Subjugating McHart (1)
"H-haha… Really, Sir Knight, you sure know how to ruin a good joke."
Faced with Ethan's uncompromising stance, McHart wore a hollow expression and forced out a laugh, straining to seem composed.
The man who had only moments before been smiling breezily at Ethan and me abruptly dropped the act, thrusting out his black grasping hands to resume the attack.
"Fine, if it's your dying wish to perish here together…! Then I'll gladly grant it!"
Having apparently given up on talking Ethan into leaving, McHart unleashed his signature ability without hesitation. Naturally, neither Ethan nor I had any intention of standing still and absorbing his onslaught, so we each took up our blades in both hands and the battle began in earnest.
"Hands of Darkness! Tear those accursed bastards to ribbons and devour them!"
-Swaaaaash!
-Shaaaaash!!
At McHart's command, five or six black grasping hands came lunging out of the shadows on every side. It was the same technique that had once ensnared us inside McHart's mindscape.
Back then, we'd only failed to counter it because we'd been trapped in darkness where we couldn't see an inch ahead of our own noses. McHart's shadow hands were, quite literally, a technique that conjured grasping hands out of shadow — which meant the larger the shrouded area, the better the technique functioned.
The colors around us had gone somewhat muted, but the gloom hadn't deepened to the pitch-black needed to summon his shadow hands — so in the current situation, we could see the hands approaching from a distance and still had time to react.
"Ethan! I'll take Formation Three! Anything coming from the front and from below is mine to block!"
"Got it, Lilith! Leave the rest to me!"
Given the nature of attacks bursting out of darkness, the ones flying in from behind did come a little more frequently. And because they emerged that much more abruptly, that position demanded even sharper reflexes.
That wasn't me dumping the more dangerous post on Ethan, mind you. It's simply that, judged purely on a swordsman's instant instincts, Ethan was far more capable than I was — so I entrusted him with the position I could rely on him to hold.
Conversely, my center of gravity sat slightly lower, which made dealing with enemies crawling along the ground easier for me. Form Three was the stance we used precisely for that purpose — standing ready against McHart's attacks.
We'd used it often enough, after all, back when we took the hands-on monster subjugation classes together, fending off waves of approaching monsters as a pair.
-Swish!
-Shaaash!
Once Ethan and I settled properly into our battle stances, his sword and my daggers began slicing the shadow hands apart one by one. Each of us held our assigned position firmly, focusing on defense against the incoming attackers for the moment.
There was truly no one in this world better suited to covering my back than Ethan. And I don't just mean in terms of raw strength — I mean suitability as a partner who had spent countless hours matching his rhythm to mine.
-Thwip! Crack!
My mana-infused dagger punched into one of McHart's black hands, and the light that spilled from the point of impact flooded the grasping fingers and dissolved them entirely.
That was the effect of Unquenchable Lantern, one of my second-tier auxiliary spells. Originally it was nothing more than a cantrip for lighting a dark road at night or illuminating a cave — but against an enemy with the dark attribute, it could occasionally serve as an offensive spell in its own right.
Learning it had burned through nearly all my remaining skill points, but it was a necessary expense. After all, I had to survive this encounter first before I could go about leveling up or investing in new skills.
After a few minutes of fighting like that, cutting down McHart's shadow hands had become almost routine — and at some point, the speed at which Ethan and I were cleaving them apart overtook the speed at which McHart could generate them.
A Sword Expert, after all, was more than capable of taking on a McHart of this caliber one-on-one. Add a mana tank like Lilith providing support on top of that, and the tide of battle was bound to shift in our favor.
No matter how favorable this space was for McHart's signature magic, five or six shadow hands simply weren't enough to subdue Ethan and me — even in his own domain. However much those inky grasping hands might look like some late-game boss technique (which, in fairness, it was), objectively speaking the raw power of each individual hand had never been all that impressive even in the original game.
It was, at its core, an ability specialized in restraining a captured target's movements and weakening them by siphoning off their mana. It was only difficult to deal with because of the Luminor Academy system's quirk of forcing a single player to control four party members at once without auto-pilot — if everyone simply did their own job properly, there was no way to lose.
-Shaaash!
"Nngh, you goddamn bastard…!!"
The expression on McHart's face, which had stayed deceptively calm as he pressed his attack, gradually twisted into panic. He seemed to be slowly realizing that unless he finished us off soon, the danger would flip around onto him instead.
Time was no longer on McHart's side. With his mana reserves, he couldn't sustain this space indefinitely while fending off the two of us, and before long the battle would end in our victory the moment his reserves ran dry.
Truthfully, by the time that happened, Gehmajoshigi-gwat would probably have arrived anyway. However tangled up he was with Antonio, the Hero's baseline physical abilities were more than enough to subdue a man like that with ease.
