Chapter 242

“…Men, prepare to intercept,” Morio murmured quietly as he dropped his center of gravity. He understood that he had failed to handle her properly, but he wasn’t sure what exactly he had done wrong. The attack arrived shortly afterward. “Hrmgh!” The air burst right next to his bent-back head. The debris along the trajectory was completely severed—a long-range attack from the tarantula threads, difficult to get a visual on. If he hadn’t guessed the method of attack beforehand, Morio might not have been able to dodge it. “Alfa, right hand six. Step three. In sync. Bravo, direction moon. Claw. Charlie. Clap hands.” “Roger.” <Roger.> <Roger.> Morio gave out orders to the soldier behind him—and the two others through the radzio. To a stranger, the orders were completely incomprehensible, sounding like a list of random words. However, the four of them, even Alfa with his severed arm, acted as if they were all one. Morio and Alfa, instantly going in their separate directions, stopped moving as if they predicted the opening in the rapid-fire threads. At the same time, their two barrels aimed toward the same composite eyes. —Though, in truth, there weren’t two of them. Factoring in Charlie, flying into the fray from behind the monster, there were three. “……!” The gunfire continued in succession. The muskets from the new continent didn’t have automatic firing functionality, but the gunshots continued without any lull in the noise. With the precision of an interlocking machine, they each alternated pulling their bolts back and showered the exact same point on the monster with precision fire. The gunshots fatally crisscrossed each other, as if an impossible-to-predict coincidence. “Hee-hee, hee-hee-hee-hee…” “No dice. Alfa, seven and eight. Charlie, rat hunting.” “Roger.” “Roger.” The severing threads flashed and swiped across the rubble-covered area. Morio’s squad also evaded this annihilation attack. It wasn’t only the deviant visitor Morio the Sentinel. The two of his Okafu mercenary subordinates did as well—and accepted this near-miraculous result as obvious. “…Aren’t you all strong. Just where did you find these soldiers, I wonder?” Morio the Sentinel himself was an unusually strong warrior. However, his deviance differed greatly from the individual combat-oriented deviance of Soujirou the Willow-Sword or Kazuki the Black Tone. A deviant ability to understand. With his powers of observation, able to grasp everything as if commanding a bird’s-eye view, he understood the battlefield, grasped the situation facing each individual subordinate deployed there, and made them understand Morio’s optimal judgment. All soldiers had their own different quirks. Those who understood the world through numbers. Those who understood it through images. Those who understood it through letters. His orders, truly optimizing each and every single one of his warriors and all given under the extreme conditions of the battlefield, compressed an enormous amount of information until becoming an incantation that was totally meaningless in the abstract. A true correct answer that the one enacting the Order themselves couldn’t reach with their own thoughts. When they acted in accordance with these optimal orders, the soldiers’ bodies were then able to make the correct movements, as if they had directly linked up with the commander’s brain. This correct movement was completely different from pushing the users’ bodies past their limits until they broke down. Above all, they were far more efficient and unburdened, moving with additional power, while also continuing to battle without fatigue. If one could move correctly based on a perfect understanding, then they would never know defeat. It was the exact same essence as Morio’s own strength. Therefore, on any battlefield where Morio was present, each and every individual soldier would turn into a fighting force equal to Morio the Sentinel himself. “Hee-hee. I really will need to adjust to this body a bit more.” This thing isn’t a tarantula. He could finally spare enough thought power, fully mobilized to process the information on the battlefield, to hypothesize the true identity of their enemy. The monster before them bore a shape that surpassed Morio’s understanding, but that was because it was two different creatures joined together. Everything from the cephalothorax bearing the tarantula’s arms and legs—the abdomen of the construct had been substituted with the body of a colossal wurm. The tarantula’s impossibly tall height was because this grand body made it rise up like a tower. It was no regular wurm. The Gray-Haired Child had told Morio the name of a monster who matched this size and these characteristics, half of whose body, from the trunk to tail, had been recovered by Aureatia. “Particle Storm.” “Hee, hee-hee-hee-hee.” The earth exploded. The monster dived into the ground, relying completely on its solidity and brute strength to do so. A bird’s-eye view. Morio had a grasp on all of it. The enemy’s target. The optimal choice. “Alfa, first breath. Trigger twenty-three. Charlie, tip over the box.” “Roger.” “Roger.” Instead of his musket, Morio grabbed the looped rope hanging from his belt. He ran to jump over to a higher elevation from the rubble. Charlie was running below him. Alfa was wounded and began moving away, dropping out of the battle area. A new fissure ran across the earth. The monster split open the ground and appeared, with its fall threatening to swallow Charlie— When, at that moment, Charlie grabbed the rope Morio had thrown his way. With brute bestial strength, Morio pulled him up to higher elevation in a single breath. “Thank you very much, Master!” “Our attacks don’t penetrate it. This isn’t going to be easy. That and…” Morio the Sentinel wasn’t capable of foreseeing