Log Horizon - Volume 11 - Chapter 4.3

3 
A fierce exchange played out between Krusty’s group and the Nue, a beast that controlled electricity. 
At first, Krusty held Hua Diao, but when she spotted her chance, she got down and fled into the shadow of the rocks. She hadn’t abandoned the Immortal; she’d done it so that she wouldn’t get in his way as he fought. 
Master Immortal never let the pain show in his expression, but there was a wound in his side that never stopped bleeding. 
No matter how often they changed his bandages, the red seeped through. He said the wound was probably cursed. Master Immortal had smiled coldly, and come to think of it, his face had always looked pale and transparent. Hua Diao was afraid to be a burden to him. 
Of course, if Krusty was defeated, she was prepared to lose her own life as well. 
After all, there was really no way for her to oppose that monster with her own combat strength. With her short limbs, she didn’t even think she’d be able to run away. 
She’d always thought he was strong, but the Immortal’s fight was overwhelming. 
Every swing of his thick ax whipped up a tsunami of rubble, dirt, and sand that assailed the beast with the force of an angry roar. However, the Nue, a magical beast that was the color of darkness, was powerful, and even Krusty’s ferocious attacks didn’t seem to be doing much damage to it. 
The black-haired woman who’d appeared along with the Immortal launched fearsome attacks as well. While Krusty seemed to sink his roots solidly into the earth, swinging both arms around, attacking and defending with a mass of iron, her movements had a feline agility about them. She flew in, paid out several jabs or unleashed kicks, then drew an arc in midair. The way she moved was a little too rough to call a dance, but it was very beautiful. 
One more supporting member had joined the fight. 
It was Gumon, the wolf dog who’d always waited at Krusty’s feet. 
Certainly, the wolf had a splendid physique, and Hua Diao had thought that it would be terrible to get chewed on by her, but now that she saw her fighting this way, her strength was overwhelming. Her large frame didn’t even compare unfavorably to Krusty’s, and she slammed it against the enemy, moving as if she was creeping across the ground in that way unique to quadrupeds. She looked brutal, and even so, she was elegant, too. The fur on her back—a back Hua Diao had ridden on occasion—reflected the light, shining wetly; it looked like flowing mercury. 
“It went bwonnng! It seriously did! Bwonnng!” 
“Did it really, Miss Kanami? That’s a good noise.” 
Her punch seemed to have brought some kickback with it; the woman was shaking her hand and looking upset. 
“You’re kinda casually mean, aren’t you, Krus-Krus?! Are you discriminating against me because I’m me?” 
“You’re wearing gauntlets, so you should be fine.” 
“You just tacked that on like you thought it was a pain!” 
To her, it looked as though the two of them and the wolf dog were working together perfectly. Apparently, the woman was an old acquaintance, and from what the Immortal said, her name seemed to be Kanami. Unlike him, she wore an extremely thin ethnic costume, and she danced up to the magical beast like a whirlwind, then attacked. 
Could she be another Immortal? Hua Diao wondered. She felt an odd emotion, something between loss and disappointment. Since she was fighting alongside Krusty, there was a good possibility the woman was another Ancient. One of the few comrades who’d survived in this broken world. 
If she was, she would be someone Hua Diao was meant to serve, like Krusty. That struck her as a bit unfortunate. Although, if the woman was like Master Immortal, she might be good at making sweets— 
The thought made Hua Diao wonder if she was really that much of a glutton, and her cheeks flushed. 
“Tiger Echo Fist!!” 
Contrary to the sound of the attack’s name, Kanami unleashed a contact attack that was almost like a shoulder-centered body blow. As if it had taken damage from it, the beast—which must have weighed several hundred kilos—rose into the air for a moment and was knocked away, staggering. 
Gumon the wolf dog was waiting for it. Crouching low, she aimed for its vulnerable back legs, sinking her sharp fangs into its iron pelt. The Nue lost its balance entirely, and she dragged it another half step to inflict more pain, then adjusted her angle, correcting her attitude. 
Then, scattering the crimson light of mana around, Krusty attacked its defenseless neck. The bardiche, whose blade was more than fifty centimeters wide, fell like the blade of a guillotine. At that attack, even the beast set up a groaning wail. 
Master Immortal is so strong! 
Hua Diao did a little dance. 
However, she couldn’t state categorically that the fight would be a sweeping victory for them. 
True, from what she was seeing, it seemed to be trending in their favor. However, the Nue was no common beast. There was no telling where it had been hiding it, but with a flood of energy, it turned the tables in a rush, and several spheres of electricity surfaced, releasing a scorched stench into their surroundings. 
The two Adventurers shifted to evading, and no sooner had their attacks begun to have trouble connecting than its thick front paws, which had claws like forked spears, switched from jabbing to sweeping. The female martial artist was forced to dodge dramatically to avoid its sharp hooked claws. 
And more than anything, its neck—which had taken that unequaled attack from Master Immortal—was a problem. 
If it had taken an attack like that, even a big boulder would probably have been pulverized. There was no need to even think about what would have happened if Hua Diao had been its target (even if there had been a hundred of her, they would all have been laid out), but on the neck that had actually been the target, the fur around the wound was very lightly bloodied, and that was all. 
Hua Diao had no idea what sort of abilities this monster had, but even so, it was clear that one of its weapons was its absurd physical strength. And if that was the case, wouldn’t the Immortals’ group run through their strength soon and collapse? There were only three of them. The unease made Hua Diao quake. 
As it turned out, her guess wasn’t that far off the mark. 
To Hua Diao, the two Adventurers had looked as if they were fighting their battle with composure, but they didn’t actually have as much leeway as it seemed. 
