“All right, it’s nothing but a matter of time now,” Derek said while stuffing his mouth with a scone he’d had his nearby wife, Elise, bring along. Under his watchful eyes, the therianthropes fell one by one to exploding shells and long-distance offensive magic.
“You bastards! Cowards! Come down here and fight us fair and square!” the therianthropes shouted. To Derek, it sounded like nothing but background noise.
“There’s no shred of honor in this battle,” mumbled someone—not the enemy, but a soldier from the Third Kingdom’s forces.
“It’s all good, as long as we win. The more cowardly our tactics, the easier victory becomes,” Derek said.
“But, still, this is...too much.” The soldiers couldn’t so easily come around to Derek’s reasoning.
“Tsk, bunch of Goody Two-shoes,” Derek grumbled to himself.
The soldiers of the Third Kingdom’s army were either from Whitehyde or Asch Sanctuary, so they were passionate advocates of chivalry in battle. They’d also voiced great opposition to Derek’s plan when he’d first given the order for it. To shut them up, he’d brainwashed their friends and family right before their eyes.
None of that matters right now. The real problem lies elsewhere. Derek assumed things wouldn’t just end like this. After all, the New Black Star had yet to show up.
Derek noticed many therianthropes that had slipped through the bombardment scaling the cliff again. “Oh, looks like some of them haven’t given up. Let’s drop them back down,” he said, giving the order for the civilian conscripts to roll down some more boulders.
“Argh! Again?!” a climbing therianthrope complained.
The therianthropes couldn’t easily dodge while climbing, so their only remaining options were to either hold on and get squashed by the boulders or to let go and willingly drop away from the incoming threat. No matter what, all the effort they’d poured into climbing would amount to nothing.
Abruptly, the unavoidable boulders split in half.
The therianthropes shouted in joy. “Commander Master Unicorn!”
A mysterious, beautiful girl wielding a longsword appeared on the battlefield. She was dressed from head to toe in pure white furs, and a single horn sprouted from her forehead. Her elegant and feminine features coincided with an attractive physique. All in all, her breathtaking beauty was a perfect manifestation of the graceful monsters known as unicorns.
“There you are, shenmo,” Derek said.
“I’ll handle this.” The moment Master Unicorn uttered those words, every last therianthrope stopped trying to join the fight.
“What, you guys so scared of fighting that you’re gonna leave the rest to your boss and enjoy the view?” Derek said.
“You’re wrong, you filthy coward! Your cheap tricks won’t break our spirits. As proud warriors ourselves, we will not interfere with the commander’s honorable battle,” the silverback objected.
“Both you guys and my men won’t shut up about honor this, honesty that. Let’s kill her off first,” Derek said, ordering his men to focus the bombardment and rolling boulders away from the therianthropes and toward Master Unicorn alone.
In response to the incoming barrage, Master Unicorn accelerated soundlessly. This was no exaggeration; her movement really was completely silent. She could perceive both the shells themselves and the shrapnel caused by their explosions as she ran like a rushing river across the bottom of the valley. The downpour of attacks didn’t so much as graze her. Even more surprisingly, once she reached the cliff, she started running up it like it was level ground.
“What the hell?!” The Third Kingdom’s soldiers were stunned.
Master Unicorn closed the gap before anyone had the time to drop more boulders. She effortlessly slashed a metal turret in half with a single swing of her longsword. The cut was so clean that the soldiers’ shocked faces were reflected on the cross section like it was a mirror. She then went on to bisect the nearby bewildered soldiers. She continued, cutting down turrets and humans without straining a muscle, her movements flowing gently as she danced from one place to another.
“What’s going on here?!” the soldiers screamed in terror. They couldn’t believe their dominant position had been easily overturned by a single person. “What kind of magic or skill is she using?!”
No, that’s not it. After watching Master Unicorn fight, Derek had arrived at an unbelievable conclusion.
