For all that he was a Lv.4 core combatant of [Loki Familia] and the leader of the Second String, Raul's legs were shaking at this moment.
"Raul. Grip your shield."
Finn let out a resigned sigh and tapped his Fortia Spear lightly against the brick paving.
The crisp ring of metal on stone finally dragged Raul's scattered attention back.
"Yes, Captain!"
Raul straightened his legs in a hurry and slapped the small black shield on his left arm, his throat tight.
Anakity stood half a step behind him and off to one side, a pair of reverse-curved blades hanging point-down in her hands. Even the black tail trailing below her skirt hem was drawn stiff and straight.
Behind the two of them stretched the vast rectangular dueling ground.
Sixteen elite members in the half-moon crest combat uniforms of [Loki Familia] had already spread into a clean, tiered battle formation.
In the front rank stood three burly close-guard men shouldering tower shields half the height of a grown man. Along both flanks lurked agile scouts, ready to slip in and harry at any moment.
At the center of the rear position, the elf magic swordswoman Alicia held her staff.
The healer, Line, kept to the most tightly sealed blind spot of safety, her eyes locked on the front line.
Besides them there were several other hands long practiced at fighting together.
A squad containing a full ten high-level adventurers at Lv.4 or pressing up against the Lv.4 ceiling — this was the finest miniature of the deep reserves [Loki Familia], a first-rank faction, showed to the outside world.
Even the Second String's combined strength, set loose anywhere in Orario, could steamroll better than nine out of ten mid-sized Familia without the slightest suspense.
Except that right now.
Fine beads of sweat stood on the foreheads of these battle-hardened adventurers.
Directly opposite, at the other end of the field.
Right at the edge of that sharply drawn white line.
Fighting for the newly appointed Constable, under the name [Haimer Familia], there were only a scant few slender figures.
Onigawara Rin raised a hand and slowly drew her Hannya mask down.
The instant the rim of the mask settled against her cheeks, it sealed away every trace of her expression, leaving nothing but the red glimmer of her eyes behind the two openings.
The blade had not left its sheath, yet her right palm already rested on the hilt.
Further forward.
Amou Kirukiru rolled her neck, and the slim joints let off a string of pops like beans bursting.
The breeze stirred her long black hair. The corners of her mouth pulled up into a grin brimming with excitement.
Inaba Tsukuyo's fingers rested quietly on the edge of the scabbard at her waist.
Eyes closed.
Up on the high spectator stand.
Loki had both arms hooked over the railing and was chewing hard on a grilled rib, eyes fixed on the ground below.
A few steps down and to the side, in the front rows of seats.
Hermes reached over and gave the bespectacled Asfi a discreet tug.
"Asfi, this setup... who do you think has the better odds?" Hermes asked, pulling his hat brim lower.
Asfi lifted one finger and pushed her light-flashing glasses up the bridge of her nose.
"Judged purely on the numbers, the formation [Loki Familia]'s Second String has laid out is an iron bucket without a single opening."
"Heavy shields up front for physical cover, the Mage building suppressive fire behind them, archers whittling the enemy down at range, rangers pinning the flanks, and a healer underwriting it all."
"It's a complete package, the kind that guarantees a very high survival rate in the deep levels of the Dungeon."
"But..."
Asfi paused, her gaze sliding to the motionless [Haimer Familia].
"These Familia members Lord Haimer brought with him," she said evenly.
"The strength of those few girls goes far, far past the standard of a normal adventurer."
Just as Asfi finished her analysis.
On the highest platform at the edge of the field, Finn had already raised the arm gripping his Fortia Spear.
The brilliant golden spearhead caught the near-noon sunlight and threw off a dazzling cross of gold.
That one motion was enough.
Hundreds of whispers in the stands vanished inside half a second. The air went still.
A hundred lines of sight. A hundred held breaths.
Veteran adventurers and gods who had come out of curiosity alike — every one of them turned toward the field.
"This match."
Finn's voice rang out clear and strong, and with that peculiar carrying power of his it covered every corner of the grounds.
