...

“But there weren’t any sweets yesterday, or the day before...”

“Uhh, please don’t worry about me,” Yukinari said, putting on an amiable smile. “I, ehh... What can I say, uh... I don’t like sweet stuff, anyway.”

That wasn’t exactly true; he just wanted to let the girls eat it. From their obvious reactions and the way that they used the word “sweet” to refer to a tree root that had almost gone straight from the ground to the plate, he could tell it was a rare treat for them, as plain as it looked. And he thought that food should probably be given to the people who would get the most joy and pleasure from eating it.

“Me... too,” Dasa said, and offered her saucer to the girls as well. The girls brightly thanked Dasa in unison and took the sweet without hesitation before Berta could even begin to stop them. Obviously feeling like they’d made a new friend, one asked Dasa if they could call her “Big Sis.”

Yukinari himself felt a warm glow watching them. There was something pleasant about how they were so honest about what they wanted. Dasa, meanwhile, was blinking with a stunned look on her face.

“What’s up?” Yukinari asked.

“Big... Sis,” Dasa mumbled, seemingly confused. “They called me... Big Sis.”

“Well, from their point of view—”

Yukinari got that far, then realized. Dasa had never really interacted with children younger than herself before. So she’d only ever experienced being treated like a younger sister.

Dasa was always the young one—obviously so from the perspective of her actual big sister Jirina, but also from Yukinari’s point of view as well—so it was impossible for him to avoid treating her like a little sister. He imagined he was treating her that way, at least. Yukinari had never actually had one, only his older sister Hatsune, so he had to rely on his imagination. But—enough with the technicalities.

“Huh. Dasa the grown-up, older sister. Hard to imagine.”

“...Yuki.” Dasa puffed up her cheeks a bit and glared at Yukinari. “What do you mean by... that?”

“Nothing really?”

“You know, I’m not just... someone for you to—” Dasa started to say something, then stopped. Her cheeks went red, and she looked the other way.

“For me to what?” Yukinari asked with a bemused chuckle.

This wasn’t the first time that Dasa had reacted peculiarly to the words “older sister.” She had acted unusually like this a number of times before—a sort of irritated, sort of yearning response. Yukinari didn’t know what this was, and Dasa wouldn’t answer even when asked...

“I am so very sorry...” Berta seemed to be feeling very embarrassed and apologetic. She looked exactly like an older sister apologizing for the misconduct of her younger siblings, and Yukinari found that feeling very nostalgic.

Hatsune and Jirina.

They had been so important to Yukinari—and he had lost them both.

“Seriously, you don’t need to worry about it,” Yukinari said, watching the young girls run out of the room giggling as Berta shooed them out.

“I got to see a lot of good things.”

“Good things?”

“Dasa being called ‘Big Sis.’ What you look like as a big sister. Stuff like that.”

A troubled expression fell upon Berta’s face. Yukinari wondered if he had said something bad.

“I don’t think I’m a good big sister...” Berta’s expression suddenly clouded over. “I’m a disgrace for coming back alive...” Yukinari frowned. Just as he’d thought, it was still playing on Berta’s mind that she had not done her “job” as a shrine maiden—as a sacrifice.

“What kind of big sister am I, when I’m not even able to do a simple job to protect my little sisters...”

She must have been talking about preventing the other girls from being offered as sacrifices by becoming a sacrifice herself. According to what he’d been told by Fiona and the others, if the shrine maiden could not do her sacrificial job, the erdgod would often go berserk, and two or three shrine maidens would be needed to quell its rage. It was certainly possible to say that despite Berta’s dedication, she had been unable to fully protect the other girls. However—

“Sure you are,” Yukinari said, and pointed to the tea that Berta had served to him. “You’re servicing me plenty well.”

“Lord...” Berta blinked a few times, seemingly unsure how to react. She lowered her gaze away from him a little before continuing. “Am I... um... really... giving you good service?”

“You are, yeah. You’re even showing me around town and stuff.”

“I just... wondered if it’s all right for it to feel... this easy...” Berta hesitantly strung words together.

