(Benimaru POV)
"Soei, what do you think?" I turned to my shadow, from which a Soei Replication popped out.
"It's not the real Charybdis. It seems that Clayman must have had a sample of the beast's body taken for insurance when he unleashed it upon Tempest." Soei reported.
"I agree. Lord Rimuru entirely consumed the original. This one seems to be an entirely new monster born from its essence. Something of a clone. Barely has any soul at all. Lady Risa would be overjoyed to see something like this." I let out a little chuckle, just imagining the overjoyed look on Risa's face if she saw this thing.
"You're right." Soei's lips curved upward into a ghost of a smile, but only for a second. "Too bad we have to kill it."
"Unfortunately, if we leave it…"
"It'll destroy everything." Soei finished for me.
'Report…' Just as I prepared to kill the beast with a Hellflare, a monotone voice told me something interesting telepathically. I recognized that voice, though I hadn't heard it much. Apparently, it was Lord Rimuru's Ultimate Skill, Isis.
Shortly after his evolution to Demon Lord, Lord Rimuru admitted to me that Isis was beginning to grow into something beyond a skill, something sentient, but I was still shocked to hear what it just proposed to me.
Still, Isis was a part of Lord Rimuru. If it wanted me to do something, then I wasn't going to turn it down.
I pulled something out of my pocket and casually tossed it at the whale.
The beast had already been releasing massive amounts of magicules and tearing into the surroundings in a mindless rage, so it wasn't a particular shock to me that the Charybdis fragment took notice of the thing that I'd thrown mid-flight, and released a devastating blast of magicule energy from its single eye. An attack that I'd seen before. Charybdis's most powerful attack. Even I wasn't sure if I was capable of taking that head-on, at least from the original version.
When the blast came into contact with what I'd thrown, it completely engulfed it. For a moment, I honestly believed that the orb had been destroyed.
Then:
"GWAGGGHHHRRRAGGHEEEYAAAH!!" Apparently, gigantic whales can scream. And this one did. An ear-splitting, heart-wrenching moan filled with nothing but pure anguish, as its body was enveloped in a dazzling white light, forcing everyone below to look away.
When the light subsided, the Charybdis fragment was gone. Just completely vanished. In its place, two humanoid beings fell nearly thirty feet, landing on the ground below with a loud double BANG.
…
(3rd POV)
A fall of thirty feet was nothing to a high-ranking magic-born like Yamza, but the force was more than enough to wake him up from whatever strange dream he'd been having.
Actually, it'd been more like a nightmare. One that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life, complete with glowing poison orbs, gigantic whales, and a strange feeling that he was only alive right now because someone didn't like leaving a project unfinished.
But that didn't matter to Yamza right now. All he could tell was that he needed to leave immediately. To Yamza, the only thing that mattered right now was his own survival.
Which meant that he needed to flee. He could instinctively tell that his soul wasn't connected to Clayman's anymore. He wasn't under the effect of any of Clayman's weird subordinate-controlling skills anymore. If Yamza wanted to be free, then he needed to leave this battlefield now. There wasn't any obligation left to keep him here, after all.
But he knew that wasn't going to be so easy. He was on a hellish battlefield full of true monsters, and he was the losing general. To leave, he needed leverage.
Then, he saw it. A young girl, sitting in the middle of the battlefield in a purple dress, looking confused.
And made the worst decision of his life.
With a shout, Yamza raced toward the out-of-place young girl and grabbed her by the collar, leveling his claw at her throat. She was his hostage before anyone could stop him.
Alvis and her Lycanthropeers would never dare to stop his fleeing now. They protected their own, and this little girl definitely wasn't one of his. A solid strategy.
But before he could get more than two steps, the girl's mouth opened.
"I don't like you."
It was a childish declaration. One that Yamza's first reaction was to ignore. He didn't care what his hostage thought of him, after all. Only that she became his ticket out of this hell.
But it was also judgement. An irreversible, absolute death sentence.
Yamza's hand, against the girl's neck, was affected first. It began with a slow twinge of pain, which quickly became an intense burning sensation as the skin quickly turned white with pus, then red with blood, before exploding into a mist. Yamza screamed in pain, dropping the girl, but it was too late.
The burning of each of his individual cells, first turning inside out, before imploding in on themselves in a cascading effect like poison continued, regardless of whether he was actually touching the girl or not. His forearm exploded next, then his elbow and bicep as the effect sped up. Before long, his entire torso was gone, the effect spreading quickly to his other arm, neck, and legs. By then, he was already dead, but the gravitic implosion of his body continued, cell by cell, until the corpse was gone.
Once the corpse was gone, a tall samurai with shocking red hair and two white horns on his head walked up to the little girl and crouched down, extending his hand to ruffle her hair. "What's your name, little one?" He asked.
"...Chia." She replied.
"Okay, Chia. Would you like to watch the battle wrap up from a better vantage point?" Benimaru asked her.
"Umu!" She nodded rapidly.
Benimaru hefted the little girl onto his shoulders before vanishing through Spatial Motion, reappearing on a nearby cliff that allowed the two to see almost all of the battlefield at once.