"Continues until one side calls out its own surrender."
"Or until the judge rules that one side has lost the ability to resist."
"Begin—!"
With the last word, the raised spear and the arm holding it swept down, tearing the air with a decisive whistle.
"Form up!"
"Advance!"
The tail of Finn's call had barely landed.
Raul, whose calves had been shaking a moment before, jerked as though someone had laid a whip across his back. The cowardice fell away and he bellowed at the top of his lungs.
In the instant that order went out, the muscle memory built over years of walking the edge of death in the depths of the labyrinth overrode the last thread of fear left in his reason.
The three hulking men with waist-high fine-steel tower shields roared as one, stamped forward with their right feet and slammed a step ahead.
"Thoom! Thoom! Thoom!"
The heavy anchor spikes at the base of the shields drove into the seams between the white flagstones.
The three tower shields locked edge to edge and, with Raul at their side, threw up a solid, ponderous wall of moving steel on open ground in a heartbeat.
Perfectly in unison.
Right behind them, five light-armored spearmen came on in staggered steps.
They kept low, and their sharp, serrated spears slid out through the observation slits and the gaps left between the three great shields, locking down every straight lane ahead.
Alicia had already lifted her rune-carved staff above her head.
The Magic Stone at its tip flared a piercing blue.
A quick, rhythmic chant began to coil smoothly out from the core of the formation, wrapped in her comrades' protection.
In the same moment that the two skirmishers with curved blades went hunting for a gap in the flank—
four bowstrings drawn to the full moon snapped taut behind the shield wall at once.
This was part of Raul's plan too.
"Loose—!"
"Thwip! Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!"
The fletching on more than a dozen arrows sliced the air.
Every one of them honed by the dwarf Gareth himself, they leapt off the strings dragging long, shrill screams behind them.
Like a flock of diving crows they cleared the heads of the front-rank shield bearers and fell in a saturating pattern, pinpoint accurate, onto the patch of ground where Onigawara Rin still had not moved.
What Raul wanted was to crush the enemy flat under the tightest physical barrage he could bring.
And yet.
In the instant that rain of arrows, heavy with plunging momentum, was about to hammer down into the girls' zone—
Inaba Tsukuyo, eyes still shut, pressed down with the toe of her right foot.
Her left foot, wrapped in a white tabi, slid smoothly outward half a body's width.
"Tap, tap, ta—"
Her left hand, holding the long blade sheath and all, tore an afterimage across the space in front of her, too fast for the eye to catch.
"Clang! Bang! Crack!"
In that sliver of time, Inaba Tsukuyo's hand cut fourteen times.
Each swing came with another muffled, crisp clap of metal.
The volley in midair might as well have run into an invisible wall.
Every arrow angled at her from every awkward line was struck by the butt of Inaba Tsukuyo's scabbard on the thinnest inch of its fine-steel head—
and snapped clean in the air.
Like sparrows stripped of their wings, they dropped limp onto the stone five paces in front of the girls and bounced there in a scattered clatter.
"What?!"
The four archers in the back rank still had their hands frozen in the release pose, mouths hanging open.
A rapid volley from four seasoned archers on the verge of crossing from Lv.3 into Lv.4.
To knock ten-odd arrows out of a dense, sight-blocking saturation pattern one after another, without any wide-area blocking art, using nothing but a scabbard—
that took appalling swing speed.
More than that, it took an inhuman gift for reading and catching what was coming.
And the one who had done it was a blind little girl who had not once opened her eyes from beginning to end.
Before the archers could shake themselves out of it—
"BOOM—"
Amou Kirukiru, still grinning, moved.
Under the spot where she had been standing, several neatly fitted white flagstones burst apart without warning, with a heavy, muffled crack.
Shattered stone sprayed outward from her push-off.
And then—
using nothing but her own body, Amou Kirukiru drove straight at the tower shield line that had just taken shape, like a maddened siege ram.
"Look out — hold her!"