What she was trying to say, in short, seemed to be that this was far easier and involved less suffering than being eaten alive by the erdgod, so she wasn’t really getting the sense that she was serving him. It seemed that “service” to Berta had to be some kind of hard work.

Maybe this feeling had arisen out of a sense of guilt for having been raised with the town’s tax money. The priests and even the townspeople themselves had probably hammered that way of thinking into her at every opportunity so that she would naturally accept her fate as a sacrifice.

“It’s fine. Seriously,” Yukinari said strongly. “I feel sorry that the one you’re serving isn’t actually an erdgod. But that’s not your fault. I was the one who chose to barge in on that ritual. If anything, you could be blaming me for this.”

“No, I could never—” Berta looked shocked at the thought, as if she’d never even considered it.

“Anyway, if I’m gonna have you nearby, I’d way rather you be thinking, ‘Serving him is so easy!’ than, ‘I’m suffering, it’s hard,’ and stuff. Personally.”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t—” Berta hurriedly shook her head. Then, she said in a mumble, “Lord Yukinari, you’re... a strange person.”

“Yeah, I’m aware I stick out as suspicious.”

“No, I meant, um...” Berta tried for a while to search for a good way of wording it. “I’m terribly sorry, I can’t express it very well...”

She was looking meekly at the ground and her cheeks were reddening. It almost looked like she—

“Uh... that’s okay,” Yukinari said, scratching his cheek out of a strange sense of embarrassment. Dasa glared at him with scornful eyes.

“...Womanizer.”

“What did I do?!” Yukinari cried out in protest, feeling like he’d been utterly wronged.

●

After Yukinari and Dasa had finished their tea and spent a short while playing with Berta’s “little sisters,” who had started to grow attached to them, they left the orphanage to walk through town again.

There hadn’t been any particular meaning in stopping by the orphanage, but Yukinari felt a little glad that he had. Ever since arriving in the town of Friedland, he had been constantly hearing about sacrifices and other sickening things. Having the chance to play with innocent children had been very comforting. However...

“I just can’t shake that feeling...” Yukinari said to himself as they walked down the street.

The town was acting strangely. Whenever the residents laid their eyes on Yukinari’s group, they immediately started to crowd together into little groups and whisper among themselves. And those groups would throw occasional glances toward them. Their gazes could not be said to be friendly by any stretch of the imagination.

“I thought so...” Yukinari muttered, looking at Berta walking in front of them. The townspeople’s stares were focused not on Yukinari and Dasa, but rather on her.

Berta was walking normally at first, but as time went on, she started slouching and bending slightly forward. Her neck was shrinking into her shoulders as she walked, as if she was hoping she could just disappear inside herself.

“What the hell is their deal? Whispering like that. It’s creepy.” Yukinari deliberately pretended that he hadn’t realized the reason.

Berta stopped in her tracks, turned back to face him, and said with a forced smile on the verge of crying, “That’s... because I had the nerve to come back when I didn’t do my job...”

“You mean as a sacrifice?”

“Yes.” Berta nodded.

“Shrine maidens depart for the temple regularly. The townspeople’s taxes and donations are what’s used to raise the orphans chosen to be shrine maidens. That’s what keeps this town protected. We’ve had this tradition for a very long time...” She spoke clearly, but with her eyes to the ground. “Our daily lives are only possible because of their taxes and generosity...”

“Sounds kinda like the sacrificial rituals of the ancient Aztecs and Incas...” Yukinari recalled something he’d heard in his previous world: in ancient Aztec and Incan society, ritual sacrifices were conducted in which sacrifices were killed as a tribute to one of their gods. Up until the moment the sacrifice was killed, they would be treated as if they were the incarnation of that god. They would live without ever needing to work and never suffering any inconvenience. However, in the end they would have to pay the bill for it all with their death.

“What’s that? Ancient... as te...?” Berta asked Yukinari with a mystified expression.

“Ah, nothing,” Yukinari said, shaking his head. “Just talking to myself.”

