Chapter 1916: Chapter 1916

"The Cloud Whale Beast isn't at its full strength. It just escaped from its seal. It attached itself to me and came to Nolan because it knew it was in a weakened state and wasn't willing to risk facing this era's human Benefactors prematurely."

Bernoulli explained in a low voice, then pleaded with Jenkins not to squeeze so hard—he felt like his neck was about to snap.

Thinking about it, the Cloud Whale Beast's decision to rashly seek out the Difference Engine seemed rather foolish. But regardless, everyone agreed that they couldn't let the Difference Engine truly "devour" the creature.

Therefore, after the reinforcements sent by Nolan arrived and took charge of Bernoulli, Jenkins and his companions joined the battle.

The mission was a complicated one. They not only had to stop the Difference Engine from taking the Cloud Whale Beast, but afterward, they had to reseal the beast as best they could and inflict as much damage as possible upon the Difference Engine.

The rain continued to fall from the sky. Jenkins pointed a finger to the heavens, and a bolt of lightning shot straight down at him. After he hurled the captured thunder into the fray, the Saint of the Righteous God's church had officially entered the battlefield.

The Cloud Whale Beast was not at its full power, and the Difference Engine had yet to reveal its true form, attacking only with swarms of chains. Although the battle was far from easy, once the Church's main forces joined, everything began to shift in their favor.

The unit responsible for sealing the Cloud Whale Beast had also arrived near the small town. In the sky, flying demigods worked together to suppress both the beast and the chains, striving to find a balance between the two forces.

Jenkins, unable to fly on his own, could only levitate for short periods in his Saint form. But even with the Sage's second blessing, gained by sacrificing his second drop of divinity, the Saint form couldn't be maintained for long.

Before the transformation wore off, he quickly descended and regrouped with the ground support team. The cat sat obediently on Jenkins's shoulder, watching the sweat and raindrops slide down his cheek, and gently wiped it away with its tail.

"Don't make trouble, Chocolate."

Not understanding the gesture's intent, Jenkins brushed the cat's tail aside. He accepted an umbrella from a Scribe and joined them in looking up at the battlefield high above.

"Prepare a quiet room for me. I need to pray for a while."

A Saint's power came from a god. The reason Jenkins couldn't maintain the form for long wasn't that his body couldn't handle it, but that the finite wellspring of power had simply run dry. That's why he wanted to reconnect with the Sage; otherwise, the power would only recover slowly over time.

In his normal state, he could still be useful on the battlefield, but this fight was taking place high in the air. The ground forces could only make a token effort against the endlessly sprouting chain-tentacles. Though he could fly on that high-legged stool of his, it was hardly convenient for combat. The freely levitating Saint form was what Jenkins needed most right now.

He subconsciously touched the silver ring on his right wrist. This was his true trump card now. But as long as the Difference Engine's core remained hidden, he absolutely could not act rashly. He understood perfectly that this was no time for impulsive heroics. The Difference Engine's main core was definitely underground in Nolan's eastern suburbs.

The chains alone were not enough to subdue the Cloud Whale Beast once it was dragged below ground. Therefore, Jenkins deduced that the Difference Engine itself might appear the very instant the beast touched the soil.

This was why, aside from his Saint form, Jenkins had held back from using his full power so far in this battle. He was waiting. No matter how small the probability, he had to confirm whether the Difference Engine would truly reveal its core.

If he chanced upon that minuscule probability, then today would be the day of his final battle with the Difference Engine.

The squad escorted a "weakened" Jenkins away from the battlefield. The cat, its little face drooping with dejection after being "unjustly" scolded by Jenkins, suddenly turned on his shoulder and stared back in the direction they had come from.

it cried, then began patting Jenkins's ear with its small paws, one after the other. Jenkins stopped and was about to see what was wrong with his cat when he, too, suddenly froze and turned to look where Chocolate had been looking.

A resplendent golden pillar of light, seeming to connect the heavens and the earth, had appeared in the far-off, rolling hills. Anyone, no matter who they were, could feel an extremely orderly, harmonious, and unyielding power emanating from that pillar of light.

At the same time, Jenkins, who had become sensitive to mechanical forces after creating his [Mechanist] ability through his own insights, felt it directly—an incredibly significant, machine-related special item had just appeared. That object would hold immense meaning for any being that wielded mechanical power.

His eyes widened as he stared in that direction, immediately realizing where the sky-piercing pillar of light had appeared:

"The manor outside Honeywood Town? Hathaway and the other two... what kind of treasure did they find in that statue?"

