A Nightmare Spilling from the West
A Nightmare Spilling from the West
Thanks to the attack Ragnis had attempted, a sudden realization struck me, and I shouted as I lunged at Water Buffalo Horn.
"Attack with invisible magic!"
At this level, I almost felt like giving thanks to that crazy Demonfolk bastard I met when I got caught up in the gate back in the Empire.
I'd personally had little experience facing magic head-on, and since I usually dispelled it or always used Magic Sight to read it, it was a fact I kept forgetting...
"Demonfolk can only visually perceive magic made of Mana!"
...Magic Power users are inevitably dull to everything related to Mana or aura.
Even I was like that, so it went without saying for Water Buffalo Horn, who carried that much Magic Power within his body. While the majority of people showed bewilderment at my shouted conclusion, they began to withdraw their doubts when they saw Water Buffalo Horn's expression clearly distort.
"Goddammit...!"
It was too late to swear now. Your cause of death was complacency!
This was no time to hold back, so I used double acceleration at full power to close the distance, then thrust my sword at the bastard's breastplate which was caved in from the explosion. He laboriously adjusted his stance and went on the defensive. Of course, he wasn't crazy enough to raise a guard against a sword. He was simply trying to do with just his two fists the parrying he had been doing with weapons up until now.
From my perspective, even that felt sufficiently insane, but since he had already proven several times that he possessed that level of skill, I could only stay intensely on edge.
In a situation where no matter how hard I tried, all my frontal attacks would be read, what helped me were Ranje and the other knights.
"What the hell are you gonna do scared of one bastard?! Push him!"
Ranje rushed in from the flank, and three knights from behind Water Buffalo Horn. Not that the five of them could coordinate and execute a proper pincer attack. At best, the three knights would pull off a real pincer while Ranje and I fought separately.
But for now, that alone was enough. Because the bastard's gaze was fixed on Ragnis, from whom he never knew when magic might fly.
Whether he was reading killing intent or pulling some other bullshit, it seemed he was confident he could roughly grasp things without looking, and that's why he was acting that way. But would simply watching Ragnis let him see the magic coming?
She was a kid who could even use chantless casting. Sure enough, despite such efforts, he had been glaring only at Ragnis until the very moment that unidentified magic flew into his face from my left.
-Bang!
"Hup?!"
It would have been truly excellent if it had smashed his face directly, but whether he sensed something or the background had rippled like a heat haze, just as Ragnis's magic was about to strike right on the tip of his nose, he jerked up a guard and blocked it.
He was such an astonishingly skilled powerhouse that it made me involuntarily click my tongue, but even if others and I weren't his equals, we had enough skill to exploit the openings that emerged.
Perhaps deciding that would deal the most impact, he pulled his body to the side to dodge Ranje's blunt weapon, but my sword ate into the armor on his left thigh and left a scratch wound, while the knights' swords, as if by promise, aimed for the nape of his neck, his armpit, and the back of his right thigh.
This was the kind of thing where even a division commander's grandpa would have to take at least one hit.
"Khuck!"
In the midst of that, the bastard showed the tenacity to protect the vital points of his neck and armpit, but he couldn't avoid the sword thrusting deep into the unarmored back of his thigh.
Watching him stagger heavily and drop to his knees, the knight who had succeeded in stabbing his thigh twisted his sword without any lingering attachment and let go of the hilt. As everyone's attacks poured down once more, I kept my sword raised, wrapped it in Magic Power, and swung it with the intent to sever his left arm.
I didn't entertain any thought that this alone would kill him. My goal was simply to force an extreme choice.
Either have your head crushed by Ranje's attack, die to the knights' attacks aiming for the nape of your neck from behind, or offer up your left arm.
At that moment, veins bulged on the forehead of the bastard who wasn't even arrogantly wearing a helmet.
My body reacted first out of instinct, something I absolutely wouldn't have known if I hadn't seen it before in the abandoned dungeon, but there was no gap to shout a warning. I didn't know myself whether pressing on and taking his left arm was right or blocking first was right, you see.
"Ghk!"
But the instant a growling groan burst out of Water Buffalo Horn's mouth, my body moved before my head did.
I lowered my stance, threw my body as if diving forward and crawling, spun once, then stared directly at Water Buffalo Horn's left fist as it came down trying to hammer-punch me, and swung the sword that had dug into his armpit.
The Magic Power-wreathed blade severed his left arm amid very slight resistance, blood splattered, and over my head echoed jumbled noises of a steel plate being crushed and a scream.
And as his blood droplets crossed the empty air in slow motion, Ragnis's magic hit the bastard again. Far more intensely than before.
"Ghaaaaaack!"
