The Reaper Constellation Ω, after watching Dante Hiakapo vanish far away, started walking.
According to what his Reaper Assassination Squad Ω had grasped, the girl who married Dante was moving not far from here.
“...Huh.”
Absurd.
Still, there was a need to meet her.
***
“Uugh...!”
Adele collapsed to her knees and clamped a hand over her mouth. Blood burst through the fingers blocking it. A body unable to endure the recoil of a powerful [Curse] was destroying itself.
“Hey...!”
Glory rushed over and checked on her. Despite her saying she was fine, he hurriedly took out a potion and handed it to her. Then he ran to Elize and checked her condition as well. He didn’t even spare a thought for his own injuries.
It wasn’t a simple sword strike. A blow into which a Constellation had poured their own mana tends to detonate inside the flesh, according to the pressure differential of mana. Elize’s insides were like that.
The fundamental damage was severe. Still, the one relief was that the blade hadn’t been coated with poison. Even though her belly had been pierced through, once he poured down a heap of potions, it began to heal from the inside.
“......”
During that process Elize started to sniffle and cry, and Glory quickly apologized. He told her it would hurt, but to bear it.
But Elize shook her head.
“Is Dad gone now?”
Glory, dull to the matter of family bonds, finally realized and checked the scattered remains. Then he narrowed his eyes.
“No, he’s there. Goaten.”
“In the afterlife?”
“No, no. He’s alive in this world.”
The scattered remains were far less than expected. Whatever shape he was in, he had survived, slapped on [Stealth], and barely fled.
“But...”
Shattered into a form that could not be restored, coming back to what he was would be a far-off prospect. In effect, elimination from the [Constellation] was fixed.
He’d have to devote all the towering, accumulated state of his mana to recovery... From now on, he would fundamentally live a life less than ordinary.
“Will you go find him?”
Glory, recognizing Elize had come to find her father, asked. Elize sniffled and wept again.
“No...”
***
Mana is the particle that embodies the will of a being.
And since the beings that have continued until now are those who, genetically, sought survival and reproduction, their will tends to trend upward.
In contrast, a [Curse] is, by default, a force that opposes mana. If something can trend downward, anything can become a curse.
Here, the Matriarch Nibelung’s favorite curses are the “curses that break wholeness.” Balmung knew that better than anyone.
Right after the 2nd Assassination War ended. In that wartime era. There were many organizations that resisted the Matriarch. At the time, the Matriarch had also lost much power, and the Nibelung family was torn at by hyenas almost daily.
But the Matriarch killed every hyena “bit by bit,” steadily.
She was someone who knew how to use curses.
She didn’t kill the enemy in an instant. Even when she could, she often watched.
She would raid an organization that doted on its children and, before the boss’s eyes, lay a strange curse on the child and leave. She would cut out just an eye and a leg of a wounded member and send him back.
The plague-stricken child and the returned cripple became a curse upon the whole organization.
That is the Matriarch Nibelung’s way.
Cruel, merciless human.
That was his mother.
Knowing that...
“...Kh!!”
At the moment flesh from ankle to shin was engulfed by Curse No. 82: 『Curse of Worm-Eaten Flesh』 and the rot crawled up skin and bone—
Balmung flipped his sniper rifle into a reverse grip and aimed at his own knee.
His hand and face stiffened for a moment. But he had to. Balmung closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
Thunk—
“Guh—!!”
Under the strike of “Siegfried⚉,” everything below the knee vanished.
He quickly crushed a potion bottle in his grip and poured it over the wound, to force hemostasis.
It was a cauterizing method that burned flesh, and Balmung had to grit through pain that almost flipped his eyes white.
“You’ve grown up since I last saw you, Balmung.”
At this point, Nibelung had only watched in silence.
The holy sword in Eve’s grasp radiated a vicious momentum, and the longer time dragged, the more that blue-eyed girl suffered.
Balmung suddenly asked.
“...You, what did you do with that girl?”
He recalled the pure girl who had followed Nibelung, whom he had seen months ago. Her name was Heliope, the Matriarch’s foster daughter.
