19. The Trial Of Arms (3)

— KA-BOOM!

By a hair’s breadth.

The patch of floor I’d been standing on a heartbeat earlier shattered with a thunderous crash. And not in any ordinary way, either.

…The rock got turned into powder?

The path the dark-red mana had carved was ghastly. The solid marble had crumbled as if eaten through by acid.

This was no simple physical blow. The mana itself was vicious, leaving lingering pain in every space it touched.

I swallowed hard without thinking.

I’d seen this sight countless times inside the game. Once a target’s DV stat crossed the critical threshold, its attacks took on two extra properties: corrosion and curse.

That was why I’d set myself a few ironclad rules.

1. The moment signs of demonification appear, kill on sight.

2. If it’s too late for that, pour in every ounce of firepower to annihilate it before it fully adapts to that power.

Because a demon that had fully adapted was no longer what it had been in life. It became a killing machine that wouldn’t so much as blink if its own family were torn apart before its eyes.

“Grrrrrr…”

The red glare leaking through the slits of the hero’s visor swept over me.

I caught myself taking an involuntary step backward.

Eve’s voice, steadying me.

“…”

Her face brimmed with conviction. With my partner this sure of herself, what business did I have standing here trembling?

I pulled myself together and drew my sword.

“There’s no way I’m dying to a trash mob like this.”

Only then did Eve finally smile.

The battle resumed with her shout.

— Krrrrunch, KA-BOOM!

A thick stone pillar behind me was sheared clean through like tofu. A cold gust grazed the top of my head, scattering shorn strands of hair into the air.

“Hup!”

I rolled across the floor and out past the hero’s reach.

As I scrambled clear, Eve threw up the patterns she’d predicted, and I read them and learned. I’d handed my life over to her commands completely. There was a slight lag to it, but my body obeyed her calls without much trouble.

Think.

The sound of air ripping open hammered at my ears. Any one of these attacks, with a single slip, would have torn my body to shreds.

Once, twice, three times.

As I kept dodging, something strange began to happen.

…I can see it.

The longer it dragged on, the more I could read the hero’s movements before Eve even called them.

Before Eve’s [Diagonal slash!] could reach my ear, I was already catching the faint twitch of the hero’s right shoulder.

Before the [Thrust pattern next!] could pop up in the chat, my body was already moving to counter it.

The sparring with Seraphina had been overwhelmingly harder. By comparison, this was nothing.

— Crash!

This time, too, its attack carved through empty air and burst a boulder.

The moment the pattern grew familiar, the fear drained out of me and cold calculation took its place.

Impossible.

A sword could be a hero’s holy blade or a Demon Lord’s instrument of world-ending ruin, depending on whose hand gripped it. But the sword Seraphina had given me, top-grade as it surely was, amounted to nothing more than a harmless, laughable little twig in front of that boss.

That was how feeble my body was.

If the opponent were human, I could have clawed open some desperate gap and driven the blade into a vital point to finish it. But this thing was a former hero whose demonification had already advanced.

Could a swing driven by these pitiful muscles even punch through that armor?

No. Even if it did punch through, could it land a fatal wound?

The odds of success were slim, and the price of failure was my head flying off. High-risk play.

“Help me lure it toward three o’clock!”

“No time to explain. Right now!”

There was no room to explain my reasoning or anything else. Eve reacted to my urgent shout in an instant.

I bit down on my lip and threw my body forward.

The plan only needed to live inside my head. For now, the one priority was reaching that pillar alive.

The hero charged at me with a beast-like roar.

— Thud, thud, thud!

Tremors that shook the ground itself chased close at my back.

Now!

Right beside the stone pillar, I dove and rolled across the floor.

— KU-KU-KU-KU-KOOM!

The hero’s fist cleaved through empty space, and the momentum it couldn’t arrest drove it straight into the pillar.

— KA-BOOM!

The pillar snapped at the waist.

The ceiling, robbed of its support, came screaming down. Massive chunks of stone poured down like a waterfall.

The hero had no time even to think of dodging, pinned right there beneath the crushing weight.

— KU-GU-GU-GUNG!

A thick cloud of dust blanketed the training hall. I coughed and pushed myself up onto my elbows.

“That did it.”

The hero was buried under the pile of rubble. Hero of the past or not, no one took dozens of tons of rock on top of them and walked away.

“It’s all because you bought me the time.”

I’d trusted her completely, and thrown everything I had into working out how to bring it down. In effect, I’d handed the entire dodging side over to her.

Eve let out a cheer.

The tension in my legs was just starting to go slack.

— Vwoooom.

From a gap in the rubble, a strange, off-key vibration came droning out.

— KA-BOOM!

The pile of stone blew apart in every direction as if it had detonated. I threw myself flat against the floor.

A wavering shadow strode out of the dust storm.

“Right. There was no way this was ending in Phase 1.”

A black haze swirled around the hero’s body.

I watched, trying to read whatever change was coming over it.

— Whish!

Like a pitcher in his windup, it cocked back and shot one arm straight forward. In an instant the black haze around its body condensed to a point, took the shape of a throwing star, and came hurtling at me.

I slashed down at the incoming star on reflex, and it dissolved back into haze that began coiling around my blade. The instant I saw that, I let go of the sword.

“…That was borrowed, you know.”

I backed off and watched the haze devour the blade in a heartbeat. And then, instead of a throwing star, it reshaped itself into the exact image of the sword that had just been in my hand.

