I really want to sit down for a bit.
Resisting the urge to drop onto the ground right then and there, Renya looked over to see how Shion and the others were doing against the humanoid forms.
Shion had managed to cut down two, Azu had roasted two more, and the last one’s head was gone, having exploded when Rona drove her mace into it with a full-body swing. Eradication was complete. He was relieved to find that his friends were fine. With that said, he’d be very worried if they actually had trouble against what were effectively a bunch of walking mannequins.
“Renya, looks like you’re done too, huh… You sure do have a weird way of using that sword, though,” said Shion as she approached him, her eyes brimming with curiosity. Apparently, she had been watching during a part of his fight, and found herself intrigued by his techniques of striking with the sheath and purposefully showing his back to his opponent in the heat of battle. While he was ostensibly leaving himself open, his pivots were also generating momentum for his next attack. It was a style of fighting that Shion and the others had never heard of.
“Yeah, I’d give you some lessons if we weren’t pressed for time right now.”
“Hm?”
“You do remember that there are a bunch of monsters trying to gobble up Azu’s party members in the other room, right? We need to get out of here and go help them, pronto…”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
Her cheeks colored slightly. Presumably, she had been so focused on the battle that she forgot about the preceding events. With quick steps, she made her way over to the entrance of the room. Despite the fact that the demon had been defeated, the door remained shut. She hit it with her fist and was rewarded with nothing more than a dull thud. Then, she tried swinging her sword at it. There was a shrill, grating sound. She looked at Renya with watery eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“They’re numb…”
Her hands had gone numb from the impact of slamming her sword into a stiff object. The sword itself fared worse, having lost a chunk of its tip, and was rendered unusable as a weapon.
“I’ll try. Get back,” said Azu as he moved Shion out of the way and began an incantation. “By my power, I summon thee. Missiles of mana, strike!”
Employing a two-fold simulcast, Azu sent two mana missiles at the locked door, only to have them lamely dissipate upon touching its surface. The sight made Azu furrow his brows and glare at the resilient obstacle.
“This door has been imbued with magecraft. And it’s still alive.”
“You mean this,” Renya said as he pointed at the cusp of his katana where the demon’s head was still stuck, “is still alive?”
Azu shook his head.
“No, there’s no way it’s still alive in a state like that.”
“Then whose magecraft is it?”
“I don’t know. But, at this rate… Damn it!”
Azu gave the door a frustrated kick. He probably realized how ill-matched his friends were against the monsters that attacked them. His distress was, therefore, understandable, but a door that shrugged off a full-body swing of Shion’s sword was not going to budge because a mage kicked it.
“Renya, can’t you do something with that blade of yours?! Cut it open, maybe?!” asked Azu, pointing a finger at the door. His voice carried the strain of someone desperately trying to suppress their panic.
Renya wasn’t sure how to answer. A visual inspection told him nothing about what the door was made of. A certain frame of mind was necessary when cutting something, and it varied depending on the target. Parting flesh required a different technique than parting wood. There was a limit to what a blade could slice through with a haphazard swing. In addition, if the door was made of metal, it would be far too thick to cut through. If Renya had been thoroughly informed about the properties of his katana, he would have known that it could chew through even a gate of reinforced steel. He wasn’t thoroughly informed, though, and no one was currently capable of making him so.
“Um… Renya?” said Rona, who had been standing behind them during their repeated attempts to abuse the door.
“Rona? What? We’re in a bit of a fix right now.”
“Well, make that two fixes, then.”
He spun around. Something about the way she said it compelled him to do so.
“What’s wrong?”
“The bodies… are gone.”
Renya looked around. She was right. Altogether, there should have been eleven bodies, plus the two halves of the demon’s corpse.
Instead, there was nothing. They had all disappeared.
Something occurred to him. He quickly glanced at the tip of his blade. The demon’s head was still there.
Okay, so the whole thing where I took down that demon wasn’t a dream.
“What… in the world is going on?” said Rona.
“Everyone! Heads up! Something’s wrong!”
Renya didn’t even confirm that everyone obeyed his order before starting to carefully scan his surroundings, intensely scrutinizing every detail. Maimed and charred as they were, the corpses of what were once Zest’s and Harz’s parties should have been lying on the ground. Pieces of the demon’s body should also have been present. The fact that they weren’t meant someone or something — in this very room, nonetheless — got rid of them without being seen by Renya or any of his three friends.
