Chapter 311: Anything Can Be Cut

Zeri stared at him for a second before the anger on his face slowly disappeared.

A smile spread across his lips.

"So..."

His tentacles remained wrapped around the four wounded Shadow Corps soldiers as he turned fully toward Yuuta.

"You finally decided to come out, Uncle."

Yuuta continued walking.

"Leave them alone."

Zeri’s attention shifted downward, and only then did he notice what Yuuta was carrying. A sword rested in his right hand, the weapon he had borrowed from Raven before leaving the unfinished building.

Zeri’s eyebrows rose.

"Oh?" His smile became curious again. "Uncle, you know how to use a sword?"

Yuuta didn’t answer.

He continued walking toward him.

His fingers tightened around the hilt as his gaze moved briefly toward the four Shadow Corps soldiers hanging in the air. Their bodies were covered in wounds, blood dripping from injuries that Zeri had deliberately aggravated simply to force them into more pain.

Yuuta felt his anger rising again.

He had already seen enough tonight to understand why humans considered demons creatures of evil. It wasn’t simply because they killed people. Humans killed too. What disturbed him was the pleasure some demons seemed to take in suffering itself.

Zeri could have killed those soldiers whenever he wanted.

Instead, he had deliberately tightened his tentacles around broken bones and damaged limbs just to hear them scream.

Yuuta stopped walking.

"I said..."

His voice dropped.

"Leave them alone."

His crimson eyes glowed.

Zeri’s smile vanished.

For one strange instant, his heart seemed to stop.

He didn’t understand what happened next. There was no conscious decision, no thought telling him to obey, yet his body reacted before his mind could catch up.

The four tentacles loosened.

The captured Shadow Corps soldiers dropped onto the street.

Their bodies struck the pavement several meters away, and although the fall hurt, they were finally free from the crushing pressure around their injuries.

Zeri froze.

His eyes widened as he stared at the soldiers he had just released.

"Huh?"

He slowly looked at his own tentacles.

"Wait..."

His hand moved toward his chest.

Something was wrong.

His heartbeat had returned, but it was faster now. His fingers trembled faintly, and that same strange uneasiness he had experienced earlier began crawling through his body.

Zeri looked toward Yuuta again.

"What was that, Uncle?"

Yuuta said nothing.

"No, seriously..." Zeri pressed his palm against his chest as though checking whether his heart was behaving normally. "There’s something wrong with me."

His gaze dropped toward his trembling hand.

"Or maybe there’s something wrong with you."

Zeri flexed his fingers several times, but the trembling didn’t immediately disappear. He hated that feeling. Ever since the Aesthor Stone had released that black aura around him, his body had begun reacting to things his mind couldn’t understand.

Fear without knowing what he feared.

Instinct without understanding what his instincts were warning him about.

"This is what I was talking about..." Zeri whispered.

Then he looked up.

Yuuta was standing several meters away with the sword in his hand.

Zeri became silent.

Something about Yuuta’s appearance made him hesitate.

There was nothing physically monstrous about him. He was still the same injured human Zeri had been teasing throughout the battle. His clothes were damaged, exhaustion remained visible across his body, and compared to a High Demon, he should have looked completely harmless.

Yet at that moment, Zeri’s instincts refused to see him that way.

Yuuta’s face was completely serious. His crimson eyes glowed faintly beneath the darkness, and the sword rested steadily in his hand despite the injuries covering his body.

For a brief moment, Zeri didn’t feel as though he was looking at prey.

The feeling was reversed.

His breathing changed.

Why am I afraid to approach him?

Zeri’s teeth clenched.

He didn’t like it.

He didn’t understand it.

And he wanted that feeling gone.

Without thinking any further, Zeri threw his arm forward.

Four tentacles exploded toward Yuuta at once.

Their speed was completely different from before.

Zeri wasn’t playing anymore. The four limbs ripped through the air at superhuman speed, attacking from separate directions so Yuuta couldn’t simply step aside. One came directly toward his chest, another curved toward his right side, while the remaining two approached from opposite angles to cut off any escape.

Yuuta saw them.

He didn’t move.

The distance disappeared rapidly.

Ten meters.

Seven.

Five.

Yuuta’s fingers tightened around Raven’s sword.

Three.

He could hear the tentacles tearing through the air.

Every instinct in his body should have been screaming at him to dodge, yet Yuuta remained exactly where he was.

Instead, he slowly closed his eyes.

His breathing steadied.

Both hands tightened around the sword.

And in the final moment before the four tentacles reached him, Yuuta stopped looking at the battlefield entirely.

He closed his eyes.

The sounds around him remained , the tearing wind produced by Zeri’s tentacles, the distant groans of injured Shadow Corps soldiers, the pounding of his own heart but Yuuta forced himself to ignore all of it, letting everything fade into the background until only one thing remained.

The sword in his hands.

A memory surfaced.

It was from his training with Isvarn.