McHart had begun by summoning five or six hands at a time, but the density of his attacks kept thinning — and when the number he could call forth at once dropped to half, Ethan and I shared our next plan for finishing him off.
"Ethan, I think he's about at his limit."
"Understood. From here on I'll hold the line, so you take a moment to—"
"No, I don't mean I'm at my limit — I mean he is. His attacks are coming less frequently, and he can only summon half as many at a time now."
"Ah."
Ethan nodded, his face making it clear he'd caught my meaning, and we moved straight into the next phase of our plan to end McHart.
"We'll go with Formation Five. The same one we used when we hunted that hellhound pack in the Dark Forest."
"Confirmed, Lilith."
"And like I said before we started today's operation — don't just up and kill him."
"……I'll try."
Was he promising to try to subdue without killing, or to try holding back his own urge to kill on instinct? It was an answer that carried an oddly ambiguous double meaning.
Even though the whole operation was built around taking McHart down, cutting him down out of hand with a sword would unleash a fallout we couldn't possibly manage. McHart's death had to come only after he publicly revealed himself to be demonkind in front of everyone.
I had sketched out the whole sequence in my head — from the moment the operation began to the final blow — and gave Ethan the signal. He raised his two-handed sword and closed the distance to McHart in a single burst, and so began our "Formation Five."
-Tadadak!
"……!!"
Ethan charged in a straight line toward the man he needed most urgently to subdue. At the sight of him suddenly bearing down on him like a moth to a flame, McHart's eyes went wide for an instant.
But a heartbeat later, a sly smile crept across the man's mouth as he kept up his assault without an ounce of retreat — and from the ground along Ethan's path, countless black grasping hands erupted upward, reaching to snare him.
"Did you think closing the distance would favor you?! I had such hopes for you — a boy who could actually handle a sword — and it turns out you're nothing but a blockhead who can only swing one!"
McHart's signature ability grew stronger the closer it stayed to his own body. Like all demonkind's magic, dark magic as a whole reached its full power only in the immediate vicinity of the caster.
His ability in particular — conjuring hands from shadow that weakened the body — was exceptionally dependent on that principle. After all, a shadow always runs darkest nearest its owner's feet.
Even so, none of it gave McHart the advantage over Ethan.
No matter how much stronger the man became at close range, Ethan had been stronger than McHart to begin with — that fact accounted for it all.
-Shaaash! Swash! Shaaash!
Ethan carved through the black hands springing up at his feet with a Sword Expert's blade energy as he ran, so the summons McHart hastily threw together scattered back into wisps of shadow after barely a few sword strikes.
The boost he gained from narrowing the distance was no longer enough to bring Ethan down. That was simply what a Sword Expert's power meant within Luminor Academy.
Thirty meters. Twenty. Ten. The closer Ethan drew to McHart, the more ferocious the man's attacks became, and Ethan warded off or cut through the bulk of them as he pressed ever forward.
…For now, Ethan can handle him well enough on his own.
With so few openings for me to assist, every judgment had to be made with care.
If I threw in my support at the wrong moment, I could just as easily plunge Ethan into peril — and even setting that aside, I had only three chances, so each one had to be spent deliberately.
"Now — diiiie…!!"
-KWAAAAANG!
There it is…!
In a final desperate flare, a colossal grasping hand burst up as if shattering the very ground and lunged straight for Ethan's body — and the instant I read the attack, I hurled one of the daggers in my hand straight at it.
"Ethan! I've got that one!"
"…Got it!"
With Dagger Throw, the blade bearing the Blackwood crest flew toward the giant hand and slammed into the back of the shadowy fingers enveloping Ethan — and the moment Unquenchable Lantern, stored within the dagger, bloomed to life, the hand burst apart into scattered shards of shadow.
And then — the moment the gap between Ethan and McHart shrank to almost nothing.
"S-stay back…!! You monster…!!"
Summoning the last of his strength, McHart called up three more hands from the floor, and the final three summons threw themselves at Ethan from the front and both flanks to swallow him whole.
I had roughly predicted this final pattern, and I flung the two daggers I'd been holding in reserve, shouting to Ethan as I did.
"Cut down only the center one, Ethan!!!"
-Nod.
Ethan's head dipped once, the way a man does when he's caught the words.
It was hard to make out clearly from the back of his head at this distance — but I was certain that's exactly what it meant.
The two daggers flying from my hands each took down one of the flank summons McHart had called up, and true to my call, Ethan cleaved clean through only the center of the three.
-Shaaash.
Every monster standing between the man and Ethan lay toppled, and sword met body as Ethan and McHart collided in a single violent clash.
…And when all the fighting had finally come to an end, of the two men standing there, only one of them was still on his feet.
It was Ethan.