In parallel to the electric fistfight at hand, Rique etched the surrounding environs into his consciousness.
A destroyed tower three steps away, to the right. A stone fence, almost fully intact, twelve paces behind him.
Debris was scattered everywhere as vestiges of past destruction, including Mighamud's battle and Tu's recent charge. He needed to piece together some lightning-fast footing for himself.
"You're going to be sorry…"
Tu jumped up slightly from atop the residential building. Her movements were light enough to make him doubt her body really was capable of causing such destruction.
"For kicking them like that!"
She vanished, leaving a brief sound behind.
She kicked the wall to come from a different direction—no. Rique couldn't see the red warning flash.
There was an ominous crunching sound of some moist hard substance being smashed.
A right arm flew through the air. Krafnir's arm, ripped off and sent flying. Far beyond him in the distance, he could make out Tu's silhouette, digging into the earth to break speed.
It was possible for Rique to evade her attacks by himself. He could just barely capture her initial motion.
Nevertheless, it was an attack he couldn't afford to be hit by, even once.
I don't have the flexibility to protect someone else. If I don't continue to keep focused on myself, I won't be able to dodge her at that speed.
Krafnir's body lurched like a falling tree, and after two shaky steps, he picked up his fallen right arm with his left. His left hand was abnormally thin and parched an amber yellow.
"Aiming for me, is she?"
The veteran arts caster spat, offended.
He wasn't just skinny. The body he had kept hidden under his thick robe up to that point had all of its flesh completely chipped away. It was the body of a skeleton.
The man who had discovered the source of construct creation. "I've got you figured out! Your body's somewhere else, isn't it?!"
"JUST FROM FIGURING THAT OUT...WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU CAN DO? DO YOU THINK A CONSTRUCTOR LIKE ME WOULD EASILY REVEAL THEIR TRUE FORM? CRAFFNIL IO SEYV. IMHOVEST. YUUSHUWEM NEO." (FROM KRAFNIR TO SAYV'S CORPSE. VIOLET STEM, TORN MEMBRANE.)
"D-don't even think about it!"
Reacting instantly, Tu's bare feet smashed the remaining torso. The vessel Krafnir manipulated remotely was lifted up and scattered into the air, together with its navy-blue robe.
A fragment of…its lower jaw continued the Word Arts incantation.
"MUQIMNART. PEGTILYRIA." (RING OF WATER. HARM.)
From within the smashed-up corpse gushed forth a dirty greenish haze, which enveloped the area.
Tu immediately jumped away, but the haze blocked her vision, resulting in the three arrows fired at her from the flank to squarely hit their mark.
Chest. Left eye. Right thigh. Rique the Misfortune's masterfully skilled shots didn't miss their targets even when aimed through a cloud of fog.
"Auugh… Dammit! I let down my guard!"
She had indeed let down her guard. Under the standards of an average fighter.
…None of them penetrated. Not even a layer of skin gone…
Aiming for the gap in her ribs at point-blank range, he had assumed it wouldn't be able to pierce through her chest.
With precision enough to fire a shot through the eye of a needle, he also made a direct hit on her left eye. It hit but was repelled. He was sure what he saw.
If he aimed at her eye, and his attacks still couldn't hurt her, what other methods were left?
"Sorry, Krafnir, but I'm leaving the offense up to you. I'm going aim for her eyes. I'll make her keep her guard up to defend them. I'm guessing you're the better thinker here… Figure out a way to get through her defenses for me."
"I've already finished doing that."
Answering Rique's call was not the skeleton body scattered in every direction, but a metal bug that flew up close to his right ear.
While Tu was wiping her eyes—alone an unthinkable opening for a fighter to show her opponent—the pair needed to exchange fighting tactics.
"It's a poison mist that paralyzes the nerves and inhibits respiration… If arrows won't pierce her, then obviously it's time to try this... Though."
Tu's eyes were once again fixed on the pair.
Her eyeballs took on an ominous green phosphorescence. She wasn't a minia...at the very least.
"Is the poison working on her? You're the one to judge." "…What am I supposed to do…?!"
Tu's feet kicked up dust. A lightning-speed kick was coming.
He twisted his body. He fired his arrow straight in front of him to slam into her charge. Rique was moving at such a blinding speed that the fabric of her clothes began to tear.
"Impressive. Gotten used to it, eh?" "I've seen it four times now!"
