A Deimos of His Own
CRACK-KOOM!
The emitter split clean in half under Arthur's blade.
"We did it! We actually did it, Simon!"
Arthur shouted with a beaming grin, but Simon's expression hadn't loosened in the slightest.
"Arthur."
"Yes?"
"Something's wrong with the emitter."
CRACK! SNAP!
The instant the device tore apart, a scarlet pulse erupted from the unstable red core at its center, which had been flickering erratically until that moment.
'!'
Simon felt every hair on his body stand on end. The wave was so powerful that even a human—no naga—could feel it tearing through him.
Fzzt! Zzt!
Then, as if its lifespan had finally run out, the emitter powered down completely and began belching foul black smoke. The crimson core crumbled to shards, its light fading away.
'What just happened?'
Simon swept his eyes over the surroundings. With the emitter generating the waves destroyed, the naga—cut off from their command structure—should have fallen into disarray.
-Kya-kakk!
-Ke-rururuk!
Instead, they had begun thrashing about even more violently. Nagas from far in the distance were swarming toward him and Arthur as well.
"Wh-what's going on? We destroyed the emitter for sure!"
Arthur shouted as he cleaved a naga in two.
"I don't know either!"
Simon kicked another naga away as he answered. Had there been some kind of mechanism built into the device? He couldn't pinpoint the cause, but one thing was certain—the moment it was destroyed, a pulse strong enough for a human to feel had ripped outward across the area.
"Simon! What do we do now— GWAH!"
VUUUUUUM!
Arthur yelped and dropped low. A massive scythe whistled past, shearing off a few strands of his red hair.
It was the Chaos Reaper Simon had summoned.
"GYAAH! Wh-what are you doing, Simon?!"
"Sorry! But I'm not doing this because I want to!"
The residual chaos in the magic circle had all but run dry, and the berserk Chaos Reaper had begun attacking allies along with enemies. Simon strained to hold the circle under control.
"Just keep your head down like that!"
As it happened, the timing worked in his favor.
Dodging the Chaos Reaper's assault, Simon manipulated the chaos magic circle fastened at his waist.
'Release!'
The Chaos Reaper's summon dissolved, melting away, and in the next instant his body burst into hundreds of streaks of chaos that shot into the sky.
A wide-area chaos bombardment spell, usable only by sacrificing the Reaper.
Simon Original — Chaos Flurry
"Arthur! Let's get out of here first and think after!"
Simon grabbed the back of Arthur's neck and kicked off the ground, sprinting.
"Yes? Wh-WAAAH!"
KWAKWAKWAKWAKWAKWAK!
Violet slashes came raining down across the entire area, bombing it mercilessly. Nagas were shredded apart by the blades, and Arthur flailed in alarm.
'Internal Jet-Black Eruption!'
Droplets of jet-black rolled down Simon's body. With the bombardment raging behind him, he slipped calmly away from the battlefield.
At that same moment, in the Deimos Museum.
"Damn it, now what?"
Malcolm—who had dissolved his ropes with Blood Poison and escaped—was staring out at the museum's exterior. He had told Simon where the emitter was, so there was no doubt the guy had gone and blown it up. And yet an even stronger pulse was now spreading across Parona, all the way out over the sea.
"Don't tell me…"
"That's exactly what it is, young master."
Malcolm whirled around in shock. A man in a tailored black suit stood with his head bowed.
"…Father sent you?"
"Yes."
The back of Malcolm's neck went cold with sweat.
How much had this bastard seen?
"He assigned the mission to me alone."
"Quite right. I have no involvement in your mission. I am merely an observer."
The man lifted his head and looked at Malcolm.
"And this particular emitter was specially designed: the instant the barrier was compromised, its core would be sacrificed to unleash an ultra-wide-range pulse."
"…What?"
"The boss anticipated every ounce of your soft-heartedness."
That Malcolm would leak information to a third party, and that he would destroy the emitter rather than recover it—Margel had read it all. This was him saying I saw it coming.
The man's eyes gleamed. "That is the boss's final message to you, young master."
GRIND!
Malcolm bit down on his lip until it bled. His fist, veins bulging, trembled violently.
"Then I trust you will complete your mission."
With those parting words, the man vanished out the door.
'Damn it all!'
They could simply have recovered the item themselves. Yet they'd deliberately left the task to Malcolm and staged it this way—which could only mean one thing.
His father, Margel, was testing him.
'DAMN IT ALL!!'
Gritting his teeth, Malcolm raised his head.
There it was—the very skull of the Deimos that Margel had ordered him to bring back.
Parona Peninsula's response was swift.
