I sprint forward.
With a burst of wind magic and physical augmentation, I accelerate instantly.
Tentacles pierce through the air, lunging at me.
They were trying to stop me with everything they had.
(Sufficiently threatening, but no matter)
In response, I command the miasma channeled to me and unleash it as a power of the Demon King.
Our forces collide, but my miasma overwhelms theirs.
Rot sets in from the tentacles' tips, smoking as they liquefy.
They failed to wound me.
I dash through the space between the decaying tendrils.
The golden tower shudders, and something is fired from its surface at high speed.
It was a translucent sphere.
I meet it with an upward slash of the heirloom sword.
The sphere splits cleanly in two, striking the ground behind me.
The points of impact burst, turning to fine powder.
It seemed to contain a potent destructive concept.
However, it apparently didn't work against *that person's* swordsmanship.
That fact bolstered my spirits, and I felt a sense of relief.
The rotting tentacles surged forward, heedless of their damage.
That said, with some of their numbers diverted to deal with the pseudo-golems, their overall attacks were fewer than before.
I severed a tendril and leaped through a shower of putrid fluid.
Stepping over the writhing mass, I pushed forward.
Midway, an explosion rumbled in the distance.
The dummy golem had been seized by countless tendrils and was breaking apart.
Light chains and Henry's shots couldn't keep up anymore.
Its crumbling giant body thrashed in resistance, stubbornly clinging on to ease my burden even a fraction.
(To help... no, that's not it)
What I needed to do was not rescue them.
It was to keep advancing, right now.
I shouldn't waste the efforts of them both.
I unleashed cursed black flames from my forbidden spell, incinerating the tendrils ahead.
I then layered multiple barriers, driving back the subsequent ones.
I maintained the path to secure my advance.
Any that slithered through the gaps I cut down with my sword.
At times, I forced through with teleportation.
Before I knew it, the surroundings were filled with rotting tendrils.
Nothing else was visible.
A raging miasma stimulated my senses.
The false god was attempting to pollute my mind.
I used the power supplied from the Valley of the Dead to defend myself.
Without dwelling on minutiae, I simply closed the distance with relentless focus.
Trivial doubts and pain invited errors in judgment.
In the midst of a fierce onslaught with no clear end in sight, I kept my consciousness strained to its absolute limit and moved continuously.
And when my sense of time had finally dissolved, I managed to break through the tentacles' defense.
Before my eyes stood the golden tower.
The human faces on its surface groaned ceaselessly.
Using instantaneous spatial transitions, I raced vertically up the tower.
Dodging the spheres fired at me, I reached the apex at high speed without slowing.
Holding aloft the heirloom sword, I proclaimed to the tower.
"It's over."
Placing the blade against the tower, I let gravity pull me into the descent.
The sword that had once slain the Demon King sliced through the golden tower saturated with miasma.
The cutting sensation was like slicing through paper.
The grandeur was mere show; in reality, it was pathetically fragile.
This was the tower's true nature.
Upon landing on the ground, I swung the sword clean and sheathed it.
Feeling the satisfying contact, I looked up.
A single sliver of light shot out from where the blade had passed through the golden tower.
The light gradually spread, and with it, the tower itself began to tilt.
It was starting to split cleanly in two from the summit.
It could no longer be stopped. The beasts, brimming with hope and worship, fell one after another, like leaves peeling away.