Ishura - Volume 9 - Chapter 10

Chapter 10 - The Twelfth Match

The unbelievably peaceful days continued.

No one chasing after Tu or Uhak popped up in the sixth borough of the Northern Outer Ward, and living in the inn at the foot of the mountains, overlooking the city, felt like being in a gap between nature and civilization. Though quiet, it was never lonesome.

Like Kia and Elea had done in Eta, they had decided on duties for everyone.

Uhak was assigned the cooking and cleaning, Kia the laundry, and keeping watch and inspecting the building was left up to Tu.

Of course, no matter how much laundry piled up, Kia could clean it all with a single word, and since she no longer needed to run around as much, it meant most of her time was spent thinking.

Usually, she would think about Elea.

Now, Kia wanted to let her know she was living in total peace and comfort. That she wasn’t lonely or in pain.

The Sixways Exhibition will finish up, the hero’ll be decided, and she’ll be pardoned.

After thinking and talking it over with Tu, she had come to believe it was best for her to wait for this moment to come.

The concept of pardons was something that Kia had learned once in class and only vaguely remembered, so to learn about it, she had needed to sneak back into Iznock Royal High School again and listen in on a class for students two years ahead of Kia’s previous grade.

A pardon is when the royal family specially exonerates someone from punishment for their crimes… Once they decide on a True Hero, they might even exonerate me for going onto the royal palace grounds. When that happens, Elea can get discharged, too, and we’ll be able to live together again.

She was able to embrace this meager hope because the days with her companions had been so comfortable. It was fun to simply talk with Tu and Uhak or take strolls through the mountain that reminded her of her homeland.

Tu was always up to something bizarre, while Uhak was almost laughably serious and earnest, and it felt like they were living in a completely different world from the roiling political landscape of Aureatia.

“Kia, look at this horned beetle! Got myself a brand-new one!”

“You brought one of those things in here again?! Our whole place is going to be filled with bugs at this rate! If you don’t do something about them, bugs will just keep popping up nonstop, you know!”

“Sure, but still, look! On just this mountain alone there’s four species of these horned guys, right? But the one I got today is the first female I’ve seen among all the ones with three horns, so—”

“Enough already! Send it back home this instant! You’re not going to show it to anyone, anyway!”

“Hey, Uhak! You’ll understand how cool this is, right?!”

Tu’s eccentric-yet-innocent nature was similar to a girl Kia had treated like a young sister back in Eta, Yawika.

Tu gave energy to Kia’s life here, discovering and teaching her all sorts of ways to enjoy themselves even as they lived in hiding and weren’t able to go into town.

Uhak earnestly lived out his days in complete silence and would look after Tu and Kia whenever his hands were free. Though he looked completely different, and their personalities were nothing alike, Kia felt he was like a mother.

Once when Kia happened to wake up early in the morning, she saw Uhak kneeling in the spacious lobby and offering up some sort of prayer. It was the prayer style of the Order.

When she had attended school, there had been a very small number of children raised the same way, and Kia remembered thinking it was a really strange custom. While the actions were the same, Uhak’s prayer, with his colossal frame, was so majestic, it came off as something totally different, and Kia unconsciously held her breath as she watched from the shadows.

“…Hey, Tu, tell me.”

Once at night, when falling asleep, Kia called out to Tu in the bed next to her.

“Why…did you go to the hyphal labyrinth? It wasn’t like anyone asked you to…and Aureatia was chasing you, too, so wasn’t it risky?”

“Eh-heh-heh, my bad.”

“You really had to go?”

“…Yup. The truth is, there’s people suffering all over the place…and I think being able to think about someone who isn’t right in front of you, however big or small the thinking may be, is what actually saving people is about. I really respect those people…who can think about the bigger stuff like that.”

Constructs were said not to have any function for sleep.

Tu clearly answered Kia’s drowsy questioning.

“But see…a person like that told me once, that even if I can only save the people in front of me, even that’s a really great thing. While we may do things differently…I’m sure she would’ve approved of it.”

“…”

“For the hyphal labyrinth, I just thought I needed to go. I thought the same when Alus the Star Runner attacked. Even I couldn’t really answer why I felt like that, but…lately it feels like I’ve started to figure out the answer. I think this is part of a code and duty, as a champion.”

