TL/ED – Miso

When anger builds past a certain point, one’s heart would instead turn cold.

It’s a fairly well-known saying. But surely this wasn’t what it meant.

“…?”

I frowned, uncomfortable at the physical coldness spreading through my heart.

My chest was filling with some kind of chill. While I was puzzling over what on earth it was, Aksha looked down at his own crushed arms and let out a sigh.

“What kind of monsters is the empire raising, honestly.”

“That’s not really something you should be saying.”

When I gathered Water Pressure once more, this time to crush his legs as well, he panicked and leapt dozens of steps backward.

Then he pulled a whistle from inside his coat and put it to his lips.

“Oh no you don’t.”

I crushed the whistle instantly, but-

-Shreeeeeeeeek!

A sound sharp enough to rupture eardrums rang through the entire Lighthouse.

I frowned. Behind the broken whistle I could see his upper body, grotesquely swollen.

So the whistle had just been a feint. Still, even if reinforcements came in this situation, nothing would change.

He seemed to know that too, giving a bitter smile as he slid his dagger back away.

“This is a bit much. I figured at most someone like the princess’s right-hand man would show up. I wasn’t counting on a monster who crushes a man’s arms just by looking at them.”

“Are you begging for your life now?”

“Begging? Pointless. I’ve heard it thousands of times myself, and not once have I ever listened… see!”

-Crunch!

As he shook his arm, the pulped limb gradually began to restore itself.

A regeneration close to a miracle. At first I suspected magic, or perhaps some hidden elixir.

But the moment I saw the fully healed arm, its skin tone different from the rest of his body, I couldn’t help but frown.

“…That, don’t tell me-”

“Sorry for the lie. For all that our organization is old and decrepit, we’re actually pretty good at adopting new things. Knights, Fallen, whatever, if we can use it, we’ll use it.”

He wasn’t a mage but a simple Assassin. Naturally, he couldn’t Fall.

Instead, it seemed he’d used some other method to borrow a Fallen’s power remotely.

Letting out a hollow laugh of disbelief, I clenched the empty air.

“Lucky you. Now I’ve got something to ask before I kill you.”

“That’s interesting. Same here!”

Aksha stamped hard on the ground.

Of course, inside the Deep Sea, such a movement meant nothing. At that very moment, I already had him by the throat.

Since I couldn’t kill him, I put in just enough pressure to knock him out. Without a trace of hesitation, he sliced through his own neck.

“What…?!”

A literal decapitation. The sharp dagger cut through a human neck as though it were nothing more than tofu.

Even then, he didn’t die. Still holding his own head, he backed away dozens of steps and tried to fling himself from the Lighthouse to escape.

Wait, that works too? Suppressing my incredulity, I caught him with Current Sense.

If cutting off his head didn’t kill him, then I’d crush his legs instead.

-Crunch!

“Tch, your reach is something…!”

-Slice!

Useless, as expected. Apparently unable even to feel pain, he sliced off his own legs with a grin on his face and plunged into the lake.

He immediately began swimming, heading for Lumia. I nearly jumped in after him, then quietly gritted my teeth.

‘Damn.’

I couldn’t approach Lumia while the Deep Sea was manifested.

With the Deep Sea manifested, I was effectively a walking mass of disaster. Just as thought grew sluggish the closer one got to Decay, an ordinary person coming near me would slowly begin to be crushed. The way people froze to death around Decay.

Even now, I could feel the air growing progressively thicker. I’d tossed Lumia down beneath the Lighthouse for her safety, but apparently that hadn’t been such a good choice.

No matter how I restrained and blocked my opponent, if he was willing to discard body parts like a lizard to reach Lumia, I had no choice but to let him close the distance.

And that wasn’t even the only problem.

[Look! There’s something happening at the Lighthouse!]

[Communications? Still no response?]

[Yes, command says to move out for now…]

The soldiers, alerted to trouble by the whistle, had begun to approach.

They weren’t exactly a threat. Ordinary soldiers, however many came, would just end up crushed to death.

But…

‘That’s quite a lot of them.’

Several hundred at a rough estimate.

I had prepared myself to kill people, but I hadn’t envisioned a slaughter on this scale.

With the Deep Sea manifested, controlling my force would be difficult, so killing them all was the only answer. It would probably be an unprecedented massacre.

‘…’

On the other hand, if I withdrew the Deep Sea here and let Lumia be taken? There was a high chance war would break out. And then, instead of hundreds, at least thousands of people would die.

