Resonance of the Left Eye
Every soul on the street turned toward the sound.
"Chimeras again?"
"Would you shut up for a second... wait. That sound's different. Hold on—mechanical spiders?"
The spiders' abdomens flickered with a dangerous light, and the moment they saw it, the gang members understood they were in mortal danger.
"Enemy!"
But the intrusion had already been allowed. The spider dangling from the ceiling dropped straight onto one of them, clamping over his mouth before he could so much as scream.
"Everyone, snap out of it, and—mmph!"
The spider sealed his lips shut. He reached up to tear it away, but—
BOOM!
The explosion came first. In its wake, the spiders scattered throughout the street bloomed into flowers of flame. Some detonated together with the gang members, some let themselves be swallowed by the chimeras before bursting, and some tore through the support structures. The ground shuddered violently under the shockwaves.
"We're in danger too, aren't we?"
"That's right."
"Then stop standing around chatting and RUN!"
Alan's party evacuated at once. They had barely taken a few steps when the earth itself began to scream.
CRUUUUMBLE!
Centered on the sinkhole, the surrounding buildings came crashing down as well. Like water sucked into a drain, everything on the surface poured into the underground.
"The ground was weaker than I expected."
"Eyes forward and RUN already!"
Explosions had triggered a collapse of the terrain—and since a ground collapse was arguably a type of earthquake, nature's raw power was truly something to behold.
They reached the safest spot they could find and caught their breath, waiting for the dust—which remained starkly visible even in the darkness—to settle. A wind blowing in from somewhere swept the debris away quickly.
"You think the mage got flattened into paste?"
"No. I sent a scout spider inside at the moment of the explosion, and it vanished by space displacement."
Barely had Alan finished speaking when a black figure popped up in the distance. The presumed mage looked around, scanning its surroundings.
Then its eyes met Alan's. No mistake—it wasn't a coincidence. They were staring at each other, deliberately.
BZZZT!
Alan's left eye resonated with something the mage possessed. And then, a voice.
[Master... No. No, you are not.]
Alan's eye had resonated with something the mage carried, producing a faint vibration. The two of them went on staring at each other in silence.
It called me "Master," so it must be someone's disciple.
At least it wasn't the Tailor herself—that much was a mercy. If she had been here, no resistance of any kind would have mattered.
But why did the eye react?
While Alan pondered, the dust settled further. Above the ruined city, a clear night sky poured its starlight down toward the earth below.
The mage pushed back its hood just then, and moonlight settled onto black hair. Pointed ears came into view as well—roughly the same length as a human's.
A half-elf.
Purebloods had been outnumbered for ages now, so people simply called them elves. It was safe to assume that nearly every elf one met these days was of mixed blood.
"What are you? And where did you get that eye?"
"..."
"Silence is a virtue sometimes. But now is hardly one of those times."
The elf swept his right hand through the air in a horizontal arc. Sharp spikes tore through the atmosphere and hammered against Alan's body. His mana barrier blocked them, but the impact was considerable enough to send the shield rippling.
"Confident in your defenses, are you?"
Keeping his eyes locked on Alan's party, the elf began to circle slowly around them.
"The idiots who think they have this city surrounded don't have the capability to find this place. You're outsiders, then."
True to his profession, the elf reached a conclusion swiftly. His judgment and perception were remarkably sharp.
"I take it you don't have another stockpile of bombs. One mage, one hunk of scrap metal, one filthy religion fanatic."
"Do you happen to hold some grudge against the Mother Church? That's quite an unnecessary adjective."
Shiva bristled, and the elf gave a dry snort.
"Interfering at every turn, preaching that you're the only ones in the right."
"We work for the sake of people."
"Am I not a person?"
"You're a beast. Beyond redemption."
"Did you know? That power you call divine grace—it's nothing but a branch of mana. You simply dress it in white light to hoodwink the gullible masses."
"Divine power is merely a tool. What matters most are heart and deed. It exists to help me walk the path I believe is right."
