Though Cutlass was more a giant slum than a town, it did have its own slums where the truly poor lived, which managed to be even more lawless and violent than the rest of the place.
“Ngh... Argh...” the striped beastman groaned, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Under the blazing sun, several sets of predatory eyes watched from the half-collapsed buildings of dirt and stone as I dragged the man down the center of the road. I didn’t have Intimidation active, but no one attacked. They probably recognized that I was dragging a Munza member and, seeing the state he was in, didn’t want to chance it.
Heat and hostility mingled in the air as I approached a large stone mansion—completely different from the surrounding buildings. Maybe this was the home of the Munza boss who controlled this area.
Originally, my plan had been to ambush them from the back and retrieve Chaco, but I’d decided on a deliberate frontal approach instead. Perhaps due to the harsh atmosphere, two beastman guards—one canine, one feline—pointed their spears at me.
“Who the hell are you?!” one asked.
“Don’t you know this is Batil’s mansion?” The feline guard paused when he noticed the man I was dragging. “Wait... Is that—”
The tiger beastman’s eyes lit up with hope, and he shouted, “This is the woman! Tell the boss!” He laughed. “You’re finished, girl! You have no idea how many of us—”
“Shut up.”
“Guh!”
I crushed the tiger man’s throat with my magic-steel-plated heel. I had no more use for him.
“Fucker!” the catfolk shouted, readying his spear.
He charged at me. I activated Boost, then threw the tiger beastman directly into the spear’s path.
“What?!” the guard yelled, stunned.
His spear pierced the striped man’s heart from behind. I grabbed the guard’s head and smashed it into the dry ground.
“W-We’re under attack!” desperately howled the other guard, who was only alive because he’d frozen.
Hurried footsteps, mixed with hostile intent, echoed from inside the mansion. Canine and feline beastmen holding spears and swords kicked down the doors and burst out, baring their fangs and growling at me as I stood beside the two corpses.
“What the hell are you doing?!” one asked.
“He said this is the woman we’re looking for!” the canine guard said.
“You think you can mess with us and get away with it?!”
“I’ll tear out your throat!”
Just as the snarling beastmen were about to attack, an intimidating voice shouted, “Stop!!!”
A male catfolk with dark fur like a panther’s emerged from the second-floor terrace, his arms around the shoulders of half-naked beastwomen. Courtesans, perhaps. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, his build wiry and toned. His upper body was bare, showing off his muscular torso, and his silver eyes were glaring at me.
“Boss! This girl—”
“Quiet!” the half-naked catfolk said. “Huh. So you’re the woman we’re after. Guess you got the message if you made it this far.” He looked at the dead men and grinned.
Though I couldn’t tell for sure at this distance, I estimated he had around 1,200 combat power—the upper end of Rank 4. Since the others were calling him “boss,” this had to be Batil, one of the Munza gang’s higher-ups.
“Damn, it cost us two guys to lure you out here? You’re expensive, you know that? Hey, what happened to the two other guys who went out there?” he asked.
“I killed them,” I replied simply.
Batil raised one eyebrow slightly. “We’re gonna have to charge the Kiluri extra, then. You look skilled enough, but you care about what happens to that little girl, don’t you?”
“This man attacked us. I came to settle the score.”
“So you don’t care?”
“Doesn’t matter. If I lose, something happens to her anyway. If I win, that settles things.”
“Heh! You’re not wrong.”
Batil and I glared darkly at one another, and the temperature around us seemed to drop slightly.
After a while, he bared his fangs in a grin and called to his men. “You lot break her limbs and bring her here. Don’t kill her! She’s worth nothing to us dead. You women, bring me chairs and booze. Gonna need a private viewing area to watch the crazy bitch get her ass kicked.”
The courtesans left Batil’s side to fetch the items, and he turned his back on me to head to his “private viewing area.”
“Get her,” he said.
All of the beastmen, who at this point had surrounded me, roared in unison and charged. Their strikes were brutal—they seemed to have forgotten their orders to not kill me. Regardless, I dodged the attacks by leaning back. In the process, I spun my slashing pendulum to cut the ankles of three approaching beastmen, then stabbed my black dagger into the eye of the wolfman closest to me.
One.
“You little—”
I wrenched out the dagger and, while the second man’s vision was blocked by the spraying blood, slashed his throat with my knife. I spun, unleashing the all-purpose pendulum from the shadows of my cloak to gouge the throat of a canine beastman who’d stopped moving when his ankles were slashed.
Three.
“Raaah!”
