Eris, born as a kin of the Star Crystal Beast Orleon, the very source of Mana that governs the world, carries an innate destiny. To stop the world's destruction brought about by human greed, she unleashes the forbidden magic 'Apocalyptic Seven Swords.'
Her sole purpose is to eradicate the exploitation of Mana by humans and to protect the life of the star. This is her answer to the countless cries of life she has witnessed over centuries. But humans call her 'the Last Boss who will destroy the w
Last Peril of the Supreme Star - White Fang Castle, Accusation of Collapse
The ash was still falling.
The Great Forest of Noa had lost every last bit of its once light-filled canopy of ancient trees, and now stood like countless black bones thrust up from the earth. The air was thick with the smell of burnt paper and rotting grass, and each breath scraped the depths of his lungs. Kaito Veldorunt knelt at the ruins of the Dawn Altar, clearing away debris with the index finger of his left hand.
His fingertip touched something cold.
It peeked out from beneath a collapsed stone monument. A single crystal, pale blue, yet holding a certain, unmistakable light. A fragment like a star's tear, formed from condensed mana. When he placed it on his palm, the star crest on his left shoulder pulsed faintly in response—as if the last whisper left behind by the vanished girl still remembered his skin.
"Eris……"
The voice that called her name mingled with the ash and vanished at once.
He clutched the crystal to his chest and rose to his feet. His body was already little more than a rag. The wounds he'd taken at the Tower of Vesper had not healed, and his left shoulder carried a heaviness, as though blood had congealed deep inside. And yet, there was a direction he had felt ever since coming to this forest. Southeast. Beyond the Tower of Vesper, toward his homeland of Helden, there was a faint, almost dying tremor of mana.
A tremor of life, crying out for help.
Kaito stepped over rubble, crossed the fractured earth, and began to walk. There was no sword on his back anymore. In its place, only Eris's crystal and a shattered, moonlight-colored hair ornament. Even so, he walked.
******
From the mountain of rubble that had been the Inquisition Chamber, a small woman finally crawled out.
Her apprentice priestess robes were filthy with dirt and soot, caked like mud, and the hem was torn to shreds. Her pale golden-brown hair was tangled and blackened with ash, and her breathing came in thin, whistling gasps. The vision in her left eye was completely white and clouded. There was light, but no shape. Only her right eye could barely make out the form of the ruined cathedral.
Celestina Mireth lay motionless for a time atop the rubble.
Her fingers were bent at angles that defied her own will, broken where they should have been straight. Even when she touched them, there was almost no sensation left. The numbness had already begun.
"……I can still…… move……"
She spoke to her broken body, willing it to listen.
On the scorched cathedral floor, the remains of priests lay scattered. Among them were those who, until yesterday, had kept her caged as a heretic. Every one of them now lay still, like mere clods of earth.
Celestina let her trembling left hand crawl to her chest.
There, seared by fire, soaked by rain, nearly torn apart, was a scrap of leather. A burnt remnant of the Old Scriptures. It was a fragment of the holy text that the experimental subject girl—who had drifted before her eyes at the moment of the Inquisition Chamber's collapse—had clutched until the very end.
She wedged it between her broken fingers, held it up as if in offering, and read it with her one remaining, unburned eye.
*'That which wounds the star is not human. It is a sword that devours mana.'*
Her voice was hoarse, withered.
"So it was true…… everyone knew……?"
A truth that stood in complete opposition to the Church's teachings. The doctrine that branded the kin as demons. That those who devoured the star were the kin. But these ancient words clearly proclaimed that the very act of consuming mana was what wounded the star.
"It isn't Eris who's killing the star……"
She murmured, still on her shattered knees.
"The Council of Seven Pillars…… Project Vesper…… they're the ones eating the star……"
At that moment, she heard footsteps.
Celestina turned with only her right eye. What she saw was a man approaching from beyond the ash-shrouded ruins. Black hair, with faint streaks of deep crimson at the tips. Reddish-brown eyes caught sight of her and wavered, wide with shock.
"You…… Celestina?"
Kaito stopped just before the mountain of rubble.
In his eyes, the pure, devout, yet stubborn apprentice priestess he had met in the garden of White Fang Castle had been transformed into a pitiful sight. The small mark of Starcrystal Syndrome that had glowed behind her ear was now hidden by soot. Her large, young-leaf-colored eyes—the left one clouded white, the right swollen with tears and mud.
"Lord Kaito……"
Her voice was spent.
"We meet again…… I wonder how I'm even alive right now…… but…… I'm glad……"
Kaito rushed to her side and supported her collapsing body with his arms. The shoulder he touched was so thin he could feel the shape of the bone beneath. She was freezing cold.
"Don't talk. Don't talk.…… Just rest."
"No, please listen."
Celestina held out the burnt remnant of the Old Scriptures to Kaito with her broken fingers.
"Look at these words…… It wasn't Eris who was eating the star…… It was the Crystal Extraction Institute that was draining the mana. In Project Vesper, they replicated the kin's power, cultivated artificial mana crystals…… used human children as experimental subjects……. The Church's teachings were rewritten by the Council. The kin aren't monsters or demons. They were children of god who protected the star. I…… confirmed it."
Kaito listened to her words, standing beneath the falling ash.
Deep in his chest, that smooth voice—the one he'd heard at the Tower of Vesper until he nearly lost his sanity—replayed itself over and over.
*'Your justice is a blade that protects the nation we prepared for you.'*
*'Your family was a necessary sacrifice.'*
The star crest on his left shoulder burned, searing hot.
