The World (6)
“Why, why, how could this be…! They aren’t your responsibility! Don’t fall for that damned bastard’s tricks!”
…Yeah, that’s more like it!!
Boom!
“Aaaaah!! What are we supposed to do now?!”
“What else? Hold out like this and—”
Boom! Another massive impact thundered through the air, and the entire building shuddered.
Crrrack. Along with the deep rumble of the earth, fine powder sifted down from the cracked walls and ceiling.
There was no choice but to endure. That was what Meister had been about to say when his mouth snapped shut as if glued together.
“…Before that, is the building going to collapse first?”
“Don’t even joke about that!! Getting buried alone with you is the last thing I want!”
“You think I want to share a grave with a moron like you?! On a normal day I wouldn’t even let the likes of you pay respects at my tomb!!”
They screamed at each other as if ready to grab each other by the hair—then gritted their teeth again as the griffin smashed into the building once more.
If they didn’t want the misunderstanding of being buried together in the same plot, there was only one option left.
“…No choice! We’ll just have to kill that thing and get out of here!”
“Fine, but weapons?!”
“Ha, don’t underestimate Meister’s workshop!”
Meister’s hands flew to his crafting tools—implements normally used for cutting metal, melting things down, or freezing them solid.
Boom boom!
“We’re all going to die at this rate!!”
“Shut up!!”
Clatter-clatter. Meister hastily tightened clamps and attached a makeshift handle, cobbling something together. Tap-tap. After a few strikes, flames spat forward like a sigh.
“Perfect—taste some fire!”
Fwoooooosh!
Meister poured the full stream straight at the griffin. Heat cascaded over the beak and head-feathers that had thrust into the building.
Kyaaaaak.
“Did it work?”
The griffin’s head withdrew outside for a moment.
And then…
KRAAAASH!
“Aaaaah! You just made it angrier!!”
“Damn it, the firepower’s weak because I slapped it together on the spot…!”
As if to say “don’t even dream of it,” the griffin rammed its body into the building. Even if it no longer shoved its head inside, it was clearly determined to bring the entire structure down on top of them.
Meister’s expression turned desperate.
“Shit, is there really nothing useful among all your precious inventions right this second?!”
“You’re one to talk when you aren’t doing a single useful thing— ah!”
In that instant Deathbringer’s words made Meister’s eyes light up. Caught at the edge of his pupils was a Meister’s Battery.
“Aaaargh! Why are you just standing there spacing out again?! If you don’t want your skull cracked, at least protect your head!!”
“Close that yapping mouth of yours for once!”
Deathbringer groaned and threw himself over Meister. Thud-thud-thud. Debris rained down on their heads from the ceiling.
Without Deathbringer’s cover, Meister’s crown would have been smashed by the falling stone shards.
“If that works… still…”
But Meister was not the sort of person who had cultivated enough humanity to offer thanks for every little thing.
Instead of expressing gratitude, he merely muttered while spinning his thoughts at high speed.
Getting us both out of here alive would be thanks enough, right? That thought was there, faintly. A splendid decision that never once asked the opinion of the person who actually deserved the thanks.
Kyaaaaaak!!
“Damn it!”
Meanwhile Deathbringer, still shielding Meister from the falling debris, packed another curse between his teeth and whipped his head around. The griffin’s massive bulk had just smashed into the building again and thrust its head inside once more.
The real problem was that the body-slam had finally torn a section of the wall down. The griffin kept ramming as if determined to punch a hole clean through the crumpled masonry!
“Hey, what the hell are we supposed to do about this?!”
If they left it alone, either the whole building would collapse or that wall would give way and the griffin would come barreling in. One of the two.
And neither ending looked good for them.
Deathbringer knew it and snatched up the flame-thrower again. He knew the firepower was lacking, but in a pinch even gums were better than nothing.
“Answer me, you crazy mage bastrrrrd!!!”
With a sound like a crow’s cry, Meister shot to his feet.
“Here like this! Here like this! Done?!”