In the end, it came down to simple arithmetic.

The difference between sacrificing hundreds and killing thousands.

“…No choice, then.”

What I had to do was clear.

Kill the Assassin, wipe out those soldiers, then retreat with the injured Linmel.

In the end, there was no such thing as an easy choice. The peaceful resolution Lumia had hoped for would likely be difficult to achieve.

Watching them push through the lake like a swarm of ants, I braced myself and spread both hands wide.

-Rrrrrrrrrrumble…

[Wh-what? What’s wrong with the water?]

[There’s not a breath of wind…]

I needed to resolve the situation while affecting Lumia as little as possible.

I couldn’t afford to take much time, so I- seized hold of the lake itself.

The lake was undeniably vast. To a country bumpkin, it could pass for a small sea. That was how enormous it was.

But at some point, the range of my Current Sense and Current had already extended far beyond it.

[What in the world… is this?]

[It, it looks like he’s doing something over there…?]

[What kind of nonsense is that?! How could a human do such a thing!]

The flow of the lake began to swirl violently in one direction, unmistakable even to the untrained eye, building itself into a storm.

Only then did the soldiers grasp the situation.

That someone was moving the currents of this enormous lake.

[Th-that can’t be…]

My Current Sense read every expression on the faces of the men aboard the ships.

The faces of those who slowly realized the truth were filled with shock, terror, and despair.

One of them raised his head and looked up at the Lighthouse. Seeing me controlling the lake, he uttered the word.

[Monster…]

-Indeed, he wasn’t wrong.

Teeth clenched, just as I was about to literally upturn the lake-

“Jern.”

“…Linmel?”

The one who, moments ago, had been groaning on the ground from her injuries stood and blocked my path.

I could see the back of her head, a faint citrus scent drifting from it. She opened her mouth lightly, as if deciding on tonight’s dinner menu.

“Leave this to me.”

“What?”

At how matter-of-factly she’d said it, I asked again more carefully.

“What are you talking about? What do you think you can do alone?”

“I’ll rescue Lumia, bring down that Assassin, and keep those men from getting hurt, all at once. Jern, you just make us a way to get out safely.”

“…”

Her crisp, clear articulation left me speechless once again.

“But… you’re injured.”

“Mm. It does hurt a bit. My ribs are throbbing.”

“Even if you weren’t hurt, that Assassin is stronger than you.”

This wasn’t to say Linmel was weak.

Linmel was young. She hadn’t even been a Knight for very long.

For someone like that to defeat a member of the legendary assassin organization that had produced the Heaven’s Judgement Knights? Even buying time would be a miracle.

Young as she was, Linmel wasn’t shallow enough to spout nonsense in a situation like this.

“Do you have some kind of chance of winning?”

“I’m not really sure. But Jern, what you’re about to do, you don’t really want to do it, right?”

“…What?”

“Then I want to do it.”

She glanced lightly down below the Lighthouse, then drew her sword.

“And I think I can.”

She said it with a small smile.

It was a blank check, impossible to accept, backed by no guarantee whatsoever.

And yet in that smiling face there was- a bearing that suggested she could pull off anything she set her mind to.

‘If Linmel can just hold out for a little while…’

I turned it over in my head in a rush. If Linmel could protect Lumia and buy me even a tiny bit of time-

there was a way to avoid the massacre and still extract information about that Assassin.

In the end, I bowed my head and let out a sigh.

“…Ten minutes. I’ll be back within that time. Just hold out, however you can. Worst case, it’s fine if Lumia gets taken. Just stay alive.”

She looked fine on her feet, so her wounds seemed to have healed to some extent, and judging by how fast she could escape from Knights, if she gave it her all, the chances of her being caught by the Assassin seemed low.

Even so, it was a stupid call. Was it really right to send this young Knight up against that ruthless Assassin?

“Mm! I’ll have it all tidied up!”

…The words were so full of confidence they made my worry feel foolish.

***

Linmel watched as Jern slowly withdrew the Deep Sea and pulled back, then.

“Owowow…! It hurts like hell…! Urgh, uuurgh.”

she promptly collapsed and rolled across the floor.

The Assassin’s kicks had hit like cannon fire. On the outside she looked fine, but on the inside it felt as though she’d been reduced to pulp.

If she’d let any of that show, Jern wouldn’t have trusted her, so she’d had no choice but to pretend she was fine, and oh, how agonizing that had been.

