How to Spend a Holiday (6)
The street had fallen completely silent, every trace of life erased. Two shadows walked the dark night path.
“Haa, I’m not feeling this at all. Seriously.”
A languid sigh drifted through the air, followed by a string of grumbled complaints. The voice belonged to a young woman. Heavy makeup caked her face as she radiated pure discontent, turning to her companion.
“Don’t you think this is ridiculous? What are we, his personal servants? He snaps his fingers and expects everything to fall into place. Never once considers the trouble we go through.”
“…….”
“Hello? Are you even listening?”
The man who had stayed silent through the entire tirade finally frowned. His reply carried a faint edge of irritation.
“Keep it down. Once we get paid, we’re done with him. Whether he’s polite or arrogant doesn’t change a thing for us.”
“Still, there’s such a thing as basic courtesy. Logically speaking, after we’ve shown this much skill, shouldn’t he at least act respectful? If it were up to me, I’d—”
“This is the plan the Apostle prepared. Do not act on your own, no matter what.”
“I heard you, so stop glaring at me like that. Want me to smack you?”
Anyone who saw the pair would have wrinkled their nose at the frivolous, almost flippant atmosphere. It was the dead of night, long after the sun had set—the hour when most people finished their exhausting day and sought rest inside their homes. Few would look kindly on anyone stirring up trouble at such a time.
Yet if one looked a little closer, the strangeness became obvious. The woman’s voice was loud enough to draw stares even in broad daylight. The man’s low, heavy bass carried clearly, and neither of them made any effort to lower their volume. Nevertheless, not a single person on the street paid them any attention. Drunken wanderers, secret lovers, even the patrol guards searching for suspicious characters—all of them acted as if the two intruders simply did not exist.
This bizarre phenomenon continued even after they slipped into the mansion. The gatekeepers stood with eyes wide open, diligently scanning the area, yet they remained utterly motionless as the suspicious duo conversed right beside them, like nothing more than scarecrows.
Standing before the firmly locked main gate, the woman spoke.
“Your turn. Hurry up and open it, Mr. Master Key.”
The man stepped forward, ignoring her impatient tone. He produced no wire, no lockpick, and didn’t even bother examining the keyhole. He simply placed his hand quietly against the section where the lock mechanism sat.
Then, as if scooping up sand from a beach, he clenched his fingers. The thick iron gate let out a grotesque groan and crumpled inward. It was a grip that defied common sense—an outright supernatural phenomenon. The gate lost all function in an instant. The two stepped through the ruined entrance without hesitation.
The gatekeepers never moved. They simply continued their vigilant watch, eyes wide so they wouldn’t miss any “suspicious persons” that might appear. The woman chuckled at their almost admirable sense of duty. She wondered what expressions they would wear tomorrow morning when they discovered their master’s corpse and the brutally shattered gate.
The same process repeated several more times. No one stopped them. They reached the bedroom containing their target without the slightest interference.
They opened the door as naturally as if they belonged there—
Kwaaaang!
The explosion that followed shook the entire mansion.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
The deafening alarm bells rang out right after the blast. Servants and guards throughout the estate began moving frantically.
“Intruders! Catch the intruders!”
“Seal all the exits!”
Ligret thought the shouts from below sounded awfully familiar. Well, it was only natural—she had been on the attacking side in a very similar situation just days ago. The only difference this time was that she was the one defending.
“What the hell is this?!”
A sharp female voice cut through the smoke. Pretty relaxed for an assassin, Ligret thought as she stepped forward. In her hand she held the Ancient Guardian’s Greatsword. She had originally planned to use Vibros’s wooden club since their goal was to take the targets alive, but Chrome had stopped her.
“It’s fine if a couple of limbs fly off as long as they’re still breathing. Start by cutting them up. When you don’t know the enemy’s full strength, you hit them with your biggest move first. What if their head flies off? …Well, that just means they were unlucky. Not my problem.”
That rotten employer of hers spent every day spouting nonsense about how he was a civilized man who loved dialogue over violence and that he was an honest, conscientious merchant. Yet the things he did were far more brutal than anything the average street mercenary would attempt. And then he had the nerve to call her the violent one.
With a touch of misplaced frustration, Ligret swung her sword with all her strength. A solid impact traveled back through the blade from within the smoke. It wasn’t the soft resistance of flesh and blood, however. It felt like she had struck a steel plate.
Following pure instinct, Ligret jerked her head back. A massive palm swept past where her face had been.
Inside the settling dust, her eyes met those of a man in black clothes with his right arm extended. Ligret twisted her body in midair, using the momentum of her dodge to regain her stance, then swept her sword horizontally toward the man’s ankles as if harvesting wheat.
The reach of the greatsword made retreat impossible. Jumping upward to evade would leave him defenseless for the follow-up. The man’s response was to bend at the waist. He lowered his posture as if tying his shoelaces and reached downward. Between the gleaming blade and his ankles, his rough fingers positioned themselves like a shield.
Normally, both ankle and fingers would have been severed together. But the same anomaly occurred again. The sword that struck his fingers bounced away instead of cutting through.
So he had blocked the previous attack with that hand as well. At the same time, Ligret instantly understood the principle behind the phenomenon.
Body reinforcement through magic power literally enhanced human functions. Its effects went beyond simple physical improvement—it could accelerate wound recovery and heighten the senses. What the man had done was most likely skin hardening. And it was clearly not the kind of toughness achievable through ordinary magical reinforcement.
This was proof that he possessed Red Light, the magic color specialized exclusively in physical enhancement.
In that case, she simply needed to unleash a barrage of strikes too fast for both hands to block. The moment Ligret tightened her grip on the sword hilt—
The man vanished from her sight.
“Tch…!”
In the brief instant Ligret hesitated, a voice shouted right beside her ear.
“Right! Half-step forward!”
Her body moved before her mind could process the words. The sword she swung according to the instruction collided with an invisible “something.” Then came the next command.
“Pull back!”
Using the enemy’s posture she had glimpsed through the smoke and the feedback from their clash, Ligret guessed where his thigh would be and delivered a powerful kick. She used the recoil to throw herself backward. A white barrier immediately enveloped her.
Another explosion.
Shaaaaak!
If the first blast when the door opened had been fire, this one was ice. Ligret realized it was the result of Chrome releasing one of his Attribute Stones—specifically a mid-tier ice spell sealed inside an “Ice Crystal.” She quickly assessed the situation.
Thanks to the barrier Fiore had apparently deployed, there was no damage from the cold. At the center of the freezing storm, two transparent human figures hovered, their outlines faintly visible through swirling ice particles.
Shaaaaak! Shaaaaak! Shaaaaak!
“…He’s really going all out.”
Chrome was hurling Ice Crystals with reckless abandon, not even giving the enemy a chance to speak, let alone counterattack. Weren’t those things insanely expensive? When he had fought the princess, he had only used fragments and saved the actual crystals as trump cards, barely bringing two or three. Now he was throwing them around like cheap candy.
That Cube business of his must be turning a serious profit.
Unable to withstand the extreme cold, the two previously transparent figures slowly began to reveal themselves. Assassins wearing robes—likely one man and one woman. The moment they collapsed to the ground, Chrome finally stopped his barrage.
Or so it seemed. Instead, he grabbed a handful of smaller fragments—cheaper than the ones he had just used—and scattered them over the fallen assassins like throwing gravel. The merciless confirmation kill, combined with the sheer stinginess of even optimizing cost-effectiveness during said confirmation kill, left even the peerless Ligret shaking her head in disbelief.