"The bastard's…moved while using Greatshield of the Dead. Star Runner's going to escape!"
Shalk the Sound Slicer, realizing the fatal transformation in Alus the Star Runner, tried to relay as much information as he could.
With just his power, or potentially even with the power of the other hero candidates, they may not have been able to stop him anymore. At least, if he was allowed to fly off from here, the damage and casualties would grow even further.
"…Attacks aren't going to have any effect on him anymore!"
As a result of the fierce fighting up until now, Alus had exhausted a majority of his equipment.
Hillensingen the Luminous Blade had returned to Toroa's hands, and at the same time, he lost Trembling Bird as well.
He no longer had the magic items that delivered autonomous multifaceted attacks in Rotting Soil Sun or Ground Runner.
He had likely gone through all of his deadly magic bullets, including the magic lightning bullets. Even his rifle itself couldn't have avoided some adverse effects from the harsh nonstop gunfire Alus was putting it through.
Torn off halfway down the whip, Kio's Hand now managed to hold out only in hand-to-hand combat in his magic swords' stead and little more.
Yet now was the truly worst moment of all.
Alus the Star Runner, his consciousness and memory degenerated and letting his multitudes of magic items run wild, had transformed into an immortal automatic machine, slaughtering without any goal.
Sure, he's run out of his offensive magic items…but that's not any comfort at
all.
The threat he posed hadn't been mitigated at all; if anything, it was only
growing worse.
There was a magic item capable of destroying Aureatia very close to the second borough of the Eastern Outer Ward.
The Cold Star
Just needs to steal again, is all.
The incessant arrows from Horizon's Roar, splitting through the sky, stopped.
Shalk could see the silhouette of something taking flight from the point of death, having been killed thousands of times and still persisting.
Alus's figure, wrapped in the vestiges of Mele's earthen arrows, hot boiling rock, looked like a flaming bird.
A part of him, his neck perhaps, moved, and he turned his path toward the small tower at the Third Fortress.
The next arrow came flying in to obstruct his path, but it had been launched before his immortal tenacity had been made clear. Unable to keep up with his godlike agility, the arrow's aim missed the mark.
He was actually accelerating his flight speed. He couldn't be destroyed.
I can't get at him in the air.
Alus the Star Runner was going to immediately attack the Cold Star's gunner and steal the magic item.
Then he'd shoot at his next target—either Mele the Horizon's Roar or potentially the city of Aureatia itself.
Such a future couldn't be prevented. Alus was arriving at the small tower.
Metal claws scratched at the small tower's parapet. "Took you long enough."
A white spear was right before his eyes.
The inexhaustible thrust flashed, casting away sound itself, and pushed Alus downward, destroying the parapet with it.
"I was getting real tired of waiting for you," Shalk spat, already having snatched the Cold Star from its pedestal and gripping it in his hand.
Such a future couldn't be prevented—for anyone else besides Shalk the Sound Slicer.
After a significant delay following the clash, the bespectacled gunner shouted, "Hey! What the hell's going on with Star Runner's body?! Forget the Cold Star; how the hell's it still unscathed after taking a direct hit from Horizon's Roar?!"
"Just to be sure. Take shelter."
"Saying this just in case. Get outta here."
Shalk left behind just two short remarks before jumping off the top of the small tower.
In the time it took Alus to fly in a straight line to the small tower, Shalk had
run all the way here.
If it was now impossible to offensively keep Alus preoccupied, then he'd use the same method he had at the start.
The only option was to use the magic item Alus wanted as bait and turn Shalk himself into a target to keep him pegged down.
But where?
The choice was between either the second borough or the fifth borough, flanking the third on either side.
Shalk wanted to avoid the flames of battle expanding to another district.
He wanted to choose the fifth borough, where there were likely no survivors left behind, but that area, where Tu had sunken down with the Rotting Soil Sun, had already turned into a muddy mire. Would he be able to have the mobility necessary to battle Alus there?
Whichever place I choose, though, now that he can't be killed, I need to lead him outside of Aureatia. The second borough is closer to Aureatia's border… Guess that's my only option.
Shalk's series of thoughts had finished even before he landed.
Kicking off a church roof, he drove his spear toward Alus as the wyvern tried to fly away from below the small tower.
"Where is…my treasure…?"
Way too hard.
Shalk could tell from the recoil he felt in his spear that his thrust didn't affect Alus at all.
He had been able to knock Alus down moments ago because this thrust had been fixed mainly at the parapet and had destroyed the wyvern's footing while simultaneously throwing off his balance right after landing.
This latest thrust served only to provoke him. "Kio's…"
The magical whip, extending out faster than the speed of sound, immediately hacked at Shalk.
