Wandering Knight
Chapter 495: A Familiar Face
"Mr. Wang Yu, I knew we would meet again someday. Though I would rather not stand against someone as formidable as you, this day was inevitable."
Emmon did not immediately charge forward. Instead, separated from Wang Yu by a swath of the battlefield, he spoke across the chaos. His words were carried cleanly by threads of void energy, cutting through the din and reaching Wang Yu's ears without any hatred or hostility, but rather the familiar respect he had always shown.
"Was this your own choice? Your boss Elliot, and your friend Vena, have both been waiting for you to return home. Aren't you going to do so?"
Wang Yu stood his ground. He did not strike at the surrounding members of the Utopia alongside the dragons; rather, he stretched the Chariot's power outward, radiating it across the battlefield, choking the enemy's magic while bolstering his own allies'. He looked steadily at Emmon as he spoke.
He had known Emmon for quite a long time, but the latter had vanished during the Utopia's invasion of the Bloodfang Empire.
Elliot had searched endlessly for him, yet had found no trace of his whereabouts. Wang Yu and the goblins had long assumed the worst. But clearly, Emmon had not died. The Utopia had spared those they found "useful" in the territories they occupied...
"Perhaps not at first," Emmon replied, a perfectly natural smile rising to his face, free of madness or fear. "But I've changed my mind. This is my choice. The Utopia has shown me a real chance to achieve the ideals I once described to you."
Emmon's peculiar dream was something Wang Yu had known since very early on. Born in a human kingdom and forged in hardship, the orc had not become brutal or bitter; instead, he had developed ideas rare among his kind.
He sought a world where races understood one another, where more intelligent beings could live better lives. Even after becoming Elliot's employee, the orc had never abandoned his dream.
"So," Wang Yu said, nodding slowly, "you are choosing, of your own will, to join the Utopia and to reshape the entire continent, building their so-called ‘perfect world' atop the corpses of other sentient races?"
He truly could not tell what he was looking at. Had Emmon's will twisted by the Utopia, or had he genuinely been convinced by what Wang Yu considered a deranged ideology, mistaking their methods for his own ideals?
This was what Wang Yu hated most: twisting a person's free will. He couldn't even be certain whether his old acquaintance was being controlled or not. And if a friend of his had indeed been shackled by mind control... the rage that would ignite in him was something he could already feel simmering.
Since arriving in this world, he had been fortunate. His special abilities could protect the freedom of those closest to him. He rarely had to face such situations. A sickening disgust welled up within him.
"When someone stands against you because their will has been twisted, then the person they once were is dead." Wang Yu would not hesitate when faced with such issues. Even if the truth was uncertain, he had come to his own conclusion.
Was life imbued in one's body or one's mind? Would someone whose mind had been forcibly rewritten still be considered alive?
He didn't know, and didn't care to ponder it. He would not let such riddles trap him. His directness was a flaw, but also his greatest strength.
"It's disgusting, just like those devils..."
In the blink of an eye, Wang Yu vanished. His body flared with violent, boiling power. Crimson flames bloomed across his skin.
Emmon had been eyeing Wang Yu, ready for an attack at any moment. He had witnessed Wang Yu's power firsthand many times. Yet he still failed to grasp Wang Yu's current level of skill.
The moment Wang Yu surged forward, Emmon lost track of him entirely—until the orc felt a thunderous punch smash into his skull. The shockwave ripped nearby spellcasters apart where they stood.
Wang Yu's burning fist struck a second time with almost no pause. This time, it hit not Emmon's head, but an invisible barrier of condensed void energy, which shattered immediately on impact.
The power of the Chariot encased Wang Yu's arm. He seized the cracked barrier with his bare hand, tore it wide open, and forced a path through.
Most of the Chariot's power was already being used to maintain the massive antimagic field for the dragons, so Wang Yu's fighting style had reverted to something brutally simple: extending the power of the Chariot into everything he touched, and crushing his enemies with a body whose strength could scarcely be described.
"Even though I was prepared, I still underestimated him..."
Emmon's thoughts flashed by. That one punch had torn a gaping hole into his skull. His bones had broken, his flesh pulped, his features a grotesque ruin. His body was far stronger now than any ordinary orc's; in the past, that blow would have annihilated him outright. Now, at least, he could endure.
