I parried and deflected the ogre's dual-blade strikes.
If I met them head-on, my sword would shatter.
Each blow was loaded with that much raw power.
No—every single attack carried lethal force capable of ending my life.
From the moment I saw that my Status was inferior, I had sensed it and kept my guard up. But I had underestimated just how badly outmatched I was.
"GRRRAAAGH!"
The ogre roared.
The cry became a solid mass of sound that slammed into me.
Pain lanced through my ears, and a shock like being punched tore through my body.
A roar that wasn't even a Skill, and it did this much.
The ogre advanced, shattering the ground with each step as its blades swept through the air.
I retreated a considerable distance while dodging wide to the side—far more than seemed necessary.
The ogre crossed in a single step the distance I had retreated at full speed, closing in on the line I had just occupied.
Purple lightning danced along the extended arc of the blade's swing.
As expected—a demonic sword.
And a remarkably powerful one at that.
And this ogre—while its behavior seemed nothing short of madness, its combat prowess was far from mere brute force.
The proof was in how it wielded the demonic sword's power.
It appeared to have lost all reason, yet it still employed combat techniques at a purely instinctual level.
What an incredibly troublesome opponent.
If only it would rampage blindly, I might still have had a way to deal with it.
I somehow slipped through the violent flurry and landed a single strike on the ogre's body.
Shallow.
And hard.
What I felt through my blade was not the sensation of flesh being cut, but of a hard surface deflecting the edge.
I couldn't even break the skin, let alone cut the flesh beneath.
The match was decided.
It seemed this was as far as I would go.
No matter how superior my technique, if my attacks simply couldn't reach, I had no chance of winning.
Perhaps I could target an eye or the throat and inflict some damage, but it would never be a fatal wound.
The ogre's attacks, by contrast, would take my life in a single blow.
The ogre would land a hit on me long before I could chip away its HP to zero.
Then there was only one thing left to do.
Buy as much time as possible so that as many residents as I could might escape.
I would abandon offense.
Everything I had cultivated over the course of my life, I would pour into defense to buy time.
How much time had passed?
It felt like both an instant and an eternity.
The ogre was the last and strongest opponent I had ever faced.
And it was likely also the longest battle I had ever fought.
How many times had the sun risen and set?
From partway onward, I had been so deep in concentration that even such thoughts had been stripped away.
The more I focused, the more my consciousness seemed to fade.
I released my will, converting that energy into focus for combat.
I abandoned my identity as an individual and became a body devoted solely to fighting.
I never imagined that at my age, I would reach yet another pinnacle of the sword.
The experience of cutting through lightning—I would have liked to pass that on to a disciple.
I doubt any disciple could replicate it, though.
Ah, but the end was drawing near.
The very fact that I was thinking this was proof enough.
I had pushed my concentration to its absolute limit, abandoning thought itself to focus entirely on the fight. But that focus was beginning to fray.
The cause was reaching the limits of my stamina.
I had successfully blocked every attack the ogre threw at me.
But the prolonged battle had pushed my body past its breaking point.
With every movement, I felt muscles tearing and bones cracking.
With every breath, the taste of blood spread through my mouth, and my vision had blurred so badly I could barely see half of what lay before me.
That I had not yet fallen was a miracle.
But even that miracle was at its end.
I could not take another step.
Yet I did not lower my sword.
It was my final vestige of pride.
The ogre did not lunge at my immobilized form.
"Old man—let me hear your name."
Oh.
I had assumed it was a mindless beast, but it could speak.
Come to think of it, from partway through the battle its swordwork had inexplicably improved.
Had it regained the reason it had lost during the fight?
I did not know what had caused it to lose its mind in the first place, but to snap back to lucidity through combat—I had seen the reverse happen countless times.
"Sword God—Reigar van Lengzand."
A hoarse voice, but steady and clear.
"Sword God. You've earned that title. I was overwhelmingly stronger, yet in the end I couldn't land a single blow on you. I never thought the frustration would actually snap you back to your senses. Well, perhaps 'senses' isn't the right word. You're so desperate to kill me that the fury is driving you mad. You've regained consciousness, but you're far from sane."
The latter half was no doubt a monologue spoken to himself.
His stance was wide open.
But I no longer had the strength to strike.
"Sword God—Reigar van Lengzand. I will not forget your name. And out of respect, I shall kill you as a warrior."
The ogre's figure vanished.
My eyes could barely see anything now, but even if they could, I would not have been able to respond.
The slash was honed to that degree of precision.
"Magnificent."
Together with my beloved blade, my body was cleaved in two.
I was not the only one who had reached the pinnacle of the sword through this battle.
It was still far from complete, but the blow carried a trace of it.
"You were magnificent, too."
In the instant my consciousness faded, those final words reached my ears.
************************* Kuro annihilated every last white spider that swarmed him.
And then he escaped the otherworld.
By Kuro's reckoning, roughly ten days had passed.
However, upon breaking free, he realized that the flow of time between the outside world and the space he had just been in was different.
"So they can manipulate even time within a space."
Kuro muttered bitterly.
The interfering party had never shown its true form in the end.
It had only unleashed the vast army of white spiders—its puppets, for all intents and purposes.
But those spiders were not to be underestimated.
While it had not been a life-or-death crisis, the degree of depletion Kuro had suffered was the worst he had experienced since the system's construction.
Kuro hurried across the demonic mountain range.
Heading for the Land in Between on the other side.
But there was no country there anymore.
Several years had passed in the outside world since the time Kuro had been sealed away.