“I’ll be right back, girls.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Celeste asked, facing the staircase.
Only I could go down, because I’d defeated the monster and made the staircase. They couldn’t go with me, but she gazed intently with a fervent desire to help despite that.
“Hmm... I know. If one of you could run back to the mansion, that might help just in case.”
“The mansion?”
“Opening the gate,” Eve said, with her usual flat tone of voice. She’d been a veteran since even before she joined our Family, so she caught on quick at times like this.
“Yeah. Go back to the mansion and use the warp room to open a gate between it and Plumbum. Then I can rush back to the mansion, too. That will help if I can’t immediately solve this spirit’s problem.”
“Ooh, I see. Like with Emily!”
“Yeah. We can try to do what she did when she helped Arsenic and got her lunar eclipse drop rates doubled.”
“Got it. Leave that to us; one of us will go.”
“Thanks.” I nodded goodbye to the two of them and went down the stairs.
But I wouldn’t get to visit the spirit straight away. Typically, an extremely strong enemy stood in the way.
As expected, I arrived in that same blank-white space. This chamber was small, though, less than half the size of a tennis court.
There was a curled-up turtle in the very middle. It looked...surprisingly like a normal turtle, with its limbs withdrawn into its shell.
I took out my gun and tried firing my growth round as a test.
Bang! Tink!
With a metallic sound, it was easily deflected by the shell.
Okay, so it’s as hard as it looks.
But just as I thought that, the turtle split into two.
It seemed it would split just like the normal monsters here.
No testing, then. I need to kill it with a big move.
I drew both guns, loaded azure flame rounds into one, and fired both guns. Flame and azure flame rounds fused to make an eternal flame round.
Invisible fire scorched one of the turtles.
“What?!” I shouted.
A heat haze flickered; the eternal flame round had definitely worked, but the turtle was unmoved. A bullet that had burned everything was doing nothing this time.
And they split again. Both turtles split, becoming four.
“Even that didn’t work... I’ll need to be prudent here.”
But what do I do? I wondered.
Meanwhile, the four turtles split into eight!
“Huh?!” I was wide-eyed and at a loss for words. I’d done nothing, yet they had split.
Wait, more importantly than that. Every time until now, only the ones I’d attacked had split. This time, even the ones I hadn’t touched were splitting.
While I was confused, they split yet again from eight to sixteen this time.
“What is this, double-or-nothing?” I watched with bated breath.
A few seconds later, I had thirty-two turtles on my hands.
After that, sixty-four.
At this point, I didn’t even have room to stand. The only silver lining here was that they didn’t attack─wait, no!
I realized now that I was in bigger trouble than ever before. They wouldn’t attack, that much seemed certain. These turtles seemed similar to Arsenic’s rocks to me in that they didn’t intend to fight.
They would just keep doubling in number every few seconds.
But this room was surprisingly small, and there was no exit. The staircase had disappeared as soon as I’d entered.
At this rate, the room would be full of turtles in less than thirty seconds, and I would be crushed to death.
“Tch!” I put away my guns and started punching the ones at my feet.
Maybe with my SS-rank strength, I thought, but I was wrong.
No matter how hard I punched, their shells didn’t even crack.
And they split even more. The layer of turtles on the floor doubled, making it feel as though the ground had risen.
I panicked and punched even harder. But it didn’t work, and they doubled again.
I only had two more doubles left. Less than ten seconds.
“Acceleration round!” I promptly fired a round into myself to buy time.
As my world accelerated, the turtles’ multiplication slowed.
I had to beat them, no matter what it took.
I gritted my teeth. Based on the feeling of my strikes, it wasn’t nullifying my attacks; it was just extremely hard─so hard that physical and magical attacks failed.
But that only meant that I needed to hit it even harder, so I grabbed one and hit it as hard as I could.
Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!
With SS-rank power, my maximum-force punches struck the turtle shell over and over.
They doubled again, filling half of the remaining space.
There was only time for one more. Only a few seconds of real time.
I punched faster and harder. The skin on my knuckles tore, and my bones creaked.
“Raaaaaagh!”
Crack!
Finally, the turtle shell cracked. It glowed and then shattered.
“There’s no time. Repetition!” I cast the spell over and over, wasting no time.
It worked, since I’d defeated one of the turtles the hard way.
I fired it off desperately, killing them at high speed. Along the way, they doubled again!
But since I’d culled their numbers with Repetition, it wasn’t enough to fill the entire room. There was barely enough space for me to fit.
As long as I wasn’t dead, I could make it out of this. I fired limitless recovery rounds into myself to supplement my accelerated Repetitions.
Their constant multiplication was brutal, but my acceleration round and Repetition just barely outpaced it.
They doubled twice more along the way, but I’d managed to cull them all.
And so, the door leading to the spirit’s chamber opened.