If he started talking about his “past world” here, he would have an awful lot of other things he’d have to explain as well, including why he and Dasa were even on this aimless journey in the first place. That would be bad. Probably.

“Only...”

Something occurred to Yukinari, and he turned to the orphanage behind him. It was solidly built out of stone, and looked considerably better than the other buildings. However, upon much closer inspection, the building had no external decoration of any kind. Its appearance could be summed up with a single word: plain. To Yukinari, it almost looked like a prison.

“With the rituals of the ancient Aztecs and Incas, I heard that the sacrifices were allowed to have their own way all the time, until the very day they were to be killed...”

It was faint knowledge at the back of his mind, so he didn’t know how reliable it was. But he thought he remembered hearing that the future sacrifices to a god were often equated with that god, and the people served them with the utmost reverence until the fateful day arrived. Yes, it was an honor to be a sacrifice. Yukinari felt uncomfortable with the idea—it went against his values—but the sacrifices of the ancient Aztecs and Incas might actually have been glad to give their lives for it. But here...

“It’s more like—” Yukinari swallowed his next word back down. He couldn’t bring himself to say “livestock” in front of Berta.

“Yuki...?” Dasa looked up at Yukinari questioningly.

“It’s nothing,” Yukinari said, and smiled at her. Just then—

“Yukinari.”

Fiona and a few of the priests were walking towards them from the other side of the street.

Fiona and the others suggested to them that they all visit the “sanctuary.”

“To see for ourselves, Yukinari, whether you really did fell the erdgod.”

That was the pretext, at least. Yukinari had his doubts whether it was the actual reason. If they only wanted to find out whether the death of the erdgod was true or not, there was no need to make the three of them come as well. And certainly there was no point in having ten or so priests tag along.

That being said, he was starting to get sick of walking through town anyway, due to the townspeople constantly staring icily at Berta, so he decided to go along with Fiona’s proposal.

However, when they reached the sanctuary, they were unable to confirm the corpse of the erdgod. It wasn’t there. Anywhere. Not a single part of it.

It wasn’t only the erdgod that was missing; even the bodies of its familiars were nowhere to be found. There were traces of blood here and there, but they were truly no more than traces, and it was impossible to distinguish whether they had come from the erdgod and its familiars or from the many shrine maidens that had been sacrificed here up until now.

“Where is it that you say you felled the erdgod?” Fiona asked.

“Well, it should be just around here,” Yukinari said, pointing to one of the sanctuary’s broken stone pillars.

That’s strange. A body can’t decompose to nothing in just a couple of days. Was it eaten by something? This place is surrounded by forest... I could imagine there being a pack of animals around...

“There’s no body,” Fiona said, frowning.

“No, there isn’t.” He was forced to agree. “Any chance that it could’ve melted and, uh, disappeared?”

He looked to Dasa for help, but she shook her head. It probably meant that she didn’t know. Like him, she knew about as much as was written in a dictionary and nothing beyond that.

Berta offered an explanation in Dasa’s place. Perhaps she thought she might as well, since she had nothing else to do. “I’ve been told that erdgods are creatures that have lived for a very long time and exceeded a certain ‘limit.’”

“Exceeded a limit?” he asked.

“Yes. They’re living creatures that have exceeded their intended lifespans in some way or another and, as a result, gained tremendous power and wisdom surpassing human beings. We call such beings ‘gods,’ or sometimes ‘spirits.’”

However, “spirits” were apparently beings that had begun to discard their physical forms. To Yukinari, it seemed like a stretch to call them “living creatures.”

“Sounds like the Yaoyorozu no Kami.”

“Yaoyo... What’s that?”

“Nothing,” he said, shrugging.

“Because of their power, they reign over humans as higher beings,” Fiona said to him, taking over from Berta. “That includes demigods, erdgods and their familiars, and xenobeasts. Erdgods are what we call the beings that manage to form a spiritual bond with the land and become able to exert influence upon their environment.”

“I’ve pretty much heard about all of that...”

