Ishura - Volume 9 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - Climax

Along a canal in the second borough of Aureatia’s Outer Western Ward, there walked a woman with grizzled hair.

Flames rose up from the city on the other side of the river. A new battle was beginning. There were screams and gunshots.

The young soldiers of Iriolde’s army, burning with ideals and ambitions, must have been boldly squaring off with the Aureatia army. They believed that, surely, they would claim victory and be able to overthrow Aureatia.

—The massive coup was over.

While for many involved, it may have only just started, for Tuturi the Blue Violet Foam, it was all long since finished.

“What a terrible mess.”

She nihilistically murmured as she watched the black smoke from the far shore, blowing upward like a monster’s breath.

Tuturi was a deserter. Leaving the countless soldiers under her command behind, she had fled.

Her dry coughing never stopped. In the ninth match she had led her troops to their death, risked her life, ultimately entrusted the task to Psianop, and miraculously managed to slay Lucnoca, and this was the end result.

“Koff, koff… This really how it all ends…? Hah, ha-ha.”

Haade the Flashpoint, who Tuturi served under, had been communicating with Rosclay’s camp from the very beginning. In order to dispose of insurrectionists like her all at once, he had sent them out to meet an absolute slaughter.

Every part of their operation had been leaked to Aureatia, and there was no chance of any reinforcements.

Everything was over. Was Tuturi just going to die like this?

She couldn’t envision any other future for herself, but it still didn’t seem real to her yet.

Right now, she lived. She breathed, her heart pounded, and thoughts were in her head.

Despite all of that, was she really, truly, going to be the one to die by herself?

“H-hell, it would’ve been better…to just get killed by Lucnoca, without knowing a thing…”

She wondered why she ended up choosing all of this.

She didn’t have any fervent beliefs or relatively personal history as a reason.

She played make-believe war games, moving wooden pawns by herself. She never had any friends who shared her interests, so Tuturi was always on the side of the Kingdom’s Army, the righteous force taking down foreign invaders.

After learning that the kingdom she had admired in her childhood as stronger and more righteous than any other had never fought with just and honest strength to begin with…she simply entertained the whim that maybe she could do that, too.

“Tuturi, you have nowhere to go, yes? You might be better off resting for a bit.”

A lanky, tall old man walked behind Tuturi.

He was Romzo the Star Map. The failure from the First Party, who had always betrayed everything and everyone, didn’t despair at the fact that this large-scale coup had been an Aureatian setup from the start, nor that the two of them had been abandoned.

“Can you just forget about me…and piss off somewhere? Having you looking at my back, I mean, not sure anyone’d feel safe doing that… You know how everyone sees you?”

“Hmm. Can’t say I really do. Wouldn’t that go for everyone?”

This man was unable to distinguish hostility or betrayal from anything else.

After fighting the True Demon King, this was how he had ended up. Without ever gaining trust from Rosclay, Haade, or Tuturi, he simply continued to survive, strong and alone.

From the very start, Tuturi’s reason for having Romzo accompany her had been to dispose of him for good during the operation. At this point, now that everything was truly finished, that too had lost all meaning.

“…You’re real pathetic.”

The smell of the river carried on the blustering wind.

Was that really true? Tuturi was probably a lot more wretched than Romzo.

She had merely wanted to show pity on him to comfort her for her own sorry state.

“Tuturi.”

“…?”

The footsteps following behind her had stopped before he spoke.

There weren’t signs of anybody on the paved embankment road. It was early morning.

However, in her sights up ahead, she could see what appeared to be a round black garden stone.

The amount of light simply made the scenery look black, but in reality, it was a transparent ooze.

There was only one person that Romzo would purposefully stop for.

“Psianop…”

Tuturi’s gut told her this wasn’t a coincidence.

Psianop the Inexhaustible Stagnation was able to precisely estimate and trace his enemy’s tracks and thought patterns.

If Psianop had intentionally located them like this…

“Sorry, but…I don’t have time to sit ’round chatting. Koff, the Aureatia army might come to bump us off at any moment…”

“Did you kill Qwell the Wax Flower?” Psianop curtly asked.

Tuturi felt cold. An icy sweat traced her brow.

In the ninth match, Tuturi had used Psianop in her operation to slay Lucnoca.

In the process, she had ordered Romzo to brutally murder his sponsor, Qwell the Wax Flower.

She didn’t know how exactly Psianop had arrived at the truth. Whatever the case, she should have already steeled herself for the inevitability.

I need to think or I’m dead. What should I say here to survive?

Tuturi needed to think of an answer worth an entire lifetime, in the time it took for one of her beads of sweat to finally fall.

