(Sorry guys, a thief broke into my house and stole a lot of stuff, please be a little patient until i recover a bit. thank you)
The Nen training was grueling. Training that made one prepare for death continued daily. The master did not ease up, and he desired that too. He was aware that for his untalented self to master even a fraction of Nen, half-hearted training would not be enough.
Days of training that a normal human spirit could not possibly endure. However, for him, it was still a comfortable environment.
The master and his senior disciples understood his constitution. The quality of the aura emitting from his body brought disgust to others. It was something like a congenital disorder, and not entirely his own fault.
He had thought that his existence was not needed by the world. He was able to realize that error.
However, even after going through hellish training, his timidity could not be corrected, and finally, the master gave up on him too. He was deemed to have completed "half" of the Shingen-Ryu curriculum and was kicked out of the dojo.
He returned to being a rootless wanderer, but he had found something he wanted to do. In the past, he probably couldn't have even imagined an ideal. He held a dream. It was to become a Shingen-Ryu acting master.
An acting master is one given the qualification to instruct students. Proof that one is recognized by the founder of Shingen-Ryu and current grandmaster, Isaac Netero, and permitted to inherit the essence. To obtain it, not only ability but also the capacity to correctly guide disciples is required. It was not a status someone like him, who hadn't even completed the training properly, could become.
Still, someday. He wanted to become a human who could guide someone.
The encounter with martial arts changed his life, in which he had previously found no value. The master who picked him up from the depths of darkness back then was a hero to him. If there was someone looking down just like him, he wanted to tell them. If you lift your face a little, a world you never imagined spreads out before you.
Enlisting in the military to go to the Dark Continent was also his decision. There, too, he gained irreplaceable comrades.
And he lost many comrades. Before he knew it, he was looking down again.
The one who taught him that he shouldn't keep his head down forever was a single girl. That girl he met in the Dark Continent was overflowing with talent for Nen, incomparable to himself. Yet, greedily seeking knowledge and skill, she said she wanted to become his disciple.
He knew well that those words were not a lie. He realized with a start. The forgotten dream revived vividly in his heart. He finally remembered the obvious: he couldn't die here.
When he lifted his face, his comrades were there. The Captain, Chel, Toku, and Quinn. He must not lose anyone else. He realized that not a single one of them could be missing.
That was why when they were chased by the Worm, when Quinn fell, when Gragg stayed behind to hold the line, he also remained in that spot. It wasn't an action he thought about. He did it naturally.
His actions from there were a blur; he didn't even remember what he said. Before he realized it, he had punched Gragg with all his might. Actually, that was his first experience punching another person in earnest. It contained anger toward Gragg for trying to sacrifice himself without permission, but since he was trying to do the same thing, he was in no position to talk.
He intends to become a decoy to let his comrades escape. The information he conveyed to Gragg was not false. There were reactions of over several dozen enemies. He arrived at that location.
There was a giant red crystal. The remains of the Worm killed by Quinn's attack were left there. It was certainly dead. But "inside" it, he sensed a writhing swarm of malice.
As if a pupa were hatching, it revealed its form. Cracks appeared in the crystal body. From the widely shattered rift, two pairs of wings burst out.
He sensed it with 'En'. Butterflies or moths? The larva (Worm) had changed its form to the adult insect to survive. No, this was not the metamorphosis of a single life. It was proliferation. A massive number of butterflies were about to take flight.
Could he stop all of this? No matter how much resolve he had, he had to say no. His body trembled with fear, his breathing was irregular and disordered, and the blood drained from his head. Calling himself a decoy was presumptuous. He couldn't move even a single finger, standing frozen on the spot. By now, the only thing keeping him standing was the single will to protect his comrades.
What did he come this far for? He couldn't move as if his body were no longer his own.
A gust of wind softly passed by him as he stood rigid. No, that was not wind.
"'Sacrificial Cradle (Rotten Egg)'."
Light filled the area, piercing through from outside the tightly closed walls. On the back of his eyelids, he saw his own lifeblood. There was a red, pulsating network of life.
A maximal flash burned his vision. His eardrums ruptured first, but the roar traveled through his bones and shook his brain.
The light subsided, revealing a forest with improved visibility. In the shadows of those trees, one, two... five butterflies that I failed to finish off remained. I thought I had certainly caught them within the range of the ray, but how did they escape? The reason became clear immediately.
Tubes protruded in all directions from the butterflies' bodies, and from there, they were jetting out poison smoke with tremendous force. That created propulsion like a jet engine, and they flew around mastering rapid acceleration and sudden braking. They had none of the elegance of fluttering butterflies.
Their wings had eyeball patterns just like the Worm. As expected, they also possessed the parasitic ability that infects just by looking. Because of that, I was forced to restrict the network of 'Mental Synchronization' and couldn't use 'Thought Processing'.
Because I used 'Sacrificial Cradle', my stock of eggs had dropped below half. Since I used it in a pressing situation, my mental concentration didn't go well, and I lost more eggs than usual. In exchange, the power increased, so perhaps I was able to defeat many enemies.
The butterflies came out from inside the Worm I had turned into a cactus. Rather than the Worm changing its form, perhaps they were something like its children. Did they escape aggravation because they were separate organisms?
I wouldn't know if the 'Erosion Machine Bullets' would work unless I hit them, but it was difficult to snipe butterflies that moved quickly and flew in zigzags as if to toy with me in the first place. It was even more troublesome because they scattered smoke screens of poison to block my vision.
And the biggest problem was the "pressure" the enemy emitted. They had used intimidation with hallucinogenic effects since they were a Worm, but it had been further strengthened since becoming butterflies.
My body was heavy. I couldn't think of this as a hallucination. It was hard to move, as if gravity had increased. Since just five of them had this much effect, I didn't know what would have happened if I hadn't wiped them out with 'Sacrificial Cradle'.
In addition to that, the enemy seemed to possess some powerful means of attack. They had shattered that red metal to come out of the shell. Although it was more brittle than the main body's armor reinforced with aura, it wasn't a material fragile enough to be broken so easily by a single entity.
They weren't opponents I could win against easily. While I was pondering how to fight, the butterflies, having finished scattering the smoke screen, began to hide their presence one after another.
They weren't hiding. They were fleeing. Considering the attack I had just unleashed, that action wasn't strange. Their presence was moving away.
If they just ran away, that would be fine. However, that direction matched where Chel and the others had headed. According to Katroi, the Worm possessed the ability to sense the Return fragment Chel held from a long distance. It would be bad if they headed that way.
Katroi stopped me as I tried to run to chase after them. His hand was placed on top of Quinn's head.
"---"
He seemed to say something, but Quinn, whose ears were damaged, couldn't hear it. Leaving a single, short word, he slowly walked forward.
Aura swirled up from his body as if erupting. A terrifying distortion where something was fatally misaligned. A presence of muddy aura that made nausea well up spread out like contamination.
Was he really Katroi? I couldn't think of him as anything but a different person. It was a quantity and quality of aura that was too excessive for a single human to emit.
That aura stirred up revulsion. Like a moth to a flame, it drew in all hatred.