“We—our ancestors—made ‘contracts’ with those erdgods. We’ve maintained those contracts for generations. We’ve relied upon the erdgods for this area’s protection in exchange for regularly offering them shrine maidens. The reason they’re called ‘gods’ is the bizarre way they look.” There was clear bitterness in the tone of Fiona’s voice. She evidently wasn’t a supporter of this sacrificial system.

“...Demigods... erdgods... xenobeasts... spirits...” It was Dasa muttering the words. She was keeping her voice low, so it would only be caught by Yukinari. “...In the Church’s... ideology... they’re just collectively called... ‘demons’...”

“Demons, huh?” Yukinari also kept his voice somewhat subdued in reply. “Doesn’t surprise me that a monotheistic religion would treat them that way.”

“Yukinari.” Fiona looked into his face. “I know you said you didn’t want to, but given that you killed the ‘god’ that we were worshipping, we would like you to take responsibility for the fact that our town is now defenseless.”

“Like I said—”

“So I have a new proposal for you,” Fiona continued, cutting him off. “If you can’t do the same things as an erdgod, then please, at least stay here in this sanctuary.”

“...What?”

Yukinari looked around him. They may have been insisting on using the word “sanctuary” to describe this place, but the truth of the matter was you couldn’t reasonably call it a “sanctuary” anymore. The most you could say was that it “used to be” a sanctuary. The structure here had been hard to call a building even before, but now several of the stone pillars were broken, and the huge slab that they had been supporting was tilting toward the ground. Asking them to live in this place wasn’t much different from telling them to camp out.

“This will also serve to prevent meaningless strife between you and the townspeople.”

“Oh. Right.” Yukinari nodded, a sour taste in his mouth.

The reason the townspeople, who had been giving Berta icy looks, had been condemning her was solely that they had the safety of the town in mind. That attitude hadn’t arisen out of a deeply-rooted reverence toward the erdgod. They didn’t actually care whether Berta became a sacrifice or not; as long as an erdgod or something similar was protecting the town, they would be happy.

As a corollary, if they learned that Yukinari had felled the erdgod, they would no doubt turn on him. In fact, they would probably lump Berta, Dasa, and Yukinari all together as equally responsible and demand they do something about it. And if the three of them refused, who knew what they might do...

“How are we supposed to live here, though?” Yukinari protested. “There’s nothing here.” Indeed, all that stood there now was a number of stone pillars. “It’s a bit much to ask us to sleep out in this windswept place.”

“We can build a hut that will serve the purpose,” Fiona said. “And of course—”

One of the priests interjected. “There is no need for the girl to live here.”

Beside Yukinari, Dasa pointed a finger at herself and tilted her head in confusion.

“Excuse me!” Fiona raised her voice. “I told you to leave that for now and let me persuade him—”

“The girl will live in town,” the priest said, ignoring Fiona. At exactly the same time, several other priests forced themselves between Yukinari and Dasa.

Yukinari reacted fast—then stopped himself. The priests were all reaching inside their robes.

They most likely had blades hidden in there. If he made any wrong moves, they would kill Dasa. That was what they were saying.

Both Yukinari and Dasa were armed with guns, but it would be far faster for a priest to pull a blade and slash or stab them at short range. And worst of all, Dasa’s Red Chili was in her case. She couldn’t immediately pull it out and fire.

Dasa had been within arm’s reach, and because of that, Yukinari had let his guard down.

“Yuki—” Dasa’s expression had stiffened a little. She no doubt understood the situation. Berta also looked flustered; her eyes were flicking back and forth between Yukinari and Fiona. It looked as though she hadn’t been told about this.

“There’s no need to worry,” a priest said, his expression also somewhat strained. Maybe he was feeling the tension as well. “We will ensure that her basic needs are met.”

“By throwing her in a place like the orphanage Berta grew up in?”

“Pardon?” the priest replied, as if he couldn’t see anything wrong with that.

“Yukinari, I—” Fiona said, panicked.

“I know.” Yukinari nodded back at her.

