Tch. An irritation, a grating inefficiency, began to fester in Glenn's gut. This was wrong. This was entirely, fundamentally wrong.
Tyrell, for all his mountain-like physique and oafish mannerisms, was no fool. A brute, yes, but a cunning brute. A scavenger who knew the quickest way to pry a coin from a dead man's grip and the fastest route for a retreat. He was not the sort of man to take this long about simply finding some rope.
This delay—this stretching, unnerving silence that was beginning to press in on the edges of the flickering campfire—was an anomaly.
It was then that the silence was not merely broken, but utterly and irrevocably shattered.
A sound, sharp and wet, tore through the night. It was the sound of a giant's whip cracking, a sound of displaced air and something snapping.. Every head jerked in unison, a puppet show of panicked reactions pulled by a single, violent string.
And Glenn's world tilted on its axis.
From the oppressive blackness of the treeline, a shape—a human shape—was ejected. It wasn't thrown; it was launched, a meat-puck hurtled with impossible force. Glenn's brain, sluggish and stupid in the face of the spectacle, supplied a name: Tyrell.
For a horrifying, suspended moment, he watched his comrade cartwheel through the air. The body was a grotesque marionette, limbs flailing with a dancer's limp grace. He's unconscious—
No.
The thought died before it could fully form, strangled by the sheer wrongness of the trajectory. The angle of the head, snapped back at a degree nature never intended. The lifeless arc wasn't that of a living man; it was a corpse already in motion.
The impact was a wet, percussive thud. A final, sickening punctuation mark to Tyrell's existence as his body slammed into the unforgiving bark of a nearby jungle tree. A fine, crimson mist plumed from the point of collision, painting the wood in a color too vibrant for the firelight.
That wasn't a man anymore. It was a broken sack of flesh and bone.
Glenn: ["Fuck… Just what the—?!"]
Glenn's choked whisper was lost in the sudden chaos.
Lacerta's head, quicker than his, snapped toward the void from which the projectile had originated. His gaze pierced the suffocating darkness, searching for the cause, for the source of this instantaneous butchery.
And in the abyss between the trees, the abyss answered.
Two points of light bloomed into existence. They weren't reflections, not the glint of some nocturnal animal. They were embers. Twin embers of smoldering, blood-red malice that floated in the gloom, burning with a cold, predatory intelligence. They rose slowly, attached to a presence that was only now allowing itself to be perceived.
A scream, thready and filled with a terror that curdled the blood, ripped from another bandit's throat.
Bandit: ["It's a Witchbeast—!!"]
A cacophony of scraping steel tore through the tense air. The bandits, their faces pale masks of fear and resolve, brandished their weapons—a useless gesture.
And yet, the aberration—the Elgina, as Glenn had named it—paid them no mind. Not a single twitch of its sinuous neck, not a flicker of its slitted pupils toward the armed men standing between them. It was as if they were nothing more than scenery, stones on the path. All of its monstrous being, its suffocating intent, was a spear pointed at a single heart: Lacerta's.
A cold knot formed in Lacerta's gut.
Why? Why me? A grudge? For the one I took down earlier? Impossible. That one was the only one there.
The malice toward him felt deeper, not exactly personal but it was intensified. This wasn't revenge. This was a designation.
The reason was irrelevant. The reality was absolute. It was here for him, and only him.
Foolishly, or perhaps bravely, a few of the men broke rank. A battle cry died in their throats as they charged, a desperate attempt to prove their existence. The response was not a roar, nor a pounce, but a near-invisible blur. A sound like a thunderclap ripping the air—the Elgina's tail. It scythed through their charge, a whip of scaled destruction.
The overwhelming crack of bone and the thud of bodies hitting the dirt in a broken heap was the only answer to their courage. They were swatted aside like flies.
Glenn: "[——No, you fools!"]
That scream wasn't a jeer. It wasn't mockery. It was the raw, desperate prayer of a man trying to shove his friends, his comrades, away from the jaws of Death itself. A plea torn from the depths of his throat, shredded by the wind and terror.
And in that infinitesimal moment—it happened.
As if a switch had been flipped in its monstrous brain, the Elgina's attention snapped. The world contorted. The air itself shrieked as the beast erased the distance between them, not like a bullet, but like a law of physics being violently rewritten. A colossal, screeching freight train of muscle and malice, defying every shred of normality as it bore down upon the pair.
Glenn: ["Shit, kid… just how cursed are you?! Two in one damn day?!"]
The roaring snake's absolute malevolence—a pressure wave of pure killing intent—slammed into Glenn. His voice, thick with a rage that bordered on a sob, spat the words out. With a scream of steel yanked from his shoulder, he drew his one-handed axe.
And then, he did something unthinkable. He didn't retreat. He didn't brace. He charged. Unexpectedly, impossibly, the gruff man threw himself forward, a moth to a catastrophic flame, his movements a blur of shocking, desperate swiftness.
The combat capabilities he'd kept hidden were now on full, impressive display.
——————————————————————————————————
That thing. That damnable, world-staining filth. The beast that had torn Tyrell apart without a shred of thought. The monster that had erased every last one of his comrades from existence.
Victory was a concept chewed up and spat out the moment he'd lunged. A fantasy. He didn't care for it. He didn't want it. All he craved—all his screaming soul demanded—was one. Just one. One good, solid, hate-filled strike before he could finally join them in the dirt.
They were his 'family,' wasn't that a laugh?
