"Aa... gaa..."
He averted his eyes from Clyde, rolling on the ground and clutching the bridge of his nose in agony.
He had no interest in what Clyde would do right now. What he needed to confirm was—
"Sarah. Are you alright?"
"Y-Yes..."
Called out to, Sarah answered even as she hung her head.
...She didn't appear to have any external wounds, but her magic power was heavily depleted. More than that, she was visibly shaken on a mental level—wearing the face of someone who had witnessed something terrible, something that had forced her to confront a harsh reality.
Before he'd arrived, something must have happened between her and Clyde. It seemed their exchange had shown her something deeply disturbing.
He figured he'd need to hear what had happened once the current attack was dealt with, but first he moved to offer her a hand—
"...Aa... aaaaaah!"
A scream-like groan rang out from behind him.
Looking back, he saw that Clyde had risen to his feet despite still clutching his nose, glaring at Ermes with eyes full of hatred.
"Don't screw with me... This can't be real. I won't accept it. That you of all people would hit me, that you would look down on me—no way in hell—!"
"...Yeah."
So that was the way it was, after all.
Thinking that, Ermes addressed Clyde—who had risen far faster than he'd expected—with a cold voice.
"Even the way you talk after getting beaten is just like Lord Aster. Did you learn to be pointlessly tough from him, too?"
"Don't... insult me...! I'm nothing like that guy! Why would you of all people get close to her!"
With words that were only partially coherent, Clyde lunged at him like a beast.
However, his movements were simple and sluggish. Ermes sidestepped with a light step, then drove a high kick into him.
"Gah! ... Aaaaaah!"
"Urgh!"
"Dzah!! ... It hurts, it hurts... you... damn it!"
"..."
He landed punishing blow after punishing blow using his martial arts, but Clyde kept getting back up and charging at him.
...I see. He'd seemed unusually tough, and now Ermes understood why.
The moment Ermes's attack connected, Clyde was reinforcing the impacted area with magic power. His body was likely moving on its own to reduce the damage, completely beyond his conscious awareness.
That was absolutely not something an ordinary amateur could pull off on purpose.
...What an irony. It seemed this man truly did possess extraordinary talent when it came to bare-handed combat, if nothing else.
But talent or not, there was no way he could contend with Ermes in close quarters — someone who had accumulated over five years of experience. If anything, the fact that he didn't collapse in a single strike only prolonged his suffering.
And finally, after who knew how many heavy blows, an elbow to the solar plexus caught Clyde, and with a choked cry, Clyde hit the ground for the second time.
"I don't particularly enjoy hurting people, so I was trying to end it in a single hit every time... but the way you're terrifyingly gifted in things you're born with, and that inexplicable tenacity at the very end — it's exactly the same."
"Ahh... it hurts...!"
Clyde staggered to his feet once more, but perhaps he'd finally realized there was no way he could beat Ermes, because this time he started screaming instead.
"Why...! Why are you still standing?! Why doesn't any punishment fall on you?! I've been trying so hard, and I'm the one being treated so horribly!"
"Like I said before — it's because you were weak."
"That can't be right! How can this miserable situation possibly be my fault — that's insane! There has to be something else, something different — that's it!"
And Clyde's face lit up as though a thought had struck him once again.
"— It was the Monsters. The quality of the Monsters was bad."
"……"
"That's right! I went through all the trouble of preparing that many Monsters and even made them smart, and yet — they still haven't broken through the barrier, they haven't killed a single person! There's no way a Dragon species could be taken out in one hit! That man — he deliberately tricked me into using weak Monsters!"
Even now, at this point, he was shamelessly shifting the blame onto the very targets he had forcibly enslaved.
Utterly speechless, Ermes decided there was no point in listening any longer. He began raising his magic power, intending to simply cut off Clyde's consciousness with a spell and go sweep up the remaining Monsters.
Clyde, oblivious to Ermes's intentions, kept on screaming.
"Aaaaaagh! What the hell! I went out of my way to put you guys — enemies of humanity — to effective use for the sake of people, and this is what I get! You're absolutely useless, a bunch of hopeless idiots! If you're really enemies of humanity, then prove it — go kill that guy already!!"
◆
— "He" watched it all.
"He" was often mistaken for weak based on appearance, but was in fact a reasonably powerful Monster that possessed a unique type of magic — no, "he" was really "they," a collective.
The magic that "he" — that they had acquired at the peak of their evolution — was called "Sharing" and "Fusion." Through it, they shared consciousness among themselves, functioning both as a swarm and as a single living organism.
Clyde — their current Boss — had discovered this magic and granted them intelligence. That was when they learned to use their ability as a means of communication, relaying information between Monsters and to their Boss.
By doing so, they were able to kill humans with dramatically greater efficiency. Even with their individually weak base strength, they could serve as a meaningful aid in hunting down other Monsters.
"He" was truly grateful to the Boss who had given them that opportunity.
But.
"Aaaaaagh! What the hell! I went out of my way to put you guys — enemies of humanity — to effective use for the sake of people, and this is what I get!"
Now their Boss was furious. He was berating them for their inadequacy.
"You're absolutely useless, a bunch of hopeless idiots! If you're really enemies of humanity, then prove it — go kill that guy already!!"
Hearing those words, "he" felt genuinely remorseful.
They — even the strongest earth dragon among them — had been unable to kill that silver-haired man. And "he" couldn't blame them for that. That man was on an entirely different level, a degree of strength never before seen among humans.
But… at the same time, "he" also thought this.
Why Is the Boss... So Terrible?