“A duty and code.”

“…Uh-huh. I was born really strong, so…I gotta do something if someone’s suffering under some strong and unjust power. I might lose…and I might end up causing trouble for you, Kia.”

“Well, um… There were people who were saved thanks to you, right?”

“There wasn’t anyone. All the people in the hyphal labyrinth died.”

“…”

Kia hadn’t ever once asked Tu about how many people Tu had saved that day.

Had Tu spent her days with all this sadness in her heart?

Not just the sadness of the hyphal labyrinth, but something more varied and complex.

“But I don’t regret going or anything. I did what I thought I had to do. Besides, it wasn’t a total waste…”

“…That’s really admirable, Tu.”

“Huh?! Kia, do you have a fever or something?!”

“Shut up… I just said it was admirable. I’m going to sleep.”

In truth, Tu thought about things much more seriously than Kia did.

Even though Kia had powers that were far greater than Tu’s, she had never used them to save a life.

With both the Lithia fire, and the fire Alus caused, by the time Kia quenched the flames, most things had already been settled.

If Kia wished for it, she could’ve easily erased the whole hyphal labyrinth, but instead she feared drawing any attention to herself, and even viewed Tu’s self-sacrificing act as nothing but risky and dangerous.

It wasn’t at all, though. Not to Tu.

Kia had the power of a champion. Would she someday be able to have the heart of one, like Tu?

As the three of them lived together, Kia came to know all sorts of things.

Tu knew about all types of people from the United Western Kingdom of Old. Ever since then, she had always liked people and had always acted this way for a long time.

When Kia thought about Elea and cried, there were times when Uhak would silently come up and nestle close to her. It served to make her even sadder and her crying even uglier.

When she woke up in the morning, she wasn’t alone. Energetic Tu and silent Uhak were there.

These peaceful days continued for a spell.

Then, without almost any forewarning, Kia the World Word disappeared without a trace.

It was a night where the red large moon and pale small moon were clearly visible.

The sixth borough of Aureatia’s Northern Outer Ward was a hot-springs town, but it was also a port town, with the springs bubbling up in the mountain range flowing into a large canal.

Atop a ship, rolling in the nighttime wharf, Shalk the Sound Slicer quietly trained himself.

It was extremely simple spear practice. He stabbed his spear toward the wall and stopped the instant it made contact with a point on the wall.

This one spot needed to be the farthest position his top-speed thrust would reach. From here, he would need the skills to gauge the feeling of distance with his spearhead while taking up position at the most optimal range from his foe.

He needed to be able to perform this attack whenever, wherever, without the need for any special tools.

A skeleton like Shalk didn’t need to sleep and as such had continued this training every day without rest.

Uhak the Silent, the True Hero.

He didn’t know how much the information Yukiharu the Twilight Diver told him was based in fact.

What were Yukiharu’s intentions in passing only this information onto Shalk?

On top of the boat, he thought as he swung his spear like the wind.

How do my actions change knowing this information? As long as I don’t accept Yukiharu’s commission, it’ll be impossible to figure out the truth or not. Still, it isn’t the sort of information that could be waved off as lies seeking profit.

His spear prodded the ever so shallow point in the ship mast.

Shalk had already stabbed his spear several hundred times, with speed that beggared all learned knowledge, but there only ever remained a single shallow point where his spearhead connected.

Truth is…I only started to get so persistent about Uhak after that guy told me he was the True Hero. I can’t let Uhak die before I know for sure. Though, it’s not inconceivable he might’ve given me that idea for this very reason.

Yukiharu the Twilight—and, by extension, the Gray-Haired Child who made use of him—didn’t want to let Shalk kill Uhak, did they? Shalk’s way of approaching his battles didn’t involve disposing of his opponent in advance, but even if it did, just having this information would make him hesitate to try something on Uhak.

The reverse held true, too. Once Shalk learned the suspicions that Uhak the Silent was the True Hero, it led him to what he was doing now, trying to stop Uhak from stepping off the playing field before revealing anything.

Or perhaps, they don’t want Uhak to kill me and are trying to stop me from doing anything unnecessary. If so then, this latest fight—

“…Shalk?”

