Light tore through pitch-black darkness, and a thread of hope surged in his breast.
The hopeless end bearing down on him could be pushed away, cast aside, escaped from—if he forced it—and expectation swelled in his heart.
But no. You're not that strong.
You thought you knew. That you weren't strong.—You really thought you did.
Without knowing a single truth about anything, like a chick begging for food, you pecked away at every second you gave me, without knowing what had been spent for each of those seconds.
"
Cold water drenched his surging heart, and your pulse leapt hard.
Beyond a veil as black as darkness itself, a face you mustn't look at peered through.
Long lashes. Beautiful violet-blue eyes. Neat, delicate features. Thin, cherry-pink lips. Beloved you.
Beyond the veil, the face you should hate most, and the face you love most—one and the same.
"—!"
In that instant of hesitation, freedom was stolen, and even the soul was caged in eternal obsession.
The means to reject it was in your hand—a white cloth wreathed in light.
Stop—you screamed, louder than ever before.
Make it stop—you clung, harder than ever before.
Please let it stop—you wished, with all the strength you had.
And every last one of those pleas came too late, every last one fell short, and every last one— "I will—"
—find a way to save you.
And you, with that resolve and that vow burning in your chest—
△▼△▼△▼△ —The impact sent Aldebaran's entire body crumpling through the air.
What struck him was a fist the size of his own head, attached to a frame coiled around a great tree by steel wire—that body's anchor point had just been smashed.
The boulder-like knuckles connected to trunk-thick arms, which in turn extended from a torso sheathed in heavy slabs of muscle plated like armor. That torso was clad in a black suit ill-suited to a battlefield, and the man wearing it was the pig-faced titan— "You won't squeal like a pig, will you?"
The pig-faced man snorted through his snout, delivering the stale joke in a low, growling voice.
Despite his near-two-meter frame and weight that couldn't possibly be under two hundred kilograms, the pig-faced warrior had launched himself skyward with cannonball-like jumping power and landed a clean blow on Aldebaran midair.
A perfectly clean first strike—the fact that Aldebaran hadn't died instantly was a miracle. No—not a miracle.
"...Does that mean my arm is headed for the dinner table tonight?"
At Aldebaran's side, having absorbed that devastating blow, Yae remarked with her usual expressionless face.
What her narrowed eyes tracked was the pig-faced man's outstretched arm—the fist that had struck Aldebaran—its fingers splaying apart in a die pattern from the tips.
Yae's steel wires, strung through the air, had caught the pig-man's punch head-on, and his own immense strength had caused his arm to be carved apart by the resilient wires.
The result: Aldebaran survived, and the pig-faced man lost an arm.
But— "That's right. I'll have the boys feast on it for their trouble. Fatty meat, though—not the healthiest diet."
"Kyaa~ I just love race-based jokes! By the way, fatty meat is best when braised."
"Then I'll braise it in your blood."
The pig-faced man who'd lost an arm, and Yae whose trump card had been brute-forced through—both maintained their composure on the surface, eyes burning with lethal intent, and exchanged their pleasantries with impeccable decorum.
This upper-tier banter between those who'd discarded the neck-snap threshold of ordinary mortals was all well and good, but for Aldebaran, who ranked below them, he was reaching his limit.
Slowly, with no force left to maintain his hold, his body—kept from falling only by being pressed against the great tree—tilted sideways and plunged into a free fall.
Though he'd survived the first blow, his skull had unfortunately split open, and there were probably things inside his helmet that really shouldn't be sloshing around.
Naturally, there was no way he could continue in this state, so— "Yae."
He called to her through lips that wouldn't form the word properly.
The next instant, the steel wire coiled around Aldebaran's neck as he fell toward the ground went taut—his vision lurched violently, and Aldebaran's head parted ways with his body.
A safety valve—designed so that even if Aldebaran somehow failed to kill himself, Yae could activate her authority.
"— — —"
Even as he confirmed its effectiveness, watching the world spin wildly from his tumbling vantage, Aldebaran steeled himself: *This is where it starts.* And then— "Let's go."
× × × "—AL GOA!!"
