Prepping the Run (12)
“How much longer will you just stand there, cowering? Fighting like this is no different from beating a scarecrow.”
The skeleton's voice dripped with venom—my taunts had clearly stung it.
Sure, the words stoked my temper too, since I was the one stuck blocking, blocking, and blocking yet again while that thing rained down a mad flurry of sword strikes. But unfortunately, I couldn't argue with it.
Because that was simply the reality of the situation.
Quite a lot of time had passed since the battle began, and yet I was still doing nothing but defend.
There were two big problems.
“Where has the majesty of the trial gone, I wonder? Were you truly a miracle sent down by the gods?”
The first was that fighting the skeleton after the trial was a completely different beast from clearing it.
The trial had looked much the same as what I'd watched through a monitor. The screen had simply become reality.
The opponent's movements. His habits. The types of attacks he unleashed. His feints and intentions. All of it had been exactly as I remembered. And the current me had the ability to recreate my past madness—all I'd needed to do was display the skills of a true rotten-water veteran.
But the battlefield before me now bore no resemblance to the one I remembered.
I had faced the post-trial skeleton countless times. I had every one of his patterns memorized by heart.
The first few exchanges, my knowledge had lined up perfectly. If not for the skeleton's uncanny counters, I might even have been able to decide the match right then and there.
But at some point, everything changed.
The skeleton began responding differently.
Shifting from what I knew. To what I didn't.
And just like that, all my veteran knowledge had been rendered useless.
“What is this? Backed into a corner, has even that nimble tongue of yours finally fallen silent? How very like a little brat.”
The second problem arose once my knowledge was dismantled and I was driven onto the back foot: there was no opening to exploit.
My fundamental strategy against an equal or stronger opponent was to endure until an opening appeared.
It was true that my skills were growing by leaps and bounds—but even so, I'd only been at this for about a year. My raw experience was inevitably lacking, so if I tried to fight a superior opponent head-on and honorably, the fight would naturally tilt against me.
That was why I preferred to hide behind my shield, bide my time, and pounce the instant a decisive opening materialized, ending the fight in a single breath.
The Mesugaki skill—a blessing and a curse all at once—happened to be specialized at prying openings out of opponents, and the shield-bearer's combat doctrine Halbae had drilled into me followed the same logic. So I had stuck to this strategy without fail.
And in truth, the strategy had never failed me.
If I could withstand an opponent's attacks, and through them carve out an opening, I would always find the path leading from the fight's end to victory.
But this battle was unlike any I'd fought before.
Was it impossible to withstand his attacks?
No.
What drove the skeleton calling itself Garad was, like all the other skeletons, originally Karon's mana.
But that mana had vanished with the end of the trial—which meant the power animating him now was not Karon's mana, but the energy of the Evil God.
And the Evil God's power, not yet fully resurrected, was inferior to Karon's mana. The strength coiled within the skeleton now was nowhere near what it had wielded as the trial's guardian.
That wasn't all.
The skeleton was resisting the Evil God's energy. The fact that he spoke with his reason intact, and did not take life as he was commanded, made it obvious.
So a skeleton laboring under these two constraints—
his power was incomparably weaker than it had been lurking at the dungeon's end.
Therefore, I could endure. My shield. Ankir. It could turn aside the skeleton's sword without difficulty.
And did the taunts fail to land?
No.
The power of the Mesugaki skill was absolute.
The skeleton's jaw rattling every time a taunt left my lips. The sword strikes growing fiercer. The hands—devoid of a single muscle—visibly tensing with effort. The surging exhilaration filling my body.
Everything proved the provocation was working exactly as intended.
Which meant the strategy that had delivered me countless victories was working—
and yet, with every exchange, the frustration swelling in my chest only grew larger.
“...Ugh♡ Here I am, suffering to keep down the revolting stench of a rotting corpse, and you keep making me open my mouth?♡ Do you want to watch me throw up what I ate♡? I thought you were a pervert, but you're the truly disgusting kind♡ Don't tell me you're planning to lick the floor later?♡”
“...Tch.”
I answered his provocation with one of my own while running through the situation in my head.
What's the problem?
Why can't I find an opening to exploit?
Why am I not being given a chance?
Am I playing it too safe?
Against someone this much stronger than me, do I need to gamble more?
Just as my mind was brimming over with questions, the path of Garad's descending blade carved itself sharply into my vision.
That one.
That swing—I could deflect it. Definitely.
Action outran thought. As if possessed by something, I moved my shield.
Ting! A crisp, unmistakable sensation of a parry rang up through the shield.
A chance. An opening.
At last, this was the moment.
Unconsciously I slid my left foot forward, reading the situation.
The sword that had been knocked wide was already recovered.
His stance, too, was unchanged—poised and ready for everything, same as always.
The giddy rush froze solid in an instant.
He isn't reacting to a crisis.
