← Previous · Series overview · Next →
A forest girl stood before Ney.
It was a surreal sight. Not that there was anything particularly strange about an ordinary forest-girl outfit, even to Ney. But the girl standing before her was clearly dressed strangely.
A sword in her right hand. A sword in her left. She was dual-wielding. Apparently, an ordinary forest girl wasn’t enough to defeat a Cerberus.
The sword in her right hand belonged to Ney. Levia had said she needed it, so Ney had lent it to her. Perhaps it felt different from the sword she usually used, because she was making practice swings to test it out. Judging by the way she occasionally lost her balance, it was probably a little too heavy for her.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
Ney called out to her. Levia looked completely unconcerned, but Ney still couldn’t help worrying.
“There is no problem. It is a little heavy, but I should manage somehow.”
Levia answered coolly. Apparently she thought Ney was worried about whether she could handle the sword.
That wasn’t it. Well, that was part of it, but Ney was worried about everything Levia was about to do. She was planning to charge straight at a Cerberus all by herself.
Ney had been in a party with the other two for half a year. Levia’s personality was… what it was, but Ney acknowledged her skill. Sharp detection abilities, movements too fast for the eye to follow, remarkable dexterity… Levia called herself a beautiful-girl swordswoman, but her ideal class was clearly thief.
And now that thief, Levia, intended to charge a Cerberus head-on. It was reckless. Ney could only picture her getting roasted by its flames. And yet…
“We could go back, you know. Find another route and attack from there.”
“Going back presents the same problem. We would still have to avoid its attacks on the way out. Could you do that, Ney?”
“Urk, that would be difficult… Oh. What about tiring it out? We could deliberately make it fire those fireballs until—”
“That would be a bad move. If the Cerberus were the only problem, perhaps. But while we were doing that, there’s no telling what the kitty might do…”
“What is this ‘kitty’ you keep talking about?” Liz asked. “Is it an enemy?”
“Who knows? At the very least, it isn’t an ally.”
The details were unclear, but Levia apparently thought that if the mysterious figure interfered, the situation might become worse.
Then something occurred to Ney.
Come to think of it, Liz didn’t seem worried.
Being from the countryside, she occasionally did things that defied common sense, but when it came to combat she was highly capable. She cared about her companions as well, so there was no chance she would simply abandon Levia.
Does she have some hidden trick?
Unlike Ney, who had only joined them half a year ago, Levia and Liz had been together for two years. Perhaps there was some technique Ney didn’t know about.
“Well then, I’m off.”
“H-hey.”
Ignoring Ney’s concern, Levia stepped lightly into the corridor as though she were going for a walk.
The Cerberus immediately fired a fireball at her. Levia avoided it by ducking back into the small room, then began running again. Even carrying the heavy swords, she moved beautifully. But after she had covered around twenty meters, another fireball came—
“Hah!”
She threw the sword in her left hand. It flew toward the Cerberus with tremendous force, but perhaps because of the distance, the beast dodged it easily.
“There!”
“Gah?!”
Levia did not waste the opening and threw the second sword. Ney’s sword.
Despite its weight, it flew at considerable speed—no, clearly faster than the first. Levia hadn’t even staggered this time.
While Ney wondered how, the Cerberus recoiled sharply. Looking closer, she saw the sword buried deep in the forehead of its right head.
Levia used the opening to sprint forward and rapidly close the distance. Thirty meters remained.
“Good! Go!”
Convinced she could make it, Ney cheered her on.
…But that was as far as it went.
The Cerberus got back up, anger filling its eyes.
The wound to its right head was fatal, but each of a Cerberus’s three heads possessed its own brain, and the creature would not die unless all three were destroyed. Losing one was not without consequence, but it was still perfectly capable of fighting.
Levia threw several knives that she had apparently been hiding somewhere. The Cerberus paid them little mind. Rather than worry about minor injuries, it seemed to have chosen to deal with the enemy directly in front of it.
The Cerberus roared. In another second, it would release another fireball.
She’s going to get hit…!
Ney could already picture Levia burning in the flames. There was nothing she could do to help from here. She winced—
—At that instant, a tremendous bang rang out.
There was a cracking crash, and Levia accelerated sharply at the same time. Before Ney knew it, she was already directly in front of the Cerberus. At the last moment, she leapt.
“HRAAH!”
“Kyain!!”
Levia landed on its right head. She immediately pulled out the sword buried in it and swept the blade sideways through the central head. The monster staggered, and Levia tried to press the attack. The Cerberus thrashed its body to throw her off, but she leapt lightly away without losing her balance and landed on the ground.
“Now! Let’s go!”
Liz shouted beside Ney.
The monster was no longer looking at them at all. It was desperately trying to hit Levia with its claws, fangs, and the flames from its mouths, without so much as glancing toward Ney and Liz.
The two took the opportunity to run toward it.
“…That was incredible. You knew she could do that?”
“Yeah. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. That amount of magical power was ridiculous.”
Ney had seen it.
For just an instant—the instant Levia accelerated—an enormous amount of magical power had poured from her.
What she had done was simple. She strengthened her legs with magical power and kicked off the floor.
The degree of reinforcement, however, had been absurd, and the resulting force enormous. The depression left in the floor by the recoil made that clear.
