I raised my heritage blade and brought it down in a vertical slash.
It was a killing blow capable of severing even a dragon.
"...!"
The demi-god's eyes sharpened as he faced it.
The trajectory of my cut wavered, as if my aim were slipping of its own accord.
My strike had not gone astray.
The demi-god was warping space itself and repurposing it for evasion.
(But that's sloppy.)
I had predicted interference of this magnitude.
In the span of a heartbeat, I began making micro-adjustments.
I shifted the angle with a flick of my wrist and continued the slash without pause.
Realizing his evasion had failed, the demi-god teleported.
I anticipated where he would appear and thrust the sword behind me.
The tip was buried in the demi-god's chest.
But when I looked more closely, the blow hadn't landed.
Only his torso had been there — now it was a gaping void.
(Did he transfer just the point of impact elsewhere?)
I admired the cleverness of the technique even as I swept the blade sideways.
The demi-god teleported again, retreating to a considerable distance.
We faced each other across that gap.
A fair amount of time had passed since the battle began.
The first light of dawn was beginning to peek over the horizon.
The demi-god was slightly out of breath.
The toll of sustained magical casting.
He possessed an enormous pool of mana, but not enough to endure a prolonged fight.
I, on the other hand, received a nearly inexhaustible supply of mana from the Valley of the Dead — the advantage was fundamental and absolute.
The demi-god wiped the blood trailing from the corner of his mouth.
"I... cannot lose here. The mission to save the world..."
Something about his state struck me as off.
My attacks shouldn't have been landing effective blows yet.
I had cut through his body several times, but each time he had simply rejoined it.
Every magical ability I used was countered without exception by spatial magic.
I hadn't inflicted anything beyond a blood-dripping wound.
And even accounting for his excessive mana consumption, his symptoms seemed worse than they should.
I scanned the demi-god's body with my eyes and pointed out what I noticed.
"You're shaving away your own life every time you cast a spell. Why push yourself this far?"
"Because the Demon Lord's death will lead to peace for the people."
The demi-god clutched his chest and coughed violently.
He spat out blood, then stomped on it with a look of disgust.
"Until recently, I was an unnamed mage. Just a dull man with a trivial aptitude for spatial magic."
The demi-god confessed his own past.
That he had been nameless was more or less what I had expected.
If he had been known before becoming a hero, my spies would have uncovered it.
The fact that they couldn't meant he had left behind no accomplishments whatsoever.
The demi-god glanced at the blood he had spat.
After a deep breath, he asked me a question.
"Do you know of the ritual magic that creates heroes? The forbidden spell that was carried out in the Holy Staff Nation."
"I do. The Steel Knight, the Valkyrie... you yourself underwent the procedure as well."
"That's right. We all took to the spell. But I was different from the other two. I was originally an ordinary, powerless person — I volunteered for the ritual."
The Steel Knight and the Valkyrie had likely been recommended through connections of some kind.
They were already well-known powerhouses, and the nation had approached them based on their promise.
By the time the ritual magic became viable, the candidates had presumably already been chosen.
The demi-god, on the other hand, had made himself a test subject.
If I believed his words, he had been an unnamed mage.
An aptitude for spatial magic would have been almost useless.
Spatial magic consumed more mana than other forms and was inherently difficult to handle, and its rarity of practitioners meant it had never been systematized.
From a normal person's perspective, it was a half-baked talent with no real application.
"There were many volunteers, but every one of them except me died. I alone became a false hero. Through the ritual, I gained abilities beyond anything I had before. But I felt it wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough to reach the Demon Lord — that's what I thought."
The demi-god fixed me with a fierce glare.
His slightly bloodshot eyes harbored bottomless obsession.
His expression barely changed, but his eyes alone told the story of his passion.
"I then subjected myself to twelve additional forbidden spells. The suffering was indescribable — worse than death itself — but somehow I endured it. All for the sake of slaying the Demon Lord, and by extension, restoring peace to the world."
The sigils covering his entire body were apparently one of those forbidden spells.
His wild white hair was likely a side effect as well.
If he had truly gone that far, then it made sense that his life was being sapped with every use of magic.
If anything, it was more surprising that he was still alive.
(Most likely, it's due to his sheer willpower.)
The burning desire to gain power and fell the Demon Lord had summoned forth a miracle.
It was beyond what reason could explain.
Just then, the demi-god clasped both hands together and began amplifying his mana.
He closed his eyes and murmured something.
It looked like an incantation.
I readied my sword once more.
(He's been casting without incantations until now... and now he resorts to one?)
A sense of foreboding crept over me.
I launched a bolt of lightning charged with miasma.
It dispersed before it ever reached the demi-god.
It had been pulled into a spatial distortion.
He may have looked wide open, but magic truly was useless against him.
In the meantime, the demi-god's spell was completed.
His mana radiated outward, interfering with the space in its entirety.
Cracks ran through the wasteland waiting for dawn.
Both sky and earth peeled back indiscriminately, beginning to transform into a space of pure white.
I attempted magical interference, but none of it had any effect.
— The world was turning inside out.
That was the only way to describe the phenomenon.
In the blink of an eye, the wasteland vanished, and we were left standing in a void of nothingness.
The demi-god lowered his arms and nearly collapsed, staggering.
Cascading sweat poured down his body, and his eyes had gone unfocused.
His complexion was as deathly as a corpse's.
Even in that state, however, he managed to speak with clarity.
"This is a subspace. All connection to the outside has been severed. Since it's isolated, you shouldn't be able to receive any mana supply."
"Hmm."
Indeed, my connection to the Valley of the Dead had been cut.
The benefit of the mana supply was no longer available.
What he had been desperate to execute despite his exhaustion — it had been to weaken me.
The demi-god coughed violently.
Viscous blood seeped through the gaps between his fingers.
He released his crimson-stained hand and declared in a hoarse voice:
"The hero of this world is dead. So I will be the one to crush evil. I will not be defeated."