“I know you had several children besides me. And that [N O V E L I G H T] everyone but me is gone. Did you kill that girl too?”
“I did not. She’s living well, even now.”
“Does she hate you, like I do?”
“You say strange things. None of the children were useless. Why would I raise a useless child to begin with?”
“Why did you raise them? To steal the assassin’s seat in this precious Hero Party and raise that damned useless ranking? And children like me—you raised them by deliberately granting the [Stigma] of the Black Star⚉, since you never knew who might ‘take’?”
The Matriarch laughed.
“For that, one of you is enough.”
At the same time, the pitch-black motes that covered her face began to fall away, and horror spread over Balmung’s pain-twisted features.
The wrinkled face was nowhere to be seen.
“......”
Balmung was at a loss for words. The last time they met, he had told Heliope: run. And he had kept thinking, all this time, that he hadn’t cried out and persuaded her desperately enough.
The result was spread before his eyes.
The Matriarch wore Heliope’s face.
“Lifespan can’t be helped. But youth can be gained. It’s a privilege only the Black Star⚉ holds.”
The Matriarch slowly approached Balmung. Eve stepped in front of him. “Just a moment.” Nibelung motioned. For some reason, Eve stepped aside. It felt like it would be fine.
Then the Matriarch bent down and faced her son.
“My son. Do you know? I’m simpler than you think. I live to have what I want. Things like wealth, honor, power.”
“You included youth in that, it seems.”
“That’s right. Even now. I’m just struggling to take the assassin seat in this thing called the Hero Party.”
The Matriarch smiled—
At this young man, cowering from learned fear.
“By you existing, this opportunity passed to the Black Star⚉. Which means your role is over. I’ll make you a proposal. Could you just step out here?”
After that, a gentle hand touched Balmung’s head.
“......”
Balmung thought for a moment.
How long had it been? Since his mother stroked his head. Maybe twenty years.
When he was little, she had pretended to be his mom.
Thinking back now, it must have been a movement for his foundational development.
A completely neglected child’s brain does not develop intact. In that case, he wouldn’t receive the offer to join the Hero Party.
So she pretended, somehow, to give just enough affection for basic development.
Back when he took classes in the Department of Assassination, Balmung thought he was like an infant monkey.
It was an experiment on “attachment.”
They put an infant monkey in a cage with a wire-mesh mother and a terry-cloth mother, and watched which one it clung to.
The infant monkey clung to the terry mother.
Naturally.
But that attachment was quite intense. Perhaps far more than the researchers expected.
The experimenters placed a banana in the wire mother’s hand and added thorns to the terry mother.
The infant monkey, terrified of the thorns, still clung to the terry mother’s arms.
Then the researchers ran an electric current through the terry mother.
Even so, the infant monkey clung to the terry mother—clung while getting shocked, suffering, panicking.
“That’s not how it should be.”
Sitting quietly in class, fury surged through Balmung’s mind.
“That’s not how it should be.”
As Balmung saw it, that monkey should later pick up a blade and rip the terry mother to pieces, then escape the cage and stab every last experimenter.
Because such a thing must not be allowed to happen.
“Hm?”
And now—Balmung met the eyes of his mother he hadn’t seen in so long.
Ptoo—
He spat in her face.
“......”
“......”
Silence fell.
The Matriarch took out a handkerchief and wiped her cheek. Then she slowly stepped back.
“Kill them.”
Once she had opened enough distance, the Matriarch gave the order, and her bodyguard squad surged through the air with daggers drawn.
Eve, who had briefly sheathed her sword to down the ninth potion Dante had given her, now drew her blade and collided with them.
Balmung also pulled a “maglev skateboard” from his waist, mounted it in the air, and took off. He had only one leg, but he had trained on one wheel fairly a lot to begin with, so he quickly adapted and opened distance.
Tatatatatang!!
Flying through the air, bullets poured in. After nimbly evading them, he began killing the bodyguards one by one.
Thunk—
Thunk—
Balmung’s sniping—each shot—was like a cannonball, and dodging it was nearly impossible. It meant his current state had risen to a staggering height.
“At this rate. We’ll. Lose.”