“Yeah. Done, you bastard!”
“Then hold the line exactly like that!”
“What, you son of a bitch?!”
“I’m going to blow that damned bird-brain away, so buy me some time!”
“Say that from the start! You cut out half the words just because you think you’re smart, you son of a bitch!”
Still, a new way to break the stalemate seemed to have appeared. The claim that he would blow the bird-brain away gave Deathbringer a tiny spark of hope.
KRAASH!
…Even if it remained anyone’s guess whether the damned ink-stained craftsman would blow the bird-brain away first or the bird-brain would punch through the wall and shove them down its throat.
“Eat shit, you demon-spawn!”
But they were already (forcibly) in the same boat. With the threat of sinking right in front of their noses, even if trust was thin they had no choice but to cooperate if they wanted to live.
Deathbringer, who absolutely did not want to die on the same day as Meister, sprayed flame exactly as instructed.
Kyaaaaak!!
The griffin that had been thrusting its head and forelegs through the hole like a cat trying to snatch a mouse screamed.
Deathbringer had deliberately aimed for the softer-looking flesh, so the reaction was even better.
Boom! Crash!
Yet even with feathers singed and tender skin burning, the griffin showed no intention of giving up.
No—it only charged more fiercely. Having nearly had its eyeballs cooked, it looked less angry and more consumed by pure malice. Its hawk-like yellow toes splayed wide, black talons gleaming wickedly.
Boom boom!
In the meantime the already cracked and hole-riddled wall shattered further under the beast’s frenzy, doubling the size of the gaps.
If Meister had not reinforced the inside of the walls with rebar for workshop security, the impact would have punched straight through long ago.
Psshahh, cough, cough.
“What the hell is this!? Why’d it stop?!”
Something had gone wrong; the scrap-metal contraption spewing flame had suddenly gone dead. Deathbringer thumped its casing a few times, but that was all.
After a few more weak coughs of fire it simply died, as if it had fulfilled its mission. “Uwaaaaah!!” Weaponless, Deathbringer screamed.
Boom boom!
The griffin’s momentum only grew. With the heat from inside gone, it began boring through the hole even more tenaciously.
Thud!
“S-shit, fine! Let’s see who dies first, bird-brain!!”
Barely dodging the griffin’s talons, Deathbringer snatched up his dark sword with the desperation of a man ready to die. “Even if I die I’ll rip your throat open first!!” The pure, stubborn roar seemed to have some effect—the griffin pulled back a little.
Ssskrt.
Or perhaps it was the damage from the clashing talon and dark sword. The griffin eyed the sharp gash on its foreleg warily and kicked the wall with its hind legs.
“Damn Master Craftsman! How much longer?!”
“Almost done!”
While Deathbringer threw everything he had into plugging the entrance, Meister had not exactly been sitting idle either.
Clunk, clunk.
He was gathering every scrap of metal and piece of equipment in the workshop into a single apparatus.
“What the hell is that?!”
“A one-use item worth six hundred ten million gal.”
Add up the purchase prices of every piece of equipment used in it and you would get roughly six hundred ten million. And if it performed exactly according to the theory he had just cooked up, that griffin’s head would fly off—and the entire heap of equipment would melt along with it.
“Shit, ridiculously expensive…”
“Still cheaper than my life.”
But equipment like this was trivial compared to everything he still intended to accomplish.
Meister ruthlessly fed every single item he had carefully accumulated over more than a decade into the build. Stripping outer casings for parts alone, using outer casings as mounts—somehow he assembled something enormous.
Clang.
“Good. Done.”
“It’s ready?”
“When I give the signal, flatten yourself on the ground. It’s the same thing I fired from the walls earlier.”
“Shit, you said that one cost thirty million gal to make.”
“Plus a full year of work. In that year we could get eaten a thousand times over. You want to wait?”
“No.”
People of the world rarely realize it, but being able to substitute money for time is a kind of luck. Normally nothing is more precious than time itself.
