Ishura - Volume 9 - Chapter 2.2

Toroa the Awful, clashing with Mestelexil during the Particle Storm’s invasion, battled on his own and fought for even longer than Zeljirga. Beyond that, he had managed to kill Mestelexil and his raw overwhelming power, several times.

Normally, such a thing could never happen. The ones capable of fighting him at all were those powerful enough to outstrip all knowledge.

A battle between a shura and the non-shura was settled the moment it began.

If there was the slightest possible chance of that not happening, though…

“Exil io shaltes.” (From Exil to Shaltes chicken.)

It was nothing more than a problem of priorities.

“Hasyites opcrait zit desnacter jal del hal tatzilidor. Datara.” (Where drought and typhoon content swing and detach death’s edge shadow of the glen where muddy yellow beasts come. Terminate.)

Word Arts were the construction and communication of a will. A technique cast by understanding a target and weaving words. As such, the time needed to make use of them was not always guaranteed to be in proportion to the length and complexity of the incantation.

With that in mind, Mestelexil’s incantations were far too instantaneous.

The carcasses that Mestelexil had crushed to death as he landed, and two golem soldiers in addition to those, vanished.

The composition of body and life was directly broken down and rendered into dust indistinguishable from the forest soil.

Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge was in and of himself an unparalleled construct weapon, but at the same time, he was also—theoretically—the ultimate Craft and Life Arts caster, surpassing even Kiyazuna the Axle.

When dealing with soulless constructs, her skills were practically the stuff of fairy tales, casting Word Arts capable of dissecting her targets alive. Even without using these advanced Word Arts at her disposal, there were several more efficient methods of destroying Mestelexil.

While Linaris the Obsidian lacked the knowledge regarding weapons of the Beyond, she had come up with a completely different way to utilize Mestelexil compared to Kaete’s camp—using his immense Word Art abilities not for creation but for erasure.

They’re destroying the evidence. Thoroughly destroying it at that.

With Mestelexil putting a priority on dismantling the golems with his dreadful craft, it created time for Kaete and Kiyazuna to think and make their next move. Kiyazuna manipulated something in her hands.

Almost at the exact second the information from his optical nerves produced an image in his brain, Kaete’s body went into action.

He kicked off the ground. He rushed toward Mestelexil, through the thick of the avian throng.

“Kiyazna io—” (From Kiyazuna—)

“Ceite io woletzhigen!” (From Kaete to Wolehshigen cloth!)

Together with Mestelexil from moments prior, all three had begun to incant Word Arts the exact instant they encountered each other.

The gap in Word Arts speed indicated the disparity in the ability to weave one’s will as a Word Arts caster.

Kaete’s initial move lagged the most behind. Even Kiyazuna the Axle, a monstrous self-proclaimed demon king who had single-handedly held sway over the world, was far slower than Mestelexil.

“Orunastea jiodestas varthalter gest nemlords djai gaddazia boqarsones—” (Like a luminescent axle, form geometry of interstellar waves of sand reach the edge of the azure stone and amethyst prism—)

“Higarp…” (Shellfish ranging.)

Kiyazuna’s Word Arts were bizarre, complex, wholly abnormal.

What?

This was fundamentally different from Mestelexil, who was capable of immediately generating incantations with his advance computational abilities. Kaete wasn’t sure if even the Kiyazuna the Axle could properly use Word Arts this complex.

“Nyaie ozard. Licraxia!” (Clock, vivid wings!)

Even as he ran, his Word Arts continued. While shouting the two-word clauses, he moved forward through the fray.

Five mechanical silhouettes attacked Mestelexil from up in the air.

The golem soldiers Kiyazuna had ordered to assemble made it in time, by a stroke of good luck.

With two punches, Mestelexil blew apart two of the remaining golems guarding the cave and prioritized taking care of the reinforcements. From both arms, he created whips of steel wire that glowed red hot.

The wires, laced with heat, tore apart the five golems’ plating without any resistance and dismantled them beyond all recognition.

