Ishura - Volume 9 - Chapter 1.1

Chapter 1 - Dissection

The false heroes must be eliminated.

Having returned from the New Continent and come to this loathsome land once more, Ozonezma the Capricious entered the Sixways Exhibition arena with this single-minded purpose.

He knew that the True Hero who defeated the Demon King did exist. As the only one who knew the truth, Ozonezma needed to bring ruin to all those claiming to be heroes, save for the True Hero himself.

It was only Cetera the External of the Final Party who deserved such honor and glory, and Ozonezma firmly believed that this lone fact would save Olukt the Drifting Compass Needle’s soul.

Everything about this driving impulse was unhinged.

After suffering defeat in his deadly duel with Soujirou the Willow-Sword, Ozonezma finally realized that he had been lost to madness from the very beginning.

The Demon King’s arm that dwelled within Ozonezma was nothing more than a severed limb, but its very existence had been more than enough to corrode his sanity.

Revealing the truth was the most terrifying act of all.

The True Demon King was a visitor, called to this world by the Wordmaker, while the True Hero was little more than a machine, possessing no valor or purpose of his own. That was the truth.

If this truth spread across the world, where the terror from the Demon King’s age remained and the embers of war still smoldered, everything that Olukt risked his life to protect would go up in flames. What Olukt had wanted was not sobering truth, but peace that delivered all from fear.

Ozonezma had been plunging ahead to an end result completely opposite his own wishes.

Right now, there were most likely three others besides Ozonezma who knew, and could speak on, the truth of the True Demon King. Hiroto the Paradox. Yukiharu the Twilight Diver. Morio the Sentinel.

Each of them were visitors and part of the same camp Ozonezma had previously associated with.

Hiroto the Paradox and Morio the Sentinel, both leading their respective nations, may not have openly spread this truth themselves, as it would destroy both minian and goblin society.

But what about the journalist, Yukiharu the Twilight Diver?

Ozonezma determined he posed more than enough of a threat.

In fact, Yukiharu had made contact with many powerful people during the Sixways Exhibition and was selling them all vital secrets. There was a chance he had already spoken to someone about the existence of Cetera the External.

Whether it was the result of dealing in such information, or because he wanted to use it as a stepping stone to obtain new information, Yukiharu the Twilight Diver used the large-scale coup to sneak into the National Defense Research Institute.

Aureatia’s commission to assassinate Yukiharu, having seen through his movements, was simply to erase from the playing field a journalist who knew too many inconvenient secrets and nothing more. This was most likely done at the behest of Rosclay the Absolute. They had aimed for the moment when defenseless Yukiharu could be caught without a shadow of a doubt. Even if Ozonezma hadn’t accepted the mission, someone else would have come to kill Yukiharu.

Nevertheless, it fell to Ozonezma to kill him.

If he did, there would be no risk of the truth leaking any further. He could perform the deed with absolute certainty.

Though it was only for a brief period of time, the job had entailed killing a comrade who had belonged to the Gray-Haired Child’s camp, just like Ozonezma.

Perhaps he was simply repeating what he had always done up until now.

Ozonezma the Capricious, just as his second name implied, repeatedly betrayed the side he was on and had wandered through several camps by now. Perhaps, being a chimera, it was impossible for not only his physical body to maintain consistency, but his mind and heart, as well.

He needed to make amends for his own mistake—allowing his guilt for slaying countless champions at Izick the Chromatic’s command to spur him to join the Final Party’s journey, only to then betray them.

Meanwhile, in the present, he was in the Tim Great Canal harbor, confronting a bizarre and grotesque wurm.

YUKIHARU THE TWILIGHT DIVER HAS BEEN DEALT WITH. HIS WOODEN BOX CONTAINED NO LIVING ORGANISM, EITHER… IF THE CONTENTS HAD BEEN PAPER OR SOME TYPE OF MECHANICAL RECORDING DEVICE, THEY WOULD HAVE NEEDED TO BE DISPOSED OF AS WELL, BUT…

The sun loomed high overhead. A majority of the harbor facilities were destroyed, and water was streaming into the cracked pavement beneath his feet.

This was the result of the wurm’s colossal body ravaging the land.

From over fifteen meters up in the air, a row of eyes keenly glimmered down on Ozonezma.

…THIS ENEMY WILL HAVE TO COME FIRST.

Ozonezma, with his eight-legged, wolflike form, possessed an irregularly large frame compared to a minia, but the building-like scale of wurms was beyond compare.

