arc1 · 014-ep14

Episode 14: Decisive Battle with the Steel Behemoth

With a weighty GOGOGO... rumbling up from the earth, the giant double stone doors swung slowly inward.

Beyond them spread a domed stone chamber, vast beyond any comparison to the dim passages before it. Pale-glowing crystal stones were studded into the high ceiling in numbers, lighting the dry flagstones underfoot bright as day.

A single step inside, and the stone doors behind him moved of their own accord, slamming shut again with a THUD! that rolled through the pit of his stomach.

They would not open again—not until the boss room's master fell, or the challengers were wiped out to a soul.

First, Iori moved to the wall right beside the entrance, slipped off the big rucksack's shoulder straps, and lowered it gently to the floor. Fighting something that big with it still on would only get in the way—and it would be a waste if the magic stones he'd gathered this far cracked on impact.

Rucksack propped against the wall and himself unburdened, he rolled his shoulders lightly and turned his gaze to the chamber's center.

There, four-legged and easily topping five meters in length, lay enshrined a gigantic armored beast sheathed head to toe in a steel-like outer shell of hideous thickness. Pale-blue mana vapor hissed and spat from the seams of its black-gleaming, ponderous armor.

Iori had stopped short just inside, so even the old body camera at his chest caught the creature's full majesty plainly as it rose at the chamber's center.

『Ah, the doors closed...!』

『Onee-sama really did go in alone!!』

『Boss room's bright, so even this beat-up camera picks it up clean』

『Walking in and gently setting her rucksack against the wall first thing is too dutiful lmao』

『Weren't you planning to just peek at the boss's face for the memories? Doors are shut now though lol』

『Whoa, the lower-layer boss here is an Iron Behemoth...? Even top clans line up three heavy-shield vanguards and grind it down for thirty-plus minutes, you know!?』

『Sure, she one-shot the trash on the way down with ambushes, but a light one-handed sword against THAT is a no-go』

GROOOWW!!—a roar shook the very air of the stone chamber, and the body camera's mic blew out into violent distortion, KRZZT!!

Near-simultaneous, the Iron Behemoth crushed the flagstones underfoot and sprang.

Explosive off the line, unthinkable from a five-meter hunk of iron. It closed tens of meters in a blink and swung its boulder of a right foreleg around in a sweeping arc.

――Oh. Pretty quick, for that much bulk.

Watching the lunge with a cool head, he fired ice spear and wind blade at the boss's foreleg joints first—stop the movement.

But the next instant—

GKANG!!—a shrill clash of metal on metal rang out, and the ice spear and wind blade that should have skewered the joints were batted away without ceremony, sparks of pale blue scattering.

The giant foreleg, not even decelerating, swept grandly through the very space Iori had been standing in.

He kicked off the floor and vaulted backward by a hair's breadth—but the wind pressure of the follow-through alone gouged the flagstones where he'd stood and blew them apart.

And the boss's assault didn't end at one blow.

Riding the momentum of the foreleg swing, the great body wheeled around, and that gnarled, thick tail—like a length of steel chain—whipped like a lash at the flank of Iori, still in midair.

The second swing was faster than expected. Nowhere to run midair, Iori immediately drew the one-handed sword at his hip with his right hand and set the flat of the blade against the oncoming tail's flank, laid on so as to deflect rather than block.

GAAN!!—a colossal shock tore through his right wrist into his shoulder. Against the great apes on the way down he'd knocked aside their blows one-handed without effort; this boss's mass and centrifugal force played in another league entirely.

Forcing no stubborn stand on the spot, he twisted in the air to bleed the shock off, skated some ten meters across the flagstones in a rush, and landed.

Thanks to the midair twist, the camera frame went wheeling—ceiling light and flagstones spinning through it end over end—and by the time the view steadied on landing, the Iron Behemoth ahead stood poised and serene, without a scratch.

