53. Joint Operation (1)

Lucius, fully corrupted.

That was the start of Phase 2.

Lucius prowled the battlefield as though slung from a wire, the way stage actors fly across a theater on invisible threads. He used that gap in height to flit here and there, raining ranged attacks down from above and nothing else.

Lucius had always run a filthy, underhanded pattern, and now he’d evolved a step further to torment the players. Complaints had poured in about this monstrously time-devouring, unfair style of fight, but the dev team never breathed a single word about it.

I watched Lucius soaring overhead and figured this, too, was going to drag out into a tedious war of attrition.

“Big Bro!”

Only a moment ago she’d been readying her magic to draw the poison out of Lucius. Then Valerian barged in with that one word and flipped the whole board over. Where hope had been about to blossom on Lillian’s face, despair bloomed instead.

“Please, Big Bro Lucius…!”

Lillian called out to the Lucius soaring above her, her voice aching.

“Kyaa!”

A steel thread shot toward the ice wall and stopped dead right in front of Lillian’s eyes, Seraphina’s doing, quick as ever. Death had brushed right past her, and still Lillian never took her eyes off Lucius.

“Big Bro! Can you hear my voice!?”

Of everyone here, Lillian alone had waged a long, long war against that poison called DV.

“Kk… kkhk… kahaha!”

Eyes rolled all the way back, Lucius flung a grotesque laugh through the air. The sheer wave of revulsion coming off him froze Elli and Leo stiff with terror, and even the hand I had on my sword hilt broke into a sweat for no reason I could name. The eldest son and daughter of House Arne, though, faced their crazed little brother without a flicker of expression.

“You can’t lose! Please, hold on!”

Lillian alone reached a hand toward Lucius, her voice crumbling.

Shhwk—!

Lucius’s thread came stabbing down out of the air, aimed at Lillian’s throat. But before it could so much as graze her skin, the blade of an enormous greatsword split the empty air. Those vicious threads I’d been pouring all my strength into holding back, Valerian batted aside as easily as he’d wave off a pestering fly.

“Give it up, Lillian.”
“…What?”
“That one is a weakling. The house has no need of weaklings.”
“A weakling? You actually have the nerve to say that right now?”

Valerian had always found Lucius distasteful. Even back when Lucius stood at his side pouring out every sweet-tongued flattery to please him, Valerian had seen straight through to the servility hiding behind his eyes.

“What is he, if not a weakling? Look at that wretched state of his.”

Valerian’s greatsword pointed at the empty air.

“Kgh, aaaaaagh! Valerian—!”

We weren’t the only ones listening in on the two of them. Branded a “weakling” to his face, Lucius flew into a frenzy. Hundreds, thousands of strands of steel thread wove together into a vast net and came pouring down, aimed at Valerian and no one else, a binding force overwhelming enough to swallow the whole cavern. Valerian didn’t so much as blink.

Shhk—!

The greatsword carved a flat, horizontal path through the air. Having ripped the descending storm of threads apart in a single stroke, Valerian went on in a dry, flat voice.

“You threw away the sword, and this paltry trick is the best you can manage? That’s exactly why you’re a weakling.”

“You rotten bastard!”

Lillian finally erupted. She lunged in and seized Valerian by the collar, gripping it hard. Valerian neither resisted nor shoved her off; he only looked down at her.

“If you’ve got the strength left to grab a man’s collar, gather your mana instead. How unseemly.”

“You don’t understand, Big Bro! You were born with everything, and you grew up without a single problem in your life! How could you possibly know how hard Big Bro Lucius fought just to hold on!”

At Lillian’s cry, the light in Valerian’s eyes went cold. He firmly pried her wrist loose and murmured.

“If you give up rising to your feet just because you’ve fallen, do you mean to stay slumped there forever? Anyone who bears the name of Arne should have groped through the dirt for a sword and gripped it.”

“That’s something only a monster like you could do!”

“No. This isn’t a question of ability. It’s a question of choice.”

The killing intent between the two of them drew taut as a thread and peaked. Tears welled in Lillian’s eyes; in Valerian’s, nothing stirred but a merciless cold.

“That’s enough.”

Just then Seraphina stepped between the two of them. Her gaze, though, wasn’t on the squabbling siblings clutching at each other’s collars; it was on Lucius, who trembled violently at being so thoroughly ignored by them.

“Both of you, settle down. Lillian, your emotional pleas are no help at all in this situation. And Valerian, your arrogance has needlessly stoked Lucius’s rage.”

At Seraphina’s cold rebuke, Valerian fell silent. She turned back to Lillian.

“Lillian.”
“…”
“Do you have the power to return Lucius to normal again?”
“That’s….”

Even as she waited for Lillian’s answer, the two of them dutifully nullified the attacks Lucius kept pouring down.

This is unbelievable.

Up overhead, the second son of House Arne, one of the strongest houses in the Empire, had demonified and was raining down attacks. And these siblings just kept bickering, tearing each other down as though they’d stepped out for an afternoon stroll.

“I… can’t do it alone. But if Arden’s with me….”

Lillian looked back at me, desperate hope tangled with clinging need in her eyes. Valerian and Seraphina turned their gazes on me as well.

I ran a quick simulation through my head. Coldly put, if Seraphina and Valerian threw themselves in for real, taking Lucius’s head would be no trouble at all. But that would cost me Lucius as a human resource, and send Lillian’s mental state crashing through the floor at the same time.

Honestly, losing Lucius didn’t matter much to me. Turning him back into a human wasn’t going to make him my ally, and it wasn’t as though I wanted him as one anyway.

“Let’s give it a shot.”

