“Eeek!!”
Suddenly—right before his eyes.
A face appeared.
A face with enormous, glittering silver eyes, without eyelids, that stared down at Pelliot from mid-air.
“Ick…”
At first, only the lower jaw and its mere holes of a nose stood out fearsomely. Then the sharp teeth springing tightly upward. The mouth looked like it split to the very back of the eyes.
As he’d thought, it was the face of a fish.
It had a mouth that could swallow Pelliot whole, and its rainbow-colored body continued on and on behind eyes that were each as large as Pelliot’s head. The thing’s tail was hidden deeper within the forest and was no longer visible.
A purple pectoral fin sprouted near where the mouth ended. Smooth fins spreading out in a wide fan about four inches on both sides of its body undulated back and forth.
“Ahhh, stop it…stay away…Please stay away.”
On the verge of tears, Pelliot stepped back, trying to escape from that enormous encroaching face. But paralyzed with fear, he tottered and crumpled to the ground.
“Don’t come any closer…Nooooo!”
He grasped a small stone that his hand brushed, and threw it weakly at the thing’s face. The stone traced a wobbly arc and grazed the monster fish’s right fin before falling.
Its huge eyes shone and stared at him.
The monster opened its mouth. The bright red chasm opened to double the size of its face, its teeth forming rows upon rows inside.
“Eeee!”
It was all over. Pelliot resigned himself. He squeezed his eyes shut. He was going to be eaten.
Why did I come to a place like this?
Did I really want to meet my mother?
Maybe I just wanted to show up Armando.
It’s too late for regrets now.
“Save me, Armando!”
Just as Pelliot cried out, he heard an echo:
✦ ✦ ✦
Boooooaaaagggghhhh…
It was the voice of the Mountain God.
“…!!”
✦ ✦ ✦
When he opened his eyes, the monster fish’s face was no longer there. Without his noticing, it had retreated away from him—and was continuing to in a rush.
Pelliot couldn’t understand what had happened.
Several seconds passed before he realized it wasn’t that the monster fish had drawn back, but rather that something had grabbed hold of it and was dragging it away.
A giant in dull purple armor stood near a large tree a little off in the distance. It held the monster fish’s body in both arms and was trying to spin it around with all its strength.
However, the monster fish wasn’t so easily captured. It wriggled its long body back and forth, trying to shake free of the giant’s arms.
“Gah…Gah, gah…”
The giant dug its fingers into the monster fish’s rainbow body. Green blood spurted out. The monster fish squirmed violently and tried to wrap itself around the giant.
“…!”
The tail of the struggling monster fish came flying towards Pelliot at a terrible speed.
He steeled himself to be hit, but before he knew it he was floating through the air.
“!”
Someone was carrying Pelliot and had sidestepped the blow.
“Young master! Are you okay?!”
“Armando!”
The bespectacled servant looked at Pelliot and smiled.
“Armando…”
In relief, Pelliot began crying about how scared he had been. Carrying the boy in his right arm and jumping back another thirty feet, Armando surveyed the monster fish running amok and the Armor Giant trying to hold it back, and pushed up the bridge of his glasses with his left hand.
“Well, this is troublesome. With his strength, he will certainly win, but having that monster’s dead body here will be a nuisance—it will rot, and the smell will most likely reach the foot of the mountain or lure other monsters to come.”
“Armando?” Pelliot looked at him uncertainly.
Armando’s speech and expression were rather different from his usual self.
“But what is that thing? There’s no corresponding creature in my database. And my Searchlight can’t make head or tails of this inferior type of animal—uh-oh.” The monster’s tail struck down nearby again. Grasping Pelliot tightly, Armando nimbly dodged the blow.
“I’m scared!”
With Pelliot shaking in his arms, Armando shouted out to the giant, “Hey! Don’t kill it!”
“Uuuugghhh…” the giant groaned, struggling against the monster wrapped around its body.
“Guess there’s no choice. Shall I give you some assistance?”
