Misfortune is an ever-accumulating thing. That was how Lendelt the Immaculate saw it.
People didn't recognize the phenomena they could potentially deal with as misfortune. It was when the hardships, generated as an inevitable part of life accumulated to an unmanageable degree that it was first meant to be referred to as "misfortune."
Right before the eighth match, Hartl the Light Pinch, who had headed off to stall Kuze the Passing Disaster, had died. As a member tasked with Obsidian Eyes mobile attacks, Lendelt had burned his body, destroying the evidence linking him back to the organization.
From there, he needed to bring Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge and return home. Right now, with Lena, Frey, and Wieze engaged in the operation at the castle garden theater and Hyakrai suffering serious wounds, Lendelt was the only member capable of doing so.
He was taking plenty of precautions. He wasn't behaving in any way that would cast suspicion on him. He should have been able to conceal Mestelexil in the carriage bed and secretly carry him outside the city.
Which was all the more reason why the circumstances he encountered after that were true misfortune.
…Damn monsters!
Behind him, there was a steam automobile chasing after Lendelt's carriage at full speed.
There was a man riding on top of the automobile's roof, kneeling. The name of this visitor, clothed in otherworldly red garments, was at that point known to most of Aureatia.
"Straight ahead! Keep on rushing straight ahead, old man!"
Soujirou the Willow-Sword. The man gripping the steering wheel with a deathly white complexion was Aureatia's Sixth General, Harghent the Still.
"Wait! I-in a situation like this?! Are you mad?!"
"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
In the carriage bed, Mestelexil was wildly firing a gun that produced a piercing howl.
It was called a Gatling gun. Its barrage, firing one thousand and three rounds a second, boasted a monstrous amount of firepower, which was fair to call excessive for not only an anti-personnel weapon but also an anti-matériel one; however…
"This all you got?! Ozonezma's! Knife things! Were waaaay faster!"
While the gunfire sounded with enough force to split the air, the only thing he could hear was the slight metallic sound coming from Soujirou's hands. The air in his vicinity was hazy. He was swinging something nonstop at high speed.
It wasn't a sword.
Soujirou's weapon was a massive something that could hardly be called a weapon, cut off from a section of the automobile.
Wielding the iron plate with unimaginable finesse, he was perfectly using the surface of the blade to completely kill the force of the Gatling gun's bullets.
"How the hell…am I supposed to escape from this situation?!" The strongest blade master in the land was pursuing Lendelt.
Going back a bit in time.
Hearing the report of Alus the Star Runner's attack, Harghent and Soujirou had hijacked one of the military hospital's steam automobiles.
While the carriages loaded with citizens filled up the main boulevards, they passed through the narrow alleyways that bypassed the buildings and headed toward the Eastern Outer Ward.
Their car continued forward, destroying a fair number of the residences and household belongings along the alleyway, but here in the districts where the residents had evacuated, there wasn't anyone to reprimand them for it.
"Yo, you're driving all over the damn place! Even I can tell! I thought you said you could operate one of these things!"
"S-stop, you're distracting me! Live combat first! I'm learning on the battlefield!"
At first glance, they saw what appeared to be a one-horse cargo carriage, left behind in the road.
The owner must have obeyed the evacuation orders from Aureatia while he was filling it up with his belongings to prepare to flee and, as a result, had left it
behind with the horse still tied to it. They had seen several other carriages like it on their path up until now, and there was nothing conspicuously unnatural about it, either.
"Harghent."
Which was why when Soujirou quietly muttered in the seat next to him, Harghent didn't think that this was what he was referring to.
"There's something real nasty in that carriage."
"…What?" Harghent asked, unconsciously reducing the automobile's speed. Soujirou the Willow-Sword—an abomination who had taken down the
Nagan Dungeon Golem all on his own—won a battle to the death against Ozonezma the Capricious, and he even now, after losing one leg, sought to battle Alus the Star Runner.
Something that this man called nasty was here in this deathly still residential district.
"Let me ask what you mean. Does that mean…strong?"
"Yup. I'd say that. Seems interesting, but I won't insist on taking it down or anything. You wanna go and defeat Alus as fast as possible, right, old man?"
"That's right. That's right, but…" Half-hearted.
Harghent thought the way unnecessary hesitation would sneak into his head at times like this was why he hadn't been able to catch up to Alus.
"…It's the Twenty-Nine Officials' job to protect the peace and safety of Aureatia. Just in case. Just in case…we'll check it out."
"A real serious guy, ain't ya?"
"If I really was that serious, I wouldn't hesitate."
At that moment, a strange crunching noise reverberated from the back of the automobile, but Harghent tried his best to ignore it.
