“Ugh! N-No way!” she gasped, struggling to brace herself against the gale.
Vitor’s voice cut through the wind, calm and contemptuous. “You really don’t get it, do you? If I hadn’t spoken first, that beastkin of yours would’ve died from my opening kick. I could’ve torn through you all before she even healed. The only reason I didn’t was to enjoy it a little longer. To see if there was anything worth using among you.”
His eyes drifted past them, uninterested now, toward the monster Lulune had killed earlier. A faint scowl touched his lips.
“Tch. When I saw that thing back at the facility, I thought they’d made something interesting. Turns out it’s just garbage.”
Anger roughened his tone as he lifted his hand and slashed it through the air. A column of raw magic dropped from the sky like a hammer. In an instant, the creature’s corpse vanished, erased so cleanly that not even dust remained.
“Well. That’s one mess cleaned up.” Vitor rolled his shoulders, eyes glinting. “Now, from here on out—”
“Huh?”
“What?”
A confused voice cut through his words. Frowning, Vitor turned toward the sound.
As Vitor called out, causing Origa and the others to instinctively leap back, Lulune stood motionless. She had been silently lost in thought since the very beginning, staring blankly into the bottom of the crater. All this time, even in the face of a mysterious creature’s corpse, her mind had been singularly fixated: How should it be cooked? What type of dish would best enhance its flavors?
“My meal… Where’s my unknown delicacy?” she mumbled, eyes wide in disbelief.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me… Even now?” Origa muttered, utterly appalled. The battlefield had just witnessed a titanic clash that had torn the earth apart, and yet Lulune hadn’t registered any of it. She hadn’t even noticed.
Lulune didn’t react to Origa’s dismay. Instead, she kept scanning the now-empty crater, desperately searching for even the tiniest trace of the monster that had completely vanished, not even dust remaining.
“W-Where did it go? That long-awaited, utterly unknown taste… where has it disappeared to? This wasteland is so desolate! I’ve waited so patiently, hoping and waiting… and now that I’ve finally located my meal… where is it?”
“L-Lulune-chan… this is too much…” Zora murmured, covering her mouth as tears welled up in her eyes.
To her, raised as she was within the dungeon and untouched by the harsher cynicism of the outside world, Lulune’s sorrow was heartbreakingly pure, so raw that Zora couldn’t help but tear up.
For more grounded individuals like Origa and Routier, her reaction was simply beyond comprehension. They were stunned speechless, caught somewhere between pity and exasperation.
Vitor, too, was no exception.
“Man… I thought it was bad enough you hadn’t even noticed us this whole time, but seriously? You don’t get what’s going on here at all, do you?”
“‘What’s going on’? My meal disappeared… isn’t that what matters most?” Lulune replied, eyes still roving over the desolate ground.
“You really don’t get it,” Vitor sighed. Unable to resist, he jabbed back with a dry remark, but quickly reined himself in. Squaring his shoulders, he fixed Lulune with a cold, unwavering stare. “All right then. Clearly, we can’t move forward with you around. I’ll start by erasing you, just like that creature. And once that’s done—”
“What did you just say?”
“Huh? Wha—GAAAGH—!”
Before Vitor could process what happened, an explosive force slammed into his gut. One moment, he was standing, and the next, he was airborne.
The blow was devastating. It crushed nearly all of his internal organs in a single strike, and blood gushed from his mouth in a crimson spray.
As he stared in shock at his own battered state, eyes wide with disbelief, Vitor caught sight of Lulune still standing on the ground, one foot lifted and frozen mid-kick.
“You’re the one who erased it,” she said coldly.
“W-What are you—”
Before he could even finish the sentence, Lulune vanished again. An instant later, a brutal impact slammed into Vitor’s side, sending his airborne body hurtling sideways like a ragdoll.
In that fleeting moment, Lulune had launched herself into the air and delivered a flying kick, knocking him across the battlefield.
Origa and the others could only stand there, speechless, completely overwhelmed by the sudden shift.
“Y-You… what are you—gah?!”
“It was you.”
As Vitor tumbled to the ground, trying to push himself upright, Lulune came down like a hammer. Her heel crashed onto the top of his skull in a vicious axe kick, driving him headfirst into the earth.
The impact was catastrophic. Just like the mysterious monster she had downed before, Vitor’s body carved a massive crater into the ground beneath him.
Lulune landed lightly on her feet, completely unfazed. Standing over his shattered frame—his bones now pulverized along with his organs—she looked down at him with chilling detachment.
“Grudges over food,” she said, voice low and final, “are absolute.”
“I don’t get this girl,” Origa muttered under her breath.
That one line perfectly summed up her state of mind. Nothing about Lulune made sense: her origins, her strength, her motives. She was an enigma wrapped in a hunger.
Still, now that the seemingly insurmountable threat of Vitor had been brought down, it felt like they could finally breathe again, just for a moment—
And then it happened.
“—Kuh… ku hu hu… ku ha ha… KAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
The grotesque laughter erupted from the figure who should’ve been unconscious, or perhaps worse: Vitor himself.
Origa and the others recoiled in disbelief, and even Lulune’s brow twitched upward in surprise.
Vitor slowly, almost mockingly, began to rise from the crater.
“Damn… that hurt. Oh yeah, that really did something! You pack a punch, you know that? Ha! This is great! You’re fun, girl!”
Vitor rose to his feet, his entire body still drenched in blood, bones broken from head to toe after Lulune’s brutal assault. But from every open wound, faint trails of smoke began to rise, and before their stunned eyes, the damage began to reverse.
The flesh stitched itself back together. The bones, crushed just moments ago, realigned and healed with a sickening ease.
Routier’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“Th-The wounds… they’re vanishing?”
“I’m sure I kicked him hard enough,” Lulune muttered, frowning deeply. She gave her foot a casual shake, almost as if testing the sensation that still lingered from the impact.
Vitor let out a short, amused laugh at her comment.
“Oh, you definitely did. Hell, I was impressed… didn’t expect you to hit that hard. You busted up everything in me. Bones, guts, the whole damn lot.”
“Then why,” she asked sharply, eyes narrowing, “are you still standing?”
“Because that’s just how this body works.”
He cracked his neck with a loud pop, rolling his shoulders as if testing out a freshly tuned machine. By this point, his frame was completely restored, as if nothing had ever happened.
Then, with a feral grin stretching across his face, he stepped forward.
“Well then… now that I know you’re worth my time, let’s kick things up a notch. Go on… entertain me!”
Lulune didn’t flinch. Her gaze turned icy, lips curling into a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Fine by me. Honestly, I wasn’t satisfied with just that small taste of revenge, so go ahead. Take every last bit of it.”
And with that, Lulune and Vitor collided once more.