Chapter 6: Majin Invasion

Chapter 6:
Majin Invasion

 

WHEN WE ARRIVED, we were greeted with a nightmarish sight. A battle had broken out between monsters and people near the gates, and there were way more monsters than people.

The knights and a ton of adventurers were totally overrun. Many injured people lay on the ground, with fewer than twenty still standing to fight.

“Over thirty monsters…” Filia marveled. “That’s quite a lot.”

“But we’ll help.”

I soared through the air with Filia on my back, passing over the monsters and landing in front of the gate. The bodies of the people who’d been knocked out during the fight littered the ground around us. Even the humans still on their feet showed clear signs of fatigue.

“Man, we’re kinda outnumbered here, huh?” I took a deep breath and fired my Pistol Punch at an encroaching monster. “HOOAH!”

The monster was blown back, but it took only a sec for it to get back up. They could withstand my Pistol Punch, huh?

“Heh. You’re tougher than I thought.”

“These monsters, Yuri—many of them are at least Rank B. Even one of them would be a threat.”

Well, if a few dozen B-Rank monsters had come crashing into the city, it was no wonder things had turned out like this.

“I’ll treat the injured, Yuri,” said Filia. “You go on ahead, and be careful.”

“You know it, Filia.”

“Do I?” Filia mumbled, but she still dashed off to take a nearby knight to a healer waving at her from the gate. Recovery magic was rare and valuable, and it made sense to prioritize putting Filia in the rear to heal people up. Once she safely retreated, I advanced to the front lines to join the fray.

 

***

 

“Sir Yuri! Glad you’re here.”

“Gauche? How’s it going?”

Gauche shook his blood-soaked head from side to side. “Ah, it’s been quite intense. We’ve pushed through about six A-Rank monsters, and now we’re nigh spent.”

“They’ve even got A-Rank monsters here?” I hadn’t fought any A-Ranks yet, but if they were stronger than that brokirin (big, green, and B-Rank), then I’d love to throw down against ’em.

“We’re dealing with two right now. Over there.”

Gauche pointed toward some kinda lupine monster with blue fur. The thing stood about three feet tall and six feet long.

“It worried me how active the monsters seemed lately, and now this. It’s a nightmare. And here I’d dared to take holiday for a whole month, and…” Gauche sounded utterly drained. “Some of my men have died, Yuri. These monsters took good knights from me, and I will never forgive it.”

No wonder he was drained—although he was technically number two in his knight order, in reality, Gauche was effectively in charge of knights all over the county.

“Gauche, you can’t push yourself any harder!” a nearby knight cried out. “You took down four of those guurdecks almost single-handedly. Your magic energy’s almost completely exhausted!”

Gauche had beaten four of those A-Rank monsters by himself? Whoa—that was downright amazing. And he’d had to fight off other monsters the whole while. Of course he was exhausted.

But Gauche didn’t back down. “I’m all right. My magical energy’s running low, but I can still move like any adventurer, like any knight…and I am a knight. Knights do not give in to exhaustion. The purpose of our order is to protect the peace of this world, so that people might live happily and smile. For that end, my life would be a small price to pay.”

Giving up your life for the sake of humanity? Wild. Maybe being so strong did weird things to your brain.

“But if you’re gone, who will lead us?!” the knight demanded.

“As things stand, I’m the only one who can fight these guurdecks. My retreat would mark the retreat of the entire front. It would be our defeat. I’m afraid, then, that I can’t. I cannot give the people of this city—of this country—reason to fear—”

Great, okay, cool beans, but this was getting wordy and I had stuff on my mind.

“Hey, Gauche. It cool if we take ’em all down?”

Thing was, Gauche was basically a friend to me, and I still had plenty to make up to him for causing him all that trouble. And, I mean, what if he died while I stood around twiddling my totally ripped thumbs? I’d have trouble sleeping at night.

“But, Yuri, you’re, ah, Rank C, aren’t you? It’s far too dangerous.”