『Uwaaa, she got launched!?』

『Onee-sama!? What a dreadful metallic ring that was!!』

『Catch an Iron Behemoth's tail with a bare one-handed sword and OF COURSE you go flying!』

『See? Told you—no one-shotting this one like the trash on the way down』

『The Iron Behemoth's outer shell repels mana—none of those little tricks from before will leave so much as a scratch on it』

『See, solo doesn't work! How is she supposed to grind this thing down from here!?』

Having recovered his footing at a distance, Iori flexed his right hand—open, close—checking the slight numbness.

Any monster on the road down would have ended at that one brush of ice and wind. But the feel of it just now told him the mechanism: the outer shell wasn't merely thick—there was another layer, a film of dense mana, stretched across its surface. So even ice or wind launched from outside would slide off the film before ever reaching the seams.

And even while he worked that out, the Iron Behemoth gave no quarter.

The vapor jetting from the seams of its back armor swelled up all at once, pale light converged deep in its gaping jaws—and the next instant, a torrent of mana like a cannon blast was loosed in a fanning sheet.

DOGOOON!!

The band of blue light melted the flagstones as it swept the stone chamber from end to end.

Catch that square-on and it would burn him and his clothes to ash in a breath. Iori broke sideways into a run, and even as he ran, threw up a slanted wall of wind just off his left side.

Not meeting the oncoming torrent head-on—the slanted wind wall nudged its arc a hair higher, and ducking just beneath the rising blast wind and smoke, he slipped around onto the boss's flank in one motion.

The flank of the boss, locked rigid from finishing its breath—the root of its hind leg, where the armor looked comparatively thin—was right there before his eyes.

Kicking off the floor into the closing distance, he wreathed the one-handed sword's blade thick in his own mana this time and slashed sharp into the hind leg's seam.

GYARII!!—fierce sparks scattered; the blade split the surface mana film, and for the first time a shallow wound carved itself into the seam of the black shell.

But the moment he tried to drive the blade deeper—

The armor plating along the Iron Behemoth's back burst open all at once with a GASHAN, and from the seams a high-pressure, high-heat blast of mana vapor erupted in every direction, enough to wipe the view pure white.

――gh—vapor for shaking off anything that got close!

He yanked the sword back in a flash and wedged a small barrier in front of himself—and using the very force with which the heat wave shoved the barrier—WHUMP!—he let it fling him backward in a great leap, out beyond the reach of the heat.

Mind you, none of it was coming through properly for the viewers watching the body camera's feed—how Iori had dodged the breath, or even why he'd leapt backward.

One moment the screen was painted over in blue flash; the next it lurched violently up and down, a metallic clang rang out, and then the lens sat smothered in billows of white steam, showing nothing for several seconds.

『Uwa, I'm blinded!!』

『Eh, she's alive!? That wasn't a direct hit!?』

『Is this a sauna stream now?』

『Audio only, and it's a full-on kaiju movie—what is even happening right now!?』

『Also the rucksack she left by the entrance earlier—did that blast wave catch it? It okay?』

『Ah, the steam's clearing... wait, the boss is springing around just fine, and if anything its whole body is starting to glow blue!?』

『She's grinding away but zero damage is going through, no? Bleeding out at this rate—it's over』

Beyond the clearing white vapor, the Iron Behemoth was growling low.

There was indeed a shallow wound at the hind leg's root—but if anything it had lit the beast's fury hotter. The heat of the pale vapor leaking from every seam of its body jumped another notch, and the steel armor itself began to glow a faint red-hot.

But for Iori, stopped at the stone chamber's center, there was no panic and no fear.

If anything, faced with a formidable opponent no single blow would finish, he was studying the boss's great bulk like a man turning a puzzle ring over in his hands—how, cleanly, to pry that sturdy guard open.

Slash into the hind leg's root, and the white-hot vapor from its back shakes you off at once. And going by the way the mana had flowed when his blade bit in, this boss's core wasn't in its belly—it sat dead behind the thickest armor of all, the chest, front and center.

By any sane reckoning, challenging that chest head-on was sheer recklessness. Magic fired from outside would be shed by the surface mana film; a sword's thrust wouldn't punch through that much steel.

But watching the vapor-spouting boss load its hind legs to charge again, Iori noticed one fact.

