"Vera..."
"Vera!"
Fayin's calls, one after another, finally made Vera look at her.
Her face was streaked with tears. In her trembling hand was a small jade-green potion bottle: the healing elixir Sirian had handed them before parting, potent enough to drag the dying back from the brink.
The little bottle was already empty.
The wound between Fayling's brows had closed, the skin smooth as it had ever been. Only the leftover streak of blood still testified that the arrow had existed at all.
But she lay there, unmoving. She did not laugh and climb to her feet the way she always did, saying, "You're all making a fuss over nothing."
"Vera, it's not working... Sister... sister is already..."
Clarity returned to Vera's eyes. He looked back once at the demons storming in outside the city, then bent down and pressed a soft kiss to Fayling's still-warm lips.
Then he laid her body in Fayin's arms. "Fayin, take Fayling and go first. Don't head for any nearby city. Run due east."
Fayin's voice came in broken pieces between sobs: "Vera... I can't... I can't leave you here alone..."
"Your staff is gone. You want to stay and be dead weight?"
Vera's sudden bark caught Fayin like a hand around her throat. Not a word would come; only the tears kept rolling, and would not stop.
"I'm sorry, Fayin." Vera pulled the girl, shaking like a startled animal, into his arms and kissed her. Her tear-blurred eyes fluttered.
When the kiss ended, Vera looked at her calmly and said it again: "Be good. Take Fayling and leave, right now. Yes?"
"Mm..." Fayin nodded through her pain, and at Vera's urging, gathered up her sister and ran for the rear gate.
High above, a vampire in bat form, emboldened by the death of every magic tower, was already gliding unchallenged over the fortress.
Amid all that chaos, his eye found the fleeing Fayin at once.
True, the Duke had decreed before they set out that this assault would take no captives, no survivors. But surely, savoring the prey a little before the kill would delay nothing of consequence.
And a fragile little girl like this one would surely offer up the most exquisite screams.
Prey chosen, he wasted no more time and dove.
Close.
Closer.
He could see her trembling shoulders. He could hear her stumbling steps!
A blinding white light cleaved in from the side, too fast for any reaction. By the time he registered it, the light had already passed through his body.
The bat's silhouette split down the middle. The transformation spell shattered, and the vampire, cut through at the waist, fell screaming from the sky.
Vera, having crossed past the bat in the air, landed on a low rooftop. Pure light rippled along his saber. The fresh blood on the edge boiled away into threads of red vapor, seared clean by the glow, and vanished into the air.
Vera looked up, confirmed no other demon was giving chase after Fayin, then sheathed his saber, dropped low, and made for the gate on the side the Empire's assault was coming from.
Every fortress worthy of the name is built from countless compound defensive magic arrays, nested layer upon layer.
Without magic's reinforcement, the tallest wall is nothing but a mound of earth that takes a bit of extra effort to climb, with no defensive value worth mentioning.
And Lar Fortress, most of its runes eaten away by the Mist, was at this moment exactly that kind of hollow shell.
Less than ten minutes after Levi gave the order, the battle line had already been pushed from the walls into the fortress interior.
Levi listened to the fighting inside, but did not enter at once. Instead he turned back toward the center of his army.
There stood an enormous monolith of dark gray stone, some twenty meters long, its surface dense with cryptic runes, strange phantom numbers drifting in the air around it.
Sixteen heavy iron chains stretched from its base, drawn forward by eight powerful war beasts.
As the sounds of slaughter rolled out of the city, the phantom runes on the monolith flickered without pause.
Levi summoned his adjutant. "I'm leaving you half the army. Whatever happens, protect the coffin. If the coffin is damaged, I'll butcher you myself before the Demon King ever gets his chance to deal with me! Understood?"
The adjutant snapped rigid. "Yes, my lord! I will guard the coffin with my life!"
Levi spared him no further glance and spurred his war beast toward the fortress gate.
The gate already stood wide open, and Levi rode straight through. The clamor of battle had been pressed deep into the fortress; both sides of the street were collapsed buildings and the freshly dead, and the air hung thick with the smell of blood.
But Levi had not ridden far when a figure burst from a corner. The commander of Lar Fortress.
"Blood-drinking rat! Leave your head behind!"
He was bathed head to foot in blood, his armor in pieces, but his eyes burned with a light close to madness.
No surprise crossed Levi's face, though. A long spear congealed out of blood and caught the falling war-blade solidly.