They had prepared for a raid by the Randolph Gang, and the evacuation procedure clicked into place with precision. First, residents and tourists were urgently moved inside the Lord's Castle with its fortified walls. The walls and gates were old, but the necromancers in the Parona lord's employ patched them up by casting barrier magic.
Still, it would be dangerous if the nagas all converged on the Lord's Castle, so most of the necromancers headed outside instead, fighting the monsters head-on while carrying out rescue operations.
That the death toll was relatively light given the scale of the disaster was nothing short of miraculous.
And inside the Parona Lord's Castle—
"We are sincerely grateful for the assistance of Kizen's students!"
A necromancer attached to the Parona Peninsula bowed deeply.
"If not for all of you, a terrible catastrophe would have unfolded."
Meilin and Camibarez, now changed back into their Kizen uniforms, returned the greeting with smiles. The necromancer's gaze fell on the red badges pinned to the two girls' shirt collars.
"Would you be taking command, then? You're more than welcome to direct Parona's necromancers yourself…"
Meilin waved her hands.
"No, no! I don't think that'll be necessary. Honestly, we haven't even had our opening ceremony yet, so we're not even full second-years."
Camibarez clenched her small fists tight and spoke up.
"More importantly, please let us know if there's anything we can do to help!"
"You'd do that? Thank you so much! Our necromancers are holding the line against the nagas on the beach, but we're badly short on strength. If you head over there, it would be an enormous help!"
Meilin turned to Camibarez.
"Cami, you've still got fight left in you?"
"Yes!"
"Then let's move out right now. Time to show them what the Kizen Student Council can do!"
Meilin felt a compulsive need to shut this crisis down completely.
In a way, her luck was insultingly bad. A brand-new student council was just about to launch, and this had to happen while they were away on a trip.
If the student council president and her executives were on-site and still failed to contain this disaster, it was obvious the mood inside the academy would sour fast. In the worst case, the 330th Student Council built around Simon might be erased as if it had never existed at all.
'That outcome, I will not allow!'
Meilin's smoldering eyes blazed with resolve.
The student council was her precious opportunity to keep working with the Group 7 members. And beyond that—she wanted to flaunt it in front of Serne: herself standing at Kizen's Number Two with Simon right beside her. What kind of face would Serne make? The thought alone was delicious.
'I am NOT giving up the vice president's seat!'
"Meilin?"
Camibarez tilted her head. "What's wrong?"
"N-nothing! Let's go!"
The stretch of coastline the Parona necromancer had pointed them to was less than ten minutes from the Lord's Castle.
As the two of them left the castle and set out on foot, they spotted two boys heading toward it from the opposite direction.
"Meilin! Cami!"
Simon and Arthur.
"Simon!"
Camibarez waved with a bright smile, and Meilin let out a relieved sigh.
"Hey! What took you so long?"
"Sorry."
Simon stopped, panting for breath. Camibarez's eyes went to the boy standing beside him.
"Um, who's this?"
"My name is Arthur Bleman! I was hired by the Parona side and I'm fighting here as well!"
"He's the Mercenary King," Simon added.
Both girls' eyes went wide.
"You've got to be kidding me."
Then Meilin's eyes narrowed sharply.
"The active Mercenary King is Leothamus Bleman! Who are you to be impersonating him? Something's off here!"
Arthur practically jumped out of his skin.
"Th-that man is my grandfather! I'M the Mercenary King now! It's true! Please believe me!"
Apparently unable to abide an unfair accusation even on pain of death, his eyes were already welling up with tears.
"We fought alongside him—he doesn't seem like a bad guy. More importantly, let's hear what happened first."
Simon explained everything from the beginning: his encounter and fight with Malcolm, all the way through to the emitter's destruction.
As she listened, Meilin ran her hand through her hair in fury.
"Ugh! Infuriating! So that doppelgänger creep put my vice president's seat at risk, is that it?!"
"Huh?"
"N-nothing! So Malcolm was the mastermind behind this whole incident?"
"Malcolm's just a chess piece. If we're naming the real culprits, it's the Randolph Gang and their boss."
Rustle.
suddenly came the sound of undergrowth being trodden. Arthur reacted instantly, hand flying to his sword—but two arms shot up out of the bushes, and a mischievous voice called out.
"It's people! People!"
The three faces lit up. Seeing their reaction, Arthur lowered his sword as well.
"I heard Simon's voice, so I figured you'd all gathered here."
It was Dick. He too had clearly been through a grueling fight—his uniform was caked head to toe in dirt.
"Commoner! What were you doing all this time?"
"Gathering information, one thing and another."
Dick gave a brief report on the current situation, and Simon in turn explained the emitter to him.
"Then let me lay it out."
Dick sat down and spread out a map of the Parona Peninsula. The four of them gathered around it.
"Here's Parona Peninsula."
