Chapter 21 | The Assassin Takes Up Arms
Every moment we spent waiting for Liogel, we used to get ready in some fashion. The sun had begun to set, painting the city in evening colors.
It was now the day after Mina told me the demon would appear. There was a chance he wouldn’t turn up at all. That was no excuse to let my guard down, however. Her report might have been a little off.
Dia yawned as she performed maintenance on her pistol in our room at the inn.
“You don’t look tense at all,” I pointed out.
“I can’t help it. I kept myself ready all day yesterday,” she answered.
“It’s too early to assume the demon won’t show. You need to remain alert.”
“Sorry, you’re right. I’ll stay focused.” Dia slapped her cheeks with both hands.
Tarte, who had also been inspecting her pistol, pinched her cheeks. Unlike Dia, Tarte was too tense and had been wearing herself out.
“…That’s strange,” Nevan muttered absentmindedly.
“Did something happen?” I asked.
“I didn’t receive the regular report from the west.”
“Then we should head there.”
“This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the demon. Whenever a regular report isn’t delivered, soldiers positioned elsewhere go to see what happened. It would be best to wait a little longer,” Nevan advised.
“You’ve entrusted the lookout to House Romalung’s elite, right? There is no way they would shirk a regular report for some minor trouble. This is worth inspecting ourselves,” I argued. Then I attached my Leather Crane Bag to my waist. I was already fully equipped otherwise.
Tarte and Dia, having finished their maintenance, equipped their respective pistols and nodded.
“You’re right, Sir Lugh. I was being overly complacent,” Nevan confessed.
“It might be nothing, but it’s worth knowing for certain,” I said.
The four of us dashed quickly out of the inn.
“Looks like I was right,” I muttered as we headed west.
I didn’t even need to cross past the city wall to be sure that the demon had killed the Romalung soldiers. Before our very eyes, a gruesome scene was unfolding.
The Beast King’s pack was slaughtering citizens.
The monsters all lacked manes, making them resemble lionesses. That meant they were the demon’s underlings. The demon himself was not present.
We couldn’t take the monsters lightly, however. Their fangs crunched through human skulls as if they were made of sand, and their claws tore through flesh like butter. The people cried and screamed as they ran to escape.
The monsters stood about two meters tall and three meters long, twice the size of an average big cat.
I probed the surrounding area using wind magic and discovered that the monsters were spread around the city. That they were so scattered was a problem.
As I was pondering the best course of action, I saw a lioness monster appear behind a woman fleeing with a child in her arms.
“H-HEEEEEEELP!” she screamed.
The creature’s claws threatened to rake her at any moment.
“Gun Strike!”
I chose Gun Strike instead of Cannon Strike for precision accuracy to keep from hitting innocents.
True to my aim, the tungsten bullet struck the lioness square in the forehead. The bullet made a hard sound on impact, however, and was repelled.
The lioness lost interest in the mother and child and leveled its glare at me.
“Go, quickly!” I yelled.
“O-okay!” the mother responded.
Fortunately, I had managed to save the two, and I’d learned something about the enemy in the process.
“Guess this means their fur is stronger than steel,” I remarked.
That was the only explanation for my shot bouncing off. There was one more thing troubling me, too.
Gun Strike could easily puncture objects with the hardness of an iron plate, and even if the enemy’s defenses were too sturdy to penetrate, the immense force of impact should still inflict damage.
Yet the bullet hadn’t stopped upon collision with the lioness’s head. It had slid off its fur.
The creature’s hair had to possess the toughness of steel while still being flexible. Perhaps the natural oils and fats coating the fibers made them slippery.
If my supposition was correct, then bullets wouldn’t accomplish much, and neither would slashing or blunt attacks. This was going to make these monsters very difficult to deal with.
“It’s coming!” I shouted in warning.
My Gun Strike may not have wounded the lioness, but it had succeeded in garnering its ire. The monster charged at me by itself.
“ROOOOOOOAR!”
The lioness moved at a breakneck pace, racing forward at top speed after the first step. It was easily moving at 300 kilometers per hour, and I was 40 meters away. It would reach me in about half a second.
That wasn’t enough time to perform the incantation for Gun Strike. The creature’s fur would render that effort worthless anyhow.
I understood now how these monsters had been able to massacre House Romalung’s elite soldiers. Not even they could do anything about this ridiculous armor and swiftness.
Unfortunately for the lioness, it was underestimating me. Its approach was far too linear.
I drew a pistol I kept concealed in a pocket inside my jacket. It was a mechanism too complex to be fabricated via magic, so I needed to carry it around.
However, having it on my person meant I could use it without casting a spell, giving me a source of rapid-fire projectiles with superior force and precision.
I like how this came out. It feels good in my hands.
I only had half a second before the lioness pounced, but that was more than enough time to draw the gun and loose several rounds. I had practiced this motion thousands of times in my previous life.
Swiftly aiming the weapon, I shot twice in quick succession.
While this firearm’s force was superior to Gun Strike, it was impossible for a gun the size of a pistol to achieve the power necessary to penetrate that hard and slippery fur. Yet I still had a way to slay the monster.
Since the fur was impenetrable, I merely had to aim for a spot without any. There was one such weak point that nearly all animals shared—the eyes.
My bullet tore through one of the lioness’s eyes, shredding its soft vital organs and killing it immediately.