The sight put a knot in Raul's chest, and in everyone else's.
Amou Kirukiru was, after all, a monster of a physique who could go toe to toe with Tione of [Loki Familia]'s First Corps.
A hard blast of wind carrying stone chips stung his cheek.
Roaring, Raul threw his whole weight behind the black shield in front of him and wedged both feet into the ground.
The three spearmen hidden behind the gaps in the tower shields reacted at once.
A clean, matched step forward.
Their silver-standard fine-steel spearpoints howled as they tore the air, driving in from three directions at once, vicious and lethal, straight at the black-haired girl's face.
Against three thrusts that could punch through armor—
at the last possible breath, an ivory sheen surged up beneath Amou Kirukiru's skin.
『Avatar Blade』
The body itself is the weapon.
And by now, that body of hers had long since become a shell past the hardness limits of any conventional weapon.
"Klang! Screeee—"
The instant the three cold-gleaming steel spearheads bit into the skin of Amou Kirukiru's shoulder and the side of her waist—
it was as if they had been driven into an unbreakable wall of adamantite.
Blinding sparks exploded from where flesh met spear tip, bursting outward like fireworks.
"Crack!"
With the shriek of metal bending and twisting out of true—
the spearman on the far right realized, in a heartbeat of terror,
that his expensive second-grade spear had been snapped in two on the spot by Amou Kirukiru.
The heavy half-moon spearhead tumbled away through the air, scraping past and slamming into open ground a dozen meters off, bouncing half a meter high and rattling out a string of clanging noise.
"She took the frontal thrust of an enchanted second-grade weapon... with her bare body?"
High up in the right-hand stands.
Hermes' pupils narrowed to points.
Behind her lenses, Asfi's pupils contracted just as sharply.
"Did she bind a high-grade single-target protective magic item inside her clothes beforehand?"
The question escaped Hermes before he could stop it.
"As far as I can see..." Asfi drew a breath and swept her eyes over Amou Kirukiru.
"There's no sign of leaking magic power, and no sign of a tool being activated."
It was not only the two of them.
Color drained out of faces all through the stands.
Only Tsubaki, Finn, Riveria and the others,
along with the rest of [Loki Familia],
kept their composure at the absurd sight of Amou Kirukiru breaking a weapon barehanded, with flesh alone.
After all.
They knew.
For days now, on the training ground of the Twilight Manor, Amou Kirukiru had been trading blows head-on, fist to flesh, with the Lv.5 Tione.
In the clatter of the breaking spear, the deadlock at close quarters cracked open.
Riding the terrifying, undiminished momentum of her charge, Amou Kirukiru drew her right arm back.
Five long, pale fingers closed into a fist that was not especially large.
And with that grip, the soft line of the girl's shoulder was suddenly carved with hard-edged muscle.
"BAM — BOOM!"
A crash rolled out like thunder splitting a stormy night sky.
Ahead of Amou Kirukiru's driving straight punch.
At the instant her knuckles met the shield.
Dead center of the great tower shield at the very front.
"CRUNCH!"
All at once,
the heavy shield of layered hardwood over a fine-steel core caved in along the axis where her fist landed, leaving a huge fist-shaped crater a full ten centimeters deep.
The welded rivets at all four corners blew loose.
And the Lv.4 heavy shield-guard standing behind it felt his arms crushed as though a monster had come charging up out of the deep levels and rolled straight over him.
"Krk, krk..."
He grunted through clenched teeth.
But that brute, unreasonable strength was nothing he could hold against.
Under the astonished eyes of the whole arena, the heavy guard was driven back, both feet plowing furrows through the ground.
"Wham!"
He crashed headlong into the spear formation reorganizing behind him.
The spearmen there lost their footing and staggered every which way.
The airtight front-rank phalanx fell apart under that one brutal punch, and a gaping hole tore open in the middle of their line.
"This is bad — hold together!"
In that flash of lightning and struck flint—
Anakity, who had been lurking on the flank, showed exactly the support reflexes that made her vice-captain of the Second String.
