3
—The Water Gate City of Pristella had gone so quiet that the events of that morning felt like a mirage.
As Subaru walked along the paving stone–lined streets, a slight glance to the side would have been all it took to get a perfect view of the peacefully crystal clear waterway, belying the crisis currently gripping the city. Looking at the serenely flowing water might have seemed like it could wash away the vortex of chaos swirling inside his chest, but that would be a lie. The melancholy that he felt could not be relieved with such simple means.
“Priscilla and her people always leave a mess behind… Man, did he lay down a real doozy before he left, though.”
Subaru was grumbling about the explosive parting message he had gotten right as they were on the verge of departing from the Muse Company.
His surprise at hearing Al bring up Gluttony was no small thing in and of itself, but that wasn’t the only piece of information the cryptic man had offered up. Afterward, Al had added one more thing.
“…So it’s possible that all the Archbishops are in Pristella right now, huh?”
Now that he thought about it, that was more than plausible.
At present, three Archbishops of the Seven Deadly Sins had already been confirmed to be inside the city. Plus, they knew the Witch Cult had taken over the four control towers on top of seizing city hall.
Given that five places had been captured, if each was under the control of one of the leaders of the Witch Cult, then Wrath, Greed, Lust, Gluttony, and Pride were all in attendance.
“—You are too deep in thought, Subaru. You should calm down a little.”
“Argh…”
While brooding over the possibilities, someone abruptly tapped his shoulder. It was only then that Subaru noticed he’d forgotten to even breathe. When he glanced over, he saw Julius was right beside him, staring with an anxious look on his face. Subaru recoiled immediately.
That overreaction made Julius snort with a “Hmph,” before continuing to speak. “From the looks of it, you have regained your senses.”
“Yeah, I’m actually pretty grateful for that… I really did wade in a little too deep.”
“Little wonder. To be blunt, you have too much hanging over you. There is taking back city hall and securing Lady Emilia’s safety. And then there is the potential presence of your fated foe, Gluttony.”
“ ”
“Were I in your position, I would have my doubts whether I could remain as calm as you are. On that score, your efforts are more than sufficient. You should take pride in them.”
“What’s with you…? Don’t creep me out like…”
Subaru furrowed his brows, feeling a chill after receiving that overly considerate compliment. He understood that Julius meant him no ill will, but how his friendly demeanor made him feel was a separate matter.
Still, thanks to Julius’s thoughtfulness, Subaru regained enough composure to properly examine his surroundings.
—At the moment, with Subaru included, the six members of the group tasked with retaking city hall were walking through the city.
Garfiel and Ricardo, both boasting keen senses of smell, led the group from the front. Crusch and Wilhelm followed behind the pair, and Subaru and Julius brought up the rear.
They walked in formation, on guard against attacks the Witch Cult might launch, but fortunately, there was no sign of any enemy presence so far, let alone an assault. Instead, what came into sharper relief were the various things smoldering deep inside each of the members of the assault team.
In Subaru’s case, the injury to his leg, his fraught escape with Beatrice, and, more than anything else, not knowing whether Emilia was safe ate at him. The added flicker of Gluttony’s presence left his mind teetering on the edge.
Much like him, the other members of the party harbored various issues in their own minds.
Garfiel and Ricardo were concerned for Mimi’s well-being; Wilhelm’s wound, which was left by his departed wife, had deep implications; and Crusch was struck by the possibility that Gluttony, to whom she, too, was tied by destiny, might be somewhere in the city.
Before heading out, Subaru had sworn to the sleeping Beatrice that he’d come back with good news, but his worries did not abate in the slightest.
“On that point, you’re pretty much the only one here with a calm and collected mind, aren’t you?”
“Considering my concern for Mimi and the others’ well-being, I would hardly claim to be calm. I am, however, striving to be as calm as I can manage.”
“And I’m thankful for that… Hey, you think we can win?”
Gently, Subaru averted his eyes and posed the question in a quiet voice so that none but Julius could hear. He detected Julius’s breath catching ever so slightly.
“…It is rather unusual for you to ask me, in particular.”
“I think I’m being stupid, too… I’d rather have our strongest guy here and not have to worry like this, though.”
“…In this sort of situation where the innocent could be hurt, it is inconceivable that Reinhard would not move. The very fact that he has not yet revealed himself should be taken as an indication that some kind of commensurate problem has befallen him. This includes the likelihood that he is engaged with Witch Cultists somewhere else.”
Even though Subaru hadn’t named anyone in particular, Julius listed off all the possibilities he could think of.