Back then, Yuuta had stood in front of the old man with a practice sword in his hands. Isvarn watched him quietly as usual, both hands resting behind his back, while Yuuta spent several minutes thinking about something before finally gathering enough courage to ask.

"Grandpa."

Isvarn raised an eyebrow.

"I have a question about something."

"Then ask, boy."

Yuuta looked down at the sword in his hands. At the time, his understanding of aura had still been painfully limited, and after everything he had experienced inside those nightmares, one particular question had continued bothering him.

"What if I learn to use aura with a sword and someday fight something much stronger than me?" Yuuta asked. "Like a monster. Would I actually be able to kill it?"

Isvarn answered without hesitation.

"Yes."

Yuuta looked up.

"But how?"

His grip around the practice sword tightened.

"What if its muscles are too dense? What if its bones are so hard the sword can’t penetrate them?" Yuuta asked, his voice losing certainty as memories from one of his nightmare trials returned. "Even with an aura blade, there has to be a limit, right?"

He remembered the monster inside the fallen temple swinging again and again, only for his attacks to struggle against flesh and bone that seemed impossibly durable. The memory alone was enough to make his hands tremble slightly.

"How can a normal human like me cut something like that?" he continued. "I can put aura into the sword, but if the thing I’m fighting is simply too strong, I don’t understand how that’s supposed to be enough."

Isvarn quietly studied him.

"Boy, you are thinking about the weapon too much."

Yuuta frowned. "What do you mean?"

Isvarn stepped closer and looked toward the practice sword in Yuuta’s hands.

"Anything that exists can be destroyed. Flesh, bone, stone, steel. it makes no difference. If something exists in this universe, then there is a means to kill or destroy it."

Yuuta stared at him, clearly not understanding.

Isvarn sighed. "What I’m saying is you shouldn’t decide something is impossible to cut before you’ve even swung your sword."

"But if the sword isn’t strong enough..."

"Then make it strong enough."

Yuuta blinked.

Isvarn pointed toward the weapon.

"Aura does not become powerful simply because you pour more of it into a blade. You must understand what you’re asking that aura to do. Feel the weapon you’re holding. Recognize its edge, its length, its purpose, then channel your aura accordingly."

His gaze sharpened.

"If your intention is to cut, don’t spread your aura carelessly throughout the weapon. Concentrate it. Compress it along the edge until the sword in your hands becomes sharper than whatever it’s facing."

Yuuta looked down at the blade.

"The better you understand your own power, the more precisely you can control it," Isvarn continued. "With enough control, even an ordinary weapon can become something capable of cutting what should normally be beyond it."

Yuuta’s eyes slowly widened.

Something about the explanation reminded him of demonstrations he’d seen back on Earth — Japanese swordsmen focusing completely before making a single precise cut through bamboo. It wasn’t wild strength or endless swinging. Everything concentrated into one movement.

One purpose.

To cut.

"I see..."

Isvarn raised an eyebrow. "You understand?"

"I think so."

The memory disappeared.

Yuuta was back on the ruined street.

His eyes were still closed.

The four tentacles were almost upon him.

Instead of pouring aura wildly around his body, Yuuta directed everything toward the sword in his hands. He felt the grip beneath his fingers and pictured the blade extending outward from them, and he remembered Isvarn’s words.

If your intention is to cut, concentrate it.

The faint dark-green aura around Yuuta began flowing into the sword. At first it flickered unevenly across the metal, unstable, scattering more than it gathered. Yuuta tightened his grip and forced himself to focus, pulling the energy back toward the blade instead of letting it spread.

The aura condensed.

Not violently, but sharply a thin, concentrated edge of green light wrapped around the steel until the ordinary weapon in Yuuta’s hands looked like something else entirely.

Zeri saw it.

His eyes widened.

But his tentacles were already committed to the strike.

Yuuta opened his eyes.

His crimson gaze locked onto them.

Then he swung.

There was only one slash.

The green blade carved a clean arc through the darkness as Yuuta twisted his body and put everything into the movement. The first tentacle met the aura-covered edge and offered almost no resistance, the blade sliding through the thick demonic flesh before continuing into the second, then the third, its momentum never breaking. The fourth followed a heartbeat later.

For a fraction of a second, nothing happened.

Then all four severed ends fell.

Heavy pieces of Zeri’s tentacles slammed against the pavement around Yuuta, blood spilling from the clean cuts as the remaining stumps recoiled violently back toward their owner.

Yuuta completed the swing and steadied the sword in front of himself, breathing hard, the green aura still burning faintly along its edge.

Zeri didn’t move.

His mouth opened slightly as he stared down at the four severed tentacles scattered across the ruined street. Blood leaked from the cleanly cut ends, staining the broken pavement beneath them.

"What...?"

For several seconds, the entire street fell into silence.

Even Yuuta seemed momentarily stunned by what he had done. His crimson eyes lowered toward the severed tentacles lying around him, then toward the sword still held firmly between his hands. The dark-green aura continued to flow around its blade, humming faintly as though the weapon itself had changed.

