Chapter 340 - 340: The True Face of the Boss

"Ottar, Allen Fromel, Hogni, all of you, get back!"

Hedin's voice rang out.

The Goddess of Beauty's warriors, who had been swarming the boss, broke off almost as one, then pulled back to open distance between themselves and their foe.

Clearly, they too had realized their last attacks had been utterly useless.

Even Allen Fromel, the most reckless of them, had cooled down, though the backlash of his magic was too plain to hide — right now he was crouched low against the ground, looking thoroughly spent.

And in the very instant the others drew away from the boss, only Ryuu noticed that Isagi, at the same moment, had drawn out a strangely shaped weapon.

It looked like countless tangled, greyish-white, slick arms, sheathing the boy's left hand and extending upward like an armored gauntlet of flesh and sinew, stretching to a preposterous length of nearly three meters.

Then, from its foremost tip, a crescent-shaped bow-limb of grey-white unfurled.

And from one side of that gauntlet several more grey-white hands grew forth, all of them together drawing back a bowstring dyed red with a dragon's heart-blood.

It was a "greatbow."

Cecil had named it the [Dragon Slayer] — a first-tier armament forged from the experience of once crafting "hunter's weapons," built with giant Monsters as its imagined enemy.

It was not only meant to replace the [Left Bow] that Isagi had broken earlier; it could likewise fire magic shots that used his Magic itself as ammunition.

And there was one more capability — the most important, and the one Isagi needed most right now.

A "finishing blow."

He had always lacked that kind of decisive, game-ending big move, so most of the time, when he wanted to inflict serious damage on a Monster, he had to rely on the mage Lefiya.

But things were different now.

An unseen jet-black arrow coalesced between the grey-white longbow and the blood-red string.

It was as fine and fragmented as a woman's slender hair, yet it tyrannically ripped away nearly half of his mental strength in one stroke — drawn out so fast that Isagi's very thoughts stalled for an instant, followed by a wave of utterly hazy vertigo.

But it didn't matter.

The trouble in his mind wouldn't affect his attack, because his body had already carried out the follow-through on instinct.

And so.

In a flash the jet-black arrow was already before the boss's eyes.

Like a star streaking past.

In the instant Ottar and the others fell back, the boss — which had just been about to swing its sword — felt, almost at the same moment, the biting killing intent that had arrived right before its eyes.

The arrow passed straight through the body of that "SSS"-rank hunter.

A hit?

Isagi kept silent, his gaze fixed on the longsword that had suddenly appeared before him.

Ryuu-senpai, Hedin, Ottar and the rest — right now, blades had materialized out of thin air beside every one of them, only they had not yet fallen.

It had frozen in place.

Because the boss had not swung down the weapon in its hand.

And the reason was simple — it was that arrow Isagi had just loosed.

The jet-black arrow had not merely pierced through the boss's body; inside it, in an instant, it had "detonated."

As if countless steel thorns had burst outward.

In an instant it strained open the body hidden beneath the grey robe, the Magic beginning to swell. The boss's frame — which had taken the form of a skeleton — was invisibly pried wider, that humanoid ribcage bloating as if it were about to explode from the inside.

The [Dragon Slayer] greatbow.

This was the greatbow Cecil had forged using the materials dropped earlier by those [Visiting Dragon]s, together with the guardian Isagi had defeated on his last trip to the Dragon Valley.

It carried the power of "lightning."

But it differed from ordinary lightning-attribute magic — it seemed that, because too much material from "dragon-kin" Monsters had been poured into it, some sort of change had occurred.

What it finally manifested as was this "thin black thread," which possessed several special effects. One of them was the [Expansion] before his eyes.

It was not a simple blast or scatter.

Rather, it caused the "air" inside the target's body to swell. As for the exact effect, Isagi had tested it before setting out on the adventure.

If it struck a great tree, then the trunk itself would abruptly be pried open from within, taking on the shape of a round ball, swelling endlessly to its limit — but it would not burst. Instead it held that state almost semi-permanently.

And right now, the Magic inside the target that drove the [Expansion] would form a vortex.

It would ceaselessly devour the Magic within the enemy's body.