Eve wasn’t a fool either; she knew she had to throw a winning move. The enemy intended to wear her down to death.
―― .
She began drawing out all the power of the two horns she normally kept sealed, and in her eyes the killing intent unique to the two-horned demons began to ripple.
In recoil, her insides were breaking further, but there was no helping it.
Eve stamped the ground.
At the same time, she raised her sword.
Into it, she poured all the mana she could gather, all that could be maintained as a human.
Then along the blade gathered a white so bright it was viciously dense—beyond white, into something savage.
That “sword aura” grew, then compressed; then more “sword aura” formed atop it, grew, and compressed again.
It was the final form of Lv.9, limit-tempered “sword aura.” A warrior’s extreme that could smash anything.
『 Swordsteel – Divine Sword Unification 』
Launched like a missile, she smashed the 『Hall of Black Darkness』 and struck at the Matriarch, eyes wide in surprise. “......!” Even the Matriarch, a Constellation, was startled into throwing herself backward.
Kwakwa-BOOM!! Flash!!
As Peacebringer† burst with holy light and drove out the blackness, the blade tip flew for the Matriarch’s head.
Kakang!!!
But it only managed to slice her forearm.
The Matriarch somehow scattered a great curse and ravaged the space, reappearing far away.
Just as pain curled Eve’s body as her viscera got that much more ruined—
“...For now, young lady, you’ll need to lie down a bit.”
The Matriarch lifted her chin.
Then she put her hand into her own mouth—
And began to pull out the long sword lodged in her spine.
It was the longsword that had been a candidate for National Treasure No. 1, which Hiaka failed to acquire.
“Siegfried⚉.”
Balmung’s sniper rifle “Siegfried⚉” was merely an imitation made by breaking off a piece of this sword.
“Die.”
In the next instant, an overwhelming stigma detonated and the world was buried in darkness.
Eve saw nothing.
The moment the stigma faded, Eve reflexively raised her sword.
Clang!!!
But that fearsome weapon caromed off at an angle and slashed Eve from chest to forearm.
A terrifyingly deep sword wound.
Blood gushed.
“You there, girl!!”
Balmung, fighting the bodyguards, was aghast.
At this moment, there was a fact that neither Balmung nor even the Matriarch, nor Eve herself, knew.
The vitality of the two-horned demons transcends human understanding; even with their heads cut off, they can live for a couple of hours.
“...??”
Eve was bewildered. Her body had been carved, but she was okay more than expected. So she simply did what she had been doing and fed more power into the holy sword.
『 Swordsteel – Divine Sword Unification 』
With sword aura surging anew, she shattered the Matriarch’s blade.
Chaeng-graang!!!
Siegfried⚉ rang with a roar and snapped clean. Right after, with her body broken, Eve raised her left hand and grabbed the Matriarch’s neck—
And threw a punch she had never thrown in her life.
SMAAACK!!
“...Kkh!”
Then again, a massive stigma of the Black Star⚉ burst out; after the world was shrouded in darkness, the Matriarch opened her eyes far away.
“......”
Now the choice was hers. In truth, it had been hers for some time. And yet—for some reason—
The Matriarch glanced into the distant air and then ordered her bodyguards:
“We withdraw.”
“Withdraw, ma’am?”
“Matriarch Nibelung!”
“Pull out. Now.”
As the Matriarch Nibelung and her bodyguards were wholly wrapped in darkness and lifted into the air, Balmung frowned as if he didn’t understand.
She looked down at the seated Balmung with a bitter expression and spoke.
“To be frank, with things as they are, it would’ve been better if you’d given it to me instead.”
“What?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
After that, they vanished as the darkness unraveled.
[Main Story] No.5
Hero Party Selection Match
After settling the situation, Eve, clutching her aching belly, headed somewhere at the foot of the mountain.
And there, behind a tree, she stood face-to-face with Rebecca, who had been standing quietly with arms crossed.
“......”
“......”
Eve knew. That this person had been here for quite some time.
And that even though she had arrived long ago, she had only stood and watched.
Because of that, her new friend had lost his legs.
“......”
Killing intent began to gather in Eve’s eyes.