Why is the Boss... so
terrible,
he wondered.
The Boss had power close to that man's, after all.
Both the magic power dwelling within and the innate physique were top-notch. If the Boss put them to full use and fought alongside them, that man should have been perfectly killable.
And yet, the Boss was hopelessly terrible at everything. The way they handled magic, the way they drew out their power — it was all crude and clumsy. There was no comparing them to that silver-haired man, and that gap was laid bare as a difference in real ability. Losing was only natural.
Ah, how frustrating.
If he had been there, he could have made the Boss win, just as they wished.
——
If
they'd let
him
use the Boss,
he could win.
............Hm?
Oh, right.
That's all
it takes.
Then why not just do that?
◆
A dull, somewhat ridiculous flapping sound echoed through the air.
"......?"
When Clyde turned around, a small flying-type Monster stood there.
It had an oval-shaped body with nothing but a pair of flat, lifeless eyes plastered onto it, and a pair of black wings sprouted from its back.
In a word, it was something akin to a "chibi-fied bat." The creature might even strike one as cute depending on how you looked at it — Ermes had seen this particular type of messenger Monster countless times on the way here.
"...What the hell are you? You don't even have the strength to fight — you're barely more useful than a carrier pigeon, and you're trying to—"
The instant Clyde fixed it with a contemptuous glare and opened his mouth to speak—
—*GRAAAH*, the Monster suddenly yanked its jaws wide open right in front of Clyde.
"......Huh?"
The creature's abrupt movement made Clyde wonder whether it had even had a mouth to begin with. Inside that gaping maw, teeth so vicious and disturbingly real that they were impossible to imagine from its rounded little form stood in rows — and the moment they glinted menacingly before Clyde's eyes—
*CHOMP* — it bit down hard into Clyde's shoulder.
"Gy—ga, gyaaaaaaAAAAAAH!?"
Clyde let out a bloodcurdling scream.
At the same time, a torrent of blood sprayed from his shoulder in horrific volume.
Ermes stared at the scene in blank disbelief.
The Monster's sudden act of savagery was one thing — but more than that, it was the Monster's manner.
It did not look like it had turned on Clyde in defiance of his words. Quite the opposite, in fact — it almost felt as though the creature was acting out of the deepest possible loyalty, with nothing but its master's interests at heart.
The sheer shock, combined with the bizarre disconnect between the creature's demeanor and its violent action, left even Ermes rooted in place, while Sarah could only turn pale and stare.
And a few seconds later, the gushing blood flowing from Clyde finally stopped.
At the same time, the Monster began to contort its form with a grotesque, pulsing movement—and its vibrations were gradually synchronizing with Clyde's own.
The instant he realized what this phenomenon meant, Clyde screamed, his face twisted in terror.
"S-Stop! What are you?! No—
come
in—
don't—
me—
inside—
come
in—
don't come inside meeeeeeeeeeeee!!"
As if that scream had been a signal.
The Monster on his shoulder completely lost its form and dissolved. At the same time, the black substance that comprised it began to bubble and ooze over Clyde's body, eventually covering even his pupils—which were wide open in panic.
What formed was a black cocoon. As Clyde struggled from within, the Monster exercised its magic.
It *shared* Clyde's nerves, his actions. It *merged* with his physical form.
Armed with the high intelligence it had been granted, it demonstrated its advanced magical capabilities to the fullest.
At the same time, the black cocoon continued to swell further in volume, and then—
"...What is that?"
What had formed was—an abomination.
Every Monster Ermes had seen until now, however fearsome their appearance, had still maintained the bearing of living creatures. They were beings with plausible shapes—convincing forms that could exist in this world, equipped with proper biological functions for survival.
But this thing looked nothing like a living creature, no matter how you looked at it.
A smooth, bell-shaped mass of black, as though a shadow had been given physical form. It barely retained the faintest suggestion of a humanoid outline, but it was so grotesquely bloated that you could hardly tell.
On top of that, eyeballs floated here and there across the bell's surface—each one placed haphazardly, as though stuck on at random, with no consistency to their arrangement. The contrast between the bloodless whites and the pupils that reflected absolutely no light was devoid of any hint of life, nothing but deeply unsettling.
And the worst of it was—the dozen or more arms extending just as carelessly from the sides of the bell. Each arm ended in a palm, to be sure, but the way the limbs undulated and stretched made "tentacles" a more accurate description. The fact that they halfway mimicked a human shape only heightened the revulsion.
Something so black it was nearly impossible to acknowledge as alive. An imbalanced grotesquerie had manifested before his eyes—like a child's careless scribble brought into three-dimensional existence.
The creature's many eyes—all of them—swiveled toward him in unison with a sickly roll.
"!... Sara, can you stand?"
In that instant, Ermes understood.
This monster was no mere matter of appearance. ...He would rather not admit it, but he felt pressure on par with—or possibly exceeding—that of Kerberos.
"That thing is bad news. I can't say for certain I could handle it alone. I need your cooperation."
"!... Y-yes!"
Because Sara knew Ermes's true strength, his declaration carried enormous weight.
Realizing without a doubt that this was an emergency, she rose to her feet despite the chaos swirling through her mind.
"...Well then."
It seemed this commotion harbored problems beyond what he had imagined.
And to bring it to an end—one final act of monster-slaying would be required.
Facing the black creature across a space shrouded in walls of darkness.
Ermes gripped his sword of purple flames, holding it aloft as if to illuminate the abyss.
The second chapter's final boss makes its entrance.
I would be grateful if you would follow me through to the end of chapter two.