A voice called his name from the wharf.

It was a tall, slender young girl, with her long chestnut hair in a braid.

She anxiously held a mud-like mass, and a green coat, to her chest.

“Shalk… Wh-what’re you doing here?”

“Am I not allowed to be here? I can at least give you time to think about that.”

“Hey, Shalk… Kia, she disappeared somewhere. I-I looked for her, but her coat was left in the path to the port and nothing else… So…”

“Yeah. Of course you did.”

Shalk jumped down from the ship to the wharf with a light thump.

Tu showing up here was exactly as he expected. It was why Shalk had come.

Tu the Magic backed away.

“…Did they need to send a big, bombastic army to encircle you guys for you to figure out that you’re surrounded? That coat’s a fake that Aureatia threw together. So that when Kia disappeared…we could draw out someone thoughtlessly coming into town. Like you.”

“Why…you, Shalk…?!”

“Because you’re a self-proclaimed demon king. Hero candidates have a duty to put down self-proclaimed demon kings—and both you and Kia the World Word were just designated as self-proclaimed demon kings a little while ago.”

Tu the Magic was no longer to be arrested alive.

The enemy was the New Demon King Army. By acting together with Kia the World Word, the greatest threat of all and perpetrator of the attack on the royal palace, it was determined that Tu was an enemy of Aureatia.

“You should’ve learned more about the tricks Aureatia’s got up its sleeves. I’m guess you never once thought that any of those geezers and grannies dressed up like shopkeepers or fishermen might’ve been a spy the whole time, huh?”

“This can’t be right, Shalk! I mean, during the Alus attack, we both—”

Tu tumbled over mid-sentence.

Shalk the Sound Slicer was already at her back.

“What was that? You were talking so slow, I missed it. Talking about the time we fought Alus the Star Runner, was it?”

“I thought you were a friend! Someone who thought like me!”

Tu was thinking that amid this battle of shura, there were others besides her making a hobby out of acts of charity.

Her thinking was far too naïve.

“Sorry about that. I wasn’t there outta the goodness of my heart, I just wanted to go toe to toe with Alus the Star Runner.”

Shalk let out a derisive, bone-rattling laugh.

“And right now, I’m really in the mood to go toe to toe with you.”

Twelfth Match. Shalk the Sound Slicer versus Tu the Magic.

I have to run.

She felt the cold ground on her cheek. The first choice that came to Tu was to flee.

Tu didn’t want to fight Shalk the Sound Slicer. She didn’t want to be defeated or defeat him.

She didn’t know Shalk’s real motives here, but whatever they were, she hated the idea of either of them getting meaninglessly hur—

No, no, no, I can’t! If I run, then Uhak and Kia’ll be in danger!

Kia had been lured out somewhere, and there was no one left to protect Uhak.

Shalk had likely anticipated that Tu would use her durability to escape by force. If he managed to pull Tu far enough away from the sixth borough of the Northern Outer Ward, Uhak would be isolated. In fact, hadn’t he just told her that there were several undercover Aureatian agents in this town already?

Aureatia was trying to capture Uhak. Kuze had misgivings about this exact situation and had entrusted Uhak to Tu.

If Tu left this area, Shalk would attack Uhak next.

“Shalk…!”

“Tell me if you’re finally interested. I’m bored.”

“If that’s, what you, want!”

Tu lowered her center of gravity to charge forward. It was the same stance she used when she broke through Nectegio.

If Tu the Magic put everything she had behind the charge, she could blitz through all the residences in the ward.

“Then, let’s g—wah?!”

Her explosive charge forward never came.

Just like when she went to move a moment ago, Tu suddenly collapsed on the ground.

Rotating from the momentum, she slammed headfirst into the wharf pavement, breaking it apart.

“Now that was a real interesting little move. You tried to catch your opponent off guard for once, eh? Make like you’re gonna run me over, but actually you were headed back to your hideout…to protect Uhak.”

“…! Why?! I didn’t trip or anything?! How could I fall over?!”

Tu the Magic falling over, with her supreme motion nerves, was a completely inconceivable phenomenon.