Generally speaking, the more physically demanding a warrior’s profession was, the greater their internal magical power, od. That was because the amount of od a person possessed was proportional to their life energy.
The stronger the body, the more life energy it produced, so a trained warrior actually possessed more magical power than a physically frail mage. The common image might suggest the opposite, but that was how it worked.
Levia, however, clearly did not have a warrior’s build. Naturally, her od should have been limited.
And yet, in that instant, the amount she released had obviously surpassed Ney’s.
Levia had called it an unfair cheat, but…
“Winds, gather. Gather and become a blade. Become the merciless blade that severs all…”
Liz began chanting.
They must have entered the range of her magic. She had already completed detection and calculation and was now constructing the spell.
Ney could think about the rest later. For now, they had an enemy in front of them to eliminate.
She shifted her focus back to the battle.
“Ney!”
Levia threw the sword in her hand toward her. Seeing it, Ney realized something.
I see. I didn’t notice before, but for just an instant—and only in one part of her body—she reinforced herself. So that’s how she managed to throw such a heavy sword with that slender frame.
For warriors, maintaining reinforcement across the entire body during combat was common sense, since it protected against unexpected damage. With Levia’s style of fighting, however, perhaps reinforcing only one part at a time was enough.
Even so, it had to require considerable control. Strengthening exactly what she needed for only the necessary instant was not something Ney could do, at least.
Impressed, Ney caught the sword and charged straight at the monster.
“Ney! I’m taking the left leg!”
“Got it!”
“Air Slash!”
A blade of wind even sharper than the one Liz had used against the goblins formed and struck the Cerberus. Its left hind leg was severed, and with a pained howl its enormous body toppled over.
“Raaah!”
Ney did not waste the opening. She brought her sword down from overhead, splitting the fallen left head vertically and stopping it for good.
“I’ll take the finishing blow!”
Levia, who had somehow retrieved her sword, leapt onto the central head and drove the blade through its eye.
The point appeared to reach the brain. With a low groan, the Cerberus collapsed and began twitching.
They remained on guard for a while, but it showed no sign of getting back up.
“…Whew. Looks like it’s dead.”
“Indeed. Once we got close, it was nothing special. In the end, it was only B-rank.”
Liz stopped constructing her spell while Ney sheathed her sword.
“Still, what was that fireball? It looked like magic, but…”
With the battle over and everyone calm again, they returned to examining what had happened.
The Cerberus had used a fireball it should not have been capable of producing. Without that, dealing with it would have been easy.
“I think it probably was magic. It wasn’t forming the fire inside its body, but outside it. And the method looked more like the way we mages do it than the way monsters normally use abilities.”
“Really? Hmm… Then what does that mean…?”
Liz said it resembled a mage’s technique, but normally a monster could not imitate something like that.
It was strange.
It exceeded what monsters should have been capable of.
Thinking about it was unlikely to produce an answer. Magic was outside Ney’s area of expertise in the first place. If Liz didn’t understand it, Ney certainly wasn’t going to.
There was one other thing she didn’t understand.
Levia was staring blankly down at her hands.
The power she had shown earlier had also fallen outside Ney’s understanding.
“Levia.”
“! Y-yes? What is it?”
“No… What’s wrong? You’re strangely quiet. Normally you’d be puffing yourself up and saying something like, ‘It was all thanks to me!’ by now.”
“O-ohohoho. Well, around ninety percent of the credit does belong to me, but the two of you did technically contribute, so I am being considerate.”
“I-I see.”
She was hiding something.
That was the impression Ney got.
Given the circumstances, it was probably about the power she had just shown. Ney didn’t know why Levia was hiding it, but as leader of Poppy Anemone, she had to address it properly.
“Levia. You saved us this time, but tell us beforehand what you’re capable of. We’re a party. We need to know what each other can do.”
Ney spoke seriously, and Levia returned her gaze with equal seriousness.
“…It isn’t as though I was hiding it because I wanted to. There is actually a fairly serious reason.”
“A reason? What is it?”
“Using that has an enormous drawback. That is why I do not want to use it carelessly.”
“A drawback…”
Of course.
The amount of magical power Levia had produced was abnormal for such a slender body.
If she could use that level of power constantly, a Cerberus would hardly have stood a chance. She could have poured magical power into a sword and thrown it, for example, killing the creature from a distance.
But the only time she had used the power fully was during that single burst of acceleration. She seemed to have held back when throwing the sword, and had not used it at all when attacking. Instead, she had relied on precision and technique, carefully targeting vital points rather than overpowering the beast.
There must be a serious burden. Perhaps it shortens her lifespan…
Ney thought it over.
Knowing Levia’s personality, this was exactly the sort of ability she would normally show off. Showing off and acting superior was what she did.
If she had kept it hidden, there had to be a reason.
In that case, Ney could not force her to use it, nor did she want to. She had plenty of complaints about Levia, but she was still an important companion. Ney wanted her to take care of her life.
For some reason, Liz was looking exasperated.
“All right. But let me ask anyway. What exactly happens when you use—”
“FIIIIIIIIISH!!”
“!?”
“Whaaa?!”
A shout rang out.
It was a voice Ney didn’t recognize.
She stopped thinking and looked up to find Levia holding her lasso again.
And at the other end of the rope—
“Damn it! Let go, asshole!”
—was a boy with animal ears.