Chapter 204: Endfield

Under Amikura Mako's direction, the scattered group finally linked back up on the lowest level of that underground base where every kind of monster ran wild. And they found the being the female executive had called the "Hell Lord."

There, in the middle of a floor littered with mangled mercenary corpses, a man stood waiting. Black skintight leather. A saw blade set crosswise through a ghastly white skull.

One hand idly stroking an exquisite brass puzzle cube, he studied the crude humanoid murals around him as if lost in thought.

He seemed to have sensed the intruders long before they arrived, yet couldn't be bothered to turn his head.

"You'll keep your word, right?!"

Cornered with nowhere left to run, the female executive seized Nanase Tsubasa's wrist like a drowning woman grabbing at straw, her voice shrill and trembling.

"However big the grudge, it should fade when the world's about to end, right? Please… take me with you!"

"We're the only ones of our own kind left to lean on from here on out!"

Faced with that shameless emotional blackmail and begging, Nanase Tsubasa spared her one cold glance and sighed.

"Relax. We're not as cold-blooded as you people."

Then she turned to the black-haired girl behind her. "Yotsuya, let her borrow the [Stone Mask]."

"If we can't leave this world alive anyway, holding onto the thing does us no good. It wouldn't mean a thing."

Miko Yotsuya went still for a moment at the sound of her name, pressed her lips together, and turned it over in her mind.

The girl she used to be might have hesitated, remembering everything this woman had done.

But now, watching the executive grovel at the absolute bottom of her dignity, she had to admit the woman wasn't wrong.

Their little band of students dared to gamble their lives here because the Black Sphere stood behind them, because Chris and the others were their backing. But strip that away, and what if their earlier guess, that "reaching another world means we get out," was nothing more than wishful thinking?

If it failed, their fate would end up no better than the natives of this world.

On top of that, going up against something whose depths they couldn't read at all, they genuinely needed a stone to test the water and take the measure of him.

Once that clicked into place, Miko Yotsuya stopped refusing. She pulled a Stone Mask still crusted with dried blood out from behind her back and tossed it down in front of the executive.

Clack. The slab of stone rang out sharply against the floor.

The executive lunged for it like a woman who'd struck treasure, scrambling on hands and knees, snatching the mask up and jamming it hard against her own face.

Because of the blood already on it, the spurs inside sprang free and drove straight into her brain.

"Aaaaaghhh—!"

And just as the executive howled through her conversion into a vampire, the Hell Lord toying with his puzzle cube was finally drawn by the noise, and glanced back at them without thinking.

Ryūji Kanzaki and Nanase Tsubasa went rigid, Black Sphere war swords already in their hands, braced as though facing an army.

By then the executive's transformation into a vampire was complete.

But the power flooding her body gave her no thought of resistance, and she made no move to turn and take revenge on Nanatsura Tsubasa and the rest.

She bolted straight to the Hell Lord, dropped to one knee with a heavy thud, and prayed like a fanatic at the altar of her god.

"Honored Hell Lord! Please, take me into your Hell!"

"Please, let me pass!"

"…I'll endure your torments for all eternity! Just let me through that door!"

Watching it unfold, Ryūji Kanzaki raised an eyebrow.

So the intel this woman had coughed up to save her own skin hadn't been a lie after all.

This was the procedure: sacrifice yourself, and you enter Hell.

'Only… would the clear condition for this Revival Match really be that simple?'

Kanzaki turned the worry over quietly behind his eyes.

Reality answered him soon enough, exactly the way he'd feared.

The Hell Lord looked down at the vampire executive sprawled at his feet like a dog.

Then he lifted his head slowly and regarded the students standing ready, his face empty of expression.

"You as well. Have you come seeking sanctuary?"

"…All of you?"

Nanase Tsubasa gripped her Black Sphere war sword tighter and said nothing, only gave a noncommittal nod.

Seeing that, the Hell Lord fell silent for a moment.

