The sword Rovi drew from the Gate of Babylon was, without question, a Noble Phantasm-grade blade born from the planet's fantasy.
A demonic sword that, in this age, still had no name.
It embodied humanity's fear of the sun's blazing torrents of fire gathering into a storm, and among the treasures in Gilgamesh's vault, it ranked among the finest.
The golden hilt settled into his steel hand, and at the same time, the shining silver-white blade flashed with deadly light.
The giants roared and charged the hovering War Gods—the messengers of the gods upon the World Tree, and above all, the messengers of God-King Odin.
The War Gods exchanged glances.
The moment they realized something was wrong, their first reaction was to flee.
They were not fools.
Nor were they about to believe, based on a few words from Rovi, that Skadi had truly betrayed the gods.
So they understood perfectly well that their best option was to leave, report what had happened, and let the gods above decide the matter for themselves.
But the moment that thought crossed their minds—before they could even act—Rovi moved first. He leapt straight into the sky above Jotunheim. Beneath the dim yellow heavens steeped in dead stillness, the dazzling demonic sword flared with crimson fire.
The King of Giants halted the giants where they stood.
He went forward in person to test the sharpness of his own blade.
"Defend—"
Rovi was too fast. The War Gods knew they could not evade him.
They could only meet him head-on.
One of them gripped their spear, beat their wings, and as feathers scattered through the air, a star-like gleam lit at the tip of his weapon.
"GREAT GOD'S DECREE—[GUNGNIR]!"
With a hum, it pierced the atmosphere.
The concepts of sure hit and sure kill clung to it.
As messengers of the gods, the weapons carried by these warriors known as War Gods were all heavily degraded imitations of Gungnir, the meteor spear wielded by God-King Odin. Far beneath the original in scale—far inferior even to the spear in Skadi's hand—they still possessed, like Gungnir itself, the concept of never missing.
The attack hit.
Just not Rovi.
With a sharp clang, the blade blazing with the sun's fire intercepted the incoming spear. The sure-hit concept was suppressed—and at the same instant, another War God lunged in from the side, their own sure-hit spear pouring down like a torrent of meteoric fire.
Rovi neither dodged nor retreated. He merely turned the sword and drew a circle through the air.
Its edge blazed like the sun bursting into bloom. The spear that struck it slipped aside, and under Rovi's perfectly rounded, exquisitely controlled force, the first attacking War God could not help but stumble forward.
Straight into the path of the second attacker.
Sure-hit spear collided with sure-hit spear in midair, and in the clash of like powers, the concept of inevitability shattered instantly. The two warriors froze on the spot, and Rovi's sword swept through both of them in the same motion.
"Gah...!"
Cries of pain rang out instinctively as divine blood flecked with countless pale crystals spilled downward and splashed across the ground.
Though he had held no grudge against them before this, as one of the dead—as the King of Giants—Rovi stood in natural opposition to the Norse gods. So when he swung his sword, he did not hesitate, and when he drew it back, there was not the slightest pause.
The heavily wounded War Gods plummeted downward, while the others closed in from every side in the same instant.
A forest of sure-hit spears pointed straight at Rovi.
The concepts of sure hit and sure kill activated together.
"King of Giants—"
"We act in the will of the gods. Here and now, we shall judge you!"
"Kill! Kill! Kill!"
The War Gods roared. Not because they truly believed they could do it, but simply to raise their own morale.
The gale rolled and howled around them.
Rovi turned the demonic sword in his hand. Divine blood dripped from the blade.
Then he smiled.
"If you can do it, come and try!"
The King of Giants raised his sword and met the lances stabbing in from all directions.
Steel rang against steel.
With a single sword, Rovi held off the magical spears thrusting at him from every quarter. He did not call forth the might of a God-King, nor did he unleash some overwhelming radiance to oppose the world. He simply kept drawing on the computational power of his Machine God body and calculating—calculating how to achieve the greatest possible result with the least possible force, how to win at the lowest possible cost.
No two wars are ever the same.
The same was true of battle.
In the past, he would simply deploy overwhelming force, lay his plans, determine the path to inevitable victory, and then crush everything straight through.
But there was no such thing as a battle that could always be won by brute force alone.
Learning how to turn one measure of strength into ten was still essential.
Rovi knocked aside an incoming spearpoint with his sword, and understanding dawned within him.
An understanding of martial skill.
All techniques were secondary. At their purest, they were nothing more than speed, precision, and ruthlessness—nothing more than following one's will and driving the effect of one's strength to its utmost limit.
Yes.
To move as he pleased, and still produce the greatest possible result in battle.
Rovi gripped the sword tightly, ripples spreading out around him. As magical power crashed against magical power in the void, a slight opening appeared.
The exhilaration of the clash had reached its limit.
And the time had come to manifest a Noble Phantasm.
The War Gods thrust forward with their spears, solemn faces visible beneath their steel masks.
Stop him. They had to stop him.
