73. My Heart Swells

Eligos could see the future. It was woven into his very nature, which made him a genuine pain for someone like me who favored solo play. His whole gimmick was reading my next attack and then either slipping it or punishing it. But the flip side was that the players, myself included, had every last one of Eligos’s gimmicks memorized cold.

— The chicken or the egg: which came first?

Everyone answered it differently. Some argued the chicken had to come first, since without it there could be no egg; others countered that without the egg, no chick could ever hatch and grow into a chicken to begin with.

And the duel in front of me posed exactly the same riddle.

— A player who has every one of Eligos’s patterns figured out, versus an Eligos with the power to foresee that player’s every attack.

But the debate didn’t stay open for long.

“…Ngh!”

After countless trials, the players had reached one flat, final verdict: one-on-one, Eligos simply could not be beaten. He seemed bent on proving that fearsome reputation well earned.

“I can see it all! Against Peak Eligos, every move you make is laid bare!”

Just as he’d claimed. I thought I’d slipped the strike perfectly, but his black spear bent its path in midair as though it already knew where I’d dodge. In the next instant, it was a breath from punching clean through my gut.

— Tak!

My body moved before my mind could. I rammed my sword into the floor for a pivot and used the recoil to wrench myself into a hard spin, whirling around the planted blade like a compass in math class.

— Shwook—!

A hair’s breadth. The spear that should have skewered me through the gut only carved a thin line across my side before tearing through empty air.

Not good.

With one arm out of commission, my offense and my defense were both shaky, and blood was running freely from the side I’d just let him open up.

“Nicely done! Very nice!”

As he seized the offensive again and his composure returned, that revolting laugh of his fired right back up. I funneled every scrap of focus into dodging and dodging alone, desperate to keep a fatal blow off me.

“How do you ever expect to beat an Eligos who fights with the power to see the future!”

From the sound of it, he’d handed full control of the body back over to Eligos.

“Coward! Fight me yourself, fair and square!”
“Coward? Don’t make me laugh. Without me, a Peak Eligos like this could never have been born. This is entirely my own power!”

He’d called it the most perfect future the demon Eligos could ever have reached.

So all that cocky bragging wasn’t just empty bluster after all.

It wasn’t that beating Eligos one-on-one was outright impossible. If both sides’ patterns canceled out cleanly, the match came down to raw stats, and an overwhelming edge there would simply bulldoze him.

Most players couldn’t pull that off, which is why it was so brutal for them.

Which was exactly why, for me, Eligos had always been a very easy boss. I had every gimmick and pattern memorized, and my stats ranked among the highest handful in the world.

That brilliant past… no, or was it the future? Either way, those rock-solid stats were gone now. In their place, only the dull thud of blows filled the arena, one after another without pause.

— Clang, crack! Thwack!

“I’m well aware of that!”

“That’s for you to analyze!”

As if it wanted in on our little conversation, my muscles twitched violently, firing off warnings of their own.

— Save me!

Something like that. If only I could have fired a reply back at my muscles.

— But you’ve still gotta do it when it has to be done, hmm? What can you do — you were born as my body, after all.

Come to think of it, calling it entirely my body felt a little off.

It is Arden’s body, after all.

But then again. Sign a lease, pay the landlord, move in and live there, and from that point on isn’t the place your home? If you really wanted to split hairs, then sure, it wasn’t technically my house. But when you have friends over, or chat with the people you know, nobody goes around announcing, “This here belongs to so-and-so, my landlord!” now, do they?

So would you do as I say, already?!

But as if to defy my will, the sensation of bones grinding and organs twisting bore down on me without a moment’s rest.

— Shaaak—!

The black spear sheared off a lock of my hair. It had taken my hair and not my head, at least, and a sigh of relief slipped out of me.

“Niiice!”

— KABOOM!

“I’m doing my best here!”

I was throwing everything into offense and still couldn’t land a single clean hit.