"Not bad, that concealment technique. Hiding inside a battlefield soaked in blood, genuinely a fine idea." Levi's voice was unhurried. "But that only fools the juniors. That roaring flood of blood and vigor inside you? I sensed it from miles away!"
"I'll kill you all the same!" Veins bulged across the commander's face, as though he'd swallowed some potential-burning drug.
The drug boiled through him. His muscles swelled a full size, and his blade fell heavier than before.
Sadly, none of it could bridge the gap between them.
Blood-light flared on the point of Levi's spear, and blade and commander were blasted away together.
The body punched through half a stone wall and crashed into the roadside ruins. Rubble clattered down after him and buried him completely.
Levi flicked a hand at the personal guards behind him. "Go. Dig him..."
He never finished. White light blazed at his back, so bright it was as if someone had plucked the noon sun out of the sky and stuffed it into this narrow lane.
"What?!"
Vera's saber came sweeping in, and up until that instant, Levi had sensed no trace of him whatsoever.
Fortunately, ambushed or not, Levi was still the faster. In a flash he sheathed his right arm in blood and barred it before the blade, while the blood spear in his left hand stabbed out at a vicious angle. Launched second, landing first!
The spearpoint ran Vera's chest through and burst out his back in a spray of blood. Yet the saber in his hands did not waver by so much as a hair.
The white light swept onward. The congealed blood vambrace tore like paper, and the edge pushed on toward Levi's throat.
Impossible!
His blood-crystal vambrace could take a full-strength blow from a hall-level warrior. This human, whose blood and vigor ran even a shade weaker than that commander's just now... by what right?
Levi had no time to reason it out, because the edge had already touched the skin of his neck.
In that instant between life and death, the pendant at his chest detonated into a mass of thick, pale blue slime.
The slime squeezed out of the pendant, shoved Levi backward, gummed up the blade's path, and bought him one more instant.
Levi dared not hesitate. His body burst apart from within, becoming countless streams of blood that shot away toward his army's lines.
Vera's saber caught only one of the streams. The rest flew far and re-congealed into Levi's swaying figure.
Only then did the personal guards' attacks arrive, everything they had dumped onto Vera at once, blasting him into the collapsed ruins.
Levi heaved for breath. He looked down at his right arm, severed clean at the elbow, then raised his eyes to that heap of rubble and gave the order with a tremor still in his chest: "Charge! Kill them!"
Only, the guards found no Vera in the ruins. Even the fortress commander from before had vanished without a trace, and everywhere hung nothing but the endless stench of blood.
Levi did sense the ghost of a trail. But wounded as gravely as he was, he had no appetite for a fight to the death, and in the end could only watch that faint trace fade into nothing.
Lar Fortress fell. No one was surprised.
Levi did not halt the army to nurse his wounds. They passed straight over Lar Fortress and drove along the inner side of the new defense line, toward the next node city.
The withdrawn mist surged back in on its cycle. With nothing left to stop it, it swallowed Lar Fortress, swallowed Levi's army, and rolled onward toward the next node city.
And within the mist, the runes on the coffin flowed, holding open a pocket of safety for the Empire's army. The incoming mist parted to either side and flowed around them.
When the mist ebbed and the next node city's defenses lay paralyzed, Levi would smash it too, without spending the effort it takes to blow away dust!
Meanwhile, due east of Lar Fortress, the commander dragged the gravely wounded, unconscious Vera along, swearing a blue streak as the pursuing mist rolled over them both.
No one knows how much later it was that the two half-dead men were picked up by a team of fat otaku Puchis that had originally been hauling supplies to Lar Fortress...
By the time the pair woke inside a fat otaku Puchi's belly and pushed open the seam beneath its cap, the walls of the Mushroom Capital were already visible in the distance.
The commander of Lar Fortress gave a bitter laugh and clapped Vera on the shoulder. "Tough kid. We actually lived. You don't even know. While you were out, the mist caught up to us, and I thought we were finished! Lucky for me, the scenario I drew was one of my old bandit-hunting days!
Damn it all, the fortress lost... my troubles are only beginning..."
"Hss!" Vera flinched from the slap and hunched his shoulder away. He looked out at the view, puzzled, then back at the man. "Sorry, but... who are you?"
"Huh? You little..." The commander gazed at the blank-faced young man before him with something close to pity. "Knocked stupid after all. Who knows if that can even be treated..."
(End of Chapter)
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