Whether there was some sort of obstacle placed at her feet, or something caught on to them, Tu possessed the physical capabilities to quite literally trample underfoot such obstacles and break through them.

Shalk’s spear was still slung on his back. It appeared that he hadn’t moved an inch from where he stood.

“You’ve got all the time in the world. Think about it. As you can see, I haven’t attacked you once. See, I already know that’d be a waste of time…”

“Urngh!”

Tu tried to stand up once more, but the instant she took a step, she fell down.

Her movements left her looking like a clumsy, writhing mess.

“Stabbing your mouth or eyes, focusing all my attacks on one point, if that sorta stuff was enough to kill you…then you would’ve been long dead from Alus the Star Runner’s attack. Ain’t that right, Tu the Magic?”

Tu didn’t think that any attempts on her part would succeed. Instead, she focused on Shalk’s behavior.

Shalk wasn’t moving—but that couldn’t possibly be true. He was sending out his spear too fast for the average person’s sight to capture and immediately returning outside Tu’s range. The feat of agility was something that Tu’s keen sight was just barely able to pick up on.

“I get it… You’re not attacking me. You’re shaving away at where I’m standing each time I go to take a step forward. So the force of my step…gets thrown off, and I can’t go forward!”

Tu looked at her feet. The wharf pavement was faintly shaved off and scattered from the impact.

The instant she went to take a step, the footing where she meant to put her weight was carved out.

Like a carriage was unable to progress through a frictionless mire, once she lost the foothold generating the counteraction, no matter how much power she put into the motion, it would never result in actual movement.

Tu didn’t fully comprehend how these dynamics worked, but there was one thing she knew for sure now.

There was a hopelessly large gap in speed between the two, to the point he could watch and aim for the exact instant she moved.

My weakness is being unable to think during a fight. But if I don’t think, this will keep up forever! I’m not doing this to win, I need to think to save Kia and Uhak!

“What’s wrong? You figured it out, and you’re still just flailing around?”

“…!”

“Give me all you got. It’ll be way too dull if this is how it’s going to end.”

I might be able to do it. But I could fail, too…

There was one method she had to attack Shalk in this situation.

The orb of mud that Tu held in her hands—Rotting Soil Sun was her personal magic tool that she had obtained for herself on the day of Alus the Star Runner’s attack, in order to keep it under control. It could fire off a large quantity of mud with the speed and power of a bullet.

Shalk’s movements were faster than a bullet. Tu was fully aware of that. But still…

“Rotting…Soil Sun!”

Offense wasn’t the goal. Her aim was to use the threatening wave of mud to block Shulk’s line of sight.

And, take a step!

She kicked out with her whole body, and yet, all she hit was empty air.

“Too slow.”

Even though Tu made the movement, the instant the thought popped into her head, to Shalk the Sound Slicer, there was still enough of a delay for him to calmly slip around Rotting Soil Sun and reach Tu.

She tumbled. Her body tilted and slammed to the ground.

Thrusting out her hand, she used it to push against the ground—but the instant before she could, countless strikes of cold steel blurred together. The base she went to push against was gouged away. Even using her hand for her forward step had been read perfectly.

Nevertheless, Tu didn’t drop any speed whatsoever, and instead of thrusting her body upward, she slammed it down, as if diving straight into the earth.

A violent explosion. A fissure.

“If I can’t move on the surface, then…”

The sturdily compacted pavement was completely pulverized from Tu putting all her muscular strength into a body slam.

The canal waterway billowed in like storm waters, dragging Tu down with the debris.

“How about this?!”

“C’mon now. Even if you go down there, in the end, I’m still on—”

Shalk spat out his words with exasperation, but then he immediately noticed a strange shift.

As if pulled down by Tu’s movements as she sunk, Shalk fell into the water as well.

The wharf collapsed.

Shalk the Sound Slicer’s thoughts were just as swift as his movements.

Any trick against him that his thoughts could work through, he could read completely in what was a single second to the average person.

What did she do to me?!

However, even with these powers of thought, this proved incomprehensible.

He hadn’t lost his footing with the collapse of the wharf. With Shalk’s speed, he was more than able to react to any unexpected destruction of the terrain around him and escape to safety.