“All right, you parentless bird-brained idiot. You forced me to melt equipment that was like my own children, so I’ll melt your neck for you.”
With those words Meister slotted the Meister’s Battery into the final circuit. The battery he had been shaking vigorously earlier now glowed with blinding brightness.
KRAASH!
“So open that shitty maw of yours! I’ll shoot the light of a lifetime straight past your throat!”
At the same instant the wall finally gave way and the griffin thrust its head right in front of them.
“Die.”
The moment Meister pulled the trigger, a massive pulse of mana tore straight through the griffin’s open mouth.
A beam of light that melted everything in a straight line blasted from the earth up toward the sky.
.
.
.
Thud, thud, thud!
“Ha, it worked.”
“Holy shit. It finally worked?”
One wall had been demolished by the griffin, the beam had been unleashed, and the shock had shaken the ground once more.
The fragile building finally dropped its ceiling; Deathbringer and Meister, who had flattened themselves under the collapsing roof, barely crawled free of the rubble.
“Hah. Next workshop, I’m designing the foundation myself from the start.”
“Please do. So this never happens again.”
Fortunately the whole structure had not come down—only the ceiling had been torn away. Otherwise they never would have crawled out.
“Damn it.”
Still, that was only the silver lining of a disaster, not pure luck itself.
Meister grimaced at the workshop, now even more of a wreck thanks to the fallen ceiling. Even after cleaning up the damage, he doubted anything would be left.
“Whoa…”
Deathbringer, on the other hand, was marveling at something else. The first thing that greeted him the moment he shoved the debris aside was the griffin’s corpse with a clean hole punched straight through it.
“A perfect round hole…”
It looked exactly like a cookie cutter pressed into dough. The head had completely vaporized, and a circular mark remained on the remaining torso.
Not only the griffin’s body—the buildings too. Though the light had been too bright to watch with the naked eye, a trench had been carved exactly along the beam’s trajectory.
Meister’s workshop, the building across the street, the one after that—everything!
“…Wouldn’t this be effective even against a Great Demon?”
“No idea. I never tested whether this is stronger than the wall version, and I never properly measured the wall version’s power either.”
How could you measure power when every shot burned money like crazy? Still, this one felt stronger than the wall-mounted version.
Because the mana inside the battery alone had seemed insufficient, he had jammed in seven precious mana-amplification devices—worth at least three hundred million gal altogether.
“…It’s still alive?”
“What, shit?!”
“Not the griffin. This.”
“Scared the hell out of me!”
While Deathbringer jumped back in fright from trying to poke the griffin, Meister fished something out of the bubbling molten metal.
Most of the apparatus had melted as the price of firing the mana cannon, yet a few salvageable pieces remained.
“Five… not bad…”
Three of the amplification devices looked ready to die any second, two were more or less intact. Two had completely melted.
Still, wasn’t this practically a luxury? He had been prepared for all seven to melt without complaint.
“This one’s okay… and this…”
Crouching stingily among the scrap and digging a little further, he discovered that the key components had surprisingly all survived.
Their condition was… not great, but at least they were usable right now.
“If I’m lucky I might even get one more shot out of it.”
Of course, that was a very big “if.” Whether it would actually fire again was another story.
In magic engineering, equations that flew on wings in theory had a habit of spinning their necks around and crashing the moment they hit the real world.
“…Is that for real?”
“Not certain. There are too many parts that wouldn’t be surprising if the circuits melted right this second.”
Better to give up cleanly than stake their lives on that kind of uncertainty. And there was no way they could haul all of this when they rejoined the city forces.
Meister packed only the purification device he had originally come for and a contingency weapon—a fire poker—then prepared to leave.
“What are you doing? If you’re planning to live here—”
“Then can you finish that and give it to me?”
“What?”
“You said it might fire one more time.”
“I clearly said it wasn’t certain. And even setting that aside, why the hell would I give it to you?”
Even half-ruined pieces could be repaired with time and used again. Did the idiot have any idea how much that was worth?
Meister’s mouth, about to say exactly that, snapped shut a second later.