The magic directly struck his breastplate this time too, but that didn't seem to be why the scream erupted. In an instant, the bastard achieved the feat of swinging his right arm to swat away Ranje and the knights. He then clutched not at the breastplate that had taken the spell, but at his severed shoulder, so my guess was probably right.
Since I was already sprawled on the ground, I wanted to just keep going and cut off his leg too, but I had no choice but to give up because of Water Buffalo Horn. Wracked with pain and clutching his shoulder, he had not lost his fighting spirit and aimed a kick at my side.
Instead, I quickly curled my body to minimize the impact as much as possible and shot my needle toward the outside of the bastard's thigh that I had cut. Fortunately, this time he couldn't block even that, and even as I went sliding across the ground like a ball, I could watch the needle sink deep into his thigh and smile with satisfaction.
Are you watching from hell, Envelde? That's the price of 'real' arrogance.
"A-Attack...!"
His swung fist must have been quite vicious, because the breastplates of the two knights sprawled on the ground were caved in, and Ranje's blunt weapon had been snapped like a drinking straw and sent bouncing far away.
The fact that was a sight created by merely swinging a single bare fist—I felt it deep in my bones, what a fucked-up result a division commander-level bastard would bring about if he caused a Magic Power rampage. Still, I thought I'd done well not to hold back and cut off his left arm.
Even in the middle of that, when Ranje, trembling and shaking, got up from her spot and gave the order, the knights who were still intact rushed in like madmen.
No matter that he was a division commander-level bastard who had even triggered a Magic Power rampage, with one arm severed and both legs turned into rags, he couldn't hold them off at this point. Even driven to such a state, he truly resisted horrifically and did manage to throw knights away, but irregularly swung fists without a weapon could cause injuries but no fatalities. The ceaseless stream of Ragnis's magic played its part too.
In less than a minute, Water Buffalo Horn's resistance was forcibly brought to an end.
He wasn't dead. And yet I said it was forced because there were no less than five swords lodged in his right arm.
The bastard was impressive to have endured the knights' attacks for dozens of seconds in a desperate situation, but the knights outdid him. Even if it meant their own bones breaking, they avoided inflicting fatal wounds on Water Buffalo Horn for the sake of capturing him alive.
Instead, they literally did not stop sticking attacks into non-fatal locations. In the process, about ten knights were left fallen around them beaten to a pulp, yet I felt not the slightest thought that it was pitiful.
How could I consider pitiful those who understood how enormous the gains from capturing that bastard alive would be and sacrificed themselves?
"To think... I'd end up... looking like this..."
Around the bastard as he laughed in apparent emptiness, clods of dirt began to creep up. Watching the flowing sequence of events, it seemed Ragnis was casting a spell to bind him.
"That's what you get for crawling into the enemy camp alone."
I heaved my throbbing body upright, pulled out the needle I had driven into the bastard's thigh, and as I approached and dropped one remark, Water Buffalo Horn looked at me with an expression of absurdity, then let out a light laugh.
"Hahaha... that's exactly what I didn't want to hear from you."
His condition clearly looked precarious, but I couldn't let my guard down. Looking closely, even the bleeding from the left arm I had severed had stopped, and his right arm with the swords still embedded in it wasn't flowing blood either.
"You still have the leeway to stop the bleeding, I see."
"...Sharp."
Water Buffalo Horn looked at me without particularly denying it or withdrawing his laugh.
More precisely, it looked like he was staring above my head...
"But you know... I never came here alone."
Clenching his fist, the bastard kicked off the clods of dirt entangling his body and leaped high into the air.
I thought, 'Oh shit,' and looked up at the sky, and there, at some point, a single wyvern had been attempting free fall with its wings folded.
"You fuck!"
Water Buffalo Horn, capable of a super jump even when driven to that state, was fucking infuriating, and so was that wyvern-riding bastard who had stubbornly returned to rescue its division commander despite the hole in the wyvern's wing membrane. Belatedly, Ragnis shot magic and fireballs flew in from somewhere else unseen, but whether because the rider was highly skilled or not, they were blocked by protective magic and vanished.
With movements utterly inconceivable for a bastard with five swords stabbed into his one remaining arm, Water Buffalo Horn seized the wyvern's leg and shouted straight down at me.
"Next time for sure...!"
I absolutely, would rather die, than watch the sight of him getting away spouting clichéd villain lines about fleeing, so I was already moving Magic Power to shoot a needle upward when what stopped me was another wyvern that body-slammed the flank of the wyvern that was just now trying to gain altitude.
It was the wyvern I had stolen.
"Gah?!"
Water Buffalo Horn, swept up by a full-body tackle—neither a bite nor a half-assed claw attack, but a body-slam delivered with all its might—lost his grip from the shock. As I watched the two wyverns tangle and crash down to the ground,
Alongside the conviction that this situation was over, I started seriously agonizing over how to officially raise the wyvern I'd picked up.