The ground looked the same as before. The ebony desk still sat abandoned in the same place. Stiffened by some sort of coating, the earthen walls looked cold and hard.
“Wait, earthen walls?”
A discrepancy leapt out at him: why could he see earth on the walls? When they came into the room, the walls were white. Right now, he was staring at the same exposed earth on the walls as the ones in the passage that led here.
“What about the wall—”
Azu never got to finish his sentence. He went flying away from the door and crashed into the ebony desk, shattering it. He continued to tumble along the ground until finally coming to a stop against the far wall. A shocked Shion barely managed to get her wits about her and turn around before she was sent flying in a similar fashion and smashing into a wall. Her longsword, having been used to blunt the impact, snapped in two. Moments after, the hilt clanked onto the ground from her limp hand.
“Shion?!” cried Rona as she made to rush to her friend’s side.
Renya tried to stop her, but it was too late. Something that resembled a whip wrapped itself around Rona’s leg as she was about to run and dragged her down. Then, it picked her up and hurled her toward the wall. As she was thrown, he heard a sickening snap from her ensnared leg. She hurtled through the air, unable to even brace herself before colliding back-first with the wall at a breakneck speed.
In the blink of an eye, three people were out of commission. Renya had barely even moved. He turned toward the figure standing in front of the door to the room and narrowed his eyes.
“Hey… Didn’t I chop you up already?”
“I do believe so, indeed. A real good slicing and dicing you gave me,” came the lighthearted answer.
The one who had just slammed three people into the wall grinned at Renya, his hands held behind his back. Deep brown skin. Light purple hair. Slightly pointy ears. Almond-shaped pupils. A lab coat draped casually over his shoulders. It was him: the demon whom Renya had supposedly just sliced to death moments before.
Without losing sight of the demon, Renya glanced at the cusp of his katana. The demon’s head was still there, but it blanched and melted like butter before his very eyes. It dripped down onto the ground, collecting in a pulpy mess that flowed toward the demon’s foot. When it touched the tip, it disappeared, assimilating itself into his body.
“What the hell are you… A slime or something?” spat Renya, mentioning the first thing that came to mind. It drew a sigh from the demon.
“Just what would make you assume I’m one of those lowly mucous creatures?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Because you’re literally acting like one of them?”
“Well, I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” laughed the demon, who seemed terrifically amused as he glanced at Renya’s now-nogginless katana.
While keeping his guard up at the chuckling man, Renya took at look at his three friends lying at the foot of the wall. None of them were moving. He hoped they were only unconscious.
“I didn’t expect that white stuff on the wall to be your actual body.”
“Technically, I also covered the ceiling. The point is, what you fought was simply a sliver of my whole self.”
If he was telling the truth, that would imply he was also the one who had been lighting up the room. Renya couldn’t help but entertain the rather out-of-place thought that this demon was a real stickler for efficiency, getting a replicant of himself to do the actual work while he himself handled the room’s interior design.
“So, all this time, we’ve been playing into your hands. Or in this case, into you literally, I guess. Man, that’s gross. Are all demons like that?” asked Renya, keeping the banter going as he considered his next move. If what he just defeated was only a portion of the man, the main body should be much stronger, which was attested by the fact that he was entirely unable to see what had hit Azu and Shion. On top of that, Renya had already shown his hand with his surprise attack, so those techniques were off the table, too. He needed a plan of action, and he couldn’t think of one.
“Were we all like this, the remaining races on this continent would be extinct by now.”
“What the hell are you supposed to be, then?”
“Emil Raja, demon researcher. Pleased to make your acquaintance, short-lived though it’s sure to be.”
Renya gleaned two pieces of information from the demon’s self-introduction. One, he confirmed that demons did, in fact, have names. Stating the obvious, perhaps, but it was nice to know. Two, the demon in question seemed to have no intention of letting any of them leave alive.
“My field of study is known as bioengineering. I research how to fuse one thing with another to create a more powerful organism.”
Highly doubtful that actual biotechnology existed in this world, Renya figured the demon was referring to a branch of some form of academic study like magecraft or alchemy. Whatever the academic study, though, one thing was for certain.