I Became A Thief Who Steals Overpowered Skills - Chapter 72

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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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Episode 72. Why on Earth Did a Cat Come Out of There

After Krash had reduced Pendalord’s gang to rubble.

In the meantime, Lakhradion was walking toward them slowly.

At this moment, Lakhradion hadn’t even stepped into the fight yet.

Everyone here knew how much worse the situation would become if she joined the battle.

“……Just go, please.”

They couldn’t stop them.

All they could think was that they’d at least bought some time.

So as they yielded the path, Krash turned his body and moved alongside Lakhradion who had caught up to him.

He’d already mapped out the route using his Sixth Sense anyway.

As long as the Mechanical Labyrinth’s walls didn’t change, he had no further need to use his Sixth Sense, so Krash immediately began running.

“You’re not killing them.”

In that moment, unexpected words came from Lakhradion.

She had noticed that Krash was holding back considerably.

“Are they bandits or World Erosion Entities? I’d have slaughtered them all.”

Krash’s reaction was one of bewilderment.

He couldn’t say with certainty that those from the Demon Palace had never killed anyone or committed crimes.

But from Krash’s perspective, they were opponents he could subdue while holding back.

He saw no reason to kill men who, the moment they felt the difference in power, wouldn’t even harbor a grudge.

After all, there were mountains of men worth killing ahead of him.

Seeing Krash like this, Lakhradion fell silent for a time.

Then, running alongside him, she opened her mouth slowly.

“Once this matter ends well, might I impose a request upon you?”
“That’s the kind of thing that makes people anxious in the middle of a crisis.”

Krash’s expression showed displeasure, but he soon nodded.

“Do as you like.”

Listening wouldn’t be difficult anyway.

But was Lakhradion’s words truly just planting a flag?

Just as Krash and Lakhradion had nearly cleared the entire Mechanical Labyrinth.

Crimson Garden, who had been gliding effortlessly above them, suddenly descended in front of Krash.

—Krash!

And unlike when she’d warned him about the trap, her voice carried a distinctly ugly edge.

—Stop!

The moment she spoke, Krash’s mind snapped into overdrive.

In that same instant, he thrust out his hand reflexively, seized Lakhradion by the collar, and yanked her backward.

“Ugh!”

Lakhradion stumbled, a startled cry escaping her throat as both she and Krash staggered sharply back.

That was when it happened.

Crash!

A violent, deafening boom tore through the air, and the wall directly in front of Krash fractured, revealing the space beyond.

Lakhradion’s breath caught.

This was the Mechanical Labyrinth’s wall—the one that even the Aura Blade hadn’t been able to cut through.

To split it in a single stroke.

The disparity hit her all at once, in that heartbeat.

Crunch, crunch—

From within the ruined wall, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching.

“Lakhradion, fall back.”

The moment Krash sensed the presence, he pulled Lakhradion along through the haze, his voice barely above a whisper, and retreated swiftly.

Lakhradion, too, grasped that something was terribly wrong, and she quickly fell back with him.

Thanks to their speed, both of them slipped out safely to the fork in the path they’d passed just before entering this corridor, pressing themselves against the wall.

Then, suppressing every sound of their presence, they sharpened their senses to a razor’s edge.

Krash’s Sixth Sense blazed far more intensely now than when he’d been searching for the labyrinth’s path.

He needed to identify who this was.

Cold sweat trickled down Krash’s brow.

Crimson Garden and Ebelaske were World Erosion Entities whom Krash had entangled himself with of his own accord.

And both of them belonged to the moderate faction among the World Erosion Entities.

‘The rest.’

There was no need to say it.

The reality was that far more of them were madmen.

Of course, even Krash at his current level had no way to stand against a World Erosion Entity.

What was a World Erosion Entity?

Born from World Erosion, they possessed the fundamental power of World Erosion itself, and they were causing all manner of problems throughout the world.

Among them, some were monsters that ranked above the Ten Strongest Under Heaven.

The one appearing here now could not possibly be at such a level.

If it were, he would truly perish without a proper burial.

Krash desperately hoped that whoever faced him was a World Erosion Entity he could at least manage to handle.

