"What's wrong, Meruem?" Saori noticed Meruem's odd reaction, stopped, and asked.
"It's nothing, Saori. Let's just end this farce as soon as possible. A new plotline has just appeared," Meruem replied vaguely.
"?
"What remarkable willpower. Even I have to admire you. Perhaps you're the ones who are right. You may pass."
With that, Scorpio Milo turned around and disappeared from the Bronze boys' sight.
At this point, almost everyone in the group had several inexplicable, large, needle‑like wounds on their bodies.
When they passed through the Sagittarius Temple, it was also completely empty. Only one line of writing was left on the wall.
"To you youths who have reached this place, I entrust Athena to you!"
After reading the words on the wall, the Bronze boys were filled with fighting spirit.
Capricorn Temple.
For some reason it, too, was empty, and the Bronze boys passed through it smoothly.
Aquarius Temple.
"My master Camus… why isn't he here?" Hyoga was a little taken aback. Although he had trained with Camus in Siberia and had almost never come to the Aquarius Temple, he was still very familiar with his master's Cosmo.
Yet right now, there was not the slightest trace of Cosmo within the Aquarius Temple.
There was no time to dwell on it. A temple without its Gold Saint guardian was not necessarily a bad thing for them.
Even so, Hyoga couldn't shake a vague sense of foreboding.
His master would never be the type to abandon the temple he guarded and leave on his own.
And sure enough—
In Pisces, the final temple of the Twelve, three Gold Saints appeared before them, all wearing flashy red capes and gleaming Gold Cloths.
Capricorn Shura, Aquarius Camus, and Pisces Aphrodite.
As rose petals drifted down, bright red roses quietly sprouted all around the Bronze boys without them even realizing.
"No passage beyond this point." The three Gold Saints had no intention of letting them leave so easily.
"Hyoga, you're here." A biting cold wind swept past everyone, and even so, the Cloths on the Bronze boys had unknowingly become encased in a thick layer of ice armor.
"My master Camus…" Hyoga spoke with difficulty, his expression more a helpless, bitter smile than anything else.
He had still ended up standing on the opposite side from his teacher.
Don't be fooled by the fact that Camus was only twenty years old; his inflexible personality was infamous among the Twelve Temples.
Once he decided something, he absolutely would not change his mind. Even Milo, his close friend, couldn't do anything about that.
The same went for Capricorn Shura. Although he vaguely knew a bit about what had happened thirteen years ago, Shura, unlike some of the other Gold Saints, would not back down easily.
The last one, the Pisces Gold Saint, known as "the most terrifying Saint"—not only was he powerful, he was also famed as a warrior whose beauty rivaled heaven and earth.
Though he hadn't shone particularly brightly in the Twelve Temples battle or the Hades arc, and in the Hades arc he had seemed extremely afraid of death—
To the point that he and Cancer Deathmask were mocked as the "useless duo" among the Gold Saints—
In truth, the later parts of the Hades arc made it clear that every revived Saint carried their own mission.
In Soul of Gold, Aphrodite completely redeemed himself. Fafner, who had given Mu a hard fight and even pushed him to a disadvantage, was utterly overwhelmed by Aphrodite with nothing but the Royal Demon Roses.
Granted, the World Tree's suppression of the Gold Saints had greatly weakened Mu's Cosmo, while Fafner's power rose thanks to the Odin Sapphire. With one falling and the other rising, Mu was thoroughly pressed.
But Aphrodite, as a Gold Saint, was likewise being suppressed by the World Tree, yet still managed to utterly crush Fafner. If André hadn't intervened, Fafner might already have been finished off by Aphrodite.
Most impressive of all was Aphrodite's broken ability to communicate with plants. He was able to control even the World Tree itself, preventing the exhausted Gold Saints, captured through the World Tree by André, from being corroded.
He turned the tables on Loki, and it's no exaggeration to say that Aphrodite's contribution in the battle of the World Tree was immense.
Facing three Gold Saints at once, even the usually carefree Seiya felt the pressure multiply.
They had already been exhausted just dealing with a single Gold Saint at a time before. Now, no matter how you looked at it, these three were not opponents they could defeat easily.
And confronting three Gold Saints at once was not as simple as one plus one plus one—the pressure increased by several times over.
"Seiya, you guys sure are slow." Just as Seiya and the others were too wary to make any rash moves, the sound of footsteps came from behind them.
"Jabu, you came too?" Seiya exclaimed when he heard that voice he both disliked and found oddly familiar.
"Heh, Lord Meruem sent us to assist you." Jabu had the same bad habit as Seiya, rubbing the tip of his nose lightly with his index finger.
"Us?"
"Ikki." The newcomer's Cloth was seven or eight parts similar to the Phoenix Cloth on Ikki, except he wore a silver‑gray mask over his face.
"Esmeralda, why are you here too? It's dangerous." Ikki said anxiously, an extremely rare expression crossing his face.
"I'm a Saint too! I want to help you, Ikki…"
Public displays of affection, right in front of everyone! Where's the mighty FFF when you need it?
"You little Bronzes actually dare ignore my Piranha Roses!" The Bronze kids chatting so casually in front of three Gold Saints made the Gold Saints feel thoroughly ignored.
Camus and Shura didn't react much; their personalities were cold by nature. Aphrodite, however, was already enraged.
His opening move was the Piranha Black Rose, which could easily shred a Silver Cloth to pieces.
"Diamond Dust!" "Nebula Chain!" Hyoga's cold air froze the black roses in midair, and then Shun's chain struck all the roses precisely, their speed greatly reduced by the ice.
"Not bad, Bronzes. But did you really think my roses were that fragile?" Seeing his technique broken, Aphrodite wasn't angry at all. Instead, a mocking smile appeared on his face.
"Take a good look at your chain," Aphrodite said.
At his words, Shun jerked his gaze toward his Nebula Chain.
And saw that the Andromeda Cloth's strongest chain was now in tatters, as if it had been corroded by something.
With nothing but the simple Piranha Roses, he had already destroyed Andromeda's greatest weapon.
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