I Split Open Its Belly
The scream of that colossal Behemoth was, quite literally, the sound of the world itself trembling.
"Clara... who in the world did you bring to us?"
There had been a prophecy. A prophecy that no one believed.
A Sanctuary forsaken by its god, a sky bleached gray, land rotting away and resources withering by the day. When life came with an expiration date, we had long since grown too tired to lean on prophecies.
A prophecy ignored by everyone — no, abandoned by everyone but one. And yet... had it been true all along? I could barely keep my mouth from hanging open, frozen stiff before a sight I couldn't comprehend.
Driving a Behemoth back single-handedly like that... and then flying across the distance in an instant to carve out its eye — that was something out of a saga of heroes. No, out of the fairy tales children read.
"That's... a human?"
Dave, the youngest ever to reach the realm of Knight — even he couldn't suppress his shock. There was no guessing, not even roughly, what level that man's martial prowess had reached.
But this was no time to stand gaping.
"Honored Dave! Covering you! Move, now!"
Though that was a story for if we lived through this.
"Yes, sir!"
Watching that inhuman prowess, it didn't look so difficult. That man was hope itself.
"PROTECT THE SANCTUARY!!"
It had been so long since my heart raced like this. What was it that made this stiffened old heart beat again? The allied soldiers running at my side? The searing heat of blood spraying from my own blade? Or was it the man performing miracles out there before our eyes?
It didn't matter which. So long as everyone survived.
"My, aren't we lively."
"Seems there's something in this blood."
Awakening, for instance.
"What in the world is this thing called 'fantasy'?"
Hang it on your ear and it's an earring, hang it on your nose and it's a nose ring — slap the word fantasy on anything and it's explained away just like that. Wasn't that a marvelously convenient little word?
"Ah, I see."
By that logic, wasn't everything like that? Though perhaps not mathematics.
Nonsense, they say... I was merely curious.
"And yet, looking at this sword now — it really does drink blood, doesn't it."
Of course, I didn't mean anything so fantastical as a demon blade or a cursed one. Simply that the edge was drenched to the brim in blood. It would fling off with the next swing, granted.
"The blood is thick and heavy. A perfect match for it, truly."
"Do you know of water-pressure cutters?"
"Well, you've guessed rightly."
I had burst every vessel I could find, intending to bleed the thing out from within.
"Yet I see not the slightest hint that it means to die."
"Still, surely it won't survive having a leg or two taken off."
It does jostle one's head around rather violently, but no matter — nothing a body can't handle, no? Well then. Down I go.
Train the lightening arts long enough, and there comes a moment when you almost believe you've become a feather yourself — a state where no matter where you run, you leave no footprints, not even the faintest trace of a human presence.
As if your very self had grown as free as something soaring through the open sky.
Those who reach it call it the realm of deceiving heaven's own principles.
Tap.
All around the spot where I touched down — a landing so impossibly light I could scarcely believe I had fallen from the head of a Behemoth so vast you'd strain your neck just to look up at it — monsters in the shape of enormous wolves had already gathered in force.
I had never once played a character in my life. But it was time to focus now. Farewell for a while, dear chat.
I had attacked its eyes with flung blood before, but carving one out — that was a first.
Which meant it was all the more worth doing, wasn't it?
I caught the rotation rising up from my feet, gathered it into my body's central axis, and just as it peaked in an instant — the sword flung off the blood it had been drinking deep.
The blood sprayed in every direction, tracing a small circle around me as its axis.
"So it works."
Along the scattered trajectories of blood, distortions bloomed across the monsters' bodies. Lines split open in an instant, rupturing into bursts of blood and viscera.
The countless liquids erupting from all sides soaked me through again before I could even raise a guard.
"Ah."
Pickled in blood, plastered head to toe in shreds of flesh. A familiar sight, a familiar texture.
And that was exactly why I hated it.
"So then — let us finish this quickly."
The ground hereabouts was already a mire of Behemoth blood, which meant my arsenal was infinite. And those creatures' numbers could not be infinite in turn.
"What would one call this... a game of chicken, perhaps?"
No, surely not. Still, anyone watching me like this probably wouldn't be frothing at the mouth insisting a game of chicken is nothing like this!
I've been dyed, haven't I. But — good. Change me into another color. I beg you.
Each swing erased roughly five of them. Their sheer bulk meant some didn't die at a stroke, but.
"KWRAAAAAK!!"
They were torn apart by their own kind. In a place where anything that bled had become the enemy, I simply held my sword.
"We're all going mad together, then."
This was, in all likelihood, the effect of that so-called awakening.
But I had lived through far too much to go mad over a mere awakening effect.
"KIEEEEEEK!!"
"KWEEEEEEK!!"
"KYAAAAHK!"
What a fine variety of shrieks. Something was crushed underfoot... ah, the pigeon from earlier. Hmm, I hadn't spared it a thought. So it died here after all. No — not just one. This was...
"Quite a few of them died, didn't they."
I killed them.
What had I just said? My ears felt stuffed with cotton — between the screams of beasts of sky and ground alike without pause, and the Behemoth over there hoisting a severed leg at me and roaring loud enough to burst eardrums...
"You mean to crush me with that."
On whom, dare you.
A colossal pressure bore down on the whole region, and as something burst with a pop, I hurled myself at the plummeting leg. The shockwave shoved at this body, but I paid it no mind. I simply rode it.
Blade laid flat, I raked my way up the leg and split the vessels open —
KUWAAAAANG!!
A violence of sound erupted as though some enormous detonation had gone off, and in the same heartbeat a fountain of blood geysered skyward.
Even at a glance, it was more blood than had spilled at any point before. Yes — even for that thing, this much had to be past its limit.
Now, where should this great beast fall so that the most of them died with it? To the left, then.
I stepped back atop the Behemoth's head, and only then did the scene come into view. What I had just created had happened at its right leg — which meant plenty of them still remained on the left.
At a glance it resembled a colossal baobab trunk, that leg. But there is no tree that falls to an axe, given enough strokes.
One swing — I carved away the hide. Two — I shaved off the fat. Three — I cleaved the muscle, and four — I shattered the bone.
[GUOOOO...!]
The enormous body crumpled in a single instant, letting out a mournful cry.
So different from every cry before it. Only now could I be certain the thing was dying.
Making my way toward the left side of its chest, where the legless Behemoth thrashed, I caught a faint, steady throbbing.
"So this is where the Behemoth's heart lies."
Hotter, thicker, and beating more violently than anywhere else on the beast.
I carved away the hide, shaved the fat, cleaved the muscle, and shattered the bone that sheathed the heart.
"The heart."
The violently pounding organ flinched as it met the cold air, then surged and thundered all the harder — and I swung my sword straight down into that massive beat.
PSHAAAAH!
I thought I had swung lightly, but somewhere along the way strength had crept in, it seemed. Like a cracked dam, thick, scalding blood gushed through the wound and bathed my whole body in heat.
"How tiresome."
Fatigue seeped into my limbs as though I were melting into a warm bath.
Come to think of it — why had I killed this thing? Ah, that's right. I had resolved to split open its belly and see. And I did seem to have saved the Sanctuary while I was at it.
I walked slowly toward where the stomach ought to be, and nothing around me showed its face. The air was still thick with screams and the reek of blood.
Didn't they say such beasts carried more than one stomach? Then I had only to cut open whatever I found.
"And yet... there is nothing here."
Empty. All of it.
Three stomachs in total I found — and inside every one of them, nothing at all. Nothing at all.