At that very moment, the figure of his opponent began to slowly materialize through Krash’s Sixth Sense.

“Walls, walls, walls—damn it, so many of them. Trying to welcome the new kid and this shit annoys me.”

Though the distance was considerable, the sharpened senses caught the voice.

A high-pitched, soprano woman’s voice.

And at the same moment, the opponent’s silhouette finally began to take shape.

A crimson tail billowing behind, and two tiger-shaped ears sprouting sharply atop her head.

An eyepatch filling the gap between fluffy hair that fell just past her nape.

Yet among it all, what caught the eye most vividly was the hundreds of weapons adorning her entire body.

How she managed to carry so many weapons across her entire frame was incomprehensible, yet she bore them with perfect ease.

The Armed Princess.

By Krash’s assessment—

She was a World Erosion Entity deserving of the epithet “completely insane.”

＊ ＊ ＊

A beast-clan female, the Armed Princess.

A deranged World Erosion Entity who plastered her body with every weapon from across the world.

Obsessed with armaments, she was a woman who would kill without hesitation to steal any weapon that caught her fancy, regardless of its owner.

The moment Krash heard Crimson Garden’s explanation, he grasped why she had appeared at the Demon Palace.

‘She came for Thunderstar.’

Thunderstar, counted among the world’s Ten Legendary Celestial Blades.

Naturally, a weapon-obsessed Armed Princess would have been drooling over it.

‘Had the Armed Princess targetted Thunderstar before?’

He couldn’t determine that much.

But if she’d aimed for it, the Armed Princess wouldn’t have been able to take the Thunderstar from Nakcheon in the past.

Because it was Velokin who’d taken it instead.

‘……Did the Armed Princess also fail to deal with Nakcheon?’

The Armed Princess would have easily defeated Nakcheon.

Her level was, without question, monstrous.

But Nakcheon’s peculiarity would have been his downfall.

Inside the Demon Palace, Nakcheon was nearly immortal.

Because he received a continuous supply of energy from the Demon Palace, he possessed regenerative powers bordering on infinite.

On top of that, if Nakcheon wished, he could move about the eighth floor as he pleased.

If he’d decided not to have the Thunderstar taken from him, he could have kept running from the Armed Princess without serious trouble.

‘If the goal had been conquering the Demon Palace, she could have simply passed by Nakcheon after crushing him.’

Since the Armed Princess’s goal was the Thunderstar, she likely grew frustrated with Nakcheon escaping alive and gave up.

There were more Ten Legendary Celestial Blades than just the Thunderstar, after all.

But why did the Armed Princess appear at precisely this moment?

Was it really a coincidence?

Unfortunately, Krash couldn’t chalk this up to coincidence.

‘The Armed Princess has always been after the Ten Legendary Celestial Blades.’

She must have caught wind of the rumor.

That Balkheim’s direct line was after the Thunderstar and challenging Nakcheon.

She was simple and straightforward.

So the moment she heard the news, she moved.

‘The fact that I’m with Balkheim must have set her off.’

Balkheim was the opponent she despised most.

Because what she feared most in the world was the Undefeated Monarch, Balkheim.

The blindfold she wore on one eye.

The scar etched into that blindfold was a wound the Undefeated Monarch had given her while wandering the world in the past.

So anything related to Balkheim sent her into a frenzy.

Fearing that the Thunderstar might fall into Balkheim’s hands and become untouchable, she must have recklessly stormed the Demon Palace before that could happen—using one of her weapons to break through from the seventh floor instead of carefully descending from the first like we did.

A mad move, truly mad.

Having reached this conclusion, Krash grimaced in annoyance.

Things had been going well lately, so of course disaster struck on a grand scale.

And the scope of it was entirely different from before.

In the meantime, the Armed Princess’s footsteps echoed upward toward the eighth floor.

Fortunately, because Krash had withdrawn as quickly as possible, it seemed she hadn’t noticed him.

She was built for combat, after all—detection wasn’t her strength.

A breath escaped from Krash’s lips at last.