The incantation bellowed like a war cry, followed by a second sun blazing red into the sky—or rather, a paper-thin imitation thereof, its spread-out flames as fragile as a net used for scooping goldfish.
Look closely and you'd see the control was sloppy—leave it going for three seconds and it would start scattering apart and fading. A dismal piece of stagecraft—but in the swirling chaos of a hastily constructed battlefield, it functioned as a perfectly serviceable ruse.
"Sir! That one's a fake—"
"UWOOOAAAHHH!!"
Unfortunately, Aldebaran's warning came too late, having only just returned.
Heinkel, in full panic mode, yanked the steel wire frantically, and the toppled-tree cannons—already loaded and ready—fired in rapid succession, arcing toward the false Al Goa.
Since he couldn't stop them, the result was the same either way. He clicked his tongue internally. Not at Heinkel, who refused to listen—not even at Racinus, who'd compensated for technical shortcomings with sheer nerve—but at himself, for having screwed up.
A meagerly underwhelming explosion erupted, and the other two—apart from Aldebaran, who'd already clocked the trick—finally caught on to the enemy's deception.
Regret came too late. Unable to halt the charging enemy's momentum, Aldebaran borrowed Yae's power once more, deploying the same wire cage as before to block the opponent's rush.
This time, however, rather than retreating to the treetops, he deliberately flew backward and landed at Heinkel's side, changing the equation.
Now— "—Huh. Dull as a pig."
The impact he'd braced for arrived from directly above, accompanied by cruel black humor. A devastating blow smashed down on him, burying Aldebaran headfirst into the forest floor.
He'd changed his position. He'd been on guard. And yet the attack still came crashing down from above, grinding him into the dirt.
"Wha—!? From where— Gwah—!"
"Don't squeal like a pig. I'll hang you up at the butcher's."
Flying in like a missile, covered in wounds from the steel wire but still swinging his arms, the blood-smeared pig-faced man slammed the defenseless Heinkel into the great tree behind him.
As for Aldebaran, buried in the ground—his spine seemed to be done for, and not a shred of fighting spirit reached his limbs. Yae had apparently dropped down and begun clashing with the pig-faced man, but he couldn't even lift his head to watch.
However, one nagging question had surfaced.—Whether in the air or on the ground, how had the pig-faced man managed to land that first punch?
With that single piece of information— "—Next."
Before Yae could decapitate him from above, Aldebaran took poison himself.
Fierce, overwhelming, lethal heat burned through Aldebaran from throat to organs— × × × "—AL GOA!!"
"UWOOOAAAHHH!!"
Flinching at the false sun, Aldebaran watched the pointless resistance—a great-tree-shaped projectile—fly off to the side, then quickly scanned his surroundings for a place to retreat that was neither in the air nor on the ground.
He needed verification.—To hold on to his last scrap of an optimal plan.
△▼△▼△▼△ —Seventy-three times.
The matrix, reset each time the fake Al Goa rose into the sky, was analyzed from every angle. What Aldebaran discovered was this: no matter where he fled or hid, the pig-faced man's devastating fist came for him every single time.
In other words— "My location is completely exposed."
Whether by Yae's side or Heinkel's, on the ground or in the air, in shadow or at a distance from the battlefield—Aldebaran could not escape the pig-man's fist.
A punch delivered with the resolve to lose an arm—even Yae's steel wires couldn't fully defend against it. Of course, if the goal were merely surviving the first blow, a combination of Yae's wires and Aldebaran's magic might suffice.
But even if he weathered one blow, the man had another arm, and for that matter, two legs. And the pig-faced man possessed the spirit to finish his opponent off no matter how many limbs he lost.
Neither pain nor loss would stop those pig-hooves.
As for trying to crack him open and learn who he was— "—Squeal, squeal, like a little piglet."
That single sentence shattered any hope. The man refused to listen to anything.
In Aldebaran's experience, opponents who'd made up their minds and locked their resolve were the worst kind of trouble.
Against such people, Aldebaran's trial-and-error became meaningless. Those who'd decided to kill him no matter what it cost would indeed kill him no matter what it cost.
Therefore, to drastically change the situation, he needed a drastic catalyst.
"First—how are they tracking my position?"
Something was keeping Aldebaran pinned down with relentless precision.
