I Became A Thief Who Steals Overpowered Skills - Chapter 38

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

Episode 38. The Weak One’s Victory

Krasus gasped for breath, his shoulders heaving.

Blood trickled from his nose, dampening his cheeks.

From overextending his Sixth Sense, veins stood out starkly across his face.

“Bark, bark bark bark!”

The sound of dogs barking echoed around him, each cry jarring his thoughts into chaos.

His vision, drained to a sickly red, felt like staring through a haze of honey.

Never before had he pushed his Sixth Sense to such extremes.

Not much time remained.

At this rate, his Sixth Sense would snap entirely.

The Limit was beginning to crush down upon his body with glacial weight.

Grind!

Yet Krasus clenched his teeth so hard they might have shattered.

‘Go to hell, then.’

He had known his limitations keenly since early on.

He was weak. Talentless.

That was why crushing his opponent with the overwhelming strength of a prodigy was impossible.

Berkman was stronger than him.

So he waited—until that final moment when his opponent would be certain of total victory.

Krasus had deliberately concealed his fangs until then, his grip tenacious.

Clang!

In that instant, the Limit of his Sixth Sense finally broke through.

As Krasus’s blade, having inadvertently shattered the phantom, wavered, Berkman’s eyes gleamed with the flash of victory seized.

The shadow of his axe scattered for a moment.

His axe, now flooded with aura, made its presence loom larger than ever before.

The air all around was sucked into the vortex of Berkman’s axe as if flowing backward.

With a bone-chilling roar, the axe tore through the atmosphere and plummeted toward Krasus in an instant.

The image of Krasus’s head flying through the air was all that filled Berkman’s mind.

And in that moment.

Crack!

Flame ignited from within Krasus’s body, spreading across his entire frame.

Ignis had set ablaze the power of World Erosion that dwelt within him.

Combustion was the driving force of power itself.

And World Erosion operated on the same principle.

Through Ignis, the power of World Erosion burned with ferocious intensity.

Crunch-crack-crack!

In that instant, the power generated from burning World Erosion flooded entirely into Krasus’s body.

A tempest of force so violent it warped muscle and reforged bone shattered his limit in a single heartbeat.

The strength of his breath transformed.

The momentum of his body transformed.

Every piece of information flooding into his eyes accelerated his thoughts in an instant.

In that blink, Krasus perceived a sensation as though the world itself had frozen within his accelerated mind.

His senses, now expanded, could perceive even the distant, gradual fall of snowflakes from the trees.

The boiling heat erupting within his body touched the Phantom Binding.

Shatter!

The sound of shattering glass rang out ferociously.

Even as the Phantom Binding dissolved in the roaring heat, both of Krasus’s eyes burned a vivid crimson.

Blood tears and nosebleed erupted from his eyes and nose simultaneously.

This was the aftershock that began the moment he broke his limit using the power of World Erosion.

Krasus’s original hybrid technique, combining Ignis and Extreme Blood Needle Poison.

Extinction Flame Erosion.

‘Three seconds.’

He understood it viscerally.

At his current level, he could maintain Extinction Flame Erosion for merely three seconds.

‘I’ll finish it within that time.’

In that moment, black flame erupted along his blade.

With the surge of power pouring into his faltering sword, Krasus drove upward, riding between Berkman’s axe strokes.

Krasus moved faster than the speed at which the axe descended.

Like a hunting dog tearing at the throat of its prey.

Krasus’s blade came streaking toward Berkman’s throat.

Until the moment the blade reached his neck, Berkman had not consciously perceived Krasus’s attack.

That was how impossibly fast Krasus’s sword was.

In that fraction of a second, Berkman’s mouth—dog-like in its gape—fell open without thought.

It was nothing more than a reflexive response.

The body’s instinctive movement before information even reached the brain.

Only then did Berkman’s eyes belatedly register Krasus’s blade.

‘When? How? I’m dead. I’m dead!’

Normally, by the time he perceived the attack, the blade would have already carved through his throat and ended him.

But that single instinctive reflex had created an opening—a lifeline.

“—————————!”

Welcome Voice.

In that instant, an explosion of unhearing sound burst from his mouth, shattering Krasus’s eardrums.

A single reflexive act had birthed a variable—Berkman’s only thread of survival.

Eeeeeeeek!

Ringing tinnitus flooded Krasus’s senses, twisting his very vision.

Skreeeech!

And in that moment, the shockwave reversed everything.

