Children of the Rune – Winterer - Chapter 226

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 226.
Choose the Dawn (38)
Boris suddenly realized that something had changed.
Whoosh, crack, slash!
A transformation occurred in my movements, which had been accelerating faster and faster. I recognized it as the same change I had felt long ago during the Silverscull Tournament.
My blade traced dozens of different paths beyond my own will. From any of these paths, strange movements immediately extended into offense. I shattered all the piercing claws that rushed toward me in an instant.
Even during Silverscull, I could not easily conclude whether this was the power of the Winterer or the power of Tigris that Nauplion had taught me.
However, because of what happened afterward, I became almost certain it was the power of the Winterer. That is why I had tried so hard to restrain that power.
But this time was different.
The moment that transformation occurred, the voices that had been ringing in my ears suddenly faded and then fell silent. It was as if something had blocked the path for the captive souls to escape from the Winterer.
From that point on, the Winterer’s power concentrated solely on manifesting this incomprehensible movement. I myself became unified with this movement and could not think of anything else.
What was this?
Bolstered by the new movement, I gradually drew closer to the monster. The attacks grew increasingly fierce, yet my movements advanced through everything like magic.
The moment I grazed and cut one of its wing joints, a bizarre phenomenon occurred—the scene before my eyes split into two pieces like torn paper, then rejoined.
Simultaneously, what must have been fifty or more piercing claws and sharp bone fragments erupting from its body rushed toward me.
My throat burned. Something hot inside my belly felt like it was on fire. The movement that was difficult even for me to control transformed into a massive current. I suddenly realized that I was predicting my own next movements.
Certainly during Silverscull it felt like being pulled along by an unfamiliar force, but now I could vividly feel each movement and envision the next moment. Why?
Could this truly not be the power of the Winterer?
“I will destroy it all… without leaving anything behind… so keep coming!”
I had suffered, unable to forgive myself for once fleeing. Of course I must cherish the life that Yefnen exchanged for his own, but what meaning comes after preserving it?
As Yefnen told the Silent Steward on the night of the uprising, “A true instrument is kept precious precisely so that it may stand alongside in the worst of moments.”
Why had I preserved this life so carefully? Precisely for this—because I must settle the old debt that bound me!
I saw half of the piercing claws shatter and the other half withdraw back into the wings. For the first time, I had withstood its all-out attack.
But I too had expended too much strength. Whenever I tried to steady my breathing, only coughs escaped. If another attack of the same magnitude came in this state, I thought it would be difficult to defend against. Then…
Perhaps I should attack rather than defend while I still had some strength remaining?
Then, the voice of a stranger reached my ears, and I flinched in surprise.
“Come any closer, Blado Jineman, and I’ll throw this child to the monster!”
A man whose presence I hadn’t even noticed appeared in the distance, clutching Yenichka and backing away.
The monster’s piercing claws, which should have been aimed at me, now extended toward him. As danger approached, he threw the child toward the monster and launched himself upward to evade the attack.
Without even a single blade to shatter the claws, he dodged all three with mere movement alone and even leaped far back to retreat.
Yurichi realized that all his plans had fallen apart after suffering a deep wound to Blado’s hagrun.
A wound to the hagrun does not heal easily even with recovery magic. For myself, whose specialty is swift movement, continuing to evade attacks normally with such a wound was impossible.
I had tried to block Blado’s attacks by using Yenichka as a hostage, but the monster reacted first instead. As a last resort, I threw the child far away to draw the monster’s attention. Now it was no longer a matter of seizing the Winterer. Life was more precious.
Yenichka fell directly in front of the monster. The moment the monster’s wing was about to strike the child’s frail body, Boris pushed off the ground without thinking and rushed forward.
Whether the child lived or died, I did not know. But I leaped forward instinctively. I had thought I should inflict a mortal wound before growing more exhausted, but I never expected to act on it so immediately.
Plunging recklessly deep, I encountered almost no resistance from the monster. I shattered only the two claws that came near, and raised my white blade high, splitting the left wing in two.
From the split seam, foul-smelling murky air rushed out. It was so toxic that it was difficult to keep my eyes open.
As the severed wing’s mist dissipated, it instantly transformed into a bare skeletal frame. I landed on the ground by bending my knees and turned to look back. Then an unexpected sight came into view.
Three fang-like protrusions simultaneously rushed toward Yenichka, but instead of piercing, they coiled around the child’s body and lifted her into the air.
Like an offering, like worship to a god that does not exist—the small child rose high, her white clothes and golden hair fluttering in the increasingly fierce wind.
Had I lost my composure for a moment at the grotesque spectacle?
Suddenly, a terrifying force struck me from behind—the creature’s remaining wing. The blow was strong enough to snap ancient trees, and caught completely off guard, I flew backward nearly ten paces before crashing down.
