“Get out of the way!”
I slashed Chaos’s arm off at the last possible moment and kicked him so hard that he went flying away from Amur.
“Aqua Heal! Aqua Heal! Aqua Heal! Eliza, take her!”
“Leave it to me!”
I triple-cast Aqua Heal on Amur, which closed her visible wounds. She had already passed out, either from shock or blood loss. I figured she probably had a few broken bones too. Amur needed to be moved carefully, but we didn’t have time for that with Chaos still on the loose. I had to let Eliza handle her while I finished off Chaos.
“Eliza, use this on the knight!” I tossed the strongest recovery medicine and salve I had on me over to her. She could treat Amur and the fallen knight with it. “Try to get them back to Gramps’s mansion. If you can’t do that, just take them far away from here! I’m gonna kill this guy.”
The right move would’ve been to incapacitate Chaos and hand him over to the knights to be interrogated, but I knew in my gut that wasn’t going to happen. He’d grown two new arms where I’d cut off the last one. His body was even bigger now, with bulging veins all over. His eyes were glowing red, and his hair was falling out in clumps.
“You look like a demon,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to you, but I can tell you’re too far gone.”
He didn’t even look like a human anymore. For a second, I almost felt bad for him, but he had shattered my golems with his bare hands and healed himself faster than we could keep up with. He could kill someone if I were to turn him in to the knights—there was no way I could expose everyone to that kind of danger.
“Arrghhh!”
“He’s fast... Stone Bullet!” I cast two bullets right where I predicted Chaos would be heading—one aimed at his chest and one at his head. “How did he block that?!”
Chaos batted both spells away with his two right arms. The stone bullets didn’t even pierce him. Instead, they just bounced off. Not even a direct hit with magic could slow him down.
As he charged me, I switched my weapons. I sheathed my kogarasumaru and drew my halberd. I put my entire body weight into my next strike.
“It’s still not over?!” I said.
I’d thought I’d sliced him right in two, but the second my halberd had made contact with him, he’d suddenly pumped the brakes and stopped. It had thrown my timing off enough that I had only nearly sliced him in two. The two halves of his body were still connected, though just barely. There were maybe a few centimeters of flesh left holding them together.
Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been the end of it. I really had thought I’d beaten him, but he was still alive. Even though he was lying in a heap on the ground, he wasn’t stopping. He smashed his body back together again and started to heal himself.
“His regen ability might be even better than a hydra’s...” Speaking of hydras, I wondered how Jin and the Dawnswords were faring against the one in the dungeon.
Chaos lunged towards me again.
“He’s super strong with crazy regen abilities, and he attacks with both brute force and speed. This should be a nightmare of a fight, but his brain is turned to mush,” I said.
Maybe the muscles had taken over his brain because all he did was charge blindly ahead. That made him easy to dodge.
“Take this!”
I evaded his attacks and landed a clean blow on him. This time, his left arm went flying.
“I’m sure that’s just gonna grow back too... But it does look like he’s starting to wear down.”
Sure enough, two new arms sprouted from this new wound, but they were way thinner and shorter than the ones that had grown before. He had probably used up a lot of juice reconnecting his torso. But even so, he still kept charging.
I could see that his left arms were weaker, though. Every time they hit the ground or a wall, they split open and bled. The bone was starting to show through.
“Let’s finish this!”
Even though Chaos had turned into a monster, he had to run out of stamina sometime. His movements were getting sluggish. I spun my halberd and pushed him back with a series of attacks. He barely had the strength to resist now, although he was still flailing his arms.
Then...
“Haah! Nngh!”
I landed a two-hit combo on him that severed both sets of his arms at the shoulders. It seemed like his body couldn’t keep up because when I sliced through him this time, his flesh felt a lot softer than before. That meant he had most likely been using magic to boost his body earlier.
“Grhghh...” he groaned.
“Haah! Huh? Nngh, gah!”
I went in for the finishing blow—a diagonal slash across his chest—but my blade hit something hard. It came to a stop in the center of him. I adjusted my angle mid-swing and forced the halberd down with everything I had. And this time, I made sure that the two halves of his body landed far apart from one another so they couldn’t reconnect.
