The Most Dangerous Creature in the World... (4)
Honestly, Lee Han alone would have been enough to kill them.
It was not arrogance, and it was not a prediction. It was certainty, the kind that comes only from clean analysis and hard experience.
They had mysterious powers. So what?
Next to that monster, they're practically cute.
Tower Lord Tur de Seigan. Set beside that nightmare of a creature—the sort of horror that might well follow a man into his dreams—they were not even frightening. Their abilities and mysteries would make them troublesome to fight, yes. Troublesome. That was not the same as a reason he could not win.
Which was to say—
"It's over."
With reinforcements arriving late, the fight was as good as finished.
"R-Rak de Duron?! Why is Galahad's Dire Wolf here!"
"The Black Lion of the North..."
They knew those two faces. They could not hide their shock, and Lee Han found himself nodding along.
I'd lose my mind too.
Reinforcements were one thing. If two monsters like that walked out among them, who could stand there and not come apart? He understood exactly how they felt. As enemies, those two were more stifling and more dreadful than anything. As allies, there was nothing sturdier under heaven.
Put it this way...
"Guan Yu on the right, Lü Bu on the left. That about the size of it?"
He muttered it under his breath, amused at the turn things had taken, and the nonsense drew an answer.
"Haha. Rest, brother. Seems you suffered plenty on your own while the two of us were sleeping easy."
"If you're tired, step out."
They pressed him to rest as if they were being considerate. Lee Han let out a dry laugh, and well he might.
"You two just want to take it out on someone, don't you?"
"......"
"Hell of a trauma, huh."
"...Ahem."
At a loss for anything to say, the pair chose silence instead of an answer. Lee Han was freshly certain that neither of them was a delicate enough man to spare anyone a kindness.
"—We run."
The words belonged to Dent, whose arm had broken blocking Rak's spear. The others agreed.
"How are we supposed to stop that?"
"We can't die in a place like this."
Holding off a single one of them had already been all they could manage, and now two more had been added—and those two just had to be the Dire Wolf and the Black Lion. Their threat stood level with the knight called Lee Han, or above him. To stand against them was nothing but suicide. Flight was, in truth, the correct judgment.
...Of course.
Whoosh!
"And where do you think you're going?"
They were never going to be allowed to leave.
Rak de Duron's spearhead came on without hesitation, meaning to run them through, and Dina's fingers flashed.
BOOM!
Salamander constitution, made technique.
A single point of heat fierce enough to burst a human body apart.
It was Dina's specialty, and the same art that had pinned Lee Han's feet. It held a blaze so violent that any ordinary human ought to have been blown to pieces—
Fwoooosh!
"...An amusing little trick."
Her misfortune was that the man on the other end happened to be Rak.
He slipped the places where the blasts bloomed, flowing like water, and went straight at her.
"How...?"
"I can see it plain as day. Why wouldn't I dodge?"
Prediction. Kinetic sight. Structural sight.
The salamander's invisible ignition matter, caught by the eye alone.
With an eye that seized what could not be seen, Rak was Dina's natural predator.
In that instant—
Clang!
"I've wanted to cross blades with Galahad's Dire Wolf at least once!"
"...Vermin, and you dare play at being a knight?"
The man with the sickles, Sixth Apostle Khan, checked Rak's movement with both blades.
Hum!
The block might as well have been an illusion. Rak's spear moved like a snake and let Khan's sickles slide uselessly off.
A master spearman's art, they said, moved like a serpent or a whip. Rak proved the saying. His spear spun out variation after variation, knocked the sickles away, and came driving down—overwhelming skill that toyed with a man through art alone, not strength and not speed. The point should have punched clean through Khan's chest.
Clang!
"So the sickles were decoration."
Rak recalled what the scoundrel had told him. Something about a power that was mystery-adjacent, wasn't it?
"...I've seen beastfolk a few times. I never thought I'd live to see an Insect Person."
Khan's form warped. His frame swelled, both arms stretched long, and along those arms grew edges sharp as a mantis's raptorial legs. Mantis-man. The words rose on their own.
CRASH!
Speed and force beyond any comparison with the sickles of a moment before. As if to display the price paid for throwing away a human shape, Khan brought to bear a strength that was anything but trivial—
Shlick!
"And what exactly am I supposed to do with that?"
—and even so, he could not stop Rak's spear.
Killing intent, turned to destructive combat energy.
A crimson flame—Red Blaze—gathered like Sword Qi. No. Like Spear Qi.
Ten trajectories in a single instant.
The only sound was a clipped rush of cut air, more than ten times in one second, and then—
Thuk!
Blood fountained out of Khan's body.
"Hm. Insect Person blood is red as well? I didn't know."
Rak nodded, satisfied to have learned something new.
"Goddamn it!!"
BOOM! Bang—!
