There was nothing left to say.
What a pure battle brought was the most absolute, most primal slaughter.
After a brief moment to catch their breath, the twin-headed dragon and the adventurers moved almost as one. Gareth cast aside the great shield that had long since caved in and shattered, took up the massive axe in his hands, and, together with the scorching blood aura erupting from Tiona beside him, swung straight at the boss.
This thing's [Stats] were so absurd that even a glancing hit from its attacks could cause a grievous wound.
They had to stay alert every moment, dodging its blows.
Just so.
By all rights, the enemy should have held the initiative completely, but fortunately the boss's [Endurance] was not high either, and so the group could tie it down by force through the simple act of pressing the attack.
Under Haruhime's magic, adventurers boosted to Lv.8 dealt attacks that even the twin-headed dragon couldn't afford to ignore.
One careless moment and it, too, could die, which made this a genuinely fair fight.
Of course, for Gareth this kind of battle was very much a matter of poor compatibility. He was the sort renowned for [Endurance] and [Defense], the one who stood guard at the very front of his companions.
When facing high-intensity foes, existences like a Monster Rex.
Gareth could plant himself at the very front through sheer toughness, holding the party's formation together.
But an enemy like the one before him was truly troublesome for him.
Even the similar special Monsters and bosses he had faced before had never possessed attack power and destructive force this ridiculous.
Yet what adventurers did best was adapt.
Because the ones who couldn't adapt were long dead. Over the course of this fight, Gareth had already found the things he could do.
Still standing at the very front, still facing head-on the monstrous, terrifying Monster before him.
Gareth gripped his massive axe. The heavy, fortress-like armor that once covered him had already shattered across most of his body, and the helmet that had once fully enclosed his face was now reduced to a few scraps clinging around the edge of his dwarven beard, laying bare his tangled brown-yellow hair and the great beard characteristic of a dwarf.
Oddly enough, the shattering of his armor left his body feeling far lighter.
He stood his ground with steady calm, facing a boss far larger than himself, saying nothing, only swinging the massive axe in his hands over and over, hacking at the enemy's vitals.
Gareth's Endurance was high, but in truth his Strength was no less formidable.
Even an ordinary swing of his weapon.
The tremendous kinetic force born of pure Strength was enough to tear the air, releasing an ear-splitting, screaming crack.
"Bang!"
It was as if a gale had slammed directly into some unimaginably hard object, then detonated right beside the ear.
But even with such a din to distract him.
Gareth remained astonishingly composed, staring straight at the boss before him, and then watching as it raised a fist toward him, about to bring it crashing down.
The techniques of close combat were simple enough to describe, nothing more than dodging, countering, blocking—
But because the enemy's [Stats] were so preposterous, even blocking was now off the table, which turned this into a kind of pure game of tag.
Make certain that every one of its blows failed to land on you, and, at the same time, seize the chance to strike back!
It sounded simple.
But doing it was maddeningly hard, and all the more so for Gareth.
His body wasn't agile enough, so he had to move with the smallest possible motions, striving each time to slip past the enemy's attack by a hair's breadth.
All he felt was the dragon-man's fists and feet grazing along the side of his body, again and again.
The heavy armor upon him.
It was in the course of these relentless blows that—unable to withstand the enemy's biting killing intent and the gale it dragged along—it was scraped and torn to pieces.
And yet even so, Gareth still stood his ground.
Like an immovable mountain.
With that plain, unadorned technique, he swung his massive axe at the enemy, one blow after another. For both sides, the situation was the same.
And Gareth was gratified that so many companions still stood beside him, helping. On his own, he would have gone down long ago.
What was more.
What the old dwarf never would have expected was that Tiona—the foolish-looking, dim-witted kid who usually seemed so silly—was the cleverest one of them all at this moment.
Mm—Tiona's combat intelligence was genuinely no small thing. The Amazon girl simply lacked common sense, but at the things she excelled in she could perform superbly on instinct alone, and once she put her little mind to work, she became even more formidable.
Right now.
Tiona had seized on the key to the fight, the very thing the twin-headed dragon feared most.
And that was its limbs.
