they would turn into berserk warriors.

The disturbing part was that miracles seemed to accompany them in this state.

The battlefield’s miracle enveloped the Elil knights.

It was a hymn called forth not by prayer, but by blood and battle. As long as the miracle’s blessing was upon them, they felt neither fear nor pain, only the resolve to slay their enemies and superhuman strength.

‘This won’t do.’

Hectali had initially planned to eat a few knights and then escape westward. However, she found no way to overcome the knights in their current state, and with the Holy Grail Knight possibly in pursuit, she couldn’t keep fighting.

[Let go!]

As the knights entered a frenzied state, gaps appeared in their formation. Hectali forcefully shook off the knights clinging to her and ran towards an opening. She thought she might escape by transforming into a deer or moose once she was far enough away.

“Where do you think you’re going?!”

At that moment, Mors roared and swung his axe. The one he faced had no time to dodge. Mors’s axe, executed with advanced swordsmanship, sliced through Hectali’s hand and embedded itself in her side. Hectali screamed irritably and grabbed Mors’s head.

She felt she would only be satisfied if she crushed his head, even as she was dying.

Just then, the last entity she should ever face appeared.

[Holy Grail Knight!!]

Hectali swung Mors’s body trying to crush the Holy Grail Knight along with it. However, Isaac calmly exhaled, thinking of the maneuvers necessary for this moment.

He remembered a trick Bashul had shown on the beach.

Drawing his sword while running and stabbing in one breath.

Distance and time didn’t matter.

A crystal battlefield monument shone brightly, enhancing Isaac’s movements with its light.

Isaac landed, ripping through Hectali’s neck.

Silence hung over the field.

Whooooosh! A sudden gust then broke branches off the Root Giant and knocked down knights. The dry grass of the plains bent sideways in the fierce wind.

For a while, the rising dust was so thick that knights could hardly see.

Thud.

And then, finally, the sound of the Root Giant, beheaded, collapsing to the ground was heard.

The sound of a centuries-old great tree falling.

[Nameless Chaos watches over you.]

[Objective: ‘Witch Hectali Sisters (1/3)’ eliminated.]