"To flee the suffering of the mortal world, is it…"

A mocking smile curled at the corner of his mouth. "In that case, I must warn you. Hell has never been a shelter for cowards, still less a playground where mortals amuse themselves for a while."

"Let me see… whether you have the courage to face true terror."

The instant the words landed, the Hell Lord raised a hand and closed his fingers gently on empty air.

Chains rasped somewhere unseen.

To either side of him, two hideous monk-like monsters stepped out of nothing, stripped of skin, nothing left but the raw grain of muscle.

At the same moment, dozens of rusted chains tipped with barbed hooks materialized out of the air.

Too fast.

Fast enough that Kanzaki and the others couldn't even finish the motion of dodging.

Thwip! Thwip!

"Guhaa—!"

The barbs tore through flesh, punching in an instant through the shoulder blades and ankle tendons of several students.

The newly turned vampire executive included, naturally.

"Aaaah! Let go of me! It hurts, it hurts!"

Her whole body was wrenched upward and left dangling in midair.

Even with a Vampire Bloodline reinforcing her, the pain from these chains out of Hell sank straight into her soul, and not one ounce of it was blunted.

It was as if the rules themselves had pressed down and turned her back into a fragile mortal.

Over on the other side, thanks to the burst of power their Black Sphere Combat Suits could spike for a moment, Nanase Tsubasa and a handful of others slipped that opening kill by a hair's width.

Miko Yotsuya reacted half a beat late, but Nanase Tsubasa's hand shot out and yanked her aside, so the chain only grazed her shoulder before burying itself in the stone pillar behind her.

"Counterattack!" Kanzaki roared, pinned where he hung.

Whoosh—!

The girl didn't answer. Her legs simply exploded with force, and the flagstones under her feet shattered.

She blurred forward, Black Sphere war sword aimed straight for the Hell Lord's throat.

But…

The Hell Lord didn't dodge, didn't evade, didn't so much as lift a hand to block.

As a priest in service to Leviathan, master of the labyrinth, his duty was to guide the souls of the mortal world down to Hell for judgment.

So long as he broke no law, so long as nothing severed his link to the master of the labyrinth, within this dimension he was invincible.

He tilted his chin up slightly and dropped his guard on purpose.

Shhk—!

The Black Sphere war sword lodged in the joint of his neck.

Blood ran down the blade.

Yet no pain showed on the Hell Lord's face. What surfaced instead was a pilgrim's rapture.

As a masochist who took his joy in agony, he decided to be generous and repay a gift like that in equal measure.

He turned his head a fraction, and the metal saw blade across his face spun up to a screaming speed, slicing straight at Nanatsura Tsubasa where she stood, close enough to touch.

"Ngh!"

Nanase Tsubasa had braced for it, but the gap in their strength was simply too wide.

Even wrenching her body aside with everything she had—

Thwip!

The girl's left arm came off clean at the elbow and spun high into the air.

But Nanase Tsubasa didn't scream, didn't break.

She swallowed the pain down to a muffled grunt and kept moving, dodging chain after chain, wrenching herself clear of the pursuit by sheer will.

The Hell Lord didn't press his advantage.

He turned his head and looked to the other side.

Ryūji Kanzaki and several ordinary boys hung there drenched in sweat.

And to his surprise, apart from the executive still whimpering for mercy and Chie Hoshinomiya, not one of these young men and women broke.

They clenched their teeth until their lips split open, and still not a single one of them begged.

Some of them were even hauling at the barbs with raw strength, ignoring skin tearing and bone snapping, trying to rip themselves free.

"Impressive."

The Hell Lord nodded, satisfied. "All mortals fear the suffering of the flesh."

"You… are an aberration."

He lifted a hand with elegant care. "Then let me see exactly how far your endurance can carry you."

He raised one pallid finger and flicked it lightly.

"Of course, before that, we must first strip away the useless impurities you carry…"

The words weren't even finished, and the wounds where the chains held Kanzaki and the others hadn't begun to close, before countless more chains boiled up out of empty air.

