Chapter 48

Chapter 48. Something Strange About This Gift (1)

The monsters were charging in, and at the same time there were the vision and the voice filling my head.

On top of that, the pretentious voice was so ridiculous it left me speechless.

'Do you desire power!' of all things.

At this rate, it was not merely difficult to answer. It was difficult even to fight.

Even when I cut off the mana, the vision did not disappear. Even when I tucked the dagger into my belt, nothing changed.

I could not tell whether it was a curse, or some aftereffect brought on by dying over and over again.

But for it to happen at a time like this.

As I stood there, unable to figure out what to do, I heard the Firebird Hunter shout.

"I’ll take care of the red ones, so handle the others! Just buy me some time! I’ll finish them quickly and come help!"

Her instructions made perfect sense.

The gray ones charging toward us were one, two, three.

When I first encountered them, I would not even have been able to flee. Even now, after repeating this several times, I could barely hope to run and buy time.

Even so, I could do what she asked.

If I were in one piece....

But with the vision blocking my sight and the voice hammering at my ears, even running seemed difficult.

Still, I could not just stand there and take it.

It did not matter whether it was a curse or an aftereffect.

I shouted at the top of my lungs.

Whatever it was, so long as it vanished from sight, that would be enough.

"Fine!"

My clear young voice rang through the passage to the stone chamber.

It was enough to make even the charging monsters flinch, and the Firebird Hunter looked startled as well.

"Oh, that’s the spirit. Then I’m counting on you!"

The problem was that she misunderstood me completely.

I was not talking to you....

The Firebird Hunter, having interpreted it in the hottest-blooded way possible, rushed toward the red monsters.

At the same time, the gray monsters leaped at me.

Even as they swung both claws toward me, I could not run.

At that moment, the phantom of the burning bird spread over my whole body.

Flames engulfed me, and my flesh began to burn away. My bones roasted, and my blood boiled.

The pain swept over me so fiercely that it felt as though I might die at any second.

And yet, even in the midst of that pain, I was able to grasp what was happening around me.

'Is this a kind of phantom pain? And why have the monsters charging at me stopped?'

The pain truly was tremendous, but it was not pain that would kill me.

Having already experienced death many times, I could endure this much easily enough.

Perhaps it was a kind of adaptation. Or perhaps resignation....

That thought passed through me for a moment, but whatever the case, that past experience helped me now.

My body burned, and I could feel the pain, but the skin beneath the flames looked no different from before.

As I thought it through, I realized once again that this was phantom pain following on from the vision and the voice.

The moment I understood it as phantom pain, the pain became slightly easier to endure.

More than that, neither my body nor the objects around me had actually stopped moving.

The claws the monsters swung at me were coming closer only very, very slowly.

It was like watching an extremely slow-motion camera.

And it was not only the monsters that had slowed.

The mercenary charging at the monsters, the wind, even the strands of hair fluttering in the wind, all of them were moving slowly, incredibly slowly.

No, it was not that everything had slowed.

It was that my mind was moving dozens, perhaps hundreds of times faster.

As I endured the pain and watched the strange situation unfold, I began to feel a change.

It was not something outside me.

It was something happening inside my body.

Throb.

The flames burning me seeped into my body, and those flames burned the mana within me.

The once-calm mana began to seethe violently, and then it started to change.

The mana, which had been translucent and without any distinct color, began turning red.

From beneath my skin to the depths of my body. From my limbs to my chest and head. All of my mana boiled and changed.

The moment all of it came to a boil.

Crack!

The mana inside my body surged toward the dagger.

The burning mana raced through my arm and hand and poured into the dagger, and the dagger accepted it as though devouring a delicious meal, shuddering all over.

Ssssh.

The more mana poured in, the longer the blade became.

No, it was not that the dagger itself lengthened, but that the mana I was feeding into it continued to extend from the tip in the shape of a blade.

It looked like the beam saber from some famous science-fiction film.

Yet the extended mana blade was not something visible to the eye. I could only tell because it was my own mana extending outward.

To the eye, it looked like nothing more than a slight ripple in space.

The vision disappeared. The voice vanished as well.

The boiling heat was gone, and the pain disappeared with it.

Only the transformed mana remained, flowing through my body and the dagger.

And at that very moment, time returned to normal.

Kyaaah!

The monster’s claws, which had been crawling toward me like a worm, lunged again.

The wind cut across my skin, and the monster’s breath burned against my face.

At the same time, I swung my dagger.

Its blade was short, so there was no way it should have been able to block all those claws, and yet I felt no worry at all.

Slash, slash. Slash.

Just as I expected.

The claws the monster swung flew backward together with its severed foreleg in the next instant.

I had not felt anything being cut, and there was not a drop of blood on the dagger.

Of course there was not. What had severed the monster’s foreleg was not the dagger itself, but the mana blade sheathing it.

A blade made of mana, three times the length of the dagger, had sliced through the monster’s sturdy foreleg in an instant.

I did not understand how it had happened, but I knew at once what I needed to do.

Now that I had gained this power, there was no need to run around buying time.

Why it had happened, and what other complications it might bring, could all wait until after I dealt with what was in front of me.

I cut off the neck of the monster whose foreleg had just been severed with the invisible blade.

Then I swung the dagger at the gray monster charging in after it.

