Why Did You Summon Me?

Angels were considered invincible. They had unfathomable strength, reflexes, and destructive capabilities. It took one angel to force meatball mode Baiyi into a corner. The only weakness angels had was their lack of battle experience.

The Voidwalkers did not agree with this assessment, though. Angels, the Voidwalkers argue, only seem invincible because humans did not know much about them. Not only were angels cloaked in mystery, but they also commanded Divine Energy — an unfathomable energy that trumps the energies that humans could wield.

Saving Noirciel had provided the Voidwalkers a glimpse into these mysterious beings. The information they received from the former High Priest deepened their understanding of angels.

For starters, angels descended to mortal realms almost in the same manner that Voidwalkers did. Both beings required a medium to exist in a mortal world; the Voidwalkers favor suit of armors, while angels inhabited living humans. If a hole was punched through a Voidwalker’s chest, they could shrug it off, but the same could not be said for angels; their hosts would have to bear this almost-fatal injury. If aggravated to serious levels, hosts could forcefully boot the spirits of angels from their bodies.

Angels do not get rid of their host’s spirit after possession. They only sever their hosts’ reception to stimuli during battles. Thus, angels could not feel pain. Only angels that have been deemed sinners, like Noirciel, have this ability taken away, as the pain was considered a part of their penance.

This wealth of knowledge, including Baiyi experience fighting Noirciel, helped the Voidwalkers devise tactics that could work against angels, who almost everyone considered invincible. The Archmage’s purple beam was one such tactic.

The Voidwalkers had noticed that angels are incredibly sensitive to energy pulses. When they noticed the surge in the strength of their enemies, the Voidwalkers added a little more of their power to their default output, as evident by Noirciel’s change in battle forms. Back when she fought Baiyi, she did not use her battle form until the Voidwalker utilized his meatball mode.

The reason why angels choose this economic battle strategy was still unknown. Could it be out of a feeling of superiority, or consideration for the limits of their host’s body, or a constraint set by the Laws? Nevertheless, angels never unleashed their full power from the get-go; this was something the Voidwalkers were keen to exploit. The Archmage compressed a large amount of mana into a small ray of purple light, in order to greatly minimize the intensity and frequency of its energy pulses. This way, the angel would not have their guard up against the attack, as it did not seem lethal.

This was why the seemingly impossible happened: the angels’ throats were quickly pierced through by the purple death ray. That was not the end, though. According to the former High Priest, in order to kill an angel, one had to get past their ability to self-heal using their Divine Energy.

As angels could only exist in a mortal realm by inhabiting the body of humans, serious injuries or loss of vital organs would only affect the human hosts, not the angels. To angels, losing body parts was no different from losing strands of hair. They could easily use their Divine Energy to heal the most serious of wounds; this made killing them quite difficult. Fortunately, after watching the playback of Baiyi fighting Noirciel, the Archmage found inspiration to his solution: another way to stop an angel from self-healing.

The Voidwalkers began to look into the mechanism behind the angels’ method of possession. Although they were still far from grasping every detail, they managed to uncover another weakness: the state of the host’s body would directly impact the angel’s stability.

It was the reason why the angels needed to mask their hosts’ sensory perceptions. If the host felt any intense sensory stimuli or emotions, their spirit would stir and reject against the angel’s subjugation, inadvertently purging the angel out of their body. Noirciel was a great example of it; Lulu’s rebellion against her angel guest’s control over her body had caused the Angel to be so severely compromised that she was later branded as a tainted sinner.

To capitalize on this characteristic, the Archmage had throw in a few illusionary magic typically found in the Charlatan and Incubus’s techniques into his “Space Ripper Stingy Eyes”. Once the attack hit its target, the psychic effects were unleashed to forcefully rouse the host’s dormant spirit. Indeed, in terms of impact, this purple deathray was more of a psychic attack than a magical one!

Incredibly, the Archmage had never put this spell to the test. The success in sniping not one, but two Angels just from its first use was nothing short of inspiring.

“You see? Once the enemies lose the protection of our ignorance, they’re nothing to be feared!” The Archmage beamed proudly to the Soul Armature Practitioner.

“Well, that’s probably true only to you. The execution is so complicated that I doubt I can pull it off even once,” The other Walker remarked regrettably before shooting a quick, green-eyed glance at the Archmage’s pompous equipment. Only the First Walker with his prodigious grasp in magic and his overpowered equipment could make a sophisticated psychic-magical hybrid spell exist beyond theories!

