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Re:Zero Kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu (LN) - Volume EX5 - Chapter 2.01




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VERMILION SWORDWOLF

1

Everyone finds a death match entertaining when it isn’t their life on the line.

That might sound like an extreme statement, but from where he was standing, it had a distinct ring of truth. It wasn’t something to be laughed off as a silly exaggeration.

He heard wild cheering from overhead as he rolled back across the hard ground. The cheering turned to jeering at his cack-handed escape, but he didn’t give a shit.

“After all, I’m the one risking my goddamn life here!” he spat—along with some phlegm—before he brought the huge sword in his right hand up in front of him. It was enough to check his opponent, who had been about to follow up with a bare-handed blow. The pale, bald man coming at him adopted a lazy posture, both arms dangling as he sneered.

The bald man held no weapons, an unusual choice around these parts. But in one sense, something much worse than any sword or spear resided in the man’s swaying arms.

There was a technique called the Poison Hand. A means of murder that involved soaking one’s hand in poison, storing it up until just before the point of death. Eventually, the impregnated toxin gathered in the fingernails, meaning the slightest scratch could kill an enemy. The bald man’s purplish-red fingers and nails were the evidence that he possessed this technique.

“Looks like we’ve got a shinobi who screwed up some important murder.” The hands, and the man’s unflinching readiness to kill, were enough to guess at his background.

Shinobi were killers who had undergone the most rigorous possible training and submitted to unimaginable augmentation of their bodies. Some people doubted they really existed—said they were just an urban legend—but if so, they were an urban legend worth believing in. They were hired by the great and powerful as elite troops in the game of kill-or-be-killed that such people lived in. No telling how this one had ended up here, but now he was trapped, just like the rest of them.

For this was…

“A disgusting little hole called Ginonhive, the sword-slave island, where its captives are forced to fight each other.”

The sword slaves were literally enslaved—and this was the status of the two men fighting at the moment. The words represented the lowest of the low; every day, much of their blood was spilled, many of their bones broken, and many of their lives lost. And this, the so-called sword-slave island, where these fights to the death passed for entertainment, was the perfect place for the awful crowds of imperial subjects to slake their bloodlust. It was the kind of place one would naturally expect to find in a land as thoroughly brutal as the Volakian Empire.

“Not that it makes it any better to have them pulling our strings!” the man growled, standing slowly, the heavy sword in one hand. The weight of the weapon meant it didn’t lend itself to being swung around one-handed for very long—but sadly, the man had no choice save to rely on his right hand to do the fighting.


For his left, which might otherwise have helped it, was gone.

“ ” His long, wild hair was tied back behind his head, so that he could glare at his opponent with eyes that some called evil. It was all he could do to keep the enemy at bay. The one-armed man let out a sigh. It wasn’t as if the arm was a recent loss. It had happened in the distant past, and he’d long since adapted to how it impacted his balance. Even so, when he fought opponents whom he had to be careful around, like this one, it still sometimes felt like a heavy burden to him.

“Which means I can’t be draggin’ this out,” he said. “How about it, Mr. Might-Be-a-Shinobi? What say we work together to forfeit this game?”

“Forfeit…?”

“Hoh, interested, are ya?”

The man with the Poison Hand warily raised an eyebrow. Sensing his chance, the one-armed man plowed ahead. “It’s easy: I keep runnin’ from you, and you keep attacking me, but you don’t hit me. That goes on for a while, the spectators and the owner are gonna start getting restless. Chances are, they’ve got a demon beast or something on hand that they’ll send in to get things going. And then we don’t have to fight each other, just the creature.”

“And if we defeat it together, we survive today—is that what you’re saying?”

“Yeah, that’s the idea! Aw, it’s great to find a guy I can talk to for onc— Hgggh?!” Just as the one-armed man was grinning and thinking what an easy conversation this was turning out to be, Poison Hand lashed out with his sharp nails. The one-armed man just managed to dodge, rolling backward to gain himself some distance from his foe.

The bald man sneered at him. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Work with you to fight a demon beast? And maybe getting myself killed in the process? Anyone with a choice between a one-armed man and a demon beast would pick the cripple. I’m no different.”

“Hey, look, I know how you feel, all right? But as a fellow human being…”

“Besides, this is my chance to show off the skills I’ve honed. And I can’t stand when someone stops me from having my fun.”

“Oh! Sorry. I didn’t realize you were one of those natural-born killers. Guess we just look at things too differently to see eye to eye, then.” He would have liked to scratch his head with sheer embarrassment, but the moment he lowered his arm, his only guard, a finishing blow would have come his way. He settled for a sigh—and then his opponent’s Poison Hand twitched.

He felt it coming—or rather, he knew it was coming. It would start with the venomous right hand, and if he dodged that, the man would strike with the left— No, he would only appear to. It would be a feint. He would come up with his leg—his trump card wasn’t a Poison Hand, but a Poison Foot. All very complicated.

But a trick couldn’t surprise you anymore if you knew how it was done.

“—!” With a sharp breath, the one-armed man dodged his attacker’s right hook, but even as he saw the left arm move at the edge of his vision, he was bringing his sword up to meet the man’s spinning leg. The blade bit into the leg just at the knee, severing it and spraying dark blood everywhere. A few drops spattered on the one-armed man, who had to hope that at least his enemy’s blood wasn’t toxic.

“Just bad luck…or should I say, a bad star,” the one-armed man said, and then the loser’s head went arcing high up through the air, still wearing an expression of disbelief.



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