He didn’t even need to consider it, but since Tu had been so out of range, she hadn’t grabbed on to his body and dragged him down with her, either.

However, as for this strange thing pulling against his bones…

“Aha, so that’s what it was…!”

He hadn’t been able to see it.

Shalk’s body was entangled in what looked like a strand of thread.

Delicate and silky though it may be, a single strand was able to pull Shalk’s whole body down without snapping.

Her hair! She wrapped it around my body!

This had been the goal behind the smoke screen of mud projectiles.

In order to interrupt Tu’s kick and her attempt to land with her hand, he had needed to approach her twice and cut away her footing.

Anticipating they would get tangled up by the intense movement, Tu had loosened her braid slightly and let it sway in the air. By curious coincidence, the thread trap bore a striking similarity to the final move Mele the Horizon’s Roar used in the seventh match to curb Shalk’s godlike speed.

He sunk down into a darkness where he lost all sense of up from down.

Bubbles. Debris. Light.

In the evening depths, two green eyes glittered.

“I got you.”

An explosive current of water flew past Shalk’s sides.

Even though he dodged, an impact shock powerful enough to blow his right arm away ran through him.

“!”

From underwater, using just her leg power, Tu the Magic flew up to the water’s surface.

Dragged by a single strand of hair, Shalk collided violently with the water surface from below. An impact. A hard blow. Up over the water.

The silhouette of Tu dancing in the moonlit sky was above him. The water spray arced through the air. Her hair was pulling him in.

My left ankle!

With his instantaneous assessment, he swiped with his spear and cut off his own left ankle, entangled by the strand of hair.

At the same time as his body fell, with his spear’s supreme agility, he struck as if slicing the surface of the water, and with the recoil, successfully grappled onto one of the ships floating in the harbor.

In midair, Tu grabbed onto the severed white ankle. Shalk stabbed his spear into the ship deck in place of his missing foot.

Tu sunk into the water once more. Once she did, Shalk wouldn’t be able to detect where she was.

Shalk had thought of his opponent as falling far short of Mele the Horizon’s Roar, but he now needed to revise that judgment.

“Tu the Magic… Guess you can put up a fight after all!”

The ship Shalk stood on wasn’t the only one. With the moors destroyed along with the rest of the harbor, countless ships floated in the canal.

Above the water, it was quiet enough to believe everything up until then had never happened. Large waves rocked the boats, and—

This isn’t a wave!

Shalk kicked off the deck with his good foot and flew to another ship with his lightweight body.

At his back, a pillar of water shot up like a geyser, smashing the boat he had been standing on to pieces.

To escape from the destruction, he again jumped to a different boat.

A wet braid, almost like a tail, flew in an arc.

Sinking back into the water, green glimmers blinked in dark depths.

Tu the Magic’s physical abilities, even when underwater—or precisely because she was underwater—achieved truly free movement, not bound by anything at all.

Our positions have reversed now. The fight’s not about me stopping Tu from moving, but her stopping my movements instead. She’s trying to totally immobilize me to prevent me from heading to find Uhak the Silent.

Shalk the Sound Slicer possessed unrivaled speed in a close-range battle. Capturing him or stopping him from making such movements would have been his greatest weakness.

If he was submerged in water and had his whole body destroyed while unable to move as he liked, what would happen to Shalk? At the very least, it didn’t seem like he’d fulfill his duty to pin Tu the Magic down.

“If this is what she’s like underwater, just how am I supposed to defeat her? Give me a break…”

Yet another vessel, the size of a small house, was destroyed by Tu’s underwater charge.

A single stroke in the water transformed into a massive, talon-like wave, and rocked the scenery around him.

Leap. Destroy. Dive.

Leap. Destroy. Dive.

Leap. Destroy. Dive.

Shalk continued to jump from ship to ship to escape the destructive waves.

Tu was hot on his heels, swimming with the speed of a folkloric sea beast, destroying every ship floating in the canal as she went.

Shalk was too far from the shore. It didn’t seem like he could run across the water surface, swaying constantly from the ferocious offensive, and reach land.

Much worse, after losing one of his feet, Shalk’s strongest advantage—his speed—wasn’t in perfect condition, either.

