The Disciple Helps a Comrade Take Revenge
“…….”
To the 5th Agent, the assassin guild that had seized her by the throat and ruled her entire life — Medusa — had been hell itself. Hell, and so she had longed to escape it; yet she had possessed no means of escape. That was why, to her, Medusa could only ever be hell: because she wanted out and could never get out.
And so she had never once imagined it.
Never once had she imagined that she would witness Medusa's collapse with her own two eyes.
And from this moment on, she no longer needed to imagine it.
She was watching it happen.
“Gyaaaaagh!”
Number Four — the assassin who, with his superb swordsmanship, had succeeded in assassinating any powerhouse he set his sights on — was being driven back with almost insulting ease. Of course he was. His opponent was the Sword Ghost, a name no one who walked the path of the blade could fail to know. An assassin's swordplay thrived on the uncanny and the unexpected, and so Number Four's blade came at the Sword Ghost wreathed in every manner of phantom stroke — yet to a man who had crossed countless battlefields and tasted every kind of sword there was, it was nothing more than a child's game.
As if to prove the point—
“Guaaaagh!”
“Uwaaaagh!”
“Fall back! Fall back!”
—the Sword Ghost cut down the assassins leaping in to ambush him as casually as if he were swatting flies, all while still dealing with Number Four.
“Leo~ Leo~ You've got to grit your teeth harder and put some real power into it.”
“Yes, ma'am!!”
The elf Riel was loosing arrows from behind Leo, the Hero candidate. Anyone could see she was holding back, carefully managing the fight so that Leo could build experience — it was glaringly obvious she was nowhere near full strength. And still the assassins were being dismantled without a prayer of fighting back.
And as for Archmage William…
KRAKOOOOOM!!
KRAAAAAASH!!!!
“Kahaha! If that poison means so much to you, shouldn't you be trying a little harder to stop me? Look at it all going up in flames!”
“Protect it somehow! Think of it as your own life…! Gueeeehk!”
“Come on, then! Guard it with everything you've got! Those are your lives on the line, aren't they?”
He was burning every last one of Medusa's precious poison workshops and storehouses to the ground. The First Number assassins had thrown themselves forward to stop him somehow, but they couldn't breach barrier magic of an Archmage's caliber. In the end they were reduced to rolling across the dirt, desperately scrabbling for even a single vial of poison.
“Kahahahaha!!!”
That… wasn't the image I had of him…
As though something long dammed up inside him had finally burst free, Archmage William was hurling magic in every direction with genuine, unrestrained glee. Medusa's stronghold had been shielded by every kind of magic, each one a formidable working laid down by high-ranking mages — formidable enough, certainly, but nowhere near enough to stand against an Archmage. And so the nightmare fortress that had seemed to the 5th Agent as though it would never fall was, in a single breathless stretch of time, burning and collapsing into nothing.
“What are you doing? Keep up.”
“…Shouldn't I be helping them?”
“They're doing fine. Why bother?”
“…….”
At the Hero's words, the 5th Agent could find nothing to say. In sheer numbers, their side was overwhelmingly outmatched — and yet in quality, they held absolute dominance. And before quality, quantity meant nothing; the assassins were being swept aside as if to prove it.
“More importantly, let's go meet the 'Source' already.”
Medusa's Source.
There was only one thing that could mean.
“The Master…”
The founder of Medusa. Its eternal dictator.
The Master.
Even the 5th Agent, who had ranked among Medusa's executives as a First Number, had never known his true identity. All she knew was that he was a powerhouse beyond even her — and she herself stood among the ranks of masters. A man who made her feel, no matter what she tried, that she could never win. That was Medusa's Master.
“Oh my. I was wondering who these noisy visitors might be. Number Five, is it? How delightful. When every last curse I'd placed on you came undone, I worried you might have died. I gathered all the children and was preparing to look into the matter — I never imagined you'd turn up perfectly unharmed.”
“Don't lie. You put tracking curses on us so you could use even our corpses. The curses that shouldn't have vanished even in death disappeared, so you got curious, gathered every member for an investigation — and walked straight into an ambush. That's the truth, isn't it?”
At the Hero's pointed remark, the Master's bearing shifted ever so slightly as he turned his gaze on Sera.
“A lady I've never met. How curious. You don't react as though this is our first encounter. It's as if you've faced me any number of times before. A most peculiar feeling.”
Medusa's Master.
To look at him, one would never have guessed he stood at the head of an assassin guild. Put bluntly, he had the kind of face that suggested he couldn't bring himself to kill so much as a single insect. And yet he could kill insects, monsters, and people alike with effortless ease. A true master of assassination — a man who, if he so chose, could turn a living person into a corpse in an instant with nothing but a fountain pen.
The realm of the Superhuman.
Unofficially, that is.
Officially, the only assassin to have reached the Superhuman realm was the one known as the Superhuman Assassin.
Which meant he was an assassin who had attained the Superhuman realm in secret.
And that, in turn, meant that whenever he had displayed his skill, no one had ever lived long enough to properly confirm it. A perfect assassin. A god among assassins.
No title was too grand for him.
The strongest assassin alive.
That was Medusa's Master.
“Might I ask your name, my lady?”
“Hero candidate Sera.”