“You should’ve dodged to the right!”

And Eve was throwing everything into defense, yet she kept letting a few shallow hits slip through.

“Argh!”

Then we each tried to break a different way, our feet snarled together, and with a thud I went sprawling.

“You’ve gone mad with fear! Talking to yourself, falling over all on your own!”

Never lose your head mid-fight; stay calm, keep your composure. It was the most basic of basics, the kind of rule you simply had to follow, and yet…

Cheesing the whole fight by handing it off to some top-of-the-line AI on auto-mode — isn’t that going a little too far?

Even as he cackled away so flippantly, Eligos’s combat power didn’t wane in the slightest, infuriatingly enough.

“Okay. Let’s calm down.”

I took three or four deep breaths.

“You calmed down a little?”

“How much longer can you keep this up?”

I remembered the fight I’d finished a good while back against Arne VII, after he had turned into a fallen hero.

My body was wrecked, and Eve flickered like a TV with a busted screen.

Overclock had been running even longer this time than it had back then. And if Pain Suppression, the thing forcibly clamping down my agony, vanished the very instant I cut the skill, could I really cling to consciousness through the tidal wave of pain that would come crashing in like a burst dam?

“Kya-hahaha! Move with a little more desperation, why don’t you!”

Even so, I couldn’t let it go now, because that would be as good as declaring my own suicide.

Harsh words burst out of Eve’s mouth.

I rewrote the plan, scrapping offense entirely to pour everything into evasion.

“Scurrying around, nothing but running away! Where’d all that bravado go from before?!”
“I left it back there, and I’m on my way to go look for it — so could you not follow me?”

Maybe because I’d gone all-in on defense, his attacks were easier to dodge than before.

Oh, for real?

But before I could get smug about it, my body was steadily seizing up. Torn muscle and cracked bone thrashed against the control we forced on them, the leash that made them ignore the pain and keep moving, until my speed was visibly dulling and going slack.

I understood at once the meaning packed into that single syllable.

A two-day hell-marathon that had ground on ever since the Arne domain. The brutal hypothermia I’d put my body through for the sake of Phantom Manifestation. Then battle, and more battle, and still more battle after that.

My legs won’t move at all.

My two legs, driven right to the brink, had finally gone on strike. Muscles rigid, nerves all but burnt out, they locked up as though they’d grown roots into the floor, deaf to anything I willed.

Was this what it meant to seize up while still standing?

“Die!”

From overhead, an absolute, undodgeable arc of death came slashing down on the diagonal.

And all over again, it sank in.

This is seriously goddamn hard.

In that moment of utter resignation, a dog’s bark came from somewhere.

“Woof! Woof, woof!”

I lifted my head to see Devil snatch the falling black spear’s blade clean out of the air in his jaws.

“You dare betray me?!”

Beta’s anger-laced shout rang out, but Devil paid it no mind.

“Woof!!”

Devil, the spear shaft still clamped in his jaws, opened his mouth wide.

— Pshuuuuu—!

A freezing blast spewed from Devil’s throat and washed over Beta from head to toe. Eligos’s upper body iced over solid.

“Arden!”

Right after, Lillian came running.

“…Big Sis.”
“Don’t talk.”

Lillian looked at my grotesquely bent left arm and my blood-soaked side, and bit down hard on her lip.

“Hurry, go help the mutt.”
“No. Right now, treating you comes first.”

She forced me down to sit on the floor, then took hold of my left arm with fingertips streaming dense mana.

“This is going to hurt. A lot.”

The words were barely out before thin, thorned vines crept from her palm and wound themselves tight around my broken left arm.

— Crrrunch, crack!

Without blinking once, I watched in silence as my arm was mended from start to finish.

“…Arden? Are you okay? Are you still with me?”

If anything, it was Lillian’s voice that shook. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead, and she bit her lip as though she were suffering more than me, and I was the one actually under the knife.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Keep going.”