At the most fundamental level, the fact that they were being hounded through this forest despite using even the Divine Dragon as a diversion was itself unnatural.
Unless he uncovered the method behind this encirclement, even if he dodged the pig-man and drove
To prevent that— "—Huh. Dull as a pig."
The pig-faced man's familiar stale joke arrived alongside his fist. This time, Aldebaran—who'd tried to use Racinus as a meat shield—had his cervical spine snapped.
As a side note, Racinus, who'd been caught in the crossfire, was having a miserable time too, glimpsed at the edge of consciousness just before it faded— × × × "—AL GOA!!"
"UWOOOAAAHHH!!"
A false grand magic rose into the sky, and the panicking Heinkel charged ahead of himself.
Watching the fireball's explosion light graze the corner of his vision for what felt like the hundredth time, Aldebaran summoned Yae—who was staring at Heinkel's rampage with an exasperated look—and had her string up a different set of wires from the cage that had been luring Racinus and the others.
A new wire launching pad—after all the toppled trees it had been slinging, what it would fling next was— "PULL!!"
Heinkel, eyes spinning and mind blank, obeyed and hauled on the wire. Powered by his extraordinary strength, it was Aldebaran and Yae who were sent arcing through the sky.
Roaring, savoring the sensation of being freed from wind and gravity, Aldebaran held Yae in one arm as he vaulted over the treetops and away from the battlefield where Racinus and the others swarmed.
Left behind, Heinkel would be trampled by the incoming horde—but this was a sacrifice round, made to verify what needed verifying.
During this test, Aldebaran would have to avert his eyes from Heinkel's noble sacrifice.
"Don't bite your tongue, okay~!"
Leaving Heinkel and his guilt behind, Yae worked her arms.
On her slender hands, at the base of her even thinner fingers, she wore plain, unadorned rings. From them extended steel wires so fine they were nearly invisible even when you squinted.
Known as a shinobi of extraordinary skill, and the only one among them to have truly mastered the steel wire art—Yae deployed it to full effect, hooking the wires onto trees as she flew, using the momentum of their parabolic arc like a Tarzan rope to gain distance with every swing.
However— "—!"
What Aldebaran and Yae smashed through mid-swing was the escape route they'd guided with smoke—in other words, the area where thick white smoke still billowed without mercy.
Using the brute-force method of wire-swinging, they reversed course along the smoke-filled escape path, heading for the final confirmation at the end of their repeated verifications.
Even so, the speed and distance gained were incomparable to running on the ground, but the chance to breathe only came at the apex of each swing—the moment they cleared the treetops and poked above the smoke.
And even that grew harder the further they went, as the thickening, rising smoke began to invade lungs, eyeballs, and mucous membranes with merciless agony.
If he kept flying around recklessly at this rate, the superhuman Yae might manage, but Aldebaran, who only had specs on par with ten ordinary men, would be overcome by the smoke in short order.
He needed to choose his path carefully, but— "—Northwest."
Leaning close to Yae's ear as she extended the wire and swung them, he gave the order.
The target was northwest, without question.—Because he'd already checked every other direction.
Figured he'd never draw the winning ticket. He'd never once felt blessed by luck since the day he was born.
"...No. There was one time."
—Meeting her had been, without question, Aldebaran's one stroke of fortune. Even now, having ultimately lost her, he would never think that meeting had been a mistake.
"—!"
Suppressing the passion surging in his chest, he bit down hard—and in that instant, the situation changed.
Bursting through the white smoke at the apex of their swing, the moment they cleared the treetops, a barrage of rocks hurtled toward Aldebaran and Yae from outside the smoke.
Not mere pebbles—they struck with terrifying force, raining down in a deluge. Aldebaran instinctively conjured a wall of earth, using it to bash through the first wave.
But the rocks would keep coming. So before that—time to cut loose.
"—Lord Al!!"
Yae's sharp voice echoed inside his helmet as Aldebaran felt the membrane of his eardrums go numb. Midair, he severed his bond with her, sending himself hurtling high into the sky.
At the apex of their swing, he'd thrown himself even further—beyond where Yae could reach.
"OOOOOHH—!!"