Using the recoil from this attack and without kicking off with his legs, Alus flew up into the sky. Outside of Shalk's spear's range.
"…Hand."
"Can you see the treasure, Alus the Star Runner?" "The treasure's…"
Shalk broke off in a run without waiting for the answer.
Fast enough for Alus to still visually follow him. To ensure that he could engage him in the second borough of the Eastern Outer Ward, without letting the damage spread any further.
There's got to be someone else who's come here besides me. Someone somewhere who can do something about this.
Guiding Alus outside of Aureatia—this was the only plan Shalk could enact alone, but was it even realistic?
Alus right now didn't seem to be acting with any reason that Shalk could comprehend.
However, if the apex adventuring rogue was trying to storm Aureatia…did that mean he wouldn't stop until he had done just what he had done in countless dungeons and labyrinths before, destroy Aureatia and plunder all its treasure?
If that is true, then this is a losing battle.
No one had imagined it, but this fight had come with a time limit from the very start.
A fight to win before Alus the Star Runner, obtaining a cogwheel body that maintained his combat functionality in perpetuity, managed to perfectly adapt the Greatshield of the Dead to his new form.
This has got to be what the original demon kings were.
Shalk could tell that the shadow of ruin had begun to pursue him from behind.
A nightmare that laid everything in the world bare, plundered it, and journeyed until the death of it all.
From the era before the True Demon King…
Born among the most populous natural enemies in the skies, the strongest of them had all transformed into legend.
An adventurer and a plunderer.
The natural enemy of miniankind.
Gigant Town. Mele the Horizon's Roar's firing position lay sixteen kilometers north of the Eastern Outer Ward.
"…Can't do any more than this. A waste of arrows," Mele casually remarked, lowering his enormous black bow.
Cayon didn't intend to object, but he was unable to experience the same world that Mele saw.
Sitting with his legs crossed in his chair, he simply looked off in the same southern direction.
"What's happening? You said you hit Star Runner, didn't you? The observers even reported several times that they confirmed he had been hit, too," said Cayon.
"Hell, I wanna ask the same damn thing. In any case, my attacks aren't working anymore. If I gotta do this without destroying the city, then I can't try shooting up into the air and hitting Alus a bunch of times until he's buried in the dirt, neither. End up destroying the whole city right down to the bedrock that way. So I got nothing left," Mele replied.
"…I get it, okay."
The trajectory of the arrows Mele shot at Alus had all been aimed toward the sky, tracing a path as though they had suddenly leaped from below. He hadn't let a single one of them land in the city.
Not only that, but he threaded them through the intricately woven streets of Aureatia's high and low cityscape, without letting the aftershock of their impact even touch the buildings. Despite showcasing this utterly sublime technique over and over again, Mele's breathing wasn't ragged at all.
"This is plenty. I never planned on having you be any part of this to begin with anyway… You've worked hard enough, right, Mele?"
With the battlefield past the edge of the horizon, Cayon couldn't possibly feel the reality of it all from here in Gigant Town.
However, the fact that Mele's skills weren't enough to fully stop Alus remained.
Would this be the end of Aureatia? he thought.
"It might be a bit callous…but if this isn't enough, I'm fine with it." "That so? In that case, I'm gonna take a nap."
Mele yawned as he departed.
The Sine Riverstead's guardian, from the very beginning, felt no obligation to protect Aureatia.
Holding this Sixways Exhibition to put an end to these champions, only to have them save the city when Aureatia itself was actually under threat, was far too self-serving—Cayon thought.
If Aureatia was brought to ruin, then no one was going to show up trying to take Mele down.
Cayon's absolute highest priority, Sine Riverstead and Mele the Horizon's Roar, hadn't changed.
Thus, there was nothing to be done for Aureatia.
The question is, if I can really be convinced of that, I suppose.
He sighed.
The individual citizens living in Aureatia weren't to blame for anything. He understood that.
Cayon couldn't do anything while innocent people died, just like during the era of the True Demon King.
Who could hope to fight against a threat that even Mele the Horizon's Roar couldn't annihilate?
That's why I'm trying to believe that the situation's hopeless.
The sounds of footsteps were coming back his way.
Mele's footsteps. Mele never moved when he was atop Needle Mountain. As such, it was a noise Cayon hadn't known in Sine Riverstead but had come to perfectly recognize after coming to Aureatia.
"…What's wrong? Wait, what are you doing?" Mele bore a massive iron pillar on his shoulder.
Of course, it was massive by minian standards, and when compared to Mele's enormous frame, it instead resembled a long arrow. One of the iron arrows that was embedded Sine Riverstead's Needle Mountain.
"Weren't you going to take a nap?"
"I'm free to do whatever I damn well please, aren't I? I just…lay down for a sec, and suddenly I was wide awake."
