Chapter 212. Encounter (2)
The explosion shook the entire factory district. Every outer wall split apart as steel railings were flung outward.
Bolts and pipelines bent and snapped wholesale, and at that very moment, the vast factory complex began its total collapse.
Behind Enoch, the massive pillar supporting the factory’s ceiling cracked in half and slowly tilted before beginning to fall.
Reacting to the ominous sound, Enoch instinctively turned around and shouted,
"Lien!"
The point where the collapsing pillar was falling was the platform directly between Enoch and Lien.
Above the maid’s head as she snapped around, the gigantic steel pillar of the ceiling dropped in its entirety, about to crush them both without leaving a trace.
"Young Master…!"
Lien cried out urgently for an instant. Then, her eyes gleamed sharply as she lowered her stance.
As if her own safety did not matter at all, the silver-haired maid swung her arm horizontally through the falling debris and clenched her fingers.
When Enoch turned his head upward, he saw wires instantly wrap around the surface of the cylindrical pillar several times. ZIIIIK, tension screamed through the metal threads.
RUMBLE, !!
The next moment, the pillar that had been plummeting with a shriek shattered into countless neat, square fragments, exploding outward in all directions.
Though it should have been impossible to hear amid the surrounding roar, Lien’s ice-clear voice quietly reached Enoch’s ears.
“…Remember this.”
When Enoch glanced back, the silver-haired maid was staring at him with cold eyes.
He knew all too well what she was about to say next, and as he nodded unconsciously,
Massive fragments crashed down before his eyes with a deafening roar, completely blocking Lien from view.
“…!”
Enoch hesitated for a split second, reaching out toward that spot, almost drawn forward against his will. Then he stopped and turned away.
No, this was not the time.
Even now, debris was raining down like madness.
From their past battles together, Enoch knew Lien was more than capable of executing three-dimensional aerial maneuvers and interceptions with her wires.
There was no way she would fall to a collapse of this level.
And in a situation where she could not be helped immediately, who were the ones in the most danger?
Enoch looked forward expressionlessly.
From the vast factory ceiling, steel fragments dozens of times larger than a person and clouds of dust poured down endlessly.
Beyond them, Alicia was staggering, unable to withstand the recoil of her lance’s bombardment.
Seeing her about to fall along with the shattered, tilting floor, Enoch kicked off the ground without hesitation.
KIIIIIIING, !!
With a thunderous crash as if the entire factory were collapsing, dust exploded outward, blinding his vision.
Crossing both arms in an X before him, Enoch broke through the gray haze head-on and sprinted forward.
"Alicia!"
Relying purely on instinct, he zigzagged between falling debris, changing direction again and again.
A powerful impact struck his abdomen, he must have been hit by a fragment, but Enoch narrowed his eyes and kept running.
THANG, !!
In the collapsing factory zone, Enoch kicked off the ground several times, accelerating as he spun his body sideways in midair.
He vaulted over structures, and the moment he hurled himself toward the falling Alicia at full speed,
A shock ran through his entire body, followed by a soft sensation in his arms.
"Ah, ! D-Direct Lineage!!"
At Alicia’s clear voice piercing his ears, Enoch opened the eyes he had squeezed shut against the dust.
Alicia was in his arms. He was cradling her slender, soft back and legs as they fell through the air together.
Alicia, for her part, had wrapped her free arm, her lance held in the other, around the back of Enoch’s neck.
With an unpleasant sense of weightlessness and gravity dragging them down, the two clung to each other as they fell alongside the collapsing floor.
"It is dangerous!"
Alicia suddenly widened her eyes and yanked Enoch toward her with her slender arms.
In an instant, her pretty face drew close, the distance between them shrinking until they could feel each other’s breath.
WHOOSH, !!
Feeling a massive steel framework brush past just behind his back, Enoch felt his blood run cold.
Looking around, the ceiling and upper floors were collapsing everywhere, debris raining down in all directions. One hit would reduce them to fragments.
Understanding Alicia’s intent, Enoch pulled her closer, minimizing the area of their bodies exposed to falling debris.
RUMBLE, !!
But their efforts were in vain as the ceiling above collapsed along with flame-wreathed piping, crashing down in one mass.