The only one he'd managed to scrape together after the first had abandoned him to the void. And now, just like before, just like always—they were gone, too.
A bestial roar tore itself from Glenn's lungs, a challenge met by the Elgina's own alien shriek. He was a cannonball of flesh and fury, landing hard against the beast's coiling, scaled flank—his axe raised high, a silver promise of retribution—only for the world to tilt.
A violent, gut-wrenching shudder threw him off balance. His grip faltered, the handle slipping through sweat-slick fingers as gravity claimed him.
And then—a blur of motion. A thunderclap of force.
The Elgina's tail, a battering ram of muscle and bone, smashed into his side with obscene power.
Glenn: ["——Gah, Hrrk?!"]
A wet, choked sound escaped him. A symphony of agony erupted from his ribs, each shattered bone a screaming violin. The world dissolved into a smear of black and red, a siren's song of oblivion cooing in his ears, begging him to just let go. To die.
But. But, but, but, but, BUT— No.
It wasn't over. Not yet. Through the blinding haze, through the white-hot torment, something inside him refused. An engine of pure spite ignited. He moved. He rose. He leapt through the air toward the beast. One more goddamn time.
Pure instinct, a pathetic, reflexive shift of his falling body sent him aside. Jaws that could crush granite snapped shut on empty air where his body had been a microsecond before. And in that sliver of borrowed time, his vision caught a flicker of movement.
The kid. The Elgina's attention, split. Divided.
Glenn: ["Damn it, kid… you should've just ran…"]
A bitter curse under his breath. An idiot. A suicidal little idiot, creating an opening that shouldn't exist. An opening he now had to use. His fingers, numb and broken, clenched around the axe handle with the strength of the dying.
Glenn: ["BUT I'LL TAKE THIS GIFT YOU GAVE ME!"]
He put everything into it. Gravity. Fury. The weight of all his dead. The axe became an extension of his will, a final, spiteful testament——and carved a weeping, crimson canyon across the Elgina's flank.
A meter-long gash erupted, spraying a hot, foul torrent. The beast's shriek of pure agony was music, a beautiful, perfect sound that bought a single, precious moment of stillness.
A moment for—
Death. It arrived. Swiftly. Silently. Before his very eyes.
Just…
Glenn: ["—Wha…?"]
It wasn't his.
——————————————————————————————————
From the sidelines, Lacerta watched, his throat sealed tight. A single frown creased his brow as his mind raced, churning through impossible calculations. What to do? What was the right move?
I'm faster. I know I'm faster than it. My body, my legs, they drastically outmatch that mabeast.
The thought was a cold, hard fact. A single, absolute truth in a world gone mad. The only time its fangs had found him was a moment born of sheer incompetence—his own. A novice's hesitation. A fool's misstep.
The phantom sting of that mistake, a ghost of pain lancing up his side, was his teacher.
—Ah, I understand now.
The stench of blood and churned earth filled his nostrils. Glenn's pained shriek was a distant thing, a background noise to the symphony of chaos.
As the battle raged, he moved. Not with skill, but with a desperate instinct.
A slide through mud, his fingers swiftly closed around a steel shortsword dropped by one of the fallen bandits. A blur of scaled fury—a tail—whipped past his head, the displaced air a hot caress of death. He ignored it, his grip tightening on the hilt.
—I see the error.
Even now, as Glenn screamed, as steel rang against hardened hide, as life was spilled like cheap wine upon the dirt, the Elgina's attention was a fractured, terrible thing. It was a predator, but its focus was divided on the boy beside it.
—The flaw in my logic.
He raised the blade. Took in a single, shallow breath.
The feeling of the weapon… it was not merely familiar. It was a completion. The hilt settled into his palm not like a tool, but like a misplaced limb finally returned. He need not learn to swing. To do so would be to ask a lung how to breathe.
The instant the thought of swinging formed, he saw it. A torrent of impossibilities flooded his mind—every tremor of the wrist, every misaligned angle, every wasted motion that could have been. He saw a hundred phantom failures play out and die in the span of a single heartbeat.
—In my very being.
And in the same instant he perceived them, he discarded them all.
Lacerta: ["I suppose... give me a sword, and I can cut anything."]
Those words. They escaped his lips like a breath he'd been holding his entire life. They sounded like the height of arrogance, the ramblings of a boy drunk on adrenaline. They sounded like unfounded, childish confidence. And yet, they rang with the absolute, undeniable weight of truth.
Why?
Why was that?
This was a boy. A boy who should be a corpse, a boy who should be screaming, a boy who should have been torn apart by bandits or beast long ago. Yet the moment—the very, very instant his flesh touched this steel—
—He felt it.
The absolute certainty of being unbeatable.
Elgina: ["———!!"]
A roar of confusion. Of instinct screaming that the prey next to it was no longer prey. That the child had been replaced by an aberration.
Too late. So, so very late.
Before the mabeast could comprehend the shift, before its muscles could even obey the command to retreat, the world was painted in a single black line. There was no thought. There was no technique. There was only the singular, absolute command—
The air itself did not whistle; it screamed. A soundless shockwave erupted, not merely cleaving a fissure into the ground but carving a crimson scar that raced towards the horizon. The Witchbeast's head did not erupt in a fountain of blood. It simply… separated. The two perfect halves drifted apart as if in slow motion, the cut so flawless that the beast's own body didn't realize it was dead until gravity took hold.
The command was issued: be cut.
Therefore, without logic, without reason, without mercy—
—The boy named Lacerta had split the Witchbeast.