Divine Luck: SSS-Rank Battle Maid Harem-Chapter 430: Apology
Instantly, everyone’s heads whipped around toward the only possible source of that crack: Patient Zero’s frozen body. They could all imagine how she had remained mostly fine and was now breaking free from the icy imprisonment to tear them all apart and eat Blizzard like a starved wolf.
Instead…
The layer of ice around Patient Zero cracked and crumbled. Like a corpse dropping out of an open and upright coffin, Patient Zero fell to the ground with no strength to even brace herself. She was not going to tear even a fly’s wings apart, much less them. She had been defeated.
Zach and Violina exchanged glances before looking at the seemingly asleep Blizzard. Zach looked at Patient Zero. He could feel her gaze on him, and he could see her lips move as she tried to say something.
Zach’s expression was unreadable as he ignored his familiars’ warning looks and walked over to Patient Zero, kneeling next to her.
Her voice was weak and hoarse. Even with his current senses, Zach wouldn’t be able to hear her if he wasn’t very close to her mouth.
"...I’m…sorry…" Zach frowned. He didn’t understand why she was apologizing. Patient Zero’s eyes were glazed over. Maybe she wasn’t apologizing to him. Maybe she was apologizing in general for all the destruction and havoc she wreaked.
At the same time, a realization flashed through Yanael’s mind.
The thing they had missed.
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Why had Patient Zero bothered inviting Zach into her tent? The only thing that had led to was a conflict between her and Zach’s familiars that drained her strength before Blizzard showed up. She had gained nothing from it other than the sentimental something of someone knowing her story.
Yanael frowned as she thought back to the situation.
While Zach had been right in front of Patient Zero, he and the maids had all been wary of Patient Zero. Considering how slow she had been at first, she would have never made it to Zach before they intervened.
And Blizzard…? There were two reasons she could be aiming for it. Either, she wanted to infect it with the Blight or somehow use its strength for itself. Or it was a diversion.
It didn’t succeed since Zach had retreated from the fight and went to regroup with his friends and Blizzard.
But Zach had managed to restore some of Blizzard’s strength.
Couldn’t he do the same with Patient Zero? What if that had been her aim all along?
"NO!" Yanael drew her sword and started reaching forward before shouting as the realization struck her. But Patient Zero’s hands were quicker, and they wrapped around Zach’s neck.
Instantly, Zach could feel an unbearable stinging sensation from deep inside him as Patient Zero’s hands latched onto his neck like leeches and tried to drain the world essence energy from deep within him.
’Ah. That’s why she apologized,’ Zach thought, his body paralyzed. He couldn’t defend himself or try to break free. But he could feel threads of world essence energy being drawn out of the tightly wound bundle in his core. His face contorted in pain but he was unable to scream due to the tight grip around his throat.
A moment later, a golden sword cut through the wrists of the arms grabbing him, severing them. It was similar to when the homeless man infected by underworld energy they saved from the sewers back then tried to strangle one of them.
Yanael cut off Patient Zero’s hands before dragging Zach back and gently slicing the fingers off his neck, releasing the pressure on his neck.
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Zach hacked out several coughs as he knelt on the ground with his hands holding up his body. A step or two away, Yanael had already severed Patient Zero’s head from her body.
The Blight be damned. There was no energy left in that body that could be used to reanimate it. She hadn’t managed to steal Zach’s world essence energy.
But to be sure, they separated the head and the body.
As he looked up, Zach saw a lone tear slip off Patient Zero’s cheek.
She truly was sorry.
Zach sighed after regaining his breath and standing up. It had left a bad taste in his mouth, and it wasn’t just because of the pain from her trying to steal his world essence energy.
He glanced around the battlefield.
The monsters in the immediate surroundings were all statues of ice, so it was impossible to tell whether Patient Zero’s death had affected them or not, at least at first.
With a plomfing sound like someone dropping a book on a pile of ash, the monsters turned into dust.
It had been the right call to kill Patient Zero. She was the source of the Blight. With her gone, the Blight lost its hold on the monsters, finally freeing their bodies from eternal suffering. After millennia of being deprived of their wrongful deaths and being used as tools for mindless slaughter and destruction, they could finally rest.
With the Blight no longer sustaining their bodies, the damage built up over all that time immediately turned them into nothingness.
Zach covered his mouth and gestured for the others to do the same. Breathing in that dust probably wasn’t good for their health.
He looked around in confusion. The cloudy starless sky was seemingly melting. It buckled like the air above a hot flame. The ground suddenly felt unsteady like a large ship out on the ocean.
"...I think we should get out of here," Zach said, the most sensitive to those changes thanks to his world essence energy. The others nodded in agreement. Violina tucked the unconcsiocus Blizzard into a pocket and started sprinting with the others.
Zach joined Nessa on the Millipede as it plowed through the mountain’s snow upward. The entrance had been up there. Hopefully, they could exit through there as well.
However, it might not be that easy.
Zach’s eyes widened as he looked forward. The shaking and tilting ground had done the opposite of what they needed. The mountain had tipped toward them and in the process, freed the boatloads of snow on it, pouring it all in their direction with one big avalanche.
"Damn."