“Heh, magic? A skill? You’re completely off the mark, sneaky humans,” the silverback said. “Commander Master Unicorn uses no magic. She fights by the sword alone.”
✦ ✦ ✦
All demons are born in one of two different ways: reproduction or abiogenesis, the latter of which involves them spawning in a random location. As a result, some demons happen to be born next to ferocious monsters and are devoured as soon as they appear in their world.
Master Unicorn—still nameless at the time—had had the misfortune of being born in the depths of the dungeon known as the most dangerous one in the underworld, a terrible place even by demon standards.
One might expect her fate would be the same as those other children eaten soon after their birth. Perhaps worse, as she appeared in the dungeon’s deepest boss room, home to the basilisk, the underworld’s most powerful giant serpent.
While the little girl’s mana quantity was rather low, its quality was remarkably high. The basilisk tried to devour this felicitous treat in one gulp. However, the newborn baby girl, who couldn’t even speak or stand on her own two legs yet, had picked up a broken sword dropped by a previous dungeon challenger.
A ferocious battle ensued. At the end, this frail baby girl stood—or rather, crawled—victorious after delivering a total of 230 slashes to the basilisk.
The girl then wandered the dungeon, cutting down every monster that attacked her. By the time she was grown and could walk out of the most difficult dungeon in the underworld, she’d exterminated every last one of its monsters. The Aloof Holy Beast of the Sword was only five years old at the time.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Commander Master Unicorn’s Ex-Skill is called Infinite Core,” the silverback explained. “It allows her to absorb natural electrical energy through her horn and convert it into her own. Neither her mana nor her stamina will run out no matter how much she exerts herself. It’s a powerful skill, if a little modest.”
Compared to a skill that made its user’s body the hardest in the world or one that allowed its user to take any kind of skill from devouring other creatures, it seemed humble.
“However, when combined with her swordsmanship, the best in the underworld, she becomes a killing machine that can slaughter her enemies without rest. That is our commander, one of the New Seven Black Stars, Master Unicorn the Aloof Holy Beast of the Sword!” the silverback announced with pride. He had the utmost respect for their leader and total faith in her strength.
Now that she was in a close-quarter fight, Master Unicorn was flanked on all sides by the Third Kingdom’s forces. Nonetheless, her peerless swordsmanship proved that the therianthrope’s faith hadn’t been misplaced. Despite their intense daily training and numerical advantage, she cut the soldiers down with a flash of her sword and not a drop of sweat.
Derek, who’d encountered all kinds of monsters and other powerful foes during the Titanomachy, noticed something else. Something more frightening.
As a shenmo, her mana quality is high, but her physical strength is around the same as a human teenage girl’s! Somehow, she displayed such fearsome power with swordsmanship alone.
The situation made Derek remember a conversation he’d once had with Kevin when visiting the Sixth Kingdom for diplomatic reasons.
“Sound is the result of energy loss. Moving in perfect silence is moving at your peak.”
“And not even you can do that, Kevin?”
“Nope, no way. When I run, there’s the sound of my feet kicking the ground, and when I swing my sword, there’s the sound of me cutting the air. Perfect silence means removing those sounds entirely. I’m closer to achieving that feat than the average person, but complete silence is such a faraway goal it might as well be infinite.”
The girl darting across the battlefield before Derek’s eyes moved without making any sound at all, putting Kevin’s theory into practice. She’d reached the pinnacle of movement that the most skilled human couldn’t dream of after a trillion time loops.
This is hopeless. We can’t take her down with numbers alone, Derek quickly realized. The New Seven Black Stars spelled nothing but trouble. He nearly spat on the ground with disgust at the words he was forced to utter next.
“Fine, I’ll fight with that ‘honor’ you guys seem to love so much,” he said. He had Elise voluntarily float him down to the valley with her magic. He landed softly on the ground and faced Master Unicorn. “We’ll fight one-on-one. You won’t run away, will you?”
“I don’t mind. It’s fine with me either way,” Master Unicorn replied, her expression unchanging.