She was simply accelerating at top speeds and kicking. Either that or punching. That was the extent of the young girl's moves.
Tu's charges had destructive power and speed that could surpass a cannonball, but as long as he didn't miss her tell, he could dodge her attack, even if its speed broke the sound barrier.
Naturally, this was predicated on his special ability to sense incoming threats
—and a vision honed through experience. Above it all, it required him to keep himself engrossed in complete concentration.
"…Enough with the dodging already!"
Tu expressed her dissatisfaction. The arrow that must have hit her square in the face didn't leave a single scratch.
"If you keep dodging me like this…I'm gonna have to run at full speed, you know."
In what seemed like a meaningless act, she began stretching where she stood. Rique's instant follow-up arrows hit her, but even as he focused the shots at her eyes, she didn't even flinch.
"I'm! Serious now! A full power kick from me! Will blast you to pieces!" "Wait! What in the world—?"
He dodged the threatening red flash. The terrifying kick ended up grazing Rique narrowly as it passed him by.
A cloud of dust. His vision turned upside down. He already factored it all in. He caught the girl in his sights and aimed his bow. He could tell his body would soon fall back down. He focused his strength in his thighs.
Firing a shot, to keep her in check. Meaningless. There wasn't any attack that could keep this girl back.
A concussive roar.
Rique jumped into the air. A black wind crossed right under his feet, gouging the earth.
The track of her green pupils drew a curved line and smashed a stone wall.
She continued running right through it.
He collapsed to the ground to dodge Tu's charge. Everything from her reactions to her attacks were too fast. It was all he could manage.
The ground was deeply gouged. The hollowed-out ditch continued all the way across the city. He didn't have any time to get back up.
An explosive blast. A dull noise echoed. Then it stopped.
Reactivated Mighamud threw its body at her from the side. Blocking the blow from the giant mass, several times larger than herself, pushed her three steps back.
Digging her bare feet into the ground and placing her hand on Mighamud's head, she suddenly murmured to it.
"…Do you have a heart?"
Unlike with Krafnir's proxy body earlier, the girl didn't crush the revenant's head.
The chance gave Rique barely enough time to get up off the ground.
The girl again set her sights on him. She lowered her body, her initial tell.
A charging stance.
It's all the same.
The girl's combat tactics were composed solely of the exact same straightforward charge, over and over again.
It had tremendous power behind it, but with Rique's superpowered eyes and experience, evading it wasn't completely impossible. He couldn't even call it a technique, instead she was simply throwing her body's physical abilities at him. However.
An explosive blast.
"Hrnaugh!"
He was narrowly dodging it the same as always, but the balance was gradually beginning to shift.
Rique's heels stopped. They touched a piece of rubble he hadn't been aware of. It was a horrifying moment. His grasp of the surrounding topography was becoming negligent.
What was the next direction he needed to step in? The timing? Tu once again stamped her foot.
An explosive sound.
How long—?
Rique kept dodging. He was concentrating his thoughts on defense, but he couldn't help having the question pass through his mind.
How long are these attacks going to continue?!
Despite how much she moved around, Tu the Magic didn't show the slightest hint of exhaustion. He couldn't even see any signs that she had discerned her tactics were useless and was changing her simple, repetitive approach. He could dodge. She was just launching herself at him.
However, the slightest hit from her attack would mean an immediate knockout.
There was no pause between her attacks. Counterattacks were ineffective. "Hey, robe guy! Where are you?! You're leaving all the fighting up to
Rique?! Lose your nerve, that it?!"
Did this girl have unlimited stamina?
Was he going to have to continue evading these attacks forever? Right at the moment Tu took her stance to attack again—
"Lose my nerve?"
The golden wire on Mighamud's flank split open, and a countless number of cannons poked up from inside its open body.
"Me?"
The simultaneous explosion and light shook the earth. Five stonework buildings were blown apart—a cone-shaped chunk of the land itself had been carved away. The vegetation that came into contact with the smoke from the barrage changed into fine black bubbles and dissolved away.
An explosion. Debris scattered. A whole area erupted in flames. The ruinous destruction was spreading out farther.
Rique immediately covered his mouth with his scarf and put as much distance between himself and the center of the attack as possible.
"Krafnir... You've gone too far!"
"Disease. Propellant. Acid. I just did what you said and gathered all the methods that'll break through her defenses."
From the start, Krafnir had hidden a countless number of cannon golems inside Mighamud's body.
