Chapter 11: Outside Story (2)
Roman turned his head at the ominous presence—and found Daywin already bearing down on him, mounted and charging with ferocious intent.
A Holy Knight?
The sheer force radiating from the approaching figure was so overwhelming that Roman hadn't even recognized him as Daywin at first.
It was only when the rider drew close enough to make out his face that he finally recognized his youngest brother.
"Why is the youngest here…"
Roman's gaze faltered as it moved over Daywin.
Eyes that looked upon a stranger.
Taking in the gleaming white Armor.
The shining Halo.
He stared with a face mixed with reverence and dismay.
"W-wait, youngest! Fall back!"
Roman snapped back to his senses and shouted.
"Don't come this way!"
The Goblin horde had grown to an uncanny size and had just begun encircling Roman's troops.
Even if his brother joined—
Fwoosh!
Daywin emitted a radiant light.
At the same moment, Esther, riding alongside Daywin, found her gaze pulled toward that brilliance.
Magic?
She stared blankly.
…This is no ordinary magic.
The light Daywin had produced gradually took shape.
A round, glowing circle bent and curved—and soon became a silhouette.
The size of a single finger.
A tiny, tiny person.
It fluttered its wings, which sprouted from its back, drifting through the air.
Graceful, delicate, and divine in bearing.
A fragment of the goddess—known only through myths and fairy tales.
A Spirit….
A Light Spirit.
A magical entity also known as a Gift of the Goddess.
Spirits fought alongside their user, cast Buff-Type Magic, or disrupted enemies.
Those who had contracted with a Spirit were rare, but if one could wield one, it was like having a dependable partner always at their side.
Light Spirits in particular were considered proof of nobility by the mere fact of being able to wield them.
Moreover, the deeper the bond between user and Spirit, the greater the effect.
Swish!
Mid-thought, Daywin's finger sliced through the air.
He had begun casting another spell.
1 gesture, 1 spell.
He wove prayers and incantations within his mind, activating them at his fingertips.
A Magic Diagram appeared on the Spirit's back.
Esther opened her eyes wide so as not to miss a single one of Daywin's spells.
Movement Speed Increase.
And then.
A 2nd one is also Movement Speed Increase.
And the one after that.
Movement Speed Increase again…?
The Movement Speed Increase Buff Daywin cast on the Spirit totaled 5 times.
Just as Esther had said during their last Academy class, a Spirit—whose body was itself a Magical Circuit—had the effects stack.
Is he planning to use the Spirit's small frame for a swift strike?
But Esther didn't know.
To survive until the end of the world, one had to discard common sense entirely.
Ping—
When Daywin pointed a finger to give his command, the Spirit—which had been showing off its elegant wing-beats—fixed its gaze on the forest where the Goblins lay in ambush.
A moment later.
Shweeeeee!
It shot off like a cannonball.
At that moment, Esther was reminded once again: a Spirit's body was a mass of magical energy.
Colossal magical energy condensed into a tiny body no bigger than a finger.
If a mass of magical energy like that hurled itself forward at tremendous speed—
Ka-BOOM!
The Spirit drove itself into a tree in the forest—and detonated.
A massive magical explosion swallowed trees and Goblins whole.
Huh? It… exploded….
Esther, of course—Roman and his soldiers too.
Every last one of them stared at the point of impact with a dumbfounded expression.
…What?
Past and future.
The man who had been Commander of the Holy Knights Order.
He was the most irreverent Holy Knight the Holy Knights Order had ever produced.
That noble Spirit… used as a magical bomb and discarded…!
That Holy Knight was neither holy nor knightly.
A Spirit was not simply an object made of magical energy.
It was a living being—one that thought, decided, and acted.
It was alive.
It had a name.
And yet.
Boom!
Daywin summoned a 2nd Spirit and immediately sent it crashing into the forest.
Another magical explosion.
The blast shook the forest, and clouds of dirt and shredded leaves billowed upward.
This… I've never even heard of this.
It was madness.
Ordinarily, one would deepen the bond with a Spirit to raise its stats.
But Daywin was the opposite.
Instead of bringing 1 Spirit to level 100, his strategy was to flood the field with 100 level-1 Spirits, freshly born.
And on top of that, they weren't simply level-1 Spirits.
The story changed once the Buffs of a Holy Knight who had gone all-in on Reinforcement Magic were layered onto them.
Even so….
What Esther found particularly incomprehensible was the Spirits being summoned in an unbroken line.
The Goddess kept sending gifts even as he sent them flying with a kick, one after another.
Unconditional love.
Or favoritism.
Daywin was loved by the Goddess to an enviable degree.
Ka-boom—!
It didn't stop.
Daywin unleashed bombardment after bombardment with a blank expression.
Boom!
Shortly after, Daywin's eyes sharpened with sudden intensity.
"…Found you."
With a voice cold as frost, he fixed his gaze on one corner of the forest.
Esther, watching from behind him, followed his line of sight.
A man in a black mask.
The masked man, who had been hidden among the Goblins in the treetops, leaped from branch to branch using them as stepping stones and fled.
In that same moment, Daywin rose to his feet on the horse's back, maintaining a precarious balance.
He then summoned 2 Spirits.
He made the Spirits cling to his back and push against his Armor with their tiny hands.
Fwoosh—!
The 2 Spirits, under the Movement Speed Increase Buff, shot upward in an instant and launched Daywin into the air.
Daywin plunged into the forest in a single bound.
A brief moment of flight.
The instant he landed, he snatched the intruder by the throat as the man was leaping between branches.
"…Ugh!"
Daywin drove the masked man's neck straight into the ground.
Thud!
"Ghhk…!"
The man let out an agonized groan at the bone-rattling impact as his back hit the earth.