Aw, come on. Gauche knew I’d killed the Grim Reaper. He should’ve realized I could handle it. Then again, I suppose Gauche thought of me as one of the people he was supposed to protect, huh? Jeez, that’s like an excessive amount of hero. Well, wasn’t like I disliked people like that or anything.

“Sorry,” I said, “but I just can’t hold back my excitement anymore. Leave these guys here to me.”

Without waiting for Gauche’s answer, I ran in and rammed my fist into a monster that was trying to chomp a knight.

“I’ll take it from here, so can ya get going already?” I shouted over my shoulder.

Once Gauche got enough people out of the way, I let out one of my favorite war cries. The monsters all turned toward me.

“Whew, you sure look amped, huh? Guess you’re just like me.”

Before I could even get out another good bellow, two guurdecks charged up all threatening and stuff. Fair, I guess. I mean, I’m good, but I’m not so full of myself that I’ll ignore someone fixing to fight me. I kicked through the air and made my way over to the guurdecks.

One of them blasted me with lightning magic and the other used water magic. I intercepted both blasts with a Pistol Punch—but that Pistol Punch got pushed back, and the blasts actually hit my body.

Now that was some good damn fighting.

“Good! Good! Bring it on!”

I was at a slight disadvantage when it came to long-distance combat. Cool, I could deal. I tried to close the distance, but as soon as I got in close enough? Whoosh—a squad of B-Rank monsters got on me all at once and intercepted me with a bunch of spells.

“Argh!” Just as I’d expected, I couldn’t avoid them all and got hit by the whole volley. My legs stopped moving, and I started falling to the ground.

“If you’re gonna get in my way, then I’m gonna hafta start with you!” I cried.

Judging from the way the Rank Bs moved at the command of other monsters, it would be a good idea for me to get them out of the way first. But even those monsters were nothing to sneeze at. Carelessness would be costly. Mid-fall, I unleashed a Pistol Kick with all my strength—much better than a Pistol Punch for a crowd.

Hit about five. Landed on the ground. Then I went back to punching. The surrounding monsters didn’t pay any attention to their fallen fellows—they just zeroed in on me. Not ideal.

See, I didn’t have any real ranged attacks. Sometimes that gets me surrounded, and I have no choice but to break through somehow. There’s one advantage to all that, though. Once I’m surrounded, it’s hard for my opponents to use magic without hitting each other, especially if I get clever and duck. And the closer I am to my enemies—which I have to be, to punch ’em—the closer they are to collateral damage.

I kept on punching while avoiding the magic whizzing past me. I avoided flames, punched. Avoided water, punched. When the group surrounding me finally started to thin out, I realized there weren’t many guurdecks around at all. Only one in this group, matter of fact, just as I’d expect from an A-Rank beastie. It could really blend in with the others though, huh?

“Damn, where the hell’d they go?”

I scanned the area, but I couldn’t see any signs of the other guurdecks. I tried to sense them, but there were so many monsters that I couldn’t really isolate that “guurdeck” feeling—unless? No way, were they coming at me from the rear?!

At that moment, a guurdeck jumped at me from behind the largest B-Rank monster in the group. Surprised the heck out of me, I’ll tell you what. In a flash, the guurdeck lunged toward me, its merciless teeth fully bared—there was no way to avoid it.

I tensed my body and focused my strength to take the hit. The guurdeck’s fangs dug into my torso.

“Gah?!”

Its jaws were way stronger than I’d expected. I punched that vicious guurdeck square in the snout. I mean, I didn’t really unleash a ton of power or anything, but that guurdeck seemed surprised by my counterattack—the thing dashed away.

“Heh. Not bad.” I glanced down at my belly. Thanks to my training, I hardly felt any pain at all, but there was the sensation of blood pouring out of my gut. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, but it excited me. My lips unconsciously curved into a smile, and reason slipped away a little. Man, I’d never imagined guurdeck bite strength would be so strong.

See, that’s why I just can’t stop fighting. It’s the best. I just can’t stop my raging combat spirit from welling up inside me. This was exactly what I wanted!

I rushed over to the guurdeck and it let out this low growl. Other monsters got between us, so I couldn’t get close. At least the B-Rank monsters seemed to have given up on the idea of surrounding me. Now they just wanted to keep me away from the guurdeck.