A fight with a wurm was itself almost equal to a disaster in scale. To ensure the Aureatian infiltration unit wasn’t caught up in it, Ozonezma had needed to move the battlefield a considerable distance away from the research building.

“THIS IS NOT A HEARTLESS CONSTRUCT WEAPON.”

He understood this much from fewer than three clashes back and forth.

Ozonezma put away the countless arms he’d deployed from his back. He had already clearly determined that against this wurm, his scalpel-throwing attacks wouldn’t prove lethal. He couldn’t afford to turn back for the infiltration unit.

As the wurm raised its head, Ozonezma saw several penetration scars in the area around its vital organs, seven in total. Ozonezma’s scalpel throwing, repeatedly improved and iterated on, boasted enough stopping power to easily penetrate the wurm’s scales, its organic armor plating said to be second only to dragon scale.

“A PLANT PARASITE INFESTS ITS BODY. THE INTERNAL ORGANS THEMSELVES AREN’T FUNCTIONING AT ALL.”

“You haven’t even touched me…”

The wurm spoke for the first time.

At that same moment, the wurm’s tail attack passed through with almost supersonic speeds, but Ozonezma evaded.

He landed perpendicularly onto a half-destroyed warehouse wall. The horribly wide-reaching tail swipe flattened the entire warehouse, but Ozonezma kicked off the wall and landed in a space the attack didn’t reach.

This was not just a wurm, nor a revenant. It was some unknown being.

“And you still understand that much? Not only that, but those mere knife tosses of yours hit harder than a cannon.”

The wurm wasn’t attempting to make conversation. Like Ozonezma, it appeared to be verbalizing its foe’s capabilities to analyze them.

IF THE PARASITIC PLANT IS THE ACTUAL BODY, THEN I NEED TO DESTROY ITS LOCOMOTIVE CENTER, NOT THE INTERNAL ORGANS.

Right in the middle of his series of dodges, Ozonezma took a new weapon in his hand. A piece of steel from a warehouse caught up in the destruction. Grabbing it with four of the arms stretching out from his back, he readied it like a massive blunt weapon.

“…!”

Appearing to pick on Ozonezma’s intentions, the wurm moved its head in the opposite direction, away from its face-to-face position, to escape.

All too slow. With a single leap, Ozonezma got in range of the wurm’s head, fifteen meters up in the air.

“GRAHK!”

A leap.

The wurm, stopping its evasion, opened its mouth wide.

It didn’t actually intercept the attack. Perhaps its massive frame made it misjudge the distance.

Ozonezma’s perfect chance. In midair, he then…failed to bring down the steel beam.

He had already stopped brandishing it. He shrunk his body into a ball. From there, he kicked the steel beam away from himself. Rotating from the recoil, he landed back down, even farther away from the wurm.

It had been only moments before he’d entered the effective range of the teeming branches stretching out from inside the wurm’s maw.

“I KNEW IT.”

The branches, as fast as spear thrusts, tried to catch Ozonezma.

Ozonezma murmured as he chopped them down with his scalpels.

“YOU PURPOSEFULLY LURED ME INTO JUMPING TOWARD YOUR HEAD. YOU WERE NOT AIMING TO DESTROY ME BUT FOCUSED SOLELY ON PENETRATING ME WITH YOUR BRANCHES.”

It had been no coincidence that the wurm had stopped moving with its head reared. To make Ozonezma focus his sights on his motionless head, it had intentionally failed to counter with its fangs. Then, it hoped to pierce Ozonezma with the densest branch cluster it could muster from inside its wide-open mouth. This was the wurm’s strategy.

Once he understood it, Ozonezma could deal with it. His jump from the very start had been a feint. The purpose of the steel beam from the beginning hadn’t been as a weapon, but as necessary footing to make an abrupt trajectory shift in the air.

The wurm had come to a standstill.

“Hraungh, ngh.”

“I PIERCED YOUR MOTOR NERVES.”

Back on the ground, Ozonezma spoke as if heaving a sigh.

The colossal wurm could no longer maintain its posture and began to slide down into the canal.

As long as Ozonezma understood the moment when the wurm’s mouth would open, destroying its cranium wasn’t even necessary.

The number of moves he had at his disposable was simply different. For Ozonezma, using one of his innumerable arms to precisely launch a scalpel while using four arms to ready the steel beam was a simple task.

“You didn’t just run…but attacked…all in that single move…”

“IT WAS A SPLENDID EFFORT TO BUY TIME.”