“Now things are getting interesting.”

It was through these exact types of battles that he could learn about his real nature and who he was.

“You gotta come at me with everything you got, or else there’s no point in fighting.”

Tu the Magic had never actually learned how the minian races swam.

However, her body, designed with ultimate physical ability in mind and the superb senses that accompanied it, made her immediately adapt to underwater activity.

She kicked the water with her insteps lined up together, in order to send the wave generated from her upper body down through her long legs. By placing both arms flat against her body, she minimized water resistance.

Thrusting through the water with her now streamlined outline, she looked like an elegant and graceful fish.

Her excellent vision was able to discern each individual ship up on the surface from the depths of the nighttime riverbed.

She didn’t need to come up for air, and even as she threw body slams with enough power to smash ships into flotsam, her body was completely unblemished.

Shalk can’t get onto land.

With a single stroke through the water and a kick of both legs, she changed her direction at a sharp angle.

In the second it took to pierce through a ship’s bilge, fly up above the water, and dive back down, Tu could get a grasp on Shalk’s position.

If I don’t have any other choice here, then I’ll drag Shalk down in the water and take both his legs off! That way I can get through all this without killing him, and then I can go help Uhak, too!

Unlike the minian races, a construct could be joined together again even if its body was blown apart.

Shalk knew that for himself and had cut off his own left ankle for that reason.

Tu the Magic was terribly naïve when it came to combat, but just like she had done in her battles in the Final Land, as long as she understood the way to incapacitate a foe without killing them, she could dedicate all her effort to make it happen.

“Shalk!” As she fluttered high above the water, Tu shouted at Shalk right below. “Don’t help out with this sorta stuff! Uhak and Kia didn’t do anything wrong at all!”

She slammed her heel down. The boat where Shalk stood was split in two the moment it landed.

She had been aiming for Shalk but didn’t hit him.

“Kia’s just a regular young girl! She doesn’t want to hurt anyone at all! Doesn’t Aureatia get that attacking her might just make her hate them instead?!”

“No clue. Truth is, they might not really get that.”

Shalk replied with his spear stuck into the shipwreck as it flew in the air.

Tu tried to shoot him down with the mud projectiles from Rotting Soil Sun, but in an instant, Shalk’s figure was no longer there.

His voice reached her from the complete opposite direction, on a ship floating at Tu’s back.

“Besides, they gotta be fed up with having their lives spared at the whims of someone else. Even with the True Demon King… Everyone’s got the inkling that they didn’t do everything they did out of a desire to hurt someone.”

“Th-they want to kill her…just to give themselves peace of mind?!”

“Is it really that strange to you? When Kia the World Word gets old and starts growing senile, are you going to be there to look after her? Do you think that she absolutely won’t cause anything on a whim for the rest of her life? If you act nice and kind to someone with a lot of power, you think they won’t look down on the minian races as beneath them?”

“…!”

“You better at least learn to imagine what the weak are thinking about. Keep going the way you are, and eventually you won’t be able to protect anyone.”

“Even then, I’m—”

Once again, she dove down into the black water.

Morphing into a water serpent that swallowed everything in its wake, she eradicated the ships floating in the river, and the wreckage that could serve as Shalk’s footing.

“—going to do whatever’s out in front of me!”

The scales of the battle were already tipping in the other direction.

The boats were being annihilated at a frightening pace, and Shalk’s footing was dwindling.

The large pieces of flotsam were smashed apart, too. Shalk fled from one, losing yet another option.

Before long, he was driven to the top of piece of flotsam just barely big enough to stand on.

All his potential footings were worn away, and there was nowhere to leap.

However, Shalk jumped.

“Guess this is it…”

Shalk the Sound Slicer, at last, fled into the water.

Tu had waited for this moment. Underwater, he wouldn’t be able to fully utilize the mobility that transcended all known wisdom.

Just as she had expected, Tu was the faster swimmer between the two. She caught up to him.

She finally grabbed both of Shalk’s legs.

“Now you ca—”

At that instant, Shalk’s arms became a flurried, afterimage blur.

He must have attempted some sort of counterattack on Tu, but of course, it didn’t leave a scratch on her body.

“…!”

“Figure it out?”