The remaining B-Ranks arranged themselves in a line and launched another volley of magic. I took a few hits, but I was gonna get that guurdeck. It came to me. When I got close enough to land a punch on the B-Rank line, my target guurdeck lunged at me, raking across my flesh with its sharp front claws as the others flanked me.

That cut would’ve cut an ordinary person in two, but it left only a thin scratch on me. Compared to the bite before, this was weaksauce. The guurdeck had a strong jaw, but its claws? Not so much.

“My turn.” I let a punch fly, aiming for the guurdeck—but the thing quickly leapt behind another monster. Clever. So it planned to use that B-Rank monster as a shield, huh? “Little ignorant, my guy.”

A B-Rank monster was way too fragile to shield against someone like me. I pierced right through the monster’s body and my punch hurtled on to hit the guurdeck. I could tell by the feeling against my fists; it was down. One more to go.

My focus wandered for just a moment when I thought that, and another guurdeck rushed me from behind. My body trembled—it was trying to use the death of its fellow monster in order to kill its enemy, huh? What a desperate, ferocious fight to survive this was!

The guurdeck tried to bite down hard on me, just like before. I couldn’t duck right now, and my steeling defense from before had failed—so I’d just do this!

“HOOAH!”

An elbow strike!

It was the most efficient way to attack someone coming from behind. Sure, it had short range, but it was incredibly effective against anybody lunging at you. My well-trained elbow shattered the guurdeck’s fangs, and my follow-up strike split the guurdeck clean down the middle, digging a messy hole from mouth to tail.

With that, I cleaned up the rest of the B-Rank monsters, too. Soon enough, I was the only one standing on the battlefield.

“Hrm?”

Strange. The monsters were defeated, but I still sensed something. What was this? It was coming from inside the gurrdeck. I backed some distance away from the guurdeck’s corpse. In the next instant, there was the sound of tearing from inside the body. It looked like it was…changing.

Rising up from the corpse of the guurdeck was a dark-skinned man with two horns growing out of his head.

“Guess ya noticed me. That your ability or something?” asked the man in an easygoing manner, brushing the filth from his clothes like it was nothing.

But man, the feeling emanating from him was downright sharp. It was like he’d crossed some boundary to become more than simply alive. The aura roiling out of his body was overwhelming, like his presence alone might even kill some less-skilled adventurer. A cold sweat ran down my chin.

“Nah,” I said, bracing myself. “Nothing like that. Just the result of my training.”

I had to sharpen my senses. I couldn’t lose sight of a single punch or kick. This guy…he could be stronger than me. My senses were already turned up from my battle with the guurdeck, but they were spiking wildly now. I could even hear Gauche talking to someone, even though he had to be hundreds of feet away.

“Unbelievable! A majin appearing in a place like this? Do we have any S-Rank adventurers?! This is an emergency, do you understand?! Get in touch with the commander! If we fail here, then this kingdom—no, this region will be utterly annihilated!”

Hmm. Yep. Whatever a “majin” was, this dude was ridiculously strong. I could feel it. And now, right after a fight to the death with some guurdecks, I was gonna fight to the death with a majin.

Man! How cool was that?! I was so excited that I felt like I was gonna burst a blood vessel in my brain. This had to be the happiest moment of my life!

“What?” The majin cracked its neck. “You not gonna come at me? Guess I’ll go first.”

I snarled.

“What was that? Are you scared?”

Like hell!

“I’m just happy to fight a strong-lookin’ guy like you! Come on, do your best not to let me down, will ya?” I made a little “come at me” gesture with my fingers to piss him off.

He sneered. “Lessee… What’s my line? How ’bout this: Lowly human…you really think a human can say somethin’ like that that to the mighty majin Lord Bezegamoth?”

The majin guy, Bezegamoth, created a sphere of lightning in his right hand and hurled it at me. I dodged by the skin of my teeth. If I hadn’t gotten all revved up from fighting the guurdeck, it would’ve been lights out for me. That was the fastest magic attack I’d ever seen, for sure—

But not too fast for my eyes.