He looked dead, but I wasn’t about to take any chances just in case there was some kind of nasty surprise left in him.
“Jeanne, Aura,” I called out. “Go back to the mansion and bring Gramps here. And Rocket too. Eliza, once Rocket arrives here, put Amur and the knight inside of him. And Amy, stay close to Eliza and don’t move.”
“Tenma! What happened?!”
Jeanne and Aura were just about to leave to get Gramps when he showed up with Shiromaru instead. Rocket must’ve stayed behind, so I asked Shiromaru to run and fetch him.
“I sensed something strange and came out to check. Was that a monster?” Gramps asked, looking at Chaos’s corpse.
I explained the situation, and his eyes went wide. He immediately crouched down and inspected the body. “Tenma, hide the body before anyone else sees it. Now,” Gramps said suddenly. His tone was dead serious.
I noticed a group of people approaching us. I wanted to ask him why I should do that, but the look on his face shut me up. I stuffed the corpse into my magic bag without another word.
“We received reports of a disturbance in the area and— Oh! Master Merlin!” The usual town guards who patrolled the area around Gramps’s mansion had arrived. They recognized him immediately. They looked around a bit. “What happened here? Were you the one fighting?” one of the guards asked Gramps.
He shook his head and told them that I had been fighting an attacker instead. Once he mentioned I’d ended up killing him, the guards wanted to take me in for questioning, but Gramps said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t allow that. This incident will likely fall under royal jurisdiction, so we’re going to head over to the castle immediately to explain the situation.”
We started to leave, but the guards stopped us. They insisted they couldn’t let us go without at least seeing the body and hearing why the case had to be handed over to the royal family.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t let you look at the body, but I’ll tell you why. The attacker attempted to murder two noblewomen, and they weren’t just any nobles. He targeted Lady Amur, the daughter of Viscount Hana from the SAR, and Lady Eliza von Sylphid. The crown prince’s fiancée, Amy, was also present, and Amur was seriously injured. There are other details as well, so it’s best this doesn’t spread too far,” Gramps explained.
The moment he made it clear these weren’t just any noble women, the guards froze. These women were very important—if harm came to them, it could cause fractures in the very kingdom. I could feel the tension in the air. They weren’t sure how to respond.
“But I know you have a job to do, so how about this? One of you can come to the castle with us, and you can explain the situation directly to whoever the king’s guard sends when we get to the palace,” Gramps suggested.
That seemed to smooth things over. The guards agreed, and their leader came along with us. But since they still needed an official statement, I gave one right there on the spot.
“Amur and the knight were being attacked. I arrived and engaged in combat, and I killed the attacker in the course of battle,” I said.
They wrote that down, and at the end, they added “Self-defense most likely.” They made two copies of the statement and gave one to the captain to keep on his person.
“We should take Amur with us, but there’s no way we can move her now with those injuries,” I said.
“True. Her testimony will have to wait. Healing should take first priority. I don’t think Alex and the others would expect an injured girl to come testify anyway,” Gramps said.
So it ended up being just me, Gramps, and Eliza who went to the palace. Jeanne and Aura stayed behind to take care of Amur, and Amy stayed with them too. The other knight who’d been assigned to guard Amy stayed behind as well, at least until her replacement arrived.
“Rocket, I’m counting on you to guard the house. If something happens, get everyone out of there and escape.”
After I finished treating Amur and the knight, I remembered that I’d been on the way back from Albert’s party, so he would need to be informed. And since Eliza had been attacked too, her family would obviously need to know as well.
“Oh, excuse me. Could you let Duke Sanga and Count Sylphid know what happened?” I asked the guards if someone could deliver that message for me. I worried for a second that maybe I was overstepping, but since it involved notifying the families of the victims, they agreed.
As for injuries, the knight had suffered a concussion from when she’d hit her head, and Amur had a concussion and a compound fracture in her left arm. Their lives weren’t in danger and both were conscious after treatment, but Amur’s arm would need to be immobilized to heal for a while.