A lifeless military force capable of utilizing noxious biological weapons against the living. Creating constructs with identical standards was the true pinnacle of Krafnir's skills.
"This is the true method of fighting with Mind Arts. I've surpassed even
Izick the Chromatic…"
The red premonition of death. The smoke split open.
Rique evaded. A green afterglow flowed through. The color of Tu's eyes. Seeing this before him, Krafnir's voice trembled in fear.
"Th-this girl…!"
Landing on top of a faraway stone wall, Tu slowly turned back around. " "
A large portion of her clothes had dissolved, and the flames from the incendiary agent that clung to her continued to torment her.
In an epicenter of destruction, bringing death a thousand times over to the average person, her fair skin was totally unscarred.
With her unobstructed body, it was only her eyes that gleamed a fiery green. She was beautiful, despite being nothing less than a reason-defying monster. Backlit against the sun... It was fantastical, as beautiful as any painting. "...What are you?" he muttered, finally finding his words.
At this point, Rique doubted whether he had enough stamina left over to dodge the next attack. The only possibility left to him was conversing with her to buy time to recover.
"You haven't gone mad… Right?! If murder…and fighting to protect
yourself isn't justice, then what…?! The beast, the Demon King Army, will attack other settlements!"
"…Where those ones you killed doing that, too?" "…"
"The fact that they're here means they couldn't leave this area even if they wanted, right?! That's why they're in so much pain. No matter how much I try to save them… It's no use. They struggle, bite their tongues…suffocate themselves… Even break their own bones."
They understood each other. Though a monster far beyond himself, she still wasn't a beast incapable of understanding Word Arts, either.
…In which case, just who was Tu the Magic? Where did she come from?
Was she not even a product of the laws of Word Arts, the world's basic foundation, but instead, like her name suggested, something ripped from a fairy tale, a being of true, real magic?
"Whenever someone comes here, they all come out. Because they want someone to help them. But everyone kills them. Excusing it by saying it's because they're the 'Demon King Army.'"
"That's right. They're too far gone to be able to go back. That's the disaster assaulting this land. They're bound to leave here eventually and attack others! Will you take responsibility for that?!"
"What if they don't attack anyone, then?! What about your responsibility?! If it's the same either way, then I'm gonna try to help the wretched and pitiful! Th- that's the champion's… You know! Er, when someone...when they do the right thing, what's it called again…?"
"MORAL CODE," Krafnir's bug pointed out. "A MORAL CODE!"
Rique dropped his bow to the ground. Then he raised both hands, empty, into the air. A stance of surrender.
He likely could've continued to fight. Enough to dodge one or two more of her attacks, at least.
However, he clearly saw how his bout with the Demon King's Bastard would end.
"It's over."
"Whoa, wait, don't just up and surrender on me! I—I won't know what
I'm supposed to do anymore…"
"…You're the one who's more in the right here, honestly."
Rique realized. He didn't have any right to unilaterally slaughter a group of
sentient beings just because they lived in The Land of The End.
This fight was meaningless already, and Rique was clearly still inexperienced if he hadn't been able to realize something so simple before he encountered this girl.
Rique pointed over toward the minia he first shot down with his bow. "Check to see if they're breathing."
"...?"
Despite finding the true meaning of his words suspicious, Tu obediently approached the minia and put her hand on their chest.
Then she blinked in shock. "He's…alive…?"
"A custom-ordered drug I had Thousandth prep for me. They'll be asleep for half a day, and there's not many side effects, either. These hollow arrows have undergone a highly precise processing and can release the medicine from the impact pressure."
"Wait, Rique, you—?"
"Right, I guess I didn't tell you, Krafnir. A small farming village's reward money isn't enough to get me to employ Thousandth. Even for a guy like me, see. My other employer is the Free City of Okafu. Recovering survivors from The Land of The End. The commission to exterminate everyone just said, 'Don't leave any living creature behind,' right?"
Tu's expression lit up instantly.
This mannerism of hers, too, seemed just like any other girl her age. "Then, Rique, to make sure everyone survived and escaped…!"
"…Since Krafnir made his constructs go wild, I ended up having to pretend we were competing with each other. At the very least, I held back to try to make sure no one died… Except with you. I get that this might not be enough of a reason to lay down your arms, but—"
A soft body came flying toward him, cutting him off, and he collapsed. Rique didn't have the stamina left over to dodge.