“Ah, the Hero candidate who's been making such a name for herself lately. I see. A Hero candidate, is it? But no — this is far too perfectly executed to be written off as some act of chivalrous justice by a mere Hero candidate. And more than that — it may be my imagination, but you seem to know even Medusa's true nature. Am I mistaken?”
“Which part are you asking about? That Medusa was actually created by the Imperial Family? That Medusa's Master is a Superhuman assassin raised by the Imperial Family? I'm not sure which one you mean, but those are the main things I know.”
“…So you knew it all. Remarkable. Information on Medusa should have been under perfect control. How long has it been since I was this genuinely surprised? Truly remarkable.”
The 5th Agent could scarcely believe it. That the Imperial Family stood behind Medusa — no, that the Imperial Family had created Medusa in the first place, and that even the Master was a Superhuman assassin raised by their hand… It was almost too much to accept. But judging by the Hero's and the Master's reactions, every word of it was true.
And yet there were pieces that suddenly made sense.
Swordsmen and mages were not countless in number, but in every age there had been those who reached the Superhuman realm. Assassins were different. Attaining the Superhuman realm through the arts of assassination was no easy feat — and precisely because of that, anyone who managed it inevitably left traces. Just as the Superhuman Assassin had. Yet the Master had appeared out of nowhere, without a single footprint behind him, as though he had simply dropped from the sky.
If he had existed all along in the Imperial Family's shadow, sustained by their support — then the story suddenly became entirely plausible.
“My lady. Are you aware that, because of this, the Imperial Family may come to regard you as an enemy?”
“Of course.”
“And you still chose to do this?”
“If the Imperial Family becomes a problem, I'll just wipe it out.”
“Arrogant.”
“If you have the power to back it up, it isn't arrogance. It's confidence.”
“Dear, dear. Really now…”
And then it happened.
In a single instant.
In the space of a heartbeat.
The Master's hand moved — and the speed of it was nothing less than the speed of light.
An ordinary person would never even have perceived it. A thing that unfolded in a world of pure instants.
Fwing!
The needle the Master flung at godlike speed streaked straight for Sera's brow. It carried the force of a Superhuman; wrapping oneself in aura would not stop it. Even against a Superhuman, it was an assassination technique designed to punch clean through the forehead, destroy the brain, and kill on the spot — a weapon built to slay Superhumans.
An overwhelming technique. And yet—
“Well now… how surprising. Hero candidate Sera is a swordswoman, is she not? No — she is a swordswoman. I can clearly sense the vast aura within the lady's body.”
The Master's reaction was only natural.
The needle he had thrown had stopped dead, hovering just short of Sera's forehead.
A needle that could pierce even aura-clad flesh — but only once it actually reached the body. Fix the space itself in place before it ever arrives, and there is simply no answer. And so Sera, with a Superhuman's senses, had locked onto the needle's position and frozen that entire pocket of space with magic. The only reason such an absurd feat was possible was that, for her, this was something she had endured to the point of exhaustion.
Across many regressions she had died to that very attack. Later, determined to find a way to wipe that infuriating look off his face, she had researched every possible method of stopping it. The surest way to crumple that smug expression had been to solve it with magic — and so that was what she had done.
“I see. So at last a 'reaper' has come for me — I who have lived as the Imperial Family's Reaper. Will you be my reaper, then, Hero candidate Sera?”
As he spoke, the Master flicked several more needles into his hands with blinding speed—
“I'll pass on a job that grim. Shut up and die.”
—but Sera's sword was faster.
Shuuuunk!
Crimson blood erupted from the Master's body, and he crumpled where he stood.
Thud.
The Superhuman assassin who had lived as the so-called Imperial Reaper — known only to the highest nobility, a figure who had filled them with dread and terror — went down in a single instant, just as every soul he had ever killed had gone down.
“Khack. Ah. So this is death?”
Sera's face twisted in irritation. Every single time she drove her aura-laden blade clean through his heart, aiming for instant death — and every single time the man refused to die on the spot and kept flapping his mouth. She hated that about him.
“Ah… not a bad feeling, actually.”
“Shut up and die.”
“Sorry, but I've been modified so I can't die easily.”
“And I suppose you'll say the Imperial Family is to blame for how thoroughly you've been broken as a human being?”
“I don't think so. I never particularly hated my life. Looking back, it wasn't such a bad one. Whatever anyone else says — this blood-soaked life was mine and mine alone.”
“You're disgustingly full of yourself.”
“Hahaha. Hearing such a blunt assessment isn't so ba—”
The Master's voice cut off there.
Because his own shadow had swallowed him whole.
Sera looked at the 5th Agent.
She was the one who had done it.
The advanced interrogation technique Medusa taught its assassins.
Shadow Prison.
A curse that sealed its target inside a prison of shadow, designed to force a closed mouth open. Naturally, it was a technique the Master himself had created — and now that very technique had locked the Master inside a Shadow Prison.
When Sera looked at her, the 5th Agent answered with a perfectly calm face.
“You looked like you really didn't want to hear any more of it. So I sealed his mouth.”
“…Yeah. Thanks.”
In the truest sense of the word, the 5th Agent had repaid the bastard who had cast her into hell with the most precise, most perfect revenge imaginable — delivered at the absolute finest moment.
