Before Oakley settled things with Gerugoroi…
There was a bit more to Alex and Joanne’s conversation.
Within the Aros Temple Cult, the title of executive candidate was a badge of honor granted only to a few: those whose combat prowess was unmatched among the believers, those who contributed greatly to the cult’s meteoric rise, or those who had saved the cult from crises unlike anything it had ever faced.
Fuankilo Legacy, in life, had been hopeless when it came to direct combat.
But in administration and fundraising, she had been a star.
Her talents in that area were essentially irreplaceable, and so Aros himself had bestowed healing magic upon her and protected her as one of his executives.
Because of that unusual precedent, her direct disciple Karatena had ended up suffering from a kind of reputational collateral damage.
If her master was a non-combat executive, the reasoning went, then Karatena, as her top disciple, must be bad at fighting too, right?
The reality, however, was different.
“Uh, I don’t know all that much,” Alex said, scratching his shaved head. “But does Karatena really have what it takes to call herself an executive candidate?”
“You’d better not underestimate her,” Joanne replied flatly.
“Huh?”
Joanne started talking about the past. About something that had happened back at the old castle base.
One time, while Fuankilo was away, they’d tortured a group of Orthodoxy soldiers the cult had captured. That night, after the interrogation was over, the captives were thrown into a cell and left there.
They rose up. The soldiers overpowered the guard, stole his weapons, and started a large-scale revolt.
But by the time Joanne arrived, having rushed over when the alarm reached her, the uprising had already been crushed. The stone floor was littered with mangled corpses, carved up without mercy.
Neither Joanne nor Fuankilo had put that rebellion down. It had been Karatena. She alone had slaughtered the entire armed group of soldiers.
“S-So… that means she’s stronger than me, right?” Alex asked, his voice suddenly small.
“You wouldn’t stand a chance, Alex,” Joanne said. “And if someone like that’s gone and taken insect power into her body, she might actually be an even nastier opponent than Gerugoroi or Whip.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Oakley had almost no real information on Karatena as a person.
He knew her only as Fuankilo’s top disciple, an executive candidate, just a title, a position on the board. He’d never bothered to think of her as more threatening than Gerugoroi or the other candidates.
And now that the lid had been ripped off, what did he find?
A far bigger monster than the man he’d just put down.
Inhuman strength and a cloud of familiars spilling from her body.
He’d drawn his old Flame Blade at first to thin out the swarm, burning away the parasitic brood. But even a casual, probing strike from her had shattered that sword like cheap glass.
Her raw output was a nightmare.
Forced into a completely different style of fight from the ones he’d had against human opponents, Oakley found himself constantly on the back foot.
“Hmph!”
On the sinking platform, he swept the Flame Spear in a wide, brutal arc.
The mass of parasites swarming up from his feet turned to ash, their bodies scattering as cinders while a band of fire hung in the air, serving double duty as both slaughter and warning line against Karatena herself.
Some of her brood spat silk, trying to bind him, but the threads were weak to heat. Exposed to the holy flame, they melted like spun sugar and lost all stickiness.
When he realized Karatena herself made no move to close the distance, a cold sweat slid down his spine.
Oakley bared his teeth at her, provoking her on purpose.
“Scared of the fire?” he called.
In this vertical darkness, where the shaft was swallowed by black, the holy flame burning in the head of the Flame Spear was the only true light.
Karatena’s gaze was locked on that fire.
“Fuankilo-sama once told me about it,” she said, voice low. “That flame… The phoenix hellfire they keep in the streetlamps of the Orthodoxy cities.”
“You know your stuff,” Oakley said, unease churning in his gut.
The elevator beneath them continued to accelerate, dropping them ever deeper. They must have fallen nearly a hundred meters from the original tunnel already.
How am I supposed to climb back up from here?
And if he couldn’t find a way to stop this platform, they’d just keep sinking.
“Tch!”
