Life Is Cruel (5)
The Inquisitor watched the departing figure without a word of protest, her head bowed under the weight of guilt. It was the guilt of having sent him alone into the most dangerous place of all — of being unable to help him and still letting him go.
Perhaps it was the knowledge that he never looked after himself, and that she had driven him toward death anyway. Or perhaps it was simply the unease her senses kept screaming at her.
"Focus."
Shhk!
Deathbringer, alternating between spear thrusts and bowshots, tossed the word her way. Apparently her lack of concentration had been obvious enough to notice.
"…Understood."
"And this time, there was no other choice. So don't take it too hard."
"……!"
Was he some kind of mind-reader? Or was she simply that easy to read?
Half-convinced, the Inquisitor unleashed her Holy Power. The creatures clinging to the wall were shoved back in a single sweeping surge.
The enemy approaching from afar looked overwhelmingly powerful — she couldn't afford to overdo it. But neither could she sit idle.
"Do you really think that?"
Doubt still gnawed at her, so she asked, seeking certainty.
Deathbringer answered with a dry, unreadable face.
"That's just how reality works. The enemy didn't only show up in one place, and it's not like you're the fastest runner around."
"The Demon Knight rode a horse this time, though…"
"More importantly, the Demon Knight doesn't belong on this wall."
Yes. This wasn't a situation where the Demon Knight absolutely had to go there — it was a situation where the Inquisitor absolutely had to stay here. The Demon Knight went because he was the one left over.
The more he spoke, the more she swallowed hard. Deathbringer, by contrast, delivered his conclusion with absolute indifference.
"Why…?"
"If you need someone who can cover a wide area, that's you. If you need someone whose combat power doesn't drop when fighting alongside crowds of people, that's also you."
The one with superior combat endurance. The one least restricted by the shape of the battlefield. The one who could slash casualties simply by reinforcing and healing others. All of that was the Inquisitor.
"I don't know what that demon that appeared behind us really is, but the damage you can prevent by staying here and fighting will outweigh whatever you'd reduce by going after it. Well, if it comes down to having to kill that giant thing, that might be a different story… Then again, who knows? Maybe it's something that doesn't need killing. Though the odds of that are pretty slim."
The Inquisitor's face flushed with a surge of emotion. Of course it did. Separate from the reality that left her no other choice, her guilt still remained.
"I see…"
"And even if you hadn't recommended it, he would've gone anyway. Let it go."
"Still… it grieves me that the only thing I can do for him is send him to the battlefield."
She shaped a vast golden barrier and slammed it down across the sea before the walls. Demons leaping upward were forced under the water, and quite a few of them died in the process — impaled on spines, or roasted dry by magic that met no resistance on the way down.
"Same here."
Even so, the waves only grew fiercer, as if they meant to crest the walls themselves.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
"……!"
"Would you forget your own head if it wasn't attached to your neck and shoulders? You just leave the weapons I provided you without even maintaining them?"
And then a sound far more raucous than any magic item used so far rang out. Chrrr-rrk. Something metallic spun with a bizarre, intricate clatter — the noise of a long, cylindrical hunk of steel.
"What, first time seeing physical magic?"
And the person standing casually atop it, picking a fight as naturally as pouring water, was—
Click. Having bitten something free, the figure tossed a round object, then swept their hair back. Thwack. Next came the middle finger, raised high.
Hisssss!
"Drop dead, you fish bastards."
The Merman struck by the round object melted on the spot.
"……."
"……."
…Wasn't that the kind of thing only officer-class soldiers used, and only rarely, with extreme caution? The contents melted skin on contact, so they always threw them with the utmost care. Never that roughly.
Faced with a sight they had never imagined, an awkward silence settled between the Inquisitor and Deathbringer.
KRAAANG!
Cheongsanho's escort widened his eyes at the sudden interloper.
"You—!"
His mouth reflexively demanded the stranger's identity, but his hands were already scrambling to gather the fallen Cheongsanho. The Great Sage — tall yet stick-thin — was scooped up into both arms.