"You're never honest, are you?" "Bah, can it."
Mele sat down cross-legged and stuck the iron arrow vertically into the ground.
"If things start to look real bad, I'll stop Alus with a net by unraveling this thing with Word Arts. May not be able to blast him to bits, but I should be able to stop 'im from flying off somewhere."
Cayon thought back to the shapeshifting iron arrows he saw in the seventh match.
Mele's Craft Arts, turning this enormous iron pillar into countless fine iron wires.
Normally, these arrows were capable of wrangling wyverns all at once, expanding in midair. Now Cayon finally understood that this was what the technique was used for.
"…In exchange, though, the second borough's not going to get through it
unscathed, is it?" "Probably not."
No matter how fine the iron wires may have been, once fired with the speed of Mele's archery skills, they became a weapon of total annihilation, able to easily sever everything they went through. While he may have been able to restrict the might of its impact to keep the damage to a minimum, they still needed to be prepared for it to result in some number of casualties.
So I have to come to a decision, then. Mele's not going to let me run away from this, is he?
Mele the Horizon's Roar may have indeed been the guardian of only Sine Riverstead.
However, like Cayon had witnessed during the match against Shalk, he was a warrior and a noble-minded champion.
Cayon the Thundering needed to ensure that he himself was a sponsor becoming of his candidate as well.
"I'll get in touch with Hidow and propose the idea as an emergency defense measure for you. But if it doesn't get approved in time…shoot, and I'll take the responsibility, Mele."
"Alus! Where are you, Alus?!"
The steam automobile raced through the leftover ashes of what was once the second borough of the Eastern Outer Ward.
A majority of what was once an intricate network of buildings had been torched, or already destroyed by Sabfom's troops, and now with the blaze extinguished, there was space for them to just barely get through.
"Alus… Gwaugh!"
The car frame sank down at an angle, together with the sound of something breaking. The car itself was reaching its limit.
Almost everything besides its essential components had been pierced by the Gatling gun, and after colliding several times during the rigorous drive, the balance of the car's body was lacking considerably. It was close to a miracle that it had been able to drive this far.
"Dammit, it's always like this with these cursed automobiles…!" "At this point, it ain't about the car, y'know."
Crawling out from the car's interior, at this point a crushed mass of iron, was
Aureatia's Sixth General, Harghent the Still, as well as the hero candidate Soujirou the Willow-Sword.
"Fine…I'll walk then!"
"That ain't happening for me right now."
Harghent looked at Soujirou's right leg. The prosthetic leg. When Soujirou had encountered Mestelexil, his fighting form was so superhuman, he hadn't seemed to be in such a state at all, but he had lost his right leg, an extremely important body part for a swordsman.
For the average person, he was obviously incapacitated. To then escape from the hospital and willingly step into a dangerous location like this would be rightly seen as sheer madness.
"…Soujirou the Willow-Sword, I hate to say this, but you…" Harghent had raced this far with Soujirou in a state of near delirium.
It was fair to say that they had each dragged each other here. Their connection was a strange one.
"You're not going to be any help at all coming in a state like that. Alus is flying. You can't even chase after him on the ground below. Erm, well…did you think about that at all?"
"Yup. I mean, yeah, you got a point." Soujirou smiled while he sat on the ground.
"But hey. He might swoop down close enough for me to cut 'im dead. Could happen by accident, or Alus may come down and challenge me himself. See, me…I'd get real pissed if there was a party kicking off somewhere without me, and I looked back on it thinking that things could've ended up that way if I was lucky. That's all."
"That's it, huh?" Harghent smiled feebly.
Coming all this way, just for that.
Harghent was aware he couldn't accomplish anything. He had come here knowing he'd be nothing but an unneeded, extraneous presence even if he did.
Even an abomination, completely detached from Harghent's reality, like Soujirou the Willow-Sword was just the same as Harghent after all.
In which case, there was no longer any need for him to hesitate. No matter who ridiculed him, he was going to face off against Alus.
"…Alus! Alus! Harghent's here!"
Harghent's shout, growing hoarse, was swallowed up by the sky.
Ahh. The sky's too vast.
Unlike Harghent, only able to crawl through the debris, Alus lived in such a vast open world, with so much freedom. What did Harghent need to do to catch up to him?
Was he in the shadow of that building? Was he, at that moment, busy flying off in a different direction?
If he had already departed from this district and flown off somewhere, there was no longer any means for Harghent to keep after him.
"Alus… Hnaugh, ngh!"
He awkwardly tumbled over.
It was his age. He had used up so much of his stamina and energy just getting this far.
Despite thinking from deep in his soul that he wanted to achieve something, nothing ever went how Harghent wanted it to, and he only ever showed this version of himself to the world, clumsily thrashing about.