Even watching Khan reduced toward a half-crippled ruin, Dina did not stop the explosions. If anything she laid them down like a bombardment, blast after blast, and she did not hesitate to catch her own comrades in the fire. Stop here, and flight or whatever else would not matter. They would all die.
Weaker than a Point Explosion. Relentless all the same.
A chain of blasts no body should be able to move through.
"Khahaha! Now this is truly fun!"
...It should have stopped him.
Maximus did not evade the blasts the way Lee Han or Rak would have. He took them on the body and charged, demonstrating in his own flesh that even explosions fit to match a grenade could neither burn him nor break him.
"You lunatic!"
Only the day before, a certain boy who carried a System Window had said it of him. Maximus bore a Strength to Overturn Mountains on the order of Heracles or Xiang Yu, and the absurd Trait called a Heavenly Martial Body. He had also inherited the blood of the North's land-god, the Black King, and so he carried a resistance to heat that let him display a majesty which simply should not have existed.
Crackle—!
The battle-axe of the man charging headlong began, little by little, to shed electric fire. His signature art. The one said to have killed even a giant.
Lightning Drop struck Dent's shield dead on.
KRUUUUM!!
"Hoh! Delightful, as expected! You blocked that... haha!"
Maximus's blow had been stopped by Dent's shield, just as Rak's strike had been stopped a moment before. A truly curious thing. Was that shield made of some peculiar material?
"Well then. Can you block this one as well?"
Whoosh!
An oversized battle-axe, so heavy that no one but Maximus could even have lifted it, moved as lightly as a wooden stick. And once again—
Crack!
Electric fire flashed, and Maximus's battle-axe came down. A second Lightning Drop.
And that—
"...Arrogant bastard."
To Dent, it looked like stupidity. The strong were arrogant, after all. The man seemed ready to walk the exact same road Rak de Duron had walked a moment ago. Dent smiled a thin smile and prepared to send the force straight back—
SHHHK!
"Hm. So that was it. You looked to be using a monster's power, the way that woman does, so I took a rough guess."
Apostle power — Number Five
Stores physical impact. Returns it twofold.
"A troublesome power to be carrying."
"Kuhk..."
Thud.
Shield, and half the body.
Sheared away at once.
Dent's body began to come apart. Not only the shield—half of him had been cut away in a single blow. A disaster born of failing to stop that one stroke. The light in his eyes faded by degrees, and what reached his ear as consciousness went out was this.
"A shame. That was quite decent shield-work. It would have been better, I think, if you had settled it with the art of the shield, instead of leaning on an ability."
"...Heh."
Admiration, and advice. Before he knew it, Dent had laughed an empty laugh, and understood. The arrogant one, it seemed—
I was the fool.
—had been himself.
"...That bastard."
Lee Han looked thoroughly sour, and honestly impressed.
Slime Resistance. It canceled most physical attacks, stored the impact, and returned it as it was—Number Five's signature trick. The shield art, too, had probably been learned by leaning on that specialty. And that giant had identified what the man's power was in a single breath, then broken it.
Force banked off obstacles. Blind angles, from every direction.
Seen once. Imitated. Then revised to fit the thief.
In their duel, Lee Han had shown him Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox. Maximus had gone past imitation and rebuilt it to suit himself, then used it to drive that Lightning Drop—or whatever the thing was called—straight into his opponent.
Lee Han was thoroughly displeased at having his technique stolen, and at the same time he had to admit it was an interesting art. Sure enough, a man whose fighting style resembled his own had found the revision no great difficulty.
...This is why those genius bastards...
Greatness was greatness. What galled him was that the man had seen the technique once and applied it like that. This was exactly why a person did not keep company with geniuses.
He was still swallowing that irritation when—
KABOOOOOM!!
An enormous blast went up, on another order entirely from what had come before, as if a shell had detonated. Number Seven's wrist was gone.
"I-I knew I shouldn't have taken this mission. Why is this place packed with monsters..."
At some point the spearman's weapon had drawn a half-circle and taken her wrist, and as the wrist fell a violent explosion had followed. A woman who was a hazardous substance from head to toe, through and through.
The spearman kept the point leveled and opened his mouth.
"Become a prisoner quietly, and I'll kill you without pain. Spit out what you know."
"...Haah. You're calling that a sentence?"
"If you won't comply, that works too."
"Stab me and I'll explode on the spot."
"Then I stab you before you explode. That's all."
"......"
"Think I'm lying?"
"Then test it, if you like."
That was the rest of what the spearman meant to say, and in the instant he moved to thrust—
KABOOOM!!
......Regrettably, the spearman had to suffer the humiliation of being blasted off his feet twice in a single day.
The reason was none other than this.
"O Thirteenth Angel, we beseech you—descend in a purification of blood upon these sinful unbelievers."
Drip. Drip.
—Because something truly dangerous had come bursting out.
"...The hell is that?"
Lee Han blinked, wholly unable to understand why a thing like that had suddenly appeared.
...Was this genre secretly an alien story?