Rebecca
Where is he?
Rebecca had watched Jun get swallowed by the explosion with her own two eyes, yet she still refused to drop her combat stance.
Which way will he come from? Straight ahead, like before? Or from behind? I need to watch overhead, too.
A hunter's instinct and a bomber's madness whispered the same warning in unison: don't let your guard down. There was no way that man had gone down from a single blast.
Her ears twitched, straining.
To track a dragon that slipped through space itself, she poured every scrap of her concentration into her hearing. Sounds she had long since learned to tune out began to sharpen into crystalline clarity.
"Nngh..."
A groan slipped from her lips unbidden. Her brain was screaming under the flood of auditory information pouring in like a tidal wave. It might have sounded like she was being dramatic, but the strain was more than justified. She could have claimed actual pain and no one would have blinked.
After all, her ears were picking up not only every sound inside the underground sparring hall, but the noise from the surface as well.
Hearing through walls — walls specifically reinforced to muffle the impact and clamor of sparring matches — should have been impossible, even for an elf whose hearing rivaled a beast's. The reason she could do it anyway was a trait she had acquired alongside her Aura.
Enhanced Hearing.
That trait had gifted her with senses so sharp and so durable that even animals couldn't match them. When she first obtained it, she couldn't control the input — she'd blacked out more than once and cursed the thing endlessly. Now it was a weapon every bit as vital as her bombs.
Drawing on techniques honed over decades, Rebecca narrowed her hearing to the sparring hall alone.
And right on cue—
Tak. Whoosh.
The sound of a foot planting on the floor. The vortex of mana being drawn in.
Rebecca spun toward the source behind her, and in the same motion—
Click.
—she pulled the trigger of the double-barreled shotgun in her hands.
A menacing BANG cracked through the air as a storm of shot erupted from the muzzle.
This one's landing.
The barrel was locked dead-center on Jun's torso, and her target was mid-swing — completely exposed. A textbook killing blow. Or so Rebecca thought.
Until the pellets that should have shredded him bounced off like raindrops striking an umbrella.
!!!
Rebecca's eyes flew wide. She could barely believe what she was seeing. Every round she fired was handmade — her own craftsmanship. Even if they weren't quite on the level of her bombs, their performance and stopping power put commercial ammunition to shame.
And a mage's barrier had stopped them? Not a priest's holy shield — a mage's.
This was a sparring match, so she hadn't reinforced her firearms or ammunition with Aura. Even so, a mage's barrier was supposed to be weaker than a cleric's. At the very least, the shot should have embedded itself or left cracks. Jun's barrier didn't have so much as a scratch.
Is that even a barrier?
The space in front of him warped as if she were looking through a distorted lens. Rebecca had lived a long life, and she had never once seen a defensive technique that bent space itself like that.
Crack. Pop.
This is no time to be gawking.
The sound of joints popping snapped her back to focus. A heartbeat later, a vicious whistle of air cutting through space reached her ears. From the crack of bone and joint alone, Rebecca had already mapped out Jun's attack — the type of strike, the trajectory, everything. She threw her upper body backward in a limbo-like arch.
Shhhk!
A pitch-black blade skimmed past just above her torso, close enough to kiss skin. Her full, jutting breasts nearly got sliced open — but mercifully, that particular disaster was averted.
Jun was far more relieved about that than Rebecca was. Even the Mind Control Device couldn't completely erase his affection for a fine pair of breasts.
And while he was busy feeling that relief—
Whoosh!
Rebecca kept her weight shifted backward and swept one leg in a wide, circular kick. It was the kind of motion that could easily strain a body, but a dark elf's springy, flexible muscle handled it without complaint.
Jun stepped back and slipped past the kick. He moved to counter immediately, but—
BANG!
—the double-barreled shotgun, its snout poking out from under her armpit, spat its last remaining shell first.
Distortion
Accelerated thought unfurled a warping field in the blink of an eye, and once again the rain of shot ricocheted away. The attack was stopped cleanly — but the cost was half a breath of delay on Jun's counter.