“I got more where that came from!” Bezegamoth cackled, lightning spheres in both hands now.

Dodging two at the same time sounded rough, so I fired my Pistol Punch and aimed right at Bezegamoth’s hands.

Bezegamoth swiftly moved his arms out of the way, avoiding my attack. “I see right through you!”

So he could still react fast even when he was charging his magic. In that case, it was time to rush in—I ran toward Bezegamoth.

He grinned and held out his arms in front of him. “This is a prison of lightning. If ya think you can dodge this one, then try it!”

The lightning that shot forth from Bezegamoth’s palms instantaneously forked out over and around me, boxing me in. Excellent ranged attack. Nowhere I could go to avoid it, no matter how fast I went, and I couldn’t just duck either.

“If I can’t duck, I’ll just push through!” I plowed through the lightning prison without even thinking. Sure, I got a hefty shock, but it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t move or anything. Looked like the charge was weaker when you spread it out like that.

“What?!” Bezegamoth stared as I escaped the lightning, and for the first time I heard a little panic in his voice. “Are you even human?!”

“You sure you want those to be your last words?”

I punched Bezegamoth. Hard. The sound of my punch landing was like a firework going off right next to you.

But I didn’t feel like I’d killed my opponent. The moment I thought that, an intense pain shot through my face. The pain didn’t stop there. No, it spread through my entire body. By the time I realized I was being hit by a series of point-blank lightning magic attacks, my body had already suffered severe damage.

“Pathetic humans! Majin bodies ain’t soft like your miserable flesh!”

My mind raced. I could tell my ribs and organs had been hit bad, could feel it, and with my senses sharpened, I felt the pain even more acutely.

Fine by me, heh. When was the last time I’d found myself in this position? I was feeling nostalgic. Even if I risked everything and gave it all I had, I didn’t know if I’d make it—and that was why I fought!

“You speck! You worm!” Bezegamoth snarled. “Death to you! Graaaaaah!”

I launched a kick at Bezegamoth as he roared junk at me, but his body didn’t yield an inch.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, human. It’s useless! Your kind are a buncha insects compared to our magnificence!”

Ignoring his ravings, I used Bezegamoth’s body like a springboard and jumped backwards off of him. If I took any more magic hits like that, I’d have to shed my swole bod and leave this mortal coil.

“I see, I see. You dared to use me, a mighty majin, like a common springboard.” Rage crept into Bezegamoth’s voice, and his aura grew a level stronger. He cracked his knuckles audibly. “Putting your feet on me… Revolting. Yer gonna be punished for yer transgressions. I’m gonna break every bone in your body. Gonna snap ya! Make sure to cry real good for me, couldja?”

“Heh, if you think you can take me, go ahead and try!” I fired back.

But damn it, I was angry with myself, inside. I resented my weakness. I’d really been living under a rock, hadn’t I? I didn’t even know what a majin was!

“This is the end. Surrender your life in a state of sweet terror, human.” Bezegamoth raised his right arm and summoned another sphere of lightning, twice as large as any he’d made before.

I readied myself. There was no way my body could take a hit from that, not in its current state. Yet there was also no way I was gonna lose. Nah, the only way to beat this guy would be to really give it my all—to dig into myself and give it all I had, but how? And what?

Filia’s face flashed in my mind.

“HOOOOAAAHHH!”

With my right hand, I tore my left arm from my shoulder and hurled it straight at Bezegamoth’s head like a javelin.

“Pointless struggling!” he taunted, guarding against the attack with a sphere of lightning and stopping my left arm, which had probably been traveling about a hundred-some miles per hour.

Exactly as planned!

In those seconds, I closed the distance between us. By discarding my left arm, my speed had increased. My left arm alone was about fifty or sixty pounds, after all. Bezegamoth’s own spheres of lightning blocked his vision, so he didn’t notice my movements. Also, my left arm got destroyed, but so did his lightning spheres.

“You idiot! What a ridiculous strategy!”

But by the time Bezegamoth noticed where I was, I had him. In fact, I was right in front of him. Bezegamoth jerked in surprise and hastily called up another lightning sphere, but it didn’t matter.