Judging by what she had said to the priest just now, this “hostage” business had probably been discussed beforehand, and Fiona had rejected it. She might have said that she would persuade Yukinari and told them not to get involved, but the priests had ignored her order as deputy mayor. They must have thought it unlikely that a young woman like her would be capable of persuading him.

Yukinari breathed a long sigh. “Goddammit.”

He could imagine that Dasa might be put up as a possible sacrifice to prepare for the eventuality of him dying in a fight against the demigods and xenobeasts. From the perspective of the people living here, that would be the most rational approach, and one that would receive no complaints from anyone except those involved.

“Look,” Yukinari said, scratching the back of his head. “I’m willing to admit it may have been a bad move for me to kill the erdgod before I knew how things worked around here. Okay, it was a bad move.”

“Yuki—” Dasa tried to say something, but Yukinari saw the priests grip her shoulders tightly as if telling her to shut up.

“But people, how about you look a bit more at the ‘here and now’?”

“The here and now?” The priests sounded suspicious. Fiona, meanwhile, had her eyes opened slightly wider than normal, as though Yukinari had seen right through her. There must have been something in his words that had resonated strongly with her.

Yukinari had discovered, or rather confirmed, a number of things while walking through town.

The level of this world’s culture and civilization, when compared with Yukinari’s “previous world,” seemed at first glance like the Middle Ages: it was dominated by a terribly superstitious way of thinking, and in the noble name of preserving tradition, no one even considered improving their quality of life or reforming the system. It should be said that the people of this town were not simply lazy, of course; they just had too much else to deal with to think about such luxuries.

In actual fact, however, the technology and facilities to make a number of industrial products did exist in this world, and their benefits extended to this town as well, even if only in a limited capacity. This world didn’t quite measure up to the ‘present’ of his previous one, but it was at least possible to consider it ‘modern,’ somewhere around the level of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Of course, not everything had developed here the same way as in Yukinari’s “previous world,” but he thought that the people of this town should at least be able to find other ways to improve their standards of living instead of remaining stuck in the past.

“I understand that leaving everything to the erdgods or whatever is easier,” Yukinari said, fixing his gaze on the priests. “You don’t need to think about anything that way. But this can’t go on for—”

His words were interrupted by a short, terrified shriek.

Everyone spun toward the source of the noise.

It had come from one of the priests, who had been a short distance away from the rest, investigating the state of the “sanctuary.”

He was—

Fiona and Berta’s screams stuck in their throats.

The priest was in the grip of a doomful beast of gigantic proportions. The priest’s head was split open, and the beast was guzzling the gray matter of his brain.

It unfurled a long tongue from its fang-filled mouth and inserted it into the priest’s skull. There came a series of disgusting slurps, each of which caused the priest’s body to convulse and his eyes to roll back into his head, so only the whites could be seen.

“...Xenobeast...!” Dasa said quietly. And she was right. This was what Fiona had called a xenobeast—an animal that had discarded its animality.

●

Fiona felt all the hairs on her body stand on end.

She knew of xenobeasts and demigods, but this was the first time she had been face-to-face with one. These monsters had very rarely dared to come close before, because the town had been protected by the erdgod—it was the erdgod’s territory. Even those monsters who had come here hoping that they could usurp the erdgod were usually killed by it well before any human laid eyes on them. But this—

“No... No, it’s too...”

This was completely different from looking at a picture or hearing a description. Just by being there, this monster filled everything around it with despair. She could tell at a glance: there was no way a person could fight this thing and win. It was covered in thick bristles, each of its four limbs was larger around than a human’s torso, and a huge number of horns—or perhaps fins—were growing up the length of its back all the way to its head. A human being wouldn’t even survive a collision with it. Their whole body would be immediately smashed and torn apart, their last breath forcibly expelled.

The fingers on its two forearms were long like a human’s, and they seemed capable of complex movements. In fact, even now the monster had those “hands” in a tight grip around the priest it had recently caught.

“...Xenobeast...!”