Feeling something was off, Tu tried to move her body. The hands that held fast onto both Shalk’s legs, and the legs that she kept together to utilize her swimming style, had been locked into their respective positions.

“Wh-why…?! Shalk, what’d you do?!”

Both Tu and Shalk were constructs that didn’t need to breathe. They were close enough that, even underwater, their voices reached one another.

Was her mindset as a warrior too naïve and soft after all, to demand an explanation from her foe like this?

I’m tied up! With something even I’m not strong enough to break out of…

“Well, here’s the thing, Tu. That’s some real monstrous strength you’ve got. You’d be able to tear apart metal wire, tarantula threads, heck, even deep celestial charsteel or dragon scale. But there’s still one thing that’s able to tie up that body of yours.”

“You wrapped my hair around my whole body…?!”

She hadn’t been able to visually perceive Shalk’s movements the moment she caught his legs.

With terrifying speed, he’d plucked Tu’s hair and entangled Tu herself up in it, before tying it off. Tu’s usually tightly braided hair, in order to drag Shalk down at the start, was left with a few strands undone.

With her own hair possessing absolute strength, she lost use of both arms and legs and began sinking down into the water.

“When the wharf was destroyed…and you dragged me into the river, I seriously panicked. That was impressive. Wouldn’t have been surprised if that was enough to do me in.”

“Sh-shalk…tell me, the truth…!”

Even with her defeat assured, Tu couldn’t afford to let go of Shalk’s legs.

If they both sunk down together, at the very least, Shalk wouldn’t attack Kia or Uhak.

“There’s no way you’d do whatever Aureatia tells you to do! You, you…had the courage to fight Alus, didn’t you?!”

“…”

Shalk cocked his head to the side, looking exasperated.

“…Here’s some friendly advice. Just keep sinking down like this. This harbor and all the boats are destroyed now, so those Aureatia guys won’t be able to look for you right away. If you keep yourself in hiding until everything’s finished…Aureatia’s bound to believe that you’ve been incapacitated for good, too. Keep quiet and stay low.”

“Shalk…”

“I wouldn’t lure you out to the waterfront for no reason, would I?”

No one would listen in on a conversation held underwater.

Even if Tu had beaten Shalk and ran away, Aureatia’s attacks against her would continue.

Shalk’s goal had been to “dispose” of Tu the Magic in a way that was impossible for Aureatia to verify.

“If you get what I mean, can you let go of my legs?”

“What…?! N-no way! If you really want them no matter what, first you have to untie me—”

“Sheesh, no matter what I say, you’ll still be headstrong to the end, huh?”

The legs Tu held had been severed from his waist.

Having lost both legs this deep in the water, Shalk would’ve been just as unable to swim as Tu, but…

“Huh?!”

The ostensibly legless skeletal structure rearranged itself, and like an optical illusion made real, he began to regain everything from his femur downward. Had what Tu thought were his rib bones actually been his feet all along?

“With all that foam and debris you scattered everywhere, you didn’t see it, did you? Appears I’m different from other skeletons and can freely rearrange my bones however I want— Truth is, I knew that you were going to try to grab my legs.”

“Wh-wha—Shalk! Y-you tricked me!”

“Incidentally, the reason I dove in at this exact position and depth was…”

A shadow loomed over Tu’s head. Debris from one of the destroyed ships…and a massive metallic part of it, at that, was sinking down to crush Tu.

“…was to stop you from surfacing. I’ll want those bones back someday.”

“Shaaaaalk!”

Tu screamed as she sunk to the nighttime depths.

With the life-or-death contest over, and now standing back on the destroyed wharf, Shalk’s eyes happened to stop in the middle of the rubble.

Stuck there was a mud arrowhead that had hooked his bones from the left ankle down.

“…That idiot.”

Shalk dryly chuckled as he picked up his foot.

She couldn’t even throw away the foot she had stolen from her enemy?

If she was stupid enough to do to this, there was a chance she might actually keep his ribs safe and sound for him, too.

“She really is a hopeless softy.”

The only things that witnessed the conclusion to the battle were the red large moon and the blue small moon.

Twelfth Match. Winner, Shalk the Sound Slicer.