I barely escaped death by falling into the putrid mire where Emera Lake’s rot began. The decayed wood I struck splintered from its roots, and the Winterer I’d been gripping plunged through the sludgy swamp floor.
“….”
For a long moment, I couldn’t breathe. Blood surged backward, rushing to the crown of my head. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine, and a scalding liquid bubbled up in my throat.
Though there was no time to delay, though I had to rise immediately, my consciousness grew distant.
“At last… it’s over. Now it’s in my hands….”
I heard a voice from somewhere, but at first I couldn’t comprehend it. Then realization struck—it was the voice of the man who had thrown Yenichka to the creature moments before.
I didn’t know who Yurichi was. Though he had followed me so persistently, I had never once seen his face.
But Yurichi was different. The exhilaration of his long pursuit finally bearing fruit, the urgency to escape this hellish situation—his body burned with such fervor he thought he might die.
When he spotted the Winterer embedded in the mud, Yurichi barely suppressed an urge to cry out as he drew his blade.
The sword still gleamed with an intoxicating radiance. Its light was so mesmerizing it clouded the mind. He even forgot, for a moment, that he needed to flee. At last he had it, at last!
That was when it happened.
Thwack!
The darkness before his eyes suddenly turned white.
Yurichi stared blankly at another blade—one that had pierced through his abdomen from behind and now protruded before his eyes. Blood dripped steadily from its tip.
From where? The enemy had fallen… the sword was taken… another?
He couldn’t think of much. His body crumbled. The last thought that crossed his mind was that he’d never lost so much blood before.
I heard my own voice, faint and distant.
“Who… are you?”
Yurichi fell without answering.
I seized the Winterer from the fallen man’s hand and watched as letters appeared on the blade of Nauplion’s sword I held.
Who was this person after the Winterer? Could he be an accomplice of the assassin I’d first cut down with this blade?
After carrying two swords all this time, I had ended up cutting with Nauplion’s blade instead of the Winterer—a strange twist of fate.
Thanks to it, my mind cleared immediately. I pulled out the splinters of wood embedded in my skin and cast them aside.
As I tried to stand straight, something like a mass rose from within my body. I couldn’t bear it and spat it out. Blood. Coughing seized me for a long time afterward.
But I wiped the blood from my lips with my sleeve and stood again.
In the distance, I could see my cousin sister, radiating a faint light like a young saint. I also saw Blado charging at the creature once more.
From Blado came a ferocity I could never have imagined—he rushed forward as if to cut and shatter even stone itself. The hideous Uncle I’d always feared since childhood, the cunning man who had brought an army and mocked Father’s ruin….
Yet he was one who could never reclaim lost happiness through any deed, and who had only now learned that he could find joy not in another’s death, but in a birth.
Wielding Hagrun instead of the Winterer, Blado severed the tentacles beneath the claws that held Yenichka. As he caught his falling daughter, Blado laughed like a madman—a sound like the dead mocking the living.
Then I sensed something and cried out without thinking.
“Dodge!”
But before Blado could even move, a powerful shockwave of air crashed down.
I knew what it was. I had seen it before when fighting the creature on the Island. I had witnessed with my own eyes what unspeakable horrors befell those caught in its path.
“Grrrrr… aaaahhhhh….”
Blado, cradling his daughter, fell to his knees and began to tremble. A vibration that made his entire body convulse pierced through him, pressing in relentlessly.
An ordinary person would have covered their ears, but Blado did not. He only held his young daughter—the child now motionless—ever tighter, drawing her deeper into his embrace. Even as everyone else lost consciousness in this ordeal, he fought to protect his daughter.
I understood what I had to do.
The moment the vibration ceased, the creature’s piercing claws would descend upon father and child.
There was a time when I hated him enough to kill him, believing he had stolen everything from me. Yet Blado had taken nothing. Like a child destroying a toy it could never possess, he had simply shattered it all to pieces.
I won, yet gained nothing, and wandered alone in my victory until young Yenichka came into my life and gave me back my reason to live.
Blado is merely a fragment of this great tragedy, and when this tragedy ends, so too shall his role conclude—through death, or through a price far worse than death itself.
“Your opponent stands here!”
As I clenched my teeth and pushed forward, something—blood or swamp water, I could not tell—oozed down my body in thick rivulets. Yet I continued onward. Into the maelstrom of sonic waves, Boris walked deliberately into the tempest.
I remembered when the Island’s monster unleashed the same attack. During that terrible surge of air pressure, it could not launch any other assault. Its needle claws, its wings—nothing could move.
Therefore, that terrifying moment was my only chance. The final gambit Boris could play in a situation where defeat was already written.
If only I could endure it.
The pressure mounting across my entire body filled my ears, my eyes, my throat until they threatened to burst. At the point where I could bear no more, Boris pushed off the ground and charged forward.
The winter that began in childhood—I lunged toward the one who had brought it, determined to erase them from existence forever.
For the names of the dead—for the lives of those who must live on!

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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