"How dull. Then let's begin—"
"Just a moment, please."
The instant the elf raised his arm, Alan cut him off. The perfectly timed interruption cooled the seething mana in the air to a chill.
"What kind of research were you conducting down there?"
"..."
"Is it a secret? Then why did you build the city this way? Because of what you people did, many have died or been maimed. Some lost their homes entirely."
"Is that supposed to be my concern? People are born again anyway. The place will be crawling with them before long."
The tone was utter indifference.
Alan's own voice changed.
"Isn't that what being human requires, though?"
"People. That word again. Tediously persistent, aren't you. There's something about you... something that feels strangely like our own kind—"
The elf never finished the sentence. A red flash appeared from nowhere and punched clean through his body, all the way to the ground.
It was a thermal beam with its width drastically narrowed in exchange for extended range and penetrating power. The sniper was Leopard, concealed inside a nearby villa.
"Ha..."
The elf did not die. Even with his heart destroyed, he moved as if nothing had happened.
"If I die, who are you going to ask about your goals?"
"That's why we left your head intact."
The Brain Expansion Device doubled as a storage vessel—even after its owner's death, some of their memories remained within it. There were techniques for extracting information directly from the brain itself, but those lay beyond even Alan's expertise.
"Plenty of ways to make you talk, even without your cooperation."
"Haha. I did say we're the same, didn't I?"
"..."
Alan fell silent. The elf's body had vanished, leaving him no leisure to speak while he hunted for the man's position.
"Fast little thing, aren't you. Unusual stealth tricks, too. You're not about to blink out of here with space displacement, are you?"
"The displacement device broke when the ground collapsed. He won't be going anywhere that way."
The sound of hard footfalls striking the floor kept echoing. Alan's left eye tracked the epicenter of each sound and the footprints left in the dust. Of course, seeing the trail did not mean he could respond to it.
The elf stretched out his hand and leveled his fingers at Alan. Alan braced for some spell—but what actually launched was a fingernail.
The nail transformed into a spike the instant it left the hand and hammered against his barrier again. The fallen spike glistened with an ominous liquid.
"It's poison. Be careful."
"You can force poison out through one side of the body. Or have Shiva cast a purification spell on you."
Alan nodded and refocused. The mages in the books of his childhood had packed enormous firepower but moved like glaciers; every mage he'd seen in the flesh, though, was quick as a whip.
Taylor stepped in first. Reflex Accel accelerated his body—not quite on the elf's level, but moving at a respectable speed all the same.
Every time he moved, glittering powder scattered in his wake. It was no mere ornament: a substance designed to cling to enemies who turned invisible, like the elf, and betray their position.
Sure enough, the powder soon clumped together into the shape of a person. His position exposed, the elf released his invisibility. Taylor leveled the shotgun in his left hand.
BANG-BANG-BANG!
The semi-automatic shotgun roared. The shells hit with enough force that where they struck, flesh went beyond honeycomb and simply powdered away.
Taylor watched the elf's shot-riddled legs regenerate at terrifying speed. At the same moment, the man's hand elongated and curved like a whip.
Mana blade met whip, and ripples exploded outward. Dust billowed up and hung suspended around their legs.
"You're a chimera too!"
"We call this evolution."
The whip that had been the elf's hand split into several strands. Bristling spikes oozed venom in slow rivulets.
"If that's evolution, I'll take de-evolution, thanks."
Despite Taylor's bravado, the situation was far from good. The whips moved with terrifying speed, and whether because they carried a will of their own, they struck from several directions at once.
His artificial skin began to scrape away bit by bit. Beneath it, instead of muscle and blood, sat metal and oil. No pain, perhaps—but machines break all the same. His joints were already beginning to groan.
That was how lethal the elf's attacks were. A mage, they'd said—he moved fast as a warrior who had trained nothing but speed his whole life.
Then Taylor saw it. Something round and hard, spinning round and round in midair.