"Go."
Meanwhile, the one who had intervened jingled her single earring. Her loosely unbound hair was the color of tarnished gold.
"I have no intention of fighting while protecting someone."
"…I don't know who you are, but a demon is conducting a ritual deeper inside. It must be stopped. Please."
"Understood."
She drew a deep breath and let it out. Then she tightened the bandages wrapped around her hands and arms — meant to prevent unnecessary wounds, or to stop her grip from slipping.
"Those clothes of his won't tear or burn! Keep that in mind as well…!"
The added information would help her decide how to fight going forward.
She raised an eyebrow at the mention of such peculiar clothing. Something curious, she figured — like the kind of gear the Demon Knight wore.
KRAAANG!
"And what are you supposed to be?"
In the meantime, the secretary had shoved aside the rubble of a collapsed building and returned to his position.
However far that single blow had driven him, several more holes gaped in the space behind him. Stone debris tumbled in cascades toward the direction he'd been pushed.
"A northern barbarian?"
Mm. That was exactly the kind of comment she had avoided dressing this way for… and yet she was hearing it the moment she put the clothes on. She rolled her neck from side to side.
Not that she particularly cared.
"Right now, being the hunter here to kill you is more than enough."
"Is that so? A long tongue alone won't accomplish anything in this land."
Her feet scraped into position. The thick cloth of her garments billowed — then, with a bang, she vanished.
Fwoom-fwoom-fwoom.
New signal flares painted the sky several times over. With another explosive crack, she reappeared — suddenly, right in the center of the path leading to the secretary. The heavy fabric draped over her body fluttered.
He wasn't completely unable to react. The secretary swung a hand a half-beat late. The sight of that enormous hand carving heavily through the air was genuinely awe-inspiring.
Tak.
But if it doesn't connect, it means nothing.
She timed her leap perfectly, vaulting over the hand and planting a foot on the secretary's shoulder. Then she drove her heel into the back of his neck.
They'd said the clothes wouldn't tear or burn — but whether they could absorb physical impact entirely was something she needed to know.
"Ghk!"
The secretary hastily thrust his other hand backward to guard.
Even so, while the clothes bore not the slightest mark, she confirmed that the blow had made him stagger forward.
So pushing and pulling force still got through.
She sorted out her approach going forward. Bare-handed as she was, cutting and tearing attacks were off the table — blunt force and joint locks would be better.
She leaped down to the far side, then spun without giving herself a moment to breathe and drove straight into the secretary's guard.
It was a deliberate play on the fact that hands that enormous struggled to respond once you were inside skin-contact range.
The secretary's hawk-sharp eyes twisted. He flung an arm out as if to shake her off. Flattened to the ground with a flexibility that belied her frame, she sprang up the instant the arm passed over her — almost as if she were flying.
Thud!
Her knee drove cleanly into his solar plexus.
It worked. His reaction was muted compared to an ordinary person's, but the pain on his face was unmistakable.
Armed with that certainty, she moved her fist next. She set her index finger slightly proud of the rest, so the impact would land as a sharp, concentrated point.
But the strikes aimed at the space between his collarbones, his Adam's apple, and his nose met something other than solid impact.
A barrier had formed over his face in an instant.
There was a condition to it, apparently — one of the gems on the secretary's ear-cuff earring shattered.
KRAAANG!
The staggering figure shrank his swollen arms, inflated his legs, and stomped the earth. The canal's edge crumbled, releasing Demon Energy forward in a wave.
That was a technique the Demon Knight used from time to time. She stepped back, thin cuts etching themselves across the surface of her skin.
Separately — what were the activation conditions for that barrier? Its duration? The limit of what it could stop? The connection to the gems shattering on the earring?
Shff.
The secretary's feet settled back into place. Only after touching the earring hanging from his ear did the realization hit him, and his face twisted violently.
"A people who do nothing but fight…!"
