Nos, who’d gotten his sight back just like Aqua, took a step forward, his heavy armor rattling. I held up my sword for form’s sake, but I didn’t think my pitiful attacks were going to do much against armor like that.
“Hey, Aqua, would you listen to this guy? He cut down his own friend with a malicious sneak attack, and now he thinks he’s the protagonist of some revenge story!”
“I guess that’s what makes him a knight of the Demon King’s army. He doesn’t feel shame no matter how awful or cruel or mean he is.”
“Y-you were the one who made me kill my friend!”
We’d succeeded in getting him to lose his cool, but he proved that he belonged here at the castle. Even enraged, I didn’t see any openings. I didn’t have a lot of hope that I was going to find a gap in the armor of a knight, a guy who specialized in swordsmanship. But I wouldn’t be able to activate Drain Touch, either, because I couldn’t touch his body.
And then, without warning, Nos attacked!
“D-dodge!” My Luck saved my neck, Auto-evade activating and allowing me to get away from his blow.
“Hrm? Well, you know how to move—I’ll give you that. I never expected you to avoid me so readily…”
This was bad, though. I’ll be honest: I hadn’t even been able to see his sword. He was exactly the sort of knight you’d expect to find in the last dungeon. I wasn’t going to be going toe to toe with him.
As a lifelong gamer, though, I knew that these meathead types were always weak to magic. It had been ever thus: in old games and recent, Western and Japanese titles alike.
“Lightning!”
“?!”
I intoned some intermediate magic and thrust my left hand in Nos’s direction. A bolt of blue-white lightning flashed out as if connecting us. Nos shook violently and dropped his sword.
“W-wow, Kazuma, you really do have a whole new arsenal of skills! You just overpowered an enemy coming straight at you, like the hero of a story or something! I can hardly believe it!”
“H-hey, shut up! Even I have my moments!”
While Aqua was busy jabbering about whatever, Nos picked his weapon back up.
“Sorry to burst your bubble,” he said, “but I was just startled. That lightning bolt only kind of tickled.”
“Ignore him! Don’t listen to him, Kazuma! Although honestly, I do feel a little relieved!”
“I said, shut up! What’s with both of you dogpiling on me? I was hoping to conserve my MP, but I think it’s time to play my trump card!”
““?!””
Nos held his sword squarely in front of him, sinking down into a fighting posture. Aqua was watching with bated breath from behind, but I knew it was going to be all right. She didn’t have to worry.
When it came to opponents with low Magic Resistance, I had the perfect killer move!
“I wonder what it is. Is it a beam? Is he finally going to shoot a beam?!”
Okay, so she may have been on tenterhooks, but I guess Aqua wasn’t especially worried.
She watched expectantly as I started to mumble a magic incantation to myself. Nos sank his stance even lower. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to do, but the second you cast a spell, I’ll put a hole in your belly. I’ll even tell you how I’m going to do it: a thrust! I’ll stab clean through you and the lady behind you. Dodge me again, and the girl’s dead, got it?”
“You heard the man! Aqua, dodge like your life depends on it!”
“Uh, does that mean you plan to get out of his way?! You’re not going to use yourself as a shield to protect a vulnerable, gorgeous goddess?!”
With my incantation finished and ready to cast my spell at any moment, I watched Nos’s movements like a hawk. It was really annoying, the way Aqua was clinging to the back of my shirt. Was she hoping to use me as a shield if it came down to it?
I mean, using your own party member as a shield—that was inhuman. Or in-goddess or whatever.
Hold on… Was she trying to get me back for using her against the wraith?
“Who are you people anyway? Where did you crawl in from? We only heard the barrier was brought down a few minutes ago. And you’d have to have some pretty serious strength to even reach the top level here. You know, I think I remember the trap team setting up some ridiculous teleporter that goes straight to this room as a…joke…” Nos, who’d been muttering to himself, his grip on his sword growing less and less steady, suddenly looked straight at us. “D-don’t tell me… You didn’t get caught in that stupid trap, did you?!”