Roaring, he covered his forward-facing body with an earth shield and dove headfirst into the welcome party of flying stones.
The earth wall, hasty and impossible to make thick enough to bear weight, was fragile—offering roughly the same protection as a blanket against the incoming barrage.
But even so, Aldebaran punched through the white smoke and emerged from the forest once more.
To the very same plain where he'd received the initial declaration of war, absorbed a blow from Grassis, and avenged her sister.
And there, just as Aldebaran had expected— "—Went out alone to pin down the standard-bearer, did he? Well now, that's a plan best counted from the bottom."
Looking up at Aldebaran as he burst from the smoke, the bald, elderly giant spoke.—The massive, long-armed giant who wore a gauntlet fitted with multiple Dialogue Mirrors.
Seeing that, it clicked.—All of it had been orchestrated by that old giant.
"You're the brains...?!"
The gap between appearance and position was so vast, he'd never even considered it.
A thug like Racinus—hearing that he was the tactical advisor would've been more believable. Normally, a giant would serve on the front lines, leveraging their physique. For one to handle intellectual work—Ezzo was the same way, but a dwarf and a giant each filling the opposite role felt almost too neatly arranged.
His thoughts cluttered with such useless griping, Aldebaran noticed.
"Felt isn't—"
Nowhere to be found on the plain.—That, too, was a blow.
Naturally, exterminating five hundred enemies to end this fight wasn't realistic. So as a viable objective, securing Felt's person had always been at the forefront of Aldebaran's mind. And the enemy had sealed that option neatly.
Obviously, their clearest path to victory was, from his opponents' perspective, their clearest path to defeat. Hateful as it was, pulling Felt from the field was the logical move.
"Damn."
Aldebaran's victory was unshakable. Certain.
So all that remained was finding a way to win.
"Don't you go looking elsewhere, you bastard!!"
"—!"
In the split second his mind had turned to updating victory conditions, something crashed through his skull from directly above.
The voice was deep, but the words weren't the usual pig-man joke. It was
"You've gotta be kidding..."
Against an opponent who'd mastered the Flow Arts, Aldebaran groaned in pain.
The Flow Arts were a gauntlet that separated the merely skilled from true elite warriors. With this additional threat wielding it, Aldebaran recalibrated his assessment of the enemy's fighting strength.
Even as he recalculated, that single blow sent him crashing to the ground.
"Guh... Gwaaah..."
Failing to roll properly on instinct, his right arm snapped at the elbow from a bad angle. The broken bone punching through flesh and skin delivered a meaningless additional wound, and Aldebaran ground his helmet into the dirt.
It hurt. It hurt. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt—but he saw what he needed to see.
"From here on... it's a battle of wits... between me... and you..."
Gritting his teeth until they cracked, lungs burning as the encroaching smoke invaded deeper, he opened the poison capsule on his tongue with a practiced motion.
The smoke was so thick he nearly coughed up the poison. He doubted the old giant's plan went that far, but bad rolls of the dice were piling up too quickly.
He had to break this losing streak. And then—find the path to victory. Search, search, search, search, search, search— △▼△▼△▼△ "—No more Pylo Trees needed. Any more and we risk the enemy exploiting it. A scheme that leaves them just barely unsatisfied—that's ideal."
Ordering the smoke-driving strategy called to a halt, Valga Cromwell—no, now known as Old Man
The encirclement of the deceased
This opponent had used the Divine Dragon
Still, the existence of such a dangerous and cunning enemy was precisely what Rom desired.
The giant race tended toward belligerence and ferocity, their instincts craving blood-and-thunder battle—but that wasn't the reason. That would be absurd.
What he wanted was a crisis that could shake the kingdom, and the honor of eliminating it.
—For Felt to advance through the royal selection, she needed fame independent of the Sword Saint.
The incident at the Watergate City of
The relative standing in the royal selection hadn't changed. So Felt needed a solo achievement.
What "the Helmet" had done—something that could shake not just the kingdom but the entire world—was more than enough.
"Though of course, Felt isn't thinking about any of that."
Felt had stood against the Helmet not for long-term political calculation, but because she possessed the power to resist the immediate danger bearing down on them, and because as the First Knight, she bore the obligation to charge in first in exactly this kind of situation.