She needed to end the battle, all alone, in her mind.

Pin the blame on Romzo? Offer to sponsor him in Qwell’s stead? Blurt out everything about Aureatia’s scheming? I made the right call… If I hadn’t killed Qwell, then Psianop would’ve been in danger himself. Am I supposed to come clean and push back at him? Or would Psianop…be satisfied with a heartfelt apology? Would you people feel satisfied to make the weak grovel on the ground?

At the end of her extreme line of thought, the words came spilling from her mouth.

“Okay, Psianop, now just listen… See, I—”

In the middle of her sentence, her intestines twisted.

The flesh and bones inside her torso were folding together from the inside.

A thumb was pointed up against her back.

“Rom…zo…”

Tuturi groaned with the last breath left in her lungs.

Romzo looked down at Tuturi, now with no hint of her minian shape remaining.

When the fatal pressure point—knotting flesh and bone together—was pressed with superhuman strength, this was how the body ended up.

Romzo the Star Map, for no reason whatsoever, betrayed Tuturi the Blue Violet Foam.

“Ah, sorry.” Romzo the Star Map flashed a wide, pleased smile. “You were getting in the way of our chat.”

The First Party didn’t always travel with all eight members together at once.

It was the generic monicker of three groups of powerful figures who were occasionally cooperative, occasionally antagonistic, and occasionally moved between each other’s groups. The only time they would actually pool their strength together was when they gathered for the last time, to defeat the True Demon King.

For example, Fralik the Heaven and Yugo the Moving Decapitation Blade, both wandering champions from before the age of the Demon King, were well known as the first group of the First Party.

Izick the Chromatic and Neft the Nirvana, powerful figures on the outside of minian society, formed a collaborative relationship under their shared goal in eradicating the True Demon King, while secretly intending to never let down their guard around each other.

Conversely, the group of the strongest gathered from within minian society consisted of Romzo the Star Map, Lumelly the Poisoned Ground, and Alena the Benighted White Wind. Psianop, without a second name of his own, was with them.

Psianop, having traveled a long time, didn’t necessarily stay with that group, either. He remembered accompanying Fralik and watching Yugo fight, and when Neft had protected him from Izick’s threats to “modify” him—the memories were still fresh in his mind, even now.

Nevertheless, he had the most memories of his travels with Romzo’s group.

The meal provided to them that day at their lodgings was first-class, a rare treat for the past several days.

The chicken, lathered and grilled in a fruit sauce, was juicy, with fragrant charred marks on its surface.

Psianop himself didn’t fancy such meals, but it had to be a feast to the minians.

“Oh, wait.”

A mere second before Alena could take one of the carved-up pieces of meat, Romzo snatched away the scrap with his fork.

Their forks never touched one another. It appeared as if Alena’s movements had been perfectly predicted.

“Hmm. It’s still a bit difficult for you, Alena, it seems.”

Romzo quietly partook in his newly secured meal, while opposite him, Alena slumped his shoulders in disappointment.

The faint-hearted Alena was a young man possessing prodigious and unparalleled talents with a spear, but on this day, Romzo had seen through him in the same way enough times to lose three pieces of meat.

“Why, though? You’re not even moving that fast…”

“Picking up on that is a good start. If you didn’t have any understanding at all, you’d mistakenly believe I had moved faster than you. I’m going to end up repeating myself here, but…watch your opponent, not the meat. Read their emotional forewarning.”

“But, that’s not like their breathing or pulse, right? You always have the same look on, Master Romzo! ‘Emotional forewarning’…? Like hell I’d be able to pick on that!”

Alena held his head in his hands.

The events of the meal weren’t mere entertainment, but a part of their training regimen.

Romzo was a master of his craft and in the prime of his life; however, he indicated that if he had the young prodigy Alena the Benighted White Wind inherit these techniques, now honed by his seasoned years, perhaps one day Alena would succeed in defeating the True Demon King.

“You’ve been able to conceal and read emotional forewarnings for a long time yourself, Alena, lad. It was all just done unconsciously. You only display it when fighting. Once you can consciously control it…”

“Ah!”

Romzo had grabbed Alena’s wrist as the young man unconsciously thrust out his fork.

“You thought I moved just now, hmm? You can purposefully show forewarnings to your enemy like this. The ability to utilize it at will, instead of masking your mind haphazardly, is the first completed form to aim for.”

“Can I actually eat something here?”

Alena’s voice sounded on the verge of tears.

“That’s amazing.” On the other hand, watching this back-and-forth, Psianop simply sat in admiration.

He spoke to the black-haired girl next to him, spinning a feather top in boredom.

“C’mon, Lumelly. We should do that, too.”