He twisted his whole body trying to break free, but Daywin's grip held rigid.
Daywin's gaze swept over the man deliberately.
An all-black outfit.
A mask that concealed not only his face but his hair as well.
In his hand, a Goblin's hatchet.
Roman died in the Goblin ambush. The evidence showed a Goblin's axe had been used.
The more the man struggled, the tighter Daywin's grip became.
As if he would sever that neck at any moment.
So it was a human who used the Goblin's weapon.
Eventually, the masked man swung the hatchet in his hand—but Daywin was faster, pinning the arm as well.
"I've imagined killing you dozens of times. Slashing you to death, burning you alive, strangling you. Yes, it was all fantasy—but to think we'd meet like this in the end. Now—"
Daywin thought back to the game that had presented the player with dozens of choices, and asked—
The opposite of how it had been when he was the player.
"How shall I kill you?"
The extra tossed the choice back.
***
011
As I choked the assassin, his blue eyes began to lose their light.
He no longer seemed to have the strength to struggle.
When I reached out toward his mask to confirm his face—
"R-run…"
He squeezed out the words with the last of his strength.
"Run…!"
Run.
Run, he said?
Whoosh!
In an instant, silhouettes burst out from the undergrowth.
Silhouettes—plural.
The same outfits, the same masks as the man I had pinned.
More assassins.
Like a swarm of insects lurking in the dark surging out when hit by a sudden blaze of light, they erupted from deep in the forest.
There wasn't just 1.
No, to begin with—
Why had I been under the illusion there was only 1?
Snap!
A sudden sense of dread made me spin around.
By reflex, I checked in Roman's direction.
"Not happening. Not going to let you run now."
A man wearing a black mask and a robe on top of it was visible, advancing on Roman's troops with an unhurried stride.
A face concealed entirely in black cloth.
A pair of emerald eyes, barely visible.
2 hatchets, 1 in each hand.
This man was different from the other assassins.
Click, click.
Even though all the others had already fled, he moved his feet lightly—as if dancing.
Roman's troops also noticed the lone masked figure and raised their shields and spears in a show of caution.
But it was too late.
He struck like a bolt of lightning.
The last assassin leaped alone into the middle of Roman's troops and slashed.
Fsshhh!
How many had he cut in a single sweep?
Quite literally in the blink of an eye.
Roman's soldiers crumpled, one after another, without even putting up a fight.
Limbs severed clean through armor.
Shields shredded like sheets of paper.
Even the screams begging for their lives.
The hideous scene hammered every one of my senses.
A pair of crude hatchets had obliterated Roman's entire force.
"……No."
I ran like a madman.
I couldn't fail again.
I couldn't let him die again.
But as if mocking my desperation, the assassin—
Bang!
—cratered the ground as he launched himself and landed right in front of Roman.
Less than 1 second.
He had closed the distance in that brief instant.
It wasn't just his legs that were fast.
He swung his arm the moment he closed in—
Thwunk!
—and buried a hatchet in Roman's chest.
Dark crimson blood splattered across the man's mask and quickly soaked in.
"Gkh…!"
Roman coughed up blood.
The assassin, as if it were trivial, kicked Roman's body to wrench the hatchet free.
And then, the man pointed the blood-dripping axe blade at me.
"Hey, the 3rd young master."
A pair of vivid green eyes looked straight at me.
"Seems a little different from the advance information?"
Buzz—
He flicked 1 hatchet up into the air and caught it again.
"When I first looked into you, I was told the 3rd son had no power whatsoever. Well—I suppose in the end you still couldn't do anything while your brother died, so I guess it's the same."
By the time I arrived, Roman's blood was already soaking into the ground.
I frantically shoved my hand into the pouch holding the potion vials.
"What are you doing? A Potion?"
He tilted his head with a clown's exaggerated flair and grinned.
"Don't get your hopes up. I'm the type who's thorough with my work."
Ping—
He flicked the axe blade with his finger.
"There's poison on it. Just in case, you know. Well, the fact that I had to step in myself is already not exactly thorough work, but…."
The man who'd been smiling while meeting my eyes spoke again.
"I didn't know something like you would pop up, so let's call it a draw."
I ignored him and sat down beside Roman.
I pressed a top-grade Recovery Potion firmly into his hand.
The Potion he'd secretly slipped in, claiming he'd protect me.
"Give it up. No matter how good the Potion is…."
I slowly rose to my feet.
Fwoosh—
I summoned 5 Spirits simultaneously and closed the distance.
"Ah—I get it! You're thinking you have to avenge your dead brother? Sorry, but I don't have time to play along. Like I said, things got a little derailed because of you."
"Dead brother? What are you talking about?"
"…Hm?"
"The only one dying today is you."
That's how I'd decided to rewrite it.
I'd decided to overwrite the changed outcome.
"Start!"
I called out to someone else while keeping my eyes locked on the assassin.
To the one who had stayed by my side all day, waiting for this exact moment.
"Esther!"
"Yes! I'll do it now!"
While the assassin was swinging his hatchet, Esther had already finished preparing her spell.
She gathered her magical energy with a face taut with tension.
Tap!
The instant her 2 hands touched the ground, a massive Magic Diagram was carved into the earth.
The Magic Diagram, radiating a warm light, enveloped the soldiers whose lives were slipping away—and Roman.
Hummm—
Severed limbs regrew, and shattered bone fragments returned to their proper places.
Roman's heart, pierced by the hatchet, began to beat once more.
Hatchet or poison—
Before Esther's overwhelming magical energy, both were useless.
The assassin took 1 step back, apparently thrown off by the unexpected turn of events.
Click—
I, in contrast, stepped forward 1 step.
Click, click, click.
My footsteps as I approached the assassin grew faster and faster.
Faster and faster.