"Umm… You, carriage over there. I am Aureatia's Sixth General, Harghent. Is anyone in there?" he called out, walking alongside the carriage. There was no response.
Harghent didn't sense any living creature inside, either. It looked like an unmanned carriage.
"Are you sure about this, Soujirou?" "Just gotta turn it over, right?"
Before Harghent had time to stop him, Soujirou extended the sheath of his sword and flipped up the canopy over the carriage bed.
"Hey…"
The singular eye of a bluish-purple golem locked its gaze with Harghent's. "Don't just—"
An explosive gunshot echoed through the alley.
In the same moment, the supposedly unmanned carriage took off.
Separate from the golem riding underneath the hood, someone with an abnormally faint presence had hidden themselves within the very tiny gap in the driver's seat—but this was all something Harghent only realized afterward.
"H-hah… Wh-what in the world is this?!"
"It shot at us! Hurry up and start the car! We're going after it!"
The massive load of bullets shot at point-blank range, by some incomprehensible logic, had all completely missed Harghent. Not only that, but the main components of the automobile, and the blade of Soujirou's sword, unsheathed in a single, impossible-to-perceive, second, didn't seem to have suffered even one scratch.
"Or are you not gonna chase 'em?!"
"I-I'll…go after it! That was Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge! A wanted criminal…i-in a place like this?! Why?!"
"How the hell would I know?!" "We're going after them!" "Then go!"
With an explosive ignition sound, the automobile took off.
They hadn't been intentionally chasing after Mestelexil and Obsidian Eyes. An accumulation of impossible-to-manage coincidences.
For Lendelt the Immaculate, it was an encounter that was nothing other than misfortune.
"Sou…jirou…!"
In the carriage bed, Mestelexil continued his unending attack to his rear.
A rocket launcher in addition to the Gatling gun. Small-size missiles. Or perhaps tear gas grenades.
They were the types of weapons Soujirou had seen often in the Beyond. All he had to do was discern which bullets from the Gatling gun were going to hit him, and dodge, and for the missiles and tear gas rounds, he just needed to distort their path before they hit.
If he cut off pieces of iron from the car's frame, Soujirou was able to create
any number of swords to wield, and currently, he could apply the speed of the automobile to his sword techniques as well.
There was always a limit to how much speed gunpowder could produce. No matter how strong the wielder may have been, it was an aspect that no amount of training could have any effect on. Soujirou didn't consider his comparison to Ozonezma from moments ago to be any exaggeration at all.
"U-umm… Uhhh! Wh-wh-who was that again…?!" "I ain't never met you before."
In addition, Mestelexil was in an unusual state.
He seemed to harbor an intense grudge against Soujirou, but it also appeared as if he currently didn't understand why he felt that way himself. Soujirou could sense that the golem wasn't able to fully bring out all of his power.
In which case, was there some way for him to kill this enemy?
This guy's like that spider thing in Lithia, huh. This guy's life is combined into one.
Even with Soujirou's intuition, he didn't understand the procedure to kill him.
What did he need to do to make killing him possible? It was the first time he had seen an enemy like this.
"Gwah, hah… This Sixways Exhibition stuff is a whole lotta fun!"
As he knocked away the storm of bullets with his massive iron plate, he ran the tip down at the car beneath him.
Grabbing a piece of steel that had been popped off with the toes of his left foot, he knocked down the rocket flying toward him.
It was with fear. The harder it was for him to understand how to kill his opponent, the more he wanted to cut them down.
It was the means to more deeply understand Mestelexil. He wanted to know what made him tick, and how he could stop it.
"Hey, Harghent! Quit shutting your damn eyes! Don't think I don't know!" "Impossible! I can't take it anymore! We're going to die! This is the end!" "We're in an automobile, and we can't even catch up to a freakin' horse?!"
Soujirou shouted as he parried the bullet storm.
If both of his legs had been healthy, he was confident he could have jumped over to the carriage in front, like the feat he had performed back in Nagan. From there, he could have cleaved through Mestelexil, armor and all. He completely understood what sort of swordsmanship he would have needed to slice through the golem's composite armor, just by looking at it himself.
However, right now, with his right leg missing at the thigh…
I ain't got a clue.
The distance between them, and the speed of their movement. The endless barrage of bullets. After he jumped, would he, Harghent, or the automobile be able to get out unscathed? A variety of factors intermingled in extremely complex ways and didn't leave him confident.
It showed that Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge was so strong that even Soujirou's gut intuition, capable of seeing the fate of anyone he faced off against, wasn't a match for him.
He's got to have more to 'im than just spraying bullets everywhere. Poison gas, flashbangs, he's gotta be able to do it all. C'mon, no need to hold back now.
