Combatants Will Be Dispatched - Volume 7 - Chapter 4.2

2

Alice is the first to greet me when I stumble out of bed a little past noon the next day.

“Hey, loser. You slept in today. We’ve all finished our preparations.”

“Good morning, Boss loser. You said we’d be going to the ruins today, but it’s almost time for lunch!”

Are these two really my partner and my subordinate?

They’re being awfully cruel to someone who was beaten up just a few hours ago.

“It took a whole bunch of medical nanobots to force my body to heal in just a day! Why can’t you guys be nicer to me?! Every part of me still hurts!”

Belial made sure I paid the price yesterday for going overboard when teasing her.

I took opportunities during our initial sparring to sneak in a few fondles and ended up motivating her to take things seriously.

By that, I don’t mean take things seriously in an erotic sense, but to seriously put the hurt on me. 

“Sorry, loser. I should’ve held back more. I didn’t expect you to be that fragile.”

“The next person who calls me loser is going to be used to harvest some Evil Points.”

I try to ward off any more attempts at rubbing salt in my wounds as I check the state of my body.

It still hurts here and there, but I’m pretty functional.

“All right. Here’s the plan. We’ll track Adelie as she goes to recover the sorcery stone. The moment she finds it and lets down her guard, we attack her and grab the stone from her. Well, we’ve done it before, so the chances of failure should be pretty low.”

Alice confirms the plan, prompting Rose to mumble an objection.

“This scheme really makes me feel awful when we do it. It feels like we take someone who’s at the height of their sense of achievement and kick them into the depths of despair...”

While our chimera does become creepily predatory when she’s hungry, ordinarily she’s one of the good ones.

“If you’re not too keen on it, I do have a plan B prepared as well.”

“Really?! Can you describe it to us?”

Rose looks at Alice, the brains of our outfit, with eyes shimmering with admiration.

“I’ve got the color and shape of the shattered sorcery stone recorded, so we can send that data to Kisaragi and have a new one with the same color and shape made out of plastic or something. After that, we’ll just claim that we obtained a sorcery stone and hand the replica over to them, take the reward, and bug out.”

“That’s even worse! Grunade needs the sorcery stone to keep functioning, so that might end up causing terrible problems after!”

Alice raises a hand reassuringly to Rose’s vehement objection.

“I have a plan for that, too. We just need to have Tiger Man steal the replica before they use the sorcery stone on the artifact or whatever. Even if they send us another request to recover the sorcery stone, we just need to refuse this time.”

“I’m sorry I even raised an objection, it feels like it’d be better to just grab it fair and square...”

—Deep in the woods near Grunade.

When we head to the coordinates Lydia has given us, we see what look like ruins.

It's a facility that's smaller in scale than the one in Torace, and it’s made of a material that’s similar to concrete.

Alice stares at the ruins from a distance before taking a look around the area.

“There’s signs of an encampment near the ruins, so it seems like they’ve already started their search. So I’m guessing the secret door that only Adelie can open is probably already open, yeah? Let's just have Lady Belial roast everything in the ruins.”

“My turn, huh? One ruin roast coming right up.”

“After which Adelie will somehow make it out of the ruins and the intense heat ends up melting the sorcery stone, right? I can already see how that plays out, so please stay back, Lady Belial.”

Belial slumps her shoulders as she’s told to stay put, prompting Rose to nervously try to reassure her.

“...Hey. Adelie’s emerging from the ruins. And she’s got some company we don’t want her to have.”

I guess because it took a while for me to wake up, Adelie has already finished her dive into the ruins and is emerging with her party in tow.

“It looks like a film crew or something is mixed in with the knights. Does this planet have TV?” Belial asks, evidently impressed, but that’s probably the bad company Alice is referring to.

Trailing behind Adelie and surrounded by knights belonging to the prince’s faction is a man carrying something that looks like a television camera.

“Yep. Despite the fact they still use outhouses, they have these weird TVs powered by some mystery sauce. I guess it’s all part of this planet’s whole magic schtick.”

“Oh, right, I saw that in the reports... Wait. That means if we grab the sorcery stone, it’ll all be broadcast to the populace, right?”

When Lydia asked the prince yesterday:

“Besides, even if they were to take the sorcery stone by force, how would you prove it?”

The prince said, “I have plans of my own.” I guess this is what he meant.

“The problem is with the fact that they already have the sorcery stone. If not, we could just have Lady Belial incinerate them before they can film it... Maybe we can hit the camera from a distance? Though even if we take out the camera, we can’t be sure they don’t have any other filming equipment. In that case, should we just hit the cameraman...?”

“No, Miss Alice, we can’t do that! Even during a war, the postman, the cameraman, and the beetle merchant are off limits!”

I get the postman and the cameraman, but why do the laws of war protect the beetle merchants?

Just then:

Belial, who has been keeping watch over our surroundings, spots something.

“...Mm? Hey, isn’t that Tiger Man? What's he doing over there?”

When we follow her gaze, we find Tiger Man lurking in some bushes.

“Good catch, Lady Belial. Tiger Man’s tough to find when he’s hiding in foliage. He’s probably trying to snatch the sorcery stone from Adelie. He’s been on a sorcery stone-collecting kick lately.”

“You can’t become king if you’re not a royal, even if you have the sorcery stone, right? What’s he planning to do with it?”

Belial tilts her head and watches Tiger Man slowly approach the target.

“There’s someone on this planet who can manipulate time. Tiger Man believes that if he can get a powerful-enough sorcery stone, she can eventually make him a child again, so he’s been trying to find every powerful sorcery stone he can get his hands on.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m kind of stupid, but I don’t understand what Tiger Man’s trying to do.”