As a matter of fact, Subaru had already experienced a lap where Reinhard had engaged the Witch Cult in combat. But this time, the man hadn’t been seen ever since the Witch Cult had attacked in earnest.
Naturally, this conspicuous absence and the question of exactly whom he and Felt had sauntered off to meet were major points of concern.
“Gahhh, how long am I just gonna grope around in the dark? If he ain’t here, he ain’t here. Worrying’s not gonna make worries go away, and it’s not about whether we can win; it’s that we will win. Time to get my head in the game…!”
Continuously stressing about every concern that came along would summon dark clouds over any warrior.
Subaru slapped his cheeks with both hands, brushing aside his welling feelings of frailty as he let out a strong and sharp breath of air.
Glancing at the sight, Julius narrowed his eyes a bit without a word. Thinking the reaction odd, Subaru tried to press the issue when—
“—Smells of blood. A lot of it, too.”
Still on point, Ricardo scouted ahead with his nose. Garfiel nodded in silence.
Right then, the report from their top two trackers confirmed that they were getting close to the tall building visible on the other side of the street—city hall. It was here where Subaru and the others halted for a moment to make their final preparations.
“ ”
Garfiel equipped his shields on both arms, and Ricardo adjusted the way he carried his large hatchet. And with a look resembling a quiet sea breeze in Wilhelm’s eyes, those three projected a sense of incredible tension.
To Garfiel and Ricardo, the opponents waiting for them in the square ahead were targets for vengeance, and as for Wilhelm…exactly what this impending encounter would mean to him was something Subaru just had to know.
“I had my flower buds survey the area, but it seems there is no sign of troops lying in ambush. According to Mr. Kiritaka, the only entrance into city hall is from the front— There is no option save challenging them head-on.”
Julius had used a number of his six contracted greater spirits to check the surrounding area; he was enveloped by pale lights as they gave him their reports. Subaru was simply grateful for the news that there was no ambush lying in wait for them.
“Can’t you get the spirits to take a look inside the building, too? If we could find out where the enemy is and how they’ve set up, this’d be a lot easier.”
“Unfortunately, I am not inclined to force the ladies to go that far. There is no guarantee that the enemy has not learned from Sloth’s defeat and taken anti-spirit measures.”
“Yeah, nothing good’ll come from them getting nailed and depleting your fighting strength, huh?”
Julius’s power was directly connected to the number of greater spirits he had and the number of options they put at his disposal. Plus, Subaru wanted to avoid the risk of them probing too deep for recon and alerting the enemy to their imminent attack.
Above all else, the longer it took them to act, the greater the danger posed to the hostages in city hall.
“Let’s go, just like we planned it. The exact details are gonna depend on the enemy’s composition and positioning, but basically, we’ll stack several people to fight each one. Relying on numbers, we’ll focus ’em down one at a time and then take back city hall. But—”
“If we believe we are at a disadvantage, we must instantly make the decision to retreat…correct?”
When Subaru spoke, taking the reins of the group as if by nature, Crusch turned a serious look toward him. Replying to her with a firm “That’s right,” Subaru surveyed the faces of everyone present.
In his companions, he saw tension, wariness, and, more than anything else, the will to fight. He nodded and gave the signal.
“—Let’s go!”
On his call, Subaru and the others broke into a run toward city hall as one.
Rounding a corner, they rushed into the square that sat in front of city hall. Swift as ever, Garfiel ran at the head of the pack, and when the square came in sight, he narrowed his green eyes and shouted:
“The square’s full of guard corpses! Don’t let it shake ya or slow ya down…”
The instant they charged into the square, the scent of blood that Ricardo had mentioned slipped into Subaru’s nostrils. And filling his vision was a mountain of corpses, just as Garfiel had spoken of—or not.
“—Eh?”
Garfiel had just yelled for them to not stop moving. And yet the instant he set his eyes on that sight, Subaru couldn’t help but slow down, dropping the speed of his sprint a notch.
But it wasn’t just Subaru. The other five were no exception. That was how completely the sight that greeted them in the square exceeded their expectations.
“ ”
According to Garfiel, the square was filled with the numerous corpses of the guards who had fallen in an attempt to take back city hall. And it was true that the current condition of the square seemed to also point to that ghastly truth.
There was a dense odor of spilled blood, and the paving stones were dyed red to the point that it evoked the expression a sea of blood. However, there was not even a single corpse lying around. In their stead were bizarre creatures.
They were pink-colored masses of flesh. As far as descriptions went, Subaru felt that this was the most fitting.
Their pink-colored surfaces were glossy, warped, and irregular in form, like mud dumplings made by little children. They were large enough that Subaru couldn’t comfortably put both arms around one, and there were at least twenty of them.
