CH 2

Leon began to walk, the unconscious woman in his left arm and his longsword in his right.

He was the only moving figure in the desolate and vast city. His black boots crushed the debris as he walked through the bloody and twisted alleyways.

The city was dead.

There were survivors, but everything they had built was destroyed. Their homes, families, friends, and even the dogs they had raised and the diaries they wrote every night were all reduced to ashes.

The long bridge slowly spanned between the broken steeple of the church and the broken fragments of the Bahamut.

He had come to find something, but once again, he was too late; ‘it’ had already left. His only hope was that he had found a human who seemed to have been assimilated by ‘it’.

“Ha…ugh.”

Leon briefly glanced at the woman lying on his arm.

In truth, it would have been stranger if she hadn’t collapsed. She was fragile, from her small frame to her delicate neck.

Her wet neck where his gaze lingered was pale and thin. He could break it with just one hand if he wanted to.

If he left her like this, she would surely die, not by the hands of monsters, but by the blade of a Holy Knight.

Three years ago, a meteor fell in the southern sea. After a year, monsters started crawling out of the sea where the meteor had fallen.

People called them the “Bahamut,” after the name of a monster in the holy scripture, whose origin was unknown.

The Bahamut were brutal. They ate humans, and in the rarest of cases, they gave birth to assimilated humans.

The assimilated humans quickly went insane and died instead, failing to be mentally linked to the Bahamut.

Naturally, the Church rejected the red-eyed assimilators. If the Holy Knights had found her, they would have killed her before she could come to her senses, unknowing that she was a human who, if used properly, might end this disaster.

The woman, Leon surmised, was the human assimilated by the ‘first’ Bahamut. It was the one to whom he had abandoned everything to pursue.

“It’s been a long time.”

At that moment, a stern voice interrupted Leon’s train of thought, like a gust of wind.

Leon, who had been walking through the black debris without hesitation, suddenly stopped.

The wind blew. His red hair, similar to the color of the flames that burned the city, fluttered wildly. He slowly turned his head.

The procession of white-armored soldiers marched in perfect formation. Their helmets resembled countless upside-down cross flags and boxes. They carried long spears and square shields.

They were the Church’s Order of the Holy Knights. Leon smirked.

“You came early.”

“Of course we are. We can’t act as recklessly as you do, traveling alone.”

Philip von Beilschmidt, the vice-commander of the Holy Knights, replied coldly. He must have been sent by the Church to the city of Bayern. The fearful Pope would never have sent the commander himself.

Undeniable loathing overflowed from Philip’s violet eyes. The silver-haired knight was renowned for his steadfastness to the law, and there was no way he could forgive Leon for leaving the Order.

Bahamut Hunter. The Red Knight of the Apocalypse.

The names people used to refer to the current Leon were nothing more than secular titles.

All the knights of the Church remembered him as he had once been, a Messenger of God. Philip respected him, admired him, trusted him, and followed him.

The man in black armor did not look like the highly respected Holy Knight he had been before. His figure standing amidst the ruins was so eerie that he seemed to be the culprit who had made the city look like this.

Leon stepped towards him. As he approached a few steps, the knights around him drew their swords with a ‘shhh’ sound.

Leon looked at the dozen sword tips aimed at him with amusement, then opened his mouth.

“Don’t stand me up like that. Thanks to me, you can take it easy.”

“Thanks to you?”

Philip raised his eyebrows in disbelief.

“Do you think I was able to take this position because you stepped down? Don’t fool yourself. Anyone who cannot bear their own cross cannot be my opponent.”

“No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the city.”

Leon looked around leisurely and added.

“Thanks to what I did, isn’t it easier to enter the city?”

Philip frowned. True enough, even on the outskirts of the city, the streets were littered with the bodies of the dead Bahamut.

Leon did it alone, borrowing the power of God as he pleased.

The fact only fueled his anger. His talent and abilities had increased, but he had thrown away the sense of justice he once had.

“Some things never change, like how you take everything so lightly and nonchalantly.”

Eventually, Philip’s gaze fell on the woman Leon was holding. He had been curious since earlier. Who was the wounded person that Leon Berg had personally carried?

The woman was thin and slender enough for Leon to hold in one arm. Her linen clothes were worn and tattered, and her jet-black hair was far from glamorous.

However, there was something strange about her that caught his attention.

“By the way, who is that woman?”

“As you can see, just an ordinary woman.”

When Philip frowned at the pun-like answer, Leon smiled for the first time.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? Whether the pitiful son rolls in the depths with a woman or not… Now, God will not say anything.”

Philip’s thin lips widened in shock. He even doubted his ears. Was the implication in that statement correct? Was someone who claimed to be devoted to God brazenly saying that he wanted a woman?

Disgust and contempt. All sorts of emotions ran through him.

The Holy Knights are fundamentally priests of God. Although he was no longer one, the thought of a former priest revealing his dirty lust made him sick.

“Why are you…no, forget it. What did I expect? Please leave now. I don’t want to speak to you again. I can only pray that when we meet again, it won’t be in front of the Inquisitor of the Saints.”

Leon stared into his stony face before turning around with a smirk.

He thought it was ridiculous. They look at him like he’s guilty of something he shouldn’t have done, but no one tried to subdue him and save the woman. Did they really think he was going to take her by force?

No, it wasn’t because he trusted Leon. He just looked at the world for his own sake.

It was then that he stopped his footsteps, which were headed towards where the horses were tied up. 

Leon suddenly turned his head as if he remembered something and said, “Oh, and Philip. My crucifix.”

Leon held up his long sword with his right hand. The blade was stained with blood from top to bottom, and a trail of red liquid dripped down its hilt. 