Therefore, scheming to use this situation for future gain was something best left to scheming people like himself—who, despite his imposing size, was no better than the filthy adults who ruled the underworld.
Using the three great organizations of the famed "City of Earth Dragons"
—In the beginning, Rom had been firmly opposed to Felt participating in the royal selection, to her involvement with the core of something as vast as the Lugunica Kingdom.
For Rom, who knew Felt's birth and the karmic weight of her bloodline, that was only natural.
And yet, Rom had stayed by Felt's side in the royal capital. He'd had the option—if he'd wanted—to take Felt, before she'd even gained awareness of the world, and live in some remote backwater far from the capital.
But he hadn't. He'd probably had a premonition, somewhere deep inside.—That an inescapable great wave would eventually catch up to them.
When that time came, if he could be at Felt's side, he would use his enormous body to its fullest, serving as shield, armor, or whatever role was needed.
But there was a real possibility he couldn't. He'd grown old. He didn't feel it pressing urgently yet, but as a giant, he could receive his final visitor at any time.
That was precisely why he needed it—the certainty that Felt, his precious granddaughter, would be protected for all eternity.
If that promissory note was nothing less than the kingdom's throne, then he would put the crown on Felt's head.
To that end, he wouldn't hesitate to wield the strategies he'd sworn never to employ again.
"The opportunities have decreased compared to the old days... but even now, nightmares refuse to let me go."
Nearly half a century had passed, and the Demi-Human War was a distant memory.
Yet in all that time, the embers of regret had simmered on in Rom's mind. The chance to see the light of day again had pried the lid off that pot.
The Valga Cromwell of those days hadn't been enough.—To compensate for that foolishness with time, maintaining his same thickheaded stubbornness while deploying every ounce of wits he had.
That was to say— "This becomes a battle of wits between me and the Helmet."
△▼△▼△▼△ "—Wire, you say?!"
The moment he'd charged into the forest, Racinus had been ensnared head to toe in nearly invisible steel wire, and he spat out that indignant line where Aldebaran could hear.
Aldebaran had deliberately exposed himself, drawing the enemy's charge and luring them into the trap.
Through Yae's steel wire techniques, fifty-two enemies had been bound.
He'd already tracked the enemy count that far, of course, but Yae wasn't holding them down with brute strength.
"As you can see, little old Yae is nothing but a twig~ I use the surrounding trees, obstacles, their own bodies as fulcrums to pin them against the ground with their feet still touching it!"
Though Yae explained the trick, Aldebaran couldn't quite grasp the core mechanics.
In any case, as long as he knew that Racinus and his men, tangled in layers upon layers of wire, were virtually unable to escape without Yae's consent, that was enough.
With that established, Aldebaran—glared at by Racinus's wide, furious eyes while the man sat immobilized before him—grabbed his clothes and rummaged through his pockets without a word.
"What the hell, you bastard!? I'm not into that kind of thing...!"
"Wow~ Lord Al, how bold! No wonder I couldn't get a rise out of you no matter how hard I flirted. Satisfaction plus a woman's pride, both restored at once—"
"Drop it! The mirror! Find the mirror! Someone's got one—Sir does too!"
Aldebaran pinned down the struggling Racinus, shouted the order to Yae and Heinkel, and began searching the immobilized men's belongings for the Dialogue Mirror.
—The speed and accuracy of information transmission had changed the nature of warfare.
A cliché borrowed from every piece of fiction throughout history, but a concept Aldebaran had only ever understood on the surface—and now it hit him.
The old giant playing the role of mastermind had prepared a gauntlet studded with multiple Dialogue Mirrors.
With those, the old giant had become the command hub of his forces, sharing real-time information to command five hundred troops at will. If that continued—if his own position and the number of his allies were constantly fed to the enemy—Aldebaran would never get a moment to breathe.
So he had to smash every unit's Dialogue Mirror. No exceptions.
For that— "Found it!!"
Fingertips closing around the right feel, Aldebaran pulled it out and held it aloft with a shout of triumph—but his elation was drowned almost simultaneously by two voices.