Lumelly had untied her usual double ponytail. Unlike Alena and Romzo, she generally only ate vegetables and fruit.

“Like I’d fight over that slushy slop of leftovers you love so much. Trying to kill me with food poisoning?”

“Fine, fine, we can go with slushy fruit instead!”

“So rotten fruit then, right?”

Lumelly the Poisoned Ground was a powerful fighter who utilized the fantastical and aberrant Word Arts she was innately gifted with. Her black, gnawing Heat Arts would overwrite even a dragon’s breath attack. In all of history, there wasn’t anyone else who had been able to wield these techniques.

Psianop would never been able to fight like Lumelly, but maybe, just maybe, he could get closer to how Romzo and Alena fought. In order to continue traveling with them, and provide whatever little fighting power he could, Psianop watched and learned from them in his own way.

“Now that I think about it, Master Romzo, Psianop doesn’t even have a face, right? Can you read his emotions, too?”

“Of course I can. He’s probably the easiest to read.”

“What?! Okay then, go ahead and try!”

Psianop crawled along the floor and asserted himself at Romzo’s feet—

“I’m going to take some meat, too.”

“You don’t even eat meat.”

Lumelly jeered from the corner of the room.

Right now, he thought. Surely, Romzo wouldn’t expect Psianop to act so quickly—

“Ah!”

“See? I knew instantly.”

His piece of meat got stolen after all.

Romzo exhibited the same composure as always, but there was a slightly teasing glint in his smile.

Perhaps the whole reason Romzo had suggested this type of training was simply because he wanted more meat for himself.

“You’re still an immature kid, Psianop.”

“Hmmm, what are these emotional forewarnings, anyway…? How long do you think I’ll need to practice?”

Romzo smiled.

“Ten years, I’d say.”

Twenty-one years had gone by.

“I’m asking a question. Answer me. You killed Qwell the Wax Flower, didn’t you?”

Psianop once again asked Romzo the Star Map.

Tuturi the Blue Violet Foam, having walked together with Romzo just moments prior, was dead. Folded up in a ball by the contracting of her own muscular strength, she was now casually collapsed on the ground.

Romzo’s techniques, stabbing the pressure points on the body, were capable of destroying nerve and muscle at a single point of contact, causing death with ease.

However, the Romzo he had journeyed with before never once used such tragic and horrible methods.

“Hm? I suppose I did kill her, didn’t I? She was a Nobit of a letdown as a practice dummy. For how rare dhampir she was—”

Psianop jumped and sent a punch at Romzo.

He did it all before he was even conscious of his own movements.

“…All I asked was if you had killed her or not.”

“Heheh. Interesting.”

While he answered, Romzo had already shifted his center of gravity behind himself. His palm, blocking the punch aimed at his face, had a layer of skin chafed off and was bleeding.

It wasn’t a telling blow. Romzo sat outside of Psianop’s effective range.

“That punch wasn’t just the opening volley leading up to the big finish, was it? This blow has more than enough power behind it to make any body it hits burst.”

The act of taking a blow from Psianop the Inexhaustible Stagnation was fatal in and of itself.

In the first match, Toroa the Awful had stopped several of Psianop’s blows, but that was because he used his superior advantage as a swordsman to its fullest benefit to maintain space between them, and maneuvered in a way to ensure Psianop couldn’t send out his strongest punch. Not a feat any normal person could replicate. Psianop’s fists didn’t just outstrip all weapons and enchanted swords, but unleashed techniques that had narrowly reached the ultimate heights of the Lucnoca the Winter as well.

However, Romzo was an accomplished master of the First Party, who had full knowledge about all the body’s meridians. For Romzo the Star Map, one of Psianop’s very own mentors and masters…

“You didn’t put everything behind that punch, did you?”

“If you don’t have anything more to tell me, the next one will.”

From the beginning, Psianop never intended to entertain Romzo’s pleas for his life.

Psianop was instead the one who felt it necessary for one last chance to talk, out of sentimentality.

Though aged now, nothing about Romzo the Star Map’s voice or appearance had changed since that day long ago.

Romzo titled his head far to the side. The movement was artificial and inhuman.

“Hrm. Is that how you killed Neft the Nirvana, too, then?”

“That’s right.”

“Too bad. If I had known he could still come back…he would’ve made a wonderful, hard-to-kill practice dummy, I’m sure. Looks like you beat me to the punch.”

“I fought with Neft because he was fulfilling a promise. You don’t get that? You were his comrade in arms, weren’t you?!”

“Comrade?”

Romzo gently spoke with both arms behind his back.

“They don’t exist at all. Comrades, enemies, good, bad—none of that exists. All people simply distinguish value based on their own personal views. All there is in this world is action, and their results.”