The flesh piles of unknown origin formed a sporadic line. The reception put everyone’s footsteps out of kilter—
“—It’s them!!”
Immediately after, Garfiel, running first among them, looked overhead and howled.
With the shock over the flesh creatures yet to recede, everyone forced their gazes upward. Two figures were leaping straight down at them from city hall’s upper level, jumping right toward them with a slash of the swords they wielded.
“! Here I go!!”
As their enemies sailed down before them, Crusch valiantly stepped forward and held her longsword at the ready.
Then she unleashed invisible blades—this was her skill One Blow, One Hundred Felled.
Slicing the air at an angle, this was Crusch’s lethal sword technique that took full advantage of her blessing of wind reading. The slicing attack was carried on the air, extending the reach of her sword strikes by tens of yards and providing her with an ultra-long-range option. This slicing attack had deeply wounded even the White Whale, and now it was hurtling forward. A moment later, it scored a direct hit on the two figures in midair.
“You got ’em?!”
“No! They were able to defend! I did not land a hit!”
When Subaru’s voice went shrill from excitement, Crusch shook her head with a bitter look on her face.
The pair, a giant man and a slender woman, landed as they fended off the blades of wind with their respective weapons. Paving stones exploded under the huge man’s feet; the woman stood quietly in the pool of blood without even disturbing the air around her.
They appeared on the stage as polar opposites, with a pair of greatswords and an uninscribed longsword. The sight of the black outfits covering them from head to toe was emblematic of the horrid fashion sense displayed by adherents of the Witch Cult.
The moment after Subaru took this all in, the two enemy figures leaned forward ever so slightly and launched their counterattacks.
However, before those two varieties of wicked blades could reach him—
“Even if they have fended off Lady Crusch’s sword blows, there is no escaping the rainbow’s yoke!”
—three different, dazzling colors circled around the Witch Cultists’ heads, summoning a cylindrically shaped aurora to seal the enemy’s movements.
Of the six greater spirits serving Julius, three acted in unison to catch the cultists. The cylinder of light must have had incredible restraining power, for the Witch Cultists went down on their knees from incredible pressure upon them.
It was then that Garfiel, Wilhelm, and Ricardo launched savage, ferocious attacks.
“!!”
Blunt and edged, each of the respective blows was an attack able to inflict a mortal wound.
Ricardo aimed for the big man’s head with his huge hatchet, while Garfiel’s fist and Wilhelm’s sword aimed at the woman, all of them entering lethal range—
“ ”
The kneeling woman spun around the longsword in her hand, sweeping at Garfiel’s and Wilhelm’s feet. Instantly, the two leaped to evade her sword, but the woman turned her body to move perfectly parallel to the sword’s arc, spreading one of her long legs to snag Garfiel around his neck and forcing him to pull her out of the effective range of the magic spell.
“The hell?!”
With the rainbow-colored force field throwing off his movements, Garfiel was stooped over as the woman broke the bridge of his nose with her knee. She then grabbed hold of Garfiel’s arm as he recoiled, using its shield to easily deflect Wilhelm’s flurry of sword attacks.
The unbelievable technique left Garfiel raising a painful cry, whereas Wilhelm let out a groan.
The price of that stagnation was a spinning kick that dug into the aged swordsman’s abdomen, with the blow causing Wilhelm to bend forward; after a half spin around his stooped body, the woman launched a backward spinning kick that laid him out on the ground.
“ ”
At the same time, the sound of an eruption exploded between Ricardo and the giant.
The large hatchet swinging down at the crouching man was blocked by two greatswords crossed over his head. The screech of steel creaking against steel rang out, at which point Ricardo punched down several times with his unoccupied fist.
The blunt blows hammered the great hatchet from behind, bringing the dull cuts ever closer to the huge man’s head. But finding himself this pressed, the giant promptly reacted by unleashing a new pair of arms from the inside of his black robe.
Now using four arms to block his blows, the bizarre creature made Ricardo’s face twist up, bringing a savage expression to his face.
“I’ve heard of your kind before, member of the many-armed tribe! Four arms ain’t nothin’!”
Though his enemy tried to block him, Ricardo spurred himself onward, heedlessly banging on his great hatchet. If his opponent had four arms, he’d just have to wring out more power from his two.
But Ricardo’s intentions were betrayed when the giant unveiled yet another hidden trick. Two more arms appeared from under the black robe, along with two more greatswords.
“The hell…?!”
Four arms were devoted to defending with two greatswords, while two more arms and greatswords went on the attack. With one turn, the attacker and the defender had switched completely; Ricardo backed up a step as the tide turned against him.