an unknown attack with perfect precision. He could only prepare himself to respond to an attack based on the situation. “That last attack divided up the terrain.” The water from the Tim Great Canal poured into the torn-up ground. Those able to control the terrain itself could change the battlefield to give themselves the advantage without even needing to fully understand it. “We’re going to need to come up with something. While you follow my orders, think for me, Charlie.” “Roger.” Looks like my bad habits haven’t changed. As she engaged in destruction that trampled over the very geography itself, Nihilo’s mental state had cooled, if anything. I should’ve seen enough in Lithia to know that a minia’s strength isn’t obvious from the outside. When measured against Helneten’s scale, normal minia’s strength was nothing more than an insignificant speck. Thus, she accidently made light of the threats that would slip in among the nameless rabble. In this current battle of hers, Nihilo picked up some amount of threat from the bearded man who seemed to be in charge of the others. She never could’ve imagined the remaining soldiers would also be this formidable. In fact, she managed cut off one arm of the first soldier she encountered before they could even react. She had estimated she could annihilate them any way she wanted, but she didn’t have any real reason to kill them, either. Nihilo had the urge to kill them because the fact that Yukiharu was gone when she came back here, and the fact that these soldiers were after Yukiharu, too, had rubbed her the wrong way. She had nothing to gain from fighting proficient and skilled enemies like this for a long time—and increasing the possibility of a worst-case scenario. This enemy doesn’t have any weapons that will work on deep celestial charsteel. Assuming they were able to open up the cockpit hatch like Dakai did in Lithia, there aren’t any minian races capable of jumping this high. Still. A powerful shock slammed against the surface of her armor, as if they had waited for the moment Nihilo sunk into thought and weakened her attack. It had come from some type of cannon firearm. It wasn’t from any of the muskets the soldiers in front of her had. “No dice. Bravo, return the pot.” The man in command gave orders through a radzio. There was a bright flash far in the distance, and this time there was a series of explosions on the ground. The water from the Tim Great Canal flowed into the ground loosened with her burrowing and began to make Helneten’s large mass sink. There was a single external mark on Helneten’s armor from the direct hit, and it didn’t seem like the earth collapsing below would stop her from being able to surface, but Nihilo couldn’t deny that she had been attacked in a manner that exceeded her expectations. “I get it… From the very beginning, you gave out orders to three other people, didn’t you?” While Nihilo’s attention was drawn to the commander and his two other men, there was another one who had been acting separately from them the whole time. After confirming that there was no way to break through her armor with the muskets at hand, they had a strategy that mobilized the one remaining soldier. “The armory.” She looked in the direction of the flash from before. Helneten and the other constructs weren’t the only unused weapons at the National Defense Research Institute. Nihilo couldn’t know what type of weapon it was, but it wouldn’t be odd for this area to have some of the Beyond weaponry Iriolde’s camp had deployed to their forces. But then, how? I didn’t see signs of any complicated orders like that. Besides, even if they found some weapons from the Beyond, it’d be impossible to utilize them unless they normally trained under the assumption this would come up. “If we keep up our fight here…” The commander man spoke up. “…we both might not get out of this unharmed. Guess that’s what you’re thinking.” “…Hee-hee. Really wish you wouldn’t assume everything is going your way.” “I’m negotiating here. I want to end this, and I’ll forget all about you cutting off one of my men’s arms. The one who stole Yukiharu’s corpse is somewhere else—don’t you think so, too?” “I’ve got the advantage in this fight. That’s not negotiating; you’re just pleading for your life.” “Oh no, we’re negotiating, all right. If you refuse, I’ll cut the chains surrounding this place and trip the tamper sensors.” “…” “Looks like you didn’t pick up on those, huh? Aureatia’s keeping watch on anyone trying to infiltrate the National Defense Research Institute. If I activate them, they’ll know immediately you’re running wild out here… If you truly insist on killing us, ’fraid I won’t have any other choice.” “Hee-hee… I was just trying to enjoy my freedom, but now it feels like the wind’s been knocked out of my sails. Fine, then. If you tell me your name, I’ll let you go free.” “Sorry, but this whole operation’s strictly confidential. Can’t leave any evidence I was here.” Nihilo stared hard at the man in command. She didn’t have any definitive reason to keep fighting from here. At the same time, though, she thought that she didn’t especially need a reason to kill him, either. “But if that’s all it takes to get you to back down, it’s a cheap price to pay. I’m Morio the Sentinel, the Free City of Okafu’s former self-proclaimed demon king.” “Hee-hee-hee-hee…” Nihilo laughed in delight. She really couldn’t afford to understand the minia forever. “My name is Nihilo the Vortical Stampede… I hope we can meet again sometime, Morio the Sentinel.” Turning Helneten around, she dived down into the collapsed riverbed of the Tim Great Canal. There was something she had once said. “You seriously like fighting that much? Are you crazy?” It was a choice she hadn’t been able to make when she had been a weapon.