"Huh?" Aldebaran turned around. Yae and Heinkel, who'd been searching other thugs' bodies separately from where he'd been rifling through Racinus, were staring wide-eyed.
—Both of them held a small mirror in hand.
"Dialogue Mirrors can be replicated—they're a type of Meteia—but the cost is still astronomical."
The one on Racinus made sense—he was the unit commander.
The fact that the second-in-command had one too was understandable. But having even more of them spread around made no sense.
Surely they couldn't equip most of their fighting force with Dialogue Mirrors.
Which meant— "—Dummies?!"
"You idiot."
Over Aldebaran's stunned whisper came Racinus's taunt, tongue sticking out.
Watching the rainbow ring swaying from the tip of that long tongue, Aldebaran instinctively dissolved the poison capsule hidden behind his molar with his tongue.—In that instant.
"—Huh. Dull as a pig."
He'd heard that joke enough times to grow warts on his ears, and this time it arrived alongside a fist. Whether the impact or the lethal poison had ended him, Aldebaran couldn't tell the difference.
But what he thought in his final moment wasn't a curse aimed at the pig-faced man— "Old coot."
It was a grudging tribute to an opponent who'd not only matched him but forced him into an impossible situation.
△▼△▼△▼△ "—Wire, you say?!"
After faking Al Goa to draw fire and minimize the toppled-tree cannon damage, Racinus had burst into the forest—only to have his entire body bound by wires so fine they were nearly invisible. He couldn't hide his astonishment at the identity of what had immobilized him.
If he'd been the only one caught, he might have forced himself to accept it.
But it wasn't just Racinus—all fifty of the thugs who'd charged into the forest with him had been restrained simultaneously.
The geometric web of wires required to pull this off in a forest—attempting to mentally reconstruct it, Racinus gave up. It was that far beyond the norm.
But what shocked Racinus even more than the red-haired woman who'd bound him— "—Sorry about this, but I'm going to have to break it."
So saying, one of the thugs—the man chosen to carry the dummy mirror—had his pocket searched, the Dialogue Mirror pulled out, dropped to the ground, and casually stomped to pieces by the Helmet.
"—Tch, cut the crap."
Involuntarily, grinding fury escaped Racinus's lips, and the wires binding him bit deeper. Not because he'd struggled—but as a warning from the red-haired woman who controlled the wires, for his insolent remark.
But in this moment, his rage outweighed the shallow cut of wire into flesh.
"What the hell is going on!? How did you smash them in one shot—"
"One shot? Not even ten or twenty would do it. My hand's just that bad."
"...Huh?"
The Helmet clearly had no intention of giving a straight answer, and Racinus gritted his teeth.
The Helmet had seen through the fact that they were using Dialogue Mirrors and coordinating around Cromwell—Old Man Rom. And to add insult to injury, instead of wasting time on the decoy mirrors that should have bought them time even if discovered, he'd gone straight for the real ones.
He'd just admonished himself about this very thing, and yet here it was again.
The inferiority complex—endlessly welling up toward those whose strength he couldn't match.
"Hey, what do we do with these. ...Kill them all?"
Setting aside Racinus's inner turmoil, it was the red-haired middle-aged man—Heinkel—who spoke up.
He was supposedly Reinhard's father. Red hair, blue eyes, an absurdly fine knight's sword, and plenty of elements that evoked the Astrea family.
That he'd been backing Priscilla instead of Felt, the candidate his own son was supporting, had already marked him as a man too stupid to even pick the right side to stand on. But it was worse than Aldebaran had thought.
"...What an idiot."
Racinus hated Reinhard.
Reinhard probably didn't think about Racinus at all, but they shared one thing—both had been born into decent families and had a troubled relationship with their fathers. Of course, the weight of what they'd been born carrying was different, and Racinus had selfishly thrown his away, while he'd never imagined Reinhard doing the same.
Born into a minor noble house, he'd run away citing friction with his family, and for some reason ended up working for Felt. He was half-hearted about everything.
But while Racinus and Reinhard shared the same type of problem, they were fundamentally different.
Racinus's father was someone you could respect. He didn't like him, but respect was possible.
"But for you? No way."
A father not worth respecting—fighting with him, letting it wound your heart. That made Reinhard an idiot.