Those tentacles hadn’t been thin or fragile. Yuuta had already felt their strength when one of them struck him earlier. They were thick, packed with dense muscle and powerful enough to smash through concrete, crush vehicles, and throw trained soldiers through buildings.

Yet he had cut through four of them with a single swing.

So this is what Grandpa meant.

For the first time, Yuuta truly understood Isvarn’s lesson. He had spent too much time thinking about the physical limitations of the weapon in his hands. Whether the steel was strong enough, whether the enemy’s body was too durable, whether a human could realistically cut through something so much stronger than himself.

But once his aura had properly flowed through the blade, those questions had stopped mattering.

Across from him, Zeri finally recovered from his shock.

"Impossible..."

His eyes moved between Yuuta’s sword and his severed tentacles.

"No. That’s impossible." Zeri’s voice grew louder as disbelief turned into agitation. "There isn’t a sword in this country that can cut through me like that! So how? How did you do that?!"

Yuuta slowly raised his gaze.

He remembered Isvarn’s words.

And this time, he repeated them.

"Anything can be cut," Yuuta said coldly, tightening his hands around the sword, "as long as it exists in this universe."

Something twisted across Zeri’s face.

His confusion vanished beneath pure rage.

"You—!"

The severed ends of his tentacles suddenly began moving. Flesh twisted and regenerated at a disturbing speed, rebuilding what Yuuta had cut away until the four limbs extended outward once again.

Zeri didn’t wait another second.

The regenerated tentacles shot forward.

Yuuta charged directly toward them.

The first tentacle came for his head, but Yuuta lowered his body and let it tear through the air above him. His sword moved immediately afterward, the green aura flashing as the blade carved through the tentacle near its middle.

Another attacked from his left.

Yuuta turned his wrist and slashed upward.

The tentacle split.

Zeri’s eyes widened as Yuuta continued advancing.

"Stop—!"

Two more tentacles came from opposite directions, attempting to crush Yuuta between them. Instead of retreating, Yuuta stepped forward and swung the sword in a wide horizontal arc.

Both were severed.

Chunks of demonic flesh fell around him.

Zeri regenerated them and attacked again, but Yuuta had already found his rhythm. Every time a tentacle entered the range of his sword, the green blade cut through it. The dense muscle that had previously resisted the Shadow Corps’ ordinary weapons now offered almost no resistance against Yuuta’s concentrated aura.

One slash cut through a tentacle.

A second divided another.

Yuuta stepped past the falling piece and brought the sword downward, slicing through a third before immediately rotating his body and cutting the fourth.

Zeri tried to pull them back.

Yuuta didn’t allow him.

He dashed forward.

The distance between them rapidly disappeared as Yuuta’s sword moved again and again. Zeri’s long tentacles were being cut into progressively smaller pieces, each attempt to surround Yuuta ending with another flash of green.

For the first time since the battle began, Zeri was being forced backward.

"What the hell is this?!"

Zeri sent one tentacle low toward Yuuta’s legs while another came straight for his chest. Yuuta jumped over the first, twisted in the air and cut through the second before landing several meters closer.

Zeri immediately attacked again.

Yuuta slashed.

Another piece fell.

Then another.

And another.

Within seconds, the long tentacles that had once dominated the entire street had been reduced to pieces scattered across the pavement.

Zeri stared at the approaching human with growing frustration. Regenerating them was becoming pointless if Yuuta could simply cut them apart faster than he could use them effectively.

"Tch!"

The remaining tentacles suddenly pulled backward.

Their flesh contracted rapidly, disappearing into Zeri’s arms until the monstrous limbs were gone. His hands returned to their normal appearance as he clenched both fists and planted his feet against the shattered road.

"Fine!"

Yuuta continued toward him.

Zeri raised his fists.

"If those tentacles aren’t going to work, then let’s settle this with our hands, Uncle!"

That was exactly what Yuuta had been waiting for.

He tightened his grip on the sword and suddenly pushed aura through his entire body.

The pavement cracked beneath his feet.

Yuuta launched himself forward.

Zeri’s eyes tracked him as Yuuta accelerated, but instead of attacking from the ground, Yuuta planted one foot against a broken section of pavement and jumped. Aura surged through his legs, throwing him high into the air directly toward the High Demon.

Zeri immediately brought his arms up, preparing for the incoming strike.

Yuuta raised the glowing sword over his shoulder.

For anyone watching, it looked as though he intended to attack Zeri himself.

But Yuuta’s eyes weren’t focused only on the demon.

For the briefest moment, his crimson gaze shifted toward the darkness behind Zeri.

The opening was there.

Zeri’s tentacles were gone.

His attention was completely fixed on Yuuta.

And Raven had been waiting for exactly this moment.

Yuuta tightened his grip around the sword and shouted at the top of his lungs.

"RAVEN, NOW!"