A slab that blotted out the moonlight and starlight of the night sky rushed toward Enoch and Alicia as if to overtake them.
Clinging to Enoch, Alicia shouted,
"Direct Lineage, hold on tight!"
Still in his arms, Alicia spun the lance once in midair, regripped it, aimed, and fired.
BOOOOOOM, !!
The next instant, ammunition detonated inside the cartridge midair, and a massive blast roared outward.
Using the lance’s recoil as propulsion, Enoch and Alicia instantly altered their trajectory, escaping the falling ceiling debris.
Even as they continued to plummet, Alicia fired the lance repeatedly to the side, changing direction dozens of times in midair and slipping past falling debris by margins as thin as paper.
It was a good attempt.
If they could keep using the lance to adjust direction or reduce speed, Enoch thought, landing would not be a problem,
CLACK, !!
The closed bolt of the lance, venting white vapor, snapped back and locked with a sharp sound.
All cartridges expended.
"Ah, ! Of all times!"
Alicia tilted the lance to check it, shouting with a pale expression.
Realizing she could no longer fire and change their direction in midair, her eyes widened.
"No! At this rate, landing, !"
WHOOOOOSH, !!
Amid the howling wind of free fall, towering debris tens of meters across, and darkness churned up by white dust,
A relatively intact floor flashed past nearby at high speed, and Enoch narrowed his eyes.
"Kh."
Spitting out a mouthful of blood, Enoch ground his teeth.
The memory of taking a direct hit to the abdomen earlier surfaced. Had his internal organs been damaged?
In his current condition, even Enoch could not hope to land safely with Alicia.
Drawing a long falling arc beside him, the uniformed girl shouted urgently through ash-brown hair scattering in the wind,
"Y-your blood! Direct Lineage! Are you all right?!"
"It is not a problem."
Enoch glanced sideways with dark blue eyes.
In the massive glass shards of the factory shattering around them, their reflections flickered.
Enoch’s black uniform flapped violently in the wind, thrown far back.
Opposite him, Alicia’s short skirt patterned in black and red fluttered as she fell endlessly into the darkness.
Enoch glanced down and made his decision.
At this rate, they would both slam into the ground and be reduced to unrecognizable pulp.
"Alicia. Listen carefully."
In the midst of endless descent, Enoch locked eyes with her.
"Y-yes?"
Her blue eyes widened under the moonlight as she stared at him. Enoch met her gaze calmly.
"You remember the rendezvous point we discussed earlier."
"W-what? W-wait! B-but, !"
Alicia realized his intent and parted her lips in a daze. But Enoch was no longer listening.
Still falling, he rotated once in midair, using centrifugal force to hurl Alicia with all his strength in the opposite direction of their fall.
He threw her precisely toward the only floor that had not collapsed amid the destruction.
"Ah…!"
As she flew away toward the intact level through falling debris, Alicia’s eyes widened.
As they separated in opposite directions midair, she reached out toward him as if to shout something.
"Direct Lineage! I do not want, !"
But the factory walls exploded in a frenzy of steel fragments and gray dust, drowning out everything.
WHIR, !!
Enoch spun the cloth-wrapped sword bag half a turn in his hand, clamped the knot between his teeth, and yanked.
The cloth wrapping unfurled upward as if surging against his fall, revealing the sword.
As Enoch corrected his posture midair, the silver blade emerged from the scabbard, dark blue light coiling around it as it hummed violently.
He gathered mana into every part of his body and fired.
To reduce his speed and land intact, he unleashed the one and only sword principle, kicking hard off the surrounding debris.
[Form 1, Explosive Sword]
THANG, !!
As his fall shifted direction, Enoch checked the angles of nearby debris, twisted his body again, and kicked off, using it as a foothold.
Cutting through swirling smoke and fragments, Enoch’s dark blue gleam accelerated along a long arc,
And as he skimmed past the long wall beside the factory, he half-rotated, drove his blade into its surface, and slid rapidly through the crimson flames engulfing the structure.
KAGAGAGAGAGAK, !!
The sword gouged into the metal, scattering dark blue sparks and carving a brilliant cutting line as it traced a long descent toward the ground.