“H-h-hell no, we didn’t get caught! I knew it was a trap! And I knew it had to be the quickest way to the Demon King’s chamber, so I deliberately tripped it!”
“Y-yeah, me too! I definitely knew that it was a trap right away, at least! My unclouded vision discerned that this was the shortest path!”
Nos sighed to himself. “I didn’t think that ridiculous trap would ever—”
“That’s enough out of you! Take this!” I cried, unleashing my spell. Nos’s reaction was instantaneous: He charged at us with his sword.
Shit! I thought I’d caught him off guard, but he had better reactions than I’d expected!
Normally, it wouldn’t have mattered what spell I’d used. But the trump card I’d played was…
✦ ✦ ✦
“Teleport!”
“Grrr! Heh, Teleport, huh? Too bad for you Teleport doesn’t work on m—”
✦ ✦ ✦
Nos stood there with his arm stretched out, as if he was stabbing with a sword. But his sword had been magically teleported away. For some reason, though, the armor was still there—and it fell noisily to the ground.
“Kazuma, you even know Teleport?! You really did have a trump card up your sleeve! Hey, where’d you send that guy anyway?”
“Axel police station.”
I currently had two registered Teleport destinations, both set up before we’d left for the castle: right outside the Axel police station and the lowest level of the dungeon I’d visited with Vanir and Wiz. Maybe I could have sent Nos to the dungeon just as well as the police station, but I’d promised Vanir that when I got back, we would go collect the rest of the treasure from the dungeon. If there was a knight waiting right there, he might kill me the moment we teleported in. So I went with the police station just to be safe.
“You’re going to reduce the poor patrolmen to tears, sending them a villain like that.”
“What’s state power for if not to help out when you’re in a bind? These are people who deal with Axel’s street punks and unruly adventurers. I think they can handle a monster. Heh! And now you see what happens to anyone who tries to get in my face now that I’ve awakened!”
I grinned broadly, and Aqua looked at me, her eyes shining. “It’s so wonderful to see you relying on others to solve your problems again! I knew you just weren’t Kazuma if you didn’t act like a pathetic weakling!”
“Ha-ha-ha, you joker! If you make too much fun of me, I’ll teleport home on my own!”
“Hee-hee! Kazuma, you’re a barrel of laughs! Pfffft-hee-hee-hee! Uh… You are joking, aren’t you? That was a joke, right?!”
I ignored Aqua, taking a fresh look at our room. The only things around were the corpse of the oni who’d been cut down by the very friend he trusted (you did have to feel a little bad) and the pile of armor formerly worn by Nos.
“I wonder why I couldn’t teleport his armor…,” I said.
“If I had to guess, I’d say the guy you teleported had weak Magic Resistance. You remember that Dullahan from way back? He had armor that protected him from holy magic, right? And if you can’t resist magical teleportation, you might be sent who knows where and even killed the moment you show up at your destination. It would have been enough for his armor to interfere with Teleport, but he probably got carried away and got armor that actually couldn’t be teleported instead.”
………
“Okay, that explains the armor, but what’s that mean? The guy inside still got teleported? I might call that a pretty serious product flaw.”
“Hey, don’t ask me. It seems like the sort of thing a muscle-brained knight would come up with.”
Geez. So he’d been all confident that Teleport wouldn’t have any effect on him, and now he was standing outside the police station…buck naked.
If we were all lucky, he was at least wearing some sort of clothes under his armor…
“I thought maybe my trump card wasn’t working right, but if this is how it’s supposed to work, then that’s fine. Anyway, how about we hunker down here and wait for the others to show up?”
“Good idea. A trap like that, they should be right behind us.”
She was right. The trap had even succeeded in catching her and me. The others would come sooner rather than later.
✦ ✦ ✦
Aqua and I settled in to wait, sure that the rest of the group would be joining us soon…