"Alus, where are you?! Where…?"
His shouts, too, began to trail off, growing weaker.
It was ridiculous to think a single wyvern would be conveniently within the narrow patch of sky Harghent saw when he looked up.
Harghent possessed neither supernaturally powerful sight, nor godlike speed to instantly race through the city.
He wasn't a shura with the power to fight, but merely an aging man who had found his way into a disaster zone.
"I won't give up… If I give up here, I'll lose who I am. I'll catch up to you, Alus. That's what I came here to do…!"
When he encountered Alus again, he had made up his mind about what he was supposed to do.
It wasn't to ask for his forgiveness or to converse with him as a friend. He would battle against Alus the Star Runner as his enemy.
If Alus's aim in annihilating Aureatia was to get revenge on Harghent, then by accepting all that resentment for himself and being cut down by the wyvern, this battle might come to an end.
If there was the slightest possibility created through exchanging an inconsequential life like Harghent's for a nation, then it was more than worth the price.
Thus, he would die.
If I died, I could escape from the shame and guilt. Right. Let's do that. I'm sure that dying…is much easier than I'm imagining it to be. Just by escaping
down the easier path, I'll be able to carry out what I've decided to do.
It didn't matter how pathetic the idea was. He just needed to avoid any hesitation until he met with Alus.
If he could just meet him, Harghent could change his mind and plead for his life, and Alus would still take his life regardless of Harghent's intentions.
He understood that the gap in their strength was so big, it was laughable and presumptuous even to challenge Alus to battle in the first place.
"Harghent… Harghent is here! Alus…!"
Then a silhouette appeared, as if to answer his cries.
It was a black-clad man, shrouded in an ominous aura. The man raised one hand slightly, showing a flaccid smile. "Hey there, General Harghent. I was looking for you."
"Y-you're…"
There was one other hero candidate Harghent the Still had a connection with from the Lithia War.
Kuze the Passing Disaster. The Order's most powerful assassin. "You were searching for me?"
"Sure was. Been decided that you're gonna have to die."
As well as the clearest and most evident incarnation of death in the land.
Aureatia Central Assembly Hall, second communications room.
As a result of processing the tremendous amount of information constantly flowing in the midst of the extremely tense situation, the Aureatia bureaucrats' exhaustion was beginning to reach their limit.
Once they're pushed to the limit, everyone's going to start getting stupid.
Hidow could sense it in the chaos of the citizens and soldiers he heard through the radzio, as well.
It was just as true for him and the others directing them. He didn't have any confidence that the orders he gave in the radzio call a moment ago were truly the right decision or not.
While this showed just how little time he could spare on each thought he had, it was clear that his judgmental abilities were on the decline compared to normal.
Ending the call, he changed over to a different line and listened to a situation report.
He wasn't able to understand the situation on the ground just by listening to
the account once, so he made them repeat it once more.
Ah, I remember now. In the era of the Demon King, everything was a mess. Engulfed in chaotic madness, everyone and everything became totally incomprehensible.
Back then, there was a wealth of anecdotes detailing inadequate directives that led to evacuating citizens straight in the direction of the Demon King's Army, or city soldiers massacring residents unprompted.
Each time, there would be a preposterous number of victims, in the tens to hundreds of thousands, and this came to be considered normal.
The radzio call finished, and he poured back the remaining half of the water in his cup. Lukewarm.
"…Ha. Is he an idiot? No one in their right mind would do something like this."
When it came to both the speed of his invasion and his exterminating power, Alus the Star Runner was a disaster that far surpassed that of the True Demon King, but despite this, casualties were being kept in check as much as Aureatia's strength could manage.
If this calamity had arrived during the era of the True Demon King, they wouldn't have gotten away with a mere ten thousand dead. Every single person would have likely met their end. Since back then, everyone had been a fool, pressed to their absolute limits.
"…Fool. That damn idiot," Hidow spat quietly, looking at a scrap of a report sitting on the edge of his desk.
The report had been submitted quite a long while ago at that point, but he hadn't found time until now to clear it from atop his desk.
—Sixth General Harghent the Still had escaped from Romog Joint Military Hospital.
"The True Demon King is dead, and you're still at your wit's end? So much time has passed…"
A completely hopeless man right through to the very end.
Even knowing he couldn't do anything, he still blindly charged onto a deadly battlefield.
Hidow knew that he was foolish enough to do such a thing. Harghent was definitely going to go, even if he had to be smeared with mud and crawl through the gutter to get there.
Steadying his breathing, intermingled with an exasperated chuckle, Hidow returned to the next radzio call and his next instructions.
Information on Harghent's movements was simply that inconsequential.
However…
I'm going to kill hopeless utter fools like you, you hear me?