A tap of her toes, and her whole body launched into the air on the burst power of 『Cat Step, Cat Path』.
Straight at Amou Kirukiru.
Her twin blades were about to land.
"Ting."
An impossibly crisp scrape of iron on iron.
Anakity's cat eyes, narrowed to needle points, snapped wide.
A great sheet of orange sparks sprayed off the ground in every direction.
Through the sparks—
Onigawara Rin had already slid into the blind spot on that flank of Amou Kirukiru's guard.
Both hands on the hilt of a tachi that breathed a bone-deep cold, wedged into the crossing point of those two curved blades.
『『Sealed-Heart Sword Soul』』.
Seal away the heart. Hypnotize the self.
[Strength] and [Endurance] rise sharply, and [Mental Immunity] is gained.
Onigawara Rin at her most extreme.
Heat flared in the webs of Anakity's hands.
"That can't be..."
"What is with this girl... her Level is barely listed at Lv. anything, and even granting her a Skill's correction—"
"This grip strength... how is it so much greater than mine?"
Anakity sucked in a cold breath.
She ground her teeth.
She knew she had no chance at all in a contest of raw strength.
Anakity arched her back and flipped away in three crisp backward somersaults, trying to open the distance fast.
But.
The one she faced was Onigawara Rin, who saw herself as a samurai, and whose own competitive fire had been stoked to a blaze these last few days by Amou Kirukiru.
Reserved as she was, to show the god she looked up to just how hard she had worked all this time—
Onigawara Rin gave Anakity no room to breathe at all.
Soles hit stone. The blade moved with the body.
The next second—
"Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!"
The dense hammering of tachi cuts and desperate parries, like hail pounding on the slate of a roof, on and on without a break.
Onigawara Rin hacked at her like a woman possessed.
Raul finally gave up on commanding anything.
He took the risk and threw himself bodily into the space in front of Anakity.
He fought with the one-handed sword Anakity had given him — 『Master of Stories』. Years ago he had fallen for a certain whore and spent every last thing he owned on her, his gear included, until he was so short of coin that he dipped into the Familia's funds; his comrade Anakity couldn't stand to watch it and forced the blade on him. Sturdy, dependable, and it cut iron like mud.
The one-handed sword came up at an angle to brace.
As a seasoned Lv.4 adventurer, Raul had used this sword to hold off more monster maulings than he could count.
But now—
"So heavy!"
Raul's teeth ground together.
And just as the two [Loki Familia] Second String members who had steadied themselves saw it, took up their spears and moved to push past the shield guards—
"RAAAGH—!"
A savage roar. A rising gale.
Hanasaka Warabi's small body, seated astride [Kyoubou], plowed into the middle of the battle.
Kyoubou, who had already ascended to Lv.2.
Layered with thick fat, bristling with coarse hair, the enormous bear paws swung left and right.
They swept out sideways at the two members coming up in support.
Like swatting a ball.
The white-wax shafts of their long weapons were batted clean out of their hands by those paws.
Great cracks spidered across the stone floor.
"Damn it all!"
"What kind of monster is this?! How is this bear's brute strength worse than the things we ran into on Floor Forty of the Dungeon?!"
One of the spearmen who had lost his weapon shouted in disbelief.
Watching the situation ahead turn dire—
the Mage standing at the very back of the line, Alicia,
Pure Night Garden — Alicia
could not stand still with the anxiety any longer.
The face of [Loki Familia]'s Second String was going to be scraped clean off today.
She had to turn the collapse around.
And then—
Alicia thrust her magic-guiding staff high.
A string of intricate chant lines spilled from her lips.
"Frozen sky, blue rain of the high heavens."
"O white ice that adorns the forest, drive out these shallow barbarians and lock them fast... Bonds of Winter!"
Alicia had mastered the technique of parallel chanting.
As the last of her spell fell into place—
in midair,
a vast blue-white orb of light, its surface crawling with arcs of lightning, condensed without warning above the center of the formation.
The temperature plunged.