As a humanoid boss, once it lost its arms and legs its combat strength would plummet drastically—an obvious truth.
And so, every one of Tiona's attacks now aimed at the enemy's most fragile joints.
Wrists, knees, shoulders… even if the dragon-man's claws, capable of splitting gold and cracking stone, were themselves top-grade [first-tier armaments], its body could not possibly be that hard and unstoppable in every single part.
That was the inevitable weakness of a humanoid.
At the same time, Tiona had cleverly transformed her means of attack into a longsword that sought only to sever—rather than the surging, gushing blood aura that once dealt sweeping, explosive area damage, or her ever-hammering twin fists.
The girl's title was [Great Slasher].
That in itself meant that, compared to bare-handed attacks, her skill with weapons was no worse—or more precisely, her ability to learn to use any weapon was extraordinarily high.
In the Amazon girl's hands, the pair of massive vambraces originally forged by Cecil—and the fist-blades that extended from them, able to be drawn out and joined together to form what was called Urga—had already vanished.
In their place.
Was a blood-red longsword compressed to the utmost extreme.
This was a new technique the girl had devised herself, modeled on the way Isagi and the others commanded their magic power—something that could also be regarded as a kind of new ability.
The longsword was composed purely of blood aura, and could in a sense be viewed as a [magic weapon].
Through ceaseless compression and shaping, Tiona had given it the form of the weapon favored by the swordsmen of the Far East.
There was a reason she made it this way.
Because it felt natural in her hand.
During this stretch of time, Tiona had also been learning the swordsmanship of the Far East from Ryuu, and even from Kaguya.
In days past the Amazon girl had fought almost entirely on instinct.
Though there were so-called teachers back in the warrior country, they were less instructors of combat methods than the big sisters who looked after her daily life, and the targets she trained against.
Telskyura had no such thing as inherited tradition. Every warrior grew stronger relying solely on their own instinct for battle and the experience of life-and-death struggle.
But the swordsmanship of the Far East was different.
Over the centuries, refined and honed by countless masters and enriched by their spoken insights, it had been shaped into an exquisitely intricate craft.
And without question, the swordsmanship Kaguya of the Gojou House had learned—she who had served as the nation's mightiest instrument of force—was among the strongest in all the Far East.
When Tiona first began learning it, she even felt as though her eyes had been opened to a whole new world.
After all.
It was where she once more sensed something close to Ais's swordsmanship—the golden-haired girl's technique was a transcendent, otherworldly thing, impossible even to learn. Tiona had once tried to imitate it, but she could never grasp the essence, and in the end could only give up.
And Ais didn't know how to teach it to anyone either. After all, she herself only mimicked, from the depths of memory and even from her body's own instinct, the figure of her father at his daily training long ago.
And so, throughout this time, Tiona had kept up her training under Ryuu and Kaguya—
The longsword made no sound.
It left only a streak of deep crimson blood-light across the azure ice.
At the utmost speed, Tiona once more scattered herself into countless motes of blood mist—dispersing, gathering, then swinging her blade at the boss.
Each time, she disrupted the enemy at precisely the right instant.
Whether it was the moment the boss was about to strike Gareth, or the moment it needed to defend against attacks from her other companions.
The Amazon girl had even learned the tactic Ais so often used—circling around the enemy's whole body, exploiting the advantages of flight and high speed to launch a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree encircling assault.
The effect was immediate.
The blood blade in the girl's hands kept striking at the boss's limb joints, forcing it to wrench its body around to defend and dodge.
Though she hadn't actually managed to sever its arms and legs, she had indeed thrown the enemy's fighting rhythm into serious disarray.
And that was enough!
Because she still had her companions!!
The radiance of magic rose and fell across the azure ice.
Scorching flame, frost-white ice arrows, blinding orbs of light—countless spells converged, surged, and, directed by the two Elf women, came raining down on the boss from every angle.
Lefiya and Riveria worked in perfect accord.
Their lips had not stopped moving since the fight began, and their minds were spinning at breakneck speed.
