Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.2

 Rudeus 

WHEN I CAME TO, I smelled something good. It was a little sweaty, but pleasant and familiar. In the corner of my eye, I saw rippling red hair, just as I felt a warmth on my cheek. Something was pressed against it.

“Are you awake?!” Whatever was touching my cheek spoke. That was Eris’s voice. Awareness rushed back. Eris was carrying me on her back.

“What’s going on?” Jerking upright, I looked about. A few others, looking like refugees, were walking with us. Cliff, Elinalise, and Ruijerd.

“We lost,” Eris said curtly. She sounded bitter. 

They’d gone in again against the Fighting God only to be beaten to a pulp. Eris had blacked out after one hit, and Elinalise’s shield was shattered. Atofe and the Ogre God had put up a valiant fight, but the Fighting God had thrown them off again and again. Because I was down for the count, Moore had ordered our retreat. Ruijerd retrieved Eris and me. With Atofe, her personal guard, the Ogre God, and Sandor covering our retreat, we’d gotten away.

“Right.” I was reeling. We’d lost, just like that. I didn’t think of myself as the toughest guy around or anything like that. The first time I took the Version One out against Orsted, I’d lost then too. I knew I wasn’t invincible. Still, my confidence had been bolstered by a run of recent victories. I’d beaten Atofe and Alec. I hadn’t beaten Alec alone, but a win was a win. I’d still always tried to consider the possibility I might lose. This was my first one-punch knockout. This was the first time I’d been blown to smithereens and knocked out cold in a single hit.

Had I underestimated Badigadi? Had I thought, Fighting God or not, the demon king would still pull his punches?

“What’s our next move?” Eris asked.

I thought about it. Next…what should we do? I wouldn’t have said we were all out of options, but there was no way any smart-ass plan I came up with would beat the Fighting God. I didn’t have much faith in our firepower. A glance around told me Sandor, the Ogre God, Atofe, and her personal guard weren’t with us. They could be dead. That left me, Eris, Ruijerd, Cliff, Elinalise…and the Superd warriors, if they counted. I definitely didn’t count as reliable firepower; without the Magic Armor, I was more of a ­liability. All I could do was make a river, or a mountain, or set the mountain on fire. You know, like in that folktale, The Three Lucky Charms. After drinking up the river, leaping over the mountain, and putting out the fire with the river water, the Fighting God would come chasing after me, just like the witch in that story. We couldn’t win with our current lineup.

“We have no choice but to flee,” Ruijerd said, looking me in the eye.

“Ruijerd…”

“He’s one of the Seven Great Powers. The real thing. We can’t win against him even with all our strength combined.”

So we’d run away. We’d run back to the Superd village, then…and then what? In The Three Lucky Charms, the boy ran to a temple, where the priest used his wiles to beat the witch. We did have Priest Orsted back in the Superd Village. And yet… The Fighting God and Geese wanted to kill me and use up Orsted’s power. If Orsted fought the Fighting God, he’d have to expend mana on an order of magnitude greater than he would have in a fight with the likes of the North God and the Sword God. No question, if that happened, we’d lose the war. And those two would chase us to the ends of the world to achieve their goal. There was nowhere we could go and be safe.

“Even if we run, we can’t win,” I said.

“Then all we can hope for is to fight and die with honor,” Ruijerd said.

When you fought and died with honor and lost, you still lost. You didn’t get to call that a win. When you die, that’s it.

“Rudeus, pull yourself together.” Eris’s hand squeezed mine. Her grip was warm and firm. She’d saved me more times than I could remember with those hands. She’d held our child with those hands.

“Right.” Calm down and think, Rudy. How can we win?

We needed information before anything else. If the Fighting God Armor had a weak point, for example, that’d do nicely. Unfortunately, as the story told it, that armor was the strongest in existence, crafted by Laplace himself. He’d gone down trying to beat his own creation! Finding a weak point probably wasn’t happening. Even if it didn’t have any, though, there were still other strategies, ways to fight it. I might be able to find something about that. Now, who knew about the armor? Atofe…wasn’t here. Which left Orsted. I’d have to ask him. If it turned out he didn’t know anything…

I pondered in silence for a moment. Whether Orsted knew anything or not, I’d still have to fight this enemy, here and now. We’d lost Atofe, the Ogre God, and Sandor. There had to be a way to win. 