With his senses warped by the burst eardrums, Krasus’s blade went astray—carving instead through Berkman’s right shoulder, deep into flesh and bone.

The blazing sword that severed bone and sinew was undeniably terrifying in its power.

But that blade embedded in his shoulder should have been aimed at his neck.

Berkman’s reflex had inverted the entire situation in a single instant.

And at the same moment, the flames consuming Krasus’s body began to fade.

The effect of Extinction Flame Erosion was weakening.

What came next was only a long retirement.

Between Berkman and Krasus, fortune and misfortune had switched places.

The situation reversed in a heartbeat.

Berkman bit down hard on his lip to endure the searing pain in his shoulder, then swung his axe toward Krasus.

In Krasus’s eyes—now tinged blue—the axe glinted.

His Sixth Sense spoke to him.

That axe would tear through his own throat and send him hurtling skyward.

Krasus, his strength draining away in the wake of Extinction Flame Erosion, drew his blade from Berkman’s shoulder—but blocking the axe was impossible.

‘Impossible?’

Of course it was impossible.

But that was only true for a sword.

He still had another option.

Krasus released his right hand from the grip.

In the same instant, he gathered every last tongue of the fading Extinction Flame Erosion and drove it hard into his right palm.

The force was so violent that the flames tore through muscle and skin, erupting upward in a torrent.

Without hesitation, Krasus swung that arm with all his might toward Berkman’s axe.

Crack!

The axe blade bit deep into Krasus’s right arm as they collided.

Even fortified by Extinction Flame Erosion, his muscle and bone were being severed by the axe.

Eventually, the axe would sever his arm entirely and slice through his neck.

But in that single moment.

His right arm, lodged in the axe blade, had bought him precious seconds.

Krasus’s eyes ignited in brilliant blue.

In this extremity.

His consciousness plunged in that fraction of time into the depths of Water-Self Unity.

His mental fortitude was so formidable that even Crimson Garden found herself gasping in admiration.

Splash!

A droplet falling from his mental force rippled across the lake of his consciousness, spreading through his entire body.

The whirlwind rising from the lake of his spirit traveled down his arm and reached his blade.

The sword embedded in Berkman’s shoulder.

In this moment, it became one with Krasus.

Witnessing this, Berkman’s expression went hollow.

Despite the fortunate circumstance of a conditioned reflex manifesting, Krasus had seized that final moment with a tenacity that was almost brutal.

Even Berkman, once called the Butcher, found that relentlessness exhausting.

‘I’ve lost.’

Realizing that every gambit he’d played had ended in defeat, Berkman closed his eyes.

And then.

A single stroke.

Crack!

As Krasus’s remaining left hand bone shattered, his blade cleaved Berkman clean in two from shoulder to hip.

Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack!

In the stroke’s lingering wake, the forest fractured with a sound that echoed across the snow.

Berkman’s bisected body tilted past Krasus and fell.

Watching him fall to that single stroke, Krasus dropped his sword.

His left hand, unable to bear the force, had shattered.

Thud, thunk—

But there was something far worse.

Krasus’s right arm, the one the axe had been lodged in, hung empty.

His right arm lay rolling across a snowfield far from his body.

Charred and withering away by the Extinction Flame Erosion, it seemed to be bidding him farewell.

In the blood that dripped steadily from his ravaged shoulder—

Krasus turned his body, gasping for breath with difficulty.

Crimson Garden watched him in silence.

Even knowing he had sacrificed his right arm, she could not stop him.

The strong defeat their opponents without a wound.

But the weak can only overcome their enemies covered in such scars.

It was the only victory Krasus could claim.

“Are you satisfied with that?”

Yet that did not make his victory just.

A sigh escaped from Crimson Garden’s lips.

She understood Krasus’s bitter despair—that he had to choose such a hollow victory even knowing it was scarred and incomplete.

But he had won.

He had brought down the true master he thought he could never defeat—for the first time.

“Satisfied? Hell no.”

So on Krasus’s lips hung a twisted smile.

Seeing that, Crimson Garden could only shake her head, muttering that he was indeed a poison seed through and through.

In that instant, Krasus’s body crumbled.

His mind had reached its limit and snapped.

“Krasus!”

Evelask appeared and rushed to support Krasus’s collapsing form.

Seeing him with his right arm severed and his left hand shattered, Evelask bit his lip.

He wondered if this was truly a victory worth becoming such a wreck for.