“I want to hit the demon with one shot.”
…That was a rather startling answer. Returning to the walls was pointless—they already knew this weapon wouldn’t work on that monster… Wait. Could it be?
“…You’re saying you’ll go to where that fire giant is?”
“Yes.”
Deathbringer began gathering the equipment Meister had left behind. The rough handling that risked breaking everything was secondary; the sheer absurdity of it was what stunned him.
“You’re going to a death trap? Are you insane?”
“If anyone dies it’ll be me, not you. I’m going alone, so just make it for me.”
“Crazy bastard…”
Had the moron forgotten that both the labor and the materials all came from him? Of course the risk of actually carrying the finished product to the demon would fall entirely on the other man…
“Why the hell there?”
“The softie—no, the Hero went there.”
Watching him fumble was already irritating enough; Meister went back into the ruined building and snatched the pieces out of Deathbringer’s hands.
Deathbringer, realizing that leaving it to him was better than an amateur’s clumsy fingers, handed everything over without protest.
“The Fighter’s body is quick, so I trust she can pull out if things get truly dangerous… but the Hero doesn’t have that.”
There were times when, despite the full plate, she moved surprisingly fast… but that was only by ordinary standards. Compared to the Demon Knight or Berserk, the Inquisitor was ultimately slow.
“Plus… for some reason, the fact that a demon came after us means demons have already spread inside the city. In that case, rather than leaving the Hero pinned down over there, finishing this fast and rejoining the city forces is best.”
Moreover the Inquisitor possessed the ability to protect large numbers of people with an all-around barrier.
It wasn’t that he thought Berserk was less worth saving than the Inquisitor—realistically, the Inquisitor could help far more people right now.
“So hurry up and make it. I’ll put one round into the Great Demon’s skull and bring the Hero back.”
Despising himself for being weak enough that he had to set priorities on whom to save, Deathbringer finished speaking.
Meister’s eyes grew deep and still.
“Crazy bastard.”
“Shit, you’re one to talk?”
“Even if I make it, do you really think you can fire it?”
“Just teach me!”
“What’s the chance it breaks on the way there? What then? Don’t tell me you want me to teach you every repair method one by one?”
“Then what the hell am I supposed to—”
“Rather than cram that into your stupid skull, I’ll just fire it myself.”
Meister thought with a rational mind.
This was pure insanity.
“And if you really want to help, you should be doing something more efficient, you moron! Crack the vault deeper inside! Flood that whole district by bursting the waterways!”
It really was pure insanity.
There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding.
I don’t feel responsibility toward them the way one of the voices claimed. Still less am I stepping forward because I think I have to take responsibility.
Yeah—me being strong and me needing to save them are completely separate matters.
“Then why…!”
So if I have to classify it, this is roughly a matter of duty. Or goodwill. Kindness.
My own morality that says this is right, that simply cannot turn away from them.
“That’s…”
Ha, look at the little saint. Well, right now that’s a relief.
“But…!”
Ah, that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say to the lot of you. I’m a bit relieved there is a way home… but that doesn’t mean I’ll just let you off for putting me through all this hell.
“……!”
Just wait. Once the immediate fire is out I’ll wring every last hidden detail out of you—who you are, why I ended up here, everything.
So don’t even think about hiding anything more.
Ha, do whatever you want.
“You, you… why…?”
I pushed aside the sneering voice and left only the tearful one, smiling faintly.
I know it’s foolish. But if there’s a home I can return to, then even if it’s hard for a while longer, moving further and saving people is the right thing. It’s the right thing to do.
There are so many people I can save just by pushing a little harder.
“Hnn…”
At the awkward words I muttered, teardrops pattered down onto my cheeks. It was strangely comforting.
I didn’t know why you had stayed silent all this time, but at least you were someone who could cry for me.
“I wasn’t supposed to bring you here… you, you…”
Because there was someone who could voice the grief I couldn’t even spit out myself…
That, more than anything, was a true comfort.