Romzo’s face, bearing more wrinkles than the days of their adventure, wore the same large grin as always. However, deeper behind his eyes, there was nothing beyond the fathomless, pitch blackness.

Romzo interlocked his fingers together.

“Let me teach you, just like the old days. Everything is easy. The things that you and I thought were impossible…are easily realized once you simply decide to do them. You can actually use every last one of the techniques you once thought taboo on others. I was able to kill Lumelly with these hands. You’re just as able to kill yourself. Why not prove it to me?”

“You’re lying.”

Romzo the Star Map had done something that surely betrayed everything about his own self.

He suffered continuously, trying to align his character, fundamentally unable to endure his own actions, with what he was now doing. With it, he had broken.

“The Romzo I knew would never abandon the responsibility of his own actions. Wouldn’t abandon the understanding of what he had done. If you’re saying that, ultimately, you’ve been reduced to a wretch who killed Qwell and repeatedly betrays others, then…”

Several memories flashed through Psianop’s mind like starlight.

The days with Alena and Lumelly around the fire. He remembered each and every conversation.

They had saved him from life-threatening danger many times, and occasionally, barely a handful of times, he had saved them, too.

The First Party had always been a point of pride in Psianop’s heart.

It hadn’t been due to the nobility in their cause, the defeat of the True Demon King.

It came from how much he cared for the people he had journeyed with.

Are you really not going to come back, Romzo?

Unlike oozes, minia shed tears.

When the sadness or regret exceeded what they could bear, they were able to shed tears.

He had watched and learned from them because, as they continued their travels together, he had wanted to provide any small amount of fighting power he could.

Psianop had been able to read the script in the Sand Labyrinth and learn minian techniques, because Romzo taught him during their journey. There was no one else out there who would teach these things to a lowly ooze like him.

If, at that moment, he was able to return back to that time, would Romzo have taught him how to shed tears, too?

At this point, while Romzo the Star Map was still a minia, he no longer had the ability to shed tears anymore.

“…Out of dignity, I will kill you.”

“Killing an enemy with ambush trickery is a fool’s errand. The fastest weapon of all lies in open dialogue. I believe that was something I taught you at some point. The thing is, Psianop…”

Romzo opened up his big, pitch-black mouth. He resembled some sort of bizarre monster.

“…that was a lie. Killing an ooze instantly is such an easy feat. Just by drilling into a single point of your nucleus…and those fists of yours are unable to conceal your emotional forewarning. Your attempt at meaningless conversation gave me the time I needed to release four types of pressure points.”

Titling his head. Putting his arms around his back. Interlocking his fingers.

All of these casual acts combined together to strengthen him as much as possible.

The pressure-point techniques that could strengthen himself and others to their physiological limits or deliver fatal blows. For a true master like Romzo the Star Map, he didn’t even need to poke pressure points to do so, instead simply controlling the flesh and bone inside his body.

“Zephyr Collum Lymph. Dwelling Might. Jabbing Step. Release Vitality.”

Romzo kicked off from the ground with inhuman speed, with a thrusting attack using two fingers.

He pierced through.

“Truly ea—”

There was a smacking sound, like a water bag being punched.

Psianop had already finished his dash and stood behind Romzo.

“Fore fist.”

“……”

The right half of Romzo’s skull was shattered.

Bursting open bright red, it collapsed.

His frontal lobe trickled down.

Psianop knew all about Romzo’s pressure-point movements, interspersed with lies and truths.

When he fought Neft the Nirvana, Psianop had defeated the lycan after making him reclaim the same amount of strength Neft had in his golden age.

What he had always wanted was the proof that he was equal with their former selves.

“With all your emotions dead and gone, you were never going to be able to read me… You’ve waned, Romzo the Star Map. This was one estimation I wanted to be wrong about.”

“Psi…an…”

“At the very least, I’ll give you a living creature’s death.”

“…”

Romzo tried to moan out words before perishing without them ever reaching his voice.

The final moments of a champion meant to save the world.

Perhaps the figure of his former mentor fallen into depravity was the same ending that Psianop the Inexhaustible Stagnation would meet.

He was not so far removed from the sight before him.

With everything lost, Psianop was now staining himself with the blood of shura.

His disciple was killed, and he killed his own master.

All of the worthy opponents in his matches, whom he had found an understanding with, were dead.

At this point, Psianop was the only one of the First Party who remained in the world.

“Sleep now.”

Putting the pool of blood behind him, Psianop the Inexhaustible Stagnation departed.

Now, there was no one who understood him.

Romzo didn’t get to savor the loneliness of being the last.