Around its outer shell, countless finger-thick bullets of ice spun rapidly into being.
In another instant they would scatter in every direction and freeze every enemy solid.
"Now!"
At the far edge of the field, Tendou Kisara held her low crouch.
The hilt of the long, narrow katana.
A hiss.
The black scabbard slid back an inch.
Riveria had once taught her the trick of using Sword Aura to unravel "Magic" the moment the blade left its sheath.
In that split second, the lesson surfaced in Tendou Kisara's mind.
"Shhk—!"
Tendou Kisara's right hand snapped out.
She herself never moved from where she stood.
But a blinding silver ribbon appeared out of empty air.
A vast, razor-edged crescent of Sword Aura in a perfect half-moon.
It carried the shrill scream of air being severed.
In an instant it tore open a full twenty meters.
It shot from her blade edge and struck dead into that huge orb spinning madly in the sky.
There came one crisp crack, like an ice sheet breaking apart.
And the "Magic" on which Alicia had pinned all her hopes
shattered in a single moment into countless fine crystals scattering across the air.
Alicia's staff arm was still raised, still holding the guiding pose, her eyes fixed on the dissipating wreckage of ice mist.
Then her limbs gave out and she sat down hard on the cold stone floor.
"That... what just happened?"
Seeing the ten-odd meters of Sword Aura Tendou Kisara had cut loose, the rest of the stands stared, dumbfounded.
"Magic"? Certainly not.
There had been no chant, not even a trace of magic power.
A magic sword, then? Clearly not that either.
"Did you see what that was?"
Hermes' face had gone grave.
Asfi nudged her glasses and answered in a low voice.
"If my eyes didn't deceive me, that should have been Sword Aura..."
—Sword Aura.
Not even the Lv.6 adventurers on record had ever cut Sword Aura capable of breaking "Magic" with an ordinary weapon and their own strength alone.
Asfi truly began to wonder just where this absurdly skilled swordswoman in black from [Haimer Familia] had come from.
The Sword Aura she cut, the kind that could break "Magic," did not seem to come from [God's Grace].
It seemed to come from the girl herself.
"Lord Hermes, I think—"
Just as Asfi was about to share her guess with Hermes.
But the moment she turned her head, she found Hermes gnawing frantically at his fingers, tense, as though he had just remembered something dreadful.
Fine, then.
Apparently the sight had dredged up some unspeakable episode from Hermes' days in the Heavens.
Looking at his reaction,
and thinking back over everything she had made a point of digging up about Lord Haimer's past in the Heavens,
Asfi decided to file this discovery away, for the time being, as one more dreadful trick Lord Haimer had brought down from the Heavens.
…
And so.
Having watched their side's last "Magic" option dismantled outright, even Raul's and Anakity's will to fight sagged.
But on the raw nerve of a high-level adventurer,
Raul still jammed his twisted left arm against the sword and held on, teeth bared, still hunting for one inch of opening in the melee to strike back through.
What he did not know.
Behind the line.
In the blind spot that had been protected layer upon layer.
Where the squad's main healer, its entire hope of staying power, waited.
— the one member of [Loki Familia]'s Second String who could least afford an accident, serving as both main healer and support, Lv.2.
"The Clown Waitress," Line Arshe.
The Attendant by the Sea — Line
"Don't panic."
Line heard Nomura Satori's voice.
She looked back.
Nomura Satori was already standing behind her.
Since when?!
Raul heard it too and whipped his head around.
There—
Nomura Satori, whose movements no one had tracked at all,
had her left arm wound around Line's stiffened neck.
A clear signal that [Loki Familia]'s key healer was already in her hands.
With their own healer taken, Raul and Anakity felt the last of their fighting spirit drain away.
After all.
They couldn't win.
They simply could not win.
Never mind that [Haimer Familia] still had several members who had not set foot on the field at all.
The other side had not even been fighting them seriously.
That was the part that truly cut to the bone.
Still, there was nothing to be done.
Losing is losing.
"Haah..."
____
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