And so, the swordsman’s figure, black coat fluttering, faded like a shadow into the pale dust.
***
Under the moonlight of the abandoned factory district, amid the steel wreckage where white dust slowly settled,
Enoch, breathing heavily with his sword planted in the ground, released his kneeling stance and slowly rose.
“…….”
FSSSS,
Looking around, he saw vast amounts of black ash drifting into the darkness from where the entire factory had collapsed.
It seemed most of the magical beasts that had entered the factory district had been killed, caught in the explosion and total collapse.
Seeing that they had all been crushed beneath the falling ruins, Enoch turned his head.
From the beginning, it had been his plan to break the situation using this effect, but the situation was still far from good.
He was separated from Lien and Alicia.
Enoch fell silent, gazing into the dark forest surrounding him while forcing himself to remain calm.
He was in the heart of enemy territory, cut off from his two most important assets.
Scanning again, he saw that the total collapse had blocked every path with debris.
Judging it nearly impossible to find each other here, Enoch turned toward the forest shrouded in darkness.
If he lingered, magical beasts from other areas might be drawn in by the explosion.
At this point, as he had told Alicia earlier, the only option was to break through to the rendezvous point, the waterfall.
Nothing would be solved by standing still.
Enoch began to move.
WHOOO,
With each step he took, hollow footfalls echoed through the ruins along with the wind.
He advanced through the pitch-black night, still wreathed in flames, carefully watching his surroundings.
Worry for Lien and Alicia, whose presence he could not sense anywhere, pressed down on him. Were they truly safe?
From the circumstances before the fall, it was almost certain they were unharmed, but until he reunited with them, he could not relax.
Then, though it would normally have been easy to miss, Enoch caught the faint sound of metal being stepped on, CLANG, CLANG, from somewhere.
Without turning around, he heightened his senses and listened carefully.
At some point, the footsteps echoing through the ruins were no longer his alone. At least five, no, more. The number was increasing.
Reinforcements of magical beasts might have arrived.
Rather than provoke them, it seemed wiser to assess the situation.
Soon, a sound like a beast’s growl pierced his ears, as if concealment was no longer a concern.
Enoch swung his one-handed sword once through the air, angled it aside, and silently turned around.
“…….”
In the darkness, he could barely make out the silhouettes of four-legged animals and pairs of sharp eyes. From their horizontally slit pupils burned a red glare.
Judging by their eye level, each one was as large as a lion.
Not ten or twenty. Based on the number of red eyes glowing in the dark, there had to be at least fifty.
Had a force of this size been searching for him since the moment the factory collapsed?
For an instant, surprise was eclipsed by doubt.
Experimental magical beasts shaped like hunting dogs.
His brow furrowed at the appearance of these experimental beasts, so far removed from the Official History.
The surrounding ruins were thick with the stench of burning and oil from the gas explosion.
Yet despite that, these beasts had tracked him precisely, meaning they were experimental types that exploited a dog’s exceptional sense of smell.
In any case, the situation was grim.
Enoch quietly lifted his sword.
WOOOOONG,
The moment he raised the one-handed sword diagonally, naturally lifting his empty left hand into stance,
-GRRRRRR!!
The hunting-dog-like beasts roared as one, the night sky trembling as their bodies convulsed.
At the command carried in that roar, they burst into a charge from the darkness.
Enoch dropped his stance instantly, kicked off the ground, and fired the mana concentrated throughout his body into the earth.
[Form 1, Explosive Sword]
THANG, !!
Dark blue light exploded beneath Enoch’s feet. He pierced the darkness at a terrifying speed, closing the distance in an instant.
Just as the beasts leapt toward him with jaws gaping wide,
A storm-like arc of dark blue light surged forward, scattering a semicircle of radiance before Enoch.
SLASH, !!
Several charging beasts were cleaved apart in a single strike, crashing to the ground as they scattered black ash and disintegrated.
That was why Enoch failed to react.
In the instant when the flying black ash blocked his vision, a new form lunged from behind the tree at his back.
“…!!”
CRUNCH, !!
A lion-sized shadow tore into Enoch’s waist, blood spraying as fresh gore splashed against his cheek.
The beast’s carapace-covered forepaw followed, slamming into Enoch’s chest as if in mockery.