Said like that, it was neither more nor less than a compliment.
She moved with fluid ease around his enormous hands, kicking a pebble up from the ground with her toes.
The stone flew straight for his face. The secretary slid backward and batted it aside with a hand.
"You—!"
But doing it only once would have been a waste.
She launched five or six more pebbles in succession, then set her hand on the building right behind her. In the structure collapsed by the earlier fighting, a usable weapon was conveniently waiting.
"……!"
Thud!
A wooden beam that had once been a pillar — now jutting alone from the rubble — was swung like a weapon.
He clearly hadn't expected it. The secretary scowled as he blocked. Crack! The wooden beam shattered in a single stroke, and the remaining length went flying toward his head.
"You—!"
He blocked that too. Even with protective gear, it was an ordinary person's reflex — to automatically defend anything coming at the head.
That made things convenient. While the secretary's own hands blocked his vision, she closed the distance and whipped a roundhouse kick into him. Her heel struck his temple.
Clink.
Another gem on the ear-cuff broke.
So impacts delivered to the head were absorbed by the gems instead, and once the load exceeded what they could bear, they shattered… Left and right together, four remaining.
"……!"
Whether impact was dispersed or nullified entirely produced very different shapes of a fight.
Knowing that, she withdrew without a shred of lingering attachment.
The secretary realized another gem had broken and twisted his face again. Not her concern.
Like a hunter who had found her method, she relentlessly targeted his head. Even if he realized it, it didn't matter.
"Aaaargh!"
She was aiming there because it was the easiest way to kill him — but there were plenty of ways to torment a person without killing them.
"Did you think protecting just the weak point was enough?"
For instance: breaking fingers. Using joints to snap an arm. Crushing an ankle with a rock until the bone showed.
By focusing just enough on his head to make him defend it so blatantly, she disabled other parts of him in an instant. Even when he inflated his body with Demon Energy, it didn't matter.
From what she had observed, he could only reinforce one area at a time — and under conditions like that, she was more than capable of breaking a person's limbs.
Clink!
The last gem shattered.
"I… I…"
Thud!
Her patience shattered with it. She floored him in a single motion and lifted her foot to crush his skull.
KRAAANG!
She would have done exactly that — if the red liquid her homeland called "flowing fire" hadn't erupted and come surging toward her.
Instead of delivering the finishing blow, she chose self-preservation for the fight still ahead.
In that interval, the erupting red liquid coiled around the secretary's body. "N-no…!" A short scream, then the sound of something burning. A woman's shriek rang until the ears went dull.
"I-I'm sorry…"
"N-no…!"
The red liquid completely engulfed the secretary's body and melted it away.
Meanwhile, flames rose from a building littered with several corpses. A firestorm consuming the entire structure.
And from the entrance, a dense, black-red mass seeped out — thick enough that it looked ready to solidify into something pitch-black at any moment. When that red liquid hardened, it would probably look exactly like that.
Splash.
As if the heat meant nothing, a Shagi of a form she had never seen before walked across it. No — was it even a Shagi? Ears and a tail of the same material as its garments, which looked as though they had been poured from yellow-hot molten metal… could that still be called a Shagi?
Better to call it a demon.
She twitched her lips. Of course — no matter how the appearance had changed, a single thought was enough to place its identity.
This was the demon from before. The one she had failed to stop. The one she had been unable to stop.
"No."
If her heart had its way, she would have answered yes to the word rematch.
But she was still standing on the borderline — between Berserk and Weapon Master, between two yokes.
Still.
"But I will fight you."
So this could not be a rematch. A rematch would only be possible once she had cast off both yokes and left behind a single, true name.
"Even if it isn't a rematch, a fight can still decide a winner and a loser."
And she would not withdraw from this one without a struggle.
"Don't worry. I won't."
Even without revenge, she had a way to win.
"My role is just to buy time."
Yes. There was no chance they hadn't noticed the demon's presence. The moment they arrived, her victory was certain.