At my flat reply, Lillian’s eyes went wide with astonishment.

“No way…. You’re really, genuinely fine?”

A tale from Romance of the Three Kingdoms floated up in my mind. The physician Hua Tuo was brought in to treat Guan Yu after a poisoned arrow struck him, and as Hua Tuo laid his blade to the arm, parting skin and flesh and scraping at the bone with a rasping scrape-scrape that battered every onlooker’s eardrums, all who watched are said to have covered their faces and gone pale as ghosts. Yet Guan Yu himself, the story goes, drank his wine, ate his meat, and played Go straight through the whole of it.

“I’ll finish as fast as I can.”

She didn’t seem to hear me, no matter how many times I told her I was fine.

In any case, her vines burrowed down between the flesh, forcing the misaligned joints of bone back into place and binding firm through every gap in the torn muscle.

Looking as though she’d just pulled off some impossibly difficult procedure, though I couldn’t say for sure, Lillian murmured in a daze.

“Incredible…. You really are different from me.”

In Lillian’s eyes lay a reverence toward me, threaded through with a quiet ache.

Instead of answering, I slowly raised my left arm. There was no pain, but the mana running through Lillian’s vines pressed on me vividly, as if it were knocking straight on my nervous system. When I tried to put strength into the arm, the mana caught my signal and, with a sloshing surge, moved it for me.

“…Whoa, this is seriously amazing.”

Now this was a real Saintess. That fake who feeds people demon blood ought to be ashamed of herself.

“Not yet. It’s not over until we beat that thing.”

The vines coiled around my arm compressed, layering over and over.

“My vines will take over for your left arm. No — I’ll make them more than that.”

Was this really the same dweeb of a Lillian who’d thrown everything into one decisive strike at Seraphina and lost?

“I can’t beat that thing on my own. So let’s take it down together.”

My heart swells….

“You son of a bitch!”

But our leisurely little exchange couldn’t last. In a single instant, the ice sheathing Eligos’s upper body melted away entirely.

“Woof!”

At that, Devil lunged back in and spewed a violet poison mist. Maybe because the head that used to breathe fire had been lopped off in his bout with me, he couldn’t spit flame anymore. Devil’s desperate thrashing went on all the same.

“Get lost!”
“Kiiing!”

Beta’s kick caught him square-on and sent him flying into the arena wall with a crash.

“Devil!”
“You think wrapping a few measly weeds around me is going to change anything?”

There wasn’t a trace of the cold or the poison mist Devil had spat anywhere on the figure now striding toward us.

Lillian pressed both palms to the magic circle she’d drawn on the floor.

— Chirrik!

In an instant, vines surged up and bound him fast.

“You really think this’ll hold me?”

Eligos’s form spread its arms, straining to tear the vines apart.

“…Nngh!”

As Lillian bit her lip, the magic circle blazed a deep green, and yet more vines rose to drag him down.

“I want to crush your eyes first. I’m curious just how ugly that face of yours will get. …No. I’ll save the eyes for last. I’ve decided — I want you to watch your own limbs get torn to shreds, piece by piece.”

Even at that chilling threat, Lillian kept pouring mana into the magic circle without flinching.

— Rrrip! Rrrrip!

But decency and raw strength didn’t go hand in hand, and the sound of vines tearing loose filled the arena.

“From Father — the head of the house — I learned swordsmanship, even if not directly. I’ve grown quite close with my elder sister Seraphina, and I’m on decent terms with Big Brother Valerian now, too.”
“Have you lost your mind again?”
“But I still haven’t built a proper relationship with Big Bro Lucius, and I haven’t completely cured Leo’s little sister Rio of her illness, either.”
“And what am I supposed to do about that?”
“It means I still have a lot left to do.”

I took Lillian’s hand and forced it up. With that, the mana feeding the magic circle cut off sharply, and the vines binding him slackened and came loose.

“Now then — let’s end this.”