I had no idea he was this big of a pain in the ass. You can’t let someone with powers like me live? Right back at ya, buddy. If there were about ten of you, you guys could easily topple a small country.
“You’re still not done yet? C’mon… Let’s just end this, buddy.”
“Never, God’s Bitch! This isn’t over until I offer your head to my deity…!”
I wiped the blood off my cheek and rolled my eyes at him. Pearlman bared his thin, snakelike fangs and howled with laughter.
Yeah, this guy’s gone completely off the deep end. And it’s funny how he keeps calling me God’s Bitch. It’s almost like they think I just do whatever the great Eltania commands me to. Well, for your information, I don’t worship any deities. If God really did exist, I’d wanna bite His face off—I’m no nobler than a rabid dog.
But even stray hounds have a few tricks up their sleeves. We do what we’ve got to do to stay alive.
Pearlman transformed his arms into blades of ice, raised them high above his head, then slashed. I slipped my sword away from his attack, leaving a punch in his gut behind as I passed through.
“Ka-HAH…!”
But Pearlman didn’t stop—he even kept smiling as he slashed at my blade.
Did ya think ya had an opening? Big mistake.
Pain was meaningless to him. I already realized that long ago, from the way he was freely swinging his broken arms. And from my little experiment of slamming him into the wall, I observed that damaging his body would not dampen its ability to move.
Next, I darted in and out of his space, lightly kicking his back to put distance between us. Even though he didn’t feel any pain, his postured did distort if I applied pressure to the problem areas of his body. Of course it did. Divine powers aside, in the end, the only thing supporting a human body is a pair of legs.
“Damn you!”
He must have thought I was making a fool of him. Pearlman charged at me, the veins in his neck bulging. I held up my rapier. But after everything we’d been through, I knew a dull blade wasn’t going to be that effective.
But there was one sword move in particular that I’d loved during my mercenary days.
It was sword throwing.
Blocking a spinning iron blade someone had hurled at you was quite the difficult feat.
Pearlman snorted. “You think throwing your sword will work?!”
This time, I was aiming for his head. Even a monster who could still move his arms when they were broken would be immobilized if his head got smashed. He would stop moving his arms and evade my attack with a big jump.
That’s right—if I threw my sword at him, he would have no choice but to evade it. And unless my calculations were off, that would give me an opening. For people who relied so heavily on magic, the thing about fighters is that they feel a lot of pride in their weapons. If I had to describe it, it was like the reverence you would feel for an ornamental heirloom with the family crest on it. But I only have that sense of it because a part of me still remains from my magicless days, where I’d perceived my weapon as simply the tool I entrust my life with. And that was actually why fighters scorned weapons, but at the same time, they tended to have pride in their swords.
And shit—I couldn’t think of anything stupider than that.
Putting your life on the scales and measuring it up against pride or whatever—the whole concept was wrong. The thing you should prioritize above all else was always the same; it never changed. It was your life, for cryin’ out loud.
I’ll use anything I can use to achieve my goals. And if something I have is weighing me down, I’ll throw it away, no matter how valuable it is.
That’s how Envil the Savage Fang lives his life!
Granted, in this lifetime, I’d gotten stuck with two things that I couldn’t part with so easily—but that’s another matter entirely. The possessiveness I felt might be Mylene’s way of living.
Anyway, throwing my sword was such an unexpected move that it was more than enough to throw Pearlman off guard. But the real shocker was yet to come. Because I had already slipped into the chink in his defenses.
“Gffaw!”
I punched him in the gut, hard enough to kill him this time.
I was sure it caused him no pain, but he would be drowning for breath after having all the air punched out of him. That aside, the concentration of force on his midsection made Pearlman fold in half. As his nose fell downward, I smashed my knee into it.
After feeling the bones of his nose shatter against me, I pushed myself off Pearlman’s shoulders up into the air. Pitching backward from the kick, widened his eyes at the sight of me floating above him. But there was little he could do to resist the tug of gravity.
“Nighty night!”
And with that, I took all my weight, all my momentum, into my legs and smashed my feet right into his face. The back of Pearlman’s head smashed into the stone floor…and sank.
Regaining my balance, I slowly removed my legs from the depressed floor Pearlman’s face had sunk into. Red threads of blood dragged from my shoes with a moist, squishy sound. His nose was smashed, and his head was split open. I could see a great amount of blood—but he had probably lost consciousness from having his brain rattled, not from the other damage inflicted.
Now that Pearlman was unconscious, the red magic energy that had enveloped him had vanished. The special pressure possessed by those with vast magic powers had subsided.
“Is he…dead, my lady?” Albert asked, timidly peering at the body.
“Nah… He’s still breathing. To be honest, though, I kicked him hard enough to kill him.”
He was in a precarious situation—that hadn’t changed—but Pearlman was still clinging to life. I had wanted to keep him alive, but it was true that I wasn’t in any place to hold back during that fight.
In part, I’d chosen not to kill him because I thought I was still too young to take a life, being a student and all. But on second thought, these bastards had kidnapped a princess and tried to kill her. They were dangerous. I didn’t think anybody would have punished me for it if I had done them in.
“Okay. What’re we gonna do with you now?” I sighed with fatigue.
Now that the fight was over and my adrenaline was dropping, I realized just what a mess I’d gotten myself into.
There was Colorne’s imperial princess with her clothing ripped all over—and the cultists who had kidnapped her. And for some reason, the prince of Eltania and his betrothed were there. On top of this, the kidnappers had been led by the homeroom teacher of a boarding school for the world’s elites, and the one who’d kicked all their asses was the aforementioned little lady betrothed to the prince.
Seeing as how I barely stopped short of killing him, there was no way I could let this go unreported. My brain began to hurt with all the crazy things I’d have to explain. I’d love to just shove everything onto Albert, but there was no telling what kinds of shit he’d say.
“Nng…”
And while I was musing over all this, the source of my ails groaned from the ground. Now I needed to add “knock my teacher out again” to the list of things I had to do, but as long as he was awake, I had questions.