“See? This is why formation magic reigns supreme over that low-level runic magic! Runes wouldn’t have the ability to bring this to reality!” The Archmage boasted.

“Which also means there’s literally no one else in this world who could make use of Space Ripper Stingy Eyes,” The Soul Armature Practitioner said pointedly.

“Oh, er… Well! Let’s not get hung up over a small complication like that,” The Archmage relented awkwardly. “This technique is meant to be used for sneak attacks only after all, so it’s not like it can be used indiscriminately during direct clashes. Our enemies could easily find ways to circumvent it. The more important lesson here is that it proved us right about these angels’ weaknesses, and now we can all devise and derive our own methods to counter them.”

“Hmm, guess I should put this to the test,” the Soul Armature Practitioner said after producing a purple ball with the word “M” engraved on it. “I can probably manage myself if I’m up against normal Angels, I hope?”

Meanwhile, word of the death of two angels reached the ears of the two Archangels.

A nonplussed expression appeared on Paimon’s face, and he indifferently asked, “What exactly have befallen Andromalius and Dantalion?”

“A moment please,” Baal said, raising his sword skyward while cupping his free hand over his ear. A brief pause later, he relayed, “They were ambushed by something… unnatural.”

“Something unnatural?”

“…Pain. They said they’d felt pain.”

Paimon’s entire body froze at the revelation saved for his wings, which were visibly quaking. When he finally spoke, his voice was shaking with fury, “They… They made them feel pain? How dare they — how dare they blaspheme like this!!”

Pain was a torment reserved only for the angels who had sinned, and only the gods had the right to mete out such a cruel punishment. The Archmage’s action, whose spell had caused agony to their fallen comrades, was equivalent to playing god!

Paimon was apoplectic. He was just about to order the entire heavenly legion to annihilate those blasphemous fiends when Baal, who was visibly calmer, stopped him. “Halt, Paimon. If the enemies could inflict pain upon us, then they are more than capable of harming our brothers as well. Let our human companions prove their alliance instead,” He advised. “With our blessings and protection, their status as mortals shall not debilitate them the slightest. Their resolve, tempered by faith, shall pulverize those blasphemers until there was nothing left of their wretched bones.”

“You may be right,” Paimon muttered and pulled out the split scepter from before. This time, instead of advising against it, Baal began to order the hovering Angels below their feet to take up positions.

The Angels obeyed and rose into the air, each of them assuming a position and altitude. Then, once everyone was settled, their aura flared even more brightly than usual until each Angel’s light was linked to their comrades’ to form a mysterious rune no mortals in Isythre recognize.

Perhaps if Noirciel had woken up from her coma and noticed this, she would have warned the Walkers. The Angels were preforming a preliminary ritual to signal the use of a god’s Arbiter’s Right, and regrettably, had Noirciel herself did the same before she borrowed her master’s power, she would not have ended up with her current fate.

“O Bella above us, pray grant humble Paimon the right to use Thy power in Thy nameth, so he may serve justice and mete out judgment to the sinned,” Paimon proclaimed loudly and cast the broken scepter into the air. It vanished.

Suddenly, strange turbulence in space erupted around Arfin. The air around it began to twist and warp until suddenly, ten million armed believers clad in golden armors of light surrounded the city out of nowhere!

“Yikes!” The Archmage exclaimed, jumping reflexively at the abrupt turn of the event. Despite his experiences, he had never seen anything like this. No one had ever been able to teleport so many people without letting out a sign! [1]

Of course, when one had access to an Arbiter’s Right, such a feat was within their capabilities. Achieving the unbelievable with a god’s power should be expected.

Archangel Paimon brandished his heavenly sword and declared his words straight into the believers’ mind. Entranced, they began to charge toward the city walls. As they came without proper siege weapons, the believers hacked and slashed at everything in their way with whatever weapons they armed.

The Archmage responded by downing barrages and barrages of devastating magic on them, yet all those did was leaving large craters in their wake. The believers survived with no more than a few scratches under the protection of their golden armor and the Holy Light. Indeed, as they leapt back to their feet and returned to charging madly into the fray, their wounds were closing and healing at a visible pace.

“Damn, did we just get thrown into World War Z or Resident Evil?” The Archmage snarked before shouting, “Brace yourselves, we’ve been ambushed!”