With one more hit, it’d be over. I’d kill him before he killed me. Because yeah, the only skill I really had was punching—but I knew damn well how to punch.

“You’re done here!” I threw a punch with the most power I’d ever mustered in my entire life. An attack forged from the resolve of tearing away my own arm. The strongest and most powerful magic I’d ever used. Even a majin wouldn’t come out of this unscathed, I knew it!

Bezegamoth went flying back in a blur from the force of my all-out attack.

“Tch!” Pain shot through my right arm too, and it sharpened as it ran through the rest of my body. As expected. Still, hoo boy, my shoulders felt like they were on fire. I focused my strength to manage the bleeding, and I raised my head to check where Bezegamoth had landed. What had happened to him? I tried to sense him, and…there he was.

In front of me stood—yeah, stood—a deeply wounded majin. His pupils were dilated, and his veins bulged in his forehead. Oh, and a fist-sized hole in his chest. Jeez, talk about vitality.

“Hey! Hey, hey, HEY! What the hell did you do?! Whaddya…whaddya think you’re doin’?! You think you can go against the likes of me, lowly human?!”

Before my eyes, the hole in Bezegamoth’s chest began to close back up.

“Whoa, you can even use recovery magic, huh?” I said. “Pretty handy.”

“Shut the hell up! I ain’t going easy on you anymore!” The fist-sized hole was just about closed, but it didn’t completely heal, not all the way.

Hold on, had he run out of magical energy?

Hmm. That reminded me, Filia had once said recovery magic used quite a bit more energy than normal magic.

“To think that a human opponent would challenge me, Lord Bezegamoth,” he snarled. “Unforgivable piece of trash! Die, and then die again! Keep dying forever!”

Purple smoke erupted from Bezegamoth’s body. I tried firing off a Pistol Kick, but the smoke didn’t dissipate. He was definitely using this without magic, which meant that this was Bezegamoth’s ability.

A purple haze. Was it poison? If it was, the antibodies I’d generated through training would help, but if I was wrong and it wasn’t poison, things could well go bad.

I made my decision. I started toward Bezegamoth, slowly walking through the smoke. Bezegamoth’s face was right in front of me. Nothing strange happened to my body.

“Are you an idiot?!” Bezegamoth taunted. “Are you a complete idiot?! You just walked right up to me. This smoke is deadly poison. Oh, and don’t bother holding your breath, it’s pointless. My poison seeps in through your skin, you pathetic fool, and—”

“Poison this, idiot.” I head-butted him as hard as I could, and wham, down he went. I followed that up with one or two or, I dunno, a few dozen more kicks.

(Seriously, who just goes off talking about their abilities, like blah, blah, blah? C’mon, don’t let your guard down. Only idiots go off blabbering.)

“You… How can ya move? Impossible…” Bezegamoth gasped, flustered and exhausted. “Do you have a recovery ability?!”

Wow. I didn’t know how anybody could gasp when they were pretty much just a head and a neck. Impressive, honestly. Man, a majin’s vitality really was something else. Amazing.

“Just the fruits of my labor,” I said. “I got swole.”

With that, I stomped down hard on Bezegamoth’s face with my heel. Course, I sensed for any signs of life just in case, but I got nothing, not there or anywhere around.

I finally relaxed, losing the anxiety I had been feeling. My head spun. When I casually looked down at the ground I saw that (oh, right) it was stained deep red with a whole lotta blood. I mean, a lot of blood. I’d totally forgotten about trying to stop the blood from my shoulder. Oh, right, and there was the bleeding from my stomach too. All in all, I was pretty light on blood.

Ah. Yeah. Okay. That was problematic.

I gazed down at Bezegamoth’s corpse. A majin, huh? He sure was a formidable opponent. To think terrifying guys like him were just walking around in this world. But hey, I was still kicking. Blood was furiously gushing from my wounds, but that just made me feel alive.

“Gotta train more. I still got a long way to go…”

I raised my head, and entering my field of vision, I saw Filia running toward me. Then everything went black.