Enough of That — Die
“If you don’t want to die, crawl the fuck out right now!!!”
The instant Leon finished speaking, the beast’s massive form reached a house standing nearest the city walls.
It swung those nightmarish pincers in a wild, indiscriminate frenzy.
KRAAAAAAASH!!
The entire second floor of the house caught between its claws simply vanished. Wood and brick erupted in a glittering spray of debris. No human flesh, no blood, showed among the wreckage.
Perhaps that was why the creature did not stop.
KRAAASH! KRAASH! CRASH!
Like a dog digging for a bone buried underground, it flailed both forelegs with savage force and smashed the remaining first floor to splinters.
“……!”
Leon and Aria’s eyes flew wide as they grasped what the beast was doing.
Aria cast Blink at once and slipped free of Leon’s arms.
Leon surged forward again, driving his body past every limit of speed.
The beast’s rampage halted the moment it found something.
“Kiiiiiik!”
It let out a splitting cry, then lowered its head. A long tentacle stretched out toward a single point. At its tip—
“Kyaaaaaaaah!”
—a young man, a young woman, and a small child huddled together, clinging to one another. A family of three: husband, wife, and daughter.
“U-ugh…!”
The man dropped the crude wooden club he had been holding. The child burst into tears. The woman wrapped her arms around her husband and her daughter.
A terror beyond description crashed over them.
They had sealed every entrance to their house two and three times over, then hidden themselves in the safest, most secret cellar they possessed. Never in their wildest dreams had they imagined a monster that would tear the entire building apart.
“Uwaaaaaaah!”
Watching the tentacles advance, they could do nothing. They only wept and screamed. Their bodies had locked rigid, trembling, refusing to move as they wished. The fear of death had paralyzed their minds.
The grotesque bulk of the great beast was overwhelming, shattering. Against a creature that crushed houses like toys, what could mere humans possibly do?
They squeezed their eyes shut. They gripped one another’s hands one last time.
Slick tentacles began to coil around their bodies—
First Form — Yeomyeong
Dawn
A brilliant light of daybreak unfurled at that very moment.
It was a radiance no one should have seen—an evening glow denied them by two straight days of rain, a dazzling half-light that had no place in this hour or weather.
“……?”
They lifted their eyelids without thinking, and they saw.
“Kiiiiiiiiiiik!!!”
A bundle of tentacles, severed clean in half, went flying as black fluid sprayed. The beast spun about in panic. And behind it, the back of a boy holding a sword that burned with blue fire.
“……Ah—ah?”
A sight that made them doubt reality. Stunned, they remembered the voice they had heard only moments before.
I am Leon Crusif!
Crusif. Was there a single soul in the Empire who did not know that name? To commoners like them it had always felt impossibly high, impossibly distant.
Why on earth would someone like that be here?
I have come in person to purge the evil that festers in this place!
Could it be—truly?
“Kiiiiiiiik!”
The beast shrieked and fled.
“Ah, that fucking bastard.”
The boy muttered something crude. He bent his knees as if to give chase, then checked himself. Glancing back at the family, he spoke. For an instant his eyes flared with a blood-red light.
“Hey. You lot.”
“Y-yes?!”
“Until I take that thing down, stay clear and keep your distance.”
BOOM!
The words were barely out of his mouth before he vanished like the wind. Ordinary eyes could not even catch an afterimage. Only the blast of air that followed, the spray of dirt, and the deep crater left where he had stood proved he had ever been there at all.
They stood dumbfounded.
The casual certainty with which he declared he would kill that monster alone. And yet the superhuman skill and presence that made the claim entirely believable. The awe-inspiring combat of beings who stood so far beyond the realm of ordinary people—the kind they had only ever read about in books, heard of in stories, pictured in imagination.
The trembling in their bodies subsided. Their ragged breathing settled into something calm.
They staggered to their feet, climbed out of the building that had been reduced to nothing but rubble, and turned their faces toward the place where thunderous noise and light were erupting.
KRAAAAAASH—! RUUUUMBLE—!
“Kiiiiiiiiiiik!!!”
Far off, two figures vaulted across the city streets every time the light flared. One was the colossal, many-legged form of a writhing centipede. The other, impossibly small beside it, was a single human silhouette swinging a sword of azure flame, red eyes blazing like open fire.
They stood rooted to the spot, watching as if entranced.
Watching a hero stand against an evil beast.
Second Form, Variation — Cheonunjincheon
Thousand Clouds Advancing Heaven
KRADDDDDDDDD!
Dazzling trajectories fluttered through the air and drove into the beast’s black carapace. Cracks spiderwebbed across the shell; black fluid oozed out in thick streams. Half a dozen legs shattered into pieces and collapsed, formless.
CRACKLE-CRACKLE-CRACKLE!
Heaven’s judgment fell almost in the same breath. Forked bolts of lightning hammered every part of the creature without discrimination, a crushing force that seized its muscles and locked them rigid. The beast toppled from the burning rooftop, trailing acrid smoke.