Slash, slash.

A sword with an invisible blade was a far more terrifying weapon than I had expected.

Thinking I was merely swinging a short dagger through empty air, the monster did not stop charging, and was immediately carved apart by the mana blade.

I brought down two monsters in the blink of an eye.

The last one seemed to realize that something was wrong, and halted on the spot to assess the situation.

But if it would not come to me, then I could simply go to it.

It truly was an intelligent monster.

It seemed to realize that my dagger was different from the other swords, and unlike the others, it moved desperately to avoid it, but avoiding an invisible blade entirely was impossible.

In an instant, the monster was drenched in blood. It looked just like the monster that had been fighting the Firebird Hunter earlier.

'Damn, I’m already running low on mana....'

Perhaps because my mana itself had changed, I could feel it draining rapidly after only a brief fight.

As expected, nothing this convenient could come without a cost.

I rushed at the monster at once and, drenched in the blood pouring from it, slashed at it again.

Krrrgh!

Fortunately, I managed to bring it down before my mana ran out.

The red mana was still coursing through my body.

I looked down at the dagger in my hand, on which not a single drop of blood had landed. I could not see it with my eyes, but rough mana was shimmering over its edge.

Had all of my mana actually changed like this?

I had acquired a splendid weapon, but having my original mana transformed was a problem.

If even my inherited ability changed, that would be disastrous.

I tucked the dagger back into my belt.

Sssssssss.

Ah, thankfully, my mana immediately began to change back.

The red mana receded, and my own transparent mana gradually returned.

It quickly reverted completely, and my mana began refilling once more.

I gripped the dagger again.

At once, my mana turned red again.

And the mana that had been replenishing itself felt as though it had stopped.

I let go of the dagger and gripped it again, repeating the action.

Each time, the mana inside my body changed.

"Not just my mana. It feels as though my body changes a little too...."

I could not describe it precisely, but it felt as though my muscles and nerves were shifting into a form suited to this altered flow of mana.

"Does holding this dagger change my ability?"

Or perhaps it was something like one of those job-change items from a game in my previous life.

I recalled the vision I had seen moments ago. The burning bird, and the question it had cried out.

—Do you desire power!

The words themselves were painfully cringeworthy, but what had happened afterward made it difficult to dismiss that vision as a mere hallucination.

The questions in my mind only multiplied, but beside me was someone who might be able to answer them.

I hung the dagger at my waist and looked toward the Firebird Hunter, who was still fighting.

Unlike what she had shouted to me, she was locked in a surprisingly even battle.

I had seen it before, but those red monsters were on an entirely different level from the gray ones.

It was like comparing a wildcat to a leopard.

Stronger hides, movements far faster than their size should have allowed, and the intelligence to avoid the invisible blade of her sword.

They were nothing like the monsters I had encountered during the journey.

I was reminded of what an older knight had once said during that trip.

"The monsters in places like this are the stragglers from the Great War and their offspring. The proper ones either returned to the Demon Realm during the war or gathered in the sealed grounds. There’s no way monsters like that should still be left in places like this."

Could it be that monsters which should never have remained here had instead been trapped in these caves?

Raising children far weaker than themselves in this dark underground?

Was that why they were so enraged?

Kraaang!

Now that all the monsters around me had fallen, the red monsters were only raging more fiercely.

Perhaps there was some pitiful story behind them, but once they became my enemies, I had no interest in such stories.

More importantly, it looked as though I needed to help the Firebird Hunter.

For all their rage, the monsters were still fighting her steadily.

Even while drenched in blood, they seemed to have measured the interval of her invisible blade.

One engaged her head-on, while the other watched for openings from the side.

They had apparently switched places several times already. Unable to land a proper blow, she was now panting for breath.

As I suspected, it seemed she was running low on mana as well.

"Damn it! Damn it! What is this? Showing off and ending up like this!"

She was berating herself loudly enough for me to hear while continuing to swing her sword.

It seemed that once the sounds behind her had ceased, she assumed I had either fled or died.

Perhaps she thought she had drawn this out for too long.

As I walked toward her, I drew the dagger once more.

Fwoooosh!

In an instant, my mana changed again.

The red mana surged into a boil.

Standing behind her as she fought desperately, I opened my mouth.

"Shall I help?"

At the sudden voice, she jerked backward in alarm. Then she turned her head and looked at me.

"Huh? You were alive?"

She actually turned her head away in the middle of fighting an enemy, so my voice must have startled her badly.

When she saw the fallen monsters and me standing there unharmed, her eyes widened.

"How...?"

She looked completely shocked.

Perhaps because of that, she failed to notice the monsters rushing at her in silence.

"Look out!"

At my shout, she finally came back to herself and managed to swing her sword in time to block the claws of the monster charging straight at her.

But in doing so, she missed the other monster that had been waiting for just such an opening.

The claws came flashing in.

She clenched her teeth.

And then, in that instant, she saw a shimmer passing beside the claws.

Kaaang!

The claws were knocked away, and she narrowly escaped disaster.

"Whew, I made it in time. What are you doing, losing focus in the middle of a fight? Get a grip!"

Even at my shout, she only stared blankly at me.

No, not at me.

She was staring at the dagger in my hand, around which mana just like her own was now shimmering.