If that Magic ran completely dry, the enemy would remain forever in the state before his eyes now — unless it could use the Magic within its own body to suppress it, which was the only way to halt its spread.

That fool Cecil actually explained it in a simple, easy-to-grasp way.

"It's basically planting a 'seed' inside the other guy's body."

The girl had said it back then, swaying her head this way and that.

"The seed keeps sucking up the Magic inside them, and if their Magic runs dry, it goes berserk and strains the body wide open from the inside.

For anything with 'life,' the result is death, no doubt about it — after all, when a person's body gets suddenly blown up like that, there's no way they could still be alive.

And for most Monsters, it's probably the same."

But plainly.

The boss before him was no ordinary Monster.

Isagi's brow furrowed slightly.

Because after this arrow called [Expansion] hit the enemy, it had strained the body open outright — which meant there was no Magic whatsoever inside the boss's body. Otherwise it could never have gone off in an instant like that.

That was impossible.

One of the fundamental mechanisms of this world was "Magic."

The [Pale King] before, his own bizarre and peculiar abilities, even the [Soul Teardrop] — all of them, at their core, were magic.

So.

The absurd mechanics this "Unreachable Eternity" had just displayed should, at their core, be magic as well.

Isagi's original idea had been to use [Expansion] to whittle down the enemy's inner Magic, so that its abilities would weaken a little — but as things looked now, the situation seemed to have changed?

Or else…

"Look out! That body isn't the real boss!!"

Isagi's sudden warning made everyone else turn their heads toward him.

And it was at that very moment.

Abruptly.

From the blind spots of Hedin's and Allen Fromel's vision, blood-red longsword slashes appeared at the same instant.

But this time it was different.

As the two faced the incoming attack, they both suddenly felt as though something behind them had given them a shove.

Without warning, utterly sudden.

Even seasoned adventurers like Allen Fromel and Hedin had never known such an inexplicable moment.

It even felt somewhat "absurd."

How could the [City's Strongest] adventurers be shoved from behind without a sound and lose their balance?

And what was more.

In that tiny instant.

Their minds went blank. They could only sense that gory red blade drawing closer and closer, yet their bodies gave no response at all — never mind swinging the weapons in their hands, they couldn't even command their limbs to make their bodies move.

Because —

"Just how do you make your hands and feet move, again?"

In the instant they lost their balance, both Allen Fromel and Hedin had forgotten that very thing.

Thankfully.

Isagi's warning came just in time.

In the very instant the boy called out, both Ryuu and Ottar sprang into action. The Elf girl used her weapon to help Hedin block that lethal blow, and Ottar was even more direct — he rushed to the Cat Person youth's side in a flash and then slammed him flying aside, so that the boss's attack struck nothing.

"That thing is invisible!"

Isagi understood.

Every one of his earlier guesses had been off the mark. Mechanics, whatever — it was all a smokescreen. In truth the boss had never been there at all.

That "skeleton" standing motionless in place was not the real boss.

The true "SSS"-rank hunter was an invisible thing!

And its real ability was —

"I have to find this thing!"

Wait.

Isagi blinked, thinking — how had he been planning to find it just now?

He had clearly had a method, yet no matter how he tried, he couldn't remember it.

His mind sank once more into a kind of daze, and by the time Isagi came back to himself, the thing that struck him instead was…

"What was I looking for, again?"

"!!"

He realized he seemed to have forgotten something extremely important!

At this very moment.

The battlefield fell into an eerie silence. Never mind Isagi — Ryuu and everyone from Freya Familia included, all of them stood rooted in place, blinking.

Then.

Everyone turned their eyes toward the not-so-distant figure standing at the center of this platform woven from enormous vines — the skeletal humanoid that still loomed beside the flower, longsword in hand.

"Is this thing the boss?"

The same words surfaced in every one of their minds.

And yet, sure enough.

Every one of them could also sense that they seemed to have forgotten something important.

"But we only just got here — what could there be to forget?"

They all overlooked Hedin's wounded left hand, the one now utterly drowned in gory red — and they completely overlooked the humanoid skeleton still strained open by those sharp jet-black thorns, ballooning outward from within like a round sphere.