“I carried it then, and I still carry it now.”

Due to the cross guard on the handle, the long sword looked like a reversed cross itself.

At first glance, it seemed like a clear act of blasphemy. A heretical act of presenting the reverse cross to a Holy Knight, claiming that God was in the sword.

However, Philip knew. The inverted cross was the cross of the Apostles.

Any Holy Knight would know the story of how a martyr pleaded to be crucified upside-down because he believed that he was not worthy of receiving the same punishment as God.

“What exactly are you trying to achieve?”

Philip muttered to himself. His thin eyes watched until the dark figure disappeared.

Behind the army of white knights, black ashes were scattered.

It was a chilly winter.

⊱ ────── {.⋅ ❁ ⋅.} ────── ⊰

‘It’s hot. My eyes are burning and my mouth is dry.’

Veronica thought with a raging head, as if she felt the feelings of a person who was being burned alive.

‘If this is what it was like to be burned at the stake, then the infidels who had been burned at the stake had gotten their due punishment.’

Her throat burned painfully and her heart felt like it was engulfed in flames.

Unknown terror choked her throat, strangling her. Veronica screamed incessantly, her fingers twitching, trying to find their way through the darkness.

‘I’m going to die. Save me. Please. Someone, anyone…’

“Open your eyes.”

A cold voice brushed her ear as her flailing limbs were pinned down.

Someone’s upper body was pressing down on her, holding her head close.

But who could it be? Everyone was dead. Her father, her neighbor grandmother, and even Benjamin.

Veronica felt a sense of doubt and slowly raised her eyelids. Her vision was blurry at first, but it gradually cleared and caught a dark gaze staring at her at close range.

It was a man. A man she had never seen before—no, it was the man who saved her.

To her surprise, an immense attraction and desire rushed in all at once.

It was a feeling she had never experienced before, as if she had met a part of her lost soul. And…

“…I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty.”

It hurt so much that her heart felt like it was squeezing. Tears streamed down her narrow eyes. As she felt the fire burning through her veins, Veronica kept biting her lips.

“Give me some water. My throat is burning…”

But the man remained expressionless as he watched her break out in a cold sweat. His cold eyes watched her like a hunter watching a dying animal.

“Water…”

“Water? Do you really want to drink water?”

The man asked in a tone that suggested she should think carefully. Veronica then thought to herself.

‘Do I really want to drink water?’

‘Yes. My mouth is dry and my throat is burning. If this wasn’t thirst, then…what was it?’

At that moment, a bloody image flashed before her eyes. The dismembered body parts she saw on the street just before collapsing came to her mind like a midsummer flash of lightning.

The stiff arms reaching up to the sky. The back of the hand pointing to the ground and the frail fingers.

It should have been repulsive, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t disgusting. On the contrary…

“Do you want to eat?”

“Yes… so please, let go of me. Please, I’m begging you.”

Veronica shook her head and struggled weakly, but the man held her firmly by the chin.

The grip was rough. It hurt, but she didn’t care.

She was just thirsty. She was hungry. She wanted to drink blood.

Veronica used all her strength to push the man away. She needed to quench her thirst as soon as possible.

She felt like she was going crazy, but her awareness and actions were separate. She felt like she would die if she didn’t see blood soon.

“Let me go and get lost!”

Veronica finally cursed. For the first time in her life, she realized she was capable of making such a loud noise. The scream was sharp and intense, coming from deep within.

Veronica glared at the man with tears streaming down her face. His gaze, similar to hers, remained fixed on her face, making the tension between them even more palpable.

Her heart started pounding loudly once again, like it had before. It felt like an earthquake, strong enough to make her heart burst out of her chest if she coughed even slightly.

The frenzied flow of air felt slippery against her skin. The man twisted his lips and muttered in a low voice.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He didn’t plan to go this far, but he reached out and brushed aside her trembling hair before lowering his head. She felt his cold breath against her skin.

“Let me go, please. I won’t kill anyone. Just for a little while—”

Veronica’s incoherent sobbing stopped abruptly, and her eyes widened.

The small hands that had been tugging at his clothes relaxed, and all of her nerves were focused on his lips.

He twisted her chin and pushed his cool tongue into her mouth, stifling her words. 

What was even more surprising than the kiss was the strange sensation of his saliva quenching her thirst. As time passed, her widened eyes gradually closed.

Her hazy emotions cleared, as if she had dipped her feet into a cold stream in the middle of summer. With each gust of wind, the leaves burned white and faded to green.

Veronica lost herself in a strange, inexplicable pleasure. She tried to stick out her tongue to receive the man’s saliva as if it were holy water, but he pulled away at her clumsy actions and muttered a curse.

“More, give me more.”

With tears in her eyes, she begged him for more. He looked down at her with a penetrating gaze before suddenly asking.

“How old are you?”

Why was he suddenly asking her age?

Veronica, who was born in the winter, had just become an adult yesterday.

“Twenty.”

The man let out a bitter laugh. He was about to say something, but he closed his mouth and tried to stand up.

‘Don’t go. Let me feel that coolness again.’

Desperate, Veronica followed her instincts and wrapped her arms around him. She awkwardly imitated the man and brought her lips to his.

The man held her cheek as if trying to push her away, but when she pushed her tongue in, he groaned and roughly sucked on it.

It was night. It was a dark and unknown place, but her body pulsed with the energy of a newly born life.

The Bahamut were brutal. They ate humans, and in the rarest of cases, they gave birth to assimilated humans. The assimilated humans possess incredible power, but their minds are corrupted and they don’t live long.

Veronica was the only survivor because Leon Berg was a knight blessed by the Gods.

His holy breath and saliva saved her. 

She became God in place of a vanished God.