The moment he spotted Shiva preparing his technique, Taylor seized the incoming whip in his bare hand. It cost him most of his left hand, but it pinned down the elf's range of motion.
At the same instant, a white meteor fell toward the elf. A falling technique that trusted in the legendary density of dwarfkind—the Falling Morning Star.
WHAAAAM!
Dust geysered upward in a heavy column. Out of it, Shiva's body bounced free, his torn clothes soaked crimson.
Taylor's body, by contrast, was yanked inward—and that gave him a clear view of the elf. One of the man's hands had transformed into something like a turtle's shell, its surface bristling with sharp protrusions.
The elf swung the shell at the reeled-in Taylor. The spikes, already stained red with Shiva's blood, gleamed all the brighter for the layer of lubricant smeared across them.
Taylor went flying and landed near Shiva. Out of the dust, the elf emerged at a steady, unhurried pace.
"That's all you've got?"
"Did you know? A vanguard's only job is to buy the mage enough time to work his wonders."
At that instant, another red flash came streaking in. A lethal beam fired from a different position than before pierced clean through both of the elf's legs.
The moment his balance broke, a volley of magic bullets came flying in from somewhere. Until now the elf had relied purely on his body; he began wielding magic in earnest.
But the bullets didn't detonate—they merely spat tiny sparks. It looked like a string of duds, yet to the one on the receiving end, it was a death sentence.
The magic bullets were armed with runes of Penetration, Confusion, and Severance—and those were especially lethal to a mage.
An ordinary mage would have surrendered around here, but the elf was not that breed. A sorcerer who had reshaped his own body didn't crumble just because his mana was being scrambled.
Antennae rose from the elf's forehead. They writhed rapidly, then pointed in a single direction.
"There you are."
The elf had located Alan's position amid the wreckage. Against a vanguard that yielded nothing but wasted effort, finishing off the mage was worth far more.
He calculated the fastest path to Alan and reshaped his legs. Reverse-jointed limbs slammed into the earth.
The moment he moved toward a slanted slab of debris, something round floated up before the elf's eyes.
BOOM!
A landmine with leaping and tracking functions. And there wasn't just one—somehow he knew it—and they were seeded along every path the elf might take.
With each passing moment, the elf's body grew more ragged. He regenerated without pause, but destruction outpaced it.
Of course, the elf did not stop. He would punch straight through and put an end to the trick-playing mage. With that thought, he took one of the leaping mines square with his body.
"Huh?"
That had been the plan, at least. His airborne body hit the ground and rolled. A sticky thread of mana was coiled around it.
Alan had also deployed adhesive mines inscribed with runes of Binding, Adhesion, Enfeeblement, and Slowness—and the elf had walked straight into them. Why else would he have laid only the explosive kind, with just enough force to shrug off? Every piece of it had been bait, designed to make the elf careless.
Spiders swarmed toward the elf, now tangled in the web. Blue light streamed from their abdomens. To their prey, the spiders offered not sharp fangs, but explosions.
KWAAAAAM!
Alan intervened with Space Interference, continuously folding the blast's shockwave inward. The elf's body shook this way and that, like a leaf caught in a typhoon.
When the explosions finally ended, the elf collapsed to the ground with a wet slap. Bloodied head to toe, he was back on his feet in moments. What a revolting vitality he had.
"You think this is the end?"
Barely had the words left his mouth when the collapsed ground heaved, and something red burst upward. An amorphous chimera resembling writhing, formless muscle latched onto the elf's body.
"Now it begins."
The man's bulk swelled rapidly. Portions of his muscle hardened into thick carapace, and it shrugged off magic bullets and shotgun shells with ease. Armor-piercing rounds bored in from the inside, but relative to his sheer mass, the damage was trivial.
Taylor, deciding it was a waste of ammunition, slung the shotgun over his back.
"Thought that went too easy. Without some serious firepower, this is going to be a problem."
"What a waste—"