After all, their opponent was a half-raid-rank monster. 
That meant that, properly speaking, twelve Adventurers with appropriate levels would have gathered and fought it together. The beast’s level was 84. The two of them had levels around 90, so it was slightly below their rank. 

Adventurers who had the help of phantasmals could fight monsters that were on their level, or a maximum of seven levels higher. For that reason, if Krusty’s subjugation team had been a regular group with twelve members, a level of 84 should have been fairly easy. It was precisely because of this level difference that Krusty’s group had been able to evade the monster’s attacks, parry them, and hold out this long. 
However, on the other hand, the fact that they only had a quarter of that regular number was critical. 
No matter how many combatants there were, defensive and evasive strengths didn’t change very much. However, attack power and endurance varied greatly depending on the number of people. Attacks were proportionate to the number of strikes, and endurance—in other words, MP—was proportionate to the number of team members. The result would be a future where Krusty and the others ran out of strength before they could finish off the Nue. Even if they kept successfully avoiding lethal attacks, fatigue and drained MP would cut down on the ways they could respond, and they’d be crushed like grains of wheat in a mortar. 
“I think I just remembered something, sort of!” 
“You’re late.” 
“Sorry for living on vague memories.” 
Even so, Kanami smiled merrily as she fought, and while Krusty grumbled, he left no openings. It wasn’t possible to sense that sort of despair from either of them. Hua Diao only watched them, fretting. 
“I guess all countries reuse raid bosses, huh?” 
“—I wonder about that. According to Hua Diao, this was a wolf-type dungeon set.” 
“So it’s not the boss for this place?” 
“I really couldn’t say. Well, it wouldn’t be odd.” 
Their laidback conversation was interrupted by a wide-range attack from the beast. 
The range of the flood of electricity had a radius of several dozen meters. The female Monk, operating on unfathomable logic, dodged that aggressive torrent, parrying it. It was Phantom Step, one of the Monk class’s abilities, but Hua Diao didn’t know that. 
Krusty—who had shrewdly slipped into the opening Kanami had created by disrupting the current, then negated the damage—whipped up dirt and sand with his bardiche, creating an impromptu defensive mound of soil. Gumon the wolf dog made use of it. 
Hua Diao wasn’t able to join their conversation, but she wanted to tell them, No, no, this is wrong; I don’t know anything about a monster like this. From what Hua Diao knew, Mount Lang Jun was connected to Mount Kunlun, a sacred place; it was a fairyland that existed to spread distant voices. It was said to be protected by an enormous wolf (just like Gumon) called Lang Jun, the wolf lord, not by this hideous monster with its raw red face. 
“I don’t know anything about this one.” 
When she shouted the words, Krusty, who’d heard, responded without turning around, raising his ax over his head as he did so: “Is that right?” She never could tell what Master Immortal was thinking, but he’d accepted that remark very easily. 
“Then where do you suppose it came from?” 
“There’s no way I could know— Eeeeeeeeep?!” 
The irritated Nue brought its front leg down hard, and rubble flew, scattering. 
The attacks were trivial, probably no more than the Nue venting its annoyance, and they couldn’t even scratch Krusty’s blue steel armor. However, this wasn’t true for Hua Diao, who’d leaned out from the shadow of the boulders to protest. A rock the size of her head came flying toward her at high speed. 
When she jumped back, startled, her excess momentum sent her rolling over and over. 
The topography was probably to blame, too: The soil that had fallen from the shadows of the rocks where she’d been hiding had piled up, forming a slope, and there was nothing to stop her. In a dizzying series of motions, Hua Diao rolled a good five meters out. 
To the martenfolk, that was quite a distance. 
She would have liked to sprint back into the cover of the rocks, but she was so frightened that she couldn’t even stand, and all she could do was crawl on all fours, panicking. Her fingertips found the edge of some silken fabric, but her knees were quaking too badly to let her cling to it and get to her feet. 
“It came from the sky.” 
A clear voice spoke to the dizzy otter. When she looked up, she saw that the hem she was clinging to belonged to a woman’s robe. She couldn’t see her face, but the voice and the murky sweet fragrance told her who it was that had spoken. 
“An overview of the summoning technique was sent to Mount Kunlun. This made it possible to send military forces to each area, corresponding to the resources.” 
The voice belonged to Enchantress Youren. 
A faint smile hovered at the edges of her lips. With the tenderness of a mother watching children at play, the Enchantress continued to speak words Hua Diao didn’t understand. 
“Our witch-ruler on Mount Kunlun, the Queen Mother of the West, is hastening the hands of the clock. She says this land holds no one who is qualified.” 
What was the Enchantress saying? 
Hua Diao, the heavenly official, didn’t know, either. 
Even though she’d been someone kind who had visited to nurse Master Immortal, too… 
No, even now, her face looked kind and fulfilled, and yet, for some reason, Hua Diao couldn’t think of it that way. The little smile on her soft lips looked like a roar of laughter that split her face all the way to her ears. It couldn’t really be like that, but she couldn’t stop shivering. 
“Our sovereign, who drifts in slumber on the shore of shattered rainbows, dreams of returning home. She says to send the time-release beasts, released one after another by Coropatiron, down like shooting stars.” 
Her lilting words froze in the face of an abrupt, overwhelming chill. 
“Elias, my new comrade. Obey the request of the Queen Mother of the West and put an end to your obsession.” 
She swept her arm outward, and as if guided by the gesture, a blue-and-gold knight appeared. Transparent sword dangling loosely, he stepped onto the battlefield.