He's swallowing the prey that crawled into his mouth.
The moment that judgment landed, the Iron Wall shrieked a warning of danger—
and I obeyed its instinct, hauling my shield up in a desperate rush, but—
a shield raised in panic mid-attack was slow, and it wasn't enough.
If I blocked the strike as I was, my balance would collapse and leave me completely exposed to his follow-up.
I'd be forced to defend from a broken stance.
...And if that happened, I would surely crumble.
So what do I do?
What surfaced from my brain—burning through itself at desperate speed—was something I'd learned during training at the Aln household.
Sometimes it's better to be sent flying cleanly than to block clumsily.
Deliberately hopping backward, I took the skeleton's sword head-on.
My lightened, airborne body was easily knocked away by his strength; spinning once through the air and reclaiming my stance, I found myself a good distance away from the skeleton.
I'd successfully reset a situation that should have turned disastrous.
“First I find you skilled at hiding, and now at fleeing as well. Are you a gutter rat, perchance?”
“Sorry~♡ It seemed like the sad little dog-bones buried in the gutter were lonely, so I tried to come say hi, but the smell was way too gross♡ My bad♡ I'm a small, adorable noble young lady, you see♡ Not like some sewer-dweller like you♡”
“...Truly, that silver tongue of yours.”
While needling his nerves, I took stock of the situation.
What I could feel, above all, was that his skill far exceeded mine.
Blade mastery accumulated over long ages. Combat logic forged across countless battles. Both of them pressed down on me, utterly flawless.
If he hadn't been weakened when the Evil God seized control of the dungeon—
and if that skeleton hadn't been pouring his strength into resisting the Evil God's energy—
could I really have held out against him at all?
The answer to the question I posed myself arrived before long.
No.
I wouldn't have lasted even a minute before being smashed to pieces.
And soon after, fear would have crawled up my spine and seized my brain.
The only thing left for me to do would have been clutching my head and sobbing, begging for my life.
That's how big the gap is.
That's the size of the chasm.
Chewing that fact over in my head, a laugh slipped out of me.
If a weakened copy is this strong, how terrifyingly strong was the real hero?
Same as when I'd felt it watching Halbae work his miracle—the road ahead was long. So, so long.
With that thought, I gripped the shield's handle once more.
The instant the thought passed, Halbae—who had been silent all this time—spoke up.
'That's true, but.'
What I had to do right now wasn't beat the skeleton. It was to endure.
Once Luka was subdued and Carl returned to join the fight, he could handle the weakened skeleton. All I had to do was hold the line until then.
'No. I'm not quite so deluded about my own abilities.'
'Because I want to feed him one good hit with my own two hands.'
Halbae. You wouldn't know this, but that skeleton cost me a whole month of my life.
Do you have any idea how much stress I was under back then?
I'm serious—the stress literally punched a hole in the top of my head?!
After endless effort, I finally cleared the trial and the hole got patched up, but that feeling of helplessness still lives vividly in my memory.
And now, every emotion I'd felt since starting this bout with the skeleton was cut from the same cloth.
Helplessness. Frustration. Impatience. Irritation. Rage.
If all I did was hold out until Carl arrived, those feelings would never go away.
I'd stay frozen at zero wins, one loss.
Never even granted the chance to flip that score, doomed to chew on that defeat forever.
I don't want that.
I absolutely don't want that.
If I have to watch that skeleton go down swinging and victorious, I'll get so heated I might actually collapse!
So I have to land a hit.
For the sake of my own peace of mind.
So I can scream you're not that tough after all!
<...Khhah! Kahahaha!>
Hearing me out, Halbae fell silent for a heartbeat—then burst into the heartiest laughter I'd ever heard from him.
What? Halbae? I am being completely serious right now? This is not laugh-timing?
'What on earth are you talking about?'
Oh. Wonderful that you've had a change of heart and all.
But there's something weird mixed in there, isn't there?
You're telling me the reason I managed to hold on just now wasn't my skill, but that mutt's chew-toy of a dog-bones going easy on me?
I settled my stance as I listened to him.
For all that the fight had dragged on, my body was still in near-perfect condition.
Which is why I'd assumed that with an opening, I could land a hit—and now I learn even that wholeness was only because my opponent had been holding back.
Haah. Ugh. That is genuinely humiliating.
And also.
Really.
Really.
REALLY infuriating.
'Huh? But—'
He was right.
I'd felt stifled. Powerless.
My doubts had only multiplied as time wore on.
Halbae recited it all back as if reading my mind, then answered in a voice brimming with absolute confidence.
'...Then what exactly is the problem?'
I had attempted attacks countless times by now, and every single one had come back a failure.
Never mind when my game knowledge still worked—even after that, I couldn't so much as threaten him.
'I've been ready the whole time.'
Halbae praised me warmly for that—and then his voice took on a note of laughter.