Фалкон Скоттын Уналт (48)

As soon as Goliath took a step forward, and the wall vibrated under Sunny once again, he called upon Saint.

By his side, Master Jet mounted the parapet of the battlement, clinging to it with one hand and ready to push herself away. In her other hand, the slender glaive weaved itself from snowflakes.

The sea of Nightmare Creatures flowed forward, overtaking the marching colossus. The familiar thunder of discharging rail guns tore the snowstorm apart, and the turrets joined them a moment later, drowning the world in a roaring cacophony.

A tall and graceful figure clad in onyx armor stepped onto the wall from the shadows. Instantly, her fearsome presence permeated the air, making soldiers turn around and crane their necks, staring at the menacing black knight in fright. Saint's ruby eyes flashed with cold crimson flames.

Someone yelled.

"It's Mongrel!"

"Mongrel is here!"

"Thank the gods!"

Their calls rolled across the wall, and the soldiers that had been shaken by the terrible visage of the marching titan regained some of their confidence. Even though Saint was dwarfed by the looming shapes of bulky MWPs, at that moment, she seemed much greater than the towering machines.

"Show that ugly boulder who's in charge, Mongrel!"

…As for Sunny, no one paid him much attention. Whatever fame he had earned among the fighters of the First Army paled in comparison to his flamboyant alter ego. After all, unlike him, Mongrel was a mysterious character. People were free to fill in the blanks using nothing but their imaginations, and the things they came up with were always much more fantastical than the truth.

Well… at least the version of the truth about Sunny that he shared with the world. The actual truth was so outlandish that no one would probably believe it.

'Doesn't matter…'

Watching Goliath walk forward, Sunny summoned a very special Memory… the one he had worked so hard to create. His payback gift to the stone giant.

The [Siege Souvenir].

Suddenly, a very lengthy and sharp javelin appeared in Saint's hand. It was about three meters long, incredibly heavy, and entirely white. A sense of immense, wild, destructive power radiated from the white javelin, making even Sunny himself feel slightly uncomfortable.

Of course, the javelin was the quill of the Corrupted Devil he had collected from an army warehouse a long time ago, the thing Sunny had spent most of his free time in Falcon Scott trying to enchant.

The Siege Souvenir was now a Transcendent Memory, and a very special one at that. Several Transcendent soul shards, as well as rivers of essence that formed numerous shadow strings, had gone into its creation.

The long javelin possessed only two enchantments.

The first one was [Death Dealer], which Sunny had copied from Morgan's Warbow. Bestowing that one to the devil's needle had been hard, but also somewhat straightforward.

The difficulty Sunny had met was merely one of scope. Of all the enchantments he had learned and recreated before, that one was the vastest and most difficult. However, there was no alternative, [Death Dealer] was the most destructive single-target enchantment in his arsenal, and so, nothing else would have done.

It was also extremely, dreadfully gluttonous in its consumption of essence.

…But not gluttonous enough, as far as Sunny was concerned.

That was where the second enchantment he had bestowed on the Siege Souvenir came in. That one had no name… because it was invented by him. Creating it was not technically hard, but required Sunny to teach himself an entirely new facet of weaving, as well as accomplish something he had never done before, not simply copy, but disassemble and heavily modify an existing enchantment.

The enchantment that had served as the basis was the [Unbroken] of the Midnight Shard. It allowed the wielder access to a vast reservoir of power when at death's doorstep, as long as the wielder refused to surrender and kept fighting against overwhelming odds.

Sunny was not interested in augmenting the javelin with additional power, nor was he interested in creating a limitation tied to how close someone was to death or their character.

What he was interested in was the reservoir itself.

After all, [Death Dealer] had to be powered by something.

And so, Sunny had spent many, many arduous hours studying the weave of the [Unbroken], trying to understand how it worked, what element of the tapestry of ethereal strings was responsible for which part of it, and how to isolate the effect he wanted to achieve, how to create a reservoir of power that could feed the Siege Souvenir from the inside.

In the end, with the timely help of the Graceless Dusk, he had succeeded in both of his undertakings.

The white javelin was much, much longer and heavier than an arrow… in fact, calling it a javelin was somewhat misleading, since it was more akin to a projectile worthy of a siege engine. Nevertheless, it possessed the capacity to deliver the same devastating force as an arrow sent flying with the help of the [Death Dealer], only at a much greater scale.

A lot of power was needed to achieve that effect, much more power than anyone in Falcon Scott could have supplied in one go. That was why Sunny had enchanted the Siege Souvenir to possess an independent reservoir of essence, and siphoned a sea of it into the javelin over the days.

He had basically created an entirely new type of Memory. Weak Memories usually possessed passive enchantments that were powered by the ambient essence used to manifest the Memory. Powerful Memories usually possessed active enchantments that required the wielder to manipulate and spend their own essence in order to use them.

The Siege Souvenir, meanwhile, possessed a dire enchantment that fed directly on the javelin's own essence.

The result of his hard work was a tremendously powerful Memory. It was so powerful, in fact, that only refined material harvested from a Corrupted creature could withstand the dreadful enchantments. Anything less would have disintegrated under strain.

Even then, the Siege Souvenir was bound to be a one-use Memory. The quill of the Corrupted Devil was not going to survive the release of its own destructive power.

There was one last hurdle to overcome to make use of it, though.

Not just anyone could wield it. Even Sunny himself was not strong enough to make use of his creation in the intended way.

That was why he had needed Saint to evolve… he needed a Transcendent being to bring forth the Siege Souvenir's potential.

…And now, he had one.