At the appearance of the golden pillar, the battlefield seemed to freeze for a moment. Everyone involved in the fight, including the dense mass of metallic tentacles, paused.

But as the pillar of light weakened and gradually vanished into the rain, the tentacles began to move again, and the Cloud Whale Beast resumed its struggle for survival amidst the three-way battle.

But a second, perhaps two, after that, in a single instant, Jenkins clearly felt a behemoth flash past beneath his feet. He didn't even have time to scan the ground with his Eye of Reality before the thing had vanished into the distance.

The direction the behemoth was heading was precisely where the golden pillar of light had appeared. A chill ran down Jenkins's spine. He easily guessed that the Difference Engine, which had been lying in wait beneath them to "devour" the Cloud Whale Beast at the final moment, had now abandoned its target.

An unknown numbered item would normally not be worth the Difference Engine abandoning the beast, a creature that could manipulate clouds and fog and would have complemented its own altered energy source perfectly. But the direction from which the golden light had erupted was also the location where the Difference Engine had sealed away its own separated core.

Now that the two locations had overlapped, Jenkins understood in an instant. The Difference Engine must have feared something had gone wrong. If he were in its place, he wouldn't believe it was such a coincidence either.

"No, I have to go see."

Hathaway and the others had no idea what was happening here. If they hadn't managed to leave in time, they might run straight into the Difference Engine's main body.

He urged the squad to escort him to the temporary private room arranged in the town. As soon as the door closed and he confirmed no one was watching, Jenkins left an illusion of himself kneeling in prayer in the center of the room and leaped directly out the window.

Of course, he didn't forget to close the window behind him. This time, he didn't leave Chocolate behind, because Jenkins didn't have the time to persuade the cat to listen to him obediently.

He sprinted through the rain. A unicorn appeared by his side with a soft neigh, and the small beast carried Jenkins and his cat into the sky. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ Nov3lFɪre.ɴet

It was nearly evening now, but the summer days were long, and only the faintest trace of sunset was visible. His heart pounding with anxiety, Jenkins urged the unicorn to fly at its top speed, but by the time he could see Honeywood Town in the distance, a change had already occurred.

A fissure had opened in the earth. The mechanical birds made of metal and bone he had seen before were pouring out of the abyss below, flying toward the town.

Riding on the unicorn's back, Jenkins summoned the iron-gray book. With a light shake, a bronze mechanical bird flew out. He pointed to the sky:

A brilliant thunderbolt struck the bronze bird. Then, its wings crackling with lightning, the bird flew toward the swarm of mechanical birds, which was as dense as a plague of locusts.

Jenkins didn't linger there any longer, instead continuing to fly toward the hill where the manor was located. From a distance, he could see the wild dance of chains. As he drew closer, he saw, as he had expected, Mr. Hood, Mr. Black Cat, and Hathaway's group trapped on the manor's roof by chains that were endlessly erupting from the ground.

Fortunately, when the workshop had been built beneath the manor, the ground had been specially reinforced to prevent a sneak attack from the Difference Engine's main body deeper below. Otherwise, if the chains had shot up from right under their feet, the three of them would never have survived long enough for Jenkins to come to their rescue.

"Jenkins, or the Believer of Lies?"

Jenkins thought for a split second as he leaped from the unicorn's back.

The White Bone Holy Sword materialized in his hand. The cat clutching his clothes on his shoulder also turned pure white.

The three on the roof couldn't even see what had fallen from the sky before the dazzling light of the sword forced their eyes shut.

But even with their eyes squeezed tight, they could feel goosebumps rising on their skin from instinctual fear as the blade whirled past them. The pressure of the air made their exposed skin sting, and the clanging rang out like a master musician playing a frantic, fast-paced concerto.

When they opened their eyes, they saw, as they'd expected, the man with the white cat standing beside them, sword in hand. Mr. Candle didn't check on his friends' condition; instead, he looked upward.

Even though his whirling sword dance had just destroyed all the chains on the surface, an endless supply of them was still erupting from the soil around the manor, rising from the depths of the earth.

At the same time, the bronze mechanical bird Jenkins had released on the outskirts of Honeywood Town, despite being empowered by lightning, had failed to stop the skeletal mechanical birds emerging from the fissure.

Now, the rainy sky was more than half-covered by the locust-like swarm of birds. The dancing chain-tentacles paused their immediate assault, instead clustering together, surging toward the four people on the roof like a great, roiling wave.

The grating clatter of the chains grinding against one another truly sounded something like the crashing of the sea. It was just that the people on the roof would have rather been drowned by real ocean waves than face this situation now.