59. The Arena (3)

I’d never once doubted that Seraphina would win, and win overwhelmingly. The real game would be decided by how Elli and I performed, anyway.

That hulking shield-soldier she’d just smashed to pieces was an opponent I could have handled well enough on my own; it just would have taken me a little longer. There was only one reason I’d sent her out first. What mattered more was arming Elli’s mind.

No matter how strong you are, if you lose, you die.

The fragments of the shattered shield-soldier made that warning more vivid than any words could. By now Elli had surely grasped it. This was no training ground, no sparring yard. It was a true field of death, where defeat led straight into eternal rest.

I turned and made my way slowly toward the red, rippling barrier and the next challenge. I could feel Elli’s gaze clinging stubbornly to my back.

She’d already worked it out: the second bout in this run of duels was mine, and she would be the one left to stand dead last. Her trembling breath reached me through the silence.

To clear the air, I spoke up in a deliberately light tone.

“Back when it was Sister’s turn to fight, you made such a fuss about what was going to happen to you. What, I’m not quite as dependable as Sister, is that it?”

Even though her own turn was still a long way off, Elli’s face had gone wretchedly pale. Half worry over me, I supposed, and half the pressure of having to face these absurdly powerful opponents herself. The firepower Seraphina had put on display was a beacon of hope and a towering wall both at once, one that did nothing but feed everyone behind her their own sense of inadequacy.

“…No. I believe in you, Young Master.”

Elli answered as though wringing the words out.

“Loosen up a little. Sister did a solid job seizing the initiative, so all we have to do is ride that momentum.”
“…Yes.”

Elli was still forcing a smile.

I decided to flip her thinking by throwing out a more practical line of talk.

“Elli, after the shield-soldier, what kind of soldier do you think comes next?”
“Huh?”

My out-of-nowhere question left Elli puzzled.

“If it were you, who would you deploy?”

At my prodding, Elli sank into thought, then answered.

“After a shield-soldier… probably a spearman with a long lance?”
“Correct. And what does that mean?”
“…It means you’ll be the one fighting the spearman, Young Master.”
“That’s right. In that case, who would your opponent be, last in line?”
“…A mage, then.”

I nodded, satisfied.

The way Seraphina had just dismantled that shield-soldier had been a kind of live demonstration. Call it a strategy meeting of sorts, one meant to give Elli the time to work out for herself how she, as a shield-soldier, ought to strike at a mage’s openings from the far side of that same matchup.

Just before passing through the red barrier, I stopped and looked back at her.

“I already laid out the whole strategy earlier. While I’m fighting, don’t just stand there gawking — picture the moment you’ll fight, run it through your head like the real thing. Got it?”

At my advice, Elli nodded gravely. The vague unease that had hardened in her chest hadn’t fully washed away, but at least the goal she had to fix on right now seemed to have come clear.

“Yes, Young Master. I’ll never forget it.”
“Hey now, it’s not like you’re marching off to die. Aren’t you taking this a little too seriously?”
“…You think so?”
“Yeah. So loosen up a little.”

Elli mulled it over, then looked at me.

“Hehe.”

Before long she let out a foolish, childlike laugh. With that artless smile she stepped aside, and I crossed beyond the red barrier.

As I advanced toward the center of the battlefield, the robed man fell in soundlessly at my side. He’d slipped clean through the air when Elli reached for him earlier, and he still gave off that ghostly sense of something that didn’t borrow the breath of the real world.

Looks like he’s a ghost-type NPC, all right.

I figured he was the soul of some past caretaker who’d died running the arena, a being who still believed himself alive and went on carrying out his appointed role in Eligos’s arena even in death.

There was never an NPC with this kind of concept in the arena, though.

As a rule, neutral NPCs like him took no one’s side.

Working even after you’re dead. How pitiful.

I found myself feeling oddly sorry for him.

When I reached the center with him still trailing me, the man opened his mouth.

“Your next opponent has been changed.”
“What? The opponent’s been switched? Whoever heard of such a thing!”
“All the rules of this arena are set by the master’s whim. I have merely relayed the message.”

Leaving only that riddle behind, the man scattered like smoke and vanished. The sheer gall of it left me speechless. What was this, some omakase counter that served whatever the owner felt like?

No way. Eligos’s arena has never once broken its own rules.

I hadn’t slacked off on the research for clearing this place. Pulling together the reviews of countless users and compiling the data had been no trouble at all.

When three challengers took on the arena, there was never a single record of anything but a spearman showing up in the second round.

To put it in an analogy: I’d marched in dead certain it was a fire-element dungeon, blown my whole fortune plastering myself head to toe in fire-resistance gear, and then out popped an electric eel spitting lightning.

— THUD, THUD, THUD!

What lumbered out of the darkness was, against every forecast, no spear-wielding knight.

A body as big as a house, fur black as pitch, three heads each glaring off in a different direction.

“…Cerberus?”

I couldn’t hide my bewilderment, and a dry laugh slipped out. By rights this thing had no business showing up here. That creature was meant to be deployed as the mid-boss of the Abyss’s second gate.

All three of Cerberus’s heads opened their mouths at once. The left breathed a blue-white chill that looked ready to freeze everything around it; the right, a yellow-red flame fit to burn the world to ash; and the center reared back a purple poison mist that could sever a living thing’s breath in a single instant.

Along with Eve’s urgent warning, all three heads roared at me at once.

— KRRRAAAAGH—!