Within the scene of black-bird feathers dancing wildly around, metallic fragments scattered and glittered in the sunlight peeking through the trees.

Mestelexil’s singular red eye trailed after him as he turned toward Kaete.

“Art syalda art kotord quast qiden worednas bigger nayao ae olkisma—” (Inherit in perpetuity the brilliant stone pillar’s, arriving with glitter, last cornerstone’s progenitor specialization and apprehension, consecrate, to extreme—)

“Sito!” (Weave!)

Everything had happened in the single moment it took Kaete the Round Table to finish his Word Arts, while Kiyazuna the Axle still continued her incantation.

The Word Arts Kaete invoked were very simple: protective gear repairs.

Recognizing their encounter, the first choice he made was to take over the problem that proceeded handling Mestelexil. In the middle of the black birds’ unending assault, he bought as much time as possible for them to move without letting Kiyazuna get infected.

While the protective gear he repaired might have immediately gotten pecked and destroyed, it was faster to end this situation altogether than handle that, whether it meant their death or not.

“Th-there is one, still alive! Who could it be?!”

Covered from head to toe in protective gear, Mestelexil pondered their true identities.

This, too, may have given them an ever so tiny bit of time.

During that brief moment, Mestelexil—

“Ha-ha!”

—decided without any hesitation to kill them.

The supersonic shock wave rushed past Kaete as he charged.

A damp smack echoed behind him.

Then, there was gunfire. He didn’t have any moment to spare a look backward, yet there was only one person behind Kaete who could’ve made that noise from inside the rock-enclosed hole.

Grams—

He felt anger. Anger at his whole soul for reacting with bewilderment and anguish amid such an urgent situation.

Hadn’t he studied under Kiyazuna the Axle because he couldn’t accept such weakness?

“Mestelexil!”

“Ah!”

Jumping forward with a single sword, Kaete surely came off as a fool seeking his own death.

Despite immediately running forward as soon as they encountered each other, there were still three paces of space between them.

After several coincidences, and Kiyazuna’s sacrifice, still three more paces.

“Ah—!”

In a moment that allowed him to shrink the gap by a step and a half, Mestelexil malfunctioned.

Just like the flamethrower that had driven off the bird swarm, Kiyazuna installed weapons of the Beyond, left behind by Mestelexil, in the golems accompanying her. The instant Kiyazuna was cognizant of their encounter with Mestelexil, she had remotely operated some of them.

The weapon that had caused the malfunction in Mestelexil had fortunately escaped the dissembling Word Arts Mestelexil brought with his arrival and had been loaded into one of the golems that was destroyed by the follow-up punch. The weapon was known as a HPEM generator.

Generating a very short-range EMP, it caused electric circuits to malfunction.

“Kastam…roll…moresdes…jakza! Nabead…! Dedcal!” (Twisted…hexagonal crystal’s…great rainbowed…dove’s blood! Wisteria flower…! Rodgersia Bronze-leaf!)

Thin, rasping Word Arts continued on behind Kaete.

Grams… She’s still alive…!

The momentary malfunction threw off the aim of Mestelexil’s shot. She had avoided instant death.

Right. Now he understood.

He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t yield.

Kiyazuna the Axle wouldn’t do it, no matter how hopeless the situation may have been.

“Exil io mestel. Nio biq basteroid. Sakragetten. Kibvartia Tafait.” (From Exil to Mestel. Thulite is ruddily sweet. The extremes of weaponry. Earth-quaking antenna. Hide.)

Exil’s Craft Arts instantly restored electric circuit functionality. It was too fast.

Now he understood.

The time amounted to less than a single second, but Kaete got it.

Kiyazuna used an EMP to force Exil into resetting Mestel’s state. Even if Mestel’s construction might have changed while in Obsidian Eyes’ hands, for this single moment of recovery, his internal construction would return to how it had been. In other words, to the construction of Mestelexil that Kiyazuna was familiar with.