It was not that they "took it for granted that this was simply how things were." They purely and simply overlooked it.

Because it did not exist, it was not a problem.

"SSS-rank hunter, 'The Unreachable Eternity,' Nelmos."

The boss's name welled up once more from deep within his heart. Now Isagi's brow creased faintly, and with some confusion he looked down at his own left hand, wrapped in those grey-white, arm-like interwoven strands.

The [Dragon Slayer] greatbow?

When had he drawn this thing out?

Normally, he would never treat this thing as a weapon for close engagement.

As if a fog were being parted.

In the depths of his hazy thoughts, a tiny point of light gleamed.

It all came clear to Isagi — he seemed to have grasped something important. And at the same time, over on the side of Ottar, Allen Fromel and Ryuu-senpai, it seemed they too had made a new discovery —

Over on Loki Familia's side, the battle was going terribly hard.

"Haah — haah — haah —"

Ragged, heavy panting echoed across this azure sheet of ice.

Gareth, Tiona, Finn and Ais had all, by now, taken wounds of one degree or another.

And even Lefiya and Riveria, stationed far back in charge of resources, looked no better. The Elf princess's right hand hung down in a horribly twisted posture — it had been utterly snapped, a grievous injury of shattered bone mixed with torn flesh, the pain so severe that the woman's pretty face had gone deathly pale.

And she had to bite down hard on the Spirit's protective cloth wound about her neck just to hold her concentration, so the agony would not scatter her thoughts.

Thankfully, the boss in the distance was not exactly having an easy time of it either.

One of its two faces was already all but destroyed, the grim white bone beneath laid bare; the other had been rendered mostly to charcoal by the force of magic. Its body was nearly soaked through with golden dragon-blood, and the once-interwoven azure and crimson scales lay scattered across the ice.

And just a moment ago, Finn's strongest strike had nearly bored clean through one of its arms — at the cost of the Pallum's [Braver] losing consciousness entirely, falling into a coma, forced to withdraw from the fight.

This thing.

It was even more troublesome than the Corrupted Spirit.

That was a fact both Riveria and Gareth had felt in their very bones. The two might well be around the same level, but the Corrupted Spirit had never possessed such absurd Strength, speed, and terrifyingly powerful "magic" — although the boss's magic was, in fact, quite simple.

It simply fired pillars of flame and ice light from its two hands, nothing more — just like the breath the original "twin-headed dragon" would use.

But that thing was too outrageous.

Even the strongest defensive magic that Riveria and Lefiya cast together — their third-stage [Dimension · Interception], which in theory could obstruct any physical and magical attack — had been blasted apart outright.

That was when Riveria's hand had been wounded.

Just as expected, this thing's [Strength], [Agility], [Dexterity] and [Magic] were all several hundred times those of a Monster of the same level.

Purely in terms of stats.

It might be closing infinitely on Lv.9 — or even surpassing Lv.9?

Incomprehensible.

The only good news, perhaps, was that its [Endurance] stat was not so absurdly amplified as the several-hundred-fold of the others at the same level — which was why, having fought this long, the boss too had taken no small share of wounds.

But what still left no room for complacency was that its will to fight seemed, if anything, to have grown thicker.

Ais and Tiona could even sense, from their foe, a certain will of "resolve unto death."

"A Miracle is born, from the very first, for the sake of death."

Like the many miracles the Dark Mother brought down into the Dungeon, its very existence was not meant to let ordinary Monsters look up at its singular uniqueness.

Rather, it was meant to die, over and over.

Monsters would challenge the Miracle's existence, and the Miracle would kill Monsters, or be killed by them.

Just as.

The Monster Rex would be endlessly subjugated by adventurers, killed by adventurers, or would kill adventurers itself.

Across this long, drawn-out process.

Change was slowly, bit by bit, accumulating.

And plainly, Isagi's arrival had intensified that change — or rather, made it far more direct.

The ["Azure's Crimson" · Beast's Miracle · Amphisbaena] did not fear death.

Because.

So long as the Dark Mother still existed, it would never truly die.

Being "killed," so called, was nothing more than returning beneath the great lake, waiting for the next time it would rise once more from the water.

And it would come back stronger still!

____

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