I chucked the whole simulation of hitting the spearman’s weak point straight into the trash and put everything into dodging.

First came the blue-white chill, lancing out from the left head. It wasn’t trying to freeze me outright; it iced the floor on purpose, hemming in my footing, cutting off my retreat, and herding me toward the far side of the cold.

The instant I twisted the way I’d been driven, the second attack came flying, as though it had been lying in wait all along.

— FWSHHH—!

What flooded my vision was a haze of purple poison fog, a mist that rotted flesh the moment it touched. For a dumb beast, it was a viciously clever chain of attacks.

With the floor iced over and nothing solid to push off from, I drew the sword at my waist.

— SHHK—!

A sharp keen of cleaved air, and sword-energy split the space in front of me. The gust of sword-wind that burst out in that instant sheared the poison fog clean in two, carving a clear path straight through it.

I didn’t waste the split-second gap. I followed the path, kicked off the ground, and bored in all the way under Cerberus’s feet. The flame it spat on reflex slammed down on bare, empty ground.

I’d slipped all three attacks without much trouble, but that hardly meant the fight was over.

Cerberus raised one of its massive forepaws to crush me flat. I felt the sheer weight of it bearing down from above, but I’d already read the arc and never stopped moving for so much as a heartbeat.

— WHAM!

By a hair I twisted aside and slipped between the slamming paws like water. The forepaw plowed into the ground, and the arena’s sand kicked up in a storm.

Cutting through the hazy cloud of dust, I let a single thought drift by.

If it had been Seraphina standing here instead of me, how would it have turned out?

Of course she’d have butchered Cerberus through sheer overwhelming force. It wasn’t even a conclusion worth chewing over. And that was exactly why I’d dug in earlier and insisted I’d be the one to risk my neck and step in.

Hiding behind someone’s back and getting carried doesn’t suit my temperament.

Cerberus’s chill would lock down their movement, and the poison fog seeping through the gaps would have withered Lillian’s summoned plants to nothing. In the end it would all have come down to Seraphina, unable to stand watching us flounder against the bad matchup, stepping in to clean up the mess.

I followed the call, and my sword slid into the blind spot, biting deep across the tenderest flesh on the inside of Cerberus’s left foreleg as it passed. Hot, fishy-smelling blood fountained up from the wound my blade had carved.

“There’s an old saying — a dog that bites people can’t be taught, no matter what you do.”

The feel of fresh blood sliding along the blade shot up my wrist in a thrilling jolt.

“How about you, though?”

Maybe it caught the taunt. Unable to master its own fury, Cerberus dug in with its hind legs and launched into the air. That enormous bulk crossing open sky in defiance of gravity was more than the word “overwhelming” could hold.

My eyes went to the patch of ground the left head had spat on earlier, now frozen solid. The image of Seraphina driving Lillian back surfaced all at once: her footwork flowing smooth along the ground beneath the dozens of vines raining down, that uncanny gliding stride that crossed the ice as if it were her own front yard. I’d watched that footwork of hers closely back then, figuring the day would come when I’d have a use for it.

Didn’t think it’d come this soon.

Without a moment’s hesitation, I flung myself onto the sheet of ice.

— FWOOSH—!

The massive gouts of flame pouring down from above washed over my back. The scorching heat meant to sear me to the bone only grazed the hem of my cloak; the fire that wanted to swallow me whole missed my heels by a few bare centimeters.

This is fun!

It might sound insane, but right in the teeth of a lethal crisis, I was having the time of my life. Even I thought I was ridiculous, yet the adrenaline of a tightrope act decided in fractions of a tenth of a second was sweeter than anything.

— Schoom—.

The flames that had been sniping at me touched down on the cold sheet of ice. The instant fire met frost.

— TSSSSSSS—!

As the searing heat and the biting cold slammed together head-on, a milky-white vapor exploded upward, swallowing all sight in an instant. The battlefield turned to a fog so thick I couldn’t see an inch ahead.

Blind now, Cerberus started loosing attacks at random. Chill scraped across the floor and poison fog churned the air, but not one of them so much as grazed me. An attack that couldn’t touch me when its eyes worked fine had no chance of miraculously running me through now.

— THUD!

It wasn’t as if Cerberus had wings. The leap had simply carried it so absurdly high that it hung in the air a long while. In the end it couldn’t cheat gravity, and it came plummeting headfirst to the ground.

And this was the moment I’d been waiting for. The opening a boss always coughs up after a big area-of-effect attack. The DPS window, in other words. Whether I could pour in enough damage right now would decide the whole fight.

Riding the momentum the ice had given me, I sprinted toward a wall near Cerberus. Just before I hit it, I borrowed the exact principle of force Cerberus had used to launch itself and kicked off the ground with my back foot.

— CRACK!

I sprang up, kicked off the wall hard enough to smash it, and bent my trajectory to leap higher still. As I traced a parabola through the air, I could see Cerberus’s heads below me, drooping and dizzy in the wake of the fall. All three wavered, dazed and out of focus.

“One down, first.”

My shadow fell across its head.

— SHUNK—!

The blade punched through its thick hide and drove deep. Then, with the crunch of breaking bone, the windpipe that had been seething with flame was severed in a single stroke.

— SHHK—!

Hot blood fountained up and drenched me head to toe.

— THUD—!

Before it could so much as scream, one of Cerberus’s heads dropped to the floor with a dull thud and rolled.

Soaked in blood, I shifted my grip on the sword toward the two heads that were left.

“So — have you learned your lesson yet?”