Fiona couldn’t tell who had said that word, but they weren’t mistaken. This was not a demigod. It was a monster that had both failed to become a demigod and deviated violently from what had once made it an animal.

One of the elements that made the demigods demigods was their clearly higher intelligence when compared to animals, most obviously their ability to speak human language (albeit poorly). However, this monster lacked that. It had yet to utter a single human word, and, most tellingly of all, its face was that of a beast or animal, never showing any human expression.

“R-Run...” one of the priests said from the ground. His legs must have been too weak from fear to follow his own advice. “Th-They’ll eat your... your...”

The xenobeast was eating its victim’s brain. Its long tongue lapped insistently at the contents of the priest’s head, cracked open like a walnut, as it sucked and gorged on everything inside. If it had simply been hungry, there would have been plenty of other parts of the man it could have eaten, but this monster was first and foremost sticking to the brain—the fount of intelligence.

It was... trying to ascend. From a beast... to a god.

Some animals acquired intelligence naturally by living for a very long time. Some among the xenobeasts, however, were more eager. They sought out the places where intelligence dwelled—human brains, or the brains of other demigods—and fed on them in an attempt to push their intelligence over the threshold. This thing must have been one of those “strong-willed” creatures.

Fiona stood aghast, unable to tear her eyes from it.

The priest was no longer even twitching. The xenobeast must have finished consuming his brain. It tossed the body away, then cast its mindless, animal eyes around. Fiona couldn’t tell what its criteria were, but when she realized that the focus of its gaze had met with hers, she inhaled sharply.

Its eyes were saying clearly that it was going to eat her next.

And barely a moment later—its already huge body rapidly grew large in her vision. She knew it was rushing straight toward her, but she couldn’t move from where she was standing. It had struck terror in her, and she was completely in its grip.

She had to run.

She knew it, but her body wouldn’t move.

She was going to be killed. No, devoured. Fiona pictured her own grisly end and grunted in revulsion.

The xenobeast barreled toward her, closer, closer, and then—

A short shout and a black blade penetrated that nightmare together.

Confusion reigned. The xenobeast staggered. And with unstoppable forward momentum, it lurched wildly to one side, passed her, and slammed hard into one of the sanctuary’s remaining stone pillars.

It stooped down there for a while as the pillar crumbled.

“Wake up,” someone said as they grabbed her by the arm and pulled.

She snapped to her senses and looked up to see that Yukinari was suddenly standing right beside her, holding that weapon of his—“Durandall,” she thought it was called—in his right hand.

She noticed something strange lying on the ground. A lump of meat shaped like a human palm, but obviously several times larger. It was the end of one of the xenobeast’s forearms.

“He... cut—?” she said distractedly.

The bristly body of a xenobeast was said to be difficult even to slice into. A normal blade would slide across the surface or clash uselessly against it. But this man had cut off one of its legs.

Granted, he had probably used the momentum of its own charge against it. But doing that would mean his hands taking the full weight and impact of that tackle. It would be like swinging an iron bar at a huge boulder rolling down at you. Normally the weapon would just be smashed out of your grip.

“Hey.” Yukinari was calling out to her. “Is that thing what you’ve been calling a xenobeast?”

She looked up at his profile, half in a daze. “Ah... Yes.” She nodded.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this. It’s not the same thing as a demigod. ‘Beast’? It’s not a god at all, then?”

“Ah...” Still shaken and struggling to keep up, she tried her hardest to answer his question. “Demigods have powers just like erdgods except... they don’t have a territory... They have the same kind of intelligence, too, human intelligence... But xenobeasts...”

Yukinari frowned as he listened. “So we’re not gonna be talking things out with it.”

“Right...!”

It was possible that if they allowed it to eat a few more human brains or waited a few decades, this xenobeast might succeed in becoming a demigod. However, neither she nor the priests could afford to wait for it.

“Get back.” Yukinari stepped forward, putting himself between her and the beast. Then, he held that sword she’d heard so much about in a peculiar stance, resting it on the wrist of his raised left arm, and said, “I’m killing it. That okay?”