So he'd just remove the reason for Reinhard to be miserable.
"...Goa."
Even bound, he could still incant.
His entire body coiled in wire, straining, Racinus pulsed the gates within his body and conjured a small fireball right in front of his own face, drawing the attention of the Helmet and the others.
But what floated up was nothing more than a tiny flame, barely the size of a thumb tip.
"Oh, trying to fake us out again! You think that same trick works twice!?"
Heinkel, still fuming from being fooled by the false Al Goa earlier, flushed red with anger and slashed the fireball with his knight's sword.
For an instant, that casual sword flash looked remarkably refined—but never mind.
More important than that observation— "Idiot."
He stuck out his tongue and hurled every ounce of contempt he could muster.
—He'd stretched the Goa spell thin to make it resemble Al Goa. By the same token, he could make an actual Al Goa look like a mere fireball.
*'Racinus-kun, you don't have extraordinary talent, but you're solid. Steady progress will surely carry you to where you want to be.'* He recalled Ezzo—who'd taught him magic—lecturing in that self-important way of his despite his short stature, and Racinus felt an uncharacteristic twinge of guilt.
Ignoring all that solidness and jumping straight to magical abuse of the highest order—exactly the kind of thing Ezzo would be most furious about.
But since that chance would never come again—a last act of defiance, if nothing else— "— — —"
The fireball, nicked by the sword tip, burst apart in midair—and the massive amount of heat compressed within it was released all at once, engulfing the space in an explosive hellscape of flame.
Just before being swallowed by his own inferno, Racinus found it darkly funny that the lament he'd been about to voice—*"Where did my life go wrong?"*—never even surfaced.
And with a smile still on his face, Racinus's body was consumed by fire— "That's enough."
As though he'd known all along, the Helmet's hand intercepted the should-have-been fatal flame, crushing it before it could manifest its full destructive force.
△▼△▼△▼△ —Two hundred and sixty-four times.
"— — —"
Racinus's body went limp in the steel wires, head hanging low. He looked like a man who'd given up.
But that was far from the truth. Rather than surrender, Racinus was absolutely refusing to abandon the idea of finishing his opponent off, even in this situation.
So— "That's enough."
Having spoken it aloud, Aldebaran cursed the wretched sound it made and clicked his tongue internally.
Setting aside that bitter reflection, Aldebaran pushed Heinkel aside and prevented the activation of the Goa—no, this time a grand magic disguised as one—that the man had carelessly slashed at.
The composition that had risen into the air, threatening to incinerate the entire area, was unraveled before it could coalesce into anything beyond a nascent spark, dispersed as mana that had lost its directionality.
Had he failed to stop it, the massive inferno would have scorched the battlefield, inflicting catastrophic damage on Aldebaran's group and ending the fight.
He felt bad about crushing Racinus's death-defying resolve—the man had been prepared to die to accomplish something—but throwing away your life to achieve something was the most futile act possible in front of Aldebaran.
Even if it cost him his life, Aldebaran would swat away every last thing.
That was why it was pointless. Dying for something—it meant nothing.
Pointless. Pointless, pointless, pointless, pointless, pointless, pointless, pointless—pointless.
And yet— "Goa..."
"Stop!!"
Aldebaran roared at Racinus, who continued incanting even after the initial spark had been extinguished, and slammed his fist into the immobile man's body.
He hooked him across the face, kicked him in the gut, and smashed his head once more. Unable to even brace for impact, Racinus was essentially a sandbag absorbing every blow.
Even if Aldebaran was a second- or third-rate fighter—someone even Garfiel could take down with the right opening—that should have been enough. And yet— "Guh... a..."
—Racinus refused to stop incanting.
"Why won't you stop?!"
He crushed the nascent spark once more, driving the fist that had done so into Racinus's face.
But despite receiving blow after blow, the signs of magic attempting to interfere with the world continued to appear around Racinus.
This was proof that even with his final strategy seen through, Racinus refused to give in.
"—Lord Al, this could go on forever, you know."
A quiet voice reached Aldebaran's ears, strained from exertion.
Then, Racinus's hanging head was lifted, steel wire coiling taut around his thin neck—beginning to constrict, no, to sever.