“Kieeek……!”
It writhed on the ground like a worm. Leon, gliding downward with the Heaven-Shattering Sword reversed in his grip, studied the creature’s mouth carefully—then shouted.
“Aria!”
“Yes!”
ZIIIIIIIIING—!!!
An unknown wave of mana erupted from the tentacles and swept the area. It was a finely tuned pulse designed to rattle the skull and freeze the body solid—but Leon and Aria had already wrapped themselves in barriers. The wave could not pierce the rounded shields at all.
They had learned the counter after taking a few hits. There was a tell before the pulse fired: the tentacles would twist in a grotesque rhythm and flush with a strange color. Watch for that moment, and the paralysis could be avoided. The cost was that they still had to wait inside the barrier while the wave ran its course.
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!
The beast’s strategy of blasting the pulse the instant it was in danger and then fleeing was working. Time kept dragging on. For reasons of its own, the creature kept hunting for citizens to devour, and Leon and Aria kept intercepting it even as they gave chase.
By a rough count, nearly fifty buildings had already been reduced to rubble. And yet there had been no loss of life. Leon always arrived in time, and his earlier shout had done its work—citizens were emerging one by one from their hiding places and evacuating.
It would not last much longer. The beast’s mana pulse clearly had a hard limit. The intervals between blasts were growing longer; the effect itself was weakening. And under the relentless battering, the wounds accumulating on its body were multiplying. Its stamina was failing, and with it, its regenerative power.
“Ugh, this bastard, seriously.”
Leon waited for the aftershock of the pulse to settle, thoroughly sick of the drawn-out pursuit.
“We should hurry. There’s still no word from the other teams.”
Aria added the thought in a quiet voice, her eyes subdued.
“Yeah. Let’s wrap this up quick.”
And so, after the same sequence repeated several more times, the beast was at last driven into the central plaza—the very heart of Pribil, home to the clock tower, the tallest building in the city.
“Kiik, kiiik!”
It was a wreck. More than a third of its legs were gone. Black fluid poured from wounds across its entire body. Several segments of its rear had been severed completely. Even so, its will to live was extraordinary; it still thrashed in desperation.
It began to climb the clock tower with frantic purpose—higher, always higher. There was no rational reason to go up. It moved on nothing but the raw will to escape this place. The cold hunter’s cunning it had once possessed was gone without a trace. All that remained was a single animal clawing for life.
“Aria. Give me some footholds.”
“Yes.”
ZZZT-ZZZT-ZZZT!
Dozens of force fields, each just large enough for a single foot, materialized in front of Leon. Spaced wide, they formed a steep flight of stairs aimed at the summit of the clock tower.
Leon felt the end approaching. And he moved to see it through.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap!
He began to climb the path Aria had laid for him. At the same time, he set his sword in motion.
Third Form — Heogunilsa
Black Cloud, Single Strike
Lofty. Imperious. An elegant trajectory spun in a perfect circle. The way he stepped from foothold to foothold transformed into a refined dance. His figure, roaming the open air, performed a sword dance of absolute restraint.
In answer, the ambient energy began to gather at the tip of his blade. The trajectories embroidering the empty sky multiplied. The mana of the surrounding space compressed into a single point. A whirlwind of suction pulled everything inward.
The higher Leon climbed toward the heavens, the heavier the sword-pressure in his hand became. By the time he had ascended halfway up the clock tower, he was trailing a storm.
WHOOOOOOOOOOSH!!
The storm knew no satisfaction; it greedily swelled its bulk. The space around his sword warped visibly, and a blue vortex spun to an unbelievable size.
Then Leon raised the blade high overhead.
Even the dark clouds of the firmament began to draw near. The ink-black sky funneled toward a single point.
FLASH! Flash, flash—!
As if the sword itself had become a lightning rod, bolt after bolt crashed down upon the blade from the sky. With every strike, the power Leon had condensed only grew.
He reached the tip of the tower. The beast, having finally completed its climb, thrust its head up at the same instant—and Leon’s finishing sword was complete.
Lightning poured without pause, brightening the whole district as if day had broken. Thunder rolled and cracked as though it meant to split heaven and earth apart.
That wondrous spectacle unfolded at the highest point visible from anywhere in Pribil. Every citizen who had come outside was watching.
A colossal monster of hideous form—and before it, standing unshaken, Leon, bringing down a sword that had bound storm and sky alike.
KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH—!!!
It was a scene out of myth. An overwhelming majesty worthy of a true hero.
“……!”
The citizens’ eyes grew red. Their chests burned hot. Their arms rose into the air of their own accord, and from their wide-open mouths a great cheer tore free.
They were alive. It was over. All of it.
Tears of rapture and relief spilled down. The fear and terror that had nested in every heart—every last scrap of it—vanished without a trace.