She noticed he’d thought to check with her. He must have learned from what happened the last time he killed a creature without thinking too deeply about it.

As she looked at his face from the side, she couldn’t see any trace of fear or hesitation, even with this monster in front of him. He genuinely thought that he could defeat it. That he could kill it. As for her—

“Y-Yes...!”

She could do nothing but nod.

●

There was more than one of them.

Only one had charged in at first, but many followed its lead. Monsters—xenobeasts—of all shapes and sizes came out from between the trees. Every one of them had a sinister feel about it that was clearly nothing like that of an ordinary wild animal. Almost every living thing possesses an innate “functional beauty,” but in these creatures it was nowhere to be found. And yet—

This might be how humans look to animals, Yukinari thought.

The default for wild animals is to walk on four legs, not two. From their perspective, human beings, who have a body shape optimized for bipedal movement, must look like the strangest things they’ve ever seen.

In any case... the only choice here was to drive these monsters away and make an escape. Defeating them all would probably have been another option... if not for Fiona, Berta, and the priests. It would be too difficult with this many liabilities around.

Dasa already had Red Chili out. Yukinari started to give her directions. “Dasa, you’re in charge of Berta, the girl, and the rest of them.”

The large xenobeasts aside, there was a good possibility that Dasa could take down the smaller ones just with Red Chili. Even if that didn’t work out, she could at least wound them or threaten them or something. Anything to stop them attacking would be good enough.

“Also, if you’ve got any breathing room, give me sniper support.”

“...Bossy,” Dasa said, nodding anyway.

Satisfied, Yukinari looked back from Dasa and began by firing Durandall at the xenobeast with the severed front leg. There was a loud boom, and the .44 Magnum bullet pierced its massive, horribly misshapen body.

The monster twitched, and it shakily stood up.

Yukinari frowned. “Like it got bit by a mosquito.”

That might have been an exaggeration, but it was clear that it hadn’t been dealt a fatal wound. Yukinari was using soft point hunting bullets with an emphasis on destructive power, but even so, he’d had no expectation that he’d be able to kill a monster with such a huge body in a single shot.

“I’ve really gotta think about preparing a Magnum rifle or something soon.” With a flourish, he pulled Durandall’s loading lever to chamber the next round and advanced, firing shot after shot into the monster.

GIIIAAARRRRR!!

The xenobeast roared in anger.

It had taken five Magnum bullets, and though its wounds weren’t immediately fatal, it was bleeding all over its body. If those wounds didn’t heal, it could even die from them—but Yukinari couldn’t wait for that.

He kicked off against the ground. Dashing towards the xenobeast, he fired the last shot. And then, through the spatter of blood and scatter of bristles, Yukinari thrust Durandall into the monster’s new mouth.

Thanks to the hole created by the Magnum bullet, the tip of his blade plunged smoothly into the monster’s body without slipping. He twisted the blade a quarter turn so that Durandall’s loading gate faced upwards, grabbed a .44 Mag from his pocket and chambered it, and with the sword still lodged in his enemy, he fired.

GYAAUGHH!

It felt that one. The xenobeast convulsed and tried to back off. But Yukinari wasn’t about to let it get away. He stepped forward with it, keeping the blade stuck inside, and unloaded another two rounds into its body.

GYAAAA...AUUGGHHH...!

The xenobeast was writhing. Small xenobeasts were trying to attack Yukinari all the while, but they were being held back and taken out by Dasa on sniping support.

“Do us both a favor and get... dead!” Yukinari wrenched Durandall around further to finish the monster off.

Blood gushed from the wound, soaking Yukinari’s arm, shoulder, and face. And then—

GYOOOUUUGGGHHH!!

That might have been its dying scream. The xenobeast convulsed even more violently. Its muscles seemed to tighten and become rigid, and Yukinari could feel them solidifying around Durandall’s blade. Taken by surprise, Yukinari gave a short grunt, but it was already too late; Durandall’s sword was bent in half.

Maybe he’d treated it too roughly. A normal sword wouldn’t have survived this long, and might easily have bent at the base right at the beginning, when he cut off the monster’s front leg.