Just in the instant it braced to drive forward, mana gathered into its back and hind legs—and for that one blink, the mana film across the front of its chest thinned. What's more, the boss's armor right now was being heated red through from inside by its own mana vapor.

――Oh. Right. In that state, that method just might crack it.

"...Alright. Let's give it a try."

At that small, quiet murmur, the corners of Iori's mouth lifted, just a little, looking rather pleased about it.

He gave up circling to the flank and walked, deliberately, on his own two feet, straight out onto the open flagstones dead in front of the Iron Behemoth—not a scrap of cover anywhere along that line.

His feet stopped, and the camera caught it square on: the Iron Behemoth, blue vapor jetting from every inch of its body, foreleg hauled high—dead center, extreme close-up.

ZUGAAN!!—the boss's hind legs stomped the stone floor to powder, and the five-meter steel bulk came charging in head-on, a black tempest.

But the camera's viewpoint did not flee left or right—it drove in straight at the boss, head-on, without a flicker of doubt.

Under the right foreleg the Iron Behemoth brought down like a stamp, Iori sank low and slid in beneath it.

Simultaneously, along the back of the one-handed sword swung up in a scooping arc, a wind clump compressed to its very limit detonated—DOOM!

The slash, riding the wind's rebound, kicked the boss's descending right foreleg violently up from below.

The last thing the beast expected was its own foreleg bounced skyward—the five-meter bulk staggered back, foreleg drifting up off the ground, and there before his eyes lay the thickest chest armor of all, bared and defenseless.

The very instant the mana film at its chest had gone thinnest, spent on the charge.

Without halting a single step, Iori drove into the dead center of that opening and plunged the mana-honed point of the one-handed sword straight into the middle of its chest.

GYARIIN!!

The point tore through the surface mana film like paper and bit a few centimeters into the red-hot, thick steel armor before stopping.

By rights, the sword's road ended here—and no spell cast from outside would arrive in time at this range.

But Iori, blade still planted into the steel at that zero distance, inside the mana film—without one syllable of chanting, without a hair of lag—poured sub-zero frost and point-focused shattering mana straight down the blade into the armor's innards.

PAKIIIN!!—a freezing crackle split the air, sharp enough to stab the ears.

The steel chest armor, searing hot from its own vapor, flash-froze bone-white in an instant under the vicious cold poured in from within, and the violent temperature gap spidered it with countless cracks. The shattering shock piled on without a breath's pause, and the hardest chest armor in the land, armor that was never supposed to break, burst apart from within with a DOGOON!!, ice shards and all.

Through the shattered armor, into the naked core pulsing red within, the one-handed sword—its momentum unspent—was drawn in as if sucked, driven through to the hilt.

With a shunk, the blade punched through—and the Iron Behemoth's bulk convulsed hard, the pale glow across its body snuffing out.

After seconds of silence, the five-plus-meter steel great-beast, denied even a death cry, came apart into drifts of black mist and motes of light, rustling down like sand.

At the stone chamber's center, only Iori remained, sword sheathed, standing quietly.

Mind you, between the violent camera shake of the charge-in and the screen blown pure white by point-blank blue flash and ice shards, by the time the focus returned, the colossal boss that should have been right there had vanished without trace or shape.

『......................huh?』

『Eh, what just happened...?』

『Hey wait, she charged INTO the head-on charge just now, right!?』

『You're kidding—punched straight through the hardest point, front on, in one hit!?』

『The screen went pure white at the very best part, and I haven't the foggiest what became of what!!』

『Hey, whoever said "bleeding out, it's over" earlier—you still breathing out there? lol』

『She settled the lower-layer boss, the Iron Behemoth, in barely a few minutes...』

With a small "...phew," Iori let out a breath and lightly shook out his right wrist, still humming with the impact. The armor had cracked exactly as he'd aimed.

And then, just as he stepped close to pick up the magic stone dropped where the boss had perished—huge, the size of a person's head—

In the empty space right beside the stone, silver-white motes of light began gathering out of nowhere, weaving themselves into the shape of one small 『box』.