That said, I wanted to keep our casualties to a minimum. I didn’t want the Superd Village to get caught in the crossfire. Norn was there, too. I couldn’t let her fight. 

There had to be a chance. There had to be. Even if it was only a fraction of a percent.

Then it came to me. That’s it!

I still had one trump card in my hand, didn’t I? I had figured I’d use it much earlier.

At last, I said, “We’ll fall back to the forest to buy some time.”

I was going to stake everything on this.

“Got it.” The others all nodded.

***

We made our way back to the Superd Village. My trump card still hadn’t shown up. All things going to plan, I would’ve expected it to be here already… But maybe something had gone wrong. 

We didn’t have time to wait around for it. What to do…?

Pushing aside my worries, I knelt in front of Orsted to report on what had happened up until yesterday.

“That brings us up to speed,” I finished. “The Ogre God, Atofe, and Sandor are all missing.”

Orsted face was stormy. “Fighting God Badigadi, you say.”

“Is there any strategy to beat him?”

“No,” Orsted said at length. “The Fighting God Armor I know, but I have never fought Badigadi wearing it.”

“Oh. I see.” It was the answer I’d expected, but I still couldn’t help but be disappointed—not that I’d let Orsted see that. “Then would you tell me what you know about the Fighting God Armor?”

“It is the strongest armor ever created, forged by Laplace. It was buried in the depths of the Devil’s Cave in the middle of the Ringus Sea. The mana that radiates from its surface makes it glow gold, and it makes the wearer unstoppably powerful. Because of that abundance of mana, however, it possesses a mind of its own. It will possess anyone who wears it.”

“Badigadi didn’t seem like he’d been possessed…” He’d looked like he was acting of his own free will, anyway. He acted exactly as I remembered. Of course, maybe he just appeared that way, and the armor was actually in control. He hadn’t given Atofe or Sandor the time of day, after all. 

“It takes time,” Orsted said slowly, “for the armor to possess the wearer. The longer they wear it, the stronger the armor’s hold on their mind becomes, until they cease to be able to tell right from wrong, craving nothing but to do battle. Although, Badigadi has an unusual immunity to the powers of the demon eyes, so it is possible that the armor will be unable to possess him.”

Aha. Badigadi hadn’t been wearing the armor for all that long yet, then. I also had the feeling I’d heard of that kind of possession somewhere before…

“Like your Magic Armor, the Fighting God Armor uses the mana of the wearer as fuel. Unlike yours, however, the wearer cannot take it off until the last of their life force has been exhausted. In Badigadi’s case, I expect it will keep operating almost indefinitely. The moment the wearer puts it on, it transforms to fit them—they can also generate their preferred weapon. The range is limited to that weapon’s typical range, but I doubt Badigadi will have chosen a long-range weapon. The golden light emitted from the surface of the armor neutralizes most magic…although it does have a threshold. If you hit it with the strongest Stone Cannon you can cast, it might get through.”

Orsted knew a lot. And he was being talkative for a change.

Right, okay. So Stone Cannon would have been a more effective choice than Lightning. I’d messed that up, though I didn’t know that at the time. 

“Who was wearing it last time you fought it?” I asked.

“One of the Sea Merfolk. They ran out of mana and died quickly.”

“Were there any others?”

“I have donned it myself several times. I have also seen one human wear it, and one demon.”

Wow. I guess if he hadn’t tried it, he wouldn’t know all those details.

“Okay, so to get specific, how do I beat it?”

Orsted was silent for a moment, then said, “I do not know.”

“You don’t?”

“When you wear the Fighting God Armor, you feel neither weariness nor pain. You are always fighting at your full potential. However, you are only ever moving it under your own physical power, and it has no ability to heal the wearer if they are wounded. Thus, if you have a way to damage it, a battle of attrition may prove effective. However…”

However, that was impossible against Badigadi. The Fighting God Armor kept going until the wearer died. And Badigadi was immortal. We had a perpetual motion machine on our hands.

“How did Laplace defeat it?”

“He hit it with an enormous output of magic that overshot its threshold, temporarily annihilating the wearer and separating them from the armor. It created a great rift in the continent that became the Ringus Sea.”

“Oh.” So it was possible to do damage to it with a strong-enough attack. Badigadi would just regenerate afterward, instead of dying, but that did give me one idea…

“I heard the wearer back then died,” Orsted remarked. “I imagine it must have been Badigadi all along.”

“You didn’t know?”