“—Garghhh!”
A seventh and an eighth arm came flying from the giant’s back, punching, punching, and punching Ricardo’s chin some more. The giant man caused blood to spill from Ricardo, sending him crashing into the far side of the square.
“ ”
The group supposedly had the initiative, but the attacks of all three of the close-range team were intercepted, with the woman sword fighter and the giant launching merciless follow-up attacks.
“As if I’m letting that happen!”
It was then that the slow-footed Subaru finally caught up and made his move.
He launched his whip at a significant range, making a rending sound as it struck the paving stones with force. The snapping sound from the whip, which ripped through the air at close to the speed of sound, caused a moment’s hesitation in the two cultists.
“Fusion magic—Ul Gora!!”
Immediately after, Julius rattled off an incantation as his greater spirits returned to him, generating a crimson whirlwind in moments. The swirling wind was then engulfed in fire, the resulting flames forcing the Witch Cultists to leap away to safety.
The heat wave of the enormous inferno made Subaru unwittingly gawk.
“The hell is that?! Were you always a hardcore spell caster?!”
“No, this is nothing more than a bluff. It is too unrefined to be used as a proper attack. Accordingly…”
When Julius replied bitterly to Subaru’s question, the scene before them proved his words true.
Having fallen back in the face of the flaming whirlwind, the retreating woman lashed out once with her longsword—and that was all it took to sever the wind’s core, disturbing the spell’s composition and causing the whirlwind to collapse, then vanish.
The frighteningly keen sword sense that the woman sword fighter boasted combined with the giant’s four massive swords and eight arms, making them seem like twin heralds of doom. Fear shot up Subaru’s spine as he continued watching them pull off superhuman feats that were even more impressive than the ones he’d heard them do.
“Going all out at them and having nothing to show for it is a pretty major shock.”
When he glanced over, Garfiel and the others, who had escaped thanks to Julius’s backup, were all wiping off blood and catching their breath. But the sense of despair at the fact that their melee fighters had been mostly overwhelmed was not something so easily brushed aside.
However, it would have been wrong to assume they had run out of cards to play.
“We know they’re pretty nuts in close combat, but they’re seriously wide-open against long-range attacks.”
Julius’s magic, Crusch’s wind blades, and even Subaru’s whip had been effective to varying degrees.
It was possible that even if his whiplashes did hit, they would be easily shrugged off and ignored, but there was no mistaking that Julius and Crusch could launch attacks that might make the difference between victory or defeat.
“ ”
The repulsive piles of flesh dotting the surrounding area weighed on his mind, but he tore his attention away from those unearthly objects. The right thing to do was prioritize taking down the two in front of them—
“Everyone, let’s attack again. We’ll make Julius and Crusch our main attackers, and…”
“—Bwa-ha-ha-ha! You came, you came, you really came, didn’t you?!”
“?!!”
Suddenly, the scene was interrupted by high-pitched, silly-sounding laughter that seemed completely out of place on the battlefield.
This incredibly grating voice brought the giant and the woman to their knees on the spot. Simultaneously, as nigh-unendurable terror urged Subaru and the others to hold their breath, the laughing voice still trembled in derisive mirth.
“All it took was a few threats to reel such big fish in. How do you meatbags even live when you’re this stupid, ugly, and shallow-minded? I wouldn’t be able to deal with that! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!”
“—It can’t be.”
Searching for the source of the voice, Subaru’s gaze wandered when he noticed Crusch gasp right beside him.
Her amber eyes had shot wide-open as she looked toward the roof of city hall. Realizing that the speaker, Lust, had to be over there, Subaru turned in the same direction.
That was when he finally understood the true meaning behind the raspy echo of Crusch’s dazed murmur.
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!! What’s with that face?! Such a stupid face! Did you practice it just for me? If you did, I want to reward you!! How about my spit? Would my saliva make you overjoyed? That should literally be mouthwatering for meatbag scum like you!!”
The nonsensical laughter echoed as the speaker standing on the roof of city hall—no, standing above it—gazed down upon Subaru and the others from her vantage point with scorn.
Then she flapped the large, malevolent black wings on her back once.
“Let me reintroduce myself! I’m the Witch Cult’s Archbishop of Lust!!”
Her red eyes glimmered with cruel delight as she—Lust—laughed with renewed disdain.
The single, black dragon claiming the title of the Archbishop of Lust gazed down at the surface, laughing scornfully.
“Capella Emerada Lugunica—that’s meee! Now die, you rotten sacks of meat!!”
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