Well. I don't get it, either.

...Just then, Tiger Man makes his move.

He probably sees that Adelie and her party are tired from dealing with the monsters in the ruins.

“Ah, Tiger Man’s about to spring into action. I’ve never seen him look so committed."

As Belial notes, the usually laid-back mutant has a look of intense determination on his face.

“Oh, there he goes! Boss, are you sure we should just be sitting here watching?” Rose asks with a note of concern, perhaps because she’s fond of him.

“Yeah, just watching is kind of dull... Lady Belial, shall we make a bet on whether or not he succeeds in nabbing the stone? I'll bet some information on one of Lady Lilith’s screw-ups on him succeeding.”

“Then I’ll bet a compromising photo of Astaroth on him failing.”

“You shouldn’t gamble like that! And that’s not what I meant...”

“Yo, looks like Tiger Man’s taken the initiative. But the camera’s got a good view of him.”

As Alice notes, the camera’s captured the entire progression of Tiger Man’s sneak attack.

Tiger Man lets loose with a jump kick against Adelie, as though to pay her back for the other day.

Adelie somehow manages to block his kick, but the impact tosses her back.

The knights around her intervene and help cushion the blow as she’s thrown toward the ruin wall.

Meanwhile, the cameraman manages to capture the whole exchange without missing a single beat.

“That cameraman is more agile than Tiger Man or Adelie.”

"That’s cuz film crews are sent to get footage of monsters in the Cursed Woods. There was a lot of buzz around the recent dragon documentary where they managed to get shots of a dragon’s lair and the dragonlings inside.”

I really want to watch that documentary, and I’d love to poach him for our team.

“Adelie’s working with the knights to fight back, but Tiger Man’s still got the advantage.”

Alice provides commentary, watching the exchange like a neutral observer.

Whatever else he might be, Tiger Man’s still one of the most powerful of our mutants. Even with knights in support, he’s still going to be too much for someone like Adelie, who’s about on my level.

Shield-carrying knights in full armor are tossed aside like tin soldiers, and before long, Adelie is cornered on her own.

The image of a humanoid monster cornering Adelie against a wall looks pretty dodgy from an ethics point of view, so the cameraman makes sure to capture the situation from multiple angles.

“Lady Belial, looking forward to seeing that compromising photo of Lady Astaroth.”

“It’s not over yet. Pay close attention, Six. I’ll show you what it means to work smarter, not harder.”

Belial then jumps out of the tree cover we’d taken shelter behind.

She makes the most of her enhancement surgery- boosted physical abilities and dashes forward at a speed that a normal person would struggle to follow by sight.

Belial quickly closes in on Tiger Man as he faces off against the knights.

“<Been a while, Tiger Man. Glad to see you looking well! Hang on, I’ll execute you in a sec!>”

“<What are you doing here, Lady Belial?! I can think of lots of reasons why I should be put to death, but neow's a bit sudden if you’re not even going to hear mreee out!>”

Tiger Man quickly leaps backward to dodge the smiling Supreme Leader’s punch.

“Hey, Alice, what are we going to do? She’s so dead set on winning her bet with me that she’s charged out without thinking."

“Even I haven’t planned for this. She’s shouting at Tiger Man in Japanese, so it’s only a matter of time before people find out he’s affiliated with us. Don’t worry, I’ve made preparations to bug out.”

As I’m trying to figure out what to do about Belial’s sudden burst of unexpected activity, Adelie, who’s ended up being rescued by Belial, faintly blushes as she looks at Belial’s back.

I guess from Adelie’s point of view, Belial looks like a hero suddenly intervening to save her in the nick of tune.

The cameraman rolls along the ground to get the best angle on the flame-haired beauty's sudden arrival.

“<Then I’ll give you ten seconds. Try to convince me.>”

“<When I snuck in to steal the sorcery stone, Princess Nadia was sitting there by herself looking lonely. When I asked her what was wrong, she spoke to me without any fear and told me she was sad because she wasn’t able to do anything to stop her older siblings from fighting.>”

...Oh?

“<When she saw me carrying the sorcery stone, she didn’t try to stop me, and instead encouraged me to take it, because it was causing the fight between her brother and sister. And then she said that if she were to vanish, maybe her big brother and big sister would put aside their differences to find her, so she asked me to take her with me in exchange for me taking the sorcery stone... When a kid asks something like that of you, you can’t just turn her down, can you?>”

...Tiger Man’s so serious that he’s forgetting to add his usual meows and purrs when speaking.

As Alice translates Tiger Man’s Japanese for Rose, I feel shame at having rushed to judge him.

“Boss, Miss Alice! I don’t know what Tiger Man is planning to do, but we should go, too!”

Rose, deeply moved as Alice tells her what Tiger Man said, clenches her hand into a fist and holds it up. I reach back and unholster my pistol to support Tiger Man.

“<So I made a decision. I’ll smack the idiots neglecting their little sister and fighting over the crown. Then, I'll obtain a new sorcery stone and take that with Princess Nadia to—>”

“<You’ve said enough, Tiger Man!>”

Belial interrupts his passionate monologue.

Belial looks upon Tiger Man with a serious expression, as though to say he doesn’t need to speak any more.

Then after giving a nod of understanding—

“<I said you had ten seconds! Your story’s way too long, and it didn’t convince me, so I’m going to execute you!>”

“<That’s way troo unfair! Meow!>”

—I have no time to intervene before Belial attacks.