"……Tell me. Everything you know."
Celestina looked up at Kaito's face with her tear-clouded right eye.
"Yes…… I'll tell you. Everything I saw. Everything I read."
Her story came in fragments. The lies of the Council of Seven Pillars that she'd heard in the Inquisition Chamber. The truth of the Tower of Vesper, spoken mockingly by the inquisitors. The artificial mana crystals cultivated underground. The children turned into experimental subjects.
Kaito never interrupted her once.
He simply watched her broken fingers, her trembling voice, and remembered—the memories of that day, when he was young.
His home village. Burning houses. A silver wolf-like demon beast.
He couldn't protect his brother or sister that day.
"I never want to lose anyone again."
That prayer had been real.
Even after being taken in by the kingdom, after gripping a sword as the Star's Chosen, after having justice drilled into him—that prayer alone had remained his own. The fiction of justice that Cassius had exploited—even that couldn't make the prayer itself a lie.
"The origin of my fight is the helplessness of that night."
He spoke as if murmuring to himself.
"I don't know what justice is anymore. But I never want to lose anyone like that again. That alone hasn't changed, even now."
Celestina saw, with her right eye, that Kaito was crying.
A single tear traced down the cheek of the hero covered in black ash. He didn't bother to wipe it away. He looked at his own left hand. There, a sword was gripped once more. With Eris's crystal held against his chest.
"I am a hero raised by the kingdom. But that wasn't all I was."
Kaito turned his gaze toward White Fang Castle.
"I'm going. I'm going to expose everything about the Council of Seven Pillars before the people."
Celestina gently placed her hand on his arm. The pain of her broken fingers no longer mattered.
"Yes. I'm coming too."
******
Graustadt had once been called the city that never slept.
Now, not a trace of that remained.
The mana crystal lights that had illuminated the city were all extinguished. The noble mansions of the upper city and the shopping streets of the middle city alike were blanketed in the same black ash. Ash fell endlessly from the sky, piling onto people's shoulders, into their hair. Their breath came out white, and not a single bird flew.
But the people were alive.
Lower city, the Ashsmoke District.
Thousands of citizens had naturally flowed into the plaza before the gates of White Fang Castle. Some gripped stones in their hands. Some held clubs. Some carried nothing at all, driven only by hunger and rage. There were old people, women, and children.
"Open the gates! Give us the mana!"
"Give back our crystals!"
"Bring out the Council! Bring out everything you're hiding!"
Before the gates, pale-faced knights stood in a line, gripping their swords with trembling hands. But the crowd did not flinch. The ground was splitting, houses were collapsing, and no matter where they fled, the mana would not return. In this city, hunger and freezing cold were now the only certain realities.
"Stand back! Come any closer and we'll cut you down!"
At that moment, a voice rose from behind the crowd.
"Make way."
The crowd parted in two.
Kaito Veldorunt walked straight toward the gate, carrying Celestina on his back. The people who saw him raised their voices one after another.
"Lord Star's Chosen……" "He's here."
But Kaito's appearance was not that of the hero they had worshipped.
There was no holy sword.
The apprentice priestess girl on his back was half-blind, her arms hanging limp.
Kaito gently lowered Celestina onto the stone pavement before the gate.
"I am Kaito Veldorunt."
His voice rang quietly across the plaza.
"I was raised by the Council of Seven Pillars. As the Star's Chosen, I swung my sword to defeat the kin, Eris. I fought to protect all of you."
Kaito paused for a breath.
Then, from within his chest, he took out the shattered silver hair ornament and the pale-glowing mana crystal, placed them on his palm, and held them up before the people.
"But all of it was a lie. Far from protecting anything, I was a tool for the side that's killing the world."
This time, from the left side of his chest, he pulled out a fragment of a broken artificial mana crystal. It was the one thing he had carried out of the Tower of Vesper. At its center, faint streaks of blood-red were mixed in.
"Look at this! This is an artificial mana crystal that the Council of Seven Pillars has been cultivating in the Tower of Vesper! They made it to turn the kin's power into weapons, into money!"
The crowd stirred with a low murmur.
"Eris was the last kin of the star. All of her companions were killed by your country. Eris wasn't born to destroy the world. She was a sacrifice of the star, who offered her own body to protect it. The one bringing about the end of the world isn't Eris. It's the Council of Seven Pillars' crystal extraction arts!"
Celestina rose to her feet beside Kaito. With her broken fingers, she held up the burnt remnant of the Old Scriptures before the people, her hands trembling.
"Please, look."
Her voice was terribly small, yet it moved the entire silence of the plaza.
"This is from the Old Scriptures of the cathedral, written over seven hundred years ago. It says this: *That which wounds the star is not human. It is a sword that devours mana.*…… What the Church teaches you now is a false doctrine rewritten by the Council of Seven Pillars. The kin are not monsters. They were children of god who protected the star. It was this country that killed them. It was this country that has been devouring the mana."
The crowd gasped and looked at one another.
"If that's true……"
"Then what have we been fighting for all this time……"
At that moment, a figure appeared on the central balcony of White Fang Castle.
An old man with silver-gray hair, carefully smoothed back. His small, pale-blue eyes were, as always, not smiling. Only his mouth curved in a soft arc. It was Cassius Heidel.
"Oh my, oh my. Everyone, please listen to me."
Cassius spoke in a smooth, carrying voice, despite having no magical amplification device.
"That young man has, tragically, lost his mind. Regrettably, he has been cursed by the ki
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