Void energy twisted around the mangled flesh, reforming matter and knitting the wound closed as Emmon retreated a few steps. He watched Wang Yu tear through barrier after barrier with fists, palms, kicks. Wang Yu was unstoppable.
"..."
Wang Yu said nothing. His gaze drifted to the tall spire behind Amon. Threads of void energy stretched visibly through the air. The Emmon before him was just a projection, a conduit. His real body was in that tower. Emmon's consciousness was merely guiding it, erecting barrier upon barrier in a futile attempt to halt him.
Wang Yu advanced, unstoppable, rending apart everything in his path with his bare hands. Schemes? Strategy? He didn't care. Once the dragons finished slaughtering the spellcasters, he would simply tear that spire down. Then, these defenses would be done for.
Even so, to his mild surprise, Emmon did not attempt to widen the distance between them. Instead, he charged straight at Wang Yu, the spire behind him pouring void energy into his simulacrum, augmenting his physical might by a terrifying degree.
Wang Yu raised an arm to catch the orc's descending strike. The earth beneath his feet shattered with a thunderous crack, only to be forced back into place by the Chariot's power. His other arm lashed out at the same time, driving a solid blow into Amon's abdomen. The kinetic force unspooled into raw momentum, hurling the orc backward.
Wang Yu had no intention of letting the stunned orc be flung beyond his reach. The arm he had used to block shot out, clamping around Emmon's neck and seizing him in mid-air before swinging him down toward the ground.
Emmon hit the earth, reinforced by the Chariot's power, with an impact that rang out like a war-drum. The void-forged armor clinging to his body twisted reality, bleeding off much of the tremendous force, but began to slough off in large swaths.
Wang Yu's heel came down mercilessly. His stomp struck where Emmon's chest had been a heartbeat earlier, releasing a deafening blast that sent a visible shockwave racing outward. Yet it struck nothing.
Emmon's form flickered into being a hundred meters away, a helpless grimace on his features. Terrifying—there was no other word for it. Wang Yu's physical strength had reached a point beyond Emmon's comprehension. And he didn't even seem to be exerting himself fully.
Even the spire's full power had barely been able to resist a blow from him.
He understood something about Wang Yu that most in the Utopia did not. Facing this man, many enemies developed the same fatal misconception that elaborate tricks, layered sigils, and intricate stratagems could smother his strength.
In truth, such schemes only played into Wang Yu's rhythm. Inevitably, those careful constructions would unravel in inexplicable ways... and then one would be forced into the domain Wang Yu excelled at above all else.
The best way to deal with Wang Yu was laughably simple, so simple that few ever considered it: meet him head-on with pure, overwhelming force and kill him outright.
Look back on his battles, and the truth would become obvious. The reason this stubborn man was able to survive so many impossible encounters was not some miraculous resilience but the simple fact that his foes lacked the raw power to finish him. Had a grand knight or a legend struck him down back when he was only a middling knight, he wouldn't have amounted to anything.
Thus, Emmon had not chosen to fling Wang Yu into the void or assault him with esoteric techniques. He had poured every mote of void energy into strengthening his body for a direct confrontation. Yet even this approach now required a threshold of power far beyond Emmon.
"Fighting without the Chariot's power really takes getting used to... but I have kept up with my training regimen. Here."
Avia's voice drifted toward Wang Yu. From a rift in the void, she placed a radiant spear into Wang Yu's hand. Powerful magic surged within it, and a thick void-chain extended from the weapon into the Tree of the Night that hung in the void beyond. The Lady of the Night had granted the two of them full access to her authority.
"Farewell."
It was rare for Wang Yu to speak during battle. When he did, it usually meant he deemed the act harmless—or advantageous.
"?!"
Even as a former believer of the Lady of the Night, Emmon could not react in time. Wang Yu vanished completely from his senses.
The spear erupted from Emmon's back, piercing through the void-coated bulwark of his flesh without slowing. Power flooded into him, igniting an implosion at his core that tore him apart in an instant.
Behind Wang Yu trailed a shroud of deep night—Beyond the World, an eighth-tier divine spell of the Lady of the Night, equivalent to her own direct intervention. It erased the target's traces for but an instant, yet within that instant, at Wang Yu's speed, there were infinite possibilities to take advantage of.
He swept the spear through the air. Threads of void energy, the same filaments that had fed the spire's energy into Emmon, caught on the weapon as if they had corporeal form. Wang Yu yanked.
The spire behind Emmon collapsed with a cataclysmic boom.