Weaponless now, I kicked at the floor to throw up a cloud of dirt. Then I ducked into the dust and slipped behind a boulder.

Eve looked thoroughly thrown.

— Crash! Crash! Crash!

Meanwhile the haze was smashing every boulder nearby to pieces, hunting for me.

“Can you analyze it?”

Anxiety was written all over Eve’s face, so I spoke up.

“Switch roles. You focus only on finding the strategy. Don’t worry, I’ll keep myself alive somehow until then.”

Until now, Eve had handled the dodging while I focused on strategy. This time I was proposing the reverse. The evasion side carried the greater pressure, after all.

I nodded, pulled in one big breath, and threw myself out from behind the boulder.

— Shiiing!

As if it had been waiting, the sword came rushing at me. The instant the boulder shattered, I sprinted straight ahead.

Defenseless.

All the while it had been hurling ranged attacks at me, the main body itself hadn’t budged. That settled my target.

But the sword was closer to the main body than I was.

The sword rushed at me again.

I snapped my upper body back hard just before it reached me. It grazed the bridge of my nose by a whisker, then whipped around at once and came tracking me again.

I ran like a madman. And then the thing came into my line of sight, standing perfectly still.

“What?”

Its legs were spread wide, locked in the recoil of that pitcher’s throw. So I followed Eve’s advice and slid between them.

— Shunk!

The sword, unable to check its own recoil along the same line, plunged straight into its body.

— Thoom.

One of its knees buckled.

“…Haah. Haah.”

I was just as winded, barely able to drag in a breath.

But as if to insist no boss would ever go down from a single clean hit, the haze coiled around its body again.

It seemed to have realized this method wouldn’t catch me.

“I’m borrowing this.”

In the brief lull while its attacks were paused, I crossed to the fallen Bato and picked up his sword. Bato still didn’t seem to have come to.

“…This isn’t going to work.”

Borrowing the sword came with one problem. Bato was a greatsword-wielding knight.

I could barely hold the greatsword up in both hands as I backed off, opening distance from Bato again. I couldn’t leave him there to take further hits as collateral in the fight.

In the meantime the thing had begun moving again, good as new. Having given up on ranged attacks, it conjured a massive spear straight into its hand out of the haze.

“That’s just cheating.”

In the end I gave up any thought of meeting it head-on and went back to rolling, leaping, twisting away. Dopamine had my brain burning hot.

My senses sharpened to a knife’s edge until the whole world seemed to move in slow motion. The tremor of its muscles, the very flow of the air.

At this rate the clear didn’t seem entirely out of reach after all.

“Hck—!?”

But all at once my body seized up as if it had hit a lag spike.

Overload.

The price of forcing my body to run on dopamine.

And the thing didn’t miss the split-second opening I’d just given it.

.

.

.

“Kuh, uugh…”

I couldn’t get up. Its spear had punched clean through my flank, and the pain of a broken rib driving into my lung wouldn’t even let me breathe.

A picture of certain death.

In place of an answer, I coughed up a fistful of clotted blood. I couldn’t so much as twitch a finger, completely spent.

The thing closed in and leveled its spear at my heart.

Ah, damn it.

To think I was going to retire right here, just like this.

In the instant death came plunging down, a furious stream of data poured across my vision.

Through the red warning text, I heard Eve’s voice.

“…E…ve?”

Eve’s form shattered into shards of blue light, and they rushed into my chest.

“GRAAAAAAH!”

A searing pain washed over me, along with a chill like ice being driven into my spine. It felt as if someone had grabbed my severed nerve fibers and was forcibly knotting them back together.

The red warning windows in front of me shattered with a crash, and a blue system window rose in their place.

The pain vanished as if by miracle. The agony of the rib stabbing into my lung, the bursting throb of my heart, all of it gone. In its place, a cold, mechanical sense of omnipotence, as if this body were no longer mine, wrapped around every inch of me.

The moment before the black spear could punch through my heart.

— Thwock!

My right hand moved of its own accord and braced against the floor. In the same instant my body sprang up like a coiled spring.

But this wasn’t my will.

Along with those words, in one corner of my vision, a red countdown timer began ticking down beside warning messages scrolling up like mad.

I gripped the greatsword Bato had dropped. For some reason, the slab of iron I hadn’t even been able to drag earlier came up light as a feather.

— Krrnch.

The sound of grinding bone ran up from the wrist gripping the greatsword, but there was no pain.

— Shiiing!

The black spear came rushing at me again. I took the greatsword in a reverse grip and drove it straight down at the front of the charging shadow.

— BOOM!

With an enormous shockwave, the thing was hurled backward. And not just driven back, either. The black haze cloaking it was ripped open for a moment, baring the core hidden inside.

But at that same moment.

— Krunch!

My right shoulder twisted out at a grotesque angle. The joint, unable to absorb the recoil, popped from its socket.

“Kuh—!”

The Pain Suppression cut out, and ghastly agony came surging back in.

A single exchange. That alone, and my body was already at its limit.

“GRAAAAAAH!”

The thing roared as it righted its stance.

I was barely propped up on the greatsword, unable to move another inch. And the strength left in me was draining away, bit by bit.

— KA-BOOM!

A tremendous chill barred the way in front of me.

But this chill wasn’t cold.

A blue butterfly fluttered its wings and settled gently onto my right shoulder.

“…I’m too late.”