Observing the state of the battlefield, releasing spells and preparing the next spells they would need—whether to attack, or to defend, or to heal in advance a companion who might be about to take damage—
A mage was usually the linchpin of an adventurer party.
For all-rounders like Riveria and Lefiya, serving as a mere gun turret was only the most basic of functions.
They were utterly versatile.
Defense, healing, and damage were all within their means.
The only thing they needed was exactly this—companions who would keep the distant boss tied down at all times, so it couldn't spare any attention for their side.
And the two of them had indeed not betrayed their companions' trust and expectations.
At this moment.
Without needing to speak of it, both Lefiya and Riveria were preparing a lethal spell.
It had been said in the earlier fighting.
For a mage, the truly most troublesome kind of enemy was in fact the sort whose speed was unbelievably fast.
Not only because such an enemy's excessive speed could easily pose a threat to them.
There was another reason as well: magical bombardment was extremely difficult to land on such a foe—unless their companions helped arrange things in meticulous detail.
Of course.
By now Lefiya and Riveria were long past being ordinary mages, and they had plenty of experience dealing with this kind of enemy.
At this moment, the two Elf women had already formed their plan, and the key to everything lay with Ais at their side.
The girl wreathed in a faint golden breeze now drifted along the edge of the battlefield.
She had not joined Gareth and Tiona in besieging the Monster, and the reason was that, ever since Finn went down, she was the only one who could protect the rear guard.
She had to keep her whole focus sharp at every instant.
To keep Riveria, Lefiya, and Haruhime from being struck by the boss.
But by the same measure.
She was also aiding the old dwarf and the Amazon girls up front in her own way.
Within the vast cavern, a wind blew without cease.
It let both Gareth and Tiona clearly feel their own bodies growing lighter—every motion, whether attack, defense, or dodge, came more readily to hand.
By contrast, the boss's side naturally seemed far more [Heavy].
The wind hindered the dragon-man's every movement.
Even if only a little—but as one side gained while the other lost, in a fight like this it was already enough.
And beyond that, Ais still had more to do.
The girl brought out the weapons meant for hunting Great Dragons, and then, through the bombardment of the gun-lance and the bolts of the great crossbow, provided ceaseless ranged support.
But the effect was clearly mediocre.
Weapons designed against Great Dragons were plainly a poor choice against a high-speed humanoid Monster.
It was obvious that if Ais the assassin wanted to make herself useful, the only way was to advance with the [Sword of Despair] in hand.
Or else—
[Use that.]
Ais was still somewhat unwilling, or rather afraid. She still feared that power—the supreme, mightiest Black Wind buried deep within her own heart, capable of devouring all things and destroying everything.
The brilliant golden radiance wreathing the girl began to dim.
At the same time, Ais herself underwent an indescribable change—first, a vast sense of strangeness that even the distant Riveria could perceive.
And then…
Terror, dread, and a bone-deep cold.
When a person faced a mighty existence, this was the only thing they could feel—something simple and utterly pure.
An immense pressure came surging down without warning.
This was because Ais still hadn't fully mastered the brand-new power she possessed, so that when it selected its targets, it swept even her own companions into its shroud.
Fortunately the girl quickly noticed this and made her adjustment.
And so the black wind-pressure began to converge upon the distant boss, like a pair of invisible pitch-black hands starting to close.
"Gareth, Tiona, both of you get clear."
Ais intended to shoulder the vanguard's duty alone. Right now, the power welling up from the depths of her heart gave her confidence enough.
[I can do it.]
Because the self of this very moment was strong to a truly terrifying degree!
Gareth and Tiona harbored no doubt at all. The instant Ais spoke they pulled back and withdrew, and then they saw the sky-blotting darkness swallow the twin-headed dragon standing on the ice in a single stroke.
An indescribable, immense pressure bore down, until every bone and every drop of blood within their bodies trembled.
The Black Wind granted Ais the ability to suffer no magic damage whatsoever.
But that was only one part of it.
The girl who had once dwelt within a Nightmare fought purely on instinct alone.
And now, Ais meant to master this power completely. She would take this darkness from the very end of all things, mighty enough to destroy the world, and turn it wholly into her own strength!
____
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