“They say even Laplace didn’t know who wore the armor during that battle. I heard they’d died and had no interest in finding out more. The Fighting God has never challenged me as an enemy like this before.”

“Did you…did you hear that from Laplace himself, in a past loop?”

“Yes. That, and that I am the son of the first Dragon God, and that first Dragon God was the one to lay this curse upon me.”

“And yet you have to kill Laplace.”

“Correct. To reach the Man-God, I must kill the five Dragon Generals and retrieve the sacred treasures.”

I fell silent. This had to be the first time I’d heard him say it flat out: he had to kill the Dragon Generals. So that was the deal. We couldn’t count on Perugius to send reinforcements, then. I wouldn’t want to ask for aid from someone I planned to stab in the back later. Continuing this line of question now wasn’t going to do me any good.

“That’s an unpleasant subject for you, I expect,” Orsted said. 

“Um, well…” 

Focus on what’s in front of us. First up: Badigadi. 

The Man-God acted based on what he saw in his own future. A free-spirited and rambunctious pawn like Badigadi would be tricky for him to control. Maybe this unpredictability was the Man-God’s true trump card, though? I’d just seen the Man-God for the first time in a long time, and he looked pretty haggard, like he was stuck in a tough spot. Fighting God Badigadi… If Badigadi had been the Man-God’s disciple all along, I didn’t know why the Man-God hadn’t made use of him in any previous loops. Let’s assume that this time, we’d dragged it out of him. If it didn’t happen in a previous loop, then odds were that the Man-God was reacting directly to me.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll fight. There’s nowhere to run.”

“Very well. I shall join you. I have never fought this particular battle before, but I surely cannot lose,” Orsted said, then stood up. I moved to discourage him.

“Please, not so fast.”

Orsted sat back down. I couldn’t see his face behind the helmet, but I knew he looked indignant. 

“Sir Orsted, if you use up your mana, we might as well have lost. We’ll have wasted all the good progress we’ve made.”

“We also lose if you die here. A waste of good progress, as you say.”

“True…”

Should we seize the day today, or tomorrow? We’d fought our way this far. I at least wanted to stick it out until it really seemed like all was lost.

“Even if you do have to fight, I can at least soften the Fighting God up for you first,” I suggested.

“You’ll die.”

“Then take care of my family for me.” I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live and go home. But this, I was sure, was where everything came to a head. The Fighting God was Geese and the Man-God’s final play. The Man-God might have something else up his sleeve, but we’d taken down the Abyssal King, the North God, and the Ogre God. His final disciple was out in the open. All his down cards were flipped. It’d have to hurt if we took the Fighting God out too. I had to stick it out, fight, and win.

“Very well. But when you see you cannot win, you must not hesitate before retreating. Am I clear?”

“Thank you.” I bowed, then stood up. “Also…any word from Roxy?”

“Not yet.”

“All right. If you hear anything, please let me know. Right away.”

Orsted nodded, then I left the house.

Outside, the warriors were waiting for me: Eris, her eyes sharp and aura savage. Ruijerd, with his air of serenity. Cliff, a little worked up, nervous, and with fear in his eyes. Elinalise, watching Cliff with a protective look. Dohga, who’d heard that Sandor had fallen and seemed ready to cry. Zanoba, who was dressed in the Superd’s traditional garments after losing everything he had on him in the last battle. And finally, the Superd warriors, here to protect their village.

This was our lineup, and to be honest, it didn’t fill me with confidence. The gap left by Sandor, Atofe, and the Ogre God was massive. They were all on par with the Seven Great Powers, a class—even two classes—above our current members.

Still, Dohga and Zanoba were a good substitute for the Ogre God, and they were still here. Badigadi favored close combat. Not a bad match up…except for how they had lost to the Ogre God, too. We were well-matched in power if you considered each of us individually and together—theoretically—but I wasn’t sure how much that would matter. Not all our cards are losers, that’s what it meant: no more, no less. Still, we might be able to hold the Fighting God off for a day or two. The chances of my trump card making it back before our bodies gave out weren’t good. Even if it did arrive, it was no guarantee of victory. I might just end up killing my allies for no reason.

“Let’s go.”

Even so, this was it. I had a plan, but the odds were all against me. I had no proof I’d read things correctly. I might have just enough time to set a trap, but we wouldn’t win against this opponent with parlor tricks.

No one said anything else. They just followed me. We were going into battle with the Fighting God.