Mestelexil was fighting in a way to avoid getting his driver caught in the cross fire.
Soujirou was protecting Harghent and the automobile, because they were supplementing his mobility now that he had lost one leg. However, normally, that shouldn't have been true of Mestelexil as well.
Most likely, the golem had experienced a battle like this in the past, and he was tracing the decisions made at that time to build his current tactical approach. You're telling me…even a guy like you is scared to jump into the unknown,
huh?
Soujirou was grinning in the middle of the loud, shrieking gunfire continuing to echo around him.
Perhaps it was that, for warriors as mighty as them, they couldn't help fearing an unknown that even their strength couldn't reach. Soujirou thought that he wanted to step into that realm of mystery.
He stepped forward with his prosthetic leg.
Soujirou didn't know what would happen, but he was gonna try jumping from one vehicle to the other.
"…Harghent. You might end up dead after this. Sorry 'bout that." "Huhhhh?! No, wait, where did that come from?! We look half dead as is!"
A very brief gap came in the barrage of bullets. Utilizing Craft Arts to repair the gun barrel and reload took only a second, but even then, as long as there was a physical restriction, Mestelexil couldn't actually continue to fire indefinitely.
Soujirou tipped his center of gravity. At that moment— "Ah."
There was a flash of blue light.
With an explosive blast, Mestelexil took off from the carriage.
The recoil from the rocket propulsion smashed the carriage bed into pieces. "…Damn you!"
Soujirou, right as he was about to jump, cut down two of the gunfire drones Mestelexil scattered right before he escaped. These drones hadn't targeted Soujirou, either.
The carriage, getting hit by the recoil of Mestelexil's flight, crashed right into a residential home and rolled over.
Harghent's automobile managed to miraculously avoid the wreckage— though it needed to tilt on one edge to do it—and came to a stop.
"What happened?!"
"He turned tail and ran! He wasn't running from us, either!"
He had most likely sensed some type of radar or sensor nearby. Soujirou himself had realized at almost the exact same moment that a mysterious something was approaching.
He looked down over the carriage wreck. It was deserted.
The man driving the carriage must have escaped from the carriage with ghostlike movements at almost the same time as Mestelexil took off. He had likely jumped through one of the windows of the nearby residences, but now wasn't the time to pay him any attention.
The mass of drones was turned toward the other side of the wall, with their
guns trained.
Then…
…the enormous figure appeared, tearing through the sturdy stone wall with one hand.
It was a massive gray ogre.
In his other hand, he swung a wooden club down.
The covered wagon's frame was completely destroyed in a single swing. "That Mestelexil bastard…! He ran away from this guy!"
The ogre, Uhak the Silent, looked up at the sky.
He almost seemed to be searching for the threat he was supposed to eliminate.
Clinking and clanking sounds echoed little by little.
Many among the drone swarm were losing their functionality. Their compositional elements broke apart and returned to the original materials they had been before being built with Craft Arts. None of them had fired a single shot.
"This hollow asshole. Came and ruined the fun."
It stuck in Soujirou's throat. With no particular reason why.
"Back off! Uhak the Silent's a hero candidate! He's different from Mestelexil!"
There was a flash of light.
Soujirou had completed his fatal slash.
Because this thing resembling an ogre was all too incomprehensible a creature.
"..."
His sword was stopped by the club.
It was completely ordinary, essentially just a mass of stiff wood.
Throughout Soujirou's life up until that point, there hadn't been anything like
it.
"…What the hell are you?" Uhak was silent.
His white pupils seemed to be both looking at Soujirou and past him at the
same time.
"…Let's go! The fact they couldn't finish us off must mean failure for that carriage driver! Bringing back the information that we saw, and engaged with Mestelexil is already valuable! Now…it's time for Alus! We're going after Alus!"
"..."
Going through the hole-ridden roof of the automobile, Soujirou returned inside the car.
"Old man. What's with this guy?"
"Uhak the Silent? He's an ogre. I've heard that he's docile, but other than that, he's just a regular ogre with no special qualities of note. Was there something strange about him?"
"Nah… That guy's definitely weird. Doesn't seem strong and doesn't look interesting at all… Normally, I wouldn't even pick a fight with someone like that…"
Soujirou wished to learn what lay at the edge of fear.
However, what he felt when confronting Uhak was a different type of terror from that time in the arena—a terrible alien sensation that made him think that he mustn't get any closer to him.
Uhak, still lingering vacantly, was far behind them.
With the landscape outside the car flowing in the corner of his eye, Soujirou looked at his own right hand.
He guarded…against my sword.