Once he confirmed the tide of parasites had stopped spawning, Oakley stepped in hard, right into the reach of Karatena’s buster sword. Considering their builds, the range of that oversized sword and his Flame Spear were nearly identical.
If anything, with those jointed limbs holding her body a meter off the ground, Karatena had the advantage when it came to bringing weight down from above.
Gritting his teeth, Oakley forced his half-healed body to move and swung the Flame Spear straight at her.
He angled the spear sideways, thrusting upward from low on his right.
Karatena slipped away with a whip-quick motion, so Oakley snapped his wrist, dragging the spear across his body and slashing up from the opposite angle, lines of fire crossing.
But with eight legs beneath her, Karatena’s movement was almost unfair.
She glided across the sinking platform with impossible smoothness, darting and sliding as if hover-skating over the surface.
There was no readable tell, no weight shift to signal where she’d go next. The moment she’d slipped past the Flame Spear, the flow reversed.
She grabbed the beak-headed pickaxe hanging at her hip and shifted it into her left hand, then came at him in a dual-blade rush with both it and the buster sword.
“Ugh!”
With those powerful insect legs bracing her, Karatena could pull off a style of dual-wielding that should have been physically impossible for a normal human.
The pickaxe, its head jutting forward like a bird’s beak, came chopping down toward his face. He barely managed to get his spear up in time; the strike stopped just short of his eyeball, steel ringing inches from his pupil.
Before he could breathe, the buster sword followed in a too-heavy swing, carving a murderous line from his left chest toward his right flank.
Every instinct screamed that blocking it head-on would shatter him.
He knocked the pickaxe upward, then let his upper body sway back, using a boxer’s slip to read the arc and twist his torso clear of the swing.
A fraction of a second later, a blow that could freeze his spine grazed his nose. The air pressure alone felt like it might peel his face off. A normal human would have been dragged off-balance by the weapon’s sheer weight, but Karatena had eight legs anchored to the ground. Her core never wavered.
Forcing his posture back under him, Oakley answered with a flurry of thrusts, driving the spearhead forward again and again in tight, snapping motions, trying to force some distance between them.
Her reaction was fast, almost like she’d been expecting it. Oakley’s thrusts were batted aside by the pickaxe in her left hand. But he flowed straight into the next move without a pause.
He hooked the Flame Spear’s tip around the pickaxe’s crescent-shaped head and wrenched, sending the tool flying from Karatena’s grip.
The beaked weapon spun weightlessly in the air, only to be shredded mid-flight as Oakley slashed it apart.
Fragments scattered, and with the butt-end of the spear, he flicked two, then three pieces toward Karatena, forcing her to respond.
She slid back, deflecting the incoming shards with a light sweep of the buster sword’s flat, using the motion to steal a bit of space between them.
And that was exactly when Oakley made his strangest play yet.
“Eh…?” Karatena’s eyes widened.
He lunged forward, chasing after the very fragments he’d knocked loose himself, and from the blind spot created by her raised buster sword, he drove the Flame Spear upward.
Believing she’d taken enough distance to simply let the debris fall harmlessly away, Karatena had relaxed for a heartbeat.
The surprise thrust caught one of her jointed limbs, severing it cleanly and throwing her balance off.
He used the only light source to fake me out!
She realized, too late, what had gone wrong.
The holy flame illuminating the shaft hadn’t moved.
That was what had fooled her into thinking Oakley hadn’t moved either.
He’d choked up on the spear, manipulating only the tip, using the flame like part of a pantomime to create an illusion of fixed distance. Having misread the range completely, Karatena suddenly found herself on the defensive.
Sensing the opening, Oakley dove straight into her guard.
Karatena, instead of panicking, flipped her ruined balance to her advantage and snapped into a roundhouse kick aimed at his head.
Oakley’s reaction speed bordered on monstrous.
He dashed in even deeper, under the arc of her leg, and the kick that would have crushed his skull instead carved through empty air at his back.