They moved like living things, hooking with perfect precision into the most fragile places on their bodies. Eye sockets. The soft inner bend of the elbow. The hollows behind the knees.

"Guh-ah!"

"Nnngh—!"

The ones who had held out until now finally lost it, and the screams tore free.

Blood soaked the tiles of the altar red.

Back beside Miko Yotsuya, Nanase Tsubasa was in no better shape.

She realized that although no chain was touching her at all, the vampire power inside her felt sealed away by force.

Her severed arm refused to regenerate, and even the baseline strength her Combat Suit amplified was draining away fast.

She had dropped back into the frailty of an ordinary human being.

But the girl had no time to spare on shock or confusion.

Nanase Tsubasa swung her sword one-handed and barely managed to sever a chain lunging for Miko Yotsuya's blind side.

"Yotsuya…"

"I don't know what happened on Amikura-senpai's end that cut off contact with us."

"But the way things stand… getting into Hell alive may be too much to hope for."

Nanatsura Tsubasa gripped the hilt hard and coughed up a mouthful of blood. "Let's try one last time!"

Miko Yotsuya reached up with a shaking hand and scrubbed away the tears the pain had forced from the corners of her eyes.

She dragged in a breath and forced herself calm enough to circulate Ripple.

"Nanase…"

Miko managed a strained laugh. "Believe in us… we're definitely getting out of this alive!"

The Hell Lord tilted his head a little and simply stood where he was.

He watched the two of them heal their wounds with Ripple, then prop each other up and turn to face him again.

He glanced up into the air.

At Kanzaki and the rest, stripped of their vampire abilities, hanging upside down and enduring an execution's worth of torment.

Pain was written across every face.

And still not one of them begged.

Honestly, it astonished him, and it filled him with a delight he had never felt before.

"Since you love the struggle so dearly…"

"Then I shall offer you a trial more absolute still."

"But first, let me indulge that trivial little wish of yours." With that, the Hell Lord slowly lifted his hand.

An invisible force descended and swept Nanase Tsubasa, Miko Yotsuya, and everyone strung up on the chains through the air to gather behind him.

A grinding roar rolled through the earth.

Even as he cast, the entire underground altar, the entire world, shuddered.

Rubble rained from above.

The Hell Lord could feel it: the ancient Evil God that belonged to this planet was moments away from breaking through the crust.

He didn't care.

As Leviathan's priest, he was an enforcer of the law of suffering, and his jurisdiction was clearly defined.

Battling an Evil God fell well outside it.

By Hell's ordinary procedure, in fact, he only ever appeared once the offerings had fulfilled the conditions for his summoning, at which point he would drag the one who called him down for torment.

As it stood, that executive had been the one to summon him, so by rights he wanted only that single offering.

He wouldn't normally lay a hand on unrelated souls.

But he truly hadn't expected this.

In a world on the verge of annihilation, a whole crowd of souls had walked up and delivered themselves to his door.

And not only did they shrug off the threat of pain, they were drunk on it, intoxicated by wounds and slaughter and struggle…

Which was, top to bottom, exactly his preferred type.

This business trip to the mortal world had paid off beyond his wildest hopes.

The Hell Lord savored the thought.

Then he raised his eyes and noticed something.

Held suspended in the air, Nanase Tsubasa and Miko Yotsuya had not given up resisting.

The two girls marshaled what Ripple still lingered in their bodies, hands joined on the hilt of a single Black Sphere war sword.

One strike, driven dead center into the Hell Lord's face.

He let the blade punch through his brain, and rather than rage, he nodded again with fresh certainty.

"Contempt for pain. An embrace of the struggle…"

"This is precisely the essence we seek."

"Come with me."

"Trials without end await there, worthy of a will like yours."

With that said, as the underground base began collapsing under the Evil God's pressure, the Hell Lord waved a casual hand, and behind him a crimson gate of Hell swung slowly open.

Barring surprises, someone in this group was certain to awaken in the endless agony ahead, and to earn the right to become his servant.