A fourth beastman aimed at my neck with a long sword, while another thrust at my legs with a spear. I stepped onto the spear tip, which reached me first due to the range difference, then ran up its shaft to dodge the sword while simultaneously releasing my sickle pendulum to tear the swordsman’s neck.
Using the bladed tip of my boot, I kicked through another beastman’s jaw, then vaulted over him to unleash my weighted pendulum at a distant catfolk, crushing his skull.
Six.
“Hi-yah!”
I dodged the screaming guard’s axe swing by sliding, then leaped in close. My elbow caved his face in as I scooped up the still-moving axe with my ankle to launch it at Batil’s turned back.
The axe tore through the air, but just as it was about to find its mark, Batil grabbed a chair a courtesan had brought and used it to intercept the flying weapon.
“Tch...”
As I stood among the corpses of half of his men, dead in the few seconds since Batil had turned his back to me, the pantherman scowled angrily.
“So you can fight, girl,” he growled. “But now that you did that, I can’t let you live.”
“Are you coming down here?”
“Who said that?”
Batil loudly clapped his hands.
The hostility in the air thickened, as though people had been waiting for that signal. From every hut, every alley, every shadow along the roadside, they began to emerge. Beggars stood with blades in hand, well-fed middle-aged women readied kitchen knives, and teenage boys held rusty hatchets. All of them had malicious glints in their eyes as they smirked.
From what I could see, there were roughly two hundred people or more.
“Did you think people around here were ordinary? Families of our guys? Nah. We Munza are a pack, girl. Women, children, doesn’t matter. If they’re in our pack, they’re Munza.”
Same as beasts, then.
Sheer numbers could overwhelm anyone, even if all these people were Rank 1 with no combat skills. Nevertheless, I quietly readied my blade against the swarm of encroaching people while Batil took a seat in the new chair a courtesan had brought him and took a swig of booze straight from a bottle.
“Don’t think you can run, girl. And try to last until my drink’s done. Now go on. Fight. Show’s on!”
At Batil’s declaration, the crowd stepped forward as one.
A faint whistle echoed from the distance. Batil and other beastmen, who had good hearing, tilted their heads up.
My lips curled into a small, defiant smile.
I’d asked Ron to keep an eye on the Kiluri’s movements and asked Camille to rescue Chaco while I boldly approached from the front to buy time.
Now that I’d heard the signal, I knew Chaco was safe. But that wasn’t the only reason I was smiling.
If the Munza gang had only a few hundred members, like the Northern Border District branch of the Assassins’ Guild, I could’ve ended them by killing each of their top executives one by one. But against an organization of this scale, assassinations would only fan the flames and cause collateral damage to innocent children.
Instead, I had to show them it was pointless to challenge me, just like I had shown the other Assassins’ Guilds and the Thieves’ Guild. The only potential problem had been that once they realized I was a threat, they might have harmed Chaco.
But now there were no such shackles to bind me.
Common sense would dictate an individual couldn’t prevail against this many opponents. But the strength I sought lay beyond that challenge.
I discarded my bloodied cloak, releasing my peach-tinted hair, which glittered in the sunlight. The approaching attackers faltered slightly.
Batil was right. The show was on.
“I’ll build true strength,” I said.
What was strength? Powerful muscles? Abundant aether? High combat skill levels?
All of the above. Brute force could bypass any obstacle. That was how monsters operated. Between monsters of the same rank, the difference in physical ability was the difference in power. Dragons were the ultimate example of this—strong from the moment they were born.
I’d been weak. A powerless, aetherless child with no combat skills. To battle those with power, I’d had to grow strong of spirit. That was why I was always ready to fight to the death. Resolve to kill meant resolve to be killed. To take, so I didn’t get taken from. As someone born weak, I wasn’t afforded the luxury of mercy against those who opposed me.
Resist fate and fight. That was the path I’d chosen. Living meant fighting, and I’d forged my heart into a weapon.
But that strength had limits. There would come a day when I couldn’t defeat opponents through willpower alone. In my current state, I wasn’t sure I could beat Karla, who’d staked her life on the path of pure violence, whose search for power had driven her to madness.
The dungeon spirit had gifted me Iron Rose, and that had given me the decisive power I’d lacked. But that power was a weapon, nothing more. A weapon with a time limit—no different from a quiver with only a few arrows.
So what was the strength I sought?
That answer had been within me all along. Thanks to that woman’s knowledge, I knew focusing on any one type of power would’ve given me some degree of strength. But I had refused that, stubbornly pursuing the ideal strength.
My mistress had sought that same thing and failed. But because she had reached the same conclusion as I had, she could pass on to me the combat techniques necessary to manifest that power.
The power to become the one true Fiend.