Saying so, Armando sliced his hand through the air. Some type of power shot out from the end and tore off a part of the back of the monster fish wrapped around the giant.
“Gghiii…” Hit with the external attack, the monster fish loosened its grip. In that moment, the Armor Giant threw off the coiled-up monster fish.
The monster fish, unspooling itself completely, swam in the air around and around the grove of trees, its rainbow body madly flickering.
“Armando…”
Pelliot no longer had a clue as to what was going on anymore. He thought he was dreaming.
Still holding Pelliot, Armando danced nimbly through the air and landed near the Armor Giant. Then—
“Uugghh,” the voice of the giant mumbled out from under the helmet.
“Did you say something?” Armando asked the giant.
“King’s, sash, fish.”
“King’s sash fish?” Armando tilted his head to one side.
“King’s sash fish—a king’s sash? Well, this monster does resemble one, but those fish are supposed to be silver. And they don’t grow to be that large.”
The monster fish came back to attack with a gaarrgh. Armando made the same motion with his hand again.
Though it recoiled and retreated, the monster fish was still going around in circles, waiting for its next opening. The giant looked up at it and spoke with difficulty.
“Breeding season…males…kill each other…eat each other…grow bigger…rainbow-colored.”
“‘The rival males grow bigger during the breeding season by eating each other’? That’s the first I’ve heard of that. Then the rainbow colors on this body must be nuptial coloration. In order to attract a female?”
“Armando, what are you talking about?”
Armando raised his left hand high while fixing his hold on Pelliot. From the end of his palm, light expanded outwards, looking like a warrior’s bow.
“If that’s the case, this will be quite simple.”
Armando readied his bow of light and took aim at the monster fish, whose huge mouth was wide open, trying to attack from directly above.
“Rewrite Light,” he muttered in a low voice, and the bow drew back as if its string had been pulled. An instant later an arrow of silver light shot off.
The arrow flew into the wide-open mouth of the monster fish.
“…?”
The monster fish abruptly stopped moving.
All of a sudden, the monster fish moved its eyes as though following something. Watching whatever it was, it turned its body around and flew straight upwards to the sky.
From outside the forest, it must have looked like a rainbow soaring and disappearing into the heavens.
“What the heck was that? What did you do?” Pelliot asked timidly.
“That was a king’s sash fish—a fish from the spirit world called the king’s sash. Have you ever seen the black manta that some Holy Knights have tamed? It’s the same kind of thing, a type of fish said to be left behind in this world from back in the old days, when Britannia associated with the spirit and fairy realms.”
“King’s…sash?”
“Once I knew it was a male in heat, it was all rather simple. All I had to do was show it an illusion of a female. It’s a base animal. It’ll chase that illusion anywhere.”
Armando gently placed Pelliot down on the ground.
“Fortunately, he remembered that information for us. Thank you.” Saying so, Armando looked back at the Armor Giant. But the giant had already turned its back to them and was staggering away, groaning as though he had already forgotten what had just happened.
“Hmmm. I guess it was only temporary. He hadn’t been able to recover any of the memories of his time as a Holy Knight so clearly up until now. However—it seems that Pelliot being attacked must have been the trigger. He seems to have had a child.”
Armando sighed, squinted his eyes, and stared at the back of the giant receding into the other side of the grove. “However, it probably won’t happen again…The effect of the seal is rapidly weakening. That may have been his last act as a human.”
“Armando…who…are you?”
Pelliot was suddenly frightened and took a step back. This man was different from the nagging, somewhat foolish servant that he was familiar with.
“Are you really Armando?”
“I could answer that, but there’s no point in telling you right now,” Armando said quietly. “I don’t think it’s quite time yet.”
“Wh-What are you talking about?”
Armando narrowed his eyes behind his glasses and gracefully raised his right hand. In that instant, Pelliot thought something shone brightly from the tip.
He fell unconscious.
The last thing he saw was a beautiful rainbow-colored light.