“Yukinari?!”

Was that Fiona screaming out? But Yukinari knew he was still okay, and he couldn’t afford to turn around to give her reassurance. He pulled Durandall back out and slid more .44 Mags into the loading gate one by one. This was the weakness of this type of gun compared to modern guns: they were a pain to reload. Unfortunately, guns like Red Chili and Durandall—lever-action revolvers and lever-action carbines—were the only guns Yukinari knew how to build. He didn’t know the construction of big bore Magnum rifles, which meant he would have to piece together the design through trial and error—and as he had grumbled earlier, he hadn’t found time to do that because they were always on the move.

“Yukinari!” Fiona screamed. “Look o—”

Fangs bared, several xenobeasts jumped Yukinari from different directions. Shooting them all down at once was, of course, impossible.

●

The xenobeasts launched themselves at Yukinari from all sides.

Dasa’s reaction was quick. Two of the xenobeasts crumpled in midair, struck by her bullets, and fell pathetically to the ground. But the remaining five piled on top of Yukinari, their violently thrashing tangle of bodies pushing him to the ground. Then a second wave came. Several more of the monsters hurled themselves at the pile, which grew to look like a gigantic ball of flesh. Yukinari was buried and hidden from sight.

“Yukinari...?!”

“Noooo!!”

Fiona called his name in shock, and Berta let out an anguished cry. However, one voice among them was strangely composed.

“...It’s Yuki... He’ll be okay.”

The others glanced over in surprise. Dasa was still continuing her attacks, an explosion of sound accompanying every shot. She said it again. “It’s Yuki... He’ll be okay.”

“B-But he—” Fiona couldn’t continue. He couldn’t possibly be okay. Dasa was just telling herself what she wanted to hear, preferring to bury her head in the sand rather than confront the horror, the reality in front of her.

But behind her glasses, Dasa’s eyes were fixed on the ball of flesh, and absolute confidence dwelled within them.

Then—

An indescribable sound.

Fiona’s eyes were drawn back to the mass of meat.

“Huh?”

The scene unfolding there was hard to believe. The meaty blob was falling to pieces.

One after another, the curiously shaped monsters were peeling off it and falling to the ground. There wasn’t even a hint of movement from them after that. They looked as though they had all expired. In the middle of those fallen beasts, Fiona saw Yukinari get to his feet.

That wasn’t all.

“H-How...?”

The xenobeasts’ bodies all had huge chunks taken out of them. The location and the shape of the wounds were different, but they all had in common the simple fact that parts of their bodies were completely gone. Fiona noticed something else, too. The xenobeasts’ wounds... weren’t those the parts that had been touching Yukinari? If Fiona’s imagination was correct, the mass of bodies that had been covering Yukinari had been gouged in a very specific way. A sphere centered around Yukinari had been cut out, and this was the result. But what kind of power could make that possible? And if a sphere was cut out, then where did all the stuff inside it go?

Fiona wasn’t the only one who was dumbfounded. Everyone present except for Dasa had been struck speechless. They should have been glad that Yukinari was alive—but that and everything else was completely lost amid this incomprehensible sight.

“What on earth...?” Fiona whispered to herself. Then, noticing something, her eyes went to Yukinari’s feet. What was all that white stuff scattered everywhere? It was like flour, or salt... a white powder was strewn all around him. She felt sure it hadn’t been there before Yukinari was attacked. The ground around this area was covered in leaf mold. A white powder would have been impossible to miss.

“...He’s okay.”

For the benefit of Fiona and all the others who were still unable to accept the reality of what they were seeing, Dasa repeated it for a third time in a composed voice. “Yukinari is... okay... but...”

Why was he fine? It was impossible that anyone could emerge unharmed from a situation like that. Plus—

“The sword—”

As Yukinari stood in a confident stance, Fiona’s eyes—all their eyes—settled on the sword gripped in his right hand. Far from being bent in half, its black blade didn’t have even a single scratch.

●

One remained.