Rebecca seized the opening. She shrugged off her cloak and flung it at him, hoping to buy another fraction of a second. Against someone with a cheat ability like Radar, the trick was essentially worthless — but Jun stepped back anyway, and abandoned the counter entirely.
He had a question he needed answered.
"Rebecca, mind if I ask you something?"
"Does it have to be right now? We were just getting to the good part."
"I'm too curious. It's been distracting me the entire fight."
"...Fine. Spit it out."
When he framed it as something that might throw off the spar, she granted permission — begrudgingly. Jun dipped his head in a mix of apology and gratitude, then pointed a finger at her. More precisely, at the outfit she was wearing.
"Is that outfit a type of weapon, too?"
"Th-this? How is this a weapon?! It's clearly armor!"
She bellowed her denial at the top of her lungs — but her face had gone scarlet, and she twisted her body into a pretzel to keep as much of herself out of his line of sight as possible.
"I don't know. Looks more like seduction gear to me. Or maybe a charm-class accessory."
A glossy black full-body leather suit, painted onto her so tightly that every lush curve of Rebecca's figure was on shameless display. That alone was lewd enough — and then there was the zipper. It ran in one continuous line from her throat, down between her breasts, over her stomach, past her sex and perineum, all the way up the cleft of her rear. There was no way to look at it and not think of extremely specific uses.
The pouches of various sizes strapped to her forearms, thighs, waist, and chest — along with the bombs and assorted weapons clipped to them — did give off a combat-ready vibe. But there were simply too many pouches, and the belts cinching them in place only served to squeeze and emphasize her ample flesh, tipping the overall impression from "tactical" into something far more fetishistic.
When Jun had first scanned her with Radar to check for injuries, one look at that outfit had nearly given him a nosebleed.
"This suit is a family heirloom passed down through my house for generations! Stop looking at it with those f-filthy eyes!"
"But still..."
"But nothing! Shut up — we're continuing the match!"
Refusing to hear another word of dissent, Rebecca activated a skill on the spot.
Black Dog
"Go!"
Two black hounds erupted from her shadow. Each clamped a bomb between its jaws at her command and charged straight at Jun.
Ignore them? No — take them out first.
If he blew past them to go after Rebecca, they'd hit him from behind mid-attack. Better to deal with them now, even if it gave her breathing room.
Decision made, Jun pulled two throwing blades from Dowonhyang and hurled them — not at the dogs themselves, but at the bombs in their mouths.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
He hadn't expected much, and sure enough, it accomplished nothing. The hounds twisted their heads to shield the bombs. Chunks of their skulls were blown apart in the process, but they regenerated almost instantly.
Annoying technique.
To destroy them properly, he'd have to obliterate the entire body or smash them to pieces. The bombs would detonate long before he managed that — which made wiping them out beforehand effectively impossible. And even if he could, Rebecca wouldn't just sit back and watch.
Like right now.
BANG!
Ting!
The distortion field bloomed again. This time, though, the rounds didn't bounce off immediately — they spun in place for a moment where they struck before finally ricocheting away. That wasn't shotgun shot. That was rifle ammunition.
She hadn't been carrying a long gun. Where had she pulled that from?
Come to think of it...
He vaguely recalled hearing that dark- and light-attribute abilities could create something resembling a subspace. There were hard limits on the size, and it took an absurd amount of effort — but even so, it was impressive.
Grrraaah!
While he was lost in thought, the black dogs slipped around the distortion field in front of him and lunged for his back. Jun didn't bother with a separate countermeasure. He simply expanded the warping field in every direction and snuffed out the ambush.
Modifying a spell already cast was supposed to be impossible — but for Jun, whose affinity with space had reached the level of a superpower, spatial magic was the exception.
After disposing of the black dogs sent reeling by the distortion field, Jun swept his gaze across the entire sparring hall.
As far as the eye could see, no one else was there.
To the naked eye, at least.
Jun turned his head to the left and fixed his stare on a particular empty stretch of floor. There was nothing there — nothing different from any other corner of the room. But with Radar, he knew exactly who was standing in that blank space.
"How long are you planning to hide?"