Ozonezma looked in the opposite direction of the wurm, to the research building.

The destroyed terrain and buildings carved up during the fight stretched out like a straight pathway in front of him, but from afar, its starting point—the camouflaged National Research Defense Institute facility—appeared to be a commonplace harborside warehouse.

This operation targeted two individuals for destruction: the visitor journalist Yukiharu the Twilight Driver and the former self-proclaimed demon king, Viga the Clamor. Ozonezma’s mark, Yukiharu, had already been finished off by Aureatia’s infiltration squad in the initial engagement. While he drew the wurm away, the squad should have raided the facility to take down Viga.

As long as there was the risk that Yukiharu had already made contact with Viga, they needed to take her down for good, too.

Right as he went to rush to the research building, he stopped.

“I SEE.”

A harsh light illuminated Ozonezma, originating from the sea surface.

“I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THEY DID NOT INTEND TO GIVE ME ANY ROOM TO RETURN AND HELP.”

A craft golem hovered over the water surface, loudly beating its wings in an intense rotation.

Fungi formed in a hideously colored sporocarp, bubbling up from the gaps in the debris.

A swarm of revenants, seemingly made with a mix of minian and wyvern body parts, rose up.

“…IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO ME, BUT…”

From Ozonezma’s back sprouted a wriggling mass of pale, dead arms.

“…IS THIS EVERYONE, THEN?”

While Ozonezma was engaging the wurm, Aureatia’s unit breached the research building. The National Defense Research Institute was a den of self-proclaimed demon kings. They had anticipated that some number of bioorganic weapons would intercept them.

Furthermore, they were able to surmise, to some extent, the threat level of a construct from their outward appearance. The mightier the construct—most of the time—the more combat-oriented they looked.

However, this tendency didn’t hold true for all examples. There were exceptions.

One such exception was the young girl the infiltration unit encountered upon breaking into Viga the Clamor’s laboratory.

The girl atop the operating table was naked. She wasn’t equipped with any armaments whatsoever, but…

“Group One, you’re on Viga the Clamor! Group Two, handle this new threat!”

The soldiers immediately determined she was one of these exceptions.

Despite having the appearance of a young girl, and even if they couldn’t intuit the threat she posed, this was what they were supposed to do.

Musket gunshots echoed in continuous succession. Then, ricochet sounds. Their line of fire at Viga the Clamor, standing beside the operating table, had been obstructed at some point by the very same table, now tipped on its side.

The girl who should have been standing on the table had disappeared from the soldiers’ sights. She had leg strength that was able to send the steel operating table flying with a single kick.

“The enemy’s above—”

The only soldier who kept a visual on the girl’s abnormal mobility had his throat slit right as he informed his comrades. Fresh blood spurted out. The girl, dropping into the middle of their defensive formation from the ceiling, extended the nerve fibers coming out of her back in a radial pattern and stabbed all the men around her.

None present had been able to witness the motion.

“Hee-hee.”

The girl giggled.

“Grgle!”

“Eaaugh!”

Controlled by the nerves linking them, the Group Two soldiers’ arms all reacted as if they were creatures with minds of their own.

Their fingers pulled triggers, counter to their own will, and shot down their comrades.

“…Damn you!”

By the time one of the Group One soldiers realized the situation and drew his short sword, the girl’s finger had pierced through his gut.

Slicing upward at an angle with her other hand, she cut out another soldier’s eyeball, smoother than any sword could.

Soon after, the remaining soldiers were wiped out by their comrades, still propelled by the nerve fibers even in death…

“V-Vortical Stampede…!”

—The captain of Group Two groaned his last words on his knees, his innards spilling out from his gut.

Nihilo the Vortical Stampede.

It was the name of the wickedest living weapon of them all, who, in the age of the Demon King, invaded Aureatia alone and successfully wiped out an entire Aureatian field army.

Neither the fact she had secretly been apprehended by Aureatia and deployed in the Lithia War, nor the fact that Dakai the Magpie had killed her in secret, were known to any of the men present.

Now, she had come back to life.

“Hee-hee. Hmm… I forgot quite a lot about how to move, since I was a head for so long.”

She wiped the soldiers’ blood splattered on her chest and stomach with her finger.

On her pale, soft skin remained a faint red line.

Nihilo’s naked body looked like a single flower, blossoming from a ground paved in blood and viscera.

“Good thing I made it in time, wouldn’t you say, Mom?”