But then he saw the faint smile lingering at the corner of Krasus’s mouth, and words escaped him.

‘What kind of life could he have led to be like this?’

How was Krasus able to smile even in the midst of such a ruined victory?

“Let’s go.”

Crimson Garden spread her wings and took flight with an easy motion.

Seeing this, Evelask rose to his feet, cradling both Bianca and Krasus in his arms like corpses.

It was time to clean up.

＊ ＊ ＊

Through a slowly focusing haze.

Krasus saw an unfamiliar ceiling.

After staring blankly at that ceiling for a time, Krasus felt pain radiating through his entire body.

‘This hurts.’

When was the last time pain had struck him like this?

Even he, resistant to pain because of his Curse, could do nothing against an injury of this severity.

There was no sensation in his right arm.

It must have been severed back then.

So it goes.

He’d grown weaker from the shipwreck, his body battered and bruised—and that was precisely why he’d found her there.

Krasus lifted his left hand, wrapped in bandages.

Fortunately, whoever had tended to his wounds used good medicine; the pain wasn’t severe.

With that hand, he flicked her forehead while she slept.

“Ah.”

At the soft sound, Bianca’s head jerked up abruptly.

Her sapphire eyes met his.

From her expression, it was clear she’d made it through unharmed.

“If you’re going to sleep, go to the bed.”

Upon hearing his words, Bianca’s dazed gaze drifted slowly down to his empty right sleeve.

Krasus, aware she’d blame herself for his injury, shifted his body slightly to hide it from view.

“…Does it hurt?”

In that moment, Bianca asked her question.

Her doll-like eyes rendered her face perpetually expressionless.

“Not much.”

Krasus spoke dismissively, and Bianca’s grip tightened on the blanket.

She opened and closed her lips repeatedly, as though searching for the right words.

Yet for a long stretch of silence, she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

She simply didn’t know what to say.

Watching her struggle, Krasus spoke in her stead.

“Why did you go into that mountain?”

The Rocal Mountain Range was treacherous terrain.

Worse still, it was Haden Hartz, where snow fell year-round—a madness to venture into such a place.

At his words, something flickered across Bianca’s face, and her hand reached down toward the floor.

When she lifted the small vial, Krasus saw what lay within: a Snowflake Hot Yang Mushroom.

At the sight of it, understanding dawned.

She’d climbed into that mountain to find the mushroom.

‘Foolish girl.’

A faint sigh escaped Krasus’s lips.

Should he scold her, or praise her for what she’d done?

I don’t know why she felt compelled to search for the Snowflake Hot Yang Mushroom herself.

But since it was Haden Hartz, I understood she must have had her reasons.

I could ask about it later.

So I reached into my pocket.

Fortunately, Bianca’s Snowflake Pin was right there where it should be.

I drew it out with my left hand.

As I went to fasten the pin into her hair, I clicked my tongue.

“I’m sorry. I can’t manage it.”

The moment I spoke, Bianca reached up and clasped my fumbling hand in both of hers.

Then she guided my hand, pressing the pin into place herself.

Watching her do this, I left my hand where it was.

Then I simply let it rest there on her head, a gentle touch.

“Well done. With your help, I’ll be able to complete the elixir.”

At my words of praise, Bianca fell silent.

Feeling suddenly awkward, the moment I tried to withdraw my hand, she caught it and held it fast.

“Krasus.”

Hearing her call my name, I looked at her.

Her face remained expressionless as always, yet for some reason, today she seemed terribly sad to me.

“I… I cannot feel emotions.”

She gazed at my empty right arm.

Looking at it, she felt a sense of responsibility.

But that was only guilt—not anger or sorrow.

Only responsibility, nothing more.

“I cannot make expressions. No tears come. My face will not flush. I cannot feel joy that you saved me, nor anger, nor sadness.”

For the first time, Bianca felt her curse with unbearable clarity.

“That’s why my heart aches so terribly now. This face of mine—it’s torture.”

For the first time, she understood how agonizing it was to feel nothing—even as the one who had saved her was suffering like this.

A curse was always like that.

It existed to torment the one it bound.

And Bianca, for the first time, felt that torment with unbearable intensity.

It’s painful.

That she couldn’t even show emotion to him—to someone who had tried so hard for her sake.

Krasus watched her in silence.

It was because a memory of Bianca from his past had surfaced.

‘I envy you.’

The sound of her voice came back to him—the way she’d looked at his face with that expressionless gaze.

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