"The look in his eyes says it all. If you don't kill him, he'll use the same trick again and again. A man of admirable resolve—isn't that the ideal of a true man? If so, then..."
"Shut up!"
"— — —"
Yae moved the fingers of her raised right hand, drawing a thin red line across Racinus's neck. Silencing her, Aldebaran stared Racinus dead in the face.
Racinus's chin was lifted, looking down at Aldebaran from that angle.
And then— "Buh... gah..."
Aldebaran's fist, right hand wrapped in its rock gauntlet, slammed into Racinus.
The blow carried a different quality of weight than anything before. Racinus's forehead split, blood spraying outward. It was a strike that could have been lethal— "...Impressive~"
Yae clapped lightly, looking at the crumpled Racinus with admiration.
She was more sensitive to others' life and death than Aldebaran. From her eyes, it seemed Racinus had survived—knocked unconscious, not killed.
"— — —"
Neither the admiration nor the fact that Racinus had merely passed out offered Aldebaran any comfort.
He'd underestimated these five hundred—not as a number, but as five hundred people who'd steeled their resolve. He needed to understand that.
"Hey, Aldebaran..."
"Sorry, but I need you to shut up for a moment."
Heinkel tried to speak to Aldebaran, who'd just put Racinus down, but the mental exhaustion of expanding his domain—beyond even what he'd anticipated—made it impossible to engage.
Regardless, the Dialogue Mirrors were destroyed, and the first wave's threat was repelled.
All that remained— "—Huh. Dull as a pig."
"— — —"
The thoroughly familiar race joke arrived—but this time it was different. No fist accompanied it.
But did that make it safe? Could he treat the crisis as having passed?
Because— "What are you doing, stopping in the middle of nowhere? Have you stuffed your heads with pig feed?"
It was no single pig-faced man who spoke those words in that grave tone—he stood alongside a full unit of fighters, and rather than charging in, the second wave had taken position before Aldebaran.
"—Domain Expansion. Matrix Redefinition."
△▼△▼△▼△ *'What are you doing, stopping in the middle of nowhere? Have you stuffed your heads with pig feed?'* Through the Dialogue Mirror in his gauntlet, the voice of Doltero Amal, the Pig King, reached him, and Rom grasped that the Helmet and the second wave had made contact.
The first wave had been Racinus's group, and fortuitously, Doltero's unit—among the most powerful combatants in the assembled roster—had been positioned closest.
"— — —"
However, before Doltero arrived, the Helmet had clashed with Racinus, and the status of his unit was unknown. Naturally, Racinus himself was included.
Given the enemy's cunning, it would be more appropriate to assume Racinus was dead.
"—This won't do."
Since fighting had broken out, the possibility of resolving the situation unscathed was nil.
Obviously, casualties would come not just from the underworld's roughnecks, but from Rom's own forces as well.—Pinning hope on the slim chance that Grassis's report from Flam contained good fortune was foolish.
So Rom blinked once, sealed his own emotions, and focused on the situation before him.
If it was Doltero, he could finish off the Helmet in one go.—But Rom couldn't allow himself such optimism. Not solely because of the Helmet's track record of juggling the Sword Saint, the Divine Dragon, and the Witch of Envy all at once.
"...He broke the mirrors I'd let the decoys carry without hesitation."
That had cut off their ability to track Racinus's group's movements—and it also meant the enemy had struck the optimal counter to their information network.
But the method of striking was, no matter how you looked at it, unnatural.
Even if they'd guessed the coordination setup and the pre-prepared Dialogue Mirrors, the steps that followed— "—Unless he can see the contents of our heads, or something equally impossible."
Either way, it fell into the realm of the absurd—claims that would be dismissed as ridiculous by anyone.
And yet, Rom had lived over a century, and he knew that forces beyond his common sense and imagination existed in this world—and that those who wielded them sat at the same board.
Those who stopped thinking in the face of the impossible always met the same miserable end.
And he would never allow that end to befall those he loved.
"—I need to verify something. All units—change of orders."
Addressing the opened Dialogue Mirrors simultaneously, Rom narrowed his eyes and schemed.
The Helmet surely understood as well.
—That this battle was, for both sides, a race against time.