Dick pointed to the spur of land jutting out from the continent. Surrounded by sea on three sides, its northern, inland side was walled off by a towering mountain range.
"The Lord's Castle is about here."
The castle sat at the peninsula's southernmost tip. Below it was open sea, and farther out lay Parona Island.
"Nagas originally attacked from all along the Parona coast, right? But destroying the emitter changed the situation."
"How so?"
"The nagas from the south—the ones living around Parona Island and its waters—have started moving inland."
Parona Island was so infested with monsters that civilians were forbidden from setting foot there. But the pulse had spread so wide that even the nagas on the island and the nearby shores had been caught in its effect.
"So now the nagas' invasion route is this."
Dick drew a single arrow pointing from Parona Island up toward the peninsula. It cut across the sea and made landfall at the beach—precisely where the necromancers were fighting right now.
"Fair warning: there are a lot of them."
Dick's voice was grim.
"We sent up Observers to scout. The entire sea is black with nagas as far as the eye can see."
The four listeners' faces hardened like stone.
Arthur in particular was clawing madly at his own head.
"D-don't tell me this is all because I destroyed the emitter—!"
Dick shook his head.
"The island's nagas were coming for us sooner or later regardless, Mercenary King."
"Then what do we do now?"
Camibarez asked.
"The one piece of good news is that their route of advance is completely uniform."
Dick traced over the arrow he'd drawn, emphasizing it with his quill.
"They're packed in so tight they're jamming up behind themselves. Now, if there's a wall of your own kin ahead of you, you'd normally swing around to the side, right? But these things have collectively lost their minds—all they'll do is push forward."
Simon, who had been listening, spoke up.
"It's the powerful pulse from the emitter. The movement order has been seared into their brains."
"Ooh."
Dick nodded along immediately.
"That's it! So the monster's been dumbed down like an undead!"
"Then we only have one job!"
Camibarez jabbed her fingertip at the coastline.
"We plug the gap right here!"
"Exactly, Cami."
Nagas mostly stayed in the water, and the moment they emerged onto land, their skin changed color while they needed time to adapt to dry conditions. Camibarez and Dick's plan was to slaughter them in exactly that window.
"But the numbers…"
Meilin planted her fists on her hips.
"You said the sea's pitch-black with them? However long we hold out, four or five hours at the outside, our jet-black runs dry first. I'd bet on it."
"Hmm…"
Sure enough, simply holding the line wasn't the answer. Parona Peninsula was so remote that any relief force would need a considerable amount of time to arrive.
And they didn't have the firepower to wipe out the nagas bobbing out in open water in a single stroke, either.
The four of them racked their brains, arguing back and forth. Someone suggested simply evacuating the civilians from the Lord's Castle and making for the mountains, but that was dismissed as impractical.
And Simon, eyes closed, lost deep in thought on his own, was exploring an idea from an entirely different direction.
"Guys."
Simon's eyes opened.
"There's a way."
"Hm?"
"You all remember, right? Tomorrow, the adult Deimos leads its marine life through these waters."
"Uh, yeah, obviously I thought of that too."
Dick said this as he marked the sea lane between Parona Peninsula and Parona Island with his quill.
"If the Deimos passes through this strait leading the sea monsters, they'd tear each other apart—a net gain for us. But the Deimos doesn't arrive until tomorrow afternoon. It's not going to hurry up for our sake."
Arthur agreed.
"Forget how the battle would go—by tomorrow afternoon, the nagas will have already set foot on all of Parona's land! A Deimos passing through then would mean nothing!"
All four of them were pessimistic about that line of thinking, but Simon's eyes gleamed with sharp intelligence.
"But who says that's the only Deimos there is?"
"?"
With those words, Simon sprang to his feet.
"Leave this one to me! You all focus on holding the coast."
"Hey, Simon! Where are you going?"
Simon broke off the strategy meeting mid-sentence and abruptly started running off toward who-knew-where. Meilin rose from her seat, but—
"Let him go. If it's Simon, he's probably thought of something again."
Dick shrugged.
"Wait a second…"
Camibarez fidgeted, then spoke up haltingly.
"Simon has a baby Deimos as a summoned undead, doesn't he?"
"Uh, yeah. What about it?"
"He's not… planning to have his undead Deimos fight the adult Deimos that's on its way, and steal its forces, is he?"
Now that she mentioned it—
According to the explanation at the museum, Deimos pods had a habit of fighting each other whenever they met in the same waters, stealing each other's followers.
Meilin and Dick burst out laughing.
"Oh, come on, Cami. Even for you that's a stretch."
"Hahaha! She's right. Say something that makes sense. How would an undead even—"
Their heads snapped forward in a hurry.
"GET BACK HERE, YOU MANIAC!!"