‘…Still.’

Linmel steadied her aching stomach, rose to her feet, and smiled happily.

‘He trusted me.’

Wasn’t this the first time?

Jern trusting her, and asking for her help.

Her insides still cried out in pain. But after pulling herself together with a few deep breaths, Linmel leapt straight down into the lake.

-Splash! A huge plume of water rose up.

“S-something just jumped off the Lighthouse!”

“All units, prepare to fi…?!”

The soldiers on the boats, who had been waiting on standby, drew their bows and prepared to shoot whatever surfaced.

But it was wasted effort. She hadn’t sunk in the first place.

Walking gracefully across the water, Linmel approached the soldiers, who stood with their bows raised and dazed looks on their faces.

“…Shoot!”

-Fwsh fwsh fwsh!

A multitude of arrows flew at her.

But Linmel’s arm whipped about strangely like a lash, knocking every single one of them down without missing a shot.

“What the hell is that…?”

“Hoh, quite a level of skill.”

“?!”

Startled by the unfamiliar voice that had suddenly appeared behind him, the captain jerked around.

Sopping wet, Aksha paid him no mind, watching Linmel with interested eyes as he carelessly dumped the unconscious Lumia onto the deck.

“Hold onto her. If she gets taken, you die.”

“Y-yes?”

A soldier, shocked by the sight before him, asked again.

Aksha, for his part, walked across the water as if it were nothing, approached until he was within a sword’s swing of Linmel, and stopped.

Still standing, he looked down at Linmel glaring up at him and gave a crooked smile.

“Seeing Rakshasa’s techniques used like this takes me back.”

“My master taught me this technique.”

“Your master merely learned what we passed down to you. How much do you know about Rakshasa?”

“I don’t. Just that you’re a defunct assassin group.”

“Sharp tongue. Not wrong, either. But… with you among us, things might be different.”

“Hmm… I’d rather just die than join you.”

Watching her speak so boldly, Aksha smirked and drew his dagger.

“A foolish choice. Where’s that Fallen?”

“I don’t know. But if it’s Jern, he must be doing something impressive.”

“Oho, you’ll die before then.”

“I won’t die.”

Declaring this firmly, Linmel pointed her sword at Aksha’s neck.

She smirked back at him and tightened her grip.

“I’ve got a reason I can’t forgive you, you see.”

“…A survivor from a village I destroyed? Happens often enough. Avengers blinded by rage coming to find me.”

“-You made Jern do something he didn’t want to do.”

Linmel’s sword, swung lightly, traced an arc.

“…!?”

A Knight’s sword could be dodged, even pressed right against the neck: the smile that had been on Aksha’s face as he thought this vanished.

-Splurt! The Sword Path she had drawn twisted bizarrely, aiming precisely at his heart.

Having retreated several steps in the blink of an eye, Aksha found one of his feet dipping slightly into the lake.

With a dazed expression, he stared at his own heart for a moment.

The wound itself didn’t matter. It would heal anyway. But that Sword Form, that alone- had caught in his eye far too familiarly.

Aksha gritted his teeth and pressed her.

“You- this, did you learn it from your master…? No, that can’t be. No Heaven’s Judgement Knight could know this.”

“Oh?”

“That’s ours. How could you know our sword…”

“Hmm. Is that so?”

Watching Aksha’s face mount with rising fury, Linmel wore an expression of barely any interest.

“Guess you thought the same as me, then.”

“…What?”

“I also thought, if I did it this way it would be a little faster…? Harder to react to.”

Saying it almost in passing, Linmel gradually closed the distance between them.

Aksha glanced down at his own feet for a moment, noticing that her feet hadn’t been dampened by the water in the slightest.

On the top of his foot, a few droplets of water trembled.

“…”

Without a word, Aksha drew a second dagger from his waist.

‘A stupid idea.’

He had thought that if he took her along, raised her as an Assassin, nurtured her talent, she’d one day become his sharpest dagger. He wiped that delusion away.

He had to kill her. Right now.

Along with that thought, a violet liquid began to drip, drip from Aksha’s dagger.

But seeing that poison, Linmel only smiled.

“What’s so amusing?”

“That, it looks like it would really hurt if it hit me.”

“…Say what?”

Linmel closed her eyes and remembered Jern, up on the Lighthouse, looking down at the scene below.

“I’m glad it’s me facing you, and not Jern.”

The result of lying to Jern for the first time was…

rather satisfying.