That didn’t halt the momentum of the monster’s charging, however. I stopped the creature by kicking it in the head with one of my boots, the bottom of which was fitted with metal.
Doing so turned out to be the right choice. Had I used my hands, they would’ve been skewered by the needlelike hairs.
“Lure the scattered monsters and focus on thinning their numbers here as much as you can!” I commanded.
The demon Liogel had spread his pack throughout the city to slaughter as many as possible. That decision would keep him from reaching all of the monsters and reviving them with his touch. We needed to take out as many of the creatures as we could now.
“Sounds good,” Dia said with a nod before burning the corpse of the lioness I’d killed. Reducing the bodies to ash was our way of keeping Liogel from restoring them.
A new lioness monster was already drawing near. As if it had sensed the death of a pack member, possibly from the smell, it paused its slaughtering of townsfolk and eyed me with clear hatred. At its roar, two more of its kind rallied to it.
Even when driven by intense emotion, these creatures were calm and intelligent… Their leader must have been thorough with their training.
“They’re coming!”
The lionesses seemed to decide that three was enough, then spread out and dashed forward. One of them raced at me in a zigzag pattern to keep me from training my gun on it, while the other two targeted Tarte and Dia, respectively.
The quick and complex movement of the lioness made it impossible to hit at all, let alone aim precisely for its eyes. That said, I had plenty of other cards up my sleeve.
The zigzagging may have taken shooting it out of the question, but it also meant the monster would take longer to reach me, which gave me time for an incantation.
I finished my spell when the monster was a step away from me.
“Wind Cage!”
This was an original bit of magic that Dia and I had created. It formed a space in front of the caster a few meters wide and filled it with carbon dioxide. Any living creature that stepped into the area would immediately have the oxygen sucked out of its lungs, suffer massive brain damage, and then fall into a coma and die.
No matter how hard this lioness’s fur was, it was a living creature. There was no escape.
Wind Cage was one of my favorites and very easy to use. With my opponent taken care of, I checked to see how the other two were doing.
I grinned upon realizing how reliable they both had become.
“Wind Bullet! I did it, my lord!”
Tarte filled her Tuatha Dé eyes with mana and dodged the claws of the attacking lioness by a hair. No sooner had she done so than she immediately launched a ball of compressed air through the lioness’s chin from just above the ground.
Because it was made of wind, the projectile ripped into the monster’s fur and struck it unconscious. Tarte didn’t waste a moment, jumping forward and plunging a dagger through one of the creature’s eyes once it was incapacitated.
Tarte was making fantastic strides as an assassin.
Wind Bullet was a spell that Dia had developed and could be invoked with a very short recitation. However, while the incantation time was brief, it was still impossible to strengthen your body with mana as you chanted. Reducing yourself to your raw physical strength and rendering yourself momentarily defenseless to counter with magic took incredible concentration and bravery.
Dia dispatched her foe utilizing a simpler method.
“Firestream! …You’re not escaping that.”
Our burning the first lioness had taught us that the monsters were vulnerable to heat. With that in mind, Dia used her powerful mana to form a torrent of flame that gave the beast no room for escape.
Such a mighty spell required a decent incantation time. Dia had undoubtedly started speaking it well before the lionesses even charged at us. Her foresight and advanced ability to correct her incantation time to finish at precisely the right moment were what enabled her to catch an enemy moving at such high speed.
I heard clapping. It was coming from Nevan, who had just been standing one stride behind us and observing.
“I knew you were strong, Sir Lugh, but I am floored by how capable your servants are,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have brought them if they were a burden. They’re very valuable assistants and important to me in battle,” I answered.
Not too long ago, I may have left Dia and Tarte behind, opting to do this alone. They’d both grown a lot and had reached the point where I felt comfortable letting them watch my back.
“Hee-hee, your relationship is so wonderful. And you, little miss maid. I am amazed you possess such strength, considering your average talent. I suddenly find you very fascinating,” commented Nevan.
“Talent is important but not everything. But forget about that. Our real target has finally arrived,” I said.
There was a reason we’d made such a show of killing those lionesses. The creatures had spread throughout the city to butcher the citizens. Killing the monsters one by one was inefficient; they were unbelievably swift, and chasing them all down was unrealistic. Trying to catch them would only allow them to kill everyone in the city.
That’s why our strategy was to garner our enemies’ attention.
If they were as similar to lions as they appeared, then they would notice the smell of their packmates’ flesh burning. A pack was a family, so the monsters had to come seeking revenge. In fact, my scheme was already paying off.
I detected something with my probing wind magic. A large group was making for us, at the center of which was a noticeably big presence.
“We’re dead if they catch us. Run!”
“Yes, my lord!” obeyed Tarte.
“There’s a trap site nearby, right?” confirmed Dia.
That was why I had engaged the monsters here. I’d judged that we would have enough time to reach the traps before they were upon us.
“Nevan, it’s time to quit your spectating. I know you can fight, too,” I stated sharply.
The daughter of House Romalung seemed a bit disappointed. “Oh goodness, I suppose I have no choice, then. That’s unfortunate. I wanted to learn more about you three.”
The enemy had already latched on to our scent. They hadn’t spotted us yet, but I was sure they would be able to follow us.
Taking on this number of enemies head-on would be tough. That was why I’d set the traps.
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