Word Arts, meanwhile, had a more powerful effect the deeper one understood their target and wove words to reach their soul.

In which case, for the one who loved and understood Mestelexil better than any other living being in the land…

“Kyastal!” (Open!)

The grandest Word Arts Kiyazuna the Axle had incanted bore fruit.

Mestelexil’s main body, down to the interior, shattered like crystal beads. The preservative amniotic fluid gushed out like blood, and the fetus-like homunculus was exposed.

Word Arts capable of dissecting a target alive were the type of skills only spoken of in fantasy.

I made the right decision.

Why did Kaete not hesitate to rush straight at Mestelexil?

Why had he only prioritized defending against the bird attacks?

Thinking about it now, there hadn’t been any logical reason at all. He understood what he needed to do faster than any spoken arrangement with his master would’ve conveyed to him.

Kaete was a civilian official, but his talent and skills with a sword were on par with any military officer.

It should have been easy to run the fragile homunculus through.

I was right, and even then—

One single step. After just one more step.

He hadn’t hesitated a moment to rush out, yet he was still one pace too far from piercing Mestelexil’s core.

Mestelexil moved first. If he repaired his armor plating, Kaete lost any chance at victory, and if he was then hit by Mestelexil’s punch, his body would burst apart. Either one would have finished before he could take the final step.

“—”

However, at that moment—

Mestelexil acted abnormally.

He transformed the back of his fuselage without repairing his chest area.

The Gatling gun barrel, sprouting out crookedly, turned toward the mansion and fired randomly in that direction. Kaete felt the only possible explanation was the vampire parent unit had given him an extremely flurried command.

Before he considered everything about the phenomenon happening in front of him…

“I…”

Kaete the Round Table took his final step forward.

His whole body had been pecked by birds. The protective gear had been torn open, and half his head was exposed.

He didn’t stop for an instant.

“…win! Victory’s mine, Mestelexil!”

Kaete stabbed his longsword at a precise angle, and in the motion to return his sword, pulled out the homunculus core.

Smacking it down to his feet, he crushed with the soles of his shoes.

The pale, immature flesh splattered and melted like bubbles between the dead leaves.

All the heartbeats in that condensed moment came to him at once, and the hot blood flow seemed to burn his brain.

The black birds that had blanketed the forest all lifted up into the sky at once.

“Ngh, urngh, hnnnnnngh.”

Mestel let out a groan that resembled white noise and began to restore his core Exil.

“Haah, haah, haaah…”

After the blood flow, next Kaete’s sweat and breathing assailed him all at once.

The flight of death had barely lasted ten paces.

It was a miracle. It was the only way he could describe it.

In this single moment, so many layers of coincidences, strategy, and sacrifice had—

“…Grams!”

Kaete turned around.

Blood was thickly splattered over the cave’s rock walls.

Slumped there was Kiyazuna the Axle.

She had no right arm. It was blown clean off by Mestelexil’s gunfire.

“Hah, here I thought…you’d be an immature snot-nosed punk forever, but…”

Kiyazuna opened up the head section of her protective gear and struggled to breathe.

Kaete could tell that in her current state, she wouldn’t have been able to get enough oxygen otherwise.

“Ya really did it, Kaete…”

“Idiot! Forget about me! You’re taking Mestelexil back, aren’t you?! You can still do it, Grams!”

“Hah, that ain’t it, though… I wasn’t looking to take him back, see…”

Kiyazuna gazed at Mestelexil, looking fully content.

She looked at her very own child, who had finally escaped from being under anyone else’s control.

“M-Ma…ma…”

Mestelexil murmured with a shaky voice.

He had long finished restoring himself, yet, he could only vacantly look at the scene before him, unable to move.

“Yer free.”

Even as she suffered fatal wounds, the force behind Kiyazuna’s wounds was unchanged.

“Free to do anything. The pretty, the ugly…all of it is…yers now. Anyone crosses you, go ahead and pummel ’em dead, and anything you want…you take for yerself.”

“M-Mama! I’m sorry! Mama!”