Because at this moment, magical power was gathering around Rovi.
Gathering into his sword.
It was a tremendous force, a storm embodying destruction and the sun.
Something the War Gods could never hope to match—!
Red light pulsed.
The tip of the sword bloomed.
It was too late to stop it.
The burning fire erupted outward in an instant. At the demonic sword's tip, a blazing sun ignited, and the primordial storm that burst forth with it crushed every obstacle in its path.
It spread like a tidal surge.
Heaven, earth, and flame fused together and rippled in expanding waves beneath the dim yellow vault overhead.
The king proclaimed his victory.
And so the War Gods bled.
"ROAR!"
Seeing their king triumphant, the giants howled as well.
Blown back through the air by the raging fire and storm, the War Gods beat their black wings desperately to steady themselves. But they still refused to give up. Once more, they raised their spears and wiped away the divine blood spilling from their mouths.
Every last one of them was already grievously wounded, yet they pressed forward with unwavering resolve. The battle will of the warriors chosen by God-King Odin was beyond question. And within them was a special power that made them stronger the longer they fought—the more grievous their wounds, the stronger they became.
The ability to convert the concept of pain into power.
A modified expression of one of the Vanguard of the Umbral Star's traits—the power that had once crushed civilizations.
But down below, Skadi's expression was growing more and more rigid.
When Rovi had fought her earlier, he had held back. That much was only natural—he had not wanted to kill her. However unwilling she might be to accept it, by now even Skadi could see that clearly.
But she also knew that even now, Rovi was still holding back.
Even at this point, he had not killed a single one.
And it was not because he was toying with the War Gods.
He was fusing something into himself.
Skadi could see that.
The so-called War Gods—who were, in truth, merely semidivine warriors of the gods—could not.
With their battered bodies, they only grew fiercer as they fought, surging forward again to drive their spears into the demonic sword in Rovi's hand.
They attacked from every side.
Again and again, they were beaten back.
Again and again, they came on.
Sword and spear crossed over and over.
Rovi stepped forward.
The War God whose chest lay beneath the point of his sword was already moving to retreat, to trade places with another.
Only to realize that no matter what they did, they could not evade this strike.
This was—
"The Gungnir!?" the War God cried out in shock, unable to believe it.
"That's right. This is your Gungnir!" Rovi laughed in answer.
This was what he had been fusing into himself.
The concept of the God-King's power, stolen from the War Gods.
A sure-hit, sure-kill attack streaked through the air like a falling meteor from beyond the heavens, and divine blood sprayed out once more.
The other War Gods all choked at once.
In this world, apart from Odin himself and them, there was only one "person" who should have been able to wield the sure-hit concept of the Gungnir.
"Goddess Skadi... really has betrayed us!"
"She even gave the power of the spear to this King of Giants!"
"No, we have to report back to the gods in the Golden Palace—"
"..."
Skadi very much wanted to tell them that he had taken the power of Gungnir from them.
But the goddess knew that even if she spoke the truth, they would never believe it.
No one in this world should have been able to seize the essence of the God-King's weapon in an instant.
The War Gods were still trying to speak.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
In the next instant, thunderous war drums shattered both their thoughts and their speech.
A crushing pressure spread across the whole of Jotunheim. Having completed the fusion, Rovi no longer concealed his power.
Laughing, he returned the demonic sword to the vault.
He stood empty-handed—and then, amid intersecting rays of light, radiance gathered in his palm and became a knightly spear.
It was the manifestation of a concept.
From sword to spear.
From man to god once more.
Armor like living steel formed over him. A silver-white mask covered his face. A great fur-lined cloak draped over his shoulders, and the long spear in his hand slanted toward the ground.
A dense aura of death surged over the world and crashed down upon the War Gods.
They froze where they were.
Not because Rovi no longer hid his strength.
But because the essence he now revealed... was astonishingly similar to that of God-King Odin, the very one who had granted them their power.
"So, you're the War Gods? Then go and tell your God-King Odin this!"
"I—"
"The King of Giants, the King of the Wild Hunt, have arrived!"
Did he steal the power of Gungnir?
No.
Rovi had merely used the immense computational power of his Machine God body to trace it back to its source, using the concept of Gungnir as a branch and following it upward until it encompassed the whole from which it came.
What he had stolen was not simply the spear's power.
It was one aspect of the Norse chief god—one aspect of Odin himself, the nightmare that ruled over dead souls and the fallen.
He possessed the body of one of the dead, the essence of a God-King, and he had even once placed the Sky King's crown upon his own head.
For Rovi, accomplishing this was not difficult.
After all, he had come here to spread civilization.
And stealing that highest position would, without question, be of enormous use.
It would allow him to fully assimilate into the Norse world without being rejected by the World Tree.
And it would also grant him a possibility of turning death into life.
So from this day onward, he was the King of the Wild Hunt.
The King of the Dead, who would sweep across the earth like a storm.
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T/N: let me know how the translation has been for the past few chapters please