Green eyes smiled like a blossoming flower, right up close to his face. "Amazing! That's incredible! I never would've thought you could protect
someone like that!" "…Er, I mean…" "..."
Unable to directly look at her bare chest, Rique compelled himself to direct his attention elsewhere.
As a result, his follow-up comments were mostly the first thing that came into his head.
"...K-Krafnir, it was the same deal with you, right?"
"...?! What're you talking about?"
"Inside of Mighamud. Going through such a large-scale reconstruction like that, you didn't leave the digestive organs behind on purpose, right? Why's a champion of your renown taking on a low-paying job like this? You planned on letting them all live and taking them out of here… Right?"
"You too?!"
"...Hmph! Save me your false accusations!"
Rique looked at the revenant lying down on the ground. Within the leftover space in Mighamud's open flank, where the golems had been released, there seemed to be plenty of room to do just as he said.
He was also competing with Rique…hurriedly recovering the survivors, trying not to kill them in the process.
Then if he considered that Krafnir's initial action to gather the region's living creatures to him was so he could swallow them all up at once—and protect them from Rique's arrows in the process…
"Even if that was true, still… It was simply because, I needed, materials for my construct creation; that's it! Nonsense… Absolute drivel!"
"It doesn't matter either way! You're still taking everyone away from here, right?! So the two of you were good guys, after all! This'll save everyone! Whoo-hoo!"
"…I'm telling you, you've got it all wrong!"
His excuses didn't seem to be reaching the young girl.
She wanted to save these people that no one would reach out to try to help. Had that sole determination really been behind her continued defense of The Land of The End? Tu the Magic was all too naive, yet as a fighter, all too warped.
"…For now, put this on? A young girl shouldn't be walking around in such a state."
"Mm-hmm! Thanks!"
Tu smiled, putting on the overcoat Rique handed her.
Where did she come from? How did someone with so much power get born into their world?
…The monster in The Land of The End was known as the Demon King's Bastard.
"I'm so glad, though. With this, I won't have to drive off all the people who show up here anymore."
"What are you going to do from here on out?"
"If I'm free to move as I'd like, then there's one place I want to go… For a long time. Perhaps if you and Krafnir could take me there…"
"…Me? You think I'd do that?"
He wasn't sure. When he thought about it, he hadn't had any prejudicial biases against goblins.
Then what were his thoughts toward a girl of a totally unknown and never- before-seen race like her?
Could Rique take responsibility for the Demon King's Bastard after she left this Final Land behind?
"I guess I'll help you out. I think it's something I need to do." "I want to go to Aureatia."
"Aureatia, you say? Hmph… I see."
Krafnir reacted to the name. He should've earned his right to participate in the Royal Games occurring in Aureatia.
Rique could spend his lifetime and still never reach him, an arts caster standing in the realm of champions.
They started walking, and it wasn't long before Zigita Zogi's carriage came into view.
Although he must've witnessed the fierce fighting from where he was, he still hadn't run away.
Perhaps he stayed out of pride for his merchant dependability—either that, or perhaps he was concealing some unfathomable power from Rique, too.
In this world, there were many powerful individuals.
Faced with such limitless heights, Rique the Misfortune still felt young and inexperienced.
"Rique! And Krafnir is…?" "RIGHT HERE."
"Huh. You've shrank down quite a bit now, haven't you? And you've added another to the group, I see."
"Once we finish up things here, I want to bring this girl to Aureatia. Can you arrange for our transport back?"
"But of course. I'll still need to prepare some number of additional carriages anyway... Assuming I have things right?"
"We're going to be carrying a lot of people outta here, after all." Rique grinned.
Ultimately, this job had been a charade, with all of them being complicit. Sometimes things ended up like this, too.
"Why do you want to go to Aureatia?"
"I mean, it's the biggest minian city, right?! I like places that're all sparkling and vibrant, too! I want some cute clothes, and I can't wait to try all different types of food! That and…"
Pressing down her overcoat to her chest, Tu looked slightly sheepish as she smiled.
A terribly carefree mind, inside an inconceivably abnormal body. "There's a young girl there I wanna see smile!"
She possessed overwhelming physical ability, wrenching superiority from any skill or technique.
Her endurance was infinite.
She boasted wholly unrivaled defensive capabilities, rendering even poison and cannon fire meaningless.
An incarnation of true magic, appearing out of a land filled with nightmares, her origin was a mystery.
Juggernaut. ------------ .
Tu the Magic.