I agreed because it doubled as an experiment: could Lillian’s power turn even an NPC whose DV stat had hit 100% and demonified all the way back to normal? Saving Lucius along the way would just be a bonus, I suppose.

“There’s a way to subdue him without killing him. As long as Sister and Brother lend a bit of strength, of course.”

Valerian’s brow narrowed. He stared at me for a moment, then snorted in displeasure and shook Lillian’s hand off.

“…A waste of time. Do as you like. But the instant my judgment is proven right, I’ll take that wretch’s head without a moment’s hesitation.”

Valerian came over and stood at my left.

“Don’t make a mistake.”

Seraphina piled on the pressure as she took her place at my right.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with the two of them, the reality of it left me feeling strangely off-balance. This was a lineup where failing would be the harder thing to pull off.

“Let me explain the plan!”

Valerian, greatsword in hand, walked off alone toward Lucius without a care in the world.

“Lucius.”

Shhwk!

The answer to his call came fired back as a steel thread. Valerian batted it aside with a light flick of his greatsword and ambled after Lucius, who was fleeing to open the distance.

“Your life is the same now as it ever was. Always nothing but running.”

“Shut your mouth!”

Lucius staggered in midair and pulled back even further. The way he stabbed threads into the ceiling here and there and scuttled around as nimbly as a spider made for a trajectory no ordinary method, no technique, could easily pin down.

But Valerian was in no hurry.

“Even if you’ve borrowed a demon’s power, you can’t change the loser’s nature that’s seeped into the very marrow of your bones.”

He let the pouring storm of threads slide past on the barest minimum of movement. Even as he turned the attacks away, his mouth never rested.

“To carry the name of Arne and have it come to this — dangling from some cramped corner of the ceiling, spinning threads. You felt inferior to me, so you abandoned the sword, and this is all you’ve got to show for it?”

“I told you to SHUT UP!!!”

Valerian knew. He knew just how vast an inferiority complex Lucius had nursed toward him all these years.

Back in their childhood, Valerian would casually toss off some simple demonstration, a breezy here, you just do it like this. And every time Lucius despaired at being unable to copy it, Valerian made no secret of his disappointment in him. As the years passed, the sheer gulf in talent between them only widened, and it was that gulf that made Lucius set down the sword and choose another path. Valerian had never once, not for a single moment, forgotten it.

“Run. Like you always have. Get away from me, cover your eyes, plug your ears. Deny reality and spend the rest of your life on the run.”

The fiercer the provocation grew, the fiercer Lucius’s attacks became. As the rain of falling threads turned more savage, Valerian must have judged that blocking it as easily as before was no longer feasible, because now he leaned harder into evasion.

Despite a frame far larger than an ordinary man’s, and a heavy greatsword in one hand at that, his movements were astonishing. As though he’d maxed out his evasion stat, Valerian slipped through the narrow gaps between thread and thread like a ghost. Ironically, even though devoting himself to dodging had slowed his pursuit, the distance between him and Lucius kept steadily closing.

“I’ll kill you… I’ll tear that mouth of yours to shreds!”

The secret behind it lay in how Lucius managed his threads. The total amount he had was fixed, split between the thread he attacked with and the thread he used to keep his distance in midair. With his reason snapped by Valerian’s taunts, Lucius began dragging even the threads he should have saved for escape and pouring them into his attacks.

“A weakling like you could never kill me.”

Lucius’s flailing offensive went on and on, but not a single strand touched Valerian’s body.

“Even now you’re not giving it everything. Because once the tide turns against you, you’ll give up at the last second and run, like always.”

As I said, Valerian knew exactly where Lucius’s sorest spot was. And that one remark shattered the last of his patience.

“…Aaaaaaaaagh! Die! Just die already!!!”

At last Lucius hauled back even the final threads holding him aloft. Tens of thousands of strands came cascading down like a waterfall. It made for a desperate sight: the net that had blanketed the entire ceiling now funneling onto a single point, the crown of Valerian’s head.

But Valerian, standing dead center beneath it, didn’t retreat so much as a step. If anything, he lightly drove the tip of his greatsword into the ground and murmured, low.

“Lucius. Don’t get the wrong idea.”

Blue mana erupted from Valerian’s body, blasting outward. This was no mere venting of mana. A rough yet intricate current of it, shaped like a lion’s mane, coiled around the blade of the greatsword.

“When did you ever come to believe that thread could block a sword?”

His greatsword began to growl, low, like a living predator. The mana coiling around the blade glinted like the eyeshine of a starving beast.

Valerian’s swordsmanship didn’t merely mimic a lion’s ferocity. Its true essence was the meticulousness of a king who isolates his prey completely and grants it not a single inch of escape.

Valerian swung the greatsword wide, tracing an arc.

“Submission of the Azure Lion.”

The instant the words left his mouth, an enormous azure lion the size of a house roared up behind Valerian’s back.

KROOOOM—!

When the azure lion that had appeared in the air swung its hefty foreleg, the threads plunging straight down were dragged together as if pulled by a magnet, mixing into a single mass and sucked forcibly beneath the lion’s paw.

SLAM—!

It looked exactly as though a giant lion had smashed a swarm of insects flat beneath its paw. Every last one of the cascading threads was ground mercilessly under the lion’s foreleg and pinned flat into the ground.

“…L-let go of this!”

Lucius cried out in shock and snapped his fingers like a madman. He tried to reel the threads back joint by joint, but the harder he pulled, the more savagely the recoil bit into his fingertips, and still the threads didn’t budge an inch.

Valerian fed ever more strength, slow but sure, into the hand gripping the greatsword. As if answering him, the lion’s paw pinning Lucius’s threads heaved and bucked as though to shatter the very earth, bearing down harder.

“Now you can’t even run anymore.”