He could hardly wait to start "sculpting" them properly.

Meanwhile, over in the Mirror World.

Amikura Mako hadn't cut contact because she'd decided there was no hope left, or because she couldn't stand to watch her friends suffer.

It was because…

Things had gone sideways on the Mirror World side too.

Maybe prey was simply scarce in the Mirror World.

After the White-Winged Swan came looking for them on its own, two more enormous silhouettes surfaced not far off.

A [Peerless Dragon], crimson from head to tail. And a [Viper King], scales shimmering with purple light.

One on the left, one on the right, boxing the group in from both sides.

Kei Karuizawa and Hayasaka Ai, on watch duty, had to break off at once and fight.

And it was precisely the fallout from that sudden battle that dragged Hiyori Shiina and Amikura Mako, the two handling communications, into evasive maneuvers, which meant they lost track of the corresponding real world for a while.

Firelight and venom mist tangled together in an instant.

Chris frowned faintly, Enma Blade in hand, weighing whether to wipe both of them out or simply pick one and bind it under contract.

Kreeee—!

A phoenix cry burst overhead, heavy with pressure.

The Peerless Dragon, mouth open to loose its flames, and the Viper King, already coiling to crush, both froze mid-motion.

As if they'd run into a natural predator, the two of them growled low at the sky in unison, twice.

Wariness and resentment, plain as day.

But when the second cry rang out, noticeably closer this time, the Peerless Dragon and the Viper King exchanged a look.

In the end they made the honest choice and backed down.

With the crisis lifted, Chris raised an eyebrow. He had no interest in chasing them, and instead played along with the moment, flipping open the Black Sphere Controller on his wrist for a look.

The matching data surfaced on the screen.

[Golden Phoenix]

[Details: The single strongest Mirror Beast in the Mirror World. Its body is wreathed in undying golden flame; its feathers are sharp enough to cut through steel, and its stats are terrifying enough to one-shot an ordinary Mirror Beast. A single beat of its wings achieves instantaneous movement, letting it travel freely to any corner of the Mirror World.]

[Ultimate Ability: At full power, the orb in its left wing commands raging fire, the orb in its right wing commands howling wind… it can even briefly halt, or reverse, the flow of time.]

At that, even Hayasaka Ai, who had never held high hopes for Contract Beasts, drew a sharp breath.

"Command… time?"

Chris obviously wasn't about to pass on a prize like that.

Still.

Given the question of how much longer the current world would last, before going off to subdue the [Golden Phoenix], Chris turned back to the others behind him with a reminder.

"In case we can't stay here long once we've finished collecting Contract Beasts for everyone—"

"—I plan to pick a world and open the teleport the moment the Golden Phoenix is mine."

"So use the time. You two keep watching. Find me a world that would work as a place to land."

Hiyori Shiina and Amikura Mako snapped out of it at that, as though waking from a dream.

They hurried back to the glass wall to survey the scenes playing out across the various worlds.

And so.

When Amikura Mako refocused on The Cabin in the Woods world, the image that met her eyes was a view from space.

That planet had once been such a gentle blue.

An enormous hand was reaching up out of the depths of the crust.

Then the atmosphere tore apart, and the surface cracked open like a jigsaw puzzle.

An endless flood of dark red welled up and stained the entire planet the color of blood.

"This is…"

Amikura Mako's lips trembled, and she went silent.

Meanwhile, on the other side.

Hiyori Shiina, assigned to observe the Overlord world, confirmed that Ainz Ooal Gown and his subordinates were still down in the Great Tomb, working carefully through all their tedious preparations. Then she turned and reported to Chris.

"President Nagumo's side is still in the prep stage for both parties. No conflict yet."

The words had barely left her.

Hearing Hiyori's report, Amikura Mako finally found her own voice again.

She took a deep breath and forced down the desolation welling up inside her.

Turning around, she kept her tone as level as she could manage.

"Chris…"

"The Revival Match Nanase and the others were in. It's already over."

"There's no need to keep watching it anymore."

____

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