If he had clashed with the Armed Princess directly on the seventh floor, even Krash would have had no recourse.

“Krash, that person just now…”
“A World Erosion Entity.”

Lakhradion caught her breath.

Krash understood well enough how much weight the very words “World Erosion Entity” carried.

But he’d lived through enough to find fear in that name almost quaint.

—What are you thinking? You might as well abandon the Thunderstar. There’s nothing to gain from fighting that madwoman.

Unlike with Ebelaske, Crimson Garden seemed to know the Armed Princess well enough.

—Once she fixates on a weapon, she doesn’t let go.

From the way it felt, Crimson Garden had apparently clashed with the Armed Princess over arms before.

But Krash shook his head.

He couldn’t abandon the Thunderstar.

Right now, among all the Ten Legendary Celestial Blades, none were easier to obtain than the Thunderstar, nor any that suited him better.

‘They say a master craftsman doesn’t fuss over his tools.’

But Krash knew that was a lie through and through.

A true master scrutinized his tools all the more carefully.

And him—still scrambling to reach the master’s heels—

He had to be even pickier about what he wielded.

‘Besides, if by any chance the Thunderstar fell into the Armed Princess’s hands, it would be over.’

She was one of those who stood at the very forefront in the war against the World Erosion Entities that came later.

If the Thunderstar ended up in such hands, just thinking about it made his head ache.

And more than that—

There was one World Erosion Entity to whom the Thunderstar must never fall.

‘The Sword Sovereign.’

If by some mischance the Thunderstar reached him through the Armed Princess, that one alone would flip the board entirely—a move that would end the war single-handedly.

Charlotte had been able to kill the Sword Sovereign in the end only because she possessed the Thunderstar—that single difference had determined everything.

And because of that very Thunderstar, Charlotte had defeated the Sword Sovereign, only to end her life in that same place.

If even one of the preceding conditions had failed to be met, that war would have ended in the World Erosion Entity’s victory.

‘Looking back now, Arthur must have refrained from coveting the Thunderstar and left Charlotte alone for precisely that reason.’

Arthur had clearly judged that only Charlotte, who possessed the Thunderstar at that time, could defeat the Sword Sovereign.

‘I’m not about to let that stand.’

Arthur had sacrificed Charlotte and the Thunderstar as expendable pieces to bring down the Sword Sovereign.

But Krash had no intention of accepting that war’s conclusion as written.

Which was precisely why he had come all the way to the Demon Palace to find the Thunderstar.

‘I was never going to let that war play out properly in the first place.’

When he thought of how many decent people had died in that conflict, the memory still made his stomach turn.

Arthur, for his part, had exploited that very tragedy to consolidate the weakened Starry Generation firmly under his own control through the war itself.

Krash, however, had no interest in squabbling over such political gains.

The kind of authority that shaped the world meant nothing to Krash.

His singular, overriding objective was a single thing: preventing the world’s destruction.

Which meant Krash had no intention whatsoever of allowing another war with the World Erosion Entity to occur.

Rather, his goal was to diminish the World Erosion Entity’s military strength so thoroughly that they would never even think of waging war again.

“Lakhradion, I’m heading to the eighth floor.”

The eighth floor was where he could confront the Armed Princess.

He likely wouldn’t be able to defeat her outright no matter what, but he could absolutely prevent the Thunderstar from falling into her hands.

Besides, the Armed Princess had taken a severe blow from the empress before.

Krash had also calculated that the moment he, as a direct descendant of Balkheim, possessed the Thunderstar, fear of the empress’s wrath would keep her from laying another hand on it.

So Krash posed the question to Lakhradion, who had come with him.

He needed her help from the start if he was to defeat Nakcheon and obtain the Thunderstar.

“We came to the Demon Palace for the eighth floor from the very beginning. I will follow you.”

Hearing Lakhradion’s resolute answer, Krash drew a light breath.

The situation had suddenly worsened, yet if anything, their fortune held steady.

The Armed Princess was an adversary he could manage, even if he couldn’t bring her down.

“Let’s go.”

It was time to deploy the secret that had kept him alive through the great war against the World Erosion Entity.

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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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