Enoch coldly looked down at the enemy biting into him, spun his grip on the hilt, and raised his arm high.
A falling streak of dark blue light raced through the darkness and pierced straight through the beast’s skull.
Black ash erupted skyward like a blood spray, splattering across Enoch’s bloodied face.
“…Kh.”
Confirming the kill, Enoch staggered back, clutching his side.
Leaning against a massive tree trunk, he wiped the blood from his cheek with a dull gaze.
The slick sensation under his fingers. The bleeding was severe. His breathing had already grown ragged.
He had been hit badly.
An ambush that used a companion as bait.
At that moment, taking Enoch’s retreat as a signal, the pack of hunting dogs emerged soundlessly from behind the trees.
Dozens of eyes glowing a deep crimson mocked him from the darkness.
They were clearly different from the magical beasts that had shed green mana until now.
There was no doubt these were the pursuit force that had tracked Enoch across the ruins.
For some reason, a memory surfaced, of fighting an unidentified monster with April during preparations for the Lantern Festival.
A conversation April had with a freelance spectator echoed in his mind.
-Excuse me, so. What exactly was that?
-I do not know the details either. But that thing, believe it or not, it was human.
-Human? That monster we just killed?
-Yes. But then it got into a fight with someone, its head was half destroyed… after that, its body twisted and mutated into that…
-What? How is that even…?
-Probably some kind of unique magic used by Black Mages. That is all I know.
Thinking back, it had been an extremely strange incident.
Buried under the magical beast invasion, it had been overlooked at the time, but that creature had been nothing like experimental magical beasts.
And Black Mages capable of manifesting unique magic were hardly common, even in an outsourcing district.
Moreover, this sensation mixed into his Sense of Mana.
Enoch stared at the ominously crimson mana spilling from the hunting dogs’ eyes.
Separate from the green Tantalus mana that had created the experimental beasts, this vicious crimson glow had to come from somewhere else,
“…Do not tell me. Is it that?”
Enoch muttered coldly as he looked down at the beasts.
Traps that magical beasts could never install. These grotesquely modified Tantalus experimental beasts.
Tracing all these elements back carefully led to a near certainty.
Why had he not realized it sooner?
Enoch knew very well the user of unique magic who trampled the sanctity of life without hesitation, who haphazardly fused living bodies together.
The most heinous Black Mage, capable of creating living puppets controlled entirely by his will.
“…Well. This is a far more enjoyable meeting than expected.”
At that moment, a deep voice pierced through the factory ruins from the darkness.
The fence formed by the black hunting dogs with crimson eyes parted to the left and right.
Under the pale moonlight, a black figure stepped forward across the ruined factory grounds.
“To meet here of all places. What a curious coincidence.”
A tailcoat fluttering in the night wind, gloved hands, and a jet-black beaked mask slowly emerged from the darkness.
Seeing him, Enoch came to a halt, sword hanging low as he stared expressionlessly.
“It seems this place, the Victoria Kazimieśi Domain, is famous for its so-called gentlemen.”
The eyes behind the mask curved into long crescents.
“Though it is an outsourcing district, this is still the Victoria Kazimieśi Domain.”
The man stepped forward slowly, letting out a low chuckle.
“Greeting one another according to local manners, man to man, do you not think that could be rather entertaining?”
“…….”
Approaching through the darkness, he adjusted the necktie of his all-black tailcoat.
The man, pressing down stylishly on the silk top hat atop his beaked mask, spread one arm and bowed among the hunting dogs.
“Shall we say it has been quite some time since our last parting, my dear Direct Lineage of Elsyde?”
His tone sounded deliberately playful, yet an unmistakable elegance lingered within it.
Holding a small disc scattering crimson light in one hand, the man continued,
“It seems we still have matters left unresolved from back then.”
He shrugged theatrically.
“Is that not so, my dear friend?”
With his movements, an overwhelming aura of densely glowing crimson mana spread through the air, engraving its pressure beneath the night sky.
The Annihilation Officer of Vendetta, Rank 9, who